Quick update I whipped together in the last two hours due to an unexpected night off...
Then he further asked, "When will the Hour be established?" Allah's Apostle replied, "The answerer has no better knowledge than the questioner. But I will inform you about its portents.
1. When a slave (lady) gives birth to her master.
2. When the shepherds of black camels start boasting and competing with others in the construction of higher buildings.
And the Hour is one of five things which nobody knows except Allah.
The Prophet then recited: "Verily, with Allah (Alone) is the knowledge of the Hour--." –
Hadith of Gabriel, describing the
al-Qiyāmah (Last Judgement)
A Sharif’s Lament
October 19th, 1237
Sharif Al-Hassan abul-Saad of the Hejaz,
Sharif of Mecca and Guardian of the Two Holy Cities, poured water into his own cup. His aged, cracked fingers were hardly up to the task—a task he was unused to. As if to mock his predicament, a hot wind blew through his tattered tent , stirring dust and ruffling the linens that hid his gaunt frame. Only a few months before, his days had been busy planning, negotiating, and celebrating. Now, he had all the time in the world, it seemed, to feel the cool wet of water under his tongue.
Sharif Al-Hassan abul-Saad came from a long, respected Hejazi lineage. By blood he was descended from the same family as Muhammad, and his family had ruled as Sharifs of Mecca for generations, holding great political power in the Hejaz, and great spiritual power within the Muslim world as the custodians of the Kaa’ba
The
Sharif had seen 58 summers, yet never before had he dealt with a crisis this great. A younger abul-Saad might have cursed his advisors Abu Hanifa and Malik ibn Da’ud, but the older, wiser
Sharif merely said a prayer for their souls, for they were already in Paradise… like so many that the
Sharif knew.
Two years before, Abu Hanifa and ibn Da’ud had been merely two voices among many crying that the time was right for Islam to erupt from Arabia as it had done in the days of the Prophet. They said the Roman Empire which had lorded and cowed the entire Middle East was a shadow, prone to collapse, that it was distracted fighting the heathen Mongols and the treacherous Turk. Now would be the time for a righteous man, at the head of a righteous army, to retake the Levant and topple the corrupt regime.
All that was needed was a man to make a call to The Faithful. But who would that man be? The Abbasid
Khalifa was homeless, powerless, fleeing from city to city. The Fatimid
Khalifa had been destroyed by the Romans and
Firanj over a century before.
Sharif abul-Saad thought himself that man. He was a great scholar of the
Qur’an, a man revered by the people of the Hejaz for his piety and righteousness. He was the
Sharif of Mecca, the political and spiritual custodian of the city, the spiritual descendant of the Prophet. The Romans
did seem weak. Had not the Mongols defeated them only recently? Hadn’t that defeat nearly brought Civil War on that vast Roman Empire?
So it was Abul-Saad that issued the call to The Faithful, that God had ordained the Romans to fall, that all The Faithful needed to do was to rise up, to take what was already in their grasp. Messengers traveled through the Levant and Egypt, bearing the good news. The time had come for the people of Islam to rise and retake what was theirs!
Yet the response had been disappointing. Egypt had remained almost silent—abul-Saad was not sure if his messengers were intercepted, or if the call had fallen on deaf ears. From Iraq and Mesopotamia the response had been muted—he’d received good wishes from many imams on behalf of their towns, but little else. The blood from the failure of Naijar was still fresh, and the Mongol threat loomed large. The Mesopotamians were thinking of the present world around them, and not of God and His Will for the future.
So it was left to the Levant, and it was here that abul-Saad had the most receptive response. Most of the southern Levant was still heavily Muslim, and the tribes of the Sinai and the Negev had more commonalities with their Arabian brethren than the more sedentary, cosmopolitan Palestinians and Syrians. Throughout 1236, more and more promises of support were received from tribal elders and village leaders, until by the spring of 1237, abul-Saad felt confident he could march.
The
Sharif laughed harshly—oh, how easy it seemed when he first crossed into what the Romans called Arabia Petrae! The Faithful of the Sinai and the southern Levant had taken to arms. The Roman princes in Petra, Beersheba and even Darum had been forced to flee—their armies were stuck in the depths of Persia, they had no means to resist. Small towns threw their gates open, and the
Sharif’s forces swelled, from thousands to tens of thousands. Jerusalem seemed in sight, as well as the humiliation of the Roman state.
Even when the
Sharif had received word on July 19th that the Roman Emperor was closing with an army 50,000 strong, he was not afraid. God would protect them, just as he had protected the
Ansar who had swept all before them five centuries before… and at first, abul-Saad’s trust seemed well placed. The Roman Emperor and his son lunged ahead of the main body of the Roman army approaching from the northeast. Abul-Saad couldn’t believe the Roman was that vain, that foolish! 20,000 Romans versus the Army of the Faithful? The
Sharif’s tribal forces, militias from the cities, and the tribes of the Sinai and Negeva raised in war? Abul-Saad had not unsheathed his sword in many years, but even he could see odds. After all, hadn’t a small army of the Faithful swept the Romans at Yarmouk? Hadn’t the Romans buckled, crumbled under the weight of a furious tide from the Hejaz?
The
Sharif sipped more water from the simple cup, and closed his eyes. He hoped it’d block the sounds, the sights, the smell of that horrible day two months before, but instead all his memories became more vivid, sharper…
Thinking 40,000 more than enough to sweep the foolish Roman Emperor and his blasphemous son aside, abul-Saad had lunged to meet the Roman counterinvasion, before the Roman Emperor could marshal his forces. Only a fool would have left so many troops behind, and abul-Saad was confident he would return to the Holy City in triumph. After all, the last time the Roman Emperor had been defeated in battle, the great empire had shuddered and fallen to her knees. If it fell, wouldn’t that be a sign for all the Muslims, from North Africa to the Near East, to rise and displace the weakened infidel?
Large sections of nomadic yet heavily Muslim Levant defected to Sharif during the fall of 1236. The Levantine thematakoi were for the most part in Mesopotamia, securing the region during Thomas II’s ongoing campaign. For the first few months of his invasion, abul-Saad faced little resistance, and quickly gathered an army approaching 40,000…
Yet, from the start, ominous events darkened the expedition. The
Sharif was a political and spiritual ruler—he left the actual battle plans to his son, Muhammad, as well as the chiefs of the tribes and clans from Arabia, the Sinai, and the Negev. The first problem came when the army began to march, as various chieftains and tribal elders bickered over who had the honor of leading the vanguard of the army that would save Islam. One of abul-Saad’s cousins even drew blades against an elder from Banu Abd Shams, threatening to cut out his tongue as he would a barking dog.
When the massed army of Islam finally moved, the Roman Emperor had already moved out of Jerusalem and was on the march. Neither the
Sharif, his son, nor the army’s feuding commanders had expected to see a Roman host until they reached Jerusalem—instead, outside of Beersheba, they found the
infidel Thomas and his small army drawn up for battle.
Muhammad called for the host to halt and set up its own lines, but Abdullah al-Muttalib led his horsemen in a headlong attempt to flank the Roman lines, unsupported and unaided. His attack was easily repulsed at the cost of his life, and the quick defeat of Banu Muttalib convinced the other tribes to halt their advance, and set up camp for the night. Abul-Saad knew Muhammad had intended to use the night to plan the course of the next day’s battle, but…
“
Saddiq!” a voice called in panic, from somewhere outside that infernal tent flap. Abul-Saad didn’t rise—there were no guards left to watch the outside of his tent, no servants to tell whoever it was to wait. Over the last two months, the
Sharif had become used to people barging into his tent unannounced, usually with more troubling news.
When the young man, a manservant named Ghazi, clad in dusty traveling linens did just that, abul-Saad knew by the look on his face whatever latest news was far worse than normal…
“Yes?” the custodian of the Holy Cities raised an eyebrow. More dark tidings—as if the
Sharif fleeing south through the desert, a Roman army on his heels, was not dark enough.
“Fresh news from the south! The infidel have landed an army at Jeddah!” the man cried breathlessly.
Abul-Saad cursed. Yet another Roman trap.
He had been asleep that night, two months before, when Muhammad burst into his tent, sword on and little else, crying that the Romans were upon them. There was no time to arm, no time to prepare—the Romans had swiftly and silently overwhelmed the camp guards, then descended on the army of the desert when it was asleep and helpless. The
Sharif remembered his servants shoving him onto a horse, as fiery arrows began to rain onto the camp, and the shouts of men, the screams of horses, the groans of camels, all rose into an orchestra of disaster. The smell—burning linen, fresh blood, panic—still played in the back of abul-Saad’s mind…
However, this army was mostly made of nominally independent tribal lords and their followers, many of which were ill-disciplined at best. The speed of Roman return to the Levant—Emperor Thomas and Prince Gabriel force marched 20,000 men of the imperial tagmata from Baghdad to Jerusalem in a month—meant that the Sharif had little time to get his vast mob into some semblance of a true army, with disastrous results.
The
Sharif closed his eyes, and sighed.
“Jeddah?” he repeated the messengers words. There was no disbelief in his voice—not now. Just… weariness. “How many?”
“Thousands,” Ghazi whispered, his voice shuddering.
Abul-Saad nodded grimly. So the Roman dog had lunged south so quickly because another Roman force had crossed the Red Sea from Egypt. The
Sharif wanted to tell Ghazi all would be well, that the men of the desert would rise and drive the infidel from their shores, but abul-Saad knew where the men of the desert were…
…thirteen days ride to the north, bones probably picked clean already by buzzards. The Romans, from what he had been told, showed no mercy, sleeping men were cut down just as those who carried swords. What little of the gathered tribes that weren’t slaughtered had scattered to the four winds. Aside from the elderly, the young, and the infirm, there
was no one to defend the Holy Cities… no one strong enough to stop the Roman Demon.
“And how are the people receiving them?” abul-Saad asked.
“They…they bowed,” Ghazi stuttered. “There were murmurs, whispers that the Roman arrival was God’s punishment for the sins of you and your family,” Ghazi went on quietly. “They say the Romans come like the Persians came unto the Jews, to chastise us onto the righteous path.”
“So they knelt?” abul-Saad shook his head quietly. Jeddah had knelt—Mecca would not. Medina would not. Maybe, if they resisted, the people would rise. Maybe…
…he had to know.
“What of Mecca and Medina?”
“The Romans have no reached the Holy Cities yet,” Ghazi went on, “but it is only a matter of time before the Romans following you and the Romans to the south unite…”
“I know,” the
Sharif cut off his servant quietly. The rest went without saying. He knew the people of his city. They would fight for their God, they would fight for their city. Yet despite his years of faith, the
Sharif was but a man, and more than a grain of doubt gnawed at his mind. What if his decision… what if…
The Prophet had said, if Mecca fell under the banner of an infidel, the end times had come. “God the Merciful, You work wonders. I pray this be Your will, and that You will rescue Your people again, as You have done in the past,” abul-Saad whispered under his breath. There was little else he could do. He quaked for the Hejaz, and for all of Islam. Indeed, it seemed, the end times had come. He prayed the Holy Cities had mustered a defense. He prayed with all his heart they would stand stout and firm, for it seemed the might of the world would shortly come tumbling down upon them…
He shook his head. There was no time to lament. Only time to prepare.
Abul-Saad shook the fear from his mind, and strode into the hot sunshine, calling for his horse.
Islam would still fight.