Homework answers / question archive / TAMIM ANSARY Praise for DESTINY DISRUPTED "If you want to put today's headlines about jihadist suicide bombings into the much larger context of history, you'd be well advised to settle in with Destiny Disrupted

TAMIM ANSARY Praise for DESTINY DISRUPTED "If you want to put today's headlines about jihadist suicide bombings into the much larger context of history, you'd be well advised to settle in with Destiny Disrupted

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TAMIM ANSARY Praise for DESTINY DISRUPTED "If you want to put today's headlines about jihadist suicide bombings into the much larger context of history, you'd be well advised to settle in with Destiny Disrupted. It's the story of a civilization that suddenly found itself upended by strangers and now wants to put itself right. And if author Ansary stops short of calling the result a clash of civilizations, he feels free to call it two one-sided views of world history. His book is a valuable tool for opening up a view of the other side." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch "This is a marvelous book. Ansary has written an indispensable historical account of the last 1,500 years from a perspective that is all too often ignored in the West. Destiny Disrupted will be read for generations to come." -REZA AsLAN, author of No god but God and How to Win a Cosmic ~r "A must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the Islamic world. But the book is more than just a litany of past events. It is also an indispensable guide to understanding the political debates and conflicts of today, from 9/11 to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from the Somali pirates to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. As Ansary writes in his conclusion, 'The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a clash of civilizations ... It's better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting."' -San Francisco Chronicle "Ansary has written an informative and thoroughly engaging look at the past, present, and future of Islam. With his seamless and charming prose, he challenges conventional wisdom and appeals for a fuller understanding of how Islam and the world at large have shaped each other. And that makes this book, in this uneasy, contentious post 9/11 world, a must-read." -KHALED HossEINI, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns "A lively, thorough, and accessible survey of the history of Islam (both the religion and its political dimension) that explores many of the disconnects between Islam and the West." -ShelfAwareness "There's not a page where you won't learn something startling in Destiny Disrupted. Beautifully clear and endlessly engaging, it's a romp through science, poetry, politics, and religion, in the company of a wise and charming mind, the perfect antidote to the Islamophobia that clouds Europe and North America." -RAJ PATEL, author of Stuffand Starved and visiting scholar, Center for African Studies, University of California at Berkeley "Never apologist in tone, meticulously researched and balanced, often amusing but never glib, Destiny Disrupted is ultimately a gripping drama that pulls the reader into great, seminal events of world history, a book which offers a wealth of knowledge and insight to any reader who wants to understand the movements and events behind the modern-day hostilities wracking Western and Islamic societies." -Portland Oregonian DESTINY DISRUPTED THE ISLAMIC WORLD TODAY DESTINY DISRUPTED ~ A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes TAMIM ANSARY PublicAffairs NEW YORK Copyright © 2009 by Tamim Ansary Hardcover edition first published in 2009 in the United States by PublicAffairs'™, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Paperback edition first published in 2010 in the United States by PublicAffairs. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107. PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (BOO) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com. Designed by Brent Wilcox Text set in Adobe Garamond A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-58648-606-8 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58648-813-0 10 9 8 7 6 54 3 2 1 For Amanuddin and Terttu CONTENTS List ofMaps Names and Dates Introduction IX XI Xlll The Middle World 2 The Hijra 17 3 Birth of the Khalifate 33 4 Schism 53 5 Empire of the Umayyads 67 6 The Abassid Age 79 7 Scholars, Philosophers, and Sufis 91 8 Enter the Turks 117 9 Havoc 133 10 Rebirth 159 11 Meanwhile in Europe 199 12 West Comes East 217 13 The Reform Movements 247 14 Industry, Constitutions, and Nationalism 269 15 Rise of the Secular Modernists 301 vii viii CONTENTS 16 The Crisis of Modernity 317 17 The Tide Turns 329 Afterword Appendix: The Structure ofIslamic Doctrine Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index 349 359 361 367 371 373 LIST OF MAPS The Islamic World Today Growth of Islam The Mediterranean World (Defined by Sea Routes) The Middle World (Defined by Land Routes) On the Eve oflslam: The Byzantine and Sassanid Empires Imam Hussein's Route to Karbala The Umayyad Empire Abu Muslim and the Abbasid Revolution The Three Khalifates Seljuk Empire: The Turks Invade the Islamic World The Theater of the Crusades The Mongol Invasions of the Islamic World Constantinople: The World's Most Impregnable City The Three Islamic Empires of the Seventeenth Century The European Quest for a Sea Route to the Indies Western Imperialism: The Global Reach of Sea Power "The Great Game" World War I and the Arab Revolt The Sykes-Picot Agreement Division of the Arab World: The Mandates Plan Israel and Palestine ix 11 xv1 2 2 15 69 76 85 121 128 141 154 176 196 201 218 23 7 296 297 312 323 NAMES AND DATES Some writers are scrupulous about the system they use for transliterating Islamic names and words into English, insisting that one or another system is correct. I have to confess I am not among them. I have seen my own name spelled too many different ways in English to be picky. (People often ask me, which is correct, Ansari or Ansary-is it y or z? Well, neither, really: it's the letter yaw.) Given the arbitrary nature of transliteration, my guiding principle in this book has been to go for the simplest spellings and the most recognizable reductions. Also many Arabic names include a series of patronymics preceded by Ibn, meaning "son of." Usually, I use the shortest form of the name by which a person is most commonly known. The profusion of unfamiliar names (and words) in this book will challenge many English-speaking readers; I wish to minimize such difficulties, so if a familiar form of a word or name exists in English, that's what I go with. Also, following a precedent set by Albert Hourani in A History of the Arab Peoples, I use the prefixal-the first time an Arabic name is used but drop it after that: al-Ghazali becomes Ghazali. As for dates, two calendars apply to these events, the Islamic one and the so-called "common era'' dating system, which actually derives from the Christian calendar. In the early decades after the birth of the Muslim community, I generally give the Islamic date (the number of years followed by AH which stands ''After the Hijra''). I do so because I think that in this early period it's useful to convey a feel for how many years have passed since the crucial events oflslam. Later in time, I slide over to the "common xi xii NAMES AND DATES era" system, because that's the framework with which most readers are familiar-and what's the point of giving a date if it doesn't place an event in context and situate it relative to other events? INTRODUCTION Growing up as I did in Muslim Afghanistan, I was exposed early on to a narrative of world history quite different from the one that schoolchildren in Europe and the Americas routinely hear. At the time, however, it didn't shape my thinking, because I read history for fun, and in Farsi there wasn't much to read except boring textbooks. At my reading level, all the good stuff was in English. My earliest favorite was the highly entertaining Child's History of the World by a man named V. V. Hillyer. It wasn't till I reread that book as an adult, many years later, that I realized how shockingly Eurocentric it was, how riddled with casual racism. I failed to notice these features as a child because Hillyer told a good story. When I was nine or ten, the historian Arnold Toynbee passed through our tiny town of Lashkargah on a journey, and someone told him of a history-loving little bookworm of an Afghan kid living there. Toynbee was interested and invited me to tea, so I sat with the florid, old British gentleman, giving shy, monosyllabic answers to his kindly questions. The only thing I noticed about the great historian was his curious habit of keeping his handkerchief in his sleeve. When we parted, however, Toynbee gave me a gift: Hendrick Willem Van Loon's The Story ofMankind. The title alone thrilled me-the idea that all of"mankind" had a single story. Why, I was part of"mankind" myself, so this might be my story, in a sense, or at least might situate me in the one big story shared by all! I gulped that book down and loved it, and the Western narrative of world history became my framework ever after. xiii xiv INTRODUCTION All the history and historical fiction I read from then on just added flesh to those bones. I still studied the pedantic Farsi history texts assigned to us in school but read them only to pass tests and forgot them soon after. Faint echoes of the other narrative must have lingered in me, however, because forty years later, in the fall of 2000, when I was working as a textbook editor in the United States, it welled back up. A school publisher in Texas had hired me to develop a new high school world-history textbook from scratch, and my first task was to draw up a table of contents, which entailed formulating an opinion about the overall shape of human history. The only given was the structure of the book. To fit the rhythm of the school year, the publisher ordained that it be divided into ten units, each consisting of three chapters. But into what ten (or thirty) parts does all of time naturally divide? World history, after all, is not a chronological list of every damn thing that ever happened; it's a chain of only the most consequential events, selected and arranged to reveal the arc of the story-it's the arc that counts. I tied into this intellectual puzzle with gusto, but my decisions had to pass through a phalanx of advisors: curriculum specialists, history teachers, sales executives, state education officials, professional scholars, and other such worthies. This is quite normal in elementary and high school textbook publishing, and quite proper I think, because the function of these books is to convey, not challenge, society's most up-to-date consensus of what's true. A chorus of advisors empanelled to second-guess a development editor's decisions helps to ensure that the finished product reflects the current curriculum, absent which the book will not even be saleable. As we went through the process, however, I noticed an interesting tug and pull between my advisors and me. We agreed on almost everything except-! kept wanting to give more coverage to Islam in world history, and they kept wanting to pull it back, scale it down, parse it out as side- bars in units devoted mainly to other topics. None of us was speaking out of parochial loyalty to "our own civilization." No one was saying Islam was better or worse than "the West." All of us were simply expressing our best sense of which events had been most consequential in the story of humankind. Mine was so much the minority opinion that it was indistinguishable from error, so we ended up with a table of contents in which Islam consti- INTRODUCTION XV tuted the central topic of just one out of thirty chapters. The other two chapters in that unit were "Pre-Columbian Civilizations of the Americas" and ''Ancient Empires of Africa." Even this, incidentally, represented expanded coverage. The best-selling world history program of the previous textbook cycle, the 1997 edition of Perspectives on the Past, addressed Islam in just one chapter out of thirtyseven, and half of that chapter (part of a unit called "The Middle Ages") was given over to the Byzantine Empire. In short, less than a year before September 11, 2001, the consensus of expert opinion was telling me that Islam was a relatively minor phenomenon whose impact had ended long before the Renaissance. If you went strictly by our table of contents, you would never guess Islam still existed. At the time, I accepted that my judgment might be skewed. After all, I had a personal preoccupation with Islam that was part of sorting out my own identity. Not only had I grown up in a Muslim country, but I was born into a family whose one-time high social status in Afghanistan was based entirely on our reputed piety and religious learning. Our last name indicates our supposed descent from the Ansars, "the Helpers," those first Muslim converts of Medina who helped the Prophet Mohammed escape assassination in Mecca and thereby ensured the survival of his mission. More recently, my grandfather's great-grandfather was a locally revered Muslim mystic whose tomb remains a shrine for hundreds of his devotees to this day, and his legacy percolated down to my father's time, instilling in our clan a generalized sense of obligation to know this stuff better than the average guy. Growing up, I heard the buzz of Muslim anecdotes, commentary, and speculation in my environment and some of it sank in, even though my own temperament somehow turned resolutely secular. And it remained secular after I moved to the United States; yet I found myself more interested in Islam here than I ever had been while living in the Muslim world. My interest deepened after 1979, when my brother embraced "fundamentalist" Islam. I began delving into the philosophy of Islam through writers such as Fazlur Rahman and Syed Hussein Nasr as well as its history through academics such as Ernst Grunebaum and Albert Hourani, just trying to fathom what my brother and I were coming from, or in his case, moving toward. xvi INTRODUCTION GROWTH OF ISLAM Given my personal stake, I could concede that I might be overestimating the importance of Islam. And yet ... a niggling doubt remained. Was my assessment wholly without objective basis? Take a look at these six maps, snapshots of the Islamic world at six different dates: When I say "Islamic world," I mean societies with Muslim majorities and/or Muslim rulers. There are, of course, Muslims in England, France, INTRODUCTION xvii the United States, and nearly every other part of the globe, but it would be misleading, on that basis, to call London or Paris or New York a part of the Islamic world. Even by my limited definition, however, has the "Islamic world" not been a considerable geographical fact throughout its many centuries? Does it not remain one to this day, straddling the Asian-African landmass and forming an enormous buffer between Europe and East Asia? Physically, it spans more space than Europe and the United States combined. In the past, it has been a single political entity, and notions of its singleness and political unity resonate among some Muslims even now. Looking at these six maps, I still have to wonder how, on the eve of 9111, anyone could have failed to consider Islam a major player at the table of world history! After 9/11, perceptions changed. Non-Muslims in the West began to ask what Islam was all about, who these people were, and what was going on over there. The same questions began to bombinate with new urgency for me too. That year, visiting Pakistan and Afghanistan for the first time in thirty-eight years, I took along a book that I had found in a used bookstore in London, Islam in Modern History by the late Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a professor of religion at McGill and Harvard. Smith published his book in 1957, so the "modern history" of which he spoke had ended more than forty years earlier, and yet his analyses struck me as remarkably-in fact disturbingly-pertinent to the history unfolding in 2002. Smith shone new light on the information I possessed from childhood and from later reading. For example, during my school days in Kabul, I was quite aware of a man named Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan. Like "everyone," I knew he was a towering figure in modern Islamic history; but frankly I never fathomed how he had earned his acclaim, beyond the fact that he espoused "pan-Islamism," which seemed like mere pallid Muslim chauvinism to me. Now, reading Smith, I realized that the basic tenets of "Islamism," the political ideology making such a clatter around us in 2001, had been hammered out a hundred-plus years earlier by this intellectual Karl Marx of"Islamism." How could his very name be unknown to most non-Muslims? I plowed back into Islamic history, no longer in a quest for personal identity, but in an effort to make sense of the alarming developments among Muslims of my time-the horror stories in Afghanistan; the tumult in xviii INTRODUCTION Iran, the insurgencies in Algeria, the Philippines, and elsewhere; the hijackings and suicide bombings in the Middle East, the hardening extremism of political Islam; and now the emergence of the Taliban. Surely, a close look at history would reveal how on Earth it had come to this. And gradually, I came to realize how it had come to this. I came to perceive that, unlike the history of France or Malta or South America, the history of the Islamic lands "over there" was not a subset of some single world history shared by all. It was more like a whole alternative world history unto itself, competing with and mirroring the one I had tried to create for that Texas publisher, or the one published by McDougall-Littell, for which I had written "the Islam chapters." The two histories had begun in the same place, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers of ancient Iraq, and they had come to the same place, this global struggle in which the West and the Islamic world seemed to be the major players. In between, however, they had passed through different-and yet strangely parallel!-landscapes. Yes, strangely parallel: looking back, for example, from within the Western world-historical framework, one sees a single big empire towering above all others back there in ancient times: it is Rome, where the dream of a universal political state was born. Looking back from anywhere in the Islamic world, one also sees a single definitive empire looming back there, embodying the vision of a universal state, but it isn't Rome. It is the khalifate of early Islam. In both histories, the great early empire fragments because it simply grows too big. The decaying empire is then attacked by nomadic barbarians from the north-but in the Islamic world, "the north" refers to the steppes of Central Asia and in that world the nomadic barbarians are not the Germans but the Turks. In both, the invaders dismember the big state into a patchwork of smaller kingdoms permeated throughout by a single, unifying religious orthodoxy: Catholicism in the West, Sunni Islam in the East. World history is always the story of how "we" got to the here and now, so the shape of the narrative inherently depends on who we mean by "we" and what we mean by "here and now." Western world history traditionally presumes that here and now is democratic industrial (and postindustrial) civilization. In the United States the further presumption holds that world INTRODUCTION xix history leads to the birth of its founding ideals of liberty and equality and to its resultant rise as a superpower leading the planet into the future. This premise establishes a direction for history and places the endpoint somewhere down the road we're traveling now. It renders us vulnerable to the supposition that all people are moving in this same direction, though some are not quite so far along-either because they started late, or because they're moving more slowly-for which reason we call their nations "developing countries." When the ideal future envisioned by postindustrialized, Western democratic society is taken as the endpoint of history, the shape of the narrative leading to here-and-now features something like the following stages: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Birth of civilization {Egypt and Mesopotamia) Classical age {Greece and Rome) The Dark Ages {rise of Christianity) The Rebirth: Renaissance and Reformation The Enlightenment {exploration and science) The Revolutions {democratic, industrial, technological) Rise of Nation-States: The Struggle for Empire World Wars I and II. The Cold War The Triumph of Democratic Capitalism But what if we look at world history through Islamic eyes? Are we apt to regard ourselves as stunted versions of the West, developing toward the same endpoint, but less effectually? I think not. For one thing, we would see a different threshold dividing all of time into "before" and "after": the year zero for us would be the year of Prophet Mohammed's migration from Mecca to Medina, his Hijra, which gave birth to the Muslim community. For us, this community would embody the meaning of"civilized," and perfecting this ideal would look like the impulse that had given history its shape and direction. But in recent centuries, we would feel that something had gone awry with the flow. We would know the community had stopped expanding, had grown confused, had found itself permeated by a disruptive crosscurrent, a competing historical direction. As heirs to Muslim tradition, we INTRODUCTION XX would be forced to look for the meaning of history in defeat instead of triumph. We would feel conflicted between two impulses: changing our notion of "civilized" to align with the flow of history or fighting the flow of history to realign it with our notion of "civilized." If the stunted present experienced by Islamic society is taken as the here-and-now to be explained by the narrative of world history, then the story might break down to something like the following stages: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Ancient Times: Mesopotamia and Persia Birth of Islam The Khalifate: Quest for Universal Unity Fragmentation: Age of the Sultanates Catastrophe: Crusaders and Mongols Rebirth: The Three-Empires Era Permeation of East by West The Reform Movements Triumph of the Secular Modernists The Islamist Reaction Literary critic Edward Said has argued that over the centuries, the West has constructed an "Orientalist" fantasy of the Islamic world, in which a sinister sense of "otherness" is mingled with envious images of decadent opulence. Well, yes, to the extent that Islam has entered the Western imagination, that has more or less been the depiction. But more intriguing to me is the relative absence of any depictions at all. In Shakespeare's day, for example, preeminent world power was centered in three Islamic empires. Where are all the Muslims in his canon? Missing. If you didn't know Moors were Muslims, you wouldn't learn it from Othello. Here are two enormous worlds side by side; what's remarkable is how little notice they have taken of each other. If the Western and Islamic worlds were two individual human beings, we might see symptoms of repression here. We might ask, "What happened between these two? Were they lovers once? Is there some history of abuse?" But there is, I think, another less sensational explanation. Throughout much of history, the West and the core of what is now the Islamic world INTRODUCTION xxi have been like two separate universes, each preoccupied with its own internal affairs, each assuming itself to be the center of human history, each living out a different narrative-until the late seventeenth century when the two narratives began to intersect. At that point, one or the other had to give way because the two narratives were crosscurrents to each other. The West being more powerful, its current prevailed and churned the other one under. But the superseded history never really ended. It kept on flowing beneath the surface, like a riptide, and it is flowing down there still. When you chart the hot spots of the world-Kashmir, Iraq, Chechnya, the Balkans, Israel and Palestine, Iraq-you're staking out the borders of some entity that has vanished from the maps but still thrashes and flails in its effort not to die. This is the story I tell in the pages that follow, and I emphasize "story." Destiny Disrupted is neither a textbook nor a scholarly thesis. It's more like what I'd tell you if we met in a coffeehouse and you said, "What's all this about a parallel world history?" The argument I make can be found in numerous books now on the shelves of university libraries. Read it there if you don't mind academic language and footnotes. Read it here if you want the story arc. 1 Although I am not a scholar, I have drawn on the work of scholars who sift the raw material of history to draw conclusions and of academics who sifted the work of scholarly researchers to draw meta-conclusions. In a history spanning several thousand years, I devote what may seem like inordinate space to a brief half century long ago, but I linger here because this period spans the career of Prophet Mohammed and his first four successors, the founding narrative of Islam. I recount this story as an intimate human drama, because this is the way that Muslims know it. Academics approach this story more skeptically, crediting non-Muslim sources above supposedly less-objective Muslim accounts, because they are mainly concerned to dig up what "really happened." My aim is mainly to convey what Muslims think happened, because that's what has motivated Muslims over the ages and what makes their role in world history intelligible. I will, however, assert one caveat here about the origins oflslam. Unlike older religions-such as Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even Christianity-Muslims began to collect, memorize, recite, and preserve xxii INTRODUCTION their history as soon as it happened, and they didn't just preserve it but embedded each anecdote in a nest of sources, naming witnesses to each event and listing all persons who transmitted the account down through time to the one who first wrote it down, references that function like the chain of custody validating a piece of evidence in a court case. This implies only that the core Muslim stories cannot best be approached as parables. With a parable, we don't ask for proof that the events occurred; that's not the point. We don't care if the story is true; we want the lesson to be true. The Muslim stories don't encapsulate lessons of that sort: they're not stories about ideal people in an ideal realm. They come to us, rather, as accounts of real people wrestling with practical issues in the mud and murk of actual history, and we take from them what lessons we will. Which is not to deny that the Muslim stories are allegorical, nor that some were invented, nor that many or even all were modified by tellers along the way to suit agendas of the person or moment. It is only to say that the Muslims have transmitted their foundational narrative in the same spirit as historical accounts, and we know about these people and events in much the same way that we know what happened between Sulla and Marius in ancient Rome. These tales lie somewhere between history and myth, and telling them stripped of human drama falsifies the meaning they have had for Muslims, rendering less intelligible the things Muslims have done over the centuries. This then is how I plan to tell the story, and if you're on board with me, buckle in and let's begin. I ~ The Middle World was born, two worlds took shape between the LAtlantic Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. Each coalesced around a different network of trade and travel routes; one of them, mainly sea routes; the other, land routes. TONG BEFORE ISLAM If you look at ancient sea traffic, the Mediterranean emerges as the obvious center of world history, for it was here that the Mycenaeans, Cretans, Phoenicians, Lydians, Greeks, Romans, and so many other vigorous early cultures met and mingled. People who lived within striking distance of the Mediterranean could easily hear about and interact with anyone else who lived within striking distance of the Mediterranean, and so this great sea itself became an organizing force drawing diverse people into one another's narratives and weaving their destinies together to form the germ of a world history, and out of this came "Western civilization." If you look at ancient overland traffic, however, the Grand Central Station of the world was the nexus of roads and routes connecting the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Iranian highlands, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, roads that ran within a territory ringed by rivers and seas-the Persian Gulf, the Indus and Oxus rivers; the Aral, Caspian, and Black seas; the Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Red Sea. This eventually became the Islamic world. Unfortunately, common usage assigns no single label to this second area. A portion of it is typically called the Middle East, but giving one part 2 THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD (Defined by Sea Routes) THE MIDDLE WORLD (Defined by Land Routes) THE MIDDLE WORLD 3 of it a name obscures the connectedness of the whole, and besides, the phrase Middle East assumes that one is standing in western Europe-if you're standing in the Persian highlands, for example, the so-called Middle East is actually the Middle West. Therefore, I prefer to call this whole area from the Indus to Istanbul the Middle World, because it lies between the Mediterranean world and the Chinese world. The Chinese world was, of course, its own universe and had little to do with the other two; and that's to be expected on the basis of geography alone. China was cut off from the Mediterranean world by sheer distance and from the Middle World by the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and the jungles of southeast Asia, a nearly impenetrable barrier, which is why China and its satellites and rivals barely enter the "world history'' centered in the Middle World, and why they come in for rare mention in this book. The same is true of sub-Saharan Africa, cut off from the rest of Eurasia by the world's biggest desert. For that matter, the Americas formed yet another distinct universe with a world history of its own, which is for geographic reasons even more to be expected. Geography, however, did not separate the Mediterranean and Middle worlds as radically as it isolated China or the Americas. These two regions coalesced as different worlds because they were what historian Philip D. Curtin has called "intercommunicating zones": each had more interaction internally than it had with the other. From anywhere near the Mediterranean coast, it was easier to get to some other place near the Mediterranean coast than to Persepolis or the Indus River. Similarly, caravans on the overland routes crisscrossing the Middle World in ancient times could strike off in any direction at any intersection-there were many such intersections. As they traveled west, however, into Asia Minor {what we now call Turkey), the very shape of the land gradually funneled them down into the world's narrowest bottleneck, the bridge (if there happened to be one at the given time) across the Bosporus Strait. This tended to choke overland traffic down to a trickle and turn the caravans back toward the center or south along the Mediterranean coast. Gossip, stories, jokes, rumors, historical impressions, religious mythologies, products, and other detritus of culture flow along with traders, travelers, and conquerors. Trade and travel routes thus function like capillaries, carrying civilizational blood. Societies permeated by a network of such 4 DESTINY DISRUPTED capillaries are apt to become characters in one another's narratives, even if they disagree about who the good guys and the bad guys are. Thus it was that the Mediterranean and Middle worlds developed somewhat distinct narratives of world history. People living around the Mediterranean had good reason to think of themselves at the center of human history, but people living in the Middle World had equally good reason to think they were situated at the heart of it all. These two world histories overlapped, however, in the strip of territory where you now find Israel, where you now find Lebanon, where you now find Syria and Jordan-where you now, in short, find so much trouble. This was the eastern edge of the world defined by sea-lanes and the western edge of the world defined by land routes. From the Mediterranean perspective, this area has always been part of the world history that has the Mediterranean as its seed and core. From the other perspective, it has always been part of the Middle World that has Mesopotamia and Persia at its core. Is there not now and has there not often been some intractable argument about this patch of land: whose world is this a part of? THE MIDDLE WORLD BEFORE ISLAM The first civilizations emerged along the banks of various big slow-moving rivers subject to annual floods. The Huang Ho valley in China, the Indus River valley in India, the Nile Valley in Africa-these are places where, some six thousand years ago or more, nomadic hunters and herders settled down, built villages, and became farmers. Perhaps the most dynamic petri dish of early human culture was that fertile wedge of land between the Tigris and Euphrates known as Mesopotamia-which means, in fact, "between the rivers." Incidentally, the narrow strip of land flanked by these two rivers almost exactly bisects the modern-day nation oflraq. When we speak of"the fertile crescent" as "the cradle of civilization," we're talking about Iraq-this is where it all began. One key geographical feature sets Mesopotamia apart from some of the other early hotbeds of culture. Its two defining rivers flow through flat, habitable plains and can be approached from any direction. Geography provides no natural defenses to the people living here-unlike the Nile, for example, which is flanked by marshes on its eastern side, by the uninhab- THE MIDDLE WORLD 5 itable Sahara on the west, and by rugged cliffs at its upper end. Geography gave Egypt continuity but also reduced its interactions with other cultures, giving it a certain stasis. Not so, Mesopotamia. Here, early on, a pattern took hold that was repeated many times over the course of a thousand-plus years, a complex struggle between nomads and city dwellers, which kept spawning bigger empires. The pattern went like this: Settled farmers would build irrigation systems supporting prosperous villages and towns. Eventually some tough guy, some well-organized priest, or some alliance of the two would bring a number of these urban centers under the rule of a single power, thereby forging a larger political unit-a confederation, a kingdom, an empire. Then a tribe of hardy nomads would come along, conquer the monarch of the moment, seize all his holdings, and in the process expand their empire. Eventually the hardy nomads would become soft, luxury-loving city dwellers, exactly the sort of people they had conquered, at which point another tribe of hardy nomads would come along, conquer them, and take over their empire. Conquest, consolidation, expansion, degeneration, conquest-this was the pattern. It was codified in the fourteenth century by the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, based on his observations of the world he lived in. Ibn Khaldun felt that in this pattern he had discovered the underlying pulse of history. At any given time, this process was happening in more than one place, one empire developing here, another sprouting there, both empires expanding until they bumped up against each other, at which point one would conquer the other, forging a single new and bigger empire. About fifty-five hundred years ago, a dozen or so cities along the Euphrates coalesced into a single network called Sumer. Here, writing was invented, the wheel, the cart, the potter's wheel, and an early number system. Then the Akkadians, rougher fellows from upriver, conquered Sumer. Their leader, Sargon, was the first notable conqueror known to history by name, a ferocious fellow by all accounts and the ultimate selfmade man, for he started out poor and unknown but left records of his deeds in the form of clay documents stamped with cuneiform, which basically said, "This one rose up and I smote him; that one rose up and I smote him." 6 DESTINY DISRUPTED Sargon led his armies so far south they were able to wash their weapons in the sea. There he said, "Now, any king who wants to call himself my equal, wherever I went, let him go!" meaning, "Let's just see anyone else conquer as much as I have." 1 His empire was smaller than New Jersey. In time, a fresh wave of nomadic ruffians from the highlands came down and conquered Akkad, and they were conquered by others, and they by others-Guttians, Kassites, Hurrians, Amorites-the pattern kept repeating. Look closely and you'll see new rulers presiding over basically the same territory, but always more of it. The Amorites clocked a crucial moment in this cycle when they built the famous city of Babylon and from this capital ruled the (first) Babylonian Empire. The Babylonians gave way to the Assyrians, who ruled from the even bigger and grander city of Nineveh. Their empire stretched from Iraq to Egypt, and you can imagine how enormous such a realm must have seemed at a time when the fastest way to get from one place to another was by horse. The Assyrians acquired a nasty reputation in history as merciless tyrants. It's hard to say if they were really worse than others of their time, but they did practice a strategy Stalin made infamous in the twentieth century: they uprooted whole populations and moved them to other places, on the theory that people who had lost their homes and lived among strangers, cut off from familiar resources, would be too confused and unhappy to organize rebellion. It worked for a while, but not forever. The Assyrians fell at last to one of their subject peoples, the Chaldeans, who rebuilt Babylon and won a lustrous place in history for their intellectual achievements in astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. They used a base-12 system (as opposed to our base-10 system) and were pioneers in the measurement and division of time, which is why the year has twelve months, the hour has sixty minutes (five times twelve), and the minute has sixty seconds. They were terrific urban planners and architects-it was a Chaldean king who built those Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which the ancients ranked among the seven wonders of the world. But the Chaldeans followed the Assyrian strategy of uprooting whole populations in order to divide and rule. Their king Nebuchadnezzar was the one who first smashed Jerusalem and dragged the Hebrews into captivity. It was also a Chaldean king of Babylonia, Balshazzar, who, while THE MIDDLE WORLD 7 feasting in his palace one night, saw a disembodied hand write on his wall in letters of fire, "Mene mene tekel upharsin. " His sycophants couldn't make heads or tails of these words, probably because they were blind drunk, but also because the words were written in some strange tongue {Aramaic, as it happens.) They sent for the Hebrew captive Daniel, who said the words meant "Your days are numbered; you've been weighed and found wanting; your kingdom will be divided." At least so goes the Old Testament story in the book of Daniel. Balshazzar barely had time to ponder the prophecy before it came true. A sudden blistering bloodbath was unleashed upon Babylon by the newest gang of ruffians from the highlands, an alliance of Persians and Medes. These two Indo-European tribes put an end to second Babylonia and replaced it with the Persian Empire. At this point, the recurrent pattern of ever-bigger empires in the heart of the Middle World came to an end or at least to a long pause. For one thing, by the time the Persians were done, there wasn't much left to conquer. Both "cradles of civilization," Egypt and Mesopotamia, ended up as part of their realm. Their suzerainty stretched west into Asia Minor, south to the Nile, and east through the Iranian highlands and Afghanistan to the Indus River. The perfumed and polished Persians probably saw no point in further conquest: south of the Indus lay steaming jungles, and north of Afghanistan stretched harsh steppes raked by bitter winds and roamed by Turkish nomads eking out a bare existence with their herds and flocks-who even wanted to rule that? The Persians therefore contented themselves with building a string of forts to keep the barbarians out, so that decent folks might pursue the arts of civilized living on the settled side of the fence. By the time the Persians took charge, around 550 BCE, a lot of consolidation had already been done: in each region, earlier conquerors had drawn various local tribes and towns into single systems ruled by one monarch from a central capital, whether Elam, Ur, Nineveh, or Babylon. The Persians profited from the work (and bloodshed) of their predecessors. Yet the Persian Empire stands out for several reasons. First, the Persians were the counter-Assyrians. They developed a completely opposite idea of how to rule a vast realm. Instead of uprooting whole nations, they resettled them. They set the Hebrews free from captivity and helped them get back to 8 DESTINY DISRUPTED Canaan. The Persian emperors pursued a multicultural, many-peopleunder-one-big-tent strategy. They controlled their enormous realm by letting all the different constituent people live their own lives according to their own folkways and mores, under the rule of their own leaders, provided they paid their taxes and submitted to a few of the emperor's mandates and demands. The Muslims later picked up on this idea, and it persisted through Ottoman times. Second, the Persians saw communication as a key to unifying, and thus controlling, their realm. They promulgated a coherent set of tax laws and issued a single currency for their realm, currency being the medium of communication in business. They built a tremendous network of roads and studded it with hostels to make travel easy. They developed an efficient postal system, too, an early version of the Pony Express. That quote you sometimes see associated with the U.S. Postal Service, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds," comes from ancient Persia. The Persians also employed a lot of translators. You couldn't get away with saying, "But, officer, I didn't know it was against the law; I don't speak Persian." Translators enabled the emperors to broadcast written descriptions of their splendor and greatness in various languages so that all their subjects could admire them. Darius ("the Great"), who brought the Persian Empire to one of its several peaks, had his life story carved into a rock at a place called Behistun. He had it inscribed in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, fifteen thousand characters devoted to Darius's deeds and conquests, detailing the rebels who had tried and failed to topple him and the punishments he had meted out to them, essentially communicating that you did not want to mess with this emperor: he'd cut off your nose, and worse. Nonetheless, citizens of the empire found Persian rule basically benign. The well-oiled imperial machinery kept the peace, which let ordinary folks get on with the business of raising families, growing crops, and making useful goods. The part of Darius's Behistun inscription written in Old Persian was decipherable from modern Persian, so after it was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, scholars were able to use it to unlock the other two languages and thus gain access to the cuneiform libraries of ancient THE MIDDLE WORLD 9 Mesopotamia, libraries so extensive that we know more about daily life in this area three thousand years ago than we know about daily life in western Europe twelve hundred years ago. Religion permeated the Persian world. It wasn't the million-gods idea of Hinduism, nor was it anything like the Egyptian pantheon of magical creatures with half-human and half-animal shapes, nor was it like Greek paganism, which saw every little thing in nature as having its own god, a god who looked human and had human frailties. No, in the Persian universe, Zoroastrianism held pride of place. Zoroaster lived about a thousand years before Christ, perhaps earlier or perhaps later; no one really knows. He hailed from northern Iran, or maybe northern Afghanistan, or maybe somewhere east of that; no one really knows that, either. Zoroaster never claimed to be a prophet or channeler of divine energy, much less a divinity or deity. He considered himself a philosopher and seeker. But his followers considered him a holy man. Zoroaster preached that the universe was divided between darkness and light, between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between life and death. The universe split into these opposing camps at the moment of creation, they had been locked in struggle ever since, and the contest would endure to the end of time. People, said Zoroaster, contain both principles within themselves. They choose freely whether to go this way or that. By choosing good, people promote the forces of light and life. By choosing evil, they give strength to the forces of darkness and death. There is no predestination in the Zoroastrian universe. The outcome of the great contest is always in doubt, and not only is every human being free to make moral choices, but every moral choice affects that cosmic outcome. Zoroaster saw the drama of the universe vested in two divinities-not one, not thousands, but two. Ahura Mazda embodied the principle of good, Ahriman the principle of evil. Fire served as an iconic representation of Ahura Mazda, which has led some to characterize Zoroastrians as fire worshippers, but what they worship is not fire per se, it's Ahura Mazda. Zoroaster spoke of an afterlife but suggested that the good go there not as a reward for being good but as a consequence of having chosen that direction. You might say they lift themselves to heaven by the bootstraps of their choices. The Persian Zoroastrians rejected religious statues, imagery, 10 DESTINY DISRUPTED and icons, laying the basis for the hostility toward representation in religious art that reemerged forcefully in Islam. Sometimes Zoroaster, or at least his followers, called Ahura Mazda "the Wise Lord" and spoke as if he was actually the creator of the entire universe and as if it was he who had divided all of creation into two opposing aspects a short time after the moment of creation. Thus, Zoroaster's dualism inched toward monotheism, but it never quite arrived there. In the end, for the ancient Persian Zoroastrians, two deities with equal power inhabited the universe, and human beings were the rope in a tug of war between them. A Zoroastrian priest was called a magus, the plural of which is magi: the three "wise men of the East" who, according to the Christian story, brought myrrh and frankincense to the infant Jesus in his stable were Zoroastrian priests. The word magician also derives from magi. These priests were thought by others {and sometimes themselves claimed) to possess miraculous powers. In the late days of the empire, the Persians broke into the Mediterranean world and made a brief, big splash in Western world history. Persian emperor Darius sallied west to punish the Greeks. I say "punish," not "invade" or "conquer," because from the Persian point of view the so-called Persian Wars were not some seminal clash between two civilizations. The Persians saw the Greeks as the primitive inhabitants of some small cities on the far western edges of the civilized world, cities that implicitly belonged to the Persians, even though they were too far away to rule directly. Emperor Darius wanted the Greeks merely to confirm that they were his subjects by sending him a jar of water and a box of soil in symbolic tribute. The Greeks refused. Darius collected an army to go teach the Greeks a lesson they would never forget, but the very size of his army was as much a liability as an asset: How do you direct so many men at such a distance? How do you keep them supplied? Darius had ignored the first principle of military strategy: never fight a land war in Europe. In the end, it was the Greeks who taught the Persians an unforgettable lesson-a lesson that they quickly forgot, however, for less than one generation later, Darius's dimwitted son Xerxes decided to avenge his father by repeating and compounding his mistakes. Xerxes, too, came limping home, and that was the end of Persia's European adventure. THE MIDDLE WORLD 11 It didn't end there, however. About 150 years later, Alexander the Great took the battle the other way. We often hear of Alexander the Great conquering the world, but what he really conquered was Persia, which had already conquered "the world." With Alexander, the Mediterranean narrative broke forcefully in upon the Middle World one. Alexander dreamed of blending the two into one: of uniting Europe and Asia. He was planning to locate his capital at Babylon. Alexander cut deep and made a mark. He appears in many Persian myths and stories, which give him an outsize heroic quality, though not an altogether positive one {but not entirely villainous, either). A number of cities in the Muslim world are named after him. Alexandria is the obvious example, but a less obvious one is Kandahar-famous now because the Taliban consider it their capital. Kandahar was originally called "Iskandar," which is how "Alexander" was pronounced in the east, but the "Is" dropped away, and "Kandar" softened into "Kandahar." But the cut Alexander inflicted dosed up, the skin grew over, and the impact of his eleven years in Asia faded. One night in Babylon he suddenly died, whether from the flu, malaria, too much drink, or poison, no one knows. He had stationed generals in various parts of the territory he had conquered, and the moment he died, the toughest ones claimed whatever terrain they happened to hold, fashioning Hellenic kingdoms that endured for a few hundred years. For example, in the kingdom of Bactria (now northern Afghanistan) artists made Greek-looking sculptures; later, when Buddhist influences seeped north from India, the two art styles mixed, resulting in what is now known as Greco-Buddhist art. Eventually, however, those kingdoms weakened, Greek influence faded away, the Greek language fell out of use here, and the Persian substratum welled back to the surface. Another empire came to occupy much the same territory as that of the ancient Persians (though not as much of it). The new rulers called themselves Parthians, and they were formidable warriors. The Parthians battled Rome to a standstill, preventing their expansion east. Their armies were the first to include cataphracts-knights in full metal armor riding huge armored horses, much like the ones we associate with Europe's feudal ages. These Parthian knights were like mobile castles. But mobile castles are cumbersome, so the Parthians had another cavalry corps as well, lightly dad men riding naked horses. As a battle tactic, the 12 DESTINY DISRUPTED light cavalry sometimes pretended to have been routed; in the hot middle of the fighting, they would suddenly turn tail and race away. The army they were fighting would break ranks and chase after them, losing all order as they clamored, "Get 'em, boys; they're on the run; let's finish 'em!" whereupon the Parthians would suddenly wheel around and fire into the disorganized rabble their opponents had become, annihilating them in minutes. This was later known as a Parthian shot, and when you hear the phrase "parting shot," you may actually be hearing a corruption of the phrase "Parthian shot." 2 The Parthians were originally nomadic herders and hunters from the mountains northeast of Persia, but once they appropriated the frame of the old Persian Empire, they became, for all practical purposes, Persians. (Their name, Parthian, is probably a corruption or variation of "Persian.") This empire endured for centuries without leaving much of a trace, because they took little interest in art and culture, and mobile castles get recycled for scrap metal once the warriors inside them die. While they lasted, however, the Parthians protected and promoted trade, and caravans moved freely within their borders. The Parthian capital was known to the Greeks as Hecatompylos, "the hundred gated," because so many roads converged there. In the bazaars of Parthian cities, you could probably hear gossip from all quarters of the empire and the societies it bordered: the Greco-Buddhist kingdoms in the east, the Hindus to the south of them, the Chinese of the further east, the waning Greek (Seleucid) kingdoms in the west, and the Armenians to their north .... The Parthians had little social intercourse with the Romans, unless fighting counts. The civilizational blood that made the Parthians Persian didn't get across that border, and so again the Mediterranean and Middle worlds diverged. Around the time the Parthians began their rise, China was unified for the first time. In fact, the glory years of China's seminal Han dynasty coincide almost exactly with the period of Parthian dominance. In the West, the Romans began their great expansion near the beginning of the Parthian era. Just as Rome was beating Carthage for the first time, the Parthians were taking Babylonia. Just as Julius Caesar was tearing up Gaul, Parthian power was peaking in the Middle World. In 53 BCE the Parthians crushed the Romans in a battle, capturing thirty-four thousand legion- THE MIDDLE WORLD 13 naires and killing Crassus who, along with Caesar and Pompey, had been coruler of Rome. Thirty years later, the Parthians dealt Mark Antony a stinging defeat and established the Euphrates River as the border between the two empires. The Parthians were still expanding east when Christ was born. The spread of Christianity went little noticed by the Parthians, who favored Zoroastrianism in a lukewarm sort of way. When Christian missionaries began trickling east, the Parthians let them in; they didn't care very much about religion, one way or another. The Parthians always operated on a feudal system, with power distributed down through many layers of lords. Over time, imperial power leaked away into this ever more fragmented feudalism. In the third (Christian) century, a provincial rebel overthrew the last of the Parthians and founded the Sassanid dynasty, and this quickly expanded to occupy all the same territory as the Parthians and a little more besides. The Sassanids didn't alter the direction of cultural change; they only organized the empire more effectively, erased the last traces of Hellenic influence, and completed the restoration of the Persian fabric. They built monumental sculptures, enormous buildings, and imposing cities. Zoroastrianism enjoyed a huge resurgence-fire and ashes, sunlight and darkness, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman: it was the state religion. Missionary monks had been roaming west from Afghanistan, teaching Buddhism, but the seeds they dropped would not grow in the soil of Zoroastrian Persia, so they turned east, which is why Buddhism spread to China but not Europe. Countless Persian tales and legends of later times go back to this Sassanid period. The greatest of the Sassanid kings, Khusrow Anushervan, came to be remembered (by Persian speakers) as the archetype of the "just king," conflated perhaps with Kay Khosrow, the third king oflran's mythical first dynasty, something like an Arthurian figure presiding over a Persian Camelot and served by noble warriors. 3 The Roman Empire, meanwhile, was falling apart. In 293, the emperor Diodetian divided the empire in four parts for administrative purposes: it had grown just too huge and cumbersome to run from a single center. But Diodetian's reform ended up splitting the empire in two. The wealth was all in the east, it turned out, so the western part of the Roman Empire crumbled. As nomadic German tribes moved into the empire, government services shrank, law and order broke down, and trade decayed. Schools 14 DESTINY DISRUPTED foundered, western Europeans stopped reading or writing much, and Europe sank into its so-called Dark Ages. Roman cities in places like Germany and France and Britain fell into ruin, and society simplified down to serfs, warriors, and priests. The only institution binding disparate locales together was Christianity, anchored by the bishop of Rome, soon known as the pope. The eastern portion of the Roman Empire, headquartered in Constantinople, continued to hang on. The locals still called this entity Rome but to later historians it looked like something new, so retrospectively they gave it a new name: the Byzantine Empire. Orthodox Christianity was centered here. Unlike Western Christianity, this church had no pope-like figure. Each city with a sizable Christian population had its own top bishop, a "metropolitan," and all the metropolitans were supposedly equal, although the top bishop of Constantinople was more equal than most. Above them all, however, stood the emperor. Western learning, technology, and intellectual activity contracted to Byzantium. Here, writers and artists continued to produce books, paintings, and other works, yet once eastern Rome became the Byzantine Empire it more or less passed out ofWestern history. Many will dispute this statement-the Byzantine Empire was Christian, after all. Its subjects spoke Greek, and its philosophers ... well, let us not speak too much about its philosophers. Almost any well-educated Westerner knows of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, not to mention Sophocles, Virgil, Tacitus, Pericles, Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar, Augustus, and many others; but apart from academics who specialize in Byzantine history, few can name three Byzantine philosophers, or two Byzantine poets, or one Byzantine emperor after Justinian. The Byzantine Empire lasted almost a thousand years, by few can name five events that took place in the empire during all that time. Compared to ancient Rome, the Byzantine Empire didn't wield much clout, but in its own region it was a superpower, largely because it had no competition and because its walled capital of Constantinople was probably the most impregnable city the world had ever known. By the mid-sixth century, the Byzantines ruled most of Asia Minor and some of what we now call eastern Europe. They butted right up against Sassanid Persia, the region's other superpower. The Sassanids ruled a swath of land stretching THE MIDDLE WORLD 15 ON THE EVE OF ISLAM: THE BYZANTINE AND SASSANID EMPIRES east to the foothills of the Himalayas. Between the two empires lay a strip of disputed territory, the lands along the Mediterranean shore, where the two world histories overlap and where disputes have been endemic. To the south, in the shadow of both big empires, lay the Arabian Peninsula, inhabited by numerous autonomous tribes. Such was the political configuration of the Middle World just before Islam was born. The Hijra Year Zero 622 CE I sixth century of the Christian age, a number of cities flourished along the Arabian coast as hotbeds of commerce. The Arabians received goods at Red Sea ports and took camel caravans across the desert to Syria and Palestine, transporting spice and cloth and other trade goods. N THE LATE They went north, south, east, and west; so they knew all about the Christian world and its ideas, but also about Zoroaster and his ideas. A number of Jewish tribes lived among the Arabs; they had come here after the Romans had driven them out of Palestine. Both the Arabs and the Jews were Semitic and traced their descent to Abraham (and through him to Adam). The Arabs saw themselves as the line descended from Abraham's son Ishmael and his second wife, Hagar. The stories commonly associated with the Old Testament-Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his ark, Joseph and Egypt, Moses and the pharaoh, and the rest of them-were part of Arab tradition too. Although most of the Arabs were pagan polytheists at this point and the Jews had remained resolutely monotheistic, the two groups were otherwise more or less indistinguishable in terms of culture and lifestyle: the Jews of this area spoke Arabic, and their tribal structure resembled that of the Arabs. Some Arabs were nomadic Bedouins 17 18 DESTINY DISRUPTED who lived in the desert, but others were town dwellers. Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, was born and raised in the highly cosmopolitan town of Mecca, near the Red Sea coast. Meccans were wide-ranging merchants and traders, but their biggest, most prestigious business was religion. Mecca had temples to at least a hundred pagan deities with names like Hubal, Manat, Allat, al-Uzza, and Fals. Pilgrims streamed in to visit the sites, perform the rites, and do a little business on the side, so Mecca had a busy tourist industry with inns, taverns, shops, and services catering to pilgrims. Mohammed was born around the year 570. The exact date is unknown because no one was paying much attention to him at the time. His father was a poor man who died when Mohammed was still in the womb, leaving Mohammed's mother virtually penniless. Then, when Mohammed was only six, his mother died too. Although Mohammed was a member of the Quraysh, the most powerful tribe in Mecca, he got no status out of it because he belonged to one of the tribe's poorer dans, the Banu ("dan" or "house of") Hashim. One gets the feeling that this boy grew up feeling quite keenly his uncertain status as an orphan. He was not abandoned, however; his dose relatives took him in. He lived with his grandfather until the old man died and then with his uncle Abu Talib, who raised him like a son-yet the fact remained that he was a nobody in his culture, and outside his uncle's home he probably tasted the disdain and disrespect that was an orphan's lot. His childhood planted in him a lifelong concern for the plight of widows and orphans. When Mohammed was twenty-five, a wealthy widowed businesswoman named Khadija hired him to manage her caravans and conduct business for her. Arab society was not kind to women as a rule, but Khadija had inherited her husband's wealth, and the fact that she held on to it suggests what a powerful and charismatic personality she must have had. Mutual respect and affection between Mohammed and Khadija led the two to marriage, a warm partnership that lasted until Khadija's death twenty-five years later. And even though Arabia was a polygynous society in which having only one wife must have been uncommon, Mohammed married no one else as long as Khadija lived. As an adult, then, the orphan built quite a successful personal and business life. He acquired a reputation for his diplomatic skills, and quarreling parties often called upon him to act as an arbiter. Still, as Mohammed ap- THE HIJRA 19 proached the age of forty, he began to suffer what we might now call a midlife crisis. He grew troubled about the meaning of life. Looking around, he saw a society bursting with wealth, and yet amid all the bustling prosperity, he saw widows eking out a bare living on charity and orphans scrambling for enough to eat. How could this be? He developed a habit of retreating periodically to a cave in the mountains to meditate. There, one day, he had a momentous experience, the exact nature of which remains mysterious, since various accounts survive, possibly reflecting various descriptions by Mohammed himself. Tradition has settled on calling the experience a visitation from the angel Gabriel. In one account, Mohammed spoke of "a silken cloth on which was some writing" brought to him while he was asleep. 1 In the main, however, it was apparently an oral and personal interaction, which started when Mohammed, meditating in the utter darkness of the cave, sensed an overwhelming and terrifying presence: someone else was in the cave with him. Suddenly he felt himself gripped from behind so hard he could not breathe. Then came a voice, not so much heard as felt throughout his being, commanding him to "recite!" Mohammed managed to gasp out that he could not recite. The command came again: "Recite!" Again Mohammed protested that he could not recite, did not know what to recite, but the angel-the voice-the impulse-blazed once more: "Recite!" Thereupon Mohammed felt words of terrible grandeur forming in his heart and the recitation began: Recite in the name ofyour Lord Who created, Created humans from a drop of blood. Recite! And your Lord is most Bountiful He who taught humans by the pen, taught humans that which they knew not. Mohammed came down from the mountain sick with fear, thinking he might have been possessed by a jinn, an evil spirit. Outside, he felt a presence filling the world to every horizon. According to some accounts, he saw a light with something like a human shape within it, which was only 20 DESTINY DISRUPTED more thunderous and terrifying. At home, he told Khadija what had happened, and she assured him that he was perfectly sane, that his visitor had really been an angel, and that he was being called into service by God. "I believe in you," she said, thus becoming Mohammed's first follower, the first Muslim. At first, Mohammed preached only to his intimate friends and close relatives. For a time, he experienced no further revelations, and it depressed him: he felt like a failure. But then the revelations began to come again. Gradually, he went public with the message, until he was telling people all around Mecca, "There is only one God. Submit to His will, or you will be condemned to hell"-and he specified what submitting to the will of God entailed: giving up debauchery, drunkenness, cruelty, and tyranny; attending to the plight of the weak and the meek; helping the poor; sacrificing for justice; and serving the greater good. Among the many temples in Mecca was a cube-shaped structure with a much-revered cornerstone, a polished black stone that had fallen out of the sky a long time ago-a meteor, perhaps. This temple was called the Ka'ba, and tribal tales said that Abraham himself had built it, with the help of his son Ishmael. Mohammed considered himself a descendant of Abraham and knew all about Abraham's uncompromising monotheism. Indeed, Mohammed didn't think he was preaching something new; he believed he was renewing what Abraham (and countless other prophets) had said, so he zeroed in on the Ka'ba. This, he said, should be Mecca's only shrine: the temple of Allah. AI means "the" in Arabic, and lah, an elision of ilaah, means "god." Allah, then, simply means "God." This is a core point in Islam: Mohammed wasn't talking about "this god" versus "that god." He wasn't saying, "Believe in a god called Lah because He is the biggest, strongest god," nor even that Lah was the "only true god" and all the other ones were fake. One could entertain a notion like that and still think of God as some particular being with supernatural powers, maybe a creature who looked like Zeus, enjoyed immortality, could lift a hundred camels with one hand, and was the only one of its kind. That would still constitute a belief in one god. Mohammed was proposing something different and bigger. He was preaching that there is one God too all-encompassing and universal to be associated with any particular image, any particular attributes, any finite THE HIJRA 21 notion, any limit. There is only God and all the rest is God's creation: this was the message he was delivering to anyone who would listen. Mecca's business leaders came to feel threatened by Mohammed because they were making good money from religious tourism; if this onlyone-god idea took hold, they feared, the devotees of all the other gods would stop coming to Mecca and they'd be ruined. (Today, ironically, over a million people come to Mecca each year to perform the rites of pilgrimage at the Ka'ba, making this the biggest annual gathering on earth!) Besides, Mecca profited from drinking dens, gambling, prostitution, and other such attractions, and the tribal power brokers could not tolerate a man railing against the very entertainments that brought in their wealth, even if he had merely a smattering of followers, many of them powerless poor people and slaves. Well, for one thing, not all his followers were poor people and slaves: they included the wealthy and respected merchants Abu Bakr and Othman, and soon they even included the physically imposing giant Omar, who started out as one of Mohammed's most bitter enemies. The trend looked disturbing. For nearly twelve years, Mohammed's uncle Abu Talib defended him against all criticism. According to most Muslims, Abu Talib never converted to Islam himself, but he stood up for his nephew out of personal loyalty and love, and his word had weight. Khadija also backed her husband unstintingly, which gave him precious comfort. Then, in the course of a single devastating year, both these major figures in Mohammed's life died, leaving God's Messenger exposed to his enemies. That year, seven elders of the Quraysh tribe decided to have Mohammed killed while he slept, thereby getting rid of the troublemaker before he could do real damage to the economy. One of Mohammed's several uncles spearheaded the plot. In fact, all seven plotters were related to Mohammed, but this didn't soften their resolve. Fortunately, Mohammed caught wind of the plot and worked out how to foil it with help from two dose companions. One was his cousin Ali, now a strapping young man, who would soon marry Mohammed's daughter Fatima and become the Messenger's son-in-law. Another was his best friend, Abu Bakr, Mohammed's first follower outside his immediate family circle and his closest adviser, soon to become Mohammed's father-in-law. The Prophet had already been in contact with delegates from Yathrib, another town near the Red Sea coast, some 250 miles north of Mecca. It 22 DESTINY DISRUPTED was an agricultural rather than a commercial town and it was torn by con- flict because its inhabitants belonged to several quarreling tribes. The people of Yathrib wanted a fair-minded outsider to come in and oversee negotiations among the tribes; they hoped that if they ceded judicial authority to such a person, he would be able to bring about a peace. Mohammed had a reputation as a fair-minded and skillful arbitrator, a role he had played in several crucial disputes, and so the Yathribis thought he might be the man for the job. Several of them visited Mecca to meet Mohammed and found his charisma overwhelming. They converted to Islam and invited Mohammed to move to Yathrib as an arbiter and help put an end to all the quarrelling; the Prophet accepted. Mohammed's murder was planned for a September night in the year 622 CE. That night, the Prophet and Abu Bakr slipped away into the desert. Ali crawled into Mohammed's bed to make it look like he was still there. When the would-be assassins burst in, they were furious to find Ali, but they spared the kid and sent a search party out to hunt down the Prophet. Mohammed and Abu Bakr had made it only to a cave near Mecca, but legend has it that a spider built its web across the mouth of the cave after they entered. When the posse came by and saw the web, they assumed no one could be inside, and so passed on. Mohammed and Abu Bakr made it safely to Yathrib, by which time some of Mohammed's other followers had moved there too, and the rest soon followed. Most of these Meccan emigrants had to leave their homes and property behind; most were making a break with family members and fellow tribesmen who had not converted. But at least they were coming to a place where they would be safe, and where their leader Mohammed had been invited to preside as the city's highest authority, the arbiter among the rival tribal chieftains. True to his promise, Mohammed sat down with the city's fractious tribes to hammer out a covenant {later called the Pact of Medina.) This covenant made the city a confederacy, guaranteeing each tribe the right to follow its own religion and customs, imposing on all citizens rules designed to keep the overall peace, establishing a legal process by which the tribes settled purely internal matters themselves and ceded to Mohammed the authority to settle intertribal disputes. Most important, all the signatories, Muslim and non-Muslim, pledged to join all the others to defend THE HIJRA 23 Medina against outside attack. Although this document has been called the first written constitution, it was really more of a multiparty treaty. Mohammed also appointed one Yathribi Muslim to mentor and help each family of Meccan Muslims. The native was to host the newcomer and his family, get them settled, and help them start a new life. From this time on, the Yathribi Muslims were called the Ansar, "the helpers." The name of the city changed too. Yathrib became Medina, which simply means "the city'' {short for a phrase that meant "city of the prophet"). The emigration of the Muslims from Mecca to Medina, is known as the Hijra {often spelled Hegira in English.) A dozen years later, when Muslims created their own calendar, they dated it from this event because the Hijra, they felt, marked the pivot of history, the turning point in their fortunes, the moment that divided all of time into before the Hijra {BH) and after the Hijra {AH). Some religions mark their founder's birthday as their point of origin; some, the day he died; and still others, the moment of their prophet's enlightenment or his key interaction with God. In Buddhism, for example, the religion begins with Siddhartha Gautama's achievement of enlightenment under the bodhi tree. Christianity attributes key religious significance to Christ's death and resurrection {as well as his birth.) Islam, however, pays little attention to Mohammed's birthday. Growing up as a Muslim, I didn't know when he was born, because nothing special happened that day in Afghanistan. Some countries, such as Egypt, commemorate the day more elaborately, but still, there's no analog to Christmas in Islam, no "Mohammedmas." The revelation in the cave is commemorated as the most sacred night in Muslim devotions: it is the Night of Power, Lailut al-Qadr, which falls on or near the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, the month of fasting. But in the Muslim calendar of history, that event occurred ten years before the really crucial turning point: the Hijra. What makes moving from one town to another so momentous? The Hijra takes pride of place among events in Muslim history because it marks the birth of the Muslim community, the Umma, as it is known in Islam. Before the Hijra, Mohammed was a preacher with individual followers. After the Hijra, he was the leader of a community that looked to him for legislation, political direction, and social guidance. The word hijra 24 DESTINY DISRUPTED means "severing of ties." People who joined the community in Medina renounced tribal bonds and accepted this new group as their transcendent affiliation, and since this community was all about building an alternative to the Mecca of Mohammed's childhood, it was an epic, devotional social project. This social project, which became fully evident in Medina after the Hijra, is a core element oflslam. Quite definitely, Islam is a religion, but right from the start (if "the start" is taken as the Hijra) it was also a political entity. Yes, Islam prescribes a way to be good, and yes, every devoted Muslim hopes to get into heaven by following that way, but instead of focusing on isolated individual salvation, Islam presents a plan for building a righteous community. Individuals earn their place in heaven by participating as members of that community and engaging in the Islamic social project, which is to build a world in which orphans won't feel abandoned and in which widows won't ever be homeless, hungry, or afraid. Once Mohammed became the leader of Medina, people came to him for guidance and judgments about every sort of life question, big or little: how to discipline children ... how to wash one's hands ... what to consider fair in a contract ... what should be done with a thief ... the list goes on. Questions that in many other communities would be decided by a phalanx of separate specialists, such as judges, legislators, political leaders, doctors, teachers, generals, and others, were all in the Prophet's bailiwick here. Portions of the Qur'an recited in Mecca consist entirely of language like this: When earth is shaken with a mighty shaking and earth brings forth her burdens, and Man says, "what ails her?" upon that day she shall tell her tidings for that her Lord has inspired her. Upon that day men shall issue in scatterings to see their works and whoso has done an atom's weight ofgood shall see it and whoso has done an atom's weight ofevil shall see it. THE HIJRA 25 When you look at the verses revealed in Medina, you still find much passionate, lyrical, and imprecatory language, but you also find passages like this one: God charges you, concerning your children: to the male the like ofthe portion of two females, and if they be women above two, then for them two-thirds of what he leaves, but if she be one then to her a half; and to his parents to each one ofthe two the sixth of what he leaves, if he has children but if he has no children, and his heirs are his parents, a third to his mother, or, if he has brothers, to his mother a sixth, after any bequest he may bequeath, or any debt. Your fathers and your sons-you know not which out of these is nearer in profit to you. So God apportions; surely God is All-knowing, All-wise. This is legislation, and this is what the Muslim enterprise expanded to, once it took root in Medina. After the Hijra, the native Arabs of Medina gradually converted to Islam, but the city's three Jewish tribes largely resisted conversion, and over time a friction developed between them and the Muslims. Among the Arabs, too, some of the men displaced by Mohammed's growing stature harbored a closely guarded resentment. Meanwhile, the Quraysh tribe had not given up on assassinating Mohammed, even though he now lived 250 miles away. Not only did Quraysh leaders put a huge bounty of a hundred camels on Mohammed's head, they remained fixated on stamping out his whole community. To finance an assault on Medina, the wealthiest merchants of Mecca stepped up their trading expeditions. Mohammed countered by leading Muslims in raids on these Meccan caravans (which helped solve another problem 26 DESTINY DISRUPTED the Meccan emigrants faced: how to support themselves now that they had lost their goods and businesses.) After a year of these raids, the Meccans decided to raise the stakes. A thousand of them strapped on weapons and marched out to finish off the upstarts. The Muslims met them with a force of three hundred men at a place called Badr and defeated them soundly. The Qur'an mentions the battle of Badr as proof of Allah's ability to decide the outcome of any battle, no matter what the odds. Before Badr, some of the bedouin tribesmen had worked for merchants in Mecca as contract bodyguards. After Badr, these tribes began to switch sides. The growing solidarity of the Muslim community in Medina began to alarm the Jewish tribes. One of the three renounced the Pact of Medina and tried to instigate an uprising against Mohammed and a return to the pre-Islamic status quo, but the uprising failed, and this tribe was expelled from Medina. Now the Quraysh really did have cause to worry. Instead of eliminating Mohammed, it looked like they might have dug themselves the beginnings of a hole. In the year 3 AH, they decided to overwhelm the Muslims while they still had the numbers. They tripled the size of their army, heading for Medina with three thousand men. The Muslims could scratch up only 950 warriors. Again, they would be outnumbered three to one-but after Badr, how could this matter? They had the only asset that mattered: Allah was on their side. The second of Islam's three iconic battles occurred at a place called Uhud. At first the Muslims seemed to be winning again, but when the Meccans fell back, some of the Muslims disobeyed one of Mohammed's explicit orders: they broke ranks and spilled across the field in a chaotic rush to scoop up their share of booty-at which point the Meccans struck from behind, led by Khaled bin al-Walid, a military genius who later converted to Islam and became one of the Umma's leading generals. The Prophet himself was wounded at Uhud, seventy Muslims were killed, and many of the rest fled. The Umma survived, but this battle marked a bad defeat. These seminal battles of Islamic history were so small-scale, measured against most real wars, that they barely qualify as battles. Each one, however, was incorporated into Muslim theology and vested with meaning. THE HIJRA 27 Thus, the battle of Badr showed that Allah's will, not material factors, determined victory in battle. But the battle of Uhud raised a thorny theological question. IfBadr showed the power of Allah, what did Uhud show? That Allah could also lose battles? That He was not quite as all-powerful as Mohammed proclaimed? Mohammed, however, found a different lesson in defeat. Allah, he explained, let the Muslims lose this time to teach them a lesson. The Muslims were supposed to be fighting for a righteous cause-a just community on earth. Instead, at Uhud they forgot this mission and went scrambling for loot in direct disobedience to the Prophet's orders, and so they forfeited Allah's favor. Divine support was not an entitlement; Muslims had to earn the favor of Allah by behaving as commanded and submitting to His will. This explanation for defeat provided a stencil that Muslims invoked repeatedly in later years, after the Mongol holocaust of the thirteenth century, for example, when nomadic invaders from Central Asia overwhelmed most of the Islamic world, and again in response to Western domination, which began in the eighteenth century and continues to this day. The Quraysh spent two years planning their next assault. Recruiting allies from other tribes, they built an army of ten thousand men-inconceivably gigantic for that time and place. When Mohammed heard about this force marching on Medina, he had his Muslims dig a moat around their town. The Quraysh arrived on camels, which would not or could not cross the moat. The stymied Quraysh decided to starve Medina with a siege. The siege strategy, however, scuttled a secret plan the Quraysh were counting on. After the disastrous battle of Uhud, another of Medina's Jewish tribes had been exposed as collaborating with the Meccans. Like the first Jewish tribe, they had been tried and sent into exile. The third tribe, the Banu Qurayza, then proclaimed its loyalty to the Pact of Medina. Now, however, in the run-up to the Battle of the Moat, its leaders had secretly conspired with the Quraysh to fall upon the Muslim forces from behind as soon as the Meccan forces attacked from the front. When no frontal attack came, the conspirators within Medina lost their nerve. Meanwhile, the besieging force began to fragment, for it was a confederation of tribes, most of whom had come along only as a favor to their Qurayshi allies. With no battle to fight, they got restless. When a windstorm 28 DESTINY DISRUPTED blew up-no small matter in this landscape-they drifted off, and soon the Quraysh gave up and went home too. All this left the Banu Qurayza in a bad spot. Their plot had been discovered and now their allies were gone. Mohammed put the whole tribe on trial and appointed one of their former associates among the Medina tribes as judge. When the tribe was found guilty, the judge declared that the crime was treason, the punishment for which was death. Some onlookers protested against this sentence, but Mohammed confirmed the sentence, whereupon some eight hundred Jewish men were executed in the public square, and the women and children of the tribe were sent to live with the two tribes exiled earlier. This whole drama sent a shock wave through Arabia. The trial and execution of the Banu Qurayza announced the grim resolution of the Muslims of Medina. In strictly military terms the Battle of the Moat was a stalemate, but the Quraysh had mustered a force of ten thousand with such fanfare that failing to win was as bad as losing, and this loss helped to stoke a growing myth of Muslim invincibility, communicating a broad impression that this community was not just another powerful tribe feeling its oats but something strange and new. The Muslims lived a distinctly different way of life, they practiced their own devotional rituals, and they had a leader who, when problems came up, went into a trance and channeled advice, he said, from a supernatural helper so powerful that Muslims had no fear of going into battle outnumbered three to one. Who was this helper? At first, many of the unconverted might have thought, It's a really pow- erful god. But gradually the Muslim message sank in: not a god but the God, the only one. And what if Mohammed was exactly what he claimed to be-the one human being on earth directly connected to the creator of the entire universe? Recruiting people to kill the man grew ever more difficult. Recruiting warriors to go up against his forces grew difficult too. After the Battle of the Moat, the trickle of conversions to Islam became a flood. It's easy to suppose people were converting out of canny self-interest, a desire to join the winning side. Muslims, however, believe there was more to it. In Mohammed's presence, they believe, people were having a religious experience. THE HIJRA 29 Mohammed never claimed supernatural powers. He never claimed the ability to raise the dead, walk on water, or make the blind to see. He only claimed to speak for God, and he didn't claim that every word out of his mouth was God talking. Sometimes it was just Mohammed talking. How could people tell when it was God and when it was Mohammed? At the time, apparently, it was obvious. Today's Muslims have a special way of vocalizing the Qur'an called qira'ut. It's a sound quite unlike any other made by the human voice. It's musical, but it isn't singing. It's incantatory, but it isn't chanting. It invokes emotion even in someone who doesn't understand the words. Every person who performs qira'ut does so differently, but every recitation feels like an imitation or intimation or interpretation of some powerful original. When Mohammed delivered the Qur'an, he must have done so in this penetrating and emotional voice. When people heard the Qur'an from Mohammed, they were not just listening to words but experiencing an emotional force. Perhaps this is why Muslims insist that no translation of the Qur'an is the Qur'an. The true Qur' an is the whole package, indivisible: the words and their meanings, yes, but also the very sounds, even the look of the lettering when the Qur'an is in written form. To Muslims, it wasn't Mohammed the person but the Qur'an coming through Mohammed that was converting people. One other factor attracted people to the community and inspired them to believe Mohammed's claims. In this part of the world, small-scale warfare was endemic, as it seems to be in any area populated by many small nomadic tribes among whom trading blends into raiding (such as North America's eastern woodlands before Columbus arrived, or the Great Plains shortly after). Add the Arabian tradition of blood feuds lasting for generations, add also the tapestry of fragile tribal alliances that marked the peninsula at this time, and you have a world seething with constant, ubiquitous violence. Wherever Mohammed took over, he instructed people to live in peace with one another, and the converts did. By no means did he tell Muslims to eschew violence, for this community never hesitated to defend itself. Muslims still engaged in warfare, just not against one another; they expended their aggressive energy fighting the relentless outside threat to their survival. Those who joined the Umma immediately entered Dar al-Islam, which means "the realm of submission (to God)" but also, by implication, 30 DESTINY DISRUPTED "the realm of peace." Everyone else was living out there in Dar al-Harb, the realm of war. Those who joined the Umma didn't have to watch their backs anymore, not with their fellow Muslims. Converting also meant joining an inspiring social project: the construction of a just community of social equals. To keep that community alive, you had to fight, because the Umma and its project had implacable enemies. jihad never meant "holy war" or "violence." Other words in Arabic mean "fighting" more unambiguously {and are used as such in the Qur'an). A better translation for jihad might be "struggle," with all the same connotations the word carries in the rhetoric of social justice movements familiar to the West: struggle is deemed noble when it's struggle for a just cause and if the cause demands "armed struggle," that's okay too; it's sanctified by the cause. Over the next two years, tribes all across the Arabian peninsula began accepting Mohammed's leadership, converting to Islam, and joining the community. One night Mohammed dreamed that he had returned to Mecca and found everyone there worshipping Allah. In the morning, he told his followers to pack for a pilgrimage. He led fourteen hundred Muslims on the two-hundred-mile trek to Mecca. They came unarmed, despite the recent history of hostilities, but no battle broke out. The city closed its gates to the Muslims, but Quraysh elders came out and negotiated a treaty with Mohammed: the Muslims could not enter Mecca this year but could come back and perform their rites of pilgrimage next year. Clearly, the Quraysh knew the game was over. In year 6 AH, the Muslims came back to Mecca and visited the Ka'ba without violence. Two years later, the elders of Mecca surrendered the city to Mohammed without a fight. As his first act, the Prophet destroyed all the idols in the Ka'ba and declared this cube with the black cornerstone the holiest spot in the world. A few of Mohammed's former enemies grumbled and muttered threats, but the tide had turned. Virtually all the tribes had united under Mohammed's banner, and all of Arabia was living in harmony for the first time in reported memory. In year 10 AH {632 CE), Mohammed made one more pilgrimage to Mecca and there gave a final sermon. He told the assembled men to regard the life and property of every Muslim as sacred, to respect the rights of all people including slaves, to acknowledge that women had rights over men THE HIJRA 31 just as men had rights over women, and to recognize that among Muslims no one stood higher or lower than anyone else except in virtue. He also said he was the last of God's Messengers and that after him no further revelations would be coming to humanity. 2 Shortly after returning to Medina, he fell ill. Burning with fever, he went from house to house, visiting his wives and friends, spending a moment or two with each one, and saying good-bye. He ended up with his wife Ayesha, the daughter of his old friend Abu Bakr, and there, with his head in her lap, he died. Someone went out and gave the anxious crowd the news. At once, loyal Omar, one of Mohammed's fiercest and toughest but also one of his most hotheaded companions, jumped to his feet and warned that any man who spread such slander would lose limbs when his lie was exposed. Mohammed dead? Impossible! Then the older and more prudent Abu Bakr went to investigate. A moment later he came back and said, "0 Muslims! Those of you who worshipped Mohammed, know that Mohammed is dead. Those of you who worship Allah, know that Allah is alive and immortal." The words swept away Omar's rage and denial. He felt, he told friends later, as if the ground had been cut out from under him. He broke down crying, then, this strong bull of a man, because he realized that the news was true: God's Messenger was dead. Birth of the Khalifate 11-24 AH 632-644 CE D EVOTED MUSLIMS SEE the whole of Mohammed's life as a religious metaphor illuminating the meaning of existence, but the religious event does not end with the Prophet's death. It continues through the terms of his first four successors, remembered as the Rashidun, "the rightly guided ones": Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali. The entire drama, from the revelation in the cave through the Hijra to the death of the Prophet's fourth successor almost forty years later, forms the core religious allegory oflslam, analogous to the last supper, the crucifixion, and the resurrection ofJesus Christ in Christianity. Islam emerged well within literate times. People were writing journals, diaries, letters, bureaucratic documents, and other works. For this period a rich documentary record exists. It seems, then, as if the origins of Islam should lie squarely within the realm of journalism rather than legend. And yet, what we know about the life and times of these first four successors derives largely from a history written decades later by the writer Ibn Ishaq, who died in 151 AH (768 CE). Ibn Ishaq came from a long line of traditionists, the archivists of oral culture: men and women whose job it was to gather, remember, and retell 33 34 DESTINY DISRUPTED significant events. He was the first of his line to write the whole story down, but most of his book has been lost. Before it disappeared, however, other writers quoted from it, referred to it, included excerpts from it in their own works, wrote synopses of it, or paraphrased its stories. (Recently, in fact, some academics have been trying to reconstruct Ibn Ishaq's work from the fragments of it found in other works.) One historian who used Ibn Ishaq as his major source was Ibn Jarir alTabari, who died about three hundred years after the Hijra. He wrote the thirty-nine-volume History of the Prophets and Kings that begins with Adam and ends in the year 292 AH (915 CE). His work has survived into the present day, and most of the anecdotes and details we read about Mohammed and his successors come to us through him. It is he who tells us what color hair these men had, what their favorite food was, and how many camels they owned. He includes their key speeches and conversations as direct quotations. His history is not exactly a readable narrative, however, because each story is nested in a mind-numbing list of names, the isnad, or "chain of transmission": "X reports that Y told him that he heard from Z that ... and finally the anecdote." After each anecdote comes a different version of the same anecdote, nested in a different isnad: "A reports that he heard from B that C said that D recounts that ... [anecdote]." Tabari doesn't say which version is true; he just puts them out there for you the reader to decide. Over the centuries, writers have compiled their own versions of the most compelling anecdotes, some of which make their way into popular and oral accounts and eventually turn into the Islamic version of"Bible stories," told to kids like me at home by our elders and in grammar school by our religion teachers. Overall, these stories chronicle a tumultuous human drama that unfolded in the first twenty-nine years after the Prophet's death, a story of larger-than-life characters wrestling with epic issues, a story filled with episodes that evoke wonder and heartbreak. It's quite possible to take sides in retelling these stories, for there are sides to take, and it's quite possible to speculate about motives and make judgments about people's decisions. On the other hand, these anecdotes have acquired allegorical status: different judgments and interpretations support different doctrines and represent various theological positions. We cannot know the hard facts of this story in a journalistic way because no untouched eyewitness account BIRTH OF THE KHALIFATE 35 has survived. We have only the story of the story of the story, a sifting process that has drawn the mythological significance of the raw events to the surface. Here, then, is that story of the succession. THE FIRST KHALIFA (I I-I 3 AH) The moment Mohammed died, the community faced an overwhelming problem. It wasn't just "Who is our next leader?" but "What is our next leader?" When a saint dies, people can't simply name some other saint in his place, because such figures aren't created by election or appointment, they just emerge; and if they don't, oh well; people may be disappointed, but life goes on. When a king dies, by contrast, no one says, "Wouldn't it be nice if someday we had another king?" The gap must be plugged at once. When Prophet Mohammed died, it was like a saint dying but it was also like a king dying. He was irreplaceable, yet someone had to take his place. Without a leader, the Umma could not hold together. The new leader had to be more than a king, however, because this was not a community like any other. It was, its members believed, the embodiment of the revelations, existing to express Allah's will and thereby transform the world. The leader of this community could not get by on brains, bravery, strength, and such traits. He had to have some special religious grace or power. Yet Mohammed's successor would not be a God-guided messenger, because Mohammed himself had said there would be no more of those. So if the leader wouldn't be a king or a God-guided messenger, what would he be? Curiously enough, the nascent Muslim community had given no consideration to this question before the Prophet died; and it gave no consideration to it in the hours immediately after his death either, for this was not a time for grand philosophical discussions. With the Prophet's body scarcely cold, Abu Bakr heard a disturbing report: the native Muslims of Medina were meeting to elect a leader of their own, as if they and the immigrants from Mecca were separate groups: here, quite possibly, was the beginning of the end of the Umma! Abu Bakr gathered some of Mohammed's closest companions, crashed the meeting, and begged the Medinans to reconsider. Muslims should elect a single leader for the whole community. He pleaded, not a prophet, not a 36 DESTINY DISRUPTED king, just someone to call meetings, moderate discussions, and hold the community together. "Choose one of these two," he suggested, pointing to the irascible Omar and to another of the Prophet's close companions. Omar himself was appalled. Take precedence over Abu Bakr? Unthinkable! He grasped the older man's hand and told the assembly that only Abu Bakr could serve as leader, now that the Prophet himself was gone. Through tears, he swore allegiance to Mohammed's closest friend, a dramatic gesture that electrified the room. Suddenly Abu Bakr did seem like the obvious and only choice, this sensible, lovable man who had distinguished himself all his life by his wisdom, courage, and compassion. In a gush of enthusiasm, the meeting gave unanimous consent to letting Abu Bakr assume the modest tide of khalifa {or, as most Western accounts would have it, "caliph"), which meant "deputy." ...