The Great Arab Conquests (68 page)

Authors: Hugh Kennedy

BOOK: The Great Arab Conquests

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As we have repeatedly seen, the Muslim conquerors put little or no pressure on the recently subjected populations to convert to Islam. Any attempt at compulsory conversion would probably have provoked widespread outrage and open hostility. As it was, the Muslim authorities established working relationships with the heads of the churches and other religious institutions that were now in their power. Conversion when it came was partly the result of fiscal pressures, the desire to escape the hated poll tax, but also because conversion provided an opportunity to escape from existing social constraints and to become a part of the new ruling class. Being a Muslim had always been essential for anyone who wanted a career in the military. By the tenth century, and before in some areas, it had become very difficult to have a successful career in the civil bureaucracy without becoming a Muslim. Attraction, not coercion, was the key to the appeal of the new faith.

During the first century, the Muslim Empire was a fairly open society. The elite of the new empire were the Muslims and Islam claimed to be a religion for all mankind. No would-be convert could be denied membership of this new elite. In contrast, Roman citizenship or membership of Persian aristocratic families was an exclusive, privileged position to be defended by those who enjoyed it. By converting to the new religion of Islam, conquered people could move to being conquerors, members of the new ruling class and, at least theoretically, equal to all other Muslims. Of course, problems soon arose and there were prolonged and violent clashes between old Muslims and new Arab and non-Arab Muslims, but this could not undermine the fact that Islam was open to all.

This is the other side of the collapse of the old social order and class boundaries lamented in aristocratic Persian sources of the period. There were some spectacular examples of this mobility. Nusayr was a prisoner of war, probably of humble Aramaean origin, captured in one of the early Arab campaigns in Iraq. He converted to Islam and his son Mūsā went on to become governor of North Africa and supreme commander of the Muslim forces in the conquest of Spain. At a humbler level, the peasants who refused to obey the orders of the Persian landowner in Iraq, the Copts who chose to stay in North Africa rather than being forced to return to their native Egypt, or the local men who served with the Arab armies in Transoxania may all have seen the coming of the Muslims as an opportunity to better themselves, taking advantage of the freedom and opportunities offered by the new order.

The early Muslims brought with them a great cultural self-confidence. God had spoken to them through His Prophet, in Arabic, and they were the bearers of true religion and God’s own language. It is interesting to compare this with the Germanic invaders of western Europe in the fifth century. When they occupied the lands of the Roman Empire, they abandoned their old gods and converted to Christianity, the religion of the empire they had just conquered, and, as far as we know, no one claimed that God spoke German. This cultural self-confidence meant that Arabic became the language of administration and the language of the new high culture. Anyone who wished to participate fully in government or intellectual activity had to be literate in Arabic and preferably a Muslim. Again the contrast with the Germanic west is revealing. Here Latin remained the language of administration and high culture until at least the twelfth century, the new ruling class adopted Latin titles like duke (
dux
) and count (
comes
), and the Germanic languages survived only as vernaculars. The Muslim titles, caliph (
khalīfa
),
amīr
and
walī
(governor) were all Arabic in origin.

Nonetheless, conquest was the prelude to conversion. It established the political and social framework within which the much slower, incremental processes of changing to Islam could take place. By the year 1000, it is likely that the majority of the population in all the different areas that had been conquered by 750 were Muslim.
³The conquest did not cause conversion but it was a major prerequisite: without it Islam would not have become the dominant faith in these areas.

The success of the Muslim conquests was the product of a unique set of circumstances and the preaching of a simple new monotheistic faith. There were many features of Islam that would have made it approachable to Christians and Jews. It had a Prophet, a Holy Book, established forms of prayer, dietary and family laws. Abraham and Jesus were both great prophets in the Muslim tradition. From the very beginning Islam established itself as a new faith, but it was one that claimed to perfect rather than destroy the older monotheistic ones. It had none of the strangeness of, say, Buddhism. These similarities, this common tradition, must have aided and encouraged conversion.

In many ways acceptance of Muslim rule was the result of Muslim policy towards the enemy: it was almost always preferable to surrender to the invaders and to make terms and pay the taxes than to resist to the last. The Islamization and Arabization that followed conquest over the next two or three centuries would not have occurred if political conquest had not already succeeded, but they were not a direct and inevitable consequence of that conquest. Instead, it was a gradual, almost entirely peaceful result of the fact that more and more people wanted to identify with and participate in the dominant culture of their time.

In the final analysis, the success of the Muslim conquest was a result of the unstable and impoverished nature of the whole post-Roman world into which they came, the hardiness and self-reliance of the Bedouin warriors and the inspiration and open quality of the new religion of Islam.

NOTES

PREFACE

1
See S. Brock, ‘North Mesopotamia in the late seventh century: Book XV of John Bar Penkaye’s
Rīs Melle’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
9 (1987): 51-75.

FOREWORD: REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

1
For this change and its importance, see J. Bloom,
Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World
(New Haven, CT, 2001).

2
See the discussion of this and other military topoi in A. Noth with L. I. Conrad,
The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A source-critical study
, trans. M. Bonner (Princeton, NJ, 1994), pp. 109-72.

3
P. Crone and M. A. Cook,
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World
(Cambridge, 1977).

4
E. Landau-Tasseron, ‘Sayf ibn Umar in medieval and modern scholarship’,
Der Islam
67 (1990): 1-26.

5
J. Fentress and C. J. Wickham,
Social Memory
(Oxford, 1992).

6
Ibn Abd al-Hakam,
Futūh Misr
, ed. C. C. Torrey (New Haven, CT, 1921), pp. 74-6.

7
Sebeos,
The Armenian History
, trans. R. W. Thomson, with notes by J. Howard-Johnston and T. Greenwood, 2 vols. (Liverpool, 1999).

8
John of Nikiu,
The Chronicle of John (
c
. 690 AD) Coptic Bishop of Nikiu
, trans. R. H. Charles (London, 1916).

9
See J. Johns, ‘Archaeology and the history of early Islam: the first seventy years’,
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
46 (2003): 411-36.

1. THE FOUNDATIONS OF CONQUEST

1
On Rusāfa and the cult of St Sergius, see E. K. Fowden,
The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran
(Berkeley, CA, 1999).

2
Quoted in A. Jones,
Early Arabic Poetry
, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1992), I, p. 1.

3
C. Lyall,
The Dwns of
^cAbd ibn al-Abras, of Asad and
^cmir ibn atTufayl, of
^cmir ibn Sa
^csa
^cah
(London, 1913).

4
Lyall,
Dīwns
, p. 106.

5
For the best introduction to the history of the south Arabian kings, see R. Hoyland,
Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam
(London, 2001), pp. 36-57.

6
G. W. Heck, ‘Gold mining in Arabia and the rise of the Islamic state’,
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
42 (1999): 364-95.

7
Mughīrah b. Zurāra al-Usaydī; Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, ed. M.J. de Goeje et al. (Leiden 1879-1901), I, pp. 2241-2.

8
Al-Nu
^cmān b. Muqarrin; Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, pp. 2239-40.

9
G. M. Hinds, ‘Maghāzī’,
Encyclopaedia of Islam
, 2nd edn.

10
This discussion of
jihād
is based on R. Firestone,
jihād: The Origin of Holy War in Islam
(Oxford, 1999).

11
See R. P. Mottahedeh and R. al-Sayyid, ‘The idea of the
jihād
in Islam before the Crusades’, in
The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World
, ed. A. E. Laiou and R. P. Mottahedeh (Washington, DC, 2001), pp. 23-39.

12
Al-Nu
^cmān b. al-Muqarrin; Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, p. 2240.

13
Quoted in F. M. Donner,
The Early Islamic Conquests
(Princeton, NJ, 1981), p. 67. See also M. Lecker, ‘The estates of
^cAmr b. al-
^cĀs in Palestine’,
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
52 (1989): pp. 24-37.

14
Quoted in Lecker, ‘Estates’, p. 25 from Ibn Abd al-Hakam,
Futūh
, p. 146.

15
On this, see Donner,
Early Islamic Conquests
, p. 81

16
Firestone,
jihād
, pp. 124-5.

17
Donner,
Early Islamic Conquests
, p. 135.

18
Ibid., pp. 205-9.

19
For the visual images, see D. Nicolle,
Armies of the Muslim Conquests
(London, 1993); Nicolle, ‘War and society in the eastern Mediterranean’, in
War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean 7th to 15th centuries
, ed. Y. Lev (Leiden, 1997), pp. 9-100.

20
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, II, p. 1315.

21
On weapons in general, see H. Kennedy,
The Armies of the Caliphs
(London, 2001), pp. 173-8; on swords, see R. Hoyland and B. Gilmour,
Medieval Islamic Swords and Swordmaking: Kindi’s treatise ‘On swords and their kinds’
(London, 2006).

22
See Kennedy,
Armies
, pp. 169-72.

23
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, II, pp. 554-5.

24
See H. Kennedy, ‘The military revolution and the early Islamic state’, in
Noble Ideals and Bloody realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages
, ed. N. Christie and M. Yazigi (Leiden, 2006), pp. 197-208.

25
On Islamic siege engines, see P. E. Chevedden, ‘The hybrid trebuchet: the halfway step to the counterweight trebuchet’, in
On the Social Origins of Medieval Institutions. Essays in Honor of Joseph F. O’Callaghan
, ed. D. Kagay and T. Vann (Leiden, 1998), pp. 179-222.

26
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, pp. 2427-8.

27
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, p. 2237, ascribed to al-Mughīra b. Shu
^cba.

28
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, p. 2309.

29
Awf b. Hārith, quoted in Firestone,
jihād
, p. 114.

30
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, p. 2271, ascribed to Rib
^cī b.
^cĀmir.

31
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, p. 2289.

32
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, p. 2365.

33
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, pp. 2302-3.

34
Tabarī,
Ta’rīkh
, I, pp. 2293-4.