Читать книгу A Dictionary of Islam. Being a cyclopedia of the doctrines, rites, ceremonies, and customs, together with the technical and theological terms, of the Muhammadan religion онлайн

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“Alif. Lām. Mīm. THE GREEKS have been defeated

“In a land hard by: But after their defeat they shall defeat their foes,

“In a few years. First and last is the affair with God. And on that day shall the faithful rejoice

“In the aid of their God: He aideth whom He will; and He is the Mighty, the Merciful.

“It is the promise of God: To his promise God will not be untrue: but most men know it not.”

Following al-Baiẓāwī, the Jalālān, and other commentators, Sale remarks that—

The accomplishment of the prophecy contained in this passage, which is very famous among the Muḥammadans, being insisted on by their doctors as a convincing proof that the Qurʾān really came down from heaven, it may be excusable to be a little particular.

The passage is said to have been revealed on occasion of a great victory obtained by the Persians over the Greeks, the news whereof coming to Makkah, the infidels became strangely elated, and began to abuse Muḥammad and his followers, imagining that this success of the Persians, who, like themselves, were idolators, and supposed to have no scriptures, against the Christians, who pretended as well as Muḥammad to worship one God, and to have divine scriptures, was an earnest of their own future successes against the Prophet, and those of his religion, to check which vain hopes it was foretold in the words of the text, that how improbable soever it might seem, yet the scale should be turned in a few years, and the vanquished Greeks prevail as remarkably against the Persians. That this prophecy was exactly fulfilled, the commentators fail not to observe, though they do not exactly agree in the accounts they give of its accomplishment, the number of years between the two actions being not precisely determined. Some place the victory gained by the Persians in the fifth year before the Hijrah, and their defeat by the Greeks in the second year after it, when the battle of Badr was fought; others place the former in the third or fourth year before the Hijrah, and the latter in the end of the sixth or beginning of the seventh year after it, when the expedition of al-Ḥudaibiyah was undertaken. The date of the victory gained by the Greeks in the first of these accounts, interferes with a story which the commentators tell, of a wager laid by Abū Bakr with Ubaiy ibn K͟half, who turned this prophecy into ridicule. Abū Bakr at first laid ten young camels that the Persians should receive an overthrow within three years, but on his acquainting Muḥammad with what he had done, that Prophet told him that the word biʿẓ, made use of in this passage, signified no determinate number of years, but any number from three to nine (though some suppose the tenth year is included), and therefore advised him to prolong the time and to raise the wager, which he accordingly proposed to Ubaiy, and they agreed that the time assigned should be nine years and the wager a hundred camels. Before the time was elapsed, Ubaiy died of a wound received at Uḥud, in the third year of the Hijrah; but the event afterwards showing that Abū Bakr had won, he received the camels of Ubay’s heirs, and brought them in triumph to Muḥammad. History informs us that the successes of K͟hosrū Parviz, King of Persia, who carried on a terrible war against the Greek empire, to revenge the death of Maurice, his father-in-law, slain by Phocas, were very great, and continued in an uninterrupted course for two-and-twenty years. Particularly in the year of Christ 615, about the beginning of the sixth year before the Hijrah, the Persians, having the preceding year conquered Syria, made themselves masters of Palestine and took Jerusalem, which seems to be that signal advantage gained over the Greeks mentioned in this passage, as agreeing best with the terms here used, and most likely to alarm the Arabs by reason of their vicinity to the scene of action; and there was so little probability at that time of the Greeks being able to retrieve their losses, much less to distress the Persians, that in the following years the arms of the latter made still farther and more considerable progresses, and at length they laid siege to Constantinople itself. But in the year 625, in which the fourth year of the Hijrah began, about ten years after the taking of Jerusalem, the Greeks, when it was least expected, gained a remarkable victory over the Persians, and not only obliged them to quit the territories of the empire, by carrying the war into their own country, but drove them to the last extremity, and spoiled the capital city al-Madāyin; Heraclius enjoying thenceforward a continued series of good fortune, to the deposition and death of K͟hosrū. (Sale’s Koran, in loco.)