In about 55292 a boy named Muhammad bin ‘Abd Allah was born into
a minor clan of the tribe of Quraysh, which was settled in and around
the shrine centre of Mecca in the Hijaz, about 900 kilometres south of
Syria. A trader by profession, he participated in the caravan trade of Arabia
and visited Syria on several occasions. In about 610 he began to preach a
monotheistic faith called ‘submission to God’, or Islam, and summoned
his fellowMeccans to prepare for the Last Judgement. By 622 difficulties in
Mecca and the erosion of vital support had reached the point where he was
obliged to move to Yathrib, 300 kilometres to the north. This migration
(the hijra)93 proved to be of crucial importance: for in Yathrib, henceforth
calledMedina,94 the ranks of his followers increased dramatically. Raids on
enemy caravans, camps and villages met with success and further expanded
his support. Muhammad returned to Mecca in triumph in 630, and by
the time of his death two years later his authority extended over much of
Arabia. The rest was brought under control by the first caliph, Abu Bakr
(632–4), andMuslim forces went on to campaigns of conquest that, in less
than a century, created an empire extending from Spain to Central Asia.
How all this occurred and why it focused onMuhammad,Mecca and the
late sixth century are questions that early Muslims took up themselves,95
and they are a major concern of modern historical research. In the 1950s
William Montgomery Watt proposed a socio-economic solution. Mecca
was a major centre for overland caravan trade, and its merchants and others
grew wealthy on the profits from commerce in such precious items as
incense, spices, gemstones and gold. This widened the gap between rich
and poor and led to social malaise as crass materialism eroded traditional
values. Muhammad’s message was essentially a response to this crisis.96
More recently, however, serious challenges have been made to the notions
of a lucrative Arabian trade in luxury items, of Mecca as an important
entrepot, and hence of some serious crisis provoking a religious response.97
Mecca is not mentioned in any non-Arabic source of the pre-Islamic
period, and does not lie on the main communication routes in western
Arabia. The site itself is barren, inhospitable and incapable of sustaining
agriculture for more than a minuscule population. Even had there been a
lucrative international trade passing through the Hijaz in the sixth century,
it would not have found an attractive or logical stopping-point at Mecca,
which owed its success to its status as a shrine and pilgrimage centre. As at
certain other shrines in Arabia, pilgrims came to circumambulate a rock –
in this case associated with an unroofed building called the Ka‘ba – and
to perform religious rituals with strong affinities to those of Judaism: these
included offerings and animal sacrifice, washing and concern for ritual
purity, prayer and recitation of fixed liturgies.98 There are indications that,
early on, few people were resident at the site: ‘People would perform the
pilgrimage and then disperse, leaving Mecca empty with no one living in
it.’99
The success and expansion ofMecca were due to the administrative and
political skills of its keepers, the tribe of Quraysh. The Ka‘ba seems to
have been a shrine of the god Hubal,100 but in the religiously pluralistic
milieu of pagan Arabia it must not have been difficult to promote it as a
place where other deities could be worshipped, too. A greater achievement
was convincing other tribes to honour the sanctity of theh.
aram of Mecca
and to suspend raiding during the sacred months when pilgrims came. As
agriculture was not possible at Mecca, Quraysh had to bring in food from
elsewhere and so was at the mercy of nearby tribes in any case. The very
fact thatMecca survived, much less prospered, thus reflects the diplomatic
skills of Quraysh. The Islamic tradition, of course, makes much of the a
priori importance of Quraysh, but this is surely something that emerged
within the paradigm of a sedentary tribe seeking to protect and promote its
interests through skilful manipulation of relations with the nomadic tribes
around it. There was mutual advantage in the prosperity of Mecca: trade
with pilgrims, import and marketing of foodstuffs and other necessities, and
collection and distribution of taxes levied in kind for feeding and watering
pilgrims.101 It may even be that Quraysh was able to organise a profitable
trade with Syria, perhaps as a result of disruption to the agricultural productivity
of the Levant caused by the destruction of the Persian wars, numerous
droughts in Syria,102 and the repeated visitations of bubonic plague
after 541.103
The message that Muhammad preached in the milieu of a prosperous
Mecca was in many ways a familiar one, and in others quite a novelty.104
His summons to the worship of oneGod recalled the notion of a ‘high god’,
and his identification of Islam as the religion of Abraham had important
associations with the doctrines of h.
anfya. As can be seen from the testimony
of Sozomen, his call for the restoration of a pristine faith, free from
the corruptions that had crept into it, was already a time-honoured tradition
in Arabia. The observances he advocated were also well known from
either pagan Arabian or Jewish practice: prayer and Friday worship, fasting,
pilgrimage, ritual purity, almsgiving, circumcision and dietary laws.105
WhereMuhammad broke with tradition was in his insistence on absolute
monotheism and his advocacy of a relationship with God that abandoned
traditional pragmatic views of religion and summoned man to unconditional
commitment and faith in response toGod’s creative munificence and
continuing solicitude. The rejection of pagan eclecticism, however, threatened
the entire social and economic position of Quraysh and thus earned
him the enmity of their leaders. Among the public at large his message
– with its corollaries of reward and punishment in the hereafter – seemed
extreme and delusory and evoked little positive response.106 In order to gain
support Muhammad had to prove that his God was a winner, and this he
achieved by moving to Medina, where he used his expanding following to
disruptMeccan commerce and food supplies.107 His military success made
him a force to be reckoned with: the tribal arrangements so carefully nurtured
by Mecca over the years soon fell apart in the face of this challenge,
while the victories of the new religion provided the worldly success which
Arabs demanded of their gods and also appealed to the Arabs’ warrior ethic.
Islam also had a broad appeal on other grounds. The Koran presented itself
as a universal scripture ‘in clear Arabic speech’,108 and thus took advantage
of the position of the Arabic language as the common cultural tongue of
Arabia and a basis for common action.109 Arabs could also identify with
one another, despite their tribal distinctions, on the basis of a shared participation
in Arabian tribal organisation and custom, a heritage of similar
cultural and religious experience in pagan systems and folklore, and a long
history of trade and commerce, revolving around fairs and religious shrines,
that engendered a certain feeling of familiarity around the peninsula.
It has often been asserted that the Arab conquests were of essentially
Islamic inspiration. The Islamic tradition of spreading theWord sees things
this way, and the Armenian chronicle, written in the seventh century and
attributed to Bishop Sebeos, also has Muhammad urging his followers
to advance and claim the land promised to them by God as the descendants
of Abraham.110 It therefore seems probable that there was a religious
agenda to the conquests from the start, and it is certainly true that without
the unifying factor of Islam there would probably have been no conquest
at all.
But the arguments of leaders and advocates are one thing, and the
response of the fighters themselves is another. Even in Mecca and Medina
the teachings of Muhammad and the text of the Koran were still known
in only fragmentary fashion, and it is difficult to see how most tribesmen
elsewhere could have had more than a vague and trivial knowledge of either
so soon after the Prophet’s death. Many warriors who joined the conquest
forces had only recently fought against the Prophet himself, or had resisted
the efforts of the first two caliphs to bring Arabia under their control. It is
also implausible that tribal warriors all over Arabia could so quickly have
abandoned the pragmatic and worldly attitude towards religion that had
prevailed for centuries, in favour of one that expected genuine commitment
to the one God. There is, in fact, good evidence on the conquests showing
that this was not the case at all.111
This is not to detract from the centrality of the message of Islam to
Muhammad’s own sense of mission and purpose, and probably to that of
others around him. One may also concede that Islam enabled the Muslim
leadership to mobilise warriors in a way that transcended important differences,
and it is likely that Islamic slogans and admonitions of various
kinds were often inspiring to fighters on the ground. But if the faith played
an important role in uniting and mobilising the tribes, it was nevertheless
waves of tribal forces, motivated primarily by traditional tribal ambitions
and goals, that broke over Syria, Iraq and Egypt from the 630s on.
It is unlikely that either Syria or Iraq could have withstood the advance
of forces of this kind, given the state of their defences after the end of the
last Persian war in 628, only six years before the first Arab advance. The
Arab armies were not simply marshalled inMedina and then sent forth with
the caliph’s instructions; providing food, fodder and water for an army of
thousands of men and animals would have been extremely difficult. The
norm was rather for small contingents to expand as other groups gradually
joined them on the march; the sources make clear that commanders were
expected to engage in such recruiting along the way, to ensure that the
newcomers were armed and equipped, and to ‘keep each tribe distinct from
the others and in its proper place’.112 In this way a small force could soon
swell to thousands as warriors joined its ranks in expectation of adventure,
fighting and plunder.
The situation was made more difficult by the fact that confronting the
Arabs on this scale posed entirely new military problems. Both imperial
powers were accustomed to dealing with Arabs as bands of raiders, and
had planned their frontier defences accordingly. Watch-towers and forts,
many of them abandoned for centuries in any case, were inadequate to
deter the forces that now swept past them, and whereas the old Roman system
had anticipated incursions by single uncoordinated bands, it was now
confronted by penetration at many points simultaneously. It was probably
also difficult to determine exactly where the enemy was at any given time,
for when battle was not imminent an Arab army tended to fragment into
bands of warriors roaming the countryside.
Finally, and as the above example shows, Arab strategy was often highly
reactive and thus difficult to counter or predict. Incursions into Iraq, for
example, seem to have begun when drought in Arabia obliged the tribe
of Rabi‘a, of the Banu Shayban, to migrate into Iraqi territory, where the
Sasanian authorities permitted them to graze their herds on the promise
of good behaviour. But the presence of these tribal elements eventually led
to friction, which the Rabi‘a quite naturally interpreted as unwarranted
reneging on an agreed arrangement. When they called on their kinsmen
elsewhere for support, the crisis quickly escalated into full-scale conflict
between Arab and Persian forces.113
It is difficult to guess whether either of the great powers would have been
able to stem the military momentum that was building in Arabia, even had
they correctly gauged the threat it posed. With Kinda, the Ghassanids
and the Lakhmids all in a state of either collapse or disarray, the growing
strategic power of Islam was able to develop in what otherwise amounted to
a political void; the real source of the danger confronting the empires was
effectively beyond their reach from the beginning. Byzantium and Persia
could fight armies that violated their frontiers, but could not stop the
process that was generating these armies in the first place. Initial victories
over the Arabs atMu’tah in Syria in 632 and the battle of the Bridge in Iraq
in 634 thus proved no deterrent, as in earlier times would have been the
case.114
What overwhelmed the Byzantines and Sasanians was thus the ability
of the message and charismatic personality of Muhammad to mobilise the
tribal might of Arabia at a level of unity never experienced among the
Arabs either before or since. Unprepared for defence on the scale required
to counter this new threat and unable to marshal tribal allies of their own
to strike at their foe in his own heartlands, both were forced to fight deep
within their own territories and suffered defeats that simply encouraged further
incursions on a larger scale.Greek and Persian field armieswere crushed
in one disastrous battle after another, leaving cities to endure sieges without
hope of relief and encouraging resistance everywhere else to evaporate in
short order.
World History
