By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Early Islam in its wider context

On November 15-16 an International Conference on Quran will take place in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. And while renewed discussions no doubt will take place about manuscripts found in 2015 appear to confirm the tradition that Muhammad’s immediate successor, Abu Bakr (632–634 CE), ordered the creation of an authoritative text of the Prophet’s visions, see also.

According to Islamic tradition, a uniform consonantal skeleton (rasm) of the Qur'an was first compiled into a book format by Abd al-Malik ibn Hishām. As the Islamic Empire began to grow, and differing recitations were heard in far-flung areas, the 'rasm', or consonantal skeleton of the Quran was recompiled for uniformity in recitation (r. 644–656 CE).

The Qurʾān yields little concrete biographical information about the Islamic Prophet: it addresses an individual “messenger of God,” whom a number of verses call Muhammad (e.g., 3:144), and speaks of a pilgrimage sanctuary that is associated with the “valley of Mecca” and the Kaʿbah (e.g., 2:124–129, 5:97, 48:24–25). Certain verses assume that Muhammad and his followers dwell at a settlement called al-madīnah (“the town”) or Yathrib (e.g., 33:13, 60) after having previously been ousted by their unbelieving foes, presumably from the Meccan sanctuary (e.g., 2:191). Other passages mention military encounters between Muhammad’s followers and the unbelievers.

Most of the biographical information that the Islamic tradition preserves about Muhammad occurs outside the Qurʾān, in the so-called sīrah (Arabic: “biography”) literature. Arguably the single most important work in the genre is Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq’s (died 767–768) Kitāb al-maghāzī (“Book of [the Prophet’s] Military Expeditions”). Ibn Isḥāq’s original book was not his own composition but rather a compilation of autonomous reports about specific events that took place during the life of Muhammad and also prior to it, which Ibn Isḥāq arranged into what he deemed to be their correct chronological order and to which he added his own comments.

What the Koran however does tell us is that Muhammad advocated the reconciliation of people whose faith descended from God’s revelation to Abraham. It tells us that he preached a powerful message of moral probity, that he delivered a potent vision of heaven as the future home of the faithful, of hell for enemies of the true faith who refused to be reconciled to Muhammad’s truth, and of the world’s end. What he did not do is predict the sudden takeover of the Roman and Persian empires, the extension of the community of his followers, within a century, to lands running from Spain to India.

According to a recent article by Marco Demichelis, the meaning and elaboration of Jihad (just-sacred war) hold an important place in Islamic history and thought. On the far side of its spiritual meanings, the term has been historically and previously associated with the Arab Believers’ conquest of the 7th–8th centuries CE. However, the main idea of this contribution is to develop the “sacralization of war” as a relevant facet that was previously elaborated by the Arab Christian (pro-Byzantine) clans of the north of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant and secondarily by the Arab confederation of Muhammad’s believers. From the beginning of Muhammad’s hijra (622), the interconnection between the Medinan clans that supported the Prophet with those settled in the northwest of the Hijaz is particularly interesting in relation to a couple of aspects: their trade collaboration and the impact of the belligerent attitude of the pro-Byzantine Arab Christian forces in the framing of the early concept of a Jihad. This analysis aimed to clarify the possibility that the early “sacralization of war” in the proto-Islamic narrative had a Christian Arab origin related to a previous refinement in the Christian milieu.1

 

Rome and Persia at War

The rise of the new Arab state means that we must also pause for a moment to contemplate the phenomenon which is often referred to, since Montesquieu’s book On the Greatness and Decline of the Romans and Edward Gibbon’s masterful Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, both composed in the eighteenth century, as the “Fall of the Roman Empire.” The result of the Arab conquests in the seventh century was that the Roman Empire declined but did not fall. It ceased to be a Mediterranean entity and would henceforth be limited to portions of what is now Turkey, modern Greece, and, occasionally, Bulgaria. We conventionally refer to this reduced entity as the Byzantine state, a name derived from the ancient name of the city that had become Constantinople. The rulers at Constantinople, who called themselves “Roman,” would have been surprised by this terminology.

According to Rome and Persia at War Imperial Competition and Contact, 193–363 CE by Peter Edwell however, the military conflict between Rome and Sasanian Persia was at a level and depth not seen mostly during the Parthian period. At the same time, contact between the two empires increased markedly and contributed in part to an increased level of conflict.2

The Sassanid emperor Shāpūr I had invaded Roman Mesopotamia and Syria in about 240: the Romans fought back, defeating the Persians at Resaena in 243. That the Romans now sued for peace owed more to grubby politics than a military necessity: Philip the Arab, who had assassinated Gordian III and seized the imperial throne for himself, needed a chance to secure his position without outside pressure.

However, Shāpūr continued his depredations in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, taking a number of territories. As emperor from 253, Valerian resolved to win these back. According to the Naqsh-e Rustam inscription, his army was 70,000 strong, and at first, it seems to have made real headway. By the time the men reached Edessa (in what is now southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border), they were beginning to flag, however. Valerian decided that his troops should hole up in the city, to which Shāpūr immediately laid siege. An outbreak of plague here cut a swath through what was soon a severely weakened Roman army. When Valerian led a deputation to Shāpūr’s camp to negotiate a settlement, he was captured with his staff and taken back to Persia as a prisoner. Valerian died in captivity.

Stressing the decline of Rome has the unfortunate tendency to obscure the fact that the fates of Rome and Persia were linked. The two empires controlled the major agricultural regions of Egypt on the one side and Iraq on the other and were surrounded by a ring of tribal societies whose welfare depended upon access to the products controlled by these empires. The true impact of the Arab conquest was to bring this system to an end, replacing it with an extensive new political system based on states sharing a common religious identity that stretched from central Asia, ultimately to southern Spain. This powerful Islamic world was flanked by tribal societies in Asia or relatively weak polities whose most important common feature was their adherence to some form of Christianity in Europe. 

 

Others have argued that because the concept of the “Fall of Rome” doesn’t reflect the complexity of the situation, many scholars have now substituted the term “Late Antiquity” to encompass the period from roughly the reign of Constantine until the period in which the new world order stabilized in the seventh to eighth centuries CE. This has the advantage of stressing change as the dominant aspect of this period, of allowing for the ascent as well as descent, and for the agents of change is neither Roman nor Persian. 

The spread of Muhammad’s message into the world of Late Antiquity stemmed in part from the exceptional talent of Muhammad’s followers, and the exceptional incompetence of the leadership of both the Roman and Persian empires. The failure of the governing class in both the Roman and Persian empires arose from the heady combination of economic failure, natural disaster, bigotry, and bone-headed refusal to recognize new realities imposed by changed economic circumstances. Traditional government incapacitated itself prior to confronting the threat that emerged from tribes united by Muhammad’s vision.

The failure of traditional government is insufficient in and of itself to explain the success of the new order or even the existence of what would become the new order. It took nearly fifty years after the disruption of the old world order in the 630s for a new regime to emerge that was able to unite the areas that had suddenly fallen under Arab control around a coherent vision for the future. The success of the Arab conquest stemmed not only from the failures of Persian and Roman governments but also from the ability of  ‘Abd al-Malik, a successor to the leaders who won the initial victories, to bureaucratize Muhammad’s teachings. In so doing, ‘Abd al-Malik provided the ethical basis of a new government.

The last great war of antiquity’ started when the Shah of Persia, Khusro II, decided that the assassination of an unpopular emperor in a palace coup in Constantinople gave him the excuse and the window he needed to try to put right a punitive settlement that had been imposed on Persia a decade earlier. According to James Howard-Johnston, it was a miscalculation that changed the world, writes the author, the start of a war whose consequences were so profound that it serves as ‘the final episode in classical history.

The bubonic plague in its wider context

There was also the bubonic plague that arrived in the Mediterranean and spread rapidly throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The bacterium came from Central Africa; the first outbreak was at Alexandria in Egypt, where trade from the south and east was funneled into the broader economy. 

The effect on Alexandria was catastrophic. Then, in the spring of 542, ships from the city carried the infected rodents to Syria, Asia Minor, and Constantinople, where the pestilence ran its course for four months. Contemporaries interpreted the outbreak as both the vengeance of God and as a play date for demons. A historian of the period wrote that many people saw apparitions in human form which struck them; another says that some demons appeared in the form of monks. Doctors knew not what to do; they had never seen the disease, and those who recovered did so for no obvious cause. The death toll was horrendous; five or ten thousand people perished in a single day. The total number of deaths at Constantinople may have reached 300,000, while in one town on the Egyptian border all but eight people were found dead. People were seen to totter and fall in the streets; merchants or customers might be suddenly overcome in the midst of a transaction; a house was filled with nothing but the dead, twenty bodies in all; infants wailed as their mothers died. At Constantinople the authorities filled the tombs around the city, digging up all the places where they could lay the dead and finally filling the towers in the defensive walls. A plague victim recalled how he was afflicted with the swellings, and how later the disease took his wife, many of his children, and relatives, servants, and tenants. For some, he said, the first symptoms were in the head, making the eyes bloodshot and the face was swollen; the symptoms then descended to the throat. For others, there was a violent stomach disorder, while for those whose lymph nodes swelled up there was a violent fever, then death, if it would come, by the third day. 

Yet the plague probably didn't wipe out the Roman Empire and half the world's population. What it did was that the plague devastated the economy, signs of expansion in various areas came to an end in the middle of the sixth century. An immediate effect of the plague was also to short-circuit an effort on the part of the Roman government in Constantinople to rebuild effective control in the western Mediterranean. In the previous century, a collection of Germanic successor states had arisen in territory once controlled by Rome in North Africa, Spain, France, and Britain. Rome had regained control of North Africa in the 530s and had ousted the Germanic regime in Italy a few years later, but it had not yet built a stable regime of its own to replace the one it had unseated. That would now not happen. When the empress Theodora, in many ways the brains behind the government, died of cancer in 548, the imperial regime would blunder from failure to failure for the rest of the reign of her husband, Justinian, who didn’t die until 565. Most significantly, Rome lost effective control over the central Balkans where a new, Bulgarian, state was developing. Justinian’s successor Justin was of very limited ability, losing control of most of Italy and faring badly in a war with Persia before his abdication in 578. His two successors, Tiberius and Maurice, stabilized the situation, but what was really needed was peace, and peace required strength that Rome no longer had. 

It is in the Balkans that the economic transition away from the Roman imperial economy first becomes obvious. Politically, the plague-weakened, over-committed empire progressively lost control in the half-century after Theodora’s death. The most serious problems were connected with the arrival of a new group of Turkic peoples, the Avars, from Ukraine into the region north of the Danube. In 567 the Avars assisted one Germanic tribe, the Lombards, in destroying their long-term enemies, the Gepids (the safety of the Roman frontier had depended upon the Roman ability to play these two groups off against each other). The Lombards, however, recognizing that they were likely to be the next target for Avar expansion, headed south into Italy to continue the by now seemingly endless struggle for control of the peninsula. There was worse to come. Even before the Avars arrived, Slavic tribes had been moving into the area north of the mouth of the Danube. Once the Avars established themselves, the Slavs tended to join them to raid Roman territory. On their own the Slavs, who were rather badly organized, were not a great threat. Linked with the Avars, they constituted a force that required powerful Roman armies to control, and those armies were soon stretched too thin. In 582 the Avars launched a series of devastating raids that culminated in the capture of Sirmium, the long-time bastion of Roman rule on the upper Danube. 

As chaos encompassed the frontier, local landowners, feeling betrayed by an imperial regime that could not keep hostile neighbors under control, began to look to their own protection. And they started eating differently, preferring legumes and millet to winter-sown grains. They had nothing now to exchange with other parts of the empire, which in turn lost markets to which they could previously have shipped surplus. Cities in the imperial core of western Turkey showed signs of decline even as the plague-ravaged economies of Syria and Egypt stabilized. Stabilizing does not, however, mean fully recovering. The urban decline had the collateral effect of lowering the empire’s tax receipts, and that had the further effect of weakening the military. 

 

The fight and split in reference to the Holy Trinity

The Roman Empire’s problems were not just economic. There was also a serious split over the proper way to understand the relationship between the members of the Holy Trinity. In 451 a council was summoned at Chalcedon (across the Bosporus from Constantinople) to produce a new creed, stating that Christ had two natures, human and divine, that became one after “he was made man.” This statement was anathema to many bishops in Syria and Egypt, who believed that Jesus had but one, divine, nature. The split between the two sides worsened with the passage of time, dividing communities throughout the eastern provinces against themselves, and some of Persia’s numerous Christians against those within the empire. The faith which Constantine had used to explain his great success and justify his new order now became a divisive force. 

 

1. Marco Demichelis, Arab Christian Confederations and Muhammad’s Believers: On the Origins of Jihad, ORCID Centre for Interreligious Studies, Pontifical Gregorian University, 00187 Rome, Italy Academic Editor: Brannon Wheeler Religions 2021, 12(9),710; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090710 Peter Edwell, Rome and Persia at War Imperial Competition and Contact, 193–363 CE, 2021.

 

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