In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

by Tom Holland

Rather like the scientist in the classic horror film The Fly, who ends up a mutant combination of human and insect, the world of late antiquity can seem, from our own perspective, peculiarly hybrid.

A narrative that features the persecution of veiled Christian women in Arabia by a Jewish king is clearly one set in a world at some remove from our own.

Far from Islam having been born in the full light of history, its birth was shrouded in what has appeared, to an increasing number of scholars, an almost impenetrable darkness.

There can only ever be speculation. Cosmologists speak of “singularities”—warpings of time and space where the laws of physics do not apply. The puzzle of Islam’s origins might be viewed in a similar way—as a black hole sucking in a great spiralling swirl of influences before casting them back out in a radically different form.

The story of how Islam came to define itself, and to invent its own past, is only part of a much broader story: one that is ultimately about how Jews, Christians and Muslims all came by their understanding of religion. No other revolution in human thought, perhaps, has done more to transform the world. No other revolution, then, it might be argued, demands more urgently to be put in proper context.

The heads of prophets, the bodies of apostles, the limbs of martyrs: the capital had bagged them all. Indeed, Constantinople’s array of relics was so incomparable that it lent her precisely what her rulers had always most craved for their capital: the authentic aura of a holy city.

Foul-smelling though the ascetics of Syria notoriously were, yet in the air that had once been breathed by Simeon there hung, so many Christians believed, a lingering perfume-trace of paradise.

Typical was the fate of Zaranj, a great fortress that commanded the approaches to the Hindu Kush, whose inhabitants had agreed as a term of their surrender to deliver annually a thousand of their most beautiful boys, each one holding in his hands a golden cup: a delicious foretaste for pious Muslims of the delights of paradise.

Abd al-Malik himself was a noted connoisseur. “He who wishes to take a slave girl for pleasure,” the great Caliph sagely advised, “let him take a Berber; he who wishes to take one as a domestic servant, let him take a Roman; and he who wishes to take one to produce a child, let him take a Persian.”

As Arab rule increasingly came to be identified with Abd al-Malik’s vision of Islam, so natives eager to join the society of their masters rushed to embrace the embryonic religion. Predictably, the Arabs, far from welcoming these converts as brothers, placed as many roadblocks as they could on the “straight path.” Those who wished to convert faced a whole host of indignities. It was not enough to submit to God. Only by submitting to an Arab patron as well might a Persian, or an Iraqi, or a Syrian come to be ranked as a Muslim. Here, for those with so much as a trace of snobbery, was a humiliation, perhaps, too far.