Author: Martin Kramer

Byron and Zion

On By Martin Kramer

April 19 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, at the age of 36. Byron was an acclaimed celebrity in his day, hailed for his literary genius and scrutinized for his notorious personal life, which gave rise to endless fascination and speculation. He died of a fever in Missolonghi, Greece, where he had lent his name, person, and what remained of his fortune to the Greek struggle for independence from Ottoman rule.

Byron by Thomas Phillips, 1813, Newstead Abbey. Wikimedia.

Byron may well be considered the secular saint of all Western enthusiasts for various foreign “liberation” struggles. He fit the description of such types offered by Tory statesman George Canning in 1821: “a steady patriot of the world alone, the friend of every country but his own.” Today, every American and European campus teems with would-be Byrons, though slogans have supplanted cantos in their repertoire.

Byron is identified above all with Greece and the philhellenes. But at various times he showed sympathy for Turks and Armenians, and seems to have been as promiscuous in his foreign attachments as he was in other aspects of his life.

He was also hugely popular with early Zionists, who imagined that had political Zionism gotten off to an earlier start, he might well have been its champion.

Zionist poetry

The most famous exponent of this view was Nahum Sokolow, a Zionist thinker and diplomat, whose overlooked contribution to securing the Balfour Declaration I’ve assessed elsewhere. In Sokolow’s two-volume History of Zionism (1919), he devotes a section to Byron within his discussion of non-Jewish supporters of Jewish national redemption. Sokolow made the case for Byron as a proto-Zionist by quoting his Hebrew Melodies, a collection published in 1815. Byron wrote these poems at the behest of the Jewish composer and musician Isaac Nathan, who wanted to set (supposedly) ancient Jewish music to contemporary verse.

“Zionist poetry owes more to Byron than to any other Gentile poet,” wrote Sokolow.

His Hebrew Melodies, which are among the most beautiful of his productions, have been translated several times into Hebrew, and there are no lines more popular and more often quoted than:

The wild dove hath her nest, the fox his cave.
Mankind their country, Israel but the grave.

which might well have been a Zionist motto….  [Byron,] who died a martyr to his zeal in the cause of the freedom of Greece, might perhaps have been equally able to sacrifice his life for the freedom of Judaea, had the deliverance of Judaea offered scope for a similar struggle in his time. As it was he expressed the Jewish tragedy, not only in its poetical but also in its political aspect.

In this “what-if,” Sokolow engaged in a bit of fanciful appropriation. There is no evidence at all that Byron saw the Jewish “tragedy” as amenable to a political solution. Yet, there is no doubt that Jews, including Zionists, saw in Hebrew Melodies a validation. The poem “Oh, Weep For Those!” lamenting that the Jews have no home, was translated dozens of times into Hebrew and Yiddish. Jewish settlers as early as the First Aliyah sang it to their own improvised tune.

Indeed, no less than Theodor Herzl may have quoted it. Herzl and the thinker and critic Max Nordau were playing the lead roles in the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, and the press organized a banquet for them. A French newspaper, according to a witness, had just published an article expressing delight at Nordau’s phenomenal memory.

Dr. Herzl, it seems, wished to showcase this, using a strategy that turned out to be both a huge surprise and the highlight of the banquet. After Dr. Nordau finished speaking, Dr. Herzl took the stage. Suddenly, he mentioned a quote from Lord Byron. Looking distressed, he glanced towards Nordau. The help arrived just when needed. Nordau recited the quote, both in the original language and translated, as though reading from an open book.

I say “may have quoted it,” because the report does not specify which poem Herzl attempted to recall or pretended to have forgotten. We shall never know, but what is telling is that, eighty years after Byron’s death, learned European Jews were still quoting him, sometimes accurately. In 1904, the Zionist leader Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky included Byron on a list of the ten authors whose works deserved to be preserved if all other books in the world had to be destroyed. According to Jabotinsky, Byron’s influence on his own generation of Russians surpassed that of Tolstoy.

Greeks and Jews

Much of Hebrew Melodies had little to do with the Hebrews at all, so Herzl, Nordau, and Sokolow didn’t have a massive amount to memorize. Indeed, in the case of Byron, there was certainly much they would have preferred to forget. His later poem, “The Age of Bronze” (1823), contains one of the meanest tirades against the Jews in all of English letters. There Byron portrays the Jews, and particularly the Rothschilds, as allies of tyranny against freedom:

All States, all things, all Sovereigns they controul,
And waft a loan “from Indus to the Pole.”
The banker – broker – Baron – Brethren, speed
To aid these bankrupt Tyrants in their need.

The rant escalates, culminating in this:

On Shylock’s shore behold them stand afresh,
To cut from Nations’ hearts their “pound of Flesh.”
Byron in Albanian dress by Thomas Phillips, c. 1835 from 1813 original, National Portrait Gallery. Wikimedia.

At most, it could be argued that Byron might have championed Jewish freedom as ardently as he did Greek independence, based on his remark to an acquaintance: “I am nearly reconciled to St. Paul, for he says, there is no difference between the Jews and the Greeks, and I am exactly of the same opinion, for the character of both is equally vile.”

It might also be noted (parenthetically) that the cause Byron did champion—Greek independence—was hardly favorable to Jews in its earliest phase. During the struggle, Greek Christians massacred Jews along with Muslims across the Peloponnese, most notoriously in 1821 at Tripolitsa, where all 1,000 Jewish inhabitants were slaughtered. Byron was well aware of the flaws in the movement he embraced. His willingness to look past them is another distinctive characteristic of the foreign friend of foreign causes.

Of course, Zionism owed a vast debt to Romanticism, and in that respect, it hardly matters what the Romantics thought of the Jews. After all, when Herzl wrote his manifesto Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in Paris, he refueled each evening by attending Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. So if Herzl and his disciples took inspiration from Byron, I suppose Israel owes him something.

On this bicentenary of his passing, then, let us reflect on the words of the nineteenth-century Hebrew poet Judah Leib Gordon, who also translated Hebrew Melodies. Just as Byron

was pained by the distress of the Greeks oppressed under the Ottoman yoke and rushed to their aid, he similarly felt compassion for the plight of Joseph and supported the children of Israel with his poetic charm. Byron was the pioneer in using his verses to awaken the love for Zion and a fondness for Jerusalem among his own people and in his land, a love that remains more deeply embedded in our people than in any other nation. Therefore, it is our duty to honor the name of this poet and cherish his memory among our people.

A selection from Hebrew Melodies

Oh! Weep For Those

Oh! Weep for those that wept by Babel’s stream,
Whose shrines are desolate, whose land a dream;
Weep for the harp of Judah’s broken shell;
Mourn—where their God that dwelt the Godless dwell!

And where shall Israel lave her bleeding feet?
And when shall Zion’s songs again seem sweet?
And Judah’s melody once more rejoice
The hearts that leap’d before its heavenly voice?

Tribes of the wandering foot and weary breast,
How shall ye flee away and be at rest!
The wild-dove hath her nest, the fox his cave,
Mankind their Country—Israel but the grave!

On Jordan’s Banks

On Jordan’s banks the Arabs’ camels stray,
On Sion’s hill the False One’s votaries pray,
The Baal-adorer bows on Sinai’s steep—
Yet there—even there—Oh God! thy thunders sleep:

There—where thy finger scorch’d the tablet stone!
There—where thy Shadow to thy people shone!
Thy glory shrouded in its garb of fire:
Thyself—none living see and not expire!

Oh! in the lightning let thy glance appear!
Sweep from his shiver’d hand the oppressor’s spear:
How long by tyrants shall thy land be trod!
How long thy temple worshipless, Oh God!

The Wild Gazelle

The wild Gazelle on Judah’s hills
Exulting yet may bound,
And drink from all the living rills
That gush on holy ground;
Its airy step and glorious eye
May glance in tameless transport by:—

A step as fleet, an eye more bright,
Hath Judah witness’d there;
And o’er her scenes of lost delight
Inhabitants more fair.
The cedars wave on Lebanon,
But Judah’s statelier maids are gone!

More blest each palm that shades those plains
Than Israel’s scattered race;
For taking root it there remains
In solitary grace.
It cannot quit the place of birth,
It will not live in other earth.

But we must wander witheringly,
In other lands to die;
And where our fathers’ ashes be,
Our own may never lie:
Our temple hath not left a stone.
And Mockery sits on Salem’s throne.

On the Day of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus

From the last hill that looks on thy once holy dome
I beheld thee, Oh Sion! when rendered to Rome:
’Twas thy last sun went down, and the flames of thy fall
Flash’d back on the last glance I gave to thy wall.

I look’d for thy temple, I look’d for my home,
And forgot for a moment my bondage to come;
I beheld but the death-fire that fed on thy fane,
And the fast-fettered hands that made vengeance in vain.

On many an eve, the high spot whence I gazed
Had reflected the last beam of day as it blazed;
While I stood on the height, and beheld the decline
Of the rays from the mountain that shone on thy shrine.

And now on that mountain I stood on that day,
But I mark’d not the twilight beam melting away;
Oh! would that the lightning had glared in its stead,
And the thunderbolt burst on the conqueror’s head!

But the Gods of the Pagan shall never profane
The shrine where Jehovah disdain’d not to reign;
And scattered and scorn’d as thy people may be,
Our worship, oh Father! is only for thee.

The Destruction of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass’d,
And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heav’d, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there roll’d not the breath of his pride:
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail;
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpets unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

Header image: Byron on his Death-bed by Joseph Dionysius Odevaere, c. 1826, Groeninge Museum, Bruges. Wikimedia.

The accountable leader from Golda to Bibi

On By Martin Kramer

During these days in April, fifty years ago, Israel was engulfed in turmoil.

On April 1, 1974, the Agranat Commission, a national commission of inquiry established to investigate the failures of intelligence and preparedness leading to the Yom Kippur War, published its initial findings. It laid most of the blame on IDF Chief of Staff David (“Dado”) Elazar and Director of Military Intelligence Eli Zeira, leading to their immediate resignations. But the commission found no fault with Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. The commission concluded that “reasonable conduct” for a government minister effectively equated to merely rubber-stamping the advice provided by military commanders.

Protests erupted over the lenient treatment of Israel’s political leaders, particularly Dayan. As the minister of defense in 1967, he had garnered laurels for the victory. Now, holding the same office, he was evading responsibility for the catastrophe. The protests overwhelmed Meir, who was already burdened with guilt and remorse. On April 10, she resigned, automatically precipitating the government’s collapse. After a new government was established in June, Meir retired from politics, and Dayan exited the cabinet, his prospects for leading Israel irreparably damaged.

In the six months from October 1973 to April 1974, Israel had struggled to regain its footing. After the initial Arab offensive, Israel turned the tables on two Arab armies backed by the Soviet Union. In November, Israel concluded a prisoner exchange with Egypt, and by January, it reached a separation of forces agreement in the Sinai. (Similar agreements with Syria were secured in May.) At the end of December, Israel conducted delayed elections, which were originally scheduled for October. Meir led Labor to an electoral victory, albeit with a diminished majority. Meanwhile, throughout that winter, the commission of inquiry meticulously gathered testimony from Meir, Dayan, Elazar, Zeira, and fifty-four others across 140 sessions.


First meeting in Jerusalem of the Agranat Commission, November 27, 1973. Credit: Sa’ar Ya’akov, National Photo Collection, Government Press Office.

As Abba Eban, then Foreign Minister, later recalled,

the imminent publication of the Agranat report brooded over our scene like a hot, humid sky waiting to explode. When the cloudburst came, all the elements of stability in our society were flooded away. If the intention in appointing the committee had been to bind up the nation’s wounds, the exact opposite occurred.

Israel could only move forward if the leaders responsible for the catastrophe departed. Only then, and despite the pain of huge losses, could Israel begin to rebuild and heal. Meir’s resignation finally made that possible.

The numbing of Israel

Compare the situation today. We are also six months into an October war, the one that began on October 7, 2023. The IDF is still fighting, not against two armies but against two terrorist groups. Over a hundred innocent Israeli hostages are still being held in Gaza by Hamas. Tens of thousands of citizens are displaced from northern Israel by Hezbollah fire, and cannot safely return to their homes. The government hasn’t established a commission of inquiry, and no official body has collected testimony under oath. There’s been no official assignment of responsibility, and no one has resigned. All this, we are told, must await the elusive “total victory.” Much of the public is still numb. Reconstruction and healing can’t begin.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on whose watch the October 7 debacle occurred, has effectively stopped the political clock: he will only explain himself “after the war.” In the meantime, he says that Israeli elections would be a victory for the enemy and, in any case, “elections have a date, it’s in a few years.”

When asked about his responsibility, he avoids mentioning the obvious parallel of Yom Kippur and promotes other, more remote analogies: “Did people ask Franklin Roosevelt, after Pearl Harbor, that question? Did people ask George Bush after the surprise attack” of 9/11? His preference is self-explanatory: FDR continued in office for over three years after Pearl Harbor, and George Bush, over seven years after 9/11.

First shoots

Golda Meir wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea of a commission of inquiry, and even told her government that “heads would not roll.” But she understood that Israel needed an accounting. Despite her formal exoneration, she accepted the verdict of an angry public, despite having won an election after the war.

Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t enthusiastic either but sees no need for an accounting. Après moi, le déluge could be his motto; and though the deluge actually occurred on his watch, he predicts a worse outcome if it sweeps him away. (One outcome, certainly worse for him, involves battling criminal charges in court.) So, whereas there was a public accounting and a course correction in 1974, today, neither has occurred.

Still, one enduring lesson of both October wars is that even when nothing seems to be happening, something is stirring. Political protests are sprouting from the ashes. Just as in the spring of 1974, so too in the spring of 2024, demonstrations are swelling in size and volume. Alongside these protests, the wider public’s demand for accountability intensifies. Those who occupied the nation’s top positions on October 7 will have to account for their actions or, more precisely, their inaction, sooner than they’d like. Israel’s very survival depends on rooting out the sources of catastrophic failures, lest such failures become normalized or, worse, routine.

That’s how Israel picked itself up in 1974. That’s what it must do in 2024.

Header image: Protestors call for the resignation of the government and Moshe Dayan, April 1974. Credit: Dan Hadani Collection, The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, The National Library of Israel.

Islam: 1,400 years embattled

On By Martin Kramer

In September 1973, Egypt’s leaders were looking for a name for their plan to launch a surprise attack against Israeli forces across the Suez Canal. According to the Egyptian chief of staff, Saad El Shazly, they wanted “something more inspirational than our planning title, The High Minarets.” Once the assault was set for October 6, falling in Ramadan, “Operation Badr named itself.”

This 17th of Ramadan marks 1,400 years since the battle of Badr (624), the first military confrontation between the Muslims and their opponents—in this case, the grandees of the Prophet Muhammad’s own tribe of Quraysh. He had fled their persecution in Mecca less than two years earlier (the hijra, 622), along with his followers, in order to regroup and recruit in Medina, to the north.

At Badr, southwest of Medina, Muhammad led a contingent of 313 Muslims, outnumbered three to one, to a decisive victory over the polytheists of Mecca. The Muslims killed many, took others prisoner for ransom, and secured much booty. Angels supposedly helped out. It’s considered a turning point in the fortunes of nascent Islam, demonstrating Muhammad’s skills as a commander as well as the divine favor enjoyed by the believers.

Badr received its most memorable cinematic treatment in the 1976 epic The Message, starring Anthony Quinn and bankrolled in good part by the then-dictator of Libya, Mu‘ammar Qadhafi (watch here). The movie roughly adhered to the traditional accounts of the battle: the preliminary duels by champions, the general melee, the cut-and-thrust, and the spirit of Muslim triumph. (Quinn didn’t play Muhammad, who couldn’t be depicted on film; he played Hamza, Muhammad’s companion and uncle. Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law and later caliph, also couldn’t be depicted; the double-pointed sword on screen is wielded by him, but you won’t see him.)

Badr did much to signal the character of Islam going forward. Bernard Lewis, historian of Islam (and my mentor), summarized that character in theses words:

The founder of Christianity died on the cross, and his followers endured as a persecuted minority for centuries…. Muhammad did not die on the cross. As well as a Prophet, he was a soldier and a statesman, the head of a state and the founder of an empire, and his followers were sustained by a belief in the manifestation of divine approval through success and victory. Islam was associated with power from the very beginning, from the first formative years of the Prophet and his immediate successors.

Thus did Islam find its validation in military success, which became its hallmark for a millennium. Its first decisive victory occurred at Badr, during Ramadan of the second year of the hijra, corresponding to March 624.

“Proven fact”

Or so I was taught. In my student days (back in the 1970s), every Islamic history syllabus started with the biography of Muhammad by a Scottish scholar, W. Montgomery Watt, in its two-volume or abbreviated version. His work, published in the 1950s, gave a coherent account that seemed well-grounded. But he achieved that only by giving the benefit of the doubt to the Muslim sources.

Why doubt? The Qur’an, the earliest source, is an opaque book of revelation, not a history. The earliest biography of the Prophet wasn’t set down until over a century after his death. The versions we have were redacted still later. The traditions regarding Muhammad were collated at about that time, and were demonstrably colored by biases and politics far removed from seventh-century Arabia. Worse still, the later the accounts, the more detailed they became, rendering them even more suspect.

Even Watt had to acknowledge that there had been “shaping” of the facts by their recorders, but he wouldn’t admit their invention: “At least the material in the early biographies is to be accepted as true,” he insisted, and “most of the background material, culled from a large number of varied works, is sound.” Otherwise, he’d never have filled two volumes.

In 1961, the French Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson published a materialist biography of Muhammad, but he too relied on the standard Muslim sources. Consider, for example, what he wrote about Badr:

We also have certain facts upon which all the traditions are agreed. The first Arab compilers differ (slightly) as to the names of those who took part in the battle of Badr, as well as the circumstances, the preparations and the consequences of the fighting. They conflict with one another on all these points, each reflecting the party-struggles of his own day. But such disputes can only take place because everyone agrees that the battle did in fact take place, on its date (at least approximately) and with its result. We must therefore consider it as a proven fact, and endeavor to see how to place it in the total chain of cause and effect.

Just as I was finishing my studies, such “proven facts” came under a full-scale assault by revisionist historians, who insisted that the story of early Islam as told in Muslim sources was entirely spurious. Islam, they claimed, arose gradually in a setting far removed from early seventh-century Arabia; the later Muslim accounts of its birth were a kind of back-filling. As one leading revisionist historian, Patricia Crone, put it, “The entire tradition is tendentious… and this tendentiousness has shaped the facts as we have them.” My fellow grad students who’d chosen early Islam as their field had entered a maelstrom of controversy. (Not that the modern history of the Middle East was less tumultuous. All this coincided with the Iranian revolution and Edward Said’s Orientalism.)

The historicity of Badr also came in for its share of doubt. A fragment of Arabic papyrus suggested that a full century after the battle, Muslims didn’t place it in the month of Ramadan. If it had been slipped into Ramadan by late-eighth-century fixers, perhaps the whole thing was made up. This is the conclusion spread a decade ago by Tom Holland, a British writer of popular histories who took in the revisionist scholarship and sharpened its edges. The canonical account of Badr essentially duplicated

the themes that the Greek poet Homer, a millennium and a half earlier, had explored in his great epic of warfare, the Iliad. The one features angels; the other gods. Why, then, should we believe that the account of the Prophet’s first great victory is any more authentic than the legend of the siege of Troy?… What if the entire account of the victory at Badr were nothing but a fiction, a dramatic just-so story, fashioned to explain allusions within the Qur’an that would otherwise have remained beyond explanation?

Over the last fifty years, early Islamic history has been turned into just such a game of “what ifs,” without the guardrails of the traditional sources. It’s a highly technical discipline, and I don’t pretend to grasp all of the current work. It does seem that the wave of hyper-skepticism has receded; Crone, a staunch revisionist, decided that “the chances are that most of what the tradition tells us about the Prophet’s life is more or less correct in some sense or other.” But to my untrained eye, the study of earliest Islam seems to have grown ever more speculative.

The Badr of memory

Islam’s formation wasn’t the chosen specialty of my teacher, Bernard Lewis. He only touched on it in more general works, such as his 1950 overview, The Arabs in History. There he largely adhered to the consensus that the Muslim sources preserved more than a kernel of truth. “There were many disagreements among scholars as to the authenticity of this or that tradition,” he later recalled, “of this or that narrative, but the broad outline of the Prophet’s career, as also the actions and achievements of his companions and successors, was generally accepted.”

But when Lewis came to revise that book many years later, everything had changed. “In certain subjects,” he wrote in 2006, “our knowledge diminishes from year to year with the progress of scholarship and research, as one generally accepted view after another is attacked, leaving a terrain strewn with demolished or endangered hypotheses and assumptions.”

Yet Lewis still believed the Muslim sources should be taken seriously. “The past as remembered,” he wrote,

the past as perceived, the past as narrated, is still a powerful, at times a determining, force in the self-image of a society and in the shaping of its institutions and laws, even if the factual base on which this image rests is shown by historians, centuries later in distant countries, to contain more fantasy than fact.

Lewis thus shows us the relevance of Badr in our own time. In his famous 1976 article “The Return of Islam,” Lewis noted the Egyptian choice of Badr as a code name for Egypt’s 1973 war plan. Indeed, Egypt continues to this day to name large-scale military exercises after Badr. (In the Egyptian setting, that’s a double-barreled pointer, to 624 and 1973.)

But Egypt hardly has a lock on Badr. On the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda drew a comparison between Badr and 9/11, which it called “Badr September.”

Truly, September 11th was a day unlike any before it. It was a day of distinction [between truth and falsehood], akin to the great [battle of] Badr, when God crushed the tyrants of disbelief of that time. Similarly, on this day in September, God crushed the head of the present era’s idol, America, and weakened its foundations through Al Qaeda’s knights of the jihad. Thus, [September 11] was a kind of Badr in one of its many dimensions and meanings…. Just as no one at the time imagined that… the final countdown of Quraysh, Persia, and Byzantium began on Friday, the 17th of Ramadan of Year Two, so no one imagined that America and its allies would begin their decline on Tuesday, September 11. But what follows will be the rise of the world’s oppressed, as is God’s unchanging law in history.

Like much in history and myth, the memory of Badr is so elastic that it’s been invoked across the entire range of contemporary politics—by Egypt’s military, the biggest Arab beneficiary of American military aid, and by Al Qaeda, America’s deadliest Arab enemy. It’s also the name of an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq, a Taliban battalion in Afghanistan, and rockets fired off by the Houthis in Yemen and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. To name something after Badr is to associate it with resistance and faith, the weak against the strong, the few against the many.

It’s also more evidence, if more were needed, for the consciousness of history that permeates the politics of the Middle East. When the novelist William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past,” he intended it as a general proposition, but it particularly describes the Middle East. “The Muslim peoples,” wrote Bernard Lewis, “like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it.” That’s true, even if the history isn’t.

For Muslims, this year’s anniversary of Badr isn’t special. By the Islamic lunar calendar, it’s 1,443 years to the battle, not 1,400. But the entire world now lives in an era when Badr again matters, and it’s the rest of us who need the reminder. Perhaps that’s because more battles of Badr may lie ahead.


Above: The battle of Badr from the movie The Message, directed and produced by Moustapha Akkad.

Header image: Muslims consult before the battle of Badr, in an illustrated 14th-century manuscript of the Jami‘ al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din, Khalili Collection.