[443] Leontius, “Life of John Eleemon.”
[444] There is also a short Armenian account, probably of the seventh century. N. Bain in Pal. Expl. Fund Quarterly, Oct. 1896; “Archives de l’Orient Latin,” ii. p. 394. The rotunda is here stated to have had an upper arcade of twelve pillars.
[445] St. Willibald (c. 754 A. D.).
[446] Pal. Expl. Fund Quarterly, Oct. 1907, p. 297, Oct. 1908, pp. 298–310, report by Mr. A. C. Dickie.
[448] So Arculphus in 680 A. D.; but in 754 A. D. Willibald describes it as being square.
CHAPTER XI
THE ARABS
Among the texts, from the Ḳorân, of the mosaics in the Dome of the Rock occurs one which reads, “Jesus the son of Mary is one sent by God, and His Word whom He sent upon Mary, and His Spirit.”[449] Muḥammad did not regard our Lord as being simply a human being, and Carlyle was not wrong in calling Islâm a kind of Christianity. But it was the Christianity of Syrian and Arab Gnostics, not of the Gospels, just as Muḥammad’s ideas about the faith of Israel were taken from Talmudic Jews, and not from the Old Testament. Islâm was a revolt, not only from the savage superstitions of Arabia but from the formalism of Jews and Byzantine Christians, who, as Muḥammad said truly, had corrupted the truth by teaching the traditions of men. He denied all the doctrines concerning the Trinity which, in his time, preoccupied the minds of Christians, and which had rent the seamless robe into seven pieces, by the schisms of Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Chaldeans, Maronites, Syrians, and Copts, who had replaced the Catholic Church of Constantine. Politically, Islâm set free the Semitic race from the feeble tyrannies of Greeks and Persians. History repeated itself, for the Arab is always eager to swarm from his deserts when the rulers of the rich lands to the north are weakened by strife among themselves. About 650 B. C., when the king of Assyria was fighting Babylon, the Arabs conquered Eastern Palestine for a few years till driven back by Assur-bani-pal. In the time of our Lord, the Arab king of Petra ruled also in Damascus, and among the earliest Christian converts were the Beni Ghassan Arabs of Bashan. Thus, when Muḥammad had united Arabia, there was already a large Semitic population ready to join the Moslems in the north, and a large Gnostic and Ebionite school of thought as weary as were the Jews of oppression by monks and bishops, weary also of endless disputes among the churches, and ready to accept a simpler belief in one God, and in a living prophet who said that there was but one faith taught by all who came before him, and common to Christian and Jew. It was not a persecuting faith, and the tolerance of Islâm, under the Arab khalifs, was not changed into fanaticism till later Turks arose to give their captives the stern choice between the sword and the Ḳorân.
OMAR
It needed, therefore, only one great defeat for the decayed power of Byzantium to crumble away, and for the ruined Sassanians to lose their sway over races mainly Semitic. This victory was won on the precipitous banks of the Yermûḳ stream in Bashan, four years after the death of Muḥammad, which took place in his house at Medînah on June 8, 632 A. D. The capture of Jerusalem by the forces of Omar, in 637 A. D., was merely an incident in that story of wonderful conquests, which, within three-quarters of a century, united West Asia, North Africa, and Spain under the Arab khalîfah of Damascus, as “successor” of the prophet.