It would have been much simpler for the early Muslim community to make a clean, harsh break from the Jews and the Christians. Rather than wrestle over whether they were entitled to special treatment, Muhammad and his immediate successors could have dismissed them as apostates and adversaries and presented them with the choice to convert or
be eliminated. But that was not an option. Just as Christian societies, no matter how violently and harshly they persecuted Jews, were unable to arrive at a justification for ending Judaism, Muslim societies had to make room for the People of the Book.
The result was ambivalence. Jews and Christians were neither warmly embraced nor unequivocally condemned. The Quran frequently acknowledges that they were, in their time, chosen by God, and that initially they heeded his call. The message that Allah delivered to the Hebrew prophets and then to Jesus was pure, but according to the Quran and Muslim tradition, in the process of transcribing what God had said, Jews got the stories and the morals wrong, and Christians erred in thinking of Jesus as the Son of God rather than as a prophet and the son of Mary. The mistakes committed by the People of the Book made the revelations to Muhammad necessary. Just as God repeatedly sent messengers to the tribes of Israel when they strayed from the path, he sent Muhammad to the Arabs. The new revelations were addressed to the People of the Book as well, and the fact that most of them did not rush to follow Muhammad was taken as proof of how far they had strayed. The more they resisted, the more the later verses of the Quran railed against their ungodliness.
For Muslims, the great failing of the People of the Book was that they had distorted the message. That created anger and indignation, but rarely hatred. The Quran condemns the People of the Book for perversion but also commands Muslims to treat them differently than other nonbelievers.Jews and Christians were not the only ones to merit special treatment; Zoroastrians were later added to the mix. But Jews and Christians were the only ones linked so intimately to Islam. In fact, because of a shared tradition, Jews, Muslims, and Christians could all be considered People of the Book. They were all members of a family, a family created by God. And just as a brother cannot kill his brother no matter how misguided that brother is, Muslims had to find a way to tolerate Christians andJews, no matter how lost, foolish, and sinful they were.
In looking for the foundation of relations between the faiths, it makes sense to focus primarily on how Muslims dealt with Jews and Christians rather than on how Jews and Christians dealt with Muslims. Judaism evolved over centuries before the emergence of Christianity, and early Christianity had to grapple with Judaism but not with Islam. Muslim identity, however, was tied to the People of the Book. There was never a
time when Muslims did not have to grapple with Jewish and Christian arguments against Islam. From the start, they had to figure out how to deal with Jews and Christians living next to them and under them as conquered people. As a result, Muslims had to think through relations between the faiths far more than Christians and Jews ever did. The subsequent history of relations between the three, therefore, begins with how Muslims treated Jews and Christians. Only after the first wave of Muslim conquests were Jews and Christians forced to invent theologically acceptable compromises that would allow them to acquiesce to Muslim rule.
THE CONQUESTS
MUHAMMAD’S
political achievements were impressive. What happened shortly after his death was astonishing. Between 627 and 632, Muhammad removed the Jews from Medina, defeated the last of the Meccan resistance, and extended the reach of Islam throughout the Arabian Peninsula and north toward the fringes of the Byzantine and Sasa-nian Empires. When Muhammad died, in 632, his father-in-law and one of the earliest and oldest converts to Islam, Abu Bakr, was chosen as his successor and given the title
khalif rasai Allah.
The title literally translates as “successor to the messenger of God,” but what that meant in practice was anyone’s guess. It clearly did not suggest that Abu Bakr was also a messenger of God, because Muhammad was heralded as “the seal of the prophets,” and therefore the final emissary to be sent by Allah before the end of days. It also did not mean that Abu Bakr or any subsequent caliph had the same moral or religious authority that Muhammad had possessed.
The issue of religious authority raises a freighted question: what is the connection between church and state in Islam? Because of Muhammad’s role as both prophet and leader, it is sometimes said that Islam was born as a theocracy. In some respects, that is true. The community of Medina was both a religious community of the faithful and a political community composed of Muslim emigrants, the Arab tribes of Medina, and for a time Jews, with Muhammad as the first among equals. But while Muhammad was blessed as a prophet and revered, he was not seen as infallible, at least not during his lifetime. His was, therefore, a theocracy
that understood that distinction between an all-powerful God and an honored leader.
Though Medina under Muhammad is revered by Muslims as an ideal, it has never been a viable model for Muslim society. When Muhammad was alive, there was no church-state dichotomy. However, as the Muslim community took on a military character after his death, there was a clear sense that the political and military realms were separate from the spiritual and personal. That was supported by the Quran, which drew an unambiguous distinction between the spirit and the flesh, and between the earthly world and the world beyond. Some verses in the Quran speak to human history and worldly affairs; others speak to the mysterious power of God and man’s insignificance in the face of that. Muhammad was both prophet and political leader, but while those roles were united in him, they were distinct.
The questions surrounding the parameters of the caliph’s authority demonstrate that most Muslims understood the distinction. No one questioned that Abu Bakr, as caliph, would lead the armies. But most rejected the notion that he had inherited the doctrinal authority of Muhammad. Respected for his wisdom and acclaimed for his piety, Abu Bakr ordered his soldiers to attack the tribes who had used Muhammad’s death as an excuse to break away from the community of Islam. The fragmentation of the community after Muhammad’s death was a crucial test: if Abu Bakr had not been able to maintain the coalition that Muhammad had assembled, it is more than likely that Islam would have wilted before it had even bloomed and that the message would never have made its way out of the desert. The brief, bloody wars waged by Abu Bakr to reestablish the federation may have been couched in the religious terms of apostasy, but the political dimension was just as important.
These wars not only cemented the legacy of Muhammad, but also established a hierarchy of priorities that remain until today. Many of the Arab tribes that Abu Bakr defeated had only recently become Muslims; others had never truly converted in the first place. All were treated as enemies of the faith who deserved (and were given) no mercy. Ever since, apostasy has been the most severe offense against the Muslim community, greater by several orders of magnitude than anything that a non-Muslim can do. Only a Muslim can be a Muslim apostate, and only apostates are marked as unforgivable. Neither Christians nor Jews
roused that level of animosity, not in Muhammad’s lifetime and not for most of the next fourteen hundred years.
Within two years of Muhammad’s death, most of the Arabian Peninsula was under the control of the caliph. In a few instances, there was slaughter, but Abu Bakr’s greater aim was to subjugate and unite the tribes, not annihilate them. One of the best ways to ensure loyalty for the future was to reward the faithful in this world with material riches. Usually, tribal chieftains consolidated their authority by leading their followers on successful raids. But with Arabia more or less unified, and intertribal raiding no longer permissible, the caliph had to look elsewhere for booty, and the most promising targets were the rich empires of the Persians and the Byzantines to the north.
In the space of less than a decade, Arabs conquered the area now covered by Egypt, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, southern Turkey, western Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula. At the time, Iran and Iraq were controlled by the Persian Sasanian Empire, and the regions to the west of the Euphrates River were ruled by the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Both were elaborate, centralized states, with monotheistic state religions—Zoroastrianism in Persia and Christianity in Byzantium. Both had existed for centuries, and had inherited state structures, armies, and imperial traditions that stretched back centuries more. The Sasani-ans were the latest in a long line of dynastic potentates that had governed Persia, part of a heritage that included Darius and Xerxes and the armies that had nearly overwhelmed classical Greece five hundred years before the birth of Christ. For their part, the Byzantines were the direct offshoot of the Roman Empire, and Christianity had become the state religion after the conversion of Emperor Constantine in the first decades of the fourth century.
On the face of it, the fact that Arab nomads swept out of the desert and crushed these dynasties is difficult to fathom. But in history as in life, timing is everything. The Sasanians and Byzantines had just concluded an especially bitter and taxing war against each other. The Sasanians had taken Jerusalem and Damascus and penetrated deep into Asia Minor, cutting off Egypt and North Africa and jeopardizing the integrity of the Byzantine Empire. The emperor Heraclius had simultaneously been confronted with an invasion of Slavic tribes that threatened Constantinople from the Balkans. Only by virtue of his great skill as both a leader and a general did he manage to withstand these dual
onslaughts. While the war between the Persians and the Byzantines wasn’t a religious conflict per se, the Persian king treated Heraclius with contempt, and Jerusalem was singled out for humiliation. In turn, as Heraclius began to reverse the tide, he destroyed Zoroastrian fire temples in revenge.
Heraclius proved his mettle as a leader and a commander when he repelled both the Slavs and the Sasanians. The culmination was the liberation of Jerusalem. Having achieved an improbable victory, Heraclius made a point of going to the holy city in 630. To great fanfare, he personally restored the True Cross to its place in the Anastasis (later called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) and proclaimed the recent triumph of the empire as a victory for Christ. “There was much joy at his entrance to Jerusalem,” said a contemporary account, “sounds of weeping and sighs and abundant tears … extreme exaltation of the emperor, of the princes, of all the soldiers and inhabitants of the city; and nobody could sing the hymns of our Lord on account of the great and poignant emotion of the emperor and the whole multitude.”
4
But the war had taken a toll on both regimes, on their treasuries and their soldiers, and neither had recovered its full strength four years later when the successor to Abu Bakr, the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, ordered his forces to attack. The Persian Empire had descended into a brief but ruinous civil war, and Heraclius had withdawn in exhaustion from an active role in leading the Byzantine armies. In contrast to an emperor whose power was waning, the new caliph was a physical and military dynamo, an early convert known for his passionate, bristling persona and his unbridled allegiance to Muhammad. At some point during his rule, Umar acquired the title
amir al-mumin
, Commander of the Faithful, which became part of the moniker of all subsequent caliphs. Umar took the military dimension of his role seriously, and he executed it brilliantly.
Three battles essentially decided the fate of both empires. In 634, at Ajnadin, south of Jerusalem, and in 636, at Yarmuk, in Syria, the main Byzantine divisions in the region were wiped out by smaller, more mobile Arab forces. In 637, at the battle of Qadisiya, near the Euphrates, the Persian army led by General Rustam was annihilated. The Persian capital of Ctesiphon was occupied, and for the next decade and a half, the Sasanian emperor was pursued by Arab detachments across Persia until he was cornered and killed. To the west, in 639, the Muslim commander
Amr ibn al-As invaded Egypt. The cities of Alexandria and Heliopolis (north of modern Cairo) quickly fell, and by 641, all of Egypt was under the control of the caliph.
As Arab armies fanned out across the Near East and North Africa, they were faced with a problem: how were they going to govern the conquered people? Would there be a mass exodus of Arabs from the peninsula into the major urban centers? Would they raid and then retreat with the spoils? Would they isolate themselves from the Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians that comprised the population of the conquered lands? And how would they handle societies that were primarily agricultural, that required a different social organization to keep irrigation works intact, to ensure harvests? Some Arabs had settled in cities like Mecca, but others were primarily nomadic, and not accustomed to living in one location year-round. There was nothing in the Quran to provide an easy answer to these new and urgent questions, and the breathtaking speed of the victories meant that there was no luxury to sit back and deliberate over options.
Because the Quran had been so explicit about the People of the Book, however, there was some guidance about how to treat the Christian populations of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Zoroastrians, who made up a considerable portion of the Persian Empire, were also granted protections. Like the Quran, the Zoroastrian holy text, the Avesta, had initially been an oral revelation, but parts of it were eventually put in writing. That made it possible for the Arab conquerors to include the Zoroastrians as a People of the Book, simply because they had a book. But alongside
ahi al-kitab
, another category developed, the
ahi al-dhimma
(People of the Pact), which encompassed not only the Zoroastrians but a whole range of sects and local religions that were alien to the Arabs of Mecca and Medina.