The World полностью

Muhammad started to criticize the Kaaba, which made him unpopular among his cousins in the Quraysh, led by the wealthy sheikh Abu Sufyan, who ordered his assassination. In 622, taking his followers with him, Muhammad escaped to the oasis of Yatrib further north, where he gathered his Meccans and his devotees, including Jews, in his ummah. He ‘could not write well’, according to Abu Bakr, but his followers wrote down his words, which they called the Recitation – the Quran; other sayings were later compiled in the Hadith.

Yatrib, renamed Medinat un-Nabi – Prophet’s Town, Medina – became a small theocratic state led by Muhammad, who, unlike Jesus, was a political and military leader as well as a religious visionary. Muhammad promoted the manumitted African Bilal to become the first muezzin – caller to prayer – thanks to his resonant voice. But some Jewish tribes in Medina rejected Islam, so Muhammad changed the qibla from Jerusalem to Mecca and, as Allah told him, preferred to ‘overlook their faults with gracious forgiveness’. But power was essential, war fundamental, to the success of every revelation.

At Badr, in 624, Muhammad ambushed a Meccan caravan led by Abu Sufyan. The sheikh counter-attacked. At the battle of the Trench, his ferocious wife, Hind, chanted encouragement to her men:

Our necks are hung with pearls,

And musk is in our hair,

If you advance we’ll hug you,

Or if you flee we’ll shun you.

When Abu Sufyan won, Hind gleefully ate the liver of Muhammad’s uncle Hamza and crafted necklaces from the ears of Muslim dead. It was all the more vicious for its intimacy: another of the Prophet’s uncles, Abbas – who would be important later – fought for the pagan Meccans. In 627, Muhammad punished one tribe of Jews who had colluded with the Meccans: ‘he struck off their heads as they were brought out in batches’ and enslaved the women and children.

His words fell on fertile ground in Arabia not just because he was charismatic but because the world seemed atilt. Empires were rising and falling in astonishing twists of fate; the Arabs had been cut adrift from their patrons; trade was shattered and times were desperate. ‘Nobody was more destitute than us, our religion was: kill one another and raid,’ recalled one of Muhammad’s soldiers. Monotheism, with its consolations of eternal salvation, was more persuasive than al-Uzza with her hunger for human sacrifice. Muhammad was just one of many holy leaders preaching in Arabia – Musaylima, Tuhayla, Aswad, the prophetess Sajah. Muhammad himself, observing the surreal tottering of eastern Rome, felt himself much closer to Christians than to Zoroastrians. ‘After their defeat,’ he predicted, ‘they shall be victorious again.’

* Khusrau fell in in love with Shirin when he saw her bathing – an echo of King David and Bathsheba. Their romance later inspired two classics of Iranian literature, Shahnameh and Khusrau and Shirin.

Tang and Sasan

DEADLY HUNTER, LION OF THE EAST: KHUSRAU’S MEGALOMANIA

Oblivious to revelations in Arabian oases, ultimate victory did not seem inevitable to the Romans. Royal Boar seized Egypt. In 619 Khusrau’s general Shahin advanced through Anatolia as far as Chalcedon, across the Bosphoros from Constantinople. Heraclius considered moving the capital to Carthage, then, meeting Shahin in person, offered to recognize Khusrau as supreme emperor with the ability to appoint Roman rulers. It looked as if Khusrau had won the 600-year World Game between Persia and Rome. In the north-east, the Turks had been defeated by another of his generals, the Armenian prince Smbat Bagration, but they would have their revenge. Khusrau called himself Parviz – the Victorious; world domination was in his grasp. Iranian aristocrats recommended Heraclius’s offer. Khusrau turned it down.

The challenge was how to take Constantinople, its walls almost impregnable. Khusrau negotiated with the Avar khagan, who was rampaging through the Balkans. But in 622 Heraclius envisaged a bold counter-attack. Leaving the Great City well defended, he transported 20,000 men along the Black Sea coast and landed behind Persian lines in eastern Anatolia, where he received a letter from the shah calling himself ‘the deadly hunter, Lion of the East’ and ‘Noblest of the Gods, King and Master of the Whole World’ and mocking Heraclius as a ‘vile and foolish slave of Khusrau’. The words were magniloquent enough to be authentically composed by Khusrau, encamped with his army in Azerbaijan. ‘You say you trust in God. Why then has He delivered to me Caesarea, Jerusalem, Alexandria?’ He suggested Heraclius retire to grow vines in Ctesiphon.