At the Origins of Islam

Figures

Figure 1. Arabia in the lifetime of the Prophet.

Figure 2. The World of Late Antiquity.

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to a number of people who helped to make this book a reality. My original D.Phil supervisors were Robert Hoyland and Mark Whittow. Even though we may have come to adopt different perspectives on issues like Fred Donner’s ‘Believers Thesis’, Robert’s deep knowledge of the subject and perceptive insights helped to expand my horizons before he left Oxford for New York. His contribution to the field is barely rivalled in his generation and I am sorry that my time learning from him first hand was not longer.

Far greater sorrow, however, must be reserved for the tragic loss of Mark Whittow. Mark was the very model of the Oxford gentleman and scholar. Dapper, refined, ceaselessly jolly and, above all, committed to a recognition of the importance of breadth in historical knowledge – in an age when many other academics seem myopically obsessed with minutiae – Mark’s death in a car accident just before Christmas 2017 was a loss to the world. I never knew him as well as some others of his students, being originally something of a refugee from Cambridge, and then distracted by interests beyond the ivory towers throughout my postgraduate years, but it was Mark’s mentorship that set me on the path of concentrating, above all, on Arabian nomads. It was also his encouragement that kept the boundaries of my thesis broad. I am deeply thankful to him.

I was subsequently supervised by Phil Booth and Christian Sahner. Phil had taught me at Cambridge and is a master of all things late antique and Christian continued the quest of opening my eyes to the complexities of Islamic history. They both refined my thinking, were patient with my errors and oversights and indulged my ideas. They graciously pushed me on and helped to bring the project to an eventual conclusion. Like my other mentors and influences, they of course bear no responsibility for any inaccuracies or failures of interpretation in what follows. I thank them both.

Many others deserve credit for helping to make the years spent at Oxford and working on what became this book a golden age. I am ←xiii | xiv→profoundly lucky to have friends like Matt, John, Toby, Chris, P. G., Dan, Marco and Aiden, many of whom often visited the city from afar to keep me company and the local publicans rich. Michael, good in name and nature, deserves a special mention for his willingness to entertain my historical musings on many an adventure in the wild and for his constant, brotherly friendship. At Oxford, I was, and remain, warmly grateful for the cheery company of George (‘the Dean’), Michael, Rob and David, not least for many a merry night when we discussed the vagaries of history under the avuncular eyes of the indomitable Lincoln College barman, SF. Lincoln itself of course deserves my thanks, as does the A. G. Leventis Foundation for funding my first two years of study. Thanks are also naturally due to Lucy and her team at Peter Lang for steering the manuscript through peer review and to publication.

Introduction

A World Made Anew …

God effected that the whole world should be illumined from the very beginning by two eyes, namely by the most powerful kingdom of the Romans, and by the most prudent sceptre of the Persian state …

– Khusro Parvez, Shah of Persia, to Maurice, Emperor of Rome, as preserved in the History of Theophylact Simocatta, 4.11.2¹

Khusro had every right to believe that the situation he described was sanctioned by powers not entirely of this world when he wrote these words to his imperial rival. From his seat at the Persian capital of Ctesiphon on the banks of the Tigris – the river that had given life to the earliest of human civilisations – he looked out upon a world that was indeed dominated by two great powers. It had been thus for so long that it simply must have been the natural order of things. He himself was the ruler of a venerable empire and the spiritual heir to the world-conqueror Cyrus the Great, who had first made Persia a world power a millennium before Khusro. The Persian shah’s domain stretched from the Great Steppe, through the Iranian plateau, across the Zagros Mountains and down into the Fertile Crescent, where Persia met Rome on the upper reaches of the Tigris, amidst the hilly and difficult terrain of the Taurus and Caucasian mountain ranges.

Rome may have lost her western provinces to the depredations of powerful barbarian peoples in the century previous to Khusro’s letter, but Maurice was still master of a vast and powerful empire. Rome had ruled lands as diverse and distant as the coastal strip of North Africa, the Balkans, highland Anatolia, the Levant and the breadbasket of empire that was Egypt for half a millennium. Her legions, though occasionally humbled, ←1 | 2→had nonetheless continued to guarantee the security of Constantinople’s subject peoples through centuries of warfare with hosts of threatening foes, not least the armies of Persia, Rome’s only real rival for Eurasian dominance. As is all too readily apparent when reading the History of Theophylact Simocatta – written in a style deliberately aping an approach to history that speaks to the self-conscious antiquity and greatness of the author’s civilisation – the men who ruled the world of the sixth century ad saw themselves as the custodians of an eternal, all-powerful and divinely ordained world order destined to last until the very end of days.