The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

This confidence was shaken, but not badly eroded, the following year, when a force of three thousand Meccans engaged a thousand Muslims at Uhad, near Medina. The Meccans were thrown back, but Mahomet’s forces suffered heavy losses, and neither side could claim a victory. Two years later, a force of ten thousand Meccans besieged Medina, but their cavalry was unable to cross a deep trench dug by the Muslims. After a night of storm, the besiegers lost their enthusiasm and left. It was after this siege that the Muslims turned on the Jewish clan of Qurayzah, suspected of intriguing with the Meccans; the men were all executed and the women and children sold into slavery. In due course, all Jews were ejected from Medina.

Two years later, in 629, Mecca surrendered quietly as Mahomet approached with a force of ten thousand. By that time, many leading Meccans had already deserted to Medina, and Mahomet had smoothed the way to a settlement by marrying the widowed daughter of his chief Meccan opponent, Abu Sufyan. Eight years after leaving Mecca as a fugitive, Mahomet returned as a conqueror.

In the following year, Mahomet led thirty thousand men on a raid on Syria. He was demonstrating to the Arabs that, now they had achieved unity, anything was possible. It was a lesson they had learned well by the time of the Prophet’s death (probably from malaria) in 632.

To understand Mahomet’s achievement we have to grasp that before his time the Arabs of the Hejaz consisted mainly of wandering tribes of Bedouins who spent much of their time raiding one another; it was murderous anarchy. This explains the blood feud; it was the only way of making a man feel that if he killed some of your tribe, some of his own tribe would eventually pay the price. But it was a wasteful method of maintaining some kind of law. It meant that the Arabs stayed permanently divided.

Yet the Arabs were formidable fighters. Both the Romans and the Persians used them as mercenaries. As we have seen, the Roman and Persian Empires had been at each other’s throats since the time of the Seleucids around 200 B.C. And while Mahomet was establishing himself as the despot of Medina and leading raids against Meccan caravans, the new Roman emperor of Constantinople, Heraclius, was at war with the Persian monarch Chosroes II. In 626, the year after the battle of Uhad, the Persians besieged Constantinople but were thrown back. In the following year, Chosroes was murdered by his own troops. His successor soon died of plague, and then for five years there was a mad scramble of pretenders to the throne of Persia and the usual intrigues and murders. History was, of course, repeating itself. And while Romans and Persians wore one another out, the Arabs flourished and grew strong.

History also repeated its now-familiar patterns after Mahomet’s death. When he died, he was master of Arabia. He was succeeded by his disciple Abu Bekr, who became first Caliph of Islam. What do successful conquerors do when they have time to sit down and survey their gains? Again, history provides us with the answer: they either squabble amongst themselves or look for more lands to conquer. The followers of the Prophet proceeded to quarrel. Many felt that Mahomet’s son-in-law Ali – married to his daughter Fatima – was a more suitable candidate for Caliph. The Muslims split into followers of Abu Bekr – the Sunni – and followers of Ali, the Shi’a. Besides, many of the nomad tribes who had offered allegiance to Mahomet felt that his death ended their obligations. So the new Caliph had to go to war. It was a political as well as a religious decision; if Arabia was allowed to split apart again, it would lose its strength. If it lost its strength, then it was no longer an effective force for conquest. And if it ceased to conquer, then there would be no flow of booty back to Mecca and Medina. So there was a bitter struggle that lasted for two years, until the rebel tribes were finally brought to heel. Then Abu Bekr died and was succeeded by another close associate of the prophet, Omar. He was faced with the same alternative: expand or stagnate. He had no hesitation about throwing his energies into expansion.

The obvious enemy was the ‘unbeliever’ – in this case, Rome and Persia. And these two empires were exhausted by war. Omar’s great general, Khalid, known as ‘the Sword of Allah’, defeated the Byzantines near Damascus and took Syria in 635. Jerusalem fell three years later. Iraq – occupied by the Persians – fell in 637, Mesopotamia in 641, Egypt in 642. And after a struggle of sixteen years, Persia itself fell to the Muslims. The citizens of most of the conquered lands welcomed the Arabs; they were tired of paying taxes to a ruler in a distant city; the Arabs at least were neighbours. Their conquest of Alexandria, and its subsequent loss when a Byzantine fleet appeared on the horizon, made the Arabs aware that they also needed ships. So they built their own fleet, and in 655 annihilated the Byzantine fleet.

Now only one major stronghold remained: Constantinople itself. In 673, the Arabian fleet blockaded Constantinople. The walls built by Constantine and his successors proved impregnable, so the Arabs prepared to wait until they had starved the city into submission. Its fall seemed inevitable.

And at this point, a single invention altered the tide of history. It was the brainchild of an architect named Callinicus, who came from Heliopolis, in Syria. He had decided that he preferred the Christian Emperor to the Muslim Caliph, and moved to Constantinople – now ruled by Constantine IV. Callinicus seems to have been interested in chemistry, and in explosives. He discovered that a mixture of saltpetre, bitumen, naphtha, sulphur and quicklime could produce a flame that was almost unquenchable. The secret formula is now lost, but it seems clear that the naphtha, bitumen and sulphur were the inflammables, while the saltpetre provided the oxygen to keep it burning. When water is added to quicklime (calcium oxide), the result is immense heat. This seems to have been the basic secret of the substance that became known as ‘Greek fire’. The startled Arabs found themselves facing ships that came towards them belching fire like dragons. When the fire landed on the water, it went on burning. It could be hurled through the air with catapults, in the form of balls of flax soaked in the chemical, or it could be made to roar from a copper or iron tube like a flamethrower. If Callinicus had stayed in Syria and given his invention to the Caliph, the Arabs would have been invincible. Now the Byzantines used it to scatter the Arab fleet. Men who were struck by the flames writhed in agony as their flesh bubbled and melted. When Greek fire landed on wooden decks, it burned its way through them; water only made it seethe and spit more violently. Gibbon says it could be extinguished by urine, but it is doubtful whether any Arab kept his head enough to try that interesting remedy.

The Arab navies continued returning for five years, but they never learned the secret of Greek fire. And so long as Constantinople could obtain its supplies by sea, it was impregnable. It would be several more centuries before the invention of gunpowder and cannons made the city wall obsolete.

So the Arabs retired from the fray, and in 677 A.D., the Byzantine navy destroyed the Arab fleet at Syllaeum. All Europe heaved a sigh of relief; for it had seemed by this time that the Arabs were unconquerable, and tales of their massacres had terrified everybody. (These were mostly exaggerated; when the Arabs conquered, they usually showed themselves to be tolerant rulers.) After the defeat at Syllaeum, the myth of Arab invincibility was at an end.

Unfortunately, the Arab conquests did nothing to heal the splits within Islam. The Caliph Omar was assassinated in 644; his successor, Othman, twelve years later, by followers of Ali. Muawiyah, the governor of Syria, swore to revenge Othman and led an army against Ali, who was now the Caliph. They eventually made peace, but Ali was assassinated in 661 by a dissident. Muawiyah became Caliph, and it was he who besieged Constantinople. When he died in 680, his son Yazid succeeded him, but the Shi’a – followers of Ali – felt he had no right to the position. Ali’s eldest son Hasan had died some years before under mysterious circumstances, believed poisoned by Muawiyah. Now his second son, Hussein, was invited to become Caliph by dissidents in Iraq. Yazid’s army defeated him in battle and his head was sent to Yazid in a basket. In 680, most of Ali’s family was assassinated, including Fatima, the prophet’s daughter. But the murderers missed one sickly child, who lived to continue the dynasty.