It would be incorrect to say that there was a cultural break at the time of the Arab-Muslim conquest, and yet, something did fundamentally change. The Arab-Muslims who conquered Syria were not like other various barbarian groups throughout the Mediterranean basin: they did not convert to Christianity (or even a heretical sect of it). They developed their own culture, based upon and incorporating large elements of the previous Hellenistic culture, but still distinctly Arab-Muslim. Although large numbers of settled Christians did not convert to Islam during the Umayyad period, by the end of the dynasty most of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Arabs were Muslims. By the middle of the Umayyad period, even the Ghassanids, so long the mainstay of Christianity in the region, were producing prominent Muslim scholars from their own ranks. Thus, even at that early period, the stage was set for the Islamization of Syria.
Other changes are apparent as well. The coastal cities, for example, clearly declined during the period of Umayyad rule, even though the Umayyads themselves made serious attempts to gain parity with the Byzantines on the sea (and defeated them a number of times). It was difficult to find Muslim populations willing to settle in coastal regions, and so non-Arabs (Jews, Persians, etc.) frequently had to be dragooned. Often, the Christian populations of the sea coasts were disloyal to the Muslims, and so had to be moved to the interior ofSyria. There was a marked decline also in agriculture along the coastal regions from this period onward, in addition to the whole-scale abandonment of towns and villages that, especially in the north, was already in train when the Muslims arrived (Foss 1995; Schick 1995). But the major cities, such as Damascus and Jerusalem, saw a revival as a result of the close proximity of the government and the monumental building projects that took place in them. Even that revival, however, was brought to an end by the ‘Abbasid revolution in AD 747, and Syria entered upon another period of more radical decline.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The Umayyad period in Syria is severely underresearched. Virtually no Arabic sources from the Umayyad period itself survive; most of the contemporaneous Syriac and Greek sources are translated by Palmer 1993 and summarized by Hoyland 1997. The best available sources about Syria from the early ‘Abbasid period are the two books on jihad and asceticism by ‘Abdallah b. al-Mubarak (d. ad 797), and the apocalyptic book of Nu’aym b. Hammad al-Marwazi (d. ad 844). In addition to these meagre sources, there is the History of Abu Zur’a al-Dimashqi (written c. ad 894-5), problematic and spare, a few other minor historians from the ninth century, and then the mammoth (75-volume) History of the City of Damascus by Ibn ‘Asakir (d. AD 1175 or 1176). The problem with using Ibn ‘Asakir is not the quantity of information contained within it (which remains virtually untapped), but the lurking suspicion that much of it is back-projection, and there is little against which to test it. The archaeology of the early Muslim period in Syria remains in its infancy as well; the most important work today is done in Jordan and in the northern Negev. Many sites in Syria and Lebanon remain untouched (except by looters).
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