'The Sword of God'
The sight of the armies of Islam shocked all Christendom
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Join the journey!
Next Thursday: The fall of Jerusalem
THEY WERE A DARK SEAM on the horizon, a line of camel- and horse-borne warriors, bearded, leather-clad, brandishing double-edged swords and spears and screaming a harsh-sounding language.
Some wore their hair plaited ‘like the horns of a goat’; some bristled with weapons and coats of chain-mail.
Many were near-naked, and the apparent carelessness of their flesh aggravated the fear they inspired. From childhood they had been taught to ride, to use a sword or bow, and live off the land in the harshest conditions on Earth.
Now, they gathered pace, galloping across the river flats and the desert plains, bearing down on their trembling foes, shouting ‘ Allahu Akbar!’ (‘God is the Greatest!’) as they fell on the enemy, killing all the men and slinging the women and children over their horses and camels, to be condemned to slavery or the harem.
That was how the people of the Levant, Egypt, Syria and Persia first experienced an invasion by the forces of Allah.
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A riot of poems and Hadithic lines celebrated these thundering armies who seemed sent, hurled, by a strange unearthly force against which bribes of treasure, slaves and women, and the condescending patronage of great empires, were impotent.
Zealotry and the violent enaction of what they believed to be the will of God drove the Arab warriors.
They wielded their swords in the name of Allah and the Prophet. They seized the spoils as the reward for their willingness to fight for God.
They refused the ‘hollow honours and lying trinkets’ with which their Persian neighbours tried to bribe them.
They scorned the pomp and ceremony of the great courts of power. They would negotiate before battle in ragged dress, barefoot, scornful, defiant.
Their souls were the tools of Allah, dedicated to propagating his revelations throughout the world.
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The Christian world was asleep to the Islamic threat. The year 630 CE marked the height of the pre-Mediaeval Christian ascendancy.
That year the emperor Heraclius crowned his victory over the Sassanid empire and marched in triumph on Jerusalem.
Borne aloft at the head of his procession was a large wooden cross, believed to be the ‘true cross’ on which Christ had died.
When Heraclius restored the cross to the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, from where the Persians had stolen it sixteen years earlier, he celebrated the religious defeat of the Zoroastrians and the end of the twenty-five-year war with the Persian Empire.
The moment is enshrined in Christian lore. Medieval historians would hail Heraclius as the ‘first crusader’. The emperor himself saw the conflict as a holy war against heathenism.
On the eve of the Arab conquests, then, Christianity and Christian rulers seemed to prevail over all they surveyed, in the Mediterranean, North Africa and Persia.
A belief in some form of Christianity filled the churches from Visigothic Spain to Byzantine Iran.
Their faith in the god of Christ pulsed through the minds of several million adherents who, a few centuries earlier, had amounted to a carpenter-prophet, a few fishermen and peasants, a tax collector, a prostitute and a traitor.
That impression of unity belied, of course, fractious divisions within Christianity itself, bedevilling any hope of togetherness before God.
There were five major Christian branches in the Middle East on the eve of the Arab conquests, ‘each one claiming to be “orthodox”’, as the historian Hugh Kennedy put it.
The tense relationship between the Western Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches was yet to rupture irreconcilably, but their ecclesiastical and doctrinal differences were hardening.
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Consumed by their internal disputes, the Christians did not perceive that their greatest peril lay in the Arab world, where tens of thousands of newly minted warriors were poised to burst out of their desert redoubt under the standard of Allah and overrun the Levant, Egypt, Byzantium, North Africa and Transoxiana (Central Asia), supplanting or oppressing Christianity wherever they found it.
Few in Christendom anticipated this terrifying spectacle. The Christians viewed the Muslim warriors with ‘the same apprehension as frost in May or the coming of a plague of locusts: a burden imposed by the Lord on the faithful which is probably a punishment for their sins’, Kennedy explained.
No calls went out to Christian communities to arm and defend themselves; no warrior for Christ came forth to lead the resistance.
If they thought about him at all, the Christians saw Muhammad as a rough Bedouin tribesman, an illiterate upstart, and certainly not as the prophet who would inspire the conquest of most of the known world and whose disciples would convert or subject millions of infidels under the banner of Islam.
Alerted to the threat of the ‘Saracens’, the Christians lent on their faith, hoping the church and God would protect them.
They scoured their apocalyptic literature for a sign of their Messiah’s return: surely Christ would avenge them and destroy the Arabs?
The Muslims, however, were on a mission from Allah.
The legacy of their spectacular military incursions may be seen today, all along littoral North Africa, in the magnificent former mosques of Andalusia and through-out the Middle East, almost all of which, in the seventh century CE, was firmly Christian.
In little more than a century, the Muslims would seize and occupy a larger landmass than Alexander the Great had conquered 1000 years earlier, larger even than the Roman Empire at its height.
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After the death of the Prophet, Abu Bakr was elected first caliph of the Rashidun caliphate. He saw at once that Arab unity relied on him continuing the conquests Muhammad had started.
Abu Bakr launched a series of wars – the ‘ridda’ campaigns – against the few remaining rebel Arab tribes. He won them all, forcefully consolidating the Arabian Peninsula as an Islamic theocracy.
He then turned his energies and manpower outwards: ‘The only way of avoiding an implosion was to direct the Muslims against the non-Muslim world,’ observed Kennedy.
In 636 CE, Abu Bakr and his chiefs set their sights on the Levant, then held in Byzantine Christian hands. They besieged the Syrian city of Damascus, which fell after six months, then briefly reverted to Heraclius before the Muslims retook it at the great Battle of the Yarmuk that same year.
The seizure of the towns of Baalbek, Homs and Hama swiftly followed. The laurels of the conquest of Syria went to Abu Bakr’s brilliant commander, Khalid ibn al-Walid, whom Muhammad had honoured as ‘the Sword of God’.
Al-Walid had converted to Islam in 627 CE after many years of scorning the Prophet; Muhammad forgave him and the pair became firm friends in the last years of the Prophet’s life.
Before the Battle of the Yarmuk, the Sword of God explained how he’d earned that accolade:
‘God sent us his Prophet, who summoned us, but we avoided him and kept well away from him . . . I was among those who called him a liar, shunned him and fought him. Then God gripped our hearts and our forelocks, guiding us to him so that he followed him. The Prophet said to me, “You are a sword among the swords of God which God has drawn against the polytheists,” and he prayed for victory for me. Thus I was named the Sword of God because I am now the most hostile of Muslims to the polytheists.’
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At Yarmuk, named after the river that ran west into the Jordan Valley, the Sword of God demonstrated what this meant.
Here, in the foothills of the Golan Heights, the entire Arab army of 24,000 massed against at least that number of Byzantine Christians.
After frenzied fighting, Al-Walid broke through the Byzantine lines and slaughtered most of them in the Yarmuk gorges.
Arab women did their bit, records the historian Tim Mackintosh-Smith. These fierce female warriors numbered among them ‘the cheerleading, firebreathing, liver-gnawing poetess’ Hind, the wife of Abu Sufyan.
Now a devout Muslim, she was heard shouting for her team from the sidelines: ‘Go on! Prune the Foreskinned Ones with your swords!’
Next Thursday, 29th May 2025: The fall of Jerusalem…
Selected sources and further reading:
Ansary, T. (2010) Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes, New York: PublicAffairs.
Fazlur, R. (2020) Islam, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Griffith, S.H. (2007) The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hodgson, M.G.S. (1977) The Venture of Islam (Vols. 1–3), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kaegi, W.E. (1992) Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, H. (2007) The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Kirby, P. (2003) ‘External References to Islam’, Christian Origins.
Mackintosh-Smith, T. (2019) Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Nicolle, D. (2009) The Great Islamic Conquests AD 632–750, Oxford: Osprey Publishing.
Penn, M.P. (ed.) (2015) When Christians First Met Muslims – A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam, Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Peters, F.E. (2005) The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Volume I: The Peoples of God, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pseudo-Methodius and Garstad, B. (transl.) (2012) Apocalypse of Pseudo–Methodius: An Alexandrian World Chronicle, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Sizgorich, T. (October 2007) ‘“Do Prophets Come with a Sword?” Conquest, Empire, and Historical Narrative in the Early Islamic World’, The American Historical Review, 112(4), pp. 993–1015.
Sophronius and Allen, P. (transl.) (2009) Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy: The Synodical Letter and Other Documents, Oxford: Oxford Early Christian Texts.
Tyerman, C. (2006) God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, London: Penguin Books.
Dear Abdulkarim Galea,
Thank you for your comment. You are right, of course, and I shall rectify the error as soon as I return to my desk.
Kind regards
Paul
One should not relate to Muslim names as one does to Christian names. While John Smith may be called Smith or John, it is incorrect to refer to Abu Bakr as Bakr (as a family or surname) or as Abu (as a first or Christian name). Abu actually means ‘father of’ and ‘Bakr’ has its own meaning. Abu Bakr should always be referred to as Abu Bakr.