Jerusalem: The Biography

Heraclius despatched an army to stop the Arabs. Omar appointed a new commander, Abu Ubayda, and Khalid rejoined the armies as his subordinate. After months of skirmishing, the Arabs finally lured the Byzantines to battle amidst the impenetrable gorges of the Yarmuk river between today’s Jordan, Syria and Israeli Golan. ‘This is one of God’s battles,’ Khalid told his men – and on 20 August 636, God delivered a duststorm that blinded the Christians who panicked and bolted helterskelter over the cliffs of the Yarmuk. Khalid cut off their retreat and by the end of the battle, the Christians were so exhausted that the Arabs found them lying down in their cloaks, ripe for the slaughter. Even the emperor’s brother was killed and Heraclius himself never recovered from this defeat, one of the decisive battles of history, that lost Syria and Palestine. Byzantine rule, weakened by the Persian war, seems to have collapsed like a house of cards and it is unclear whether the Arab conquest was more a triumphant series of raids. However intense the conquest really was, it was an astonishing achievement that these tiny contingents of Arabian cameleers, some of them as small as 1, 000 men, had smashed the legions of the Eastern Rome. But the Commander of the Believers did not rest; he sent another army northwards to conquer Persia which also fell to the Arabs.²

In Palestine, Jerusalem alone held out under Patriarch Sophronius, a Greek intellectual who praised her in his poetry as ‘Zion, radiant Zion of the Universe’. He could scarcely believe the disaster that had befallen the Christians. Preaching in the Church of the Sepulchre, he denounced the sins of the Christians and the atrocities of the Arabs, whom he called Sarakenoi in Greek – Saracens: ‘Whence come these wars against us? Whence multiply barbarian invasions? The slime of the godless Saracens has captured Bethlehem. The Saracens have risen up against us with a beastly impulse because of our sins. Let us correct ourselves.’

It was too late for that. The Arabs converged on the city which they called Ilya (Aelia, the Roman name). The first of their commanders to besiege Jerusalem was Amr ibn al-As, who after Khaled was their best general and another irrepressibly larger-than-life adventurer from the Meccan nobility. Amr, like the other Arab leaders, knew the area very well: he even owned land nearby and had visited Jerusalem in his youth. But this was not just a quest for booty.

‘The Hour has drawn nigh,’ says the Koran. The early Muslim Believers’ militant fanaticism was stoked by their belief in the Last Judgement. The Koran did not state this specifically but they knew from the Jewish-Christian prophets that it had to take place in Jerusalem. If the Hour was upon them, they needed Jerusalem.

Khaled and the other generals joined Amr around the walls but the Arab armies were probably too small to storm the city and there does not seem to have been much fighting. Sophronius simply refused to surrender without a guarantee of tolerance from the Commander of the Believers himself. Amr suggested solving this problem by passing off Khaled as the Commander but he was recognized so Omar was summoned from Mecca.

The Commander inspected the rest of the Arab armies at Jabiya in the Golan and Jerusalemites probably met him there to negotiate their surrender. The Monophysite Christians, who were the majority in Palestine, hated the Byzantines and it seems the early Moslem Believers were happy to allow freedom of worship to their fellow monotheists.^*

Following the Koran, Omar offered Jerusalem a Covenant –dhimma – of Surrender that promised religious tolerance to the Christians in return for payment of the jizya

tax of submission. Once this was agreed, Omar set out for Jerusalem, a giant in ragged, patched robes riding a mule, with just one servant.

OMAR THE JUST: TEMPLE REGAINED

When he saw Jerusalem from Mount Scopus, Omar ordered his muezzin to give the call to prayer. After praying, he donned the white robes of the pilgrim, mounted a white camel and rode down to meet Sophronius. The Byzantine hierarchs awaited the conqueror, their bejewelled robes contrasting with his puritanical simplicity. Omar, the hulking Commander of the Believers, a wrestler in his youth, was an implacable ascetic who always carried a whip. It was said that when Muhammad entered a room, women and children would continue to laugh and chat, but when they saw Omar they fell silent. It was he who started to collate the Koran, created the Muslim calendar and much Islamic law. He enforced far more severe rules on women than the Prophet himself. When his own son got drunk, Omar had him scourged with eighty lashes which killed him.