The Fall of Madāʾin Kisra: the First Jumʿah in the Hall of Khosrau

In the sixteenth year after the Hijra, which in the Gregorian reckoning corresponds to the year 637, the history of the Sasanian Empire turned over in a single month. Between the two banks of the Tigris, there where the white arch of the Taq Kisra had for more than four centuries cast the shadow of the palaces of Khosrau across Mesopotamia, the voice of an Arab khatib was heard for the first time declaring that there is no god but Allah ﷻ and that Muhammad ﷺ is His Messenger. Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁, the commander who had broken Persian power at al-Qādisiyya, stood in the hall that lent its name to a dynasty, and there he performed the first Jumʿah ever held in Iraq.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up this moment in a single sentence, and that sentence carries the whole weight of what happened. “In the year 16 AH Ahwaz and Madāʾin were opened, and in the latter Saʿd ﵁ established the Jumʿah in the great hall of Khosrau, and this was the first Jumʿah held in Iraq. That was in the month of Safar.” One sentence, two place names, a month, and the birth of the Friday prayer on the soil of the empire that until a few years earlier had treated the Arab tribes on its border the way an emperor treats his sentries.

This chapter follows Suyuti’s ﵀ pen. We hold to what he writes, and we grant the reader only what is needed to understand his formulation within the broader chronicle. For the rest, the arch of the palace speaks for itself.

An Editorial Note on the Chronology

Before the pen continues, one clarification that serves the modern reader.

In the article on the Iraqi campaign of Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ under Abu Bakr ﵁, Suyuti’s ﵀ formulation is cited that seems to place the taking of Madāʾin in the twelfth year. There the editors warned the reader that historically the fall of Ctesiphon took place only under ʿUmar ﵁ in the year sixteen. Here, in his treatment of the khilafah of ʿUmar ﵁, Suyuti ﵀ gives the chronological placement that the broader historical scholarship also confirms. What in his Abu Bakr section is understood as a reference to the whole Iraqi campaign receives, in his ʿUmar section, its proper date. In this article we follow Suyuti’s ﵀ sixteen-AH placement as the canonical narrative of the taking of the Persian capital. The reader who lays the two articles side by side will see the coherence.

What Preceded Madāʾin

In the fifteenth year after the Hijra, on the plains of al-Qādisiyya, the Sasanian Empire broke in its military backbone. Suyuti ﵀ sums up this battle too in a single line, and in that same line it stands that al-Yarmūk was won against the Byzantines and al-Qādisiyya against the Persians. Two fronts, two battles, one year. Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ held command over the Iraqi bank; he was the maternal cousin of the Messenger ﷺ, one of the ten to whom Paradise was promised, and the man who knew the prayer of a sahabi ﵁ in the hour of distress from his own experience.

Between the fall of al-Qādisiyya and the taking of Madāʾin lay months in which the Sasanian remnants withdrew eastward, while the emperor Yazdegerd III fled the capital and the palace city was left behind without a coherent army to defend it. The Tigris, which divided the city into two banks, formed the last natural barrier between the advancing Muslim army and the seats of Khosrau.

Saʿd ﵁ pressed northward from al-Qādisiyya, for it is geography itself that wrote the course of his movement: from the plain of al-Qādisiyya northward along the Euphrates, then eastward toward the Tigris, and at last toward the banks of the Madāʾin. Suyuti ﵀ passes over the intermediate place names and the skirmishes that occurred; his pen sets down the outcome, not the intermediate steps.

Ahwaz and Madāʾin

Suyuti ﵀ names Ahwaz and Madāʾin in one breath. Ahwaz lay east of the marshes, in the province of Khuzestan, and was a junction on the route to the eastern provinces of the empire. The taking of Ahwaz and the taking of Madāʾin in the same year trace not one campaign but two parallel thrusts: one toward the heart of the empire and one toward its eastern flank. What his pen passes over is which of his commanders fought which flank; what his pen does not pass over is the outcome, for both fell.

The month of Safar of the year sixteen is the date that Suyuti ﵀ explicitly gives for the Jumʿah in Khosrau’s hall. Safar falls after Muharram in the Hijri calendar; in the Gregorian conversion this month lay in March or April of the year 637. The detail of the month is rare in Suyuti’s ﵀ chronicle, for he seldom names more than the year, and that he gives the month here is a sign that the moment was held in the tradition as something extraordinary. The first Jumʿah in Iraq was no ordinary Friday.

The Great Hall of Khosrau

The great hall of which Suyuti ﵀ speaks is the Taq Kisra, the vaulted audience hall of the palace complex on the eastern bank of the Tigris. It was, in the seventh century, one of the largest vaults of freestanding masonry in the then-known world. No Arab pen had ever described a building of these dimensions to its readers in the Hijaz; when Saʿd ﵁ and his men crossed the threshold, they entered a space that in its scale and in its material opulence surpassed every comparison with the structures of Mecca or Medina.

In that hall stood a throne, on the walls hung carpets whose hem was worked with inlaid gemstones, and on the floor lay the famous carpet called the Spring of Khosrau, a carpet on which a garden of flowers, brooks, and fruit trees was woven, with gold thread as stem and with sapphires and rubies as buds. Whoever crossed the carpet crossed, in the symbolic language of the Sasanians, the gardens of the paradise of the King of Kings.

Upon this floor Saʿd ﵁ placed his minbar, and upon this floor he drew up the ranks for the first Jumʿah held in Iraq. Suyuti ﵀ passes over what the khatib uttered and even whether a formal khutbah was given in the style of Medina. What he does not pass over is the central act: Saʿd ﵁ established the Jumʿah in the great hall of Khosrau. The words of Suyuti ﵀ lay the emphasis on the founding, not on the praying, for it was not merely a gathering, it was the institution of the Friday prayer on the soil of the empire that had never known that prayer.

The Symbolism of a First Jumʿah

The Jumʿah is no loose act of prayer. It is, in fiqh, a collective duty that can be performed only when an established community is present with its imam and its minbar. The performing of the Jumʿah in a place means that that place, in a legal sense, has become a dar al-islam, a house of Islam where the call to prayer sounds openly and where the collective faith is made visible.

When Saʿd ﵁ performs the Jumʿah in the hall of Khosrau, he therefore establishes not only a prayer, but a new legal order in the place where until a few weeks before another order reigned. The palace that received the emperor on the throne of his forefathers now receives the believers on the floor of their sujud: the same space, the same carpets, the same vaults, but a different meaning.

What Suyuti ﵀ sums up in a single sentence is a gesture of the whole ummah. The space of the palace was taken, not destroyed; the Taq Kisra was not torn down, it was consecrated in a new manner. Islam in its earliest expansion often lets the structures of its predecessors stand and gives them another purpose, as the Hagia Sophia, centuries later, would undergo a similar fate under the Ottomans. But the first model of this reversal lies here, in Safar of the sixteenth year, on the floor of Khosrau.

Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁

The one who performed the first Jumʿah in Iraq was no arbitrary commander. Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ was one of the ten promised Paradise in this life by the Messenger ﷺ. He was the first to shoot an arrow in the path of Allah ﷻ, he was the man of whom the Prophet ﷺ said in the hour of Uhud, “Shoot, Saʿd, my father and mother as ransom for you”, and he was the maternal cousin of the Messenger ﷺ.

That it was precisely Saʿd ﵁ who established the Jumʿah in the hall of Khosrau is no coincidence in the pen of one who reads this history as sacred history. The man who in Mecca was among the first to embrace Islam now stood in the capital of the empire that regarded the Arabian desert as the lateral margin of its imperium. The arc of his life runs from the house of al-Arqam in Mecca to the arch of Khosrau in Madāʾin, and no pen can trace this arc without acknowledging the hand of the One who gives.

ʿUmar ﵁ in Medina received the reports from Iraq with the austerity that marked his khilafah. He wept, as is related in the broader chronicle, when the treasures of Khosrau were spread out before his feet in Medina: not out of joy over the wealth, but out of concern over what wealth can do to a community that does not know it. Suyuti ﵀ passes over this scene in his treatment of Madāʾin, but he gives elsewhere in his chronicle the saying that ʿUmar ﵁ often repeated in these months: that the Messenger ﷺ and Abu Bakr ﵁ had not lived to see this, and that he feared the wealth of Khosrau would kindle a fire in the ummah greater than his own flame.

The Treasure of Madāʾin and the Hand that Divides It

At the taking of Madāʾin the whole palace treasure of Khosrau fell into the hands of the Muslims, and the extent of that treasure was, in the traditions that followed, impossible to grasp: carpets of gold thread, vessels of inlaid silver, crowns of kings, archives of scrolls, and the throne itself. By the law and custom of the ummah a fifth of the spoils fell to the treasury of Medina; the remaining four fifths were divided among the fighters.

Saʿd ﵁, who held the command, carried the fifth part under heavy guard to Medina. The khalifah ﵁ received it in the city, and with his own hands he divided it among the Muslims according to the rule of priority that he had instituted in that same year. Suyuti ﵀ links this, in his pen, to the institution of the diwan, the pay register that arose under ʿUmar ﵁. Whoever reads the taking of Madāʾin as an isolated moment misses its coherence with the administrative organization that ʿUmar ﵁ set up in the same months, for the one event called for the other: to divide a treasure of that magnitude without a register would have split the community, whereas with a register it was reconciled.

Suyuti ﵀ passes over this dialogue. We give here a reconstruction that lies in the spirit of his pen, fed by the sayings of ʿUmar ﵁ that he does record elsewhere in his chronicle. Let the reader regard the dialogue block as illustrative of what the sources relate about the tenor of the moment, not as a literal record by Suyuti ﵀ himself.

The Geography of Madāʾin

Madāʾin means literally “the cities”. The Arabic name for Ctesiphon was plural because the city was plural: on both banks of the Tigris stretched palace complexes, residential quarters, markets, and garrisons. Whoever took Madāʾin had to cross a river and master two banks at once.

It was this geographical reality that the Sasanians had for centuries deployed as their defense, for the Tigris was their moat. But in the months after al-Qādisiyya the Sasanian cavalry was shattered, and the bridges that were normally guarded by garrisons were unguarded, so that Saʿd ﵁ crossed over.

What he found in the western quarters differed from what he found in the eastern quarters: some quarters surrendered by treaty, others were taken by force. Here echoes the formulation that Suyuti ﵀ used in his Abu Bakr section for Madāʾin as a whole: partly by treaty, partly by force. In the sixteenth year that formulation receives its full legal meaning, for it was determined quarter by quarter under which regime the inhabitants would live: whoever submitted by treaty kept his possessions under a jizyah, while whoever was taken by force lost his right of property to the treasury.

Suyuti ﵀ passes over this division by quarter in his single sentence. But his choice of the verb “to open” (futiha) betrays his legal literacy: a city that is opened is a city taken into dar al-islam, regardless of whether that came about by treaty or by force. The verb sums up what the legal outcome was.

The Jumʿah as Turning Point

The turning point of the taking is, in Suyuti’s ﵀ pen, not the fall of the city walls nor the flight of Yazdegerd, but the first Jumʿah. He states explicitly that this was the first Jumʿah held in Iraq. The sentence carries the weight of a first, and firsts carry their own weight in Islamic historiography. The first prayer in a new city, the first khutbah on a new minbar, the first call to prayer in a new region; these “firsts” mark the expansion of the house of Islam like milestones along a road.

What began in the Quba mosque outside Medina in the first year after the Hijra, with the first Jumʿah that the Messenger ﷺ ever performed on his way into the city, found its echo in Safar of the sixteenth year in the hall of Khosrau. Between those two Jumʿahs lay fifteen years of community-formation, of battles, of the gathering of the Mushaf, of two khalifahs, and of an expansion that no Arab in the time of jahiliyya could have foreseen.

The Universal Reading

Whoever reads Suyuti ﵀ on the point of Madāʾin reads a single sentence; whoever reads the history that lies within that sentence reads a turn that the world would never undo. The borders of the Arab world were, on that Friday in Safar, crossed not only militarily but also liturgically. The prayer that the Messenger ﷺ had left to his community sounded for the first time on the soil that for centuries had been sung over by the hymns of the Mazdean fire. Two liturgies, two communities, two orders of being; and on a day in March or April of 637, the one replaces the other.

The Spring of Khosrau, the carpet that depicted the gardens of the paradise of the King of Kings, was in the end cut up and divided among the fighters at the urging of ʿUmar ﵁, so that no Muslim would claim possession of that garden as his own garden. Suyuti ﵀ passes over this scene in his Madāʾin section, but it stands firm in the broader tradition. The image is telling enough: the garden that had been woven onto a carpet was scattered among the believers, because the real garden belongs to Allah ﷻ alone and is given in the hereafter.

The Place of Madāʾin in World History

Whoever views the world history of the seventh century from a distance sees two great empires that had been each other’s enemies for four centuries: Byzantium on the western side, Sasanian Persia on the eastern side, and between them the provinces of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Armenia that changed owners in every generation. The last great conflict between them, the war of Heraclius against Khosrau II, had exhausted both empires in its aftermath. The Byzantines won it in the end and the Sasanians lost, but the victory of Heraclius cost his empire so much gold, so many men, and so much resilience that it could offer no further resistance against the Arab advance.

In that spectacle Madāʾin fell. The city that for centuries had formed the counterweight to Constantinople fell not to Constantinople; it fell to a community born in Mecca and grown up in Medina. No Byzantine emperor, no Sasanian king, and no historian of the jahiliyya had foreseen that the Arabian desert itself would cross the threshold of world history. What happened in Madāʾin in Safar of the sixteenth year was not only a military victory but a shift of the center of gravity of the world itself, for the axis of world history slid southward, toward the Arabic language and toward the Islamic community, and it would keep its center there for the following thousand years.

Suyuti ﵀ passes over these broad vistas in his single sentence. He contents himself with the outcome: Ahwaz and Madāʾin were opened, the Jumʿah was established. The universal-historical depth of what he names lies before the reader to ponder.

The Carpet of the Spring in Detail

The Spring of Khosrau deserves its own consideration. In the palace inventories of the Sasanians the carpet was described as sixty cubits by sixty cubits, a square of about thirty meters to a side, woven of silk and gold thread, with sapphires, rubies, and emeralds inlaid as the flower buds and the fruits of the garden it depicted. Brooks ran across it in silver thread and trees rose in gold thread with emerald-green leaves. The carpet was, in itself, the garden of paradise as the Sasanians imagined it, and it lay before the throne of Khosrau so that the visitors of the emperor literally walked over a paradise before they approached the throne.

At the taking of Madāʾin the carpet fell into the hands of the Muslims, and Saʿd ﵁ had it brought to Medina. ʿUmar ﵁ stood, in the tradition, before the choice of what he would do with it, and he called the Sahaba ﵃ together. Some proposed to lay the carpet in the Masjid an-Nabawi, so that the mosque of the Messenger ﷺ would be adorned with the treasure of Khosrau; others proposed to keep it in the treasury as a memory of the victory; and ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ proposed a third way: to cut the carpet into parts and divide those parts among the fighters, so that no Muslim would claim possession of a garden of paradise as his own garden.

ʿUmar ﵁ chose ʿAli’s ﵁ proposal. The carpet was cut up and the parts were divided. What had once been a square of thirty meters fell apart into hundreds or thousands of smaller pieces that scattered across the Arab world. Not a single piece of it has been recovered in the centuries since; the Spring of Khosrau has vanished from history, not through destruction but through division.

Suyuti ﵀ does not record the division in his Madāʾin section. We give it here because it is preserved in the broader tradition as a characteristic act of ʿUmar’s ﵁ khilafah: what could make the ummah waver in its relation to wealth is scattered, and what through scattering belongs to no one becomes safer than what is held in one hand.

Toward What Follows

With the taking of Madāʾin and the first Jumʿah in its hall the Iraqi campaign was completed in its central aim. What remained was the eastward pursuit of the emperor Yazdegerd and the stabilizing of the provinces. In that same year sixteen, or in the years immediately after, ʿUmar ﵁ would take the decisions that would give the taking of Iraq its lasting form: the founding of Kufa and Basra as garrison cities, so that the fighters would not settle in the old palace city and mingle with its opulence. The taking of Madāʾin was, in this respect, the climax of a campaign but at the same time the problem for an administration, for how do you keep a community pure when it suddenly dwells in the palaces of its former enemy.

In the next article the pen follows ʿUmar ﵁ to Jerusalem, where in that same sixteenth year or the one directly after another threshold is crossed: the threshold of the holy city of the two prior revelations, and the treaty that would give its name to the Umariyya. What was taken in Madāʾin was a palace; what was taken in Jerusalem was a place of prayer. Two different things, two different approaches, one hand of the same khalifah ﵁ in Medina who led both.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 135.