The Great Arab Conquests (7 page)
Read The Great Arab Conquests Online
Authors: Hugh Kennedy
The Arabic historiography also varies greatly in quality and approach. In general, the accounts of the first phases of the conquests, from the 630s to the 650s, are generally replete with mythical and tropical elements, imagined speeches and dialogue and lists of names of participants. They are correspondingly short of details about topography and terrain, equipment and tactics. The accounts of the conquests of Egypt and North Africa owe something to a local historiographical tradition, but in both cases this tradition is disappointingly thin. The conquests of the early eighth century are very differently reported. The accounts of the expeditions in Transoxania, collected and edited by the writer Madā’inī and published in Tabarī’s
History
, are by far the most vivid and detailed we have of any of the major campaigns of the period. They are full of incident and action, heat and dust, and recount the failures of Arab arms just as fully as the successes. Nowhere else can we get as close to the reality of frontier warfare. The account of the conquest of Spain in the same decades is in striking contrast. The narratives are thin, replete with folkloric and mythical elements, and date, in their present form, from at least two centuries after the event: the best endeavours of generations of Spanish historians have failed to penetrate the confusion.
History
, are by far the most vivid and detailed we have of any of the major campaigns of the period. They are full of incident and action, heat and dust, and recount the failures of Arab arms just as fully as the successes. Nowhere else can we get as close to the reality of frontier warfare. The account of the conquest of Spain in the same decades is in striking contrast. The narratives are thin, replete with folkloric and mythical elements, and date, in their present form, from at least two centuries after the event: the best endeavours of generations of Spanish historians have failed to penetrate the confusion.
Alongside the newly dominant Arabic, there were other, older cultural traditions which produced their own literature. Of course, some people continued to write in the old high-culture language of Greek. The most famous of these was John of Damascus, the most important Greek Orthodox theologian of the eighth century. He came from a family of bureaucrats of Arab origin who worked for the Umayyad administration in Damascus in the same way as their ancestors had worked for the Byzantines. But St John, as he came to be known, belonged to the last generation to use Greek as a primary language of business, and he was no historian. We have no surviving local Greek historiography of the Arabic conquests. Of course, people continued to write history in Greek across the Byzantine frontier, where Greek endured as the language of government. It is interesting, however, that the main Greek account of this period, written by the monk Theophanes in Constantinople, seems to be dependent for its information on Arabic or Syriac accounts, translated into Greek. There is no independent Byzantine tradition to provide a check on the Arabic narratives.
For the historian of this period, the Syriac tradition is more important than the Greek. Syriac is a written dialect of Aramaic, a Semitic language, not very different from Hebrew and Arabic but using its own distinctive script. For centuries it was the common vernacular speech of the Fertile Crescent, understood alike by subjects of the Byzantine emperor in Syria or the Persian King of Kings in Iraq. Christ and his disciples would have spoken it in their everyday lives. It is still spoken in a few places, notably the small Syrian town of Ma
c
lūlā, a largely Christian community isolated, until recently, in a rocky mountain gorge north of Damascus. With the coming of Christianity to Syria, the Bible was translated into Syriac, and in many rural areas far away from the Greek-speaking cities of the coast, the church liturgy and all religious writing was in Syriac, the language the local people could understand.
c
lūlā, a largely Christian community isolated, until recently, in a rocky mountain gorge north of Damascus. With the coming of Christianity to Syria, the Bible was translated into Syriac, and in many rural areas far away from the Greek-speaking cities of the coast, the church liturgy and all religious writing was in Syriac, the language the local people could understand.
The Syriac historiography of the early Muslim world comes mostly from an ecclesiastical background. As in early medieval Europe, most of the chroniclers were monks or priests, and their concerns were first and foremost for the monastery and the world around it. They are interested as much in unseasonably harsh weather and rural hardships, both of which directly impinged on the life of the monastery, as they are in wars and the comings and goings of kings. Above all they are concerned with the politics of the Church, the great deeds of famous saints, the rivalries for ecclesiastical office, the evildoing of corrupt and, worst of all, heretical churchmen. In this world of village, mountain and steppe, the arrival of the Arabs is viewed with the same apprehension as frost in May or the coming of a plague of locusts: they are a burden imposed by the Lord on the faithful which is probably a punishment for their sins and, in any case, has to be endured with as much stoicism as possible. Perhaps strangely to modern eyes, there are no exhortations to the local people to arm themselves and attack their oppressors. The moral is rather that people should remain faithful to their Church and God would preserve them.
There is a literature of resistance but it is an apocalyptic literature. These writings look forward to a day when a great king or emperor will destroy the domination of the Arabs and usher in a coming of the end of the world. Present hardships and tyranny will be ended, not by the human agency of those who are being oppressed, but by divine and superhuman intervention. This writing is in many ways weird and wacky and the twenty-first-century reader may easily wonder how anyone believed it or even took it seriously. But it does provide an essential insight into the thought world of that great mass of the people of the Fertile Crescent who were conquered and submitted to these new alien invaders. Helplessness and fatalism, learned from generations of distant and unresponsive rule, seem to have deterred such people from taking up arms in their own defence: better to rely on prayer for the present and the coming of a long-promised just ruler for the future.
There were other non-Muslim traditions of historical writing. In the remote fastnesses of the Caucasus mountains, the Armenians continued a tradition of historical writing which lasted from the coming of Christianity in the fourth century all through the Middle Ages. For the time of the Muslim conquests, the chronicle of Sebeos provides a few tantalizing pages of information which largely corroborate the broad outlines of the Arabic tradition.
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For the conquest of Egypt there is the Coptic chronicle of John of Nikiu, bishop of a small town in the Nile Delta and a contemporary eyewitness.
8
This survives only in an Ethiopic translation, some of the narrative is lost and much of the rest is muddled and confused. For Spain there is a Latin chronicle produced in the south in the area under Muslim rule and known, from the year of the final entry, as ‘the Chronicle of 754’. Finally the eighth century saw the emergence of an Arabic-language Christian chronicle-writing tradition which drew on both Christian and Arabic traditions. These chronicles are sometimes nearly contemporary with the events they describe and the information that they give us is invaluable, but their brevity and fragmentary nature mean that they leave many questions unanswered.
7
For the conquest of Egypt there is the Coptic chronicle of John of Nikiu, bishop of a small town in the Nile Delta and a contemporary eyewitness.
8
This survives only in an Ethiopic translation, some of the narrative is lost and much of the rest is muddled and confused. For Spain there is a Latin chronicle produced in the south in the area under Muslim rule and known, from the year of the final entry, as ‘the Chronicle of 754’. Finally the eighth century saw the emergence of an Arabic-language Christian chronicle-writing tradition which drew on both Christian and Arabic traditions. These chronicles are sometimes nearly contemporary with the events they describe and the information that they give us is invaluable, but their brevity and fragmentary nature mean that they leave many questions unanswered.
Although the Christian chronicles are often frustratingly short, vague and confused they do provide both a check and an antidote to the material found in the much more voluminous and apparently more polished products of the Arabic tradition. The Arabic sources are almost exclusively interested in the doings of Muslims. The only infidels who get speaking parts in the chronicles are the Byzantine emperors and Persian generals whose deliberations form a prelude to their inevitable defeats. An outsider reading Tabarī’s vast
History of the Prophets and Kings
, for example, would have very little idea that the vast majority of the population of the lands ruled by the caliphs in the eighth and ninth centuries were not Muslim, still less any understanding of their concerns and the effect that the coming of the Arabs had on them. As long as they paid the money agreed, and were not actively hostile to the new regime in any way, their doings could be, and were, completely ignored in the narratives of the ruling elite.
History of the Prophets and Kings
, for example, would have very little idea that the vast majority of the population of the lands ruled by the caliphs in the eighth and ninth centuries were not Muslim, still less any understanding of their concerns and the effect that the coming of the Arabs had on them. As long as they paid the money agreed, and were not actively hostile to the new regime in any way, their doings could be, and were, completely ignored in the narratives of the ruling elite.
The written sources are extensive but very problematic. Can we supplement them by turning to the archaeology? Surely the unemotional testimony of mute material remains can give us a more balanced account than these overwrought stories? To an extent this is true, but the archaeology, like the written records, has its limitations and in a way its own agenda.
To begin with it is clear that there is no direct archaeological testimony to the conquests themselves. No battlefield has yielded up a harvest of bones and old weapons, there is not a single town or village in which we can point to a layer of destruction or burning and say that this must have happened at the time of the Arab conquests. All the archaeological evidence can do is provide a guide to longer-term trends, the background noise to the coming of the Muslims.
Another problem is the patchy nature of this evidence. There has been a great deal of excavation and survey of sites in Syria, Jordan and Palestine/Israel accompanied by a lively critical debate about the evidence and its interpretation. Across the desert in Iraq, the position is very different. Political problems over the last thirty years have meant that the sort of investigation and questioning which have been so fruitful in the Levant have simply never happened on any large scale. The same is true to some extent in Iran. Here the Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought a virtual halt to excavation and survey and, though a new generation of Iranian archaeologists are beginning to take up the challenge, the debate about the transition from Sasanian to Islamic rule in the cities of Iran has hardly begun.
One area in which the archaeology has illuminated the coming of the Muslims is the question of the state of population and society in the Middle East at the time. Again Syria and Palestine provide the best example. There has been a lively debate in recent years about the fate of Syria in late antiquity. There is little doubt that the whole of the Levant enjoyed a period of almost unprecedented economic and demographic growth in the first four decades of the sixth century. The question is whether this flourishing continued until the coming of the Arabs almost a hundred years later. There are no records or statistics that will tell us this and the narrative sources can only provide glimpses. The archaeological evidence from towns and villages suggests, however, that the second half of the sixth century and the beginning of the seventh was a period of stagnation, if not absolute decline. Cities do not seem to have expanded and some, like the great capital of the east at Antioch, can be shown to have contracted, consolidating within a reduced circuit of walls. The evidence is often ambiguous: very rarely does the archaeological record demonstrate that a certain place or building was clearly abandoned. We can see that the great colonnaded streets, bath-houses and theatres of antiquity were invaded by squatters or turned over to industrial use as pottery kilns. It is less clear what this means for the prosperity of the town: did it become a half-abandoned ruin-field or was a plentiful and vigorous population simply using the city in different ways and for new purposes? Much of the evidence can be read both ways.
Furthermore, the archaeology has been bedevilled by contemporary political concerns. There is one commonly held view that Palestine in particular was a flourishing and wealthy area until the coming of the Arabs destroyed this idyll and reduced much of the area to desert. Such views have been espoused by Zionists and others who have used the fate of Palestine to suggest or even argue that the Arabs were destructive rulers who are, by implication, unworthy to rule the area today. This view has been challenged, not least by other Israeli archaeologists, who have demonstrated that, at least in some cases, the changes and decline popularly associated with the coming of the Arabs had been well under way before. There is also evidence of development of markets (in Bet She’an and Palmyra, for example) and bringing of new lands under cultivation along the desert margins of Syria. The archaeological evidence is problematic and ambiguous, contested territory, and its interpretation often owes more to the preconceptions of the investigator than to hard science.
We are on firmer ground when looking at the constructive aspects of early Muslim rule.
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It is generally much easier to determine when buildings were constructed than when they fell into disuse. We can see the footprint of Islam in many of the cities that the Arabs conquered as mosques were constructed in many urban centres. Mosques, like churches, can be easily identified from their plans, the rectangular enclosure, the columned prayer hall and above all the mihrab, or niche, which points the worshipper in the direction of Mecca. Literary sources tell us that mosques were constructed shortly after the conquest in many cities. There is, however, no surviving archaeological evidence for this. It is not until the very end of the seventh century, at least sixty years after the conquests, that the first testimony of Muslim religious architecture appears with the construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem after 685. Within a hundred years of the conquests, there were mosques in Damascus, Jerusalem, Jerash, Amman, Ba
c
albak in Syria, Fustāt in Egypt, Istakhr and possibly Susa in Iran. There must have been mosques in Iraq and other parts of Iran, indeed historians and Arab travellers tell us about them, but nothing seems to have survived to give archaeological confirmation. The religious buildings in Jerusalem (the Dome of the Rock) and Damascus (the Umayyad Mosque) have both miraculously survived the thirteen centuries since they were built to demonstrate more eloquently and forcefully than any literary text the wealth and power of the early Islamic state. The Umayyad-period mosques at minor settlements like Ba
c
albak and Jerash show how Islam had spread into the smaller towns of Syria. The mosques show that Islam was in the ascendant a hundred years after the initial conquests, but they tell us nothing about the course of those conquests or the reasons for Muslim victory.
9
It is generally much easier to determine when buildings were constructed than when they fell into disuse. We can see the footprint of Islam in many of the cities that the Arabs conquered as mosques were constructed in many urban centres. Mosques, like churches, can be easily identified from their plans, the rectangular enclosure, the columned prayer hall and above all the mihrab, or niche, which points the worshipper in the direction of Mecca. Literary sources tell us that mosques were constructed shortly after the conquest in many cities. There is, however, no surviving archaeological evidence for this. It is not until the very end of the seventh century, at least sixty years after the conquests, that the first testimony of Muslim religious architecture appears with the construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem after 685. Within a hundred years of the conquests, there were mosques in Damascus, Jerusalem, Jerash, Amman, Ba
c
albak in Syria, Fustāt in Egypt, Istakhr and possibly Susa in Iran. There must have been mosques in Iraq and other parts of Iran, indeed historians and Arab travellers tell us about them, but nothing seems to have survived to give archaeological confirmation. The religious buildings in Jerusalem (the Dome of the Rock) and Damascus (the Umayyad Mosque) have both miraculously survived the thirteen centuries since they were built to demonstrate more eloquently and forcefully than any literary text the wealth and power of the early Islamic state. The Umayyad-period mosques at minor settlements like Ba
c
albak and Jerash show how Islam had spread into the smaller towns of Syria. The mosques show that Islam was in the ascendant a hundred years after the initial conquests, but they tell us nothing about the course of those conquests or the reasons for Muslim victory.
If the mosques are a clear indication of the arrival of a new order, it is more difficult to tell how the everyday life of the population might have changed. In many areas the picture is one of continuity. The Muslim conquest did not, for example, bring in new kinds of pottery to Syria. Local ceramics, everyday cooking- and tableware, continued to be produced under Muslim rule as they had been under Byzantine government. Not surprisingly, the incoming Arab conquerors simply purchased and used what they found. It was not until two or three generations later that the first Muslim styles appeared, and even then they were fine wares, for court and elite use. The pottery of everyday life remained largely unaffected. There is, however, one change in the ceramic record which we can observe, and that is the disappearance of large-scale pottery imports into Syria from across the Mediterranean Sea. In late antiquity there had been massive imports of the tableware known to archaeologists as African Red Slip, which was manufactured mostly in Tunisia. This had been distributed as a sort of piggyback trade along with the grain and oil that the province exported throughout the Roman Empire. The disappearance of this ware from the markets of the lands conquered by the Muslims indicates a break in commercial contacts which reflects the picture that we have in the written sources of the eastern Mediterranean as a zone of conflict rather than a highway of commerce. Again, the archaeology can be used to demonstrate the long-term effects of the conquests, but not the course of events at the time.
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