Although we can discern traces of a command structure in the execution of the early conquests, we have almost no contemporary information about the caliphs in Medina (632—60). This is possibly because some 650 miles of mountain, steppe, and desert separate Medina from cities like Damascus and Basra, or because the turbulence of these years disrupted the usual channels of communication. Whatever the reason, writers who lived at the same time as the first four caliphs—Abu Bakr (632—34), 'Umar (634—44), 'Uthman (644—56) and 'Ali (656—60)—recorded next to nothing about them, and their names do not appear on coins, inscriptions, or documents. It is only with the fifth caliph, Mu'awiya (661—80), that we have evidence of a functioning Arab government, since his name appears on all official state media. Having been stationed in Damascus as governor of Syria for twenty years (640—60), he had worked with the local provincial administrators and so was much better placed than his predecessors, based in faraway Medina, to begin the job of establishing a centralized state, which was crucial if the conquests were going to result in a lasting legacy. This made him unpopular, though, for many resented ceding any of their booty and autonomy to a central agency. Many felt that things had been better before Mu'awiya began his state-building activities and they attributed their ideas of how government should work to the caliphs before him, especially to 'Umar, who gradually acquired the status of model statesman and an arbiter on all matters to do with statecraft. For example, he was said to have insisted that the state should circulate wealth to its members rather than hoard it from them. When the question was put to him: “O commander of the faithful, would it not be a good idea to store up this wealth for emergencies that might arise,” he replied: “This is an idea that Satan has put into your head. It would not affect me adversely, but it would be a temptation for those who come after me.”36
How then were the conquered territories governed in the time of the Medinan caliphs? The answer is that to a substantial degree the existing systems that were already in place kept on ticking over. For example, until at least the 650s considerable quantities of regular Byzantine coins, mostly struck in
Constantinople, continued to arrive and circulate in Syria, and Sasanian silver dirhams remained the principal currency in Persia until the 690s. A Syrian author of Damascus, writing around 660, still speaks of “our empire” and “our emperor”; he is aware that “others” hold Jerusalem, but confidently asserts that “as long as the head and the empire remain firm, all the body will renew itself with ease.” A contemporary of his, the monk John of Fenek, explains the squabbles between the Arabs in terms of ancient disagreements between the Byzantines and Persians, as though their empires still structured the fabric of his world. Old thinking died hard, but also it was not at once appreciated that the Arab conquests would lead to a permanent occupation, let alone to a new civilization. In Damascus, as our Syrian writer notes, Christians still predominated, their churches had not been harmed, and the city walls remained intact. Moreover, Arabic-speaking tribesmen had long constituted a substantial proportion of the region’s population and so would not have seemed so alien as we now tend to think.37
The day-to-day running of the machinery of state was initially left, then, to continue in much the same way as it had before the conquests, conducted by much the same staff. In Egypt, for example, the system of pagarchs (in charge of cities and their agricultural hinterland) and dukes (in charge of the regional divisions of the country) and the offices that went with them initially remained in place.38 Two major policy innovations were made in the Medinan period, however, both of which had very long-term repercussions. First, it was decided to pay all soldiers a stipend (‘ata’), the rate varying according to length of service, and this was to be funded out of direct taxation. Second, a poll tax was introduced, which comprised varying annual rates according to the wealth of the payer and exemptions for women, minors, and the poor. This type of tax may have been employed for convenience, since it is easy and transparent to calculate and enforce (one person, one payment), and so was often imposed at a time of upheaval or invasion (the Mongols prescribed it for their subjects, for instance). Muslim sources suggest, however, that it was modeled on the Persian poll tax, which was also graded according to ability to pay and included exemptions for the elite (corresponding to the conquerors in the Arab case).39 The stipend system is also sometimes attributed to a Persian precedent, though it may have suggested itself simply because the Arabs formerly in the employ of the empires had become accustomed to receiving stipends in return for military service. In order to facilitate payments to the Arab troops, they were, in Iraq and Egypt at least, kept together in a small number of garrisons, which were positioned at a slight distance from existing population centers: Fustat (near Babylon of Egypt), Kufa (near Hira), and Basra (near Ubulla). Whether intentional or not, this had the effect of allowing the soldiers to bond with one another while at the same time isolating them somewhat from the local people. This promoted a sense of group solidarity and reduced the chance of soldiers going native in the early decades, as may well have happened if they had been paid via land grants and dispersed across the countryside, which was common practice among the invaders of the West Roman Empire.40
We would know very little about these measures if it were not for Egypt's gift to scholars: the vast quantities of documents on papyri that have been preserved by the country's dry unforgiving climate. Among them we find numerous texts related to the local Arab administration in the country from as early as 642. The new armies had not only to be paid, but also to be fed, housed, and equipped, which led to a flurry of documentation as demand notes were dispatched and receipts were issued for a wide variety of goods, such as grain, oil, fodder, blankets, saddles, and horses. To meet the heavy demands of maintaining the army, Arab governors paid close attention to fiscal matters and movements of people, as is clear from the floods of letters issued by governors cajoling and ordering lower officials to chase up overdue taxes and to round up errant taxpayers. One of the earliest texts to survive is number 558 in the collection amassed by Archduke Rainer in Vienna; it describes itself as a “Receipt for the sheep given to the magaritai and others who arrived, as a down-payment for the taxes of the first fiscal year” (Figure 3.3). It sounds prosaic, and the papyrus looks very scrappy, but it can tell us much about the world of the new conquerors. First, it is dated very exactly by two different dating systems—the Egyptian Christian era of the martyrs and the Islamic calendar—to April 25, 643. The Muslims counted from the year of Muhammad's hijra, when he left Mecca to go and found his new community in Medina, in 622. Already by 643 it is being used in documents, and not long thereafter we find it used in
FIGURE 3.3 Papyrus bought by Archduke Rainer from Egypt, dated 643 ad. © Vienna National Museum.
Arabic inscriptions on coins, tombstones, buildings, and rocks (for graffiti) from Egypt to Iraq.
Second, the papyrus is written in Greek and Arabic. This is surprising because we have no documents written in Arabic prior to 643. We knew that it was used before this on the evidence of a few inscriptions in Arabic from the preceding centuries, but now we can infer, given that papyri like no. 558 are written quite competently, that an Arabic administrative tradition existed before the seventh century. It was evidently a tradition nurtured by the Byzantine world, for it shares the same notions of contract, surety, and mutual guarantee. It also follows the practice, established by edict of the emperor Maurice (580-602), of beginning with an invocation to God: the Arabic bis-millah is an exact translation of the Greek en onomati tou theou (“in the name of God”). The obvious candidates for practitioners of such a tradition would have been the various Arab tribes allied to the Byzantine and Persian empires in the fifth and sixth centuries ad whom we know were using Arabic already in the sixth century and who would have had at least a rudimentary bureaucracy.
A third revealing feature of Papyrus 558 is its designation of the conquerors as magaritai (also written moagaritai), which is how they are most commonly referred to in Greek documents of the seventh century. A clearly related term is found in Syriac literary texts from the 640s onward, namely, mhaggre. Both terms are intended to convey the Arabic term muhajir, which is the word used in Muhammad's foundation agreement to specify those who had left Mecca with him to find refuge in Medina and begin the war against the infidels. Evidently the word had become applied since then to all those who left their homeland to join in the battle against the empires. A crucial component of its meaning was settling, for it is often contrasted with the word ta‘arruh, which meant “to return to desert life”; as one early governor of Iraq said: “a muhajir is never a nomad.” In the Qur'an it is often linked with jihad, both being conducted “in God's path.” The word has the meaning, then, of both soldier and settler, but to the conquered peoples it simply served as a label for the conquering armies, and in the rare cases that magaritai features in a bilingual Greek-Arabic document it is rendered in Arabic by the word juyush, that is, troops.41 Since it is the most common word for the conquerors in the seventh century, employed by themselves and by the conquered, we should really speak of the conquests of the muhajirun, rather than of the Arabs or Muslims, which only become popular terms in the eighth century. At the very least, we should recognize this primary impulse of the movement after Muhammad's death, namely, to conquer and settle, a message that must have originated in the early drive to recruit the nomadic tribes of Arabia and the Syrian desert.
World History
