Introduction

Here is an old Middle East legend that tells of a band of Christian youths fleeing the persecution of a pagan Roman emperor in the mid-third century ad. They leave their native city behind and seek refuge in a cave, where they soon fall asleep. When they go out on what they assume to be the following day they are astonished to hear church bells ringing out across the streets below and to see crosses on all the high buildings. Unbeknown to them, God had spared them from witnessing the cruel ravages of heathenism by putting them to sleep for two centuries, and so the youths passed overnight from a pagan world to a Christian one.1 One experiences much the same feeling when one studies the seventh-century Middle East. Histories of the region up until ad 630 present an image of a largely Christian land, where Christ’s word is fast gaining ground even in the deserts of Africa, the Persian Empire, and as far away as China. But when one turns to Muslim accounts to read about the post-630 world, then it appears that the prophet Muhammad’s preaching was carried at breakneck speed from its birthplace in west Arabia across the whole Middle East by Arab soldiers, who then established unified rule over all the lands of the former Persian Empire and in all the southern and eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire in only a few short years. The

Arabs are everywhere victorious; non-Arabs everywhere submit, convert, or are killed; and Islamic government is everywhere imposed—or at least this is the picture that ninth-century Muslim historians painted and it is one that has been widely accepted ever since.

The problem with this narrative is not so much that it is wrong, but that, like all histories told from the standpoint of the victors, it is idealizing and one-sided: the role of God and Islam is played up and the role of non-Muslims is mostly ignored. It is the aim of this book to try to give a more rounded account of this undeniably world-changing phenomenon. The main strategy for achieving this is a simple one: I will give precedence to seventh-and eighth-century texts and documents over later ones. Our earliest extant Muslim sources date from the ninth century, and even though their authors were using earlier materials, they inevitably shaped them in the light of their own world. This is of course always so, but the problem is magnified in this case because the political and religious landscape of the ninth-century Middle East was so dramatically different from that of the seventh century. It may seem very odd to an outsider to this field why this strategy of privileging earlier sources over later ones would not have been used before—is it not just standard practice for modern historians? The problem is that the early sources are overwhelmingly of Christian provenance and in languages other than Arabic, and so they fall outside the usual purview of Islamic historians—and it is also assumed that they will be either prejudiced or ill-informed. Christian authors inevitably had their own preconceptions and biases, but the Arab conquests did affect them concretely and directly, and so there is very good reason to refer to their works to write about this subject. Moreover, those living in the decades shortly after the conquests still understood the late antique world in which these events had occurred and so can help us to understand what these events meant in their own time as opposed to what they meant to the inhabitants of the ninth-century Islamic world. But I do not want simply to champion non-Muslim sources over Muslim sources; indeed, it is my argument that the division is a false one. Muslims and non-Muslims inhabited the same world, interacted with one another, and even read one another's writings. In this book, the distinction I make is simply between earlier and later sources, and I favor the former over the latter irrespective of the religious affiliation of their authors.

This strategy allows me to put back a number of elements missing from the traditional narrative. The first is process. The word most associated with the Arab conquests by Western scholars is “speed.” “The speed of the Arab expansion is staggering,” says one; another speaks of its “near-miraculous speed,” like “a human tsunami speeding outwards.” This reflects the assumption that the Arab conquests were over and done with in a few short years. For example, a famous modern medievalist sums up the situation with this sentence: “The Muslim Arab armies conquered half of one empire, that of east Rome, and all of another, Sasanian Persia, and most of this process was completed in six years, 636—42.”2 This massive compression of the duration of the conquests means that the process by which they were achieved is lost. The Arabs’ victories were certainly stunning, and their progress was much faster than that of settled powers like the Romans, but it is comparable with armies comprising a high proportion of nomads (the Mongols actually covered a larger area in just seventy years). To help make clear the varied pace and extended duration of the conquests I have decided to proceed chronologically and to take the narrative up to the 740s, which is when the Arab conquest juggernaut finally runs out of steam. As in all human ventures, things did not always go to plan: the Arabs suffered some reverses and had to come to an accommodation with some peoples, but none of this diminishes the impressive scale of their overall achievement.

The second element that needs to be put back is the voices of the vanquished and of the non-Muslim conquerors. The ninth-century historians wanted to create a distinctively Arab Muslim history, which meant downplaying the role of non-Arabs and non-Muslims and placing God, Muhammad, and the Muslims center stage. President Barack Obama, when asked whether he thought the American people had a special mission, diplomatically replied that every people likes to think that it is special. And it is the specialness of their people that these ninth-century Muslim historians were trying to portray. Like the Christian historian Eusebius before them, they wanted to record the implementation of God’s plan for His chosen people. Just as Eusebius of

Caesarea (d. 339) began his Ecclesiastical History with Christ, so Muslim historians made a strong distinction between profane time, when “barbarity” (jahl) prevailed, and sacred time, when Muhammad founded his community at Medina. This act is linked with the initiation of raiding by Muhammad and later full-scale conquest, which were approved by God, so these historians say, as a means of propagating Islamic rule across the world. “It is a sign of God's love for us and satisfaction with our faith,” as one Muslim general explained to a Christian monk, “that he has given us dominion over all religions and all peoples.”3 But this is an idealized, simplified, and homogenized picture, whereas the reality was complex and variegated. Wars are messy affairs—the composition of the opposing sides and the reasons for which they are fighting are often diverse and shifting. However, those who wage the wars and those who document them have a strong interest in portraying the situation as black and white: believers against infidels, good against evil, justice and freedom against tyranny and oppression.

Third, I will emphasize the pre-history of the Arab conquests. Muslim sources give the impression that Muhammad and his companions invented the world anew; rather, they refashioned the world that they found. To understand this, however, one needs to be familiar with the culture of the Middle Eastern lands that the Arabs appropriated. Here non-Muslim sources are particularly useful, for they can inform us about the period before the Arab conquests (commonly now referred to as Late Antiquity in acknowledgment of the fact that some elements of the ancient world still endured). This means that we can work forward from this time and see how events unfolded and changes occurred from the sixth to the eighth century. If, however, we follow the usual practice of Islamic historians and work backward from the ninth-century sources, we hit a wall with the time of Muhammad and will end up concluding with medieval Muslim authors that Islamic civilization flows directly from pre-Islamic west Arabia.

Finally, I will try to broaden the horizons of the narrative rather than focus narrowly on Muhammad's movements in west Arabia and the activities of his successors. Arab tribesmen had been serving in the armies of Byzantium and Persia in large numbers in the fifth and the sixth centuries, and some powerful clans had managed to establish petty states on the margins of these empires. A new world power, a Turkic confederation, had seized control of vast swathes of the lands between Persia and China in the late sixth century and was launching attacks against the Persians. The 1,500-year-old civilization of Yemen had collapsed in the mid-sixth century and many of the ancient settlements of northwest and east Arabia were shrinking. And the two superpowers of the region, Byzantium and Persia, engaged in all-out war for more than two decades in the early seventh century. Yet even experts narrow their vision to concentrate wholly on Muhammad’s west Arabia and consider it sufficient simply to say that the Arab conquests happened and succeeded because of the religious zeal of the Muslims without any reference at all to broader socioeconomic factors. I do not want to belittle the role of religion but rather to expand its remit. Religion is integral to the conquests and the evolution of an Islamic Empire, but religion is not just piety and devotion, especially not in the seventh century; it is as much about power and identity as spiritual yearnings and righteous behavior.4

To reduce this later Islamicizing perspective I will speak of “Arab” conquests rather than “Islamic” conquests. Both terms are to some degree inaccurate, since the conquerors were neither all Arabs nor all Muslims, and the meaning of both terms was in any case evolving in the immediate aftermath of the conquests. Nevertheless, contemporary observers mostly referred to the conquerors in ethnic rather than religious terms, and even if some of the conquerors were not Arabs their descendants often came to think of themselves as such, and so it seems preferable to use the term “Arab,” while bearing in mind that we are not talking about a nationalist endeavor nor an immutable racial category.5 Islamicists would say that religion plays a greater role in the object of their study, but that is a dubious claim. When the Vandal king Geiseric was asked one day by his ship’s captain whither he should sail, he replied: “Against those with whom God is angry of course,”6 and this accords well with the spirit of the conquerors treated in this book. Furthermore, if we use the term “Islamic conquests” we cannot distinguish between the many different conquests achieved over the centuries by many Muslim groups (Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Berbers, etc.). This causes much confusion among students, and among quite a few experts too, for it tends to be assumed that the Arabs conquered most or all of the lands that are majority Muslim today, whereas a large proportion of them were actually conquered much later, by local Muslim dynasties, of non-Arab origin, or were Islamized slowly by traders, missionaries, and wandering ascetics.

In general, this book tries to emphasize complexity and ambiguity and to give voice to groups that are not normally heard. Historians writing at a considerable remove from the events they are describing tend to simplify, schematize, telescope, and idealize their narratives. Since our modern accounts of the Arab conquests have relied upon ninth-century writers for this seventh-century phenomenon, they have tended to perpetuate and intensify these tendencies, stressing the miraculous speed and success of the conquests and the religiosity of the conquerors. My aim is to reintegrate these conquests and their impact into the fabric of human history, against the prevailing trend to see them as utterly exceptional, and I hope thereby to make them more explicable according to the usual norms of human behavior. The achievements of the Arab conquerors were immense, but they can be properly appreciated only if we also take account of the difficulties and reverses that they had to overcome.