The origins of Islam lie in the northern Arabian peninsula, where different forms of Christianity and Judaism had competed and coexisted for centuries with indigenous beliefs, in particular in the much-travelled trading and caravan communities of Mecca and Medina. Mohammed was himself a respected and established merchant who had probably accompanied the trade caravans north to Roman Syria. Syria and Palestine already had substantial populations of Arabs, both farmers and herdsmen, as well as mercenary soldiers serving the empire as a buffer against the Persians. Reflecting his own synthesis of Judaic, Monophysite Christian, and traditional Arab concepts within a Messianic framework which owed more to Judaism than Christianity, Islam under Mohammed rapidly attained a considerable degree of sophistication and coherence. Although Mohammed’s preaching met initially with stiff resistance from his own clan, the Quraysh, who dominated Mecca and its trade (as well as the holy Kaaba), by 628-9 he had established his authority over much of the peninsula, made an alliance with the Quraysh, and begun to consider the future direction of the new Islamic community. On his death (traditionally placed in 632) there followed a brief period of internecine warfare; and there is little doubt that both religious zeal combined with the desire for glory, booty, and new lands motivated the attacks into both the Persian and Roman lands. A combination of incompetence and apathy resulted in a series of disastrous Roman defeats and the loss of Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt within the short span of ten years, so that by 642 the empire was reduced to a rump of its former self. The Persian Empire was completely overrun and destroyed. The Arab Islamic empire was born (Hawting 2000; Kennedy 1986; Kaegi 1992; Whittow 1996: 69-88).
The most important loss was Egypt, the main source of grain for Constantinople and other eastern coastal cities. Along with Syria and the other eastern provinces it had provided the bulk of the empire’s tax revenue. Constantinople was forced to restructure radically its fiscal apparatus and its priorities, including the way the army was recruited and supported; and the result was, by the later seventh century, an administratively very different state from that which had existed a century earlier.
World History
