During the last few years of his life, the Prophet gradually
expanded his sphere of influence within the Arabian Peninsula by means of
military campaigns and peaceful alliances. In the aftermath of his death, the
Muslim leadership at Medina began a series of conquests that still have the
power to amaze the observer. Taking place over a period of ninety years, these
conquests swept away the imperial forces of the Arabs’ proud neighbors to the
north and resulted in a permanent cultural transformation of the societies that
came under Muslim control.
Arabia and the Fertile Crescent
The Prophet’s sudden death in 632 was a stunning and
disorienting experience for his followers. Having become dependent upon him to
serve as both the channel of God’s revelation and the political and military
leader of the new state, the community was bereft of its religious and
political leadership at a stroke. That the despair and confusion in the wake of
his death did not cause the collapse of his nascent movement is a testimony to
the strength of the institutions and the ideals that Muhammad had left behind
and to the quality of the leadership that succeeded him.
According to the most commonly accepted version of events,
several factions emerged among the Muslims, each advocating its own solution to
the leadership vacancy. The three primary groups were the original Muslim
migrants to Medina, the natives of Medina who converted to Islam, and the
Meccans who converted after the conquest of their city in 630. Two of the first
converts to Islam, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab and Abu Bakr, played leading roles
during the decision-making days after the Prophet’s death. In the heat of the
debate over the course of action to be taken, ‘Umar made a passionate speech
that convinced those present to accept Abu Bakr as the leader of the Umma. Abu
Bakr was a pious, highly respected confidant of Muhammad who was famous for his
knowledge of the genealogy of the region’s tribes, a valuable asset for the
politics of the day. He and the Prophet had solidified their relationship by
Muhammad’s marriage to Abu Bakr’s nine-year-old daughter, ‘A’isha, soon after
the Hijra. The young wife became Muhammad’s favorite, and he died in her arms.
The title of the position that Abu Bakr now held came to be known as that of
the caliph, although as we shall see later, it is not clear whether Abu Bakr
himself was addressed by this title. There is evidence, in fact, that ‘Umar and
Abu Bakr worked together closely during the latter’s short administration.
With the loss of the Prophet, the new leader’s most pressing
challenge was that many of the tribes that had subjected themselves to Medina
no longer considered themselves under Medina’s control. Interpreting the
situation in traditional fashion, they felt that the terms that they had
contracted with Muhammad had been of a personal nature, and that it was
incumbent upon his successor to renegotiate the terms. They failed to pay their
tax and waited for Medina to react. A reversion to paganism does not appear to
have played a major role in this challenge to Medina’s authority. There were,
indeed, certain “false prophets” leading challenges to Islam’s dominance among
tribes in central and northeastern Arabia, but these were not areas within
Medina’s sphere of influence. In most cases, the revolt represented a residual
tribal antipathy toward unfamiliar centralized control, and it is clear that in
some cases the affected tribes were divided, with significant factions wishing
not to break with the Umma. Abu Bakr’s stature as a leader, however, lay in his
recognition that to allow tribes to secede from the union would doom the newly
emerging society and allow a relapse into the polytheistic and violent
tribalism of the recent past. He perceived that Muhammad’s polity inextricably
combined religious expression with political authority. Islam was not a
religion that could recognize a difference between what belonged to God and
what belonged to Caesar. In the Prophet’s vision, any distinction between the
“religious” and the “political” was fatuous. Political infidelity would result
in religious infidelity.
The military campaign that Abu Bakr ordered to bring the
recalcitrant tribes back under Medina’s control is known in Islamic history as
the ridda wars, or the Wars of Apostasy. The campaign is important historically
because it marks the transition to the Arab wars of conquest outside the
peninsula. The campaign to coerce rebel groups to resubmit to Medinan hegemony
made two seamless shifts in policy. The first was a transition from
pacification of the rebellious tribes to one of subduing Arabian communities
that had never had a treaty with the Prophet. The subjugation of the rebels was
a short affair, which may be explained in part by evidence that many of the
secessionist tribes and settlements were experiencing internal divisions over
the issue of rebellion and put up only a half-hearted resistance. In the
process of coercing rebel groups back under Medinan hegemony, the Muslim army
at some point began to subdue the Arabian tribes that had not made submission.
Despite fierce resistance from a handful of tribes, Medina won an overwhelming
victory and was master of the peninsula by 634. Augmented by the manpower of
the forces that it had conquered in the Ridda wars, the Muslim army was large
and confident, whereas its opponents could never unite against Medina. The
decisive victory by the diverse coalition that made up the Islamic state made a
deep impression on many Arabs regarding the inadequacy of a purely tribal identity.
Just as the Ridda wars are impossible to distinguish from
the war for the conquest of the peninsula, so the latter evolved imperceptibly
into invasions of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. The specific reasons for
this evolution into major international military expeditions are lost to
history, but scholars have suggested three factors that may have converged
precisely when the two empires were at their weakest. The first was a
geopolitical motivation on the part of the Muslim leadership. As Medina’s
campaign moved into the northern part of the peninsula, the objectives of the
Muslim elite may well have expanded. Muhammad himself had already attempted to
gain control of the Arabian tribes and settlements on the route from the Hijaz
to Syria; now Abu Bakr seems to have been concerned about the threat posed to
the Umma by nomads and rival settlements situated on important trade routes. He
was concerned with bringing under his control any potential security threat to
the trade of the new state, and he used a combination of force, cajolery, and
material incentives to do so.
The second factor was the inspiration of religion itself.
Many of the soldiers who fought for Medina throughout the Arabian campaigns
were genuinely motivated by religious concerns. The Qur’an repeatedly enjoins believers
to engage in a struggle (jihad) against unbelievers until God’s rule is
established on this earth. Muslims who refuse to help either by fighting, or by
helping the cause by contributing to it financially, are called hypocrites. On
the other hand, those who fight are rewarded not only spiritually (in the
afterlife), but also materially (the troops are to share four-fifths of the
loot captured in fighting the infidels). The scriptures, the promise of
material reward, and social pressure all combined to create a polity that
offered powerful ideological motivations for participation in warfare.
Which of these motivations was most important to the typical
rank-and-file soldier? It would be interesting to know. Few of the fighters
could have been knowledgeable regarding the nature of societies beyond their
own, and no doubt initially envisioned fighting and converting only pagan
Arabs. As it turned out, they chose to tolerate the existence of the huge
number of Christians and Jews in the lands west of Iran, and nowhere did they
welcome non-Arab converts to Islam. What, then, was the nature of God’s rule
that they hoped to establish as a result of their efforts? Unfortunately, it is
as impossible to know the answer to this question as it is to know the exact
motivations of the Frankish crusaders who went off to Palestine or of the
conquistadores with Cortes who claimed to be engaging in a mission for God
against the Aztecs.
A third factor in the unexpected irruption of the Islamic movement
into regions outside the peninsula was one that we shall see repeated many
times over the next eight centuries when nomads were recruited into armies in
the Afro-Asiatic land mass: Although the nomads were supposed to be instruments
of the policy of political leaders, their own needs and expectations often
dictated policy. The irony facing the Medinan and Meccan elites was that a
majority of their troops were of necessity the very bedouin who historically
had depended on raiding settlements for the acquisition of their surplus. In a
sense, the Muslim leadership was riding a tiger by depending on armies made up
of the social group that posed a perpetual threat to the personal, political,
and economic security of town dwellers.
It would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible,
to have escaped the dilemma. Muslims expected the raids and battles to yield
plunder as well as strategic or religious gains. The Qur’an stipulated that the
Prophet would retain one-fifth of the captured property from such battles for
distribution among the community, and the remainder would be divided among the
warriors who participated in the fighting. The wars under the first caliphs
continued that policy, with one-fifth of the captured property going to the
caliph. Each Muslim victory yielded plunder and recruits from the ranks of the
vanquished. The additional warriors made the next stage of conquest easier, but
they also made the next stage imperative. Further conquests were needed to
satisfy the demand and expectation of plunder. The conquest of neighboring
tribes within the peninsula, then of settlements outside the peninsula, and
then of contiguous areas beyond, proved to be a way of providing the nomads
with loot, which kept their minds on new enemies and opportunities, rather than
on the central government. Controlling the forces that made their very success
possible, however, would be a continuing challenge for the Muslim leadership.
The Arabian Peninsula merges imperceptibly with the land
mass of southwest Asia. So, too, did the presence of Arabs extend from the
peninsula into the Fertile Crescent. From the Medinan perspective, the Syrian
and Iraqi Arabs were obvious candidates for incorporation into the Umma. The
Syrian portion of the Fertile Crescent received priority. As we have seen,
Muhammad had already sent more than one army in its direction. Its oases and
green hills were known to those who plied the caravan trade, and it was the
setting for many of the important religious figures mentioned in the Qur’an. Populated
by numerous Arabs, it attracted Muslims for both religious and economic
reasons.
In the autumn of 633, four Arab armies entered southern
Syria and were soon joined by a fifth army that Abu Bakr transferred to Syria
from its location on the southern Euphrates in Iraq, where it had been engaged
in raiding and reconnaissance. The total manpower of the Muslim forces probably
amounted to about 24,000 troops, including both infantry and cavalry. Abu Bakr
died a few months later and was succeeded by his friend ‘Umar by the same
process of deliberation that had brought Abu Bakr into the leadership role a
mere two years earlier. Reflecting the common vision of the two men, the Syrian
conquest proceeded without interruption.
Whereas the Muslim conquest of Syria proceeded seamlessly
despite the death of the first caliph, the Byzantine defense of the region
never became coherent. Plague and sustained warfare had reduced the population
of the area by twenty to forty percent over the previous century, and adequate provision
had not been made for the loss of the Ghassanid auxiliaries. Byzantine armies,
forced to move at the rate of their infantry, might travel twenty miles per day
at best and by this time had developed a reputation for preferring a defensive
rather than an offensive posture. They had also lost much of their discipline
and combat readiness. The best of the regular imperial troops were concentrated
near Constantinople, and those in Syria were outnumbered by their own,
friendly, Arab forces by a ratio of at least two to one, and perhaps five to
one. The populace was sullen. The numerous Monophysite Christians had no reason
to feel loyalty to distant Constantinople, and the Jews were suffering severe
persecution in retaliation for their active support of the Sasanian occupation
that had just ended.
The first objective of the Muslims was to establish
dominance over the Arabic-speaking areas of southern and eastern Syria. Many of
these tribes put up stiff resistance against what they thought was another raid
from desert dwellers, but many local Arabs, including Christians, joined the
conquering armies. With these reinforcements, the invaders developed a
numerical advantage over the local defenders. Syrian cities in the interior
began to fall, and Damascus surrendered in 636. At that point, Heraclius
realized that the invasion was a serious threat and sent in a huge Byzantine
army that was reinforced by Arab and Armenian mercenaries. At the Yarmuk River,
a tributary of the Jordan River just south of Lake Tiberias (the Sea of
Galilee), the Muslims and their local allies decisively defeated the Byzantine
coalition, effectively sealing the fate of Syria. The only question would be
how long the sieges of the remaining cities would take. Over the next few
months, Antioch and Aleppo fell, and Jerusalem capitulated in 637. The seaport
of Caesarea was the last Byzantine city to fall, in 640. The Muslim Arabs now
ruled the coastal plains and the interior, although they never gained effective
control of the remote and rugged Lebanese mountainous areas.
Although the chronology is not certain, it appears that
after the battle of Yarmuk, ‘Umar felt that he could send troops into Iraq.
When the Muslims began their attacks on Iraq, local Arab nomads and the Aramaic
towns fought to protect themselves. Soon, however, the primary Muslim army
devastated a much larger Sasanian force at Qadisiya, northwest of Hira. It then
moved on to capture Ctesiphon. From that point, the largely Nestorian and
Jewish population of central Iraq put up little resistance. Meanwhile, a second
Muslim army captured southern Iraq. The young Sasanian emperor, Yazdagird, fled
east, and, by 638, the Muslims had secured almost all of the Tigris and
Euphrates valleys. The conquerors established military settlements to serve as
garrison cities that could ensure security, serve as supply points, and keep
the Arab troops from mixing with the local people. Kufa and Basra were the
biggest of these new settlements, and within a short time, each of these new
towns was thronged with tens of thousands of Arabs from the peninsula.
Meanwhile, in 639, the Arab commander ‘Amr ibn al-‘As
requested permission from ‘Umar to lead a force into the Nile valley. ‘Umar,
whose clearly stated focus had been the subjugation of Arab populations rather
than conquest in general, initially refused. After further consideration, ‘Umar
gave his reluctant consent, perhaps being persuaded by the security threat
posed by the Byzantine army and navy that were based in Alexandria. Muslim
armies now entered a new phase of their conquests. From that point, they would
spread the hegemony of Islam wherever their power enabled them to overcome
local resistance. ‘Amr’s army benefitted from the policies of the Orthodox
patriarch, Cyrus. After the Byzantines retook Egypt from the Sasanians in 628,
Cyrus had begun a savage repression of Monophysitism, with the result that
Copts provided no support to their hated Byzantine overlords. ‘Amr’s army won
control of Egypt by 641, and he created a military garrison and capital,
calling it Fustat. Significantly, it was near the old Roman settlement of
Babylon, on the southern fringe of the Nile delta, rather than at the
traditional seaside capital, Alexandria. Whereas Alexandria was Greek in
culture and faced the Byzantine-dominated Mediterranean, Fustat—like Kufa and
Basra—was for Arab troops, and was oriented toward Medina.
