💭 ‘Earliest most complete’ Hebrew Bible gets winning bid of $38 million
A Hebrew Bible has attracted a $38 million winning bid in an auction at Sotheby’s.
Sotheby’s auctioned off what it describes as “the earliest most complete Hebrew Bible” in New York on Wednesday.
The Codex Sassoon is believed to have been written around 900 A.D. by Jewish scholars living in modern-day Israel or Syria. The text vanished for centuries before re-emerging in 1929, when it was acquired by collector David Solomon Sassoon, who owned the world’s largest private collection of Hebrew manuscripts.
The Sotheby’s auction house describes the Codex Sassoon as “the earliest surviving example of a single codex containing all the books of the Hebrew Bible.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Romania, Alfred H. Moses won the auction on behalf of the American Friends of ANU. The Codex will be given to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where it was previously displayed between March 23 and March 29.
The text’s seller, Jacqui Safra, obtained the Codex in 1989 for $3.19 million, which is equivalent to $7.7 million when adjusted for inflation.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 14, 2021
💭 My Note: – Like the great Renaissance dam – Tigrayans built and modernized Addis Ababa – now anti-Tigrayan-Ethiopian Pogroms – mob violence occur against them in the Oromo & Amhara dominated City? Wow! This all begun a long, long time ago. Oromara Emperors Menelik ll, Haile Sleassie did it, Evil Mengistu Haile Mariam did it. I’ve relatives who during the 1st Oromo fascist Derg regime of Mengistu Hailemariam. have been denied career opportunities and internal promotion – some were even blocked from getting higher education and scholarship opportunities because of their Tigrayan ethnic identity. I don’t know how they were able to tolerate all those injustices for a very long time (130 years) The Oromos were not supposed to come to power – history has taught us that they don’t recognize or appreciate the value of Integrity, liberty, dignity, equality and justice we see it now with the monster Abiy Ahmed Ali. The TPLF made a big mistake three years ago when it carelessly handed the power to these evil fascists. A very big mistake! Now, they are obliged – and it’s only up to them to lead the people of Tigray and rectify their mistake to accomplish the task of overthrowing this evil enemy regime 😈 – the sooner the better!
As hate speech and targeting of Tigrayans escalates in Addis Ababa, many are terrified and some are planning to flee.
Yared* has not left his apartment in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa for days. “I don’t feel safe here,” the 29-year-old says. “I’m scared to go outside. They [Ethiopian police] are going around the whole city and detaining people from restaurants, bars, cafeterias, and even their homes.”
Yared is from Tigray and, about two weeks ago, celebrations broke out in the regional state capital Mekelle after the Tigray Defence Forces, led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), retook the city. This was the latest dramatic turn of events in Ethiopia’s devastating eight month-long civil war, which has been marred by serious human rights violations, including ethnic cleansing, mass killings, and brutal sexual violence.
Despite Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed withdrawing federal troops from Mekelle and declaring a unilateral ceasefire on 28 June, Tigray has remained under siege on all sides. Up to 900,000 people are facing famine, and humanitarian supplies are restricted due to a lack of fuel and a shutdown of telecommunications and electricity.
Nonetheless, Mekelle’s residents embraced the temporary reprieve from war, cheering and setting alight fireworks, as Tigray regional fighters were met with hugs and kisses. Tigrayans living elsewhere in Ethiopia, however, sunk into terror.
Since November 2020, Tigrayans in Ethiopian cities, especially the capital Addis Ababa, have been arrested by the thousands, had bank accounts temporarily frozen, been purged from their jobs, and had businesses shuttered. Tigrayans, a minority ethnic group who make up about 6% of the Ethiopian population, have also been prevented from traveling abroad.
Now, Tigrayan residents in Addis Ababa tell African Arguments this racial profiling has escalated to an alarming degree since the TPLF regained ground, with many Tigrayans too fearful to leave their homes. Mass arrests have resumed, along with scores of Tigrayan businesses being forcibly closed by Ethiopian authorities.
“Next they will kill us”
Yared’s 42-year-old brother, a father of three, was detained by Ethiopian security forces soon after the war erupted. He was held for a week and interrogated about his relationship with the TPLF despite not having any connections with the group. Soon after the TPLF took over Mekelle, he was detained once again by plain-clothed police officers while eating lunch at his home in Addis Ababa, Yared explains.
Yared says he and his brother’s wife followed behind the vehicle to the Akaki Kality police station. “There were over two hundred Tigrayans there demanding information about their loved ones who were detained,” he recounts. Yared was informed a week ago that his brother had been moved to an undisclosed location. Yared’s uncle, who was an officer in the Ethiopian army, was also detained when the war broke out in November and has not been heard from since.
There have been widespread reports over the last two weeks of scores of Tigrayans being detained and transported to detention centres. At least 15 Ethiopian journalists and media workers were also arrested in the crackdown.
“It’s very concerning,” said Fisseha Tekle, a researcher for Ethiopia at Amnesty International. “It’s clear racial profiling. People are getting arrested after police check their IDs and see that they’re Tigrayan. They are not taken to court. It’s a clear human rights violation and a violation of their rights to due process.”
Dawit was just released from the Semit police station in Addis Ababa on Sunday night after being arrested that morning from Feven Shiro, a local Tigrayan-owned restaurant in the city, where he was eating breakfast with three non-Tigrayan friends.
“About seven [uniformed] police officers came in and checked everyone’s IDs,” Dawit told African Arguments. “I was one of four Tigrayans in the restaurant and they detained us. They accused us of celebrating the TPLF’s control of Mekelle. They were pushing us around and insulting us.” The police also confiscated their mobile phones.
Dawit, along with the three other Tigrayans, were brought to the police station and placed in a large holding compound, where Dawit estimates at least a thousand other Tigrayans were being held. “There were a lot of girls there and they were crying and the boys looked so sad,” Dawit explains. “Even myself, I was shaking and feeling so sad. I had heard about Tigrayans being arrested, but when it happened to me I felt so heartbroken.”
Dawit says the Tigrayans were being held for about three days and then transferred to Awash Arba, a military camp located about 221 km from Addis Ababa. Yared says he heard that his brother was also transferred there. According to Dawit, the Tigrayans in the compound at Semit station are fed one piece of bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and do not have access to water. They are forced to sleep on the cold ground.
Dawit was released after about ten hours after paying 10,000 birr ($228); one of his non-Tigrayan friends had connections with the police commissioner. Dawit, who was born in Addis Ababa, owns a bar in the city, which was also shut down by Ethiopian authorities.
Tekle from Amnesty International says there have also been cases of arbitrary arrests in Dire Dawa, a city in eastern Ethiopia, and that these people have not been heard from since their arrest.
According to Dawit, there are checkpoints in Addis Ababa every two or three kilometers where police check IDs. “If someone is Tigrayan, the police will take their phone, tell them to open their social media and their messages. If there’s even a flag of Tigray or anything related to Tigray, they will be arrested,” he says.
Fresh out of the jail, Dawit says he will leave to Tigray after three days. Despite the siege, Tigrayans are finding a way to access Tigray through the Afar region, which borders it to the east, in order to seek refuge.
“I was raised as an Ethiopian,” Dawit told African Arguments. “But now I want to go to Tigray and I will join the resistance and fight for freedom. This is the only option we have now. Today they are arresting us and tomorrow they will kill us. It’s better to go and fight then to just die here in Addis.”
Dawit wanted his full name published because he is leaving for Tigray and he “just doesn’t care anymore”. We decided to keep him anonymous to protect his well-being.
African Arguments reached out to the Ethiopian government for comment, but did not receive a response.
“Full of hate”
Sara*, 27, moved with her husband from Mekelle to Addis Ababa a few weeks before the war broke out. She says her guesthouse in Addis Ababa was forcibly closed by police about a week ago. “The police came in and told everyone they had to leave,” she says. “They shut it down with no explanation. Our neighbours’ shops were also closed”, all of which are Tigrayan-owned. Her husband’s relative who was at the guesthouse at the time was detained and interrogated for days.
“We feel very unwanted here,” Sara explains. “We can’t speak Tigrinya on the streets anymore because someone could just call you ‘junta’ [Abiy’s preferred term for the TPLF] and security forces will come and take you, no questions asked.”
Sara and her husband’s bank account, which was opened in Tigray, has also been frozen, along with all other bank accounts opened in Tigray. “It’s very hard to live now,” she says. “We’re using the money we have right now. But when we run out we don’t know what we will do.”
All those who African Arguments spoke to pointed to Abiy’s recent speech after the TPLF’s advancement as the source of escalating targeting and hate speech against Tigrayans. In his first remarks since he pulled federal troops out of Mekelle, Abiy, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, denied that his military was defeated by the TPLF and went on to allege that Tigrayan civilians had attacked the Ethiopian army and helped the TPLF.
“Our army sometimes stayed for four or five days without water when continuous fighting was going on, while the junta was busy drinking bottled water,” he said, adding that Tigrayan priests had called for people to fight the army and that “most of the churches” were used for hiding weapons.
In last month’s elections, Abiy’s Prosperity Party won 95% of seats. This suggests he enjoys significant support, though the legitimacy of the process has been questioned due to its timing during a brutal civil war, the fact that Tigray region was not permitted to participate, that some of the most prominent Oromo politicians continue to be imprisoned, and that many opposition parties boycotted the vote.
Abraha*, a former Tigrayan law professor in Amhara state, says that since Abiy came to power, he and his support base, much of which originates from Addis Ababa and the Amhara region, have “blamed Tigrayans for everything that’s happening in the country”. But “up until recently, he was mostly blaming the TPLF, not civilian Tigrayans,” Abraha explains. Now, however, “because of Abiy’s recent statement, people are claiming all Tigrayans are traitors and it has fuelled the process of racial profiling that already existed.”
“I’ve been receiving threats for months, but now the death threats have become much more serious,” he says. “And this is not just some random social media users. Even my own former students have threatened me.”
“It feels very different now,” Abraha adds. “As a researcher I’ve always feared the government, the intelligence and the police. But now I’m scared of everyone, even my students and colleagues. Everyone is now expressing their hatred of Tigrayans, from the politician to the yoga teacher.”
In a recent interview, Dagnachew Assefa, an advisor of Abiy, publicly suggested the registration and possible deportation of Tigrayans. Seyoum Teshome, a prominent social media activist with hundreds of thousands of followers, recently stated: “since each and every Tigrayan youth… has been raised with the same Woyane [Tigrayan rebellion] mentality… If you want to defeat them, you have to eliminate all the youth in Tigray.”
Amhara journalists have also called on citizens to spy on their Tigrayan neighbours. “These statements and these anti-Tigrayan campaigns can spread like wildfire because of social media,” says Abraha. “My fear is that if this continues, and the Ethiopian army continues to be defeated or humiliated, that all Tigrayans living in all parts of Ethiopia will be in danger.”
According to Amnesty researcher Tekle, this is not yet “people attacking people”. “This is the government machinery that is targeting them,” he says. “We haven’t seen any actions by civilians against Tigrayans, at least in Addis.” On Sunday, though, reports emerged of at least three Tigrayan civilians allegedly being killed by a mob in the town of Wereta in Amhara region.
Aaron*, a 34-year-old father born and raised in Addis Ababa, says he has never identified with his Tigrayan roots. “I honestly thought I was Amhara up until two weeks ago,” he says. “All my friends are Amhara and I don’t even know any Tigrayans in the city…I always saw myself as Ethiopian and all my friends as just Ethiopians. I have an Amhara name and so none of my friends in Addis actually know I’m Tigrayan.”
He is concerned now, however, as “the hate is escalating a lot”. “I’ve been hearing about many Tigrayans being arrested and even my friends who are usually politically neutral are openly talking about Tigrayans as traitors and how they hope Tigrayans are killed or deported. These are my colleagues, employees, and childhood friends saying these things.”
“I’m terrified they will find out I’m Tigrayan,” says Aaron, adding that he has started learning Tigrinya, along with others in Addis, in fear that they could be expelled to Tigray. Aaron has also attempted to make connections with other Tigrayans on social media forums, but is viewed as suspicious because he cannot speak the language.
“Everyone is so full of hate here and hate for Tigrayans is growing all over the country. I feel like I’m around full-scale fascism,” he adds. “The ethnic cleansing has already been happening, but I’m scared the worst is yet to come. I’m worried we will become the next Rwanda.”
“I have a family in Addis so I cannot run away to Europe or the United States if something happens…For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m living on foreign soil. I used to be Ethiopian, but now I have no idea where I belong.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 14, 2021
😈 Nobel Peace Laureate Abiy Ahmed Ali’s hate speech against Tigrayans:
“Our army sometimes stayed for four or five days without water when continuous fighting was going on, while the junta was busy drinking bottled water. Tigrayan Orthodox Priests had called for people to fight the army & most of the churches were used for hiding weapons.”
Right after Nobel Peace Laureate Abiy Ahmed’s hate speech against Tigrayans:
“There are checkpoints in Addis Ababa every two or three kilometers where police check IDs. “If someone is Tigrayan, the police will take their phone, tell them to open their social media and their messages. If there’s anything related
to Tigray, they will be arrested & sent to concentration
camps, such as this”
It is now certain that it’s evil Abiy Ahmed Ali is the one who recently communicated that genocidal wishful thought against Tigrayans to the EU envoy.
💭 The EU Envoy to Ethiopia, Finland Foreign Minster Pekka Haavisto attested as follows:
“..when I met the Ethiopian Leadership😈 in February they used this kind of language, that they are going to destroy the Tigrayans, they are going to wipe out..” Finland FM Haavisto.
#TogogaMassacre | Abiy Ahmed Repeated What His Oromo Father Mengistu Did on the Very day of June 22
💭 My Note: History repeats itself:
🔥 Amhara & Oromos (Oromara) bombing Tigray, Using Rape, Hunger & Forced Resettlement (Mengistu did it back then, Abiy Ahmed is doing the same now) as a Weapon against People in Tigray for the past 130 years:-
😈 Menelik ll: Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
😈 Haile Selassie: Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
😈 Mengistu Hailemariam: Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
😈 Abiy Ahmed Ali ´= Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
The great famine is estimated to have caused 3.5 million deaths. During Emperor Menelik’s Reign, Tigray was split into two regions, one of which he sold to the Italians who later named it Eritrea. Only two months after the death of Emperor Yohaness lV , Menelik signed the Wuchale treaty of 2 May 1889 conceding Eritrea to the Italians. It was not only Eritrea that Menelik gave away, he also had a hand in letting Djibouti be part of the French protectorate when he agreed the border demarcation with the French in 1887. Some huge parts of Tigray were put under Gonder. The Southern part, places like present day Alamata, Kobo etc were put under Wello Amhara administration.
👉 2. Haile Selassie (1892 – 1975)
In 1943, at the request of the Emperor Haile Selassie, the Royal British Airforce bombed two towns – Mekelle and Corbetta. Thousands of defenseless civilians lost their lives as a result of aerial bombardment. It is recorded that ‘on 14th October [1943] 54 bombs dropped in Mekelle, 6th October 14 bombs followed by another 16 bombs on 9thOctober in Hintalo, 7th/9th October 32 bombs in Corbetta’.
Between 2 and 5 million’ people died between 1958 and 1977 as a cumulative result. Haile Selassie, who was emperor at the time, refused to send any significant basic emergency food aid to the province of Tigray,
👉 3. Mengistu Hailemariam (1937 – )
1979 – 1985 + 1987
Due to organized government policies that deliberately multiplied the effects of the famine, around 1.2 million people died from this famine. Mengistu & his Children still alive & ‘well’ while Tigrayans starving again.
👉 4. Abiy Ahmed Ali (1976 – )
2018 – Until today: probably up to 500.000 already dead. 😠😠😠 😢😢😢 Unlike the past famine there is no natural or man-made drought, rather, Abiy simply uses war and hunger as a weapon. Abiy Ahmed sent his kids to America for safety, while bombing & starving Tigrayan kids!
[Galatians 5:19-21]
“Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 20, 2021
🔥 Egyptian Journalist Threatens to Destroy Ethiopia if Dam Diverted
Al-Ahram Editor-in-Chief Ashraf El-Ashry and Yassin Ahmad, president of the Ethiopian Institute for Public Diplomacy exchanged threats regarding the opening of the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on a TV debate. The debate was aired on Russia Today TV on June 8, 2021. El-Ashry said that Cairo will never let the Renaissance Dam turn into a spigot that cuts off water from 100 million Egyptians. He added that he hopes that the Ethiopian leadership takes a long look in the mirror.
El-Ashry said that they must know that the extent of the losses and disasters that would befall the Ethiopians would have a calamitous effect on them and could take them back to the Stone Age. In return Ahmad said that if Egypt bombs the Renaissance Dam, Ethiopia will not sit idly by and it might bomb the Aswan Dam. He said: “Either we swim together, or sink together.”
😈 Of course, while evil Abiy Ahmed and his Muslim-Protestant Oromo Jihadists are waging Jihad against Christian Tigrayans, and openly declare to send Christian Tigray back to the stone age, Egyptians are projecting everything their Muslim brother in Addis Ababa thinks of an evil plan.
😈 Traitor in-Chief Abiy Ahmed Ali Already gave Egypt + Sudan a green light to take the dam.Egypt & Sudan are just creating a political campaign on behalf of their agent & Muslim brother in Addis Ababa who organized a sham election for tomorrow, Monday, 21 June 2021. They even hired Muslim social media activists in suits and ties from Ethiopia, like Mohammed Al Arusi & Ustath Jemal Beshir. Are these traitors, who are part of the divisive Abiy Ahmed Ali’s confuse and convince team, twins?
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 25, 2018
A demonstration against anti-Semitism in Berlin is urging participants to wear a kippah on Wednesday in response to an attack on an Israeli man wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap.
The “Berlin wears a kippah” protest is set for Wednesday evening in front of the Jewish community center in the German capital. It follows the assault of Adam Armush, a 21-year-old Israeli Arab who was violently assaulted by a 19-year-old Muslim refugee in the German capital last Tuesday.
The video of Armush being whipped with a belt while his attacker cries out “Yahudi!” or “Jew” in Arabic quickly went viral. Berlin police identified the attacker as a Palestinian from Syria named Knaan S. who was registered at a refugee home in Brandenburg state outside Berlin, but who most recently was living “out of a suitcase” in the capital.
The Jewish community plans to hand out thousands of kippahs to everyone interested in expressing solidarity with the Jewish community in Germany by wearing them proudly across the city and elsewhere.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 6, 2016
“First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” This statement is used by Islamists to describe the order in which they will commit murder. First the Jews, the Saturday people. And then the Christians, the Sunday people. The global conquest envisioned by radical Islam depends on their disappearance.
All-out religious war is being waged every day against Jews and Christians. It may be an invisible war because the mainstream media – suffering from excess concern about Muslim sensitivities and from editors’ and reporters’ anti-religious bias – has virtually blacked it out, but it is one of the most violent conflicts in our world nonetheless.
Jewish communities in the Arab World that just a half century ago numbered in the millions have all been driven to brink of extinction. Either hunted down or forced to flee their ancestral homes, these communities that had survived for thousands of years have vanished from history. If not for the existence of Israel, the Jews who once lived there would have vanished too. Meanwhile, Christian communities’ suffering in the Muslim world is worse than ever before.
The Saturday people and the Sunday people have a common cause – protecting their brothers and sisters who are being targeted for violence and protecting the Judeo-Christian civilization their faiths have collaborated in building over the centuries. Jews need to read “Muslim Persecution of the Christians” and understand the plight of Christians in the Muslim world. Christians need to learn from the genocidal history of Islam against Jews in countries which have now become exclusively Muslim states or Judenfrei (Jew free).
Christian Iraqi Population Shrinking With Persecution ‘Worse Than Under Saddam Hussein’
I just saw Toni Blair defending of invading Iraq at Chilcot press conference. His voice kept cracking everytime he gave contradicting arguments. I was nodding my head with amusement all the time. Madre mía!
„Iraq under Saddam had no chance, Iraq today has a chance“ Bleaching Tony Blair, July 6, 2016
It doesn’t get more wicked than this. 13 years later, still the same. Shall we call him ‘B’liar. Unbelievable! Don’t such evil individuals like T. Blair, D. Cameron, A. Merkel, The Clintons, The Bushes, Obama, H. Kissinger, Z, Brzezinski and G. Soros have a repentance gene? The so-called „International Court of Justice“ might ignore these cruel men and women, but, sooner or later they will appear before the courts of the house of the LORD.
A human rights group has warned that minorities in Iraq, including Christians, are facing a “catastrophic” reality with tens of thousands of people murdered or abducted by terror groups.
“The impact on minorities has been catastrophic. Saddam [Hussein] was terrible; the situation since is worse. Tens of thousands of minorities have been killed and millions have fled for their lives,” said Mark Lattimer, head of Minority Rights Group, according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Christian population was as many as 1.4 million in Iraq back in 2003 during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, but that number has dwindled since. In October 2015, Aid to the Church in Need said that only 300,000 Christians were left, but MRG says that number is now down further to somewhere between 50,000 to 250,000.
Iraq’s minorities suffered in various ways under the decades-long dictatorship of Hussein, but the human rights group insisted that things have only been getting worse in the 13 years of warfare since the U.S. military campaign toppled the regime.
Persecution of Christians and other minorities has especially escalated since the summer of 2014 with the rise of the Islamic State terror group, which has captured several cities in Iraq, including ones with formerly notable Christian populations, such as Mosul.
Iraqi Christians have been forced to choose between converting to Islam, paying a high living tax to the terror group, or abandoning their ancestral homes – with many enslaved or killed.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 19, 2012
Himyar, modern Yemen during the 6th Century was an area where Christianity, Judaism and paganism competed for religious allegiance and where Ethiopia, Persia and the eastern Roman Empire competed for political advantage. The kingdom of Abyssinia– Axum – had a presence on the Arabian coast from the 3rd century. In the early 300s, they invaded Himyar in the Yemeni region, holding it until 378. Between 320-360, Axum became Christian under King Ezanes. During the 6th Century Christianity had become fairly widespread in Yemen but encountered strong opposition from the region’s long-established Jewish community and from local nationalists. In 521 A.D. the Christian Ma’adikarib Ya’fur became king and, supported by the Aksumites, began a series of military expeditions against the Central Arabian tribes in order to reinforce his power and prepare a war against the Lakhmids of al-Hira (or Nasrids, Northern Arabian vassals of the Sasanians). After his death, the Judaist Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar ascended to the throne, mortal enemy of the Aksumites and their Christian allies. In 523 Yusuf Asar Dhu Nuwas (518-525) (also known as Masruq) King of the Himyar and a recent convert to Judaism, (it is believed his mother was a Jewish slave girl) began removing foreign influences from his realm and some Roman and Axumite merchants were killed. Whether he planned to establish an explicitly Jewish state is debatable — many of his followers were pagan or Nestorian — but most of his enemies were Christian, and his war to establish Himyar’s full independence from Axum took on a distinctly religious character and into confluct with the regions Christians and Axumite.
The king of Axum, Ela Atzheba (Ela-Asbeha) also known as Elesboas (in Malalas), Hellesthaeus (in Procopius) and sometimes as Kaleb which was his Christian name, sent an army to Yemen to punish Dhu-Nuwas driving him in to the hills, but once Ela-Asbeha’s army retired he regains his kingdom and in retaliation Churches are burned and Arab Christian civilians are massacred, most famously at Nagran; In October of 523 believing the Najran Christians collaborated with the Axumites Dhu-Nuwas tears down all their churches and burns alive those who refuse to apostatize. These martyrs are commemorated in the liturgies of the Greek, Latin and Oriental Churches. Dhu Nuwas is said to have justified such atrocities by referring to the horrendous persecution of Jews in the Roman Empire.
It appears that a Christian from Najran escaped and brought news of the massacre to Ela Atzheba along with a half-burnt copy of the Gospel. Ela-Asbeha outraged by the actions of Dhu Nuwas was determined to return to Yemen and had the troops with which to intervene but no ship transports; he got in touch with Byzantine emperor Justin I through the patriarch of Alexandria, Timothy III. It should be noted that Ela Atzheba was of Orthodox Tewahedo and Timothy Coptic Orthodox Christian faiths whereas Justin was a devout Chalcedonian, nevertheless Justin offered the use of 60 ships for the Ethiopian army (Although his support was provided officially to protect the persecuted Christians of Yemen, it is probably more likely that it was an attempt to control one of the passages of goods from India destined to Byzantium.). The campaigns which Caleb (Ela Atzheba) led in person and under the spiritual guidance of the celebrated Axumite monk Pantaleon were eventually victorious in a great battle on the seashore at Zabid, where Dhu Nuwas himself fell in the surf. Once Dhu-Nuwas was dead South Arabia was turned into a province of the Axumite monarchy.
News of the Ethiopian emperor’s rescue of the Christians of Himyar spread throughout the Orthodox world, and Caleb (who eventually abdicated his throne to become a monk, sending his gold crown to be kept near the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem) is venerated as a saint not only in the Ethiopian Church but also, as St. Ellasbaan (i.e. Ella Asbeha), by the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics. South Arabia, however, remained a restless province, and Caleb soon granted it de facto independence under the Christian prince Abraha who between 535-570 was the most powerful man in Yemen. In, the year of Muhammad’s birth, Abraha’s army elephant corps attacked Mecca, giving that famous year the name “Year of the Elephant” in Arab history. Another Islamic echo of the wars of Caleb may be in Sura 85 of the Koran, which describes how those who burn the Saints burn themselves; this is thought by many commentators to refer to Dhu Nuwas and the Martyrs of Nagran.
The Axumite viceroy, Abraha invasion of Mecca, is eventual stopped by pestilence which wipes out his army. Still, by 575 he was enough of a threat that Mecca had to ask Persia for assistance, at which point they lost their independence to Persian dominance. Around this time Abu Morra Sayf b. Dhu Yazan of the royal Himyarite house asked for an external intervention to overthrow the Christian/Aksumites. The Byzantines and the Lakhmids refused to send their troops but not the Persians bringing about the first encounter between Persia and Africa during the reign of Khusru (Khosrow) I when he expelled the Christian Aksumites (or Abyssinians) from Yemen in c. 570 A.D. According to al-Tabari, Khosrow I Anoshirvan armed eight ships with eight hundred released Daylamite prisoners, leaded by a certain Vahrez [Exactly as for many other Sasanian names, it is not clear if this was a personal name or a high-rank title, and with this army he defeated ‘Abraha’s son Masruq. Sayf b. Dhu Yazan was proclaimed chief of the reign, now a Sasanian protectorate known as Samaran, but after few years he died during a revolt that probably happened between 575 and 578. Vahrez intervened once more but this time with a more numerous army.
If I were a theologian, my idea of Valhalla would be something like a villa in Languedoc, an endless supply of red, a smoke (I assume that won’t be a problem in the afterlife) and a good history book.
Among my favourite authors is Tom Holland, whose previous publications Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium have accompanied me on those increasingly rare periods of relaxation abroad.
Holland writes about antiquity with great flair and authority, capturing the sense of struggle, anxiety and desperation that often overshadowed great men and great civilisations as they battled for supremacy (and anyone who doubts Steven Pinker’s thesis that we are all getting nicer and less violent should study ancient history more closely).
Holland’s latest, In the Shadow of the Sword, takes a look at a period of antiquity, the 6th and 7th centuries, that has fallen to the very back of the western mind, largely because for our ancestors the light of civilisation had gone out (or had not yet been switched on); in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, however, the Roman Empire continued much as normal, although now centred in Constantinople and speaking Greek. During this period the Romans battled for supremacy with the Persian Empire, occasionally fighting ferociously in Mesopotamia or Syria but more often in a state of uneasy truce.
But Holland’s latest book is interesting in a different way, for as Charles Moore noted on Monday, it delves into a seriously controversial area – the birth of Islam.
The Near East at the time was a fascinating hodge-podge of different faiths; Holland opens the narrative with the story of Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar, an Arab king who defeated the Christians in the Najran region by the Red Sea – the twist being that Yath’ar was not Muslim but Jewish, and there were communities of both living in Arabia at the time.
And sometimes the dividing line between the faiths was unclear. Further north in modern-day Iraq, where Jews had lived for a millennium and Christians for several centuries, there were Jews who still prayed to Jesus and Christians who practised Jewish rites. Iran itself was Zoroastrian, the world’s oldest major religion: although today rather tiny (Freddie Mercury is perhaps the only Zoroastrian many of us could name) it was to influence Islam heavily, as Holland points out. Another even smaller group, the Samaritans (so small in number that they’ve been forced to marry out for genetic reasons) were still a significant force at this time, before their strength was broken by two failed uprisings.
Further out in the wilds of Arabia there were all sorts of pagans, some of who worshipped cubes (which seems to have been a particular thing with Arabs at the time).
And it was out of this wilderness that came one of the world’s great religions, whose followers would in a short space of time conquer an empire from Spain to central Asia, and whose scholars would form a coherent religion that has flourished to this day.
And yet from a historical point of view the study of Islam and its founder is problematic. The oldest biographies of Mohammed, in the form we have them, date back to more than two centuries after his death, and despite the diligent work of Al-Bukhari, who is said to have collected 600,000 supposed sayings of the prophet and dismissed all but 7,225, the religion is as vulnerable to higher criticism as Judaism and Christianity.
That criticism, which began with historians such as Edward Gibbon and accelerated in 1863 when Ernest Renan published a biography of Jesus that treated his subject as a man, leading one critic to describe it as a “new crucifixion of Our Lord”, has been irreversible.
Yet while in the 18th century Muslim jurists concluded that the “gate of interpretation” was closed because all there was to learn had been learned, by the late 19th century Western scholars such as Ignác Goldziher also began to ask questions about Islam, especially about the hadiths, the collection of sayings that made up the Sunna, or Islamic law – a question that Muslim scholars had asked a thousand years before (concluding that many were fakes).
And in the past four decades Islam has come under a far more rigorous microscope. In 1950 the German professor Joseph Schacht wrote that: “We must abandon the gratuitous assumptions that there existed originally an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet.”
Instead, as Holland concludes, many of the inventions of Islam already existed at the time it arose. It seems unlikely that Mecca, so biographers of Mohammed say, was a pagan city, devoid of any Jewish or Christian presence, in a great desert. This would indeed make the rise of fully-fledged monotheism there, complete with references to Abraham, Moses and Jesus, a miracle. As Holland writes:
Well, this pivotal historical time should not be considered ‘brave’, particularly, when most of these narratives are accepted and acknowledged as historical facts among Ethiopian theologians and historians.
The “Telegraph’s” Charles Moore reviews “In the Shadow of the Sword” by Tom Holland (Little, Brown)
Most of the attention given to this book so far has, rightly, been favourable. But it has skirted round the key point. Tom Holland is attempting to show that much of what Muslims believe about the Koran is incorrect. Since their belief is rigorously literal – they hold that the Koran is the uncreated word of God recited (the word Koran means “recitation”) directly through the mouth of Mohammed – any Muslim who accepted Holland’s evidence would have to reconsider many aspects of his faith.
This painful process of textual inquiry into scripture has been well known to Christians since the 19th century, when the Bible came under similar scrutiny. It has caused anguish, but many have been able to reconcile their faith with the discoveries of scholarship. No such process has taken place in Islam. Indeed, the suppression of questioning has actually got worse. Until 1924, for example, seven different versions of the text were considered canonical, so areas of doubt were implicitly acknowledged. Now there is only one normative text, and it is inconsistent in many particulars, but Muslims dare not say so. Holland is being brave.
Before any zealot starts threatening him, it is worth saying something about his motive. Holland has clearly not written with an animus against Islam. He does permit himself some amusing acerbities – such as why people started to teach that Mohammed used a toothbrush – but this is not a polemical work promoting Judaism, Christianity or atheism against Islam, or saying that Muslims are liars. It is a work of history, trying to tell the truth, as modern historians understand that fraught concept.
Historical truth is closely related to the idea of context, and therefore clashes with the Muslim view that the Koran came, as Holland puts it, like “lightning from a clear blue sky”. The right context, he argues, is not a lonely revelation in desert obscurity. It is the period in which the Persian and Roman empires came to an end.
To Holland, it is significant that no biographies of Mohammed survive from before the ninth century (he is believed to have died in 632), and that the stories of his life became more detailed the longer the elapse of time from his death. The Koran itself says very little about the Prophet – he is mentioned only four times – so almost everything that Muslims believe about him comes from poor, later evidence. As Holland says, it is rather as if we were to study the two world wars without any eyewitness accounts at all.
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