The Great Arab Conquests (3 page)
Read The Great Arab Conquests Online
Authors: Hugh Kennedy
I have attempted to give an account of the history of the Arab Muslim conquests of the Middle East and the wider world as they occurred between the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 and the fall of the Umayyad caliphate in 750. The starting date is fairly obvious. Although the roots of the conquests lay in the policies and actions of Muhammad in his lifetime, it was not until after his death that Muslim armies began to invade lands outside the Arabian peninsula. The terminal date is more arbitrary, missing out, as it does, on some important conquests - of Sicily and Crete, for example - but in broad terms, the boundaries of the Muslim world as they were established by 750 remained largely unchanged until the expansion into India around the year 1000.
The Arab conquests had a major impact on human history and the results of these tumultuous years have shaped the world we all live in today. Yet there is nothing inevitable about the Arab/Islamic identity of the Middle East. In the year 632, Islam was confined to Arabic-speaking tribesmen living in Arabia and the desert margins of Syria and Iraq. Most of the population of Syria spoke Greek or Aramaic; most of those in Iraq, Persian or Aramaic; in Egypt they spoke Greek or Coptic; in Iran they spoke Pahlavi; in North Africa they spoke Latin, Greek or Berber. None of them were Muslims. In Egypt and North Africa, lands we now think of as clearly Islamic, there were no Muslims and effectively no Arabic speakers, and the same was true of Iran and Afghanistan. The scale and the speed of the transformation are astonishing; within a century of the Prophet’s death, all these lands, along with Spain, Portugal, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and southern Pakistan (Sind), were ruled by an Arabic-speaking Muslim elite, and in all of them the local population was beginning to convert to the new religion.
The speed of the Muslim conquests is amazing, but there have been other rapid conquests of vast areas in the course of human history which are in a sense comparable. The conquests of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan immediately come to mind. What makes the Arab Muslim conquests so remarkable is the permanence of the effect they had on the language and religion of the conquered lands. Spain and Portugal are the only countries conquered at this time where the spread of Islam has been reversed; by contrast we now think of Egypt as a major centre of Arab culture and of Iran as a stronghold of militant Islam.
Clearly so swift and massive a change needs historical investigation, yet the approachable literature on the subject is very restricted. This is partly because of territorial boundaries in the historical profession. The fundamental reference work,
The Cambridge Ancient History
, for example, ends with volume xiv, which takes us up to the assassination of the Byzantine emperor Maurice in 602.
The Cambridge History of Islam
starts off, naturally, with the life and preaching of Muhammad. The gap is reflected much more widely in the way in which history is taught and researched in modern universities: classical/ancient history is separated from medieval/Islamic history. This in turn is partly a consequence of the linguistic divide: historians tend to divide on one hand into those who are competent in the use of Latin and Greek sources, and on the other those who use Arabic and Persian; few, of whom I am certainly not one, feel equally competent and proficient in all.
The Cambridge Ancient History
, for example, ends with volume xiv, which takes us up to the assassination of the Byzantine emperor Maurice in 602.
The Cambridge History of Islam
starts off, naturally, with the life and preaching of Muhammad. The gap is reflected much more widely in the way in which history is taught and researched in modern universities: classical/ancient history is separated from medieval/Islamic history. This in turn is partly a consequence of the linguistic divide: historians tend to divide on one hand into those who are competent in the use of Latin and Greek sources, and on the other those who use Arabic and Persian; few, of whom I am certainly not one, feel equally competent and proficient in all.
The nature of the sources has also discouraged historians from trying to give a bold and clear narrative of these world-shaking events. Historians may enjoy controversy over interpretations and approaches, but when it comes to the dates and order of important events, everyone craves certainty. In the story of the great Arab conquests, there are fundamental questions of fact, the order of events in the conquest of Syria, for example, or the date of the battle of Qādisiya in Iraq, about which we simply cannot be certain. In this book I have attempted to construct a plausible narrative of the main events, but it would be wrong to claim that this is the only possible reconstruction, or to hide the fact that I have made choices and judgements that are sometimes based as much on probability and likelihood as on firm evidence.
There is also what one might, to use a popular contemporary cliché, call the elephant-in-the-room syndrome: the subject is simply so large and so obvious that scholars are reluctant to tackle it, preferring to work on smaller projects around the edge of the room where they feel comfortable in their own discipline. It may be impossible, it may be rash and foolish to try, but this book is an attempt to describe and investigate this particular historical pachyderm.
In doing so, I am standing on the shoulders of giants. This work shamelessly plunders and exploits the excellent scholarship of the last few decades. At the risk of being unduly selective, I would single out Fred Donner’s
The Early Islamic Conquests
, Mike Morony’s
Iraq after the Muslim Conquest
, Walter Kaegi’s work on military history, Dick Bulliet on conversion to Islam, Robert Hoyland on non-Muslim views of early Islam and Larry Conrad and Chase Robinson on historiography. I have also depended on works of older generations of historians, who still have much to teach us - Hamilton Gibb on the Arab conquests in Central Asia, Vasili Vladimirovich Barthold on Turkistan, Alfred Butler on the Arab conquest of Egypt. My debts to these, and to other scholars living and dead, will be readily apparent to anyone familiar with the field.
The Early Islamic Conquests
, Mike Morony’s
Iraq after the Muslim Conquest
, Walter Kaegi’s work on military history, Dick Bulliet on conversion to Islam, Robert Hoyland on non-Muslim views of early Islam and Larry Conrad and Chase Robinson on historiography. I have also depended on works of older generations of historians, who still have much to teach us - Hamilton Gibb on the Arab conquests in Central Asia, Vasili Vladimirovich Barthold on Turkistan, Alfred Butler on the Arab conquest of Egypt. My debts to these, and to other scholars living and dead, will be readily apparent to anyone familiar with the field.
This is a narrative history, heavily dependent on narrative sources. The nature and formation of these stories are discussed at some length in the Foreword, but I should say a few words about how I have treated them. The narratives of the early Muslim conquests are replete with confusion and improbability, and are often impossible to accept at face value. Modern authors have tended to approach these in two ways: either to dismiss them as hopelessly inaccurate and not worth the attention of serious historians; or to cherry-pick them for incidental details, names, places, etc. I have tried to do something slightly different: to read and use the stories for what they are trying to tell us; to work with the flow, so to speak, rather than against it, to surf the waves of the narrative and be carried along with it. This does not mean accepting the early Arabic accounts as accurate records of ‘what actually happened’, but accepting them as reflections of seventh- and eighth-century Muslim social memory and using them as such.
A particular case in point is the use of direct speech. The early Arabic accounts are full of records of conversations and oratorical set pieces and I have often quoted these in direct speech. This should not be taken to mean that I believe that these words were actually spoken on the occasion described. There are, however, good reasons for taking this approach. The speeches are often the means whereby different points of view are articulated in the sources. Descriptions of councils of war, for example, allow the author to discuss the issues and choices that faced the Muslim armies, to show why they did what they did and to explore the roads not taken. The second reason is to reflect the nature of the Arabic material and be true to it, especially for readers who are unfamiliar with the field, and to give texture and variety to what might otherwise be a bald and unexciting narrative.
This book is an attempt to tell the story of one of the most important changes in world history, a change whose results have profoundly affected the world in which we live today. I have tried to make it accessible, even entertaining, to student and general reader alike. No doubt scholars in the future will produce works that are fuller, more profound and more elegant; but if this work gives rise to wider reflections on these momentous events, it will have served its purpose.
This book is concerned primarily with the conquest of the central Islamic lands by Muslim armies in the century that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammed in 632. In order to clarify the issues it is important to attempt to define some terms. ‘Conquest’ may seem at first a fairly uncontentious term, implying the subjection of one party to another through the application of military force. In reality, however, things may be more complicated. The Arabic sources use the term conquest (
fath
) to describe the taking over of the lands of the Byzantine and Persian empires. The
fth
root in Arabic implies ‘opening’, but in the conquest literature it clearly implies the use of force. Conquest can, and did, take many different forms. At one extreme it meant the brutal and violent sack of a city, the pillaging of its wealth and the execution of many or all of its defenders. The sacking of Istakhr in Fars or Paykand in Transoxania are clear examples of this. But conquest was often a more peaceful process. The people of town and country would agree to the imposition of terms, usually involving the payment of tribute and the promise that they would not aid the enemies of the Muslims. The terms were agreed to because of the use, or threat of the use, of force. At the other extreme, conquest might be little more that the sending of a message accepting overlordship. Many of the more mountainous areas of Iran, North Africa and Spain must have been ‘conquered’ without an Arab ever having visited the area, still less settling down to rule and tax it. ‘Conquest’ meant different things to different people in different places at different times.
fath
) to describe the taking over of the lands of the Byzantine and Persian empires. The
fth
root in Arabic implies ‘opening’, but in the conquest literature it clearly implies the use of force. Conquest can, and did, take many different forms. At one extreme it meant the brutal and violent sack of a city, the pillaging of its wealth and the execution of many or all of its defenders. The sacking of Istakhr in Fars or Paykand in Transoxania are clear examples of this. But conquest was often a more peaceful process. The people of town and country would agree to the imposition of terms, usually involving the payment of tribute and the promise that they would not aid the enemies of the Muslims. The terms were agreed to because of the use, or threat of the use, of force. At the other extreme, conquest might be little more that the sending of a message accepting overlordship. Many of the more mountainous areas of Iran, North Africa and Spain must have been ‘conquered’ without an Arab ever having visited the area, still less settling down to rule and tax it. ‘Conquest’ meant different things to different people in different places at different times.
Conquest, Settlement and Conversion
The early Muslim conquests meant the imposition of a new political and religious elite on the lands conquered. The conquest was often followed by a process of settlement in which numbers of Arabs, many from nomad backgrounds, took up permanent residence in the conquered territories, often in specially founded new towns. While conquest and settlement took place comparatively quickly, and in the central Middle East were largely complete by 650, the conversion of the subject people to Islam was a slow and long-drawn-out process, and it was not until the tenth and early eleventh centuries that the majority of the population was converted to Islam. Conquest and settlement took only a decade; conversion of the majority took three hundred years.
Arabs and Muslims
The term Arab can only be usefully and simply defined as anyone whose mother tongue is Arabic. In 632 Arabs inhabited the Arabian peninsula and the Syrian desert and its margins. As the conquest proceeded, however, more and more people became Arabic speakers and numerous men who had no ‘Arab blood’ in their veins nonetheless spoke Arabic as their native tongue. In many areas where assimilation between conquerors and conquered advanced most rapidly, the differences between Arab and non-Arab had become very blurred by the end of the first Islamic century.
In 632 almost all Muslims were Arabs, and in the early years of the conquests we can use the terms Arab and Muslim interchangeably to describe the armies of the conquest. When we move into the late seventh and early eighth centuries, however, such a usage would be misleading. Arabs formed only a proportion of the Muslim armies that conquered North Africa, Spain and Central Asia. What defined these armies was not their Arabness, even if the leaders were Arabs and the language of command and administration Arabic, but their identity as the armies of Islam - that is, religious identity had replaced the ethnic.
If not all Muslims were Arabs, likewise not all Arabs were Muslims. Before the coming of Islam, large numbers of Arabs had been converted to Christianity, especially in those areas of the Syrian desert which bordered on Byzantine territory. Some of them retained their Christian faith after the conquests, and their status proved a problem for the Muslim jurists of the eighth century: should they be treated as subject people and obliged to pay the hated poll tax or should they be treated as Muslim Arabs? In some cases a compromise was reached whereby they just paid the alms tax, but at twice the rate of their Muslim counterparts.
Romans and Byzantines
Historians are accustomed to talking about the Byzantine Empire to describe the Eastern Roman Empire. It is a convenient term to designate the Christian, Greek-speaking and -writing empire of the seventh and eighth centuries. It is also completely out of touch with the language of the people at the time. No one at that or any other time ever described themselves in normal life as ‘Byzantines’. They themselves knew that they were Romans and they called themselves as such, though they used the Greek term
Romaioi
to do so. Their Muslim opponents also knew them as
Rm
, or Romans, and this term was often extended to include the Latin Christian inhabitants of North Africa and Spain. Despite the violence it does to the language of the sources, I have, with some reluctance, accepted the general scholarly usage and refer to Byzantines and the Byzantine Empire throughout.
Romaioi
to do so. Their Muslim opponents also knew them as
Rm
, or Romans, and this term was often extended to include the Latin Christian inhabitants of North Africa and Spain. Despite the violence it does to the language of the sources, I have, with some reluctance, accepted the general scholarly usage and refer to Byzantines and the Byzantine Empire throughout.
Kharāj
and
Jizya
and
Jizya
The Arab conquerors always demanded payments in cash from the people they conquered. In later centuries, this public taxation was divided by the Islamic lawyers into two distinct categories,
kharj
or land tax and
jizya
or poll tax, paid only by non-Muslims. At the time of the conquests, however, the terms were much more blurred and
jizya
was used to describe any sort of tax or tribute.
kharj
or land tax and
jizya
or poll tax, paid only by non-Muslims. At the time of the conquests, however, the terms were much more blurred and
jizya
was used to describe any sort of tax or tribute.
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