Just as Eusebius, five hundred years previously, had sought answers to very similar questions in the life of a Roman emperor, so now did Ibn Hisham—a scholar originally from Iraq who by the early ninth century had settled in Egypt—likewise turn to biography in order to fathom the purposes of heaven. “Sira,” he termed his chosen genre: “exemplary behaviour.” It was less what his subject had done that concerned Ibn Hisham than how he had done it. There was an urgent reason for this. The hero of Ibn Hisham’s biography, so Muslims believed, offered the ultimate in role models. God had chosen him to serve as His mouthpiece. It was through him that the All Merciful had revealed His wishes to the Arabs, and graced them with those same revelations that had then inspired them, two centuries before the time of Ibn Hisham, to erupt from their deserts and tear the world’s superpowers to pieces. “We are God’s helpers and the assistants of His prophet, and will fight men until they believe in God; and he who believes in God and His prophet has protected his life and property from us; and he who disbelieves we will fight in God unceasingly, and killing him will be a small matter to us.” 8 (Ibn Hisham, p. 629 )
This, according to Ibn Hisham, was the swaggering manifesto promoted by Arab warriors on the eve of their conquest of the world. But who, precisely, was this “prophet?” Ibn Hisham’s aim was to provide the answer. Sitting in Egypt, surrounded by the ruins of forgotten and superseded civilisations, he regarded his sira not merely as a biography but as a record of the most momentous revolution in history. Its subject was a man who had died only two years before the dismemberment of the Roman and Persian empires had begun: an Arab by the name of Muhammad. Aged forty, and with a moderate career as a merchant behind him, he had experienced—if Ibn Hisham were to be believed—history’s most epochal mid-life crisis. Restless and dissatisfied, he had begun to roam the wilderness which stretched beyond his home town, “and not a stone or tree that he passed by but would say, ‘Peace be unto you, O prophet of God.’ (Ibid., p. 105.)
Most spectacular and irrefutable sign of God’s favour, however, was the transformation of Muhammad, in no more than a decade, from refugee to effective master of Arabia. He led twenty-seven campaigns in all, according to Ibn Hisham; and if occasionally there was a defeat, and if the angels, by and large, chose not to fight as they had done at Badr, but rather to serve him as a reserve, then perhaps his ultimate triumph could be considered only the more extraordinary for it. By 632, the traditional date of his death, paganism in Arabia had everywhere been put in shadow. Sweetest moment of all had been the conquest, two years previously, of Mecca itself. Riding into his hometown, Muhammad had ordered the Ka’ba stripped of its gods. A great bonfire had been lit. The toppled idols had been consigned to its flames. The Devil, summoning his progeny around him, had cried out in woe: “Abandon all hope that the community of Muhammad will ever revert to shirk after this day of theirs!” 21 (Waqidi:Kitab al-Maghazi, quoted by Hawting (1999), p. 69. )
Well might he have yowled. The venerable sanctuary, that pre-eminent bastion of paganism, had been brought at last to a due submission: to “Islam.” This consecration of Mecca to the service of the One True God, however, was far from an innovation. What Muhammad had done, so he revealed to his followers, was restore the shrine to its primordial, pristine state. “God made Mecca holy the day He created heaven and earth. It is the holy of holies until the resurrection day.” 22 (Ibn Hisham, p. 629)
By the time that Ibn Hisham sat down to write his biography, it was not only Arabs who faced Mecca as they prayed. Strange peoples of whom the Prophet had possibly never even heard—Visigoths and Berbers, Sogdians and Parthians—could all be seen treading the sands of Arabia: pilgrims bound for the Ka’ba. Although Ibn Hisham himself did not touch upon this phenomenon in his sira, there was no shortage of other scholars eager to relate the extraordinary conquests, far beyond the limits of Arabia, that had followed the death of the Prophet. Such relish was hardly surprising. Back in the wild days of their paganism, nothing had delighted the Arabs more than a spot of loud-mouthed boasting, be it about some heroic feat of arms, some stirring deed of banditry, or some glorious humiliation forced upon a rival. Now, when they blew their own trumpets, it was all in the cause of God. From Badr to the ends of the world, the story of Islam had been one of storming military triumph. Cities infinitely greater than Mecca had been captured; peoples infinitely mightier than the Quraysh obliged to bow their necks. The scale of these victories, won in the teeth of ancient empires and venerable religions, surely furnished all the proof that anyone might need of the truth of the Prophet’s claims. “This is a sign that God loves us,” as one exultant Arab put it, “and is pleased with our faith, namely that He has given us dominion over all peoples and religions.” 23 (From a West Syrian Christian text which records a disputation between a monk and “a man of the Arabs.” Although the monk—hardly surprisingly, considering its authorship—ends up decisively winning the argument, the suggestion that God’s approval of Islam had manifested itself in the sheer scale of the Arab conquests was a difficult one for Christians to rebut.)
Ibn Hisham: The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, trans. A. Guillaume (Oxford, 1955)