Sailing from Byzantium (15 page)

In 632 Muhammad died after a brief illness. He was somewhere in his early sixties. He and his Muslims controlled virtually the entire Arabian peninsula, and he had begun leading exploratory raids in Byzantine Syria, where he planned the next stage of conquest. Having mastered the new art of holy war, the student had decided to test it against the teachers. It would be up to his successors to carry out the mission.

First stop, Byzantium. Or more precisely, Byzantine Syria and Palestine, where disturbing omens would later be recalled: “There was an earthquake in Palestine, and a sign called an apparition appeared in the heavens to the south, predicting the Arab conquest. It remained thirty days stretching from south to north, and it was sword-shaped.”

Victorious Byzantium was also exhausted and off guard. The Arabs engaged and destroyed the main Byzantine army of Syria at a spot of the Arabs’ choosing on the Yarmuk River. A decisive turning point, the victory of the Yarmuk cracked Byzantine Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia wide open, leaving the cities there totally exposed. Those that tried to hold out were conquered and sacked; to avoid that fate, most capitulated voluntarily. The great Byzantine cities of Damascus, Antioch, and Jerusalem all fell to the Arab armies only a few short years after the Byzantines had so exultantly regained them from the Persians. Damascus would remain in Muslim hands forever after, while Antioch and Jerusalem would be temporarily recaptured by Christian forces much later, the former falling to the revived Byzantines in the late tenth century and the latter to Western European Crusaders in the early twelfth. By 640, Byzantine power in Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia was shattered. By the mid-640s, Byzantine Egypt too had fallen, with its glorious city of Alexandria, a vital center of ancient Greek learning. In all these places, many people were Monophysite Christians, whom the Byzantines persecuted as heretics. Often they welcomed the Arabs as liberators.

The Arabs had also begun looking westward to the Maghrib, “the West,” as they called coastal North Africa. But at that point Heraclius, who had lived just long enough to
feel his miraculous triumph over Persia turn to ashes in his mouth, was dead. Reportedly driven mad by the harsh turn of fate, he succumbed to dropsy in 641, a broken and pathetic figure.

The beleaguered Byzantines held the Arabs off at the border of Syria and Asia Minor, just north of Antioch, turning back numerous raids into the peninsula's mountainous interior, where the Arabs, desert fighters unused to the high country, never really got a foothold. It would be up to the migrating Turks, whose origins lay in the mountain uplands of Central Asia, to claim Asia Minor for Islam, but that big step lay centuries in the future. For now, though deprived once again (and permanently, this time) of its richest provinces, and still facing real peril, Byzantium would survive.

Soon after the first victories had been won in Palestine and Syria, the Arabs had also begun simultaneous incursions into Persian territory, starting with today's southern Iraq. Around the same time as the victory on the Yarmuk opened the Byzantine north and west to them, they had struck a similarly decisive blow against the Persians at Qadisiyah in Iraq, opening up the Persian East.

The Persian capital of Ctesiphon lay just over the border from Arabia. Near the site of the future Baghdad, it was within easy striking distance of the Arab raiders and fell rapidly. Once Ctesiphon fell, the already shaky Sassanid state crumbled, unable to mount an effective defense from its provincial centers, where ties to the capital had not yet been firmly reestablished after the war. The Persian strategic situation was the opposite of the Byzantine one: Byzantium was exposed in its provinces, perhaps, but relatively secure in its distant, well-fortified capital.

By about 650, the Arabs had conquered nearly all of the Fertile Crescent, as well as Egypt and most of Persia, where
some mopping-up operations remained. These lands, a huge area that the British began calling the “Middle East” in the early twentieth century, would constitute the heart of the Arab Islamic empire. Muslim Arab settlers immediately began pouring into them from Arabia, many of them at first living in newly founded garrison towns (such as Basrah or Kufah in southern Iraq) and only later blending with the local populations.

But Muhammad's beautiful dream of unity now fell apart. Uthman, the fourth and last of Muhammad's elderly companions to hold power as caliph, and a member of the Umayyad clan, was assassinated by mutinous soldiers. Followers of the prophet's nephew Ali pushed him forward as caliph, but opposition to Ali coalesced around Ayesha, the prophet's favorite wife. It included Muawiyah, the governor of Syria, who was an Umayyad cousin of the murdered Uthman.

Muawiyah had conquered Syria for Islam, and he now refused to recognize Ali as caliph. When Ali was assassinated by an embittered former supporter, Muawiyah was confirmed as caliph. In these events, though, were the seeds of further dissension, because they gave rise to the Shiite movement, creating Islam's bitterest division. Alienated from the Sunni mainstream, Shiites would cling to the memory of Ali's assassination.

Muawiyah moved the Muslims’ capital from Medina to Damascus, a logical choice for him, since it was from there that he had governed Syria. Thus the Umayyad dynasty was founded, with the former Byzantine city of Damascus serving as what amounted to the Arabs’ first imperial capital. And, for the moment anyway, a semblance of unity was restored.

“The first to use a throne in Islam was Muawiyah,” writes the great fourteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, picking out a key moment as the caliphate evolved from its original Bedouin simplicity toward the majesty familiar to Westerners from sources such as the
Arabian Nights.
Earlier, Ibn Khaldun explains, the Muslims had “despised pomp, which has nothing whatever to do with the truth. The caliphate then came to be royal authority, and the Muslims learned to esteem the splendour and luxury of this world.”

The move to Damascus that established royal authority also put the center ofthat authority firmly in a Byzantine milieu: the Arabs’ first teachers in pomp and circumstance were the Byzantines. The Arabs could scarcely have done better, unless perhaps they had chosen the Persians—who would become their second teachers.

That second stage, the Persian-inspired Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad that we associate with the
Arabian Nights,
was nearly a century off when Muawiyah assumed the first caliphal throne in Damascus.
^∗
Long before Baghdad was founded, the splendor of Byzantine court ritual first seduced the Arabs into imitating it in their own ceremonials. Not that Muawiyah wasn't criticized for putting on royal airs. In defense he explained “that Damascus was full of Greeks, and that none would believe in his power if he did not behave and look like an emperor.”

But Byzantine influence on the emerging Islamic civilization, a tidal pull that now reached its high-water mark,
went far beyond the caliph's assumption of royal ways. It covered virtually all areas of life.

On the official side of things, from the first conquests of Byzantine and Persian lands in the 630s, the Arab conquerors had maintained the civic institutions that already existed in those lands. As newcomers to the challenges of ruling such vast territories, the Arabs had no time-tested institutions of their own to impose. Wisely, they let things go on pretty much as before, relying on their new subjects to keep the wheels turning. “The Muslims were illiterate Arabs who did not know how to write and keep books,” writes Ibn Khaldun of this early period. “For bookkeeping they employed Jews, Christians, or certain non-Arab clients versed in it.”

Tax structure, currency, civic administration—from Egypt to Antioch the rhythms of official life generally kept the same or a similar flavor, except that Arab Muslim commanders replaced the old imperial officials at the top. Numerous Arab loanwords from Greek reflect the wholesale continuation of the old institutions under the new overlords, as the Arabs simply transliterated words from Greek that had no Arabic equivalent. The Byzantine poll tax called the
demosia
became
al-haraj ad-dimusi;
taxable farmland or
pakton
became
baqt;
the officials who collected the taxes, the
grapheis
and the
meizon,
became the
garafisis
and
mazun,
respectively; and the currency, the Byzantine
denarius,
became the
dinar.
Similar phenomena can be traced in former Persian lands, though again the fact that the Umayyad power center lay in former Byzantine territory weighted things in Byzantium's favor in these early days.

Another sort of impact took place on the levels of folk culture and artistic expression, where oversight gave way to apprenticeship. As nomadic Arab tribesmen arrived to
garrison their outposts in the wake of conquest, Ibn Khaldun says, they exchanged settled ways for their old Bedouin life. Though at first they acted as overlords to the former Byzantines and Persians, eventually the Arabs were tutored by their civilized subjects in the skills necessary for the sedentary existence.

As with administrative matters, this process left its traces in Greek loanwords that found their way into Arabic in areas from domestic life (household items, furniture, cooking, clothing, cleaning, jewelry) to agriculture (animals, crops, other plants, containers), commerce (measures, ships, other nautical matters), literature (writing tools and methods), arts and crafts, and religion.

Scholars have also traced Byzantine and Persian influences in Arab music and painting, both of which Ibn Khaldun says the Arabs learned from their new subjects.
^∗
And Byzantine law was taken up by early Islamic
qadis
or judges, contributing toward the body of jurisprudence that would become the
sharia,
or Islamic law. Byzantine continuity and Arab imitation were so pervasive that modern historians have called the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus a “Neo-Byzantine empire.”

When Muawiyah was still governor of Syria, having found himself checked in Asia Minor by land, he had begun building up the Arabs’ naval fleet, aggressively challenging Byzantine
mastery of the sea. With a fleet in place, and with Byzantine naval dominance a thing of the past by the 670s, the Arabs could raid coastal Asia Minor, establishing garrisons as they went, and work their way closer to the Byzantine capital by that route. By this time, too, Muawiyah was attacking Byzantine forces in North Africa and Sicily by sea. In 674, the Arab fleet entered the Bosporus, blockading Constantinople and raiding right up to the walls. The blockade and the raids lasted four years, with the Byzantine navy penned into the Golden Horn lest it be destroyed by the stronger Arab fleet.

Finally the Byzantines risked battle, sending out ships armed with their secret weapon, a napalm-like substance called Greek Fire, which scorched some Arab ships, probably frightening more than it harmed. But the Arabs were demoralized by now, and they headed for home. The fleet was wrecked in a storm on its way, and most of the ships and men were lost. At the same time, the Byzantines badly defeated the Arabs in several land battles. Forced to negotiate for a truce—according to which the Arabs agreed to pay tribute to the Byzantines, an indignity that must have rankled— Muawiyah died the following year, in 680.

Before his death, Muawiyah had publicly designated his son Yazid as his successor, thus breaking with earlier practice and adopting the principle of dynastic succession. Yazid faced big trouble from the beginning. The Byzantines were counterattacking, backed by Christian guerrillas in Syria, and the Berbers of North Africa soon also rebelled against the governor that Yazid appointed there. The old Muslim families in Medina let it be known that they opposed Yazid, encouraging Ali's son Husayn to rebel in Kufah. Yazid's forces easily crushed Husayn and his small band of supporters,
surrounding them in the desert at Karbala and, when they refused to surrender, killing them all.
^∗

Yazid died unexpectedly in 683. Further chaos ensued, but eventually another branch of the Umayyad family arose under Muawiyah's cousin Marwan, who claimed the caliphate, and Marwan's son Abd al-Malik, who succeeded his father in 685. It took still more bloodshed, but by 692— the year after he completed construction on the Dome of the Rock—Abd al-Malik had vanquished his rivals, subdued the Shiites and other rebels, gone back on the offensive against the Byzantines, and won general recognition as the rightful caliph, restoring the Umayyad dynasty to full glory. If the Dome of the Rock said that Islam was here to stay, it also said the same thing about the Umayyads, and about Abd al-Malik himself, who had fought so hard to reestablish their power.

With Abd al-Malik begins the High Caliphate, a period of some two and a half centuries during which Arab imperial might reached its zenith. Abd al-Malik's assertive Dome of the Rock notwithstanding, the Umayyads would preside only over the first half century or so of this imperial and cultural flowering. The real florescence of Islamic civilization would occur under their successors, the Abbasids, and it would be centered not in Byzantine-flavored Damascus but in the new Arab-built capital of Baghdad, far to the east in former Persian territory. From a Neo-Byzantine empire, the High Caliphate would evolve into a Neo-Sassanid empire, as Persian cultural influences rose to shape the larger outlines of Islamic civilization and the earlier Byzantine framework fell away.

Yet, it was still within the Byzantine context that the first
scaffolding was put in place. The Dome of the Rock was not an isolated projection of Islamic and Arab pride but part of a larger, coherent program by which Abd al-Malik proposed to declare Islam's and the Arabs’ arrival, to differentiate Islamic civilization from its Byzantine sources even while continuing to draw on them.