Dhu Nuwas

Himyar controlled the south-western corner of the Arabian peninsula from the late third century, and from about 380 its royal inscriptions stop naming the old south Arabian gods. In their place stands Rahmanan, the Merciful, lord of heaven, sometimes with the addition lord of the Jews. Whether the kingdom is best described as Jewish, as monotheist in a deliberately unspecific way, or as a court Judaism sitting above a mixed population, is argued about, and the inscriptions are terse enough to support more than one reading. What is not in doubt is that for roughly a hundred and fifty years before Dhu Nuwas the public religion of a substantial Arabian state was not polytheist, and that Jewish communities were established in the Yemeni highlands long before Islam.

Dhu Nuwas belongs at the end of that arc. Sabaic texts of his reign give his regnal name as Yusuf Asar Yathar, and the Arabic tradition knows him by a nickname referring to his hanging sidelocks. His accession around 522 came at a moment when Aksum, the Christian kingdom across the Red Sea in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea, had already intervened in Himyari affairs and kept a presence in the country. The confrontation that followed was therefore not simply a matter of one man's belief. It was a contest between two states with two religious alignments over the corridor between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, fought at a moment when both Rome and Persia had an interest in the outcome.

The event that fixed his name is the killing of the Christians of Najran, an oasis in the north of his territory, in about 523. Two Syriac accounts carry it: a letter circulated by Simeon of Beth Arsham and the fuller narrative preserved as the Book of the Himyarites. Both were written by Christians, within living memory, for readers expected to be appalled, and both name Harith, the leader of the Najran community, among the dead. A martyr cult formed around him quickly and reached Greek, Ethiopic and Arabic literature.

The exegetical tradition of Islam connects the same episode with the people of the ditch in sura 85, though the Quranic passage names nobody and the identification is the work of later commentators rather than of the text. The two layers are worth keeping apart. That an Arabian king killed Christian subjects is attested outside the Islamic tradition; that a particular Quranic passage refers to it is an interpretation.

The end came within a year or two. Kaleb of Aksum crossed the Red Sea with a fleet, defeated the Himyari forces and installed a client regime. Himyar never recovered its independence, passing from Aksumite to Persian control before the Islamic conquests. How Dhu Nuwas died is not settled: the Arabic tradition has him ride his horse into the sea rather than be taken, which is the kind of ending a story acquires rather than the kind a chronicle records.