Yet Muhammad had not been a Christian. In 689, on Mount Moria, work began on a building that broadcast this in the most public manner possible. The Dome of the Rock, as it would come to be known, occupied the very spot where the Holy of Holies was supposed to have stood, and was a deliberate rubbing of Jewish noses in the failure, yet again, of all their hopes: of their messiah to appear; of the Temple to be rebuilt. Even more forthright, though, was the lesson taught to Christians: that they clung to a corrupted and superseded faith. Running along both sides of the building’s arcade, a series of verses disparaged the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God.’10 This was not merely to reopen theological debates that Christians had thought settled centuries before, but to condemn the entire New Testament, gospels and all, as a fabrication. Squabbles among those who had written it, so the Dome of the Rock sternly declared, had polluted the original teachings of Jesus. These, like the revelations granted prophets before him, Abraham, and Moses, and David, had originally been identical to those proclaimed by Muhammad. There was only the one true deen, the one true expression of allegiance to God, and that was submission to him: in Arabic, islam.11
Here was a doctrine with which ‘Muslims’ – those who practised islam – were already well familiar. It was not only to be found emblazoned on buildings. Most of the verses on the Dome of the Rock derived from a series of revelations that Muhammad’s followers believed had been given to him by none other than the angel Gabriel. These, assembled after his death to form a single ‘recitation’, or qur’an, constituted for his followers what Jesus represented to Christians: an intrusion into the mortal world, into the sublunar, into the diurnal, of the divine. Muhammad had not written this miraculous text. He had merely served as its mouthpiece. Instead, every word, every last letter of the Qur’an derived from a single author: God. This gave to its pronouncements on Christians, as on everything else, an awful and irrevocable force. Unlike pagans, but like Jews, they were owed the respect due a people who had their own scriptures, as a ‘People of the Book’. Self-evidently, though, the errors in these same scriptures ensured that God had no choice but to ordain their perpetual subjugation. The very deal that the Roman authorities had prescribed for the Jews was now, to Christians’ dismay, imposed on them as well. Tolerance, so it was written in the Qur’an, should be granted both Peoples of the Book; but only in exchange for the payment of a tax, the jizya, and humble acknowledgement of their own inferiority. Stubbornness could not be allowed to go unpunished. Why, for instance, when it had been revealed conclusively in the Qur’an that Jesus, rather than suffering execution, had only appeared to be crucified, did Christians persist in glorifying the cross? Paul, and the writers of the canonical gospels, and Irenaeus, and Origen, and the drafters of the Nicaean Creed, and Augustine had all been wrong; Basilides had been right. ‘Those who disagree on this know nothing, but merely follow conjecture.’12
Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which – directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634 – he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brush-strokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16
Heraclius, two years before the Arab invasion of Palestine, had commanded that Jews be forcibly baptised out of dread for the security of the Christian empire. Not even in his darkest nightmares could he have anticipated the calamities that had then rapidly followed, and left Constantinople shorn of her richest provinces. Yet the threat presented by the Saracens to Christian rule was not merely a military one. The challenge was much greater than that. It was the same, in its essentials, as had prompted Paul, centuries previously, to write in desperate terms to the Galatians. The principle that Paul had fought for, and which had come to render Christianity irrevocably distinctive from Judaism, was clearer, perhaps, to Jewish converts than to Christians – most of whom had never met with, still less talked to, a Jew. To accept Christ was to accept that God could write his commandments on the heart. Again and again, among those Jews in Carthage whose compulsory baptism had been followed by an authentic conversion, this was the reflection, this the change in assumptions, that they had found the most overwhelming. ‘It is not by means of the Law of Moses that creation has been saved, but because a new and different Law has risen up.’17 The death of Christ upon the cross had offered humanity a universal salvation. There was no longer any need for Jews – or for anyone else – to submit to circumcision, or to avoid pork, or to follow detailed rules of sacrifice. The only laws that mattered were those inscribed by God on the conscience of a Christian. ‘Love, and do as you want.’18
So Augustine had declared. Nowhere in the Latin West had the implications of Christian teaching been more brilliantly elucidated than in Africa – or to such influential effect. That there were Jews in Carthage who had been brought to accept them was, perhaps, due reflection of the distinctive quality of the city’s Christianity: austere and passionate, autocratic and turbulent. Its self-confidence was that of a Church assured that it had indeed fathomed the laws of God.
But now a new understanding of the laws of God had emerged – and those who proclaimed it enjoyed, unlike the Jews, the muscle of a mighty and expanding empire. In 670, terrified reports reached Carthage of a raid on Africa that had carried away thousands of Christians into slavery. Over the succeeding decades, ever more incursions were recorded. Fortresses, towns, entire swathes of the province: all fell to permanent occupation. Finally, in the autumn of 695, sentries on the walls of Carthage spotted a smudge of dust on the horizon – and that it was growing larger. Then the glint of weapons catching the sun. Then, emerging from the dust, men, horses, siege-engines.