How does a man born in a distant desert, born in a land that even God seems to have forsaken, found a movement that outdoes every expansionist and colonialist culture in the history of humankind? How does that man give birth to a movement that does something Western scholars like Harvard’s Caroline Elkins call impossible—winning hearts and minds. Winning them so completely that they refuse to give up the beliefs that were imposed on their ancestors by the deliberate and systematic use of military tactics we would call “atrocities.”
The story begins over 200 years before the birth of Mohammed, a time when the superpowers of the world were in a situation very similar to ours today—they were racked by indecision, under attack by outsiders, and, in one important case, crumbling like Roquefort cheese.
History did a lot to soften the turf for the rise of Islam. 410 AD The barbarian Alaric led his Visigoths in the sack of Rome. The result was a long, slow slide of the Roman Empire into chaos. Europe turned from a paradise into a scrap-heap oozing blood. Roughly half of Western Europe’s population died of starvation or plague. In the West, it was the beginning of the Dark Ages.
Things seemed to be going far better in the East. In 324 AD a Roman Emperor, Constantine transformed an ancient Greek city that straddled the waters dividing Europe from Asia into a capital he called Nova Roma, the New Rome. We know that city better by its original Greek name, Byzantium, and by a name honoring the Emperor who lifted its stature, Constantinople. Six years after Constantine’s facelift, he named Byzantium the new capital of the Roman Empire. So, in a sense, Rome didn’t fall when Alaric entered its gates to literally rape and pillage. It moved. The City of Byzantium fought hard to keep the Western properties of the its Empire—the Roman Empire. In some cases it succeeded. In some, it failed. Because of those failures, the Western Roman Empire—especially the 2,200-mile-long north coast of Africa—remained shaky, something that would eventually help the armies of Islam enormously. But the New Rome, Byzantium, managed to hold on to the Eastern half of the Roman Empire…and keep it in one piece.
That was not as comforting as it sounds. In the East, the New Rome, Byzantium, was up against another superpower, the Empire of Persia. The Persian Empire was as land hungry as Rome—the new Rome or the old Rome. And its credentials for conquest were even more august. The Persians had been master of lands from India to Egypt in the days when Herodotus was writing Western Civilization’s first history, around 440 BC. In those days, Rome was just a pip with a minor squeak. By 550 AD or so, the Persians and the New Romans, the Byzantines, had worn each other into exhaustion in a non-stop battle for the domination of Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor. I’d like to say that both the New Romans and the Persians dismissed the desert fleas of the Arab Peninsula as insignificant barbarians. But that would be an exaggeration. In fact, as we’ll see further on, the emperors of The New Rome and of Persia didn’t even seem to know the Arabs existed. This ignorance would also someday play into Mohammed’s hands. In part, because the Arabs, like many of history’s overlooked barbarians, used war as what Islamic biographer Muhammad Abdul Hai would someday call a “hobby.”[106] They loved to fight, to kill, to raid, to take revenge for minor slights, and to run off with the spoils—some old clothes and a camel or sheep.
Those who pursue hobbies obsessively sometimes become remarkably good at the skills they practice…another fact Mohammed would eventually turn to good advantage.
Events in the wild wastes of the Arab desert also paved the way for Mohammed’s arrival on the scene. The year was 552[107] AD. It was the Year of the Elephant. No, this wasn’t China, and years in the deserts the Arabs made their home were not normally named after pigs, bears, and mice. But this year there was a struggle over the religious soul of the Arab heartland, a struggle that would that would involve an animal with a trunk where its nose should have been. The Red Sea divides Arabia from Africa by only 17 miles at its narrowest point. On the Arab side was Yemen. On the African side were the paths that led the 100 miles south to Ethiopia.
Ethiopia was not the mousey little nation we view it as today. The Persian religious thinker Mani listed it as one of the four great powers of its time, along with Rome, Persia, and China.[108] For roughly 200 years, Ethiopia had been Christian.[109] For at least 500 years, Ethiopia and Yemen had been trade partners.[110] And since 520 AD,[111] only 30 years earlier, the Ethiopians had actually ruled Southern Arabia, including Yemen. So the Ethiopians decided to bring a little holiness to their newly-acquired land. They set up a church in the Yemeni city of Sanaa, the sort of massive church designed to attract converts.
In 552 AD, a citizen of a city deep in the mountainous deserts 600 miles away took offense on behalf of the rag-tag idols of his fathers, snuck into Sanaa one night, and vandalized the brand new Ethiopian church, defiling it to the best of his ability. The church-defiler came from a trading town with a name that would eventually be known around the world—Mecca. At the time, however, Mecca was the desert equivalent of Chillicothe, Ohio—a town of nearly total anonymity. The Christian governor of Yemen—the man who ruled Yemen on behalf of Ethiopia—was not at all pleased with the vandalism perpetrated by this desert hick. He sent a military force equipped with the mega-mobile-terror-weapon-of-the-day, an elephant, to take revenge on the Meccans by destroying Mecca’s holy building, the Kaaba.
According to Meccan poets, a god named Allah didn’t care for having his headquarters in Mecca assaulted, even if that headquarters was filled with the shabby idols of gods from the desert’s hither and yon. Allah sent in His air force—birds carrying molten rocks, rocks the birds dropped with absolute precision on the heads of the Ethiopian troops, burning holes from the top of their heads to their nether ends, literally boring the Ethiopian soldiers to death, and eliminating the Ethiopian army.
The Meccans quickly turned this holy victory to their advantage. Up until now, the Arabs had observed a sacred period of “holy months,” roughly 40 days in which war was forbidden and in which the tribes of the neighborhood set out on what they called The Hajj. Each tribe made the rounds of three distant sacred sites, staying 20 days in the first destination, 10 days in the second, and eight days in the third, performing holy rituals to keep the gods of these hamlets, their hills, and their rocks happy, setting up fairs, and trading with the tribes in whose vicinity the sacred sites were located[112]. This holy ramble was the great commercial integrator, idea exchanger, and new-wife-finder of the day.
Now, with the Victory Of The Bored Ethiopians under their turbans, the Meccans aimed for a monopoly over the Holy perambulation business. The declared that their sacred site, the Kaaba, was more sacred than ever, that only they were holy enough to lead rituals in it, and that only Mecca was good enough to be the town to which folks should come to worship and to trade. The Meccans added that, “We are the sons of Abraham, men of honour, governors of the house of Allah, inhabitants of Mecca. No Arab has such virtue as we, nor such dignity as we.”[113]
The Meccans must have been far better at wheeling, dealing, and self-promotion than history tells us. They succeeded in their aim, establishing Mecca as the deity’s only hot spot and themselves as the only men holy enough to handle the ceremonies that pleased the gods. To top it off, the Meccan opportunists laid down an interesting set of new sacred rules. When you came to Mecca, you couldn’t bring your own food. You had to buy food from the Meccans. You couldn’t wear your old clothes. You had to buy new ones from, guess who? The Meccans.
The Meccans would, however, make an exception for you if you were rich and showed up in a really expensive outfit. When you finished your holy perambulations around the Kaaba you had to leave your clothes behind and never touch them again[114]. Don’t worry, the Meccans took good care of your garments. Neat way to clean up, isn’t it? These lucrative religious innovations would pump money into Mecca’s coffers for the next 1,450 years.
In the year 571 AD, nineteen years after The Year of The Elephant, for all practical purposes, nothing happened. Or did it? According to one Islamic source, “most of the idols at the Ka’ba toppled over; the palace of the Sassanid Emperor shook and cracked, and its fourteen pinnacles collapsed; the small lake of Sawa in Persia sank into the earth, and the fire which was worshipped by the Magians [followers of the sixth century BC prophet of flame and darkness, Zoroaster] at Istakhrabad and had been lit continually for a thousand years was extinguished.”[115] To put it differently, an obscure baby was born into an obscure family in an obscure town on an ordinary Monday.[116][117] The town was our old friend Mecca, the village that had recently motivated an elephant to take a 600-mile walk into the vast nowhere of the Arabian Peninsula in the deserts that today belong to Saudi Arabia. Mecca, as we’ve seen, had two major industries…trade and religion. It was a way station on the route from Yemen to Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. This may not sound like much, but Yemen’s position on the Indian Ocean made it a contact point for trade with the two biggest exporting nations of the day—China and India—lands whose goods were so high-end they were consistently referred to in the world literature of the day as “treasures.”
In turn, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—the destinations at the opposite end of this trade pipeline—were outlets to the ultra-rich consumer empires of the Persians and the Romans. What’s more, the Yemenis were not just masters of the import business. They raised perfumes and air-fresheners like frankincense and myrrh[118]. The sixth century AD was one of the smelliest eras in history. Something nice to sniff, especially when festive occasions—from feasts to funerals—arrived, could give you a nasal vacation worth a fortune.
Living in a broiled and bland make-your-own-sandstorm center like Mecca wasn’t much.[119] But every poison is a miracle-cure awaiting its moment of reinvention. To survive from one month to the next in the deserts of Arabia, you had to be fairly good at camel wrangling. Camels were great for making war among the dunes. But what else could you do with animals so nasty that they hiss? The sea-going Arabs of the Indian Ocean,[120] another desert roughly 600 miles away had invented ships that carried cargo in mass quantities—up to 30 tons[121]. Cross a Red Sea vessel with an Indian cargo boat and you get a hybrid called a dhow,[122] a mistress of the Eastern seas that can haul Indian and Chinese cargo by the ton to Yemen. But there was a catch. Ships need water. The stretch of crunching brown silicone between the Indian Ocean and the stretch of Greater Syria the Meccans traded with had no rivers. At best it had a few watering holes, oases[123] like Mecca. So could do you transport goods from Yemen overland in mass quantities? By harnessing the strange-humped beasts of the desert and stringing them together in caravans.
Hence the name “ship of the desert.” Not to be confused with a “ship off the old block.” However there was an old block in Mecca. And, thanks to the new approach to the Hajj the Meccans had invented roughly 20 years before Mohammed’s birth, that old block was now as profitable as the camel-caravan-based transport business. The cube we’re talking about was a big, black meteoric stone in a day when stones were popularly associated with gods. The Meccans made the most of this strangely geometric blob of rock by associating it with every god in the neighborhood—and every god in the 2.1 million or so surrounding square kilometers. Which means that every tribe in and out of sight kept the idol of its deity in a sugar-cube-shaped building in which the naturally squared-off meteoric stone was housed—the Kaaba (Arabic for “cube).[124] Then, once a year, the rabblers and scrabblers of the sands tried to restrain themselves from muggings and plunder for four months,[125] hang on to a period of precarious peace, and make pilgrimages to visit the gods of their fathers, or at least to visit the 360-or-so wooden and stone effigies thereof. So Mecca may have been a flyspeck among the dunes, but it was a flyspeck that evaded eradication thanks to the profits of commerce—commerce in goods, and commerce in gods. What’s more, there was a saying in the neighborhood that the Arabs were so good at these feeble industries that they could, “Turn a grain of sand into a nugget of gold.” This was the Mecca into which Mohammed was born.
But Mohammed’s childhood set him apart from other children. His father died before he was born. His mother died when he was six, leaving him an orphan. Kids are not kind to those whose background is odd or disadvantaged. There’s evidence that they made fun of Mohammed[126] The result? Mohammed was apparently a loner, possibly even a loner with a persecution complex. According to one of his Islamic biographers, Sarwat Saulat, he “was a boy of a serious nature he did not play with the boys of the streets, kept himself aloof from idolatry and never took wine.”[127]
In 577 AD, when Mohammed was six, his mother took him 280 miles to her hometown,[128] Medina,[129] a “city” of only a thousand inhabitants originally founded by Jews,[130] a city that that would someday save Mohammed from assassination and would prove crucial to the rise of Islam. And a city whose oldest citizens, its Jews, would play a critical role in the next 1,400 years of Muslim history. It may have been in Medina that Mohammed became obsessed with the God of the Old Testament, with the Jewish holy book, the Torah, and with the Jewish story of the universe and mankind, from creation to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and to the Jewish hope that someday a prophet would arise who would save the Hebrews from perpetual humiliation at the hands of mightier nations, a prophet who would prove to be a Messiah. All these would be crucial ideas to Mohammed, memes he would adopt and knit together in surprising and often ominous new ways. But all that was in the future.
Right now, when Mohammed was still a child of eight, he was beset by other challenges. In 579 AD, his loss of relatives continued—and continued to disadvantage him. His grandfather died. That grandfather, according to Islamic tradition, had been Mecca’s leader. His position at the top of the heap put Mohammed’s tribe, the Hashem,[131] at the pinnacle of power and prestige. But that power and prestige disappeared utterly when Mohammed’s grandfather was no longer around to defend the tribe’s position. Instead, a rival tribe, the Banu Umayya shoved Mohammed’s Hashem tribe to the bottom of the heap.
That humiliation, too, would shape history. Someday Mohammed would reverse this loss and would gain power over the very people who had humiliated him and his clan—the Banu Umayya. He would subjugate the Banu Umayya with a new approach to violence and to psychological manipulation. But the Banu Umayya would once again turn the tables and take over something far bigger and more prophetable—sorry, profitable—than mere pecking order prestige in Mecca. The Banu Umayya would become the keeper of Mohammed’s legacy. A legacy that would go global.