Creation of a Muslim Empire The Quraysh Civil War & the Marwanids A Late Antiquity Perspective Prepared by Cyril Achcar Concordia University 1 Sitting in Constantinople, in the early seventh century, the highly educated Alexandrian immigrant, Theophylact Simocatta, wrote what would become the last of the great secular classicizing histories of Late Antiquity. His History was a form of literature which reached back to Herodotus, Thucydides and Arrian in imitation1. Writing about events in about 590CE, Theophylact inserts a supposed letter from the exiled Sassanid Emperor Khosrow II asking the Byzantine2 Emperor Maurice for assistance in restoring him to his throne. The letter apparently greatly moved the Emperor Maurice for he would go on to successfully assist Khosrow. More importantly though, the letter gives us an excellent insight into how the Byzantines and Sassanids viewed the world order at the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh centuries. The letter begins: “Chosroes [Khosrow] king of Persians greets the most prudent king of the Romans, the beneficent, peaceful, masterful, lover of nobility and hater of tyranny, equitable, righteous, saviour of the injured, bountiful, forgiving. God effected that the whole world should be illumined from the very beginning by two eyes, namely by the most powerful kingdom of the Romans and by the most prudent sceptre of the Persian state. For by these greatest powers the disobedient and bellicose tribes are winnowed and man's course is continually regulated and guided3.” The “regulation and guidance” of mankind by these “two eyes” of the world however had been in a state of near constant conflict through most of the sixth century. Finishing his History around 620CE, Theophylact wrote in the midst of just the latest war between the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires after the assassination of the Emperor Maurice in 602CE. The aforementioned Khosrow II however, would take the opportunity to invade the Byzantine Empire, the same Empire which had so recently helped restore him to power4. The war would see the Sassanids overrun almost the entire Byzantine Empire in a matter of a few years before the Byzantine Emperor and usurper, Heraclius, rolled back these conquests. And yet Theophylact is not entirely disparaging of the role played by the Sassanid Persians in maintaining the stability of this bipolar world order. As one of the “eyes” which kept balance against the marauding forces of “bellicose tribes” living just beyond their respective borders, both empires had a divinely mandated prerogative to intervene in their affairs to maintain the civilized order. So malignant are these “abounding demons” as he called them, that even in the midst of a war which saw Theophylact’s hometown conquered by the Persians, he exhorts that the “Roman state” had an obligation to save the Persians by helping to end the dynastic civil war which had plagued Khosrow II’s reign. The alternative, Theophylact reminds us through the letter of Khosrow II, is that if they should fail: “…and that thereby the fierce, malevolent tribes may gain authority and power over the most meek kingdom of the Persians, and then subsequently thereby in the course of time gain irresistible might, which will not be without great injury to your [sic. Roman] tributary nations as well.” 5 Through these words Theophylact demonstrates the perceived fear that if one of these “two eyes” holding up the order of the civilized world should collapse, the other would be greatly endangered. A case perhaps of the enemy you already know is better than the one you don’t. The fact that this whole world order would come crashing down in precisely this manner is something which perhaps fortunately neither Khosrow II, nor Theophylact would live to 1 Whitby, The History of Theophylact Simocatta, 1. 2 The word ‘Byzantine’ will be used here to refer to the Empire and its Greek and Latin speaking peoples. However, it is important to note that the people of the Empire viewed themselves as a continuation of the Roman Empire and identified as Romans. 3 Whitby, Theophylact, Book 4, 11.1-4. 4 Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, 11. 5 Whitby, Theophylact, Book 4, 11.5-8. 2 witness6. Within a couple decades of their deaths, the Sassanid Empire would cease to exist and the Byzantine Empire would be fighting for its own survival. Setting the Stage The ‘usurpers of civilization’ however would not come from fearsome northern steppe warriors, who make up the bulk of Theophylact’s ‘uncivilized’ antagonists in his History, but rather from an unexpected direction, the South7. For in the mid-seventh century a rather peculiar series of events in world history began to take place. Completely unexpectedly, Arabic speaking armies led by minor merchants from the fringe market town of Mecca in the Hejaz made an appearance on the imperial stage between the domineering Byzantine Roman and Sassanian Persian Empires. These armies were led by the scions of a tribal group the Quraysh, founded by the eponymous Qusayy. Beginning in the early sixth century, the Quraysh were the latest of a series of tribal families to dominate the sacred haram in Mecca. His descendants would begin the commercialization and urbanization of this otherwise desolate location giving rise to Mecca as a minor hub between the great Indian Ocean and Mediterranean trading emporiums8. By about 630CE the Quraysh of Mecca had been defeated by one of their own, an exile who had taken command of the agricultural oasis of Yathrib. This outcast mandated that there would be reconciliation between the merchants of the Quraysh, the exiles followers, and their erstwhile helpers from Yathrib9 (soon to be called Medina). Indeed the families of the Quraysh and their descendants would go on to lead a polity in some shape or form down to 1258, and beyond to the present day10. How these people called their new polity is highly unclear from our sources, but from contemporaneous papyri from the early seventh century, qada’ al-mu’minin, shows up the most often, variously translated to as the ‘jurisdiction’ or ‘era of the Believers’11. Who these Believers are, what this polity they formed was, and how it transformed itself in the late seventh century, are the questions addressed in this paper. Whilst questions surrounding the exact nature of this new state have confounded modern historians for decades, it is undoubtable that they were urged by a new moralising message from a member of the Quraysh, the Prophet Muhammad, and that this emerging states’ leadership would come solely from the Quraysh ‘super-clan’. Adherence to the Prophet and membership in the Quraysh would become the key sources of legitimacy for would be rulers12. It is also important however to remind ourselves that these Arabic speaking peoples13 were a tiny minority in their newly conquered lands, but also that they were not 6 Theophylact died in 630CE, and two years prior Khosrow II was executed by his son Kavad II, starting another dynastic civil war in the Sassanid Empire. 7 In his History, Theophylact only seemingly mentions Saracens four times, usually as allies of the Byzantines (ie. the Ghassanid Arabs). Starting in Book 8 however his description of “Saracens” changes as they are described as having ravaged the land during Khosrow II’s reign. See Whitby, Book 8, 1.1-2. 8 Kennedy, The Prophet, 22. 9 The Meccan exiles are called “emigrants” or Muhajirun, and the “helpers” of Medina, those who aided Muhammad are called the ansar. 10 In 1258CE the last Abbasid Caliph was deposed by Mongol armies, and today the Banu Hashim, a subgroup of the Quraysh that the Prophet Muhammad belonged to, rule in Jordan. 11 Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 176-177. 12 Whilst this held true for the majority of the ummah, the minority group the Kharijites would reject this understanding. 13 From here on out they will be called ‘Arabs’, even though it is unclear when this identity came to express holistically the Arabic speaking peoples. Robert Hoyland expresses an earlier start to this identity in In God’s Path, whilst Fred Donner posits that an Arab identity cannot be expressed in a pre-nationalist state in Muhammad and the Believers. 3 entirely foreigners. For centuries they had interacted with the cities on the littoral of the Syrian and Arabian deserts, sometimes as immigrants, soldiers or even rulers14. The collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and the near collapse of its Eastern half in the seventh century, is no longer seen as the guillotine that killed ‘classical civilization’. The transformation therefore from Antiquity to the Middle Ages was a drawn out process, and this process has come to be termed Late Antiquity15. Many historians in recent decades have since merged the study of Late Antiquity and the rise of Islam16, including the originator of the term Peter Brown. Brown states: “…we no longer treat Islam and Christianity as if they were totally incommensurable – as if they were hermetically sealed entities, incapable of communicating with each other”17. Following this then, in studying the seventh century onwards, it does a disservice to our understanding of the period to create an Islamo-centric narrative of the region, when the vast majority of its people would continue to be Christian or Jewish and its literature written in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, for many centuries to come18. The Church fathers, bureaucrats, pilgrims and many others who wrote these accounts give us the best picture of the emerging Medieval Middle East that was ruled by what would become an expressly Muslim polity by the early eighth century19.