Conclusion

One of the aims of this book has been to peel away these Islamicizing layers in order to understand better the factors that underlay the success of the Arab conquests and the transformative impact that they had on the political, social, and cultural makeup of the Middle East. In the first place, we have seen that the most commented-upon aspect of the conquests, their rapidity, is a consequence of the drive by the conquest leadership to recruit nomads into their armies. Nomads are much more mobile than sedentary people, more used to fighting in their everyday lives, and their work (herding animals) is less labor intensive than growing crops, so more of them can be spared to fight than in an agricultural society. Nomad conquests tend, therefore, to have an explosive character, and this is most dramatically illustrated by the Mongol conquests, which led to the establishment, in just over seventy years, of the biggest empire of pre-modern times. In the Arab case, non-Muslim sources allow us to perceive an additional advantage, namely, that Arabs had been serving in the armies of Byzantium and Persia long before Islam; they had acquired valuable training in the weaponry and military tactics of the empires and had become to some degree acculturated to their ways. In fact, these sources hint that we should view many in Muhammad's west Arabian coalition, its settled members as well as its nomads, not so much as outsiders seeking to despoil the empires but as insiders trying to grab a share of the wealth of their imperial masters.27

In the second place, I have stressed that the Arab conquerors made heavy use of non-military means to extend and entrench their gains. As well as the usual promises to respect life, property, and freedom of worship to those who submitted without a fight, they offered tax exemptions and autonomy to those who lived in difficult terrain and who were willing to provide military service or to act as guides, spies, and informers. They also enrolled groups who showed themselves to be skilled in warfare and agreed to pay them stipends. This was of course a sound policy for any aspiring empire and adopted by many in the past. Around 80 percent of the soldiers in the British imperial army in India were natives of the subcontinent; men of British origin were mainly found only in senior positions. Empires would also move conquered subjects around and deploy them far from their homeland, since they would then have no local sympathies; for example, garrisons in French Algeria were frequently composed, according to an American observer of 1922, of “negro troops. . . in French uniform, under the French flag and commanded by French officers.”28 These sorts of policies were practiced by the Arabs, too, but it is somewhat obscured by the fact that converts to Islam took Arab names and learned to speak Arabic, making the Arab armies look more homogeneous than they actually were. In reality, it was only by large-scale recruitment of non-Arabs in their armies that the Arabs could maintain their hold over their vast territories.

Third, there is the role of Islam. Whereas a number of recent studies have emphasized the zeal that it imparted to the conquerors, I have preferred to focus on its integrative capacity, which allowed the conquerors and conquered to come together to create a new identity and a new civilization. Islam as outlined in the Qur'an would have been reassuringly familiar to Middle Easterners, drawing on the standard constituents of Abrahamic monotheism: one omnipotent God, prophets, scripture, prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, holy days, congregational buildings, and so on. It was different enough from Christianity and Judaism to make it distinctive, but similar enough to make it palatable, and the lack of any clergy or hierarchy made it particularly easy to convert to (in terms of faith at least, all believers are equal before God). In this respect the Arabs were very different from the Mongols: all that Genghis Khan’s chiefs had to offer was worship of the sky god Tengri and this cult was just too alien for the Mongols’ new subjects to consider converting to, even if the Mongols had been willing to let them do so. Consequently, Mongol leaders mostly adopted one of the religions of the conquered peoples, which limited the degree to which they could instigate major cultural change.

It is clear why some of the conquered would want to convert to Islam, since it facilitated access to all the benefits that the conquerors enjoyed.29 What is less evident is why the Arabs would let them do so. Conquerors do not normally grant entry to their ranks so easily, for they want to keep the privileges of conquest for themselves. European imperial powers, for example, were very restrictive; the Romans were much less so, but it was still some four hundred years before they extended citizenship to everyone in their realm. There are hints that the Arabs favored a genealogical restriction (for example, blocking marriage between Arabs and non-Arabs), but they unwittingly found themselves in a Trojan horse scenario. They brought back such huge numbers of captives from their raids into their homes and government offices that it was difficult to keep them separate, especially once they started converting to Islam. Moreover, the right of Muslim males to marry four women and have numerous concubines coupled with access to money and power meant that on average they fathered many more children than non-Muslims, and their political dominance ensured that these children were raised as Muslims.30 Some Arab governors did reject the conversions of low-status people, but given the lack of any support for such a policy in the Qur’an or the sayings of Muhammad it was difficult to defend as a principle and faced strong opposition from those who felt that the spread of Islam was God’s wish and strengthened Arab rule. One Muslim authority advocated “the killing of nine out of ten non-Arab captives,” but that was hardly a realistic option. In short, the combination of the ease of conversion to Islam and the numerousness of displaced prisoners-of-war willing to convert resulted in the rapid incubation of a Muslim population and ultimately of Islamic civilization.31

But if Islam was just a version of Abrahamic monotheism, like Judaism and Christianity, why did Islamic civilization diverge so much from Roman Christian civilization? A major part of the answer is that the Arabs not only captured large chunks of the Byzantine Empire but also the entirety of the Persian Empire. The Arabs were, therefore, not only heirs to Rome, as has been highlighted by a number of recent studies, but also heirs to Persia.32 In the former Byzantine province of Syria, Islam had a close affinity to Christianity: Muslims were debating classic Christian questions like the relationship between free will and predetermination, the link between miracles and prophecy, and the ontological status of God’s attributes. If they had only conquered Syria and Egypt, the Arabs would probably have partially assimilated to Byzantium in the same way that various Gothic and Frankish polities modeled themselves on the West Roman Empire, especially as many in the upper echelons of the Umayyad elite were descendants of Arab Christian tribesmen who had been citizens or allies of Byzantium.33 But the Arabs had swallowed the Persian Empire whole, and so unsurprisingly its culture was to have a huge impact on the nascent Arab polity. In particular, when the Arabs moved their capital to Iraq in ad 750, they were exposed to the full cultural weight of this realm. From Basra to Balkh, the grandsons of the aristocrats and bureaucrats of late Sasanian Persia were waiting in the wings to impart this cultural wealth to their new masters. Under their direction, the provincial minimalism of Umayyad Damascus was upgraded to the imperial grandeur of Abbasid Baghdad. In addition, an infusion of scholarship from ancient Greek texts translated into Arabic and the input from talented persons from all over the conquered territories, from Seville to Samarkand, transformed the Arabs’ local Abrahamic cult from west Arabia into a world religion and the centerpiece of a thriving new civilization.

Postscript: In the Qur’an jihad means ‘struggle’, not only military struggle, but also moral struggle, ‘struggle of the self’ as it would be called later. Inevitably it was the idea of military struggle that was to the fore while the conquests were in full swing, but as these waned the pacific notion gained ground: the struggle to act in accordance with God’s laws and to build a just society.