Chapter Three: The Arab Conquest and the Establishment of the Caliphate, 632- 809
Just a few years after the death of Muhammad in 632, the Arab people, heretofore marginal players in a region dominated by powerful empires, exploded out of Arabia. Striking at a time when the established powers of antiquity were peculiarly weak, small but highly mobile Arab armies won a series of decisive victories that, by 651, resulted in the umma taking control of the Byzantine Middle East and the entirety of the Persian Empire. After a pause in the mid-to-late-seventh century, the wars of conquest continued. When those campaigns finally came to a close a century later, they had produced a new empire, the caliphate, of breathtaking scale. Stretching from Spain in the West to the Central Asian city of Samarkand in the east and from the Pyrenees in the northwest to Yemen in the south, this Arab empire was considerably larger in extent than Rome had been at its peak and every bit as sophisticated. This achievement was remarkable—not least because the Arabs took control of this territory during a period in which they experienced significant internal dissension that included intrigue, assassination, and even civil war.
Remarkable as it was, the conquest would have been of limited consequence had the Arabs proven unable to institutionalize their control over the far-flung territories that they acquired between 632 and 751. History is replete with examples of powerful conquerors whose empires were as fleeting politically as they had been dominant militarily. However, the Arabs proved to be more than up to the challenge of administering the territory that they had acquired. Despite having no more experience ruling a large sedentary empire than had earlier nomadic groups such as the Huns, they managed to establish a durable system of government based on a combination of borrowed and original practices and institutions. Critically, they also ensured domestic tranquility by developing stable relations with the empire’s millions of diverse subject peoples who remained, until at least the tenth century, predominately non-Muslim.
The Birth of the Caliphate
The pivotal, early stages of the conquests occurred during the reigns of the first four caliphs, or “successors,” of Muhammad. These men, Abu Bakr (r. 632-634), Umar ibn Al-Khattab (r. 634-644), Uthman ibn Affan (r. 644-656), and Ali Ibn Talib (r. 656-661) played an outsized role in determining not only the structure of the early caliphal government, but also the nature of Muslim society. As a result, Muslim religious scholars called ulama later came to refer to these early leaders as the Rashidun, or “rightly guided.”
That the Rashidun caliphs were obliged to define the framework of the government stemmed from the fact that Muhammad had not left clear instructions as to how the polity he created should be governed after his death. In fact, beyond making clear that his successors would not be prophets, he had never articulated the role of the caliph and had thus left the umma with several critical, unanswered questions. Was the ruler’s authority to be strictly political in nature, or was it also to encompass religious issues? If his authority was to extend to spiritual matters, what religious powers would he wield? Finally, was the caliph to be “first amongst equals” administering a loosely organized state or was he to rule as the all-powerful head of a tightly centralized government? With Muhammad having demurred in answering these questions, it fell to his immediate successors to address them. Through their actions, pronouncements, and decisions, the first four caliphs did so, establishing in the process, the broad structure that would define caliphal authority going forward.
The Succession Crisis
Muhammad’s refusal either to explain the nature and extent of his successors’ powers or to make clear who was next in line would not have proven problematic had the umma been united and thus able to devise a system for determining who was best suited to follow Muhammad. The community of believers was anything but unified in 632, however. Instead, it was divided into three loose factions, the Ansar, the muhajirun, and the Banu Hashim, that vied with each other for power and influence. As a result, even as Muhammad’s followers grieved following his death, they also engaged in a brief succession struggle that would have momentous political, social, and even religious implications for the fledgling movement.
Each faction advanced a claim in favor of one of its members. The Ansar, the Medinan natives who had backed Muhammad from the time of his arrival in Yathrib, believed that their critical support during a peculiarly difficult period entitled them to select a successor from among their ranks. The muhajirun, Muhammad’s earliest followers, strongly disagreed. They instead maintained that the successor should be a Muslim from the Quraysh tribe who had faced persecution alongside the prophet during Islam’s earliest days in Mecca. Finally, a third group made up largely of members of Muhammad’s Banu Hashim clan claimed that the prophet had intended that his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, should succeed him. Known as Alids or, more formally as the Shi’at Ali, or Party of Ali, this faction argued that the Prophet had made his intention explicit when he had announced at the oasis of Ghadir al-Khumm during his return from his final pilgrimage to Mecca in 632 that “any of you who consider me a patron should consider Ali your patron.”
However, the prophet’s son-in-law did not get the opportunity to take part in the deliberations at which the leading figures in the umma determined the succession. Instead, while Ali was preoccupied helping to prepare Muhammad’s body for burial, the leading muhajirun and Ansar held a traditional consultation of important men called a shura to resolve the dispute before it turned into a full-blown crisis. They made two enormously consequential decisions. First, looking to freeze Ali out, they rejected his candidacy on the grounds that he was too young to head the community of believers. Second, they determined that they could only overcome the divisions in the umma that the succession had revealed by selecting someone who was both a member of the Quraysh tribe and an early, trusted companion of Muhammad. They quickly settled on the respected muhajirun Abu Bakr, who was both one of the first men to accept Islam and the father of Muhammad’s favorite wife, ʿAʾisha (c. 613-678). Ali was disappointed that the shura had passed him over and unhappy that it had met without him. Despite the anger of his Alid supporters, however, he reluctantly consented to the decision out of a desire to ensure the unity of the umma.
The Ridda Wars
Acceptance of Abu Bakr as caliph resolved the dispute over the succession, but it did not prevent the emergence of a serious new crisis. It centered on the relationship between the central government in Medina and the bedouin tribes that had supported Muhammad. Many of the tribes had responded to the news of the Prophet’s death by claiming that they had pledged allegiance not to the government in Medina but instead to Muhammad personally, and that they were, as a consequence, no longer bound to the state that he had created or obligated to forward the zakat tax to its treasury.
Compounding this insubordination, several figures had emerged among the bedouin who claimed, like Muhammad, to be prophets tasked by God with delivering His divine message to the Arabs and who had begun to establish rival political-religious communities similar in structure to the umma. These threats were serious ones for the movement Muhammad had created. Were Abu Bakr to have permitted the tribes to secede or allowed new religious communities to take root, the umma would likely have collapsed in short order. Likewise, one of Muhammad’s signal achievements, the establishment of intertribal peace in Arabia, would have all-but certainly ended in a return of the intertribal conflict that had characterized the peninsula in the pre-Islamic era.
The new caliph was determined to prevent such a train of events from occurring. Accordingly, he began his brief reign by launching the Ridda Wars, or Wars of Apostasy against the bedouin tribes that had rejected his authority. Given the large number of tribes that had broken with Medina, this task promised to be a difficult one. Fortunately for the Muslims, Abu Bakr was a skilled military commander and a deft negotiator. Using a combination of intimidation, diplomacy, and, when necessary, force, he succeeded in bringing the breakaway tribes to heel and in crushing the rival religious movements. As a result, the Ridda Wars ended in the spring of 633 in a decisive Muslim triumph. The umma had been saved.
Still, despite the quick victory, the leadership of the umma found the secession of so many tribes deeply troubling. It not only suggested that the bedouins’ acceptance of Muhammad’s message of peace and unity was superficial, but, more critically, it raised questions about Islam’s ability to endure. Accordingly, even before the fighting had ended, they began to consider the root cause of the Ridda Wars and to implement changes that would ensure the tribes’ ongoing loyalty.
After reflecting on the issue for some time, they determined that the war had emerged out of the tension that existed between Muhammad’s message of peace and the bedouins’ deeply entrenched social and economic practices. As we saw in Chapter Two, the nomadic Arabs had traditionally engaged in low-intensity ghazu, or raids that provided both the means through which tribes could acquire the wealth upon which survival depended and a regulated system of warfare through which young men could win respect and social standing. While welcome, in other words, Muhammad’s ban on violence within the umma had unintentionally created serious problems for the bedouins. Not only were the tribes now enduring material deprivation, but they were also experiencing internal conflict among the young men who suddenly lacked a sanctioned means of gaining prestige. It was these problems that had led the tribes to break with Medina, and it was these issues that the leadership of the umma would have to resolve if the community of believers were to endure.
This assessment was sobering. It suggested that there existed an intrinsic tension between the tribes’ socioeconomic needs and Muhammad’s call for peace within the Muslim community. Importantly, it also indicated that, absent significant changes, every caliph would have to wage a destabilizing civil war with separatist elements upon acceding to office—a prospect that boded ill for the success of both the community of believers and Muhammad’s religious message.
But how could the umma solve this problem? How could its leadership reconcile Muhammad’s vision of internal peace with the tribes’ need for raiding? It did so by devising a plan wherein the caliphate would direct the bedouins outward against external, non-Muslim enemies. This approach would provide the young men with the regulated warfare they needed to gain prestige just as it would permit the tribes to secure the wealth that they required to survive; now, however, they would achieve those ends in a way that was consistent with Muhammad’s call for peace within the umma.
The Arab Conquests
Abu Bakr had come to a realization recognized by many political leaders throughout human history: the moment you stop expanding is the moment you start to contract. Accordingly, after concluding the Ridda Wars, Abu Bakr and the other leaders of the umma prepared to launch a sustained campaign of raiding against the nearby Byzantine and Persian Empires. It was a bold decision to say the least. As the merchants of Mecca knew from firsthand experience, those empires were fabulously
rich, and the Arabs could expect to win great exploits and to acquire great wealth by raiding them. At the same time, however, the targets of those ghazu were two of the mightiest powers that had ever existed. Attacking them was thus a highly dangerous move that could potentially imperil the fledgling community of believers.
The campaign could serve a religious purpose as well. Remember that when Gabriel transmitted the words of God to Muhammad, he was reading word for word from the Qur’an in Heaven, words that were unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable. Since Muhammad then recited those words in Arabic, logic would dictate then, that the original also was in Arabic. There were Arab tribes that were clients to the Byzantine and Persian Empires, and as such, were outside of the umma and had yet to hear the message of God, a message that had been delivered in their language, to their people. It was incumbent upon the Muslims to share this message with their fellow Arabs and bring them into the umma.
Though he had played an important part in shaping the umma’s plans, it was not Abu Bakr who would shoulder that risk. Instead, following Abu Bakr’s death in 634, direction of the campaign fell to his successor, Umar. One of the muhajirun, Umar was a severe, disciplined, and pious man who famously demonstrated his dedication to Islam’s revolutionary message by wearing homespun clothing and by taking naps in the corner of the mosque in Medina. Deeply committed to the success of the umma, he was as dedicated as his predecessor had been to ensuring that there would be no repetition of the Ridda Wars. Accordingly, after taking the title of Commander of the Faithful in addition to that of caliph, he proceeded with the plan to launch simultaneous attacks against the Persian and Byzantine Empires. It was a fateful decision, one that would mark the beginning of what turned out to be one of the most successful sustained military campaigns in history: the Arab Conquest.
The Conquest of the Byzantine Middle East
While the campaign against the Byzantine Empire began with modest goals it quickly transformed into an outright invasion. The attacks started in early 634 when mobile Arab forces entered southern Palestine from the Arabian desert in search of plunder. Meeting with immediate success, they quickly amassed large quantities of loot. More importantly, they also handily defeated a small Byzantine detachment and seized control of several border towns and cities. These early victories were modest in scale but significant in terms of their impact. Making clear that Byzantine control of Palestine was more tenuous than the Arabs had earlier assumed, they suggested to Umar that his soldiers could do more than merely make off with some stolen goods. Accordingly, the caliph ordered one of his top commanders, Khalid ibn al-Walid (585-642), to lead his small force across the desert from Iraq, where it had been raiding the Persian Empire, and to take charge of the war in Palestine. Thus reinforced, the Arabs quickly scored a stunning victory over imperial troops at the Battle of Ajnadain in July 634, a triumph that resulted in them taking control of most of Palestine. Khalid did not rest following this victory. Moving with characteristic aggressiveness, he took advantage of Byzantine disarray following the battle to lay siege to Damascus in August 634. Just a month later, he secured the city’s surrender.
The occupation of Damascus was a serious threat to the Byzantine position in Syria. Emperor Heraclius (r. 610-641) could tolerate some raids and even the seizure of a few towns on the edge of the desert, but he could not stomach the loss of one of the empire’s most important commercial and administrative centers, especially to a people that the Byzantines had historically viewed with contempt. Determined to restore Byzantine control of Syria, he responded by bringing his main field army into the region in 635. Its arrival set the stage for a decisive battle, one that would determine whether Syria would remain a province of the Byzantine Empire or whether it would become a part of the emerging Arab Empire.
The clash took place in southern Syria. Khalid initially responded to the arrival of the Byzantine army by relinquishing Damascus and retreating into Palestine. However, his withdrawal should not be interpreted as a permanent abandonment of the territory that his troops had conquered. On the contrary, it was a shrewdly designed strategic redeployment aimed at gaining the time needed for reinforcements to arrive and at ensuring that the decisive engagement occurred at a place of his choosing.
Khalid was successful on both counts. Not only was he able to greatly reinforce his army thanks to his decision to defer the decisive engagement, but he was also able to maneuver Heraclius to battle at a place conducive to the Arabs’ more mobile soldiers. Fought in the summer of 636, the resulting contest, the Battle of Yarmuk, ended in a decisive victory for the Arabs that shattered Heraclius’ army.
The Battle of Yarmuk settled once and for all the question of who would control Syria. Lacking sufficient troops to continue to contest the Arab attack, Heraclius abandoned the province and withdrew into Asia Minor through the Cilician Gate, a strategic pass in the Taurus Mountains. Gazing down on Syria for the last time from the top of the pass, he reputedly acknowledged the province’s permanent loss by declaring “‘Peace unto thee, O Syria, and what an excellent country for the enemy.’” Whether he actually uttered those words or not, his withdrawal made clear that Byzantine rule in the Levant had come to an end, a reality that the remaining cities in Syria and Palestine quickly grasped. With the return of imperial authority now an impossibility, their leaders opted to come to terms with the Arabs rather than to fight what they concluded would be a doomed effort. Even Jerusalem, seat of one of the Church’s five patriarchates and site of the Crucifixion, negotiated an agreement with Umar’s troops. Thus, with shocking suddenness, a millennium of Greco-Roman rule in Syria and Palestine came to a close.
Byzantine Egypt came next. If Syria had been important to the empire, Egypt was its economic linchpin. Thanks to the steady supply of water that the Nile River provided, the province produced far more wheat and other agricultural goods than its people consumed. That surplus was critical to the well-being of the empire in two ways. First, it supplied the food that sustained the hundreds of thousands of residents of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. Second, it produced substantial annual tax receipts that provided the government with the revenue needed to pay for its army. In other words, without Egypt and its surplus the Byzantine government would have been unable either to fund its military or to keep its capital fed. Unsurprisingly, the empire devoted a great deal of attention to the province’s defense. It garrisoned a large force of troops in Egypt and maintained a series of strategically placed fortifications including the imposing fortress of Babylon at the base of the Nile River Delta. Additionally, the empire stationed a large force of troops in the well-protected walled city of Alexandria located on the western edge of the delta. So long as Alexandria remained in imperial hands, the province could not be captured.
Indeed, it seemed at first Umar had no desire to attack Egypt. Concerned with consolidating authority in Syria and an ongoing war with Persia, a campaign in Egypt could have overstretched Arab forces and led to disaster. Enter the veteran commander Amr Ibn al-As (c. 573-664). Alongside Walid he had been instrumental in the conquest of Syria, and in fact had been named as governor of Palestine by Abu Bakr before the invasion had even left Arabia. Prior to all of this, Amr had been a wealthy merchant and his trading interests in Egypt made him well aware of the importance of the province. The traditional Muslim sources generally hold that Amr undertook the campaign with Caliph Umar’s reluctant approval, though a number of accounts hold that he entered the region without Umar’s authorization. The attack, which began in 640 seemed a fool’s errand. The army he led was tiny and appeared to be no match for Egypt’s extensive fortifications and powerful garrison. Nonetheless, he and his troops quickly defeated a Byzantine field army and compelled the fortress of Babylon to surrender. By early 641, as a result, central Egypt had come under Arab control.
Amr was pleased with his victory but was unwilling to settle for anything less than full control of the entire province. He consequently followed his capture of central Egypt by besieging Alexandria. Like Babylon, it appeared to be beyond the capabilities of his small army. With imposing walls, a large garrison, and a port able to receive supplies, the city appeared to be all-but invulnerable. Despite the apparent solidity of its defenses, however, the Arab commander once again achieved a nearly cost-free victory. Taking advantage of dissension among the defenders, he was able to secure the city’s surrender from its leader, the Patriarch Cyrus in September 642. Thus, in just two short years, Egypt and its massive grain production had become part of the rapidly expanding caliphate.
The Conquest of the Persian Empire
Astonishingly, at the same time that Arab armies were overrunning the Byzantine Middle East, they were simultaneously dismembering the Persian Empire. Like the attacks on Palestine and Syria, the invasion of the Sassanid domain began with a series of raids. These incursions prompted the Persian Shah, Yazdgard III (r. 632-651), to deploy his army to the border to repel the raiders. Prudence dictated a quick Arab retreat in the
face of the shah’s superior numbers; sensing opportunity, however, Umar instead decided to reinforce his troops in Mesopotamia—thus setting the stage for a decisive clash. It occurred just outside the small settlement of Qadisiya on the border between Mesopotamia and the Arabian Desert. Details of the battle are hazy due to an acute absence of sources, historians are not even sure if it occurred in 636, 637, or 638, but the outcome was clear: Umar’s forces won a crushing victory that shattered the Persian army and left the empire defenseless. The invaders wasted no time in exploiting their triumph. Moving quickly, they followed the battle by seizing Mesopotamia, including, pivotally, the imperial capital of Ctesiphon. Yazdgard III and the four-century old Sassanid Dynasty were in serious trouble.
The Arab occupation of Mesopotamia meant that the young shah could no longer access the resources of what was by far the wealthiest part of his empire. Meanwhile, the loss of the capital not only greatly complicated his efforts to provide central direction to the defense of his realm, but also scattered his tax officials, thereby leaving him bereft of the bureaucrats needed to raise the revenue on which the restoration of his armies depended.
The Arabs did not stop with the conquest of Mesopotamia, moreover. Taking advantage of the disarray that the capture of the Persian capital had created, they surged out of Iraq and onto the Iranian plateau. While they met significant resistance in a few areas, Arab forces pushed inexorably eastward over the course of the late 630s and 640s. Yazdgard III could do little to stem the tide. With Arab armies nipping at his heels, he had no choice but to flee eastward while attempting, unsuccessfully, to rally the Persian nobility and to win the support of the Turkish principalities of Central Asia.
The end finally came in 651. With his last supporters having deserted him, the shah took shelter in a watermill just outside the caravan city of Merv in modern-day Turkmenistan. Accounts differ about what happened next, but all end with the last Persian shahanshah, or king of kings, dying, abandoned and alone, at the hands of the miller. So ended the Persian Empire, and so, at least for a time, ended the Arabs’ astounding surge out of Arabia.
Sources of Arab Success
The extent of the Arab Conquest at the time of Yazdgard III’s death was staggering. Between 632 and 651, Arab armies had established an empire of almost incomprehensible size. They had conquered a territory that stretched from Yemen in the south to the Caucasus Mountains in the north, and from Egypt in the west to Central Asia in the east. Even more shocking, they had, in the process substantially reduced one of antiquity’s greatest empires and had utterly destroyed another. How did they do it? What accounted for the tremendous sequence of victories that Arab armies achieved during this period?
From the start, popular explanations for the Arabs’ success have tended to stress religious factors. Unsurprisingly, Muslims have long maintained that the Arabs’ string of victories was a product of divine will. That is, they believed that the caliphs’ soldiers had triumphed because they were followers of the true religion and thus had God on their side. Indeed, so far as the early Muslims were concerned, the sheer scale of their conquests demonstrated conclusively that Islam was the correct path. How else could they explain their armies’ seemingly preternatural success?
Many people in the West have also long posited a religious explanation for the Arab Conquest, though they reject the idea that the Arabs had God on their side. Instead, those arguing from this perspective have asserted that Arab success was a product of Islam’s newness and its militarist ideology of jihad, the lesser one, and understood here to mean ‘holy war.’ According to this interpretation, Arab soldiers fighting against Byzantine and Persian forces prevailed for two reasons. First, they had the ‘zeal of the convert,’ meaning that they had the extra motivation and fervor typically ascribed to those new to a faith. Second, they were inspired by an Islamic tradition that holds that a Muslim fighter who died while on jihad would go immediately to heaven where he would enjoy the company of seventy-two virgins. This interpretation concludes that these factors ensured that Arab Muslim soldiers entered battle without fearing death, a conviction that dramatically boosted their morale and all-but assured them of victory.
Present-day scholars take issue with these explanations. They dismiss the traditional Muslim interpretation that divine favor explains Arab success on the grounds that such an argument is unprovable, and thus inconsistent with modern rules of scholarship and argumentation. For different reasons, they also dispute the popular Western view that Arab success stemmed from a combination of religious zeal and the enticement of immediate admission into heaven. Noting that the promise of seventy-two virgins dates only to the ninth century, they reject the idea that it could have been a motivating factor in the wars of expansion. Instead, while acknowledging that Islam played a major role in motivating and organizing the Arab Conquest, they generally agree that three key factors made possible the caliphate’s remarkable military success in the decades immediately following Muhammad’s death: the Arabs’ mobility and effective leadership; deep-seated religious discontent in Syria and Egypt; and the peculiar weakness of the Byzantine and Persian Empires in the 630s and 640s.
Arab Mobility and Leadership
First, historians today argue that the Arabs benefited from superior mobility and unusually effective leadership. Possessing large herds of camels and operating without cumbersome and slow-moving supply trains, the Arabs easily outmaneuvered their Byzantine and Persian enemies and were able to mass troops quickly at the point of battle. They also enjoyed highly capable leadership from far-sighted political figures such as Umar and from skilled battlefield commanders such as Khalid and Amr al-As. An episode recounted by the Muslim historian Al Tabari (839-923) illustrates the critical role that mobility and strong leadership played in securing one of the Arabs’ earliest victories against the Byzantine Empire. As he relates, Umar’s decision in 634 to order Khalid to rapidly shift his force from Mesopotamia to Palestine so that they could help the Arab soldiers there take advantage of the province’s weak defenses presented Khalid with a dilemma. If he took the long-but-secure route along the Euphrates River, his army would safely make the journey but would arrive too late to help defeat the Byzantine forces massing in Palestine. If he instead marched directly across the waterless Syrian Desert, he risked seeing a large part of his force die of thirst. A savvy leader, Khalid quickly came up with a clever way of ensuring that his soldiers could safely take the direct route through the desert. Before setting out, he had his camels drink their fill; he then ordered his men to periodically kill some of the animals during their journey across the desert and to fill their canteens with drinking water from the deceased animals’ stomachs. In this way, his army was able to make it to Palestine in time to help win the critical Battle of Ajnadain.
Religious Dissension
Historians today also stress the role that religious discord within the Byzantine Middle East played in facilitating the Arab Conquest. As noted in Chapter Two, the majority of Christians in that part of the empire were Monophysites who believed that Jesus was wholly divine in nature. Known as Copts in Egypt and Jacobites in Syria, they had faced concerted persecution from both the imperial government and the Church hierarchy ever since the Council of Chalcedon had declared their beliefs to be heresies in 451. They did enjoy a brief respite under Persian occupation during the early-seventh century, a point we shall return to in a moment, but then experienced a new and particularly aggressive period of religious oppression when Byzantine officials and clerics returned in the late 620s and early 630s. Persecution was especially severe in Egypt. Installed as both Patriarch of Alexandria and provincial governor in 631, the Bishop Cyrus oversaw a brutal campaign that centered on torturing and even executing Coptic clerics who refused to recant their beliefs.
There was another religious minority that suffered even more than the Monophysites from the reinstitution of Byzantine control: the Jews. Despised by Christians of all denominations, Syria’s long-suffering Jewish population had enjoyed a brief respite under Sassanid rule before enduring renewed persecution following the Persian withdrawal. In many ways their circumstances had gotten considerably worse following Syria’s return to Byzantine rule than they had been before the Persian occupation. Most notoriously, in 632, Heraclius decreed that all Jews living within the empire had to undergo forcible conversion to Christianity.
Unsurprisingly, given this situation, the people of the Middle East did little to oppose the Arabs. Experiencing severe persecution at the very moment that the invaders were surging out of Arabia, the Copts, Jacobites, and Jews who lived in Syria and Egypt were disinclined to risk their lives resisting the Arabs. Indeed, recalling recent Byzantine persecution, many cities opted to come to terms with the Arabs rather than resist them. Some later sources even suggest that the conquered people may have preferred the Arabs to their previous imperial masters. For instance, the medieval Arab historian Al-Baladhuri (820-892) related that the Syrian city of Homs requested Arab help when threatened with recapture by Heraclius, declaring that “[w]e like your rule and justice far better than the state of oppression and tyranny in which we” lived under Byzantine authority. Meanwhile, fear that Alexandria’s huge Coptic population would help the Arabs enter the city played an important part in leading Cyrus to surrender the city in 642. Concerns that religious minorities would help the Arabs were not overblown. Textual evidence shows that the Arabs captured the city of Caesarea only after a Jewish resident eager to end Christian harassment revealed to them a secret passage through its walls.
Exhausted Empires
Finally, and most importantly, modern-day historians maintain that the peculiarly feeble state of the Byzantine and Persian Empires in the early-seventh centuries proved pivotal in making the Arab Conquest possible. Their weakness had two sources. The first was a catastrophic outbreak of plague in the sixth century known in the Byzantine Empire as the Plague of Justinian. The pandemic was a product of global trade. Travelling along the Silk Road, rat-borne fleas brought it from the east to Persia and the Mediterranean world in the early 540s. There, it spread rapidly in a series of devastating waves that resulted in the deaths of millions. Ruinous for the Persians, it proved particularly damaging to the highly urban Byzantine Empire. Moving from city to city along trade routes, it led to a 25 percent decline in the population over the course of the sixth century alone. The plague not only demoralized the people of these empires but also confronted both states with a brutally challenging fiscal situation. Each still had to guard the same borders and to maintain the same infrastructure that had existed before the outbreak, yet they now had to do so with substantially reduced populations that generated commensurately less tax revenue than they had in the past.
Second, just before the Arab invasions, the two empires had waged a debilitating, twenty-six-year-long conflict known as the Byzantine-Sassanid War. Enormously costly, it left both empires in political, economic, and, especially, military disarray. The conflict had its origins in a Byzantine coup. In 602, a low-ranking army officer named Phocas (r. 602-610) seized power by deposing and killing Emperor Maurice (r. 582-602). The Persian shah, Khosrow II (r. 590-628), sensed opportunity in the turmoil that subsequently engulfed Constantinople. Khosrow had actually been helped into power by Maurice, so he used the coup as a pretext to declare war to avenge his ally. Phocas reacted incompetently. Better at seizing power than at ruling, his main response, stripping the Danube River of troops for use against Persia, backfired badly. Not only did the powerful nomadic Avars take advantage by invading the Balkans, but the repositioned troops failed to prevent Khosrow II from making substantial incursions into Byzantine Mesopotamia. These setbacks did little to help the already-unpopular Phocas, and he soon confronted a series of plots and outright revolts that only ended when Heraclius, the powerful governor of North Africa, landed in Constantinople and seized the throne.
The situation worsened considerably during the early years of Heraclius’s reign. Taking advantage of the instability that followed Phocas’s downfall, Khosrow II’s armies broke through the Byzantine defenses in northern Mesopotamia in the early 610s. Now able to operate unhindered, they quickly occupied Syria, Egypt, and Palestine. It was a huge defeat for Constantinople. The loss of these provinces and the vital grain and tax revenues that they produced enormously complicated efforts to mount a counterattack. The situation was so bleak in the early 620s, in fact, that Heraclius gave serious consideration to relocating his government to the city of Carthage in North Africa. Ultimately, however, the emperor opted not to pursue that drastic course. Instead, he implemented a series of military and fiscal changes that he hoped would reinvigorate the army and thus lead to victory.
Heraclius’ reforms proved successful. While the Persians and their new allies, the Avars, unsuccessfully besieged Constantinople in 626, the emperor launched a bold counterstroke through Armenia. After ravaging the Persian Empire’s northern provinces, he marched into Iraq and decisively routed the Sassanid army at the Battle of Nineveh in 627. That defeat marked the end for Khosrow II. Weary of the war and the taxes it required, Persian aristocrats deposed and executed him and then elevated his son to the throne. The new shah promptly sued for peace. Relieved, Heraclius accepted, and the two empires returned to their prewar borders.
While the long war imposed huge costs on both empires, its impact was greatest on Persia. Politically, defeat thoroughly discredited its ruling house and tipped power toward the nobility. As a consequence, it experienced four years of court intrigue and civil war during which a succession of seven short-tenured shahs ruled. Only with the accession of Yazdgard III to the throne in 632 did Persia once again experience a semblance of political stability. The conflict’s fiscal and economic consequences were every bit as dire. The long war had been tremendously expensive and had resulted in the devastation of several economically critical provinces and in a steep decline in tax receipts that left the government with inadequate revenue to rebuild its thoroughly depleted military. Thus, Persia was uncharacteristically feeble following the war with the Byzantine Empire. With its army weakened, its political system destabilized, and its economy gutted, the empire that Yazdgard III inherited was a shadow of its former self, and so was in no position to repel a serious attack.
While Heraclius avoided the kind of political challenges that Khosrow II’s successors faced, he too confronted serious fiscal and military problems in the conflict’s wake. The expense of the lengthy war and the temporary loss of the empire’s two most economically vital provinces, Syria and Egypt, had placed enormous strain on the empire’s fiscal position. As a result, the Byzantine treasury came out of the conflict in no position to support another war. Meanwhile, the empire’s once firm defenses had suffered greatly as a result of neglect and wartime crises. Compelled to maintain the bulk of its army on the Persian front, Constantinople could no longer keep the Avars and Slavs at bay and had to accept the loss of its traditional defensive line along the Danube River. The situation was even more dire in the recently recovered provinces of Syria and Egypt. There, the empire confronted the daunting task of completely rebuilding its shattered defensive positions immediately following the conflict—a task that promised to take many years. Thus, like Persia, the Byzantine Empire emerged from the war ill-prepared to resist a concerted attack.
Scholars today largely agree that the feebleness of these empires following their long war with each other was the most pivotal factor in setting the stage for the success of the Arabs in the 630s and 640s. Militarily weakened, economically strapped, and, in Persia’s case, politically destabilized, they proved to be easy pickings for the Arabs’ small, but well-led and highly mobile armies. Thus, luck played an outsized part in the astonishing success of the Arab Conquest. As the historian Hugh Kennedy puts it, “[i]f Islam had been born fifty years earlier, and the early Muslims had attempted to raid Syria and Palestine in the 580s not the 630s, there can be little doubt that they would have been sent off very quickly, as the provinces were firmly controlled by the government and the defenses well organized.”
Early Islamic Government
Arab leaders were pleased with the extent and speed of the conquests, but they also understood that the rapid acquisition of a huge empire created significant practical challenges that they would need to quickly address if they were to retain possession of the valuable territory they had seized. Two issues were particularly pressing. First, they had to determine how they were going to administer the huge number of non-Muslims that they had conquered. Second, they had to develop political structures to ensure that power did not decentralize as the empire expanded but instead remained firmly in the hands of the central government in Medina. Resolving those challenges fell initially on the shoulders of Umar and his successor, Uthman, the two men who oversaw the most explosive phases of the early Arab conquest. Despite his background as a relatively modest merchant, Umar proved remarkably adept at managing the growth of the empire and at addressing the problems that came with rapid expansion. Uthman, in contrast, was unable to deal as effectively with those issues. As a consequence, the empire would experience significant upheaval during the latter part of his reign.
Umar (r. 634-644)
As his armies began racking up victory after astonishing victory, Umar grappled with the question of how his government could best administer the newly acquired territories and the huge, non-Muslim populations that they contained. According to the traditional Muslim narrative of the conquests, he addressed these issues by hewing closely to Qurʾanic decree and to Muhammad’s earlier practices. Thus, he did not order the forcible conversion of those now living under Arab rule. Instead, honoring the Qurʾan’s declaration that “there is no compulsion in religion,” he gave defeated people, particularly the ahl al-kitab or “People of the Book,” meaning Christians Jews, and, later, Zoroastrians, three choices: conversion to Islam, death, or submission to Muslim political authority as dhimmi, meaning, literally, protected people. (Qurʾan, 2:256).
Umar’s decision to rule the conquered territories indirectly and with a light hand made this last choice a hard one to refuse. Cities that surrendered could continue to administer themselves as they had in the past and merely had to agree to collect and forward the jizya, a poll tax paid by the dhimmi, to the central government in Medina. These were remarkably easy conditions made even more palatable by the fact that the jizya may have been less financially burdensome than the levies that the Byzantines and Persians had previously imposed. Meanwhile, aware that his government lacked the institutional capacity to rule the new lands at the local level, he opted to retain the existing Byzantine and Persian administrative institutions, after all, the bureaucrats who staffed them excelled at the critical task of collecting taxes. Finally, he chose to continue to use Greek and Persian as the languages of administration in the conquered territories. Collectively, these were unusually lenient terms, which, by encouraging many cities to surrender rather than to resist, paid substantial dividends for Umar and the Arabs.
Umar also took the first, critical steps toward ensuring that political power did not decentralize as the empire expanded. He refused to let Arab soldiers seize land, which would have provided them with enough wealth to be independent of Medina and instead stationed them in newly founded garrison towns such as Kufa and Basra in Iraq and Fustat (Cairo) in Egypt. This decision had far-reaching consequences. It kept the soldiers concentrated and thus ready for further military operations, and it ensured that they did not assimilate into the local culture, thus preserving their Arab-Muslim identity. Umar next set up a sophisticated fiscal system wherein an office called the diwan used the proceeds of the jizya to pay salaries to Arab warriors. By keeping the soldiers financially dependent, this arrangement ensured that they remained firmly under the control of the central government. Finally, Umar appointed governors, or amirs, to oversee the conquered territories and to ensure that the Arabs carried out his will.
Uthman (r 644-656)
Umar’s successor, Uthman, had a far more difficult time administering the evolving empire and at balancing the different interests within it. Indeed, discontent, particularly among the Alids, beset his rule from the very start. Still seething that the leading Muslims had passed Ali over in 632 and again in 634, they anticipated that he would finally become caliph following Umar’s death at the hands of a Persian slave in 644. Unsurprisingly, they greeted the news that Ali had once again been sidelined with incredulity and fury. They were especially incensed by the fact that Uthman was from Banu Umayya, the clan that had most stridently opposed Muhammad in the 610s and 620s and whose members had resisted Islam until, conveniently it seemed, they had finally felt moved to convert just as the prophet was taking control of Mecca. Ali shared his followers’ disappointment. Not wanting to stoke dissension, however, he agreed to acknowledge Uthman as the new leader of the umma. This move eased the tension that had followed the new caliph’s succession and helped ensure that Uthman enjoyed broad support at the start of his reign. Still, below the surface, there remained a latent, if as-yet inchoate dissatisfaction with Uthman’s selection among the Alids and some other important groups.
A series of controversial decisions on Uthman’s part soon brought that discontent to the surface. First, early in his reign, he had authorized the production of an official, canonical version of the Qurʾan. This action was uncontroversial in itself, but his related decree that all other variants had to be destroyed provoked heated opposition both from Muslims who preferred those versions and from those who believed that he was overstepping his authority. Second, lacking Umar’s charisma and forceful nature, he had found maintaining control of the empire increasingly difficult. To compensate, he replaced the existing amirs with members of Banu Umayya. This decision was not an unreasonable one, after all, he could rely on his kinsmen to carry out his wishes, but it alienated many of the older Muslims who resented the fact that they were increasingly under the rule of the Umayyad clan that had so bitterly resisted Muhammad and his religious message. Finally, seeking to consolidate the empire before it expanded further, Uthman brought the first phase of the Arab Conquest to a close in 651. This change did not adversely affect those already on the diwan and thus engendered little opposition among the veterans of the earlier campaigns. However, it produced significant discontent among new recruits who thereafter did not have the opportunity to earn the military experience needed to start receiving a salary, a state of affairs that they found particularly galling in light of the fact that a growing share of those who received compensation did so not because they had fought in the wars of expansion but because their fathers had.
Uthman’s position rapidly deteriorated after 650 as discontent with these decisions spread. By 655, the situation had gotten so bad that factions like the Alids and the Ansar were loudly demanding a series of sweeping changes to the government, and the garrison towns of Iraq were in outright revolt. The end came in 656. Seeking redress for their grievances, armed delegations from Egypt and Mesopotamia descended on Medina where they discovered that the rest of the Muslim elite, including, most notably, Ali, had forsaken Uthman and that the caliph was thus vulnerable and unprotected. Still, while his position may have been weak, Uthman nonetheless refused to accede to their demands. Infuriated by this, the mob responded by forcing its way into his house and murdering him while he was reading the Qurʾan.
The First Fitna
The assassination of Uthman came as a great shock to the umma and initiated a long period of instability marked by political conflict and outright fitnas, or civil wars, that lasted from 656 to 692. This era was pivotal in the political evolution of the umma and, as we shall see in Chapter Four, in the emergence of competing sects of Islam. It was a time in which divergent attitudes about who could lead the community, about how that person was to be selected, and about the nature of the caliph’s responsibilities began to take clear form. It was also a period in which the government transformed from a personal and consensual one based on traditional Arab practices to an absolutist, monarchical one patterned after the government of the Byzantine state.
Ali (r. 656-661)
The first order of business following Uthman’s death was the selection of a new caliph. Ali was the obvious choice, and he at last became the new leader of the umma. Delighted that he had finally assumed the office that they believe he had been unjustly denied, his Alid backers rejoiced. However, their elation would prove premature.
Dominated by the First Fitna, his tenure as caliph was marked by a series of challenges to his legitimacy that included the first large-scale bloodshed between rival Muslim forces. As a result, while of enormous political and religious significance, his reign would also prove to be a brief and unhappy one.
The first challenge to Ali came from Muhammad’s widow, ʿAʾisha, and two of the prophet’s former companions, Talhah (594-656) and Zubayr (594-656). Though they appeared nominally supportive of Ali immediately following Uthman’s murder, they were in fact looking for an opportunity to rally people against him. The new caliph soon obliged. Eager to restore order in chaotic Medina, he felt compelled to pardon the men involved in Uthman’s murder. This decision gave ʿAʾisha, Talhah, and Zubayr the excuse they were seeking. Using Ali’s failure to prosecute Uthman’s killers as a pretext, they declared themselves in revolt and went to the garrison town of Basra to raise an army. Having not yet fully consolidated power, Ali perceived this challenge to be a serious one. Accordingly, desperate to quickly bring it to an end, he recruited troops in Kufa, including some who had participated in Uthman’s murder, to bolster his forces before marching to Basra in late 656. There, in a contest known as the Battle of the Camel because the fiercest fighting took place around the mount ʿAʾisha was riding, Ali’s army won a decisive victory. Talhah and Zubayr both died in the battle while ʿAʾisha, whose status as the Prophet’s wife insulated her from more serious consequences, was compelled to live out the rest of her life in quiet retirement in Medina.
The Battle of Siffin, 657
Almost immediately after defeating ʿAʾisha and her supporters, Ali confronted a considerably more serious challenge: a revolt by the powerful amir of Syria, Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan (r. 661-680) of Banu Umayya. A savvy leader, the amir had deftly caught the caliph in a bind. Pointing to Ali’s reliance on the very soldiers involved in the death of his relative Uthman, Muawiyah declared that he would not acknowledge Ali as caliph until the latter had first punished the men who had killed Uthman, a demand that the amir knew the caliph could not meet in light of his dependence on Uthman’s murderers. Initially a war of words, the dispute devolved into civil war in 657. That summer, Muawiyah began marching his troops down the Euphrates River from Syria while Ali brought his up from Kufa. The two armies met at the Battle of Siffin near modern-day Raqqa in late July. The fighting did not go well for Muawiyah, and his army soon stood on the brink of defeat. In response, the amir pursued a desperate gambit. He ordered his soldiers to stick pages of the Qurʾan on their spears and to call for arbitration in a bid to sow dissension in Ali’s army. The ploy worked. Realizing that many of his soldiers would not continue the fight if he refused the offer of arbitration and others for fear of trampling on the Word of God during the battle, a frustrated Ali felt that he had no choice but to accept Muawiyah’s proposal.
New Challenges
In two ways, this decision proved to be a serious misstep on Ali’s part. First, Muawiyah’s arbitrator, the conqueror of Egypt, Amr al-As, outclassed Ali’s representative, Abu Musa Ashari. As skilled at negotiating as he was at leading troops into battle, al-As tricked Ashari into accepting an agreement that called for both Muawiyah and Ali to renounce their claims to the caliphate, after which a shura would choose a new leader. Ali was furious. Though Ashari cast the agreement as a compromise, he instead perceived it to be a one-sided deal that caught him on the horns of a dilemma. If he accepted it, he would no longer be caliph; if he instead refused to abide by a process that he had freely entered into, he would lose credibility within the umma. Ali’s assessment proved correct. Disenchanted with him when he made clear that he refused to accept the terms of the deal, many of his Iraqi supporters either abandoned him, or worse, switched sides.
Second, and more troubling, was the reaction of a small, radical group of Ali’s soldiers who soon came to be known as Kharijites, or “seceders.” Their objections centered on the caliph’s willingness to enter into arbitration with his rebellious subordinate. In their view, Ali had been obligated as caliph to enforce divine justice by attacking the rebellious Muawiyah. If the amir was guilty, God would ensure that he was defeated; if Muawiyah was instead in the right, God would see his army to victory. Arbitration was thus tantamount to a usurpation of God’s power to judge, a sin so grave in the Kharijites’ eyes that it rendered Ali’s rule illegitimate and entitled, indeed required, the community of believers to depose him. Accordingly, chanting “‘only God can decide,’” the Kharijite extremists abandoned Ali in disgust once he agreed to arbitration and began plotting his overthrow.
To achieve that goal, the Kharijites self-consciously pursued a course patterned after Muhammad’s actions four decades earlier. Just as Muhammad had retreated during the hijra and reestablished his movement in Medina when faced with a greater power, so, too, did the Kharijites withdraw, initially to central Iraq and later to Arabia and Persia. Likewise, just as the Prophet had established a new, ideal community of believers in his new home, so, too, did they act to make their state the perfect Muslim society. Finally, just as Muhammad had waged war against his Meccan enemies from his new base, so, too, did the Kharijites mount a campaign against Ali from their new home.
Thus, Ali was in an increasingly weak position following the Battle of Siffin. Not only did both Muawiyah and the Kharijites continue to deny that he was the legitimate caliph, but, more broadly, his refusal to abide by the arbitrators’ decision had seriously damaged his legitimacy within the umma. Even his successes came with caveats. Most notably, while his effort to bring the Kharijites to heel met with substantial success in 658 and thus solidified his hold on Iraq, it also drew his attention away from the more serious challenge that Muawiyah posed and, in so doing, gave his Umayyad rival the time both to rebuild his army and to gain control of the wealthy province of Egypt. By 661, as a result, Muawiyah had once again emerged as a serious menace to Ali’s position.
Now focused on the threat that Muawiyah posed, the caliph massed his army in Kufa in 661 in preparation for a campaign against Syria designed to finally bring the insubordinate amir to heel. However, he never got the chance to lead it. Instead, the day before the campaign was to begin, a Kharijite assassin struck Ali with a sword as he entered the mosque in Kufa to pray. It was a glancing blow that did little physical harm; however, the weapon had been treated with a powerful poison that slowly killed the caliph over the next two days. The political consequences of his death were enormous. With Ali gone and his supporters hopelessly divided, there was no one left to stand up to Muawiyah; as a result, the way was now paved for the amir to become caliph.
Political Debates
The First Fitna proved enormously significant for the rapidly evolving Islamic polity. It not only settled the short-term question of who would control the empire, but, more importantly, also gave form to three competing schools of thought regarding both who was eligible to serve as Commander of the Faithful and what authority that person would hold. The first, advanced by Ali’s supporters, maintained that the rightful successors descended from Muhammad through his daughter Fatimah and her husband, Ali, and that the caliph served as both a secular ruler and as a divinely- endowed religious leader, or Imam. (Not to be confused with ordinary imams, or prayer leaders.) The second position, held by those who supported Muawiyah, asserted instead that the leader of the umma had to come from the Quraysh tribe and that while the caliph was obligated to uphold the Qurʾan, the position was a fundamentally secular one with no special religious role or powers. The third view, advocated by the Kharijites, likewise held that the caliph’s role was secular, but took a very different view regarding the question of who could serve. For them, the caliph’s tribal affiliation and ancestry were irrelevant. Instead, the sole qualification that mattered was piety; in their eyes, only the most devout were eligible to serve as caliph and those that did had to remain free of sin for the duration of their reigns.
As rudimentary as they were in the 650s, these schools of thought regarding who should rule proved to be enormously influential. As we shall see in Chapter Four, the fact that religion and politics were so tightly bound together at that time meant that the opposing views held by the supporters of Muawiyah and Ali would produce parallel religious understandings that would gradually evolve into competing Islamic sects.
For its part, the Kharijite conception of the caliph’s authority never gained widespread support and thus did not produce a distinct religious perspective. Still, even it remained powerfully influential. Indeed, as we shall see, the Kharijites’ puritanical beliefs, endorsement of terrorism, and strategy of retreating before counterattacking would remain influential and would continue to profoundly shape extremist movements in the Muslim world through the present day.
The Establishment of the Umayyad Dynasty
While the beliefs of the Kharijites would exert a strong influence on extremist groups in the future, it was the new caliph, Muawiyah, who would define the political structure of the Arab Empire as it emerged from the First Fitna. He did so in the process of responding to two related issues that the civil war with Ali had revealed. First, the conflict had demonstrated that the umma would likely once more devolve into internal strife following his death if he did not first find some means of stabilizing and institutionalizing the succession. Second, the factionalism and anarchy of the First Fitna had made clear that the traditional, tribal system of personal loyalty that lay at the heart of the caliphate’s existing administrative arrangement was not up to the task of overseeing a massive, sedentary empire.
There was also the practical concern of the geography of ruling. In the time of the Rashidun the government had been run from Medina and Mecca, cities that were quickly beginning to be on the periphery of the growing empire. Though important to Islam, the two oasis cities were now on the fringes of the empire from both a demographic as well as an economic perspective. It made sense to move capitals then, as the cities could no longer provide for the needs of the Caliphate. Muawiyah had another reason for not taking up residence in Medina. There were many people there who were not happy with his ascendency to the title of Caliph. Why move to a place where he would constantly have to look over his shoulder, when he already had a perfectly viable capital further north.
Ruling from Damascus, where he had served as governor for about twenty years, Muawiyah instituted reforms on the institutions of the caliphate’s main rival: the Byzantine Empire. Drawing on three of its defining political practices, he transformed the government he inherited into a rigidly hierarchical and centralized structure that lodged enormous power in the caliph’s hands. First, he replaced the caliphate’s informal system of governance with a stratified and highly efficient bureaucracy patterned on the Byzantine system of administration, which had the side effect, for a time, of making Greek the language of governance. Central to that effort was the creation of a chancery to oversee government finances and a postal service to improve communications. Second, he remade the position of caliph from one that ruled on the basis of persuasion and consensus into one patterned after the Byzantine Empire’s absolutist emperors. Thereafter, he and his successors would no longer present themselves as first-among-equals; instead, they would rule as powerful, unchecked monarchs. Finally, determined to institutionalize a system of succession that would avoid the conflict that had ensued following Uthman’s death, he adopted the Byzantine system of hereditary succession and named his son, Yazid (r. 680-683), to succeed him, thereby establishing the Umayyad Dynasty.
The majority of Muslims came to accept these changes, if perhaps grudgingly. Many were unenthusiastic about Muawiyah and grumbled that his assumption of imperial powers was alien to Muhammad’s vision of a just and equitable society. Despite these reservations, however, opposition was muted. Wishing to avoid a repetition of the anarchy that had accompanied the First Fitna, most welcomed the return to order that Muawiyah had brought to the umma.
The Battle of Karbala, 680
Still, there remained a minority who balked at the changes that he had affected. The most vociferous among them were the Shi’at Ali. Unlike many other Muslims, they did not object to having a hereditary system of government; however, they stridently opposed the idea of having the succession run through Banu Umayya and argued with growing fervor that it should instead follow the descendants of Muhammad through the line of Fatimah and Ali. The leader of the Alids at that time, Ali’s son Hussein (626-680), reluctantly came to share this view. Though he had been content to focus quietly on his religious studies in Medina, Yazid’s accession to the caliphate repelled him and led him to declare that he was the rightful caliph. Hussein moved quickly to organize the Alids against the Umayyad government.
Lacking significant military support in the Hijaz, he left Medina in the late summer of 680 with a small contingent of soldiers and marched northward hoping to rally the strongly pro-Alid garrison town of Kufa to his cause. He never made it. Instead, the Umayyad governor of Iraq foiled his plan by first intimidating the soldiers in Kufa into inaction and then intercepting Hussein’s force shortly after it had entered Iraq. In the ensuing Battle of Karbala, Yazid’s troops handily crushed Hussein’s tiny force. The Umayyad victory was so total, in fact, that it appeared to have ended once and for all the Alid movement.
Events soon made clear that this impression was inaccurate, however. As we shall see in Chapter Four, Hussein’s defeat did not mark the end of the Alids; instead, Karbala became a pivotal moral victory in their eyes, one that marked the moment that the Shiʿat Ali transformed from a political movement into a full-blown religious sect.
Yazid likely would have institutionalized the stable system of succession that his father had sought to put in place had he enjoyed a long reign, but his death in 683 and the passing of his son and successor only two months later created a power vacuum that left Umayyad rule in complete disarray. As a result, the fighting between Yazid’s troops and the Alids that had begun in 680 morphed into a broader series of challenges to Umayyad legitimacy known as the Second Fitna (680-692). It was a chaotic time for the caliphate. While Umayyad forces retained control of Syria and Egypt, they faced challenges in every other part of the empire. In Mecca, the prominent Qurayshi Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr (624-692) declared himself caliph shortly after Yazid’s death.
Meanwhile, a pro-Alid revolutionary named Mukhtar ibn Abi Ubayd (622-687) seized control of Iraq, and the revived Kharijites reasserted themselves in central Arabia. Hopes that the accession of the new Umayyad caliph, Marwan (r. 684-685) would arrest the decline of the dynasty’s fortunes died with him the following year. Indeed, by the time his son Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705) took the throne in 685, the Umayyad Dynasty appeared to be doomed to imminent collapse.
To the surprise of many observers, it did not. Instead, Abd al-Malik’s accession to the caliphate proved to be a turning point for the dynasty. A dynamic and charismatic leader, he had the determination, intelligence, and strength of will to restore Umayyad control of the empire. He began by quickly consolidating his position in Damascus. With Syria firmly under his control, he then ordered his trusted lieutenant, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (661-714), to reestablish Umayyad authority over Iraq and to bring al-Zubayr and the Kharijites to heel. As decisive as Abd al-Malik, al-Hajjaj easily intimidated the Iraqis into capitulating in 691 before taking his army into the Hijaz. There, he demonstrated his characteristic ruthlessness by bombarding Mecca with catapults, some projectiles even struck the Kaʿba itself, before defeating al-Zubayr in 692. Having secured Mecca, he then brought the Second Fitna to a close by crushing the Kharijites in central Arabia.
The Great Leap Forward
With Abd al-Malik having solidified the dynasty’s position, he and his Umayyad successors were finally in a position to continue Muawiyah’s effort to remake the caliphate. Much of what they did built directly on his earlier efforts. For example, they further institutionalized the system of hereditary succession and absolutist rule that he had pioneered, and they expanded the bureaucratic system that he institutionalized. At the same time, however, these caliphs also broke new ground by implementing a series of enormously consequential new policies. They restarted the wars of conquest, undertook a number of important symbolic actions aimed at strengthening the caliph’s authority, and, most importantly, took steps to erode the sharp line that had heretofore existed between the Muslim Arab conquerors and the vastly more numerous subject peoples. This last initiative proved particularly consequential. With it, the Umayyads set in motion the forces that would result in the development of a new, Islamic civilization a change so pivotal that the historian Robert Hoyland refers to it as “The Great Leap Forward.”
Asserting Caliphal Authority
Abd al-Malik initiated this period of rapid change with a series of high-profile initiatives designed to enhance the authority of the caliph. First, he decreed that the issuance of currency was a prerogative reserved solely to the caliph and ordered the minting of coins with his name on them. Thereafter, the gold dinar replaced the Byzantine solidus and the silver dirham supplanted the Sassanid drachm. Of great symbolic significance, this change not only demonstrated the central government’s authority following the instability of the Second Fitna but, in banning the amirs from minting currency, also made clear that they were subordinate to the caliph. Second, he and his successor, al-Walid I (r. 705-715), commissioned monumental works of architecture—most notably the Dome of the Rock Mosque (692) on the Temple Mount and the Damascus Mosque (715). Designed to exalt Islam and to make clear its permanence, these monuments served an important secondary purpose as tangible signs of the caliphs’ power.
Renewed Wars of Conquest
Abd al-Malik also moved to restore the power of the caliph by restarting the wars of expansion. Since the first phase of the Arab Conquest had ended in 651, caliphal armies had won almost no new territory. In part, this lengthy pause in the empire’s expansion was a function of the civil wars that had dominated the 650s and 680s.
During both fitnas, the Arabs had been too preoccupied with internal conflict to engage in efforts aimed at securing new territory. Even when they had been able to wage offensive wars during this period, moreover, they had been unsuccessful. Indeed, the most notable effort to expand the empire at that time, Muawiyah’s lengthy siege of Constantinople in the 670s, had ended in abject failure. Still, lingering memories of this setback aside, al-Malik saw great value in restarting the wars of conquest. Reasoning as Abu Bakr had five decades earlier that he could best maintain internal peace and assert caliphal authority by directing the energies of the Arabs outward, he followed his victory in the Second Fitna by ordering Muslim armies to return to the offensive.
They started in North Africa. There, Arab soldiers made rapid gains against the Byzantine Empire. Moving with characteristic speed and boldness, they secured possession of the city of Carthage and the rich grainlands of the Maghreb (the Western region of North Africa) in 698. They followed by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in 711 to invade the Visigothic Kingdom that ruled Spain. According to Arab sources, they were assisted in this bold move by Julian, the rogue Byzantine governor of the North African city of Ceuta. Furious that Roderic, king of the Visigoths, had impregnated his daughter while she was serving as a lady-in-waiting in his court, Julian helped the Umayyad army, made up of Berbers and Arabs, cross to Spain as an act of revenge, declaring that “‘I do not see how I can punish him and pay him back except by sending the Arabs against him.’” While this story is almost surely apocryphal, the speed of the Arab conquest of Spain, thereafter known as al-Andalus, was anything but. By 716, Umayyad forces had completely destroyed the Visigothic Kingdom and occupied the entire peninsula save for the upland region in the far northeast. As they had with the expansion into the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim forces knew when they had conquered all that they could without overextending themselves. This is not to say that they didn’t aspire to continue to expand. Periodically, raiding parties were sent across the Pyrenees to test the mettle of the Frankish rulers to the north. It was one of these parties that was met and stopped by the major domo Charles Martel in 732 at the Battle of Poitiers (sometimes called Tours). It is important to note that this was a very small force, not the huge invasion it is sometimes made out to be by Western historians. However, they are right in one aspect, after the defeat at Poitiers/Tours, Muslim armies never again crossed the Pyrenees, contenting themselves with consolidating their rule on the Iberian Peninsula.
In the meantime, al-Walid I had restarted the wars of conquest in the east. These new attacks followed two axes: a northern one into Central Asia and a southern one into the Indus River Valley. Both campaigns were successful. In the south, an Arab army operating out of Iran took possession of the valuable region of Sind during the early years of al-Walid I’s reign in an operation that marked the first major Muslim incursion into the Indian Subcontinent. In the north, meanwhile, a second army concurrently surged across the Oxus River and into Transoxiana. In the process, it took possession of a number of key commercial centers including the entrepots of Bukhara and Samarkand and thus secured control over the western half of the Silk Road.
The only notable setback for Arab armies during this period was the failure in 718 of their second effort to conquer Constantinople. Massive in scale, the campaign came at the behest of the new caliph, Sulayman (r. 715-717), who sought a great victory to enhance his power. The results were disappointing. Though the army he dispatched was substantial and though it enjoyed the support of a huge fleet, it proved unable to break through Constantinople’s stout defenses. Instead, benefiting from the recent development of Greek Fire, a secret incendiary weapon that proved especially effective against ships, the city’s defenders succeeded in turning the tables on the Arabs and in compelling them to retreat in disorder in 718. Thereafter, the caliphate made no further effort to attack Constantinople and instead consigned itself to frequent raids into Byzantine territory in eastern Anatolia.
Islamic Civilization
Meanwhile in parallel with the renewed campaigns of conquest, the Umayyad caliphs of the late-seventh and early-eighth centuries also effected a series of legal and social changes that would have far-reaching social and political ramifications. As with the renewed wars of conquest and the symbolic elevation of the caliph, it was Abd al- Malik who initiated this process. Seeking to elevate the culture of the conquerors, he ordered that Arabic would henceforth replace Greek and Persian as the language of administration throughout the empire. It was a sweeping ruling that had far-reaching consequences. It required those who wished to work in the administration or who hoped to do business with it to learn the language of the conquerors. As a result, over time Arabic gradually displaced Coptic, Greek, and Aramaic as the dominant tongue in most of the empire. Only Persia resisted. Thanks to a proto-nationalist cultural rebirth it underwent in the ninth century, that part of the empire proved impervious to spoken Arabic. Even there, however, written Arabic made sufficient inroads that literate Persians gradually came to accept it as the basis for their system of writing. Thus, by the year 1000, the process that Abd al-Malik had set in motion was nearly complete.
Arabic had become not only the dominant language of the Middle East, but also— thanks to the caliphate’s central position in long-distance trade networks—the lingua franca of commerce in a zone stretching from Central Asia in the north to East Africa in the south, and from the Maghreb in the west to the ports of India in the east.
Even more significant for the people of the Caliphate was a push to attract non-Muslims to Islam. This new effort marked a significant change for the umma. Through the early-eighth century, Muslims had made little effort to convert non-Arabs to Islam. On the contrary, jealous of the prerogatives that accompanied membership in the ruling religion, most sought to prevent dhimmi from adopting their faith. Even the state took steps to limit conversion. Concerned about the impact that the mass adoption of Islam would have on tax receipts, the government actively discouraged conversion and required those who became Muslims, known as mawali or clients, to continue to pay the jizya tax assessed on the dhimmi. This approach was effective. Through the early eighth century, conversion rates remained low, and the overwhelming majority of the subject people retained the religion into which they had been born.
That approach began to change under Umar II. Noted for his piety, the caliph hoped to encourage conversion to Islam and wished to end the mawalis’ second-class status. Accordingly, he decreed that Muslims would henceforth pay the same taxes and be accorded the same status whether they had been born into the religion or had converted.
Meanwhile, though its provenance is disputed, tradition holds that Umar I issued it, Umar II was also likely responsible for the Covenant of Umar. Designed to formally establish the status of non-Muslims in the empire, it enumerated the rights and restrictions that would apply to the dhimmi. It barred them from riding horses or marrying Muslim women, imposed on them a series of sartorial laws that required them to identify themselves by wearing certain clothing, prohibited them from building prominent houses of worship, and required them to show deference to Muslims. In exchange, the caliph promised to protect them and guaranteed that they would enjoy the right to worship freely. The rights that the Covenant of Umar accorded to non-Muslims were substantial, particularly during an era hardly noted for its religious tolerance. Still, the restrictions that it imposed were also significant and made life considerably less pleasant for the caliphate’s non-Muslims.
Together, the religious and fiscal changes that Umar II effected marked a critical turning point for Islam’s growth in the Middle East. Over time, the carrot of lower taxes and the stick of greater restrictions on non-Muslims would help to spur a steady increase in conversion. It is important to keep in mind that this change was very gradual; indeed, Egypt would remain predominantly Christian through the fourteenth century. Nonetheless, the demographic evidence makes clear that it was during Umar II’s reign that conversion, heretofore a trickle, rose to a rate sufficient to ensure that Islam would eventually become the dominant religion in the Middle East.
As significant, in conjunction with Abd al-Malik’s reforms, Umar II’s policies substantially weakened the barriers between conquered and conqueror and led to the gradual emergence of a new, hybrid, Islamic civilization. Importantly, though the Arabs were clearly the dominant party, its creation was not simply a one-way street in which the conquerors imposed their culture and religion on the dhimmi. Instead, it was a complex, two-way exchange in which the conquered people absorbed Arab identity even as the Arabs adopted much of the existing culture of the region. Thus, Islamic art and literature derived more from pre-Islamic Persian than Arab traditions, while the legal system incorporated vast numbers of Roman rulings that belatedly gained approval as Muslim law when scholars interpreted Muhammad’s words in ways that made him appear to be their source. The result was something new: an amalgamated civilization that was Arab in language and Islamic in religion, but with strong antecedents in the pre-Islamic cultures of both the conquerors and the subjugated.
Umayyad Decline
While the Umayyads had enjoyed substantial success during the late-seventh and early-eighth centuries, they began to confront growing problems in the 730s and 740s. Three issues in particular crippled the dynasty. First, the Umayyads gained a reputation as degenerate pleasure seekers whose lives of opulence and conspicuous consumption were at sharp variance with the simplicity and morality of Muhammad and the early community of believers. This perception was more caricature than reality, but it nonetheless gained widespread acceptance at great cost the Umayyad Dynasty’s legitimacy. Second, thanks to distance and the resilience of the remaining states that bordered the Arab Empire, the wars of conquest that Abd al-Malik had restarted gradually petered out by the end of the 720s. As a result, the Umayyads no longer enjoyed the fiscal ease that the steady influx of loot had afforded earlier caliphs. Finally, the dynasty confronted a peculiarly challenging political dilemma. On the one hand, the umma could not thrive without the order, efficient tax collection, and firm enforcement of the laws that only a highly centralized government could provide; on the other, Islam was a revolutionary and egalitarian religion that explicitly challenged the political and economic hierarchies that were intrinsic to such a government. As a result of this tension, efforts to consolidate and enhance caliphal power, however reasonable or necessary, produced bitter opposition among those who saw such initiatives as a return to the arbitrary and capricious practices of the empires that the Islamic revolution had usurped.
Thus, the Umayyads found themselves in an increasingly tenuous position by the middle of the eighth century. Facing a steadily worsening fiscal situation, the ruling dynasty now confronted opposition from many Muslims who seethed at a political order that they believed ran counter to Islam’s ethic of social justice and who resented a ruling class that seemed to have abandoned Islam for hedonist excess. Indeed, though the Umayyads did not realize it, by the 740s, they were on very thin ice. At that point, all it would take to overthrow the dynasty was the emergence of an organized, ideologically appealing, and militarily powerful opposition movement within the empire.
The Abbasid Dynasty
Such a movement emerged with great suddenness in the mid-740s in the province of Khurasan. Encompassing the far-northeast part of the empire, the province contained large numbers of Arab transplants and Iranian mawali, who, as residents of a frontier province, were quite proficient at warfare. By the 740s, both groups fumed with resentment at the Umayyads. The Arab residents of Khurasan objected to the Syrian Arabs’ dominance of the government and to the high levies that the Umayyad’s assessed, while the mawali chafed at the lingering discrimination they experienced and at the dynasty’s recent decision to reimpose the poll tax on them.
Seeking to tap into that resentment, a mysterious Persian provocateur named Abu Muslim arrived in Khurasan in the mid 740s. He bore a straightforward and apocalyptic message for the disgruntled people of the province: the Umayyad caliphs were corrupt pleasure seekers who had perverted Muhammad’s vision of the ideal, egalitarian society. As such, devout Muslims were obligated to band together to overthrow the reigning Umayyad caliph and to replace him with a new ruler from Muhammad’s clan, Banu Hashim. Abu Muslim’s message fell on receptive ears throughout the empire. Its revolutionary implications drew the disgruntled Arabs and mawali of Khurasan to his cause, while his call for a new government headed by a chosen one from the family of the Prophet was, though vague, sufficiently pro-Alid to win over many of the Shi’at Ali.
Bolstered by this support, Abu Muslim felt strong enough to shift from propaganda and underground organization to open revolt in the late 740s. Under the black banners that would become the hallmark of the dynasty that he helped put in power, his army seized control of the strategic city of Merv in 747 and then drove the Umayyad governor out of Khurasan in 748. Greatly strengthened by this success, Abu Muslim and his soldiers next marched into the heart of the empire. Gaining strength as they moved westward, they swept inexorably through Iran and into southern Iraq. Finally, along the bank of a tributary of the Tigris River, Abu Muslim’s warriors decisively defeated the Umayyad army in 750 bringing the dynasty to an ignominious end.
Only then did Abu Muslim reveal that the movement he led had a narrower aim than he had previously suggested. To the disappointment of the Alids, he made clear after his victory that his goal was not to install as caliph someone from the line of Ali and Fatimah but instead to put on the throne a member of the Abbas family, which descended from Muhammad’s uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Mutatalib (c. 565-c. 653) and which had secretly masterminded the revolt that he led. In keeping with this goal, Abu Muslim arranged to have one of Abbas’s great grandchildren, Abu al-Abbas (r. 750- 754), proclaimed caliph in the mosque in Kufa, establishing, in the process, the Abbasid Dynasty that would rule the caliphate for the next five centuries.
Abu al-Abbas spent the next few years seeking to ensure that the Umayyads could not mount a comeback. Accounts of this effort differ. One holds that he had all of the remaining members of the dynasty hunted down and killed; a competing story instead maintains that he invited them to his palace for a dinner party and had his guards murder them after they had taken their seats. Regardless of which account is accurate, only two grandsons of the Umayyad caliph Hisham escaped, ‘Abd al-Rahman and his younger brother Yahya.
The prince, in his early twenties, fled first to the Bedouin of the Arabian Peninsula. Here his brother Yahya was captured and slain, but he escaped and made his way to northern Africa. Due to the political instability of the times and the newness of their rule, the ‘Abbasids had not yet been able to replace the local leadership of Egypt and the Maghreb with people loyal to them. Acting upon this weakness, the regional emirs made a push for local independence and, for a time, sheltered the surviving member of the family that had once been their patrons.‘Abd al-Rahman still did not feel safe. By 755, the Umayyad refugee had made it as far west as Ceuta, a northern Moroccan city located on the Straits of Gibraltar where he found shelter with the his mother’s family. While surveying the situation in the region, ‘Abd al-Rahman was reunited with many supporters of his family who had escaped from Damascus.
In August 755, the Umayyad prince saw an opportunity that could not be passed up. Due to the poor rule its emir, al-Andalus was torn by strife as two tribes fought for control. ‘Abd al-Rahman was invited in to lend his legitimacy as a member of the Umayyad family to intervene. On August 14, 755, ‘Abd al-Rahman landed at Almuñécar and began to gather his forces. Over the course of 756, he fought until in May he was finally able to defeat the emir outside of Cordoba. With the defeat of the old emir the main obstacle had been removed and so ‘Abd al-Rahman was able to begin the creation of his own political state.
Meanwhile, back in the east, Abu al-Abbas’s successor, al-Mansur (r. 754-775), completed the consolidation of Abbasid power. He began by moving to ensure that the dynasty faced no danger from within the movement that had put it in power. Most notably, he had the popular, and, thus, potentially dangerous, Abu Muslim executed while the latter was passing through Iraq in 755. He next dealt with the Alids. Bitter that Abu Muslim’s call for a new caliph from Muhammad’s family had failed to bring a descendant of Ali and Fatimah to power, they launched revolts against the Abbasids in 762 in the Hijaz and in Iraq. Al- Mansur’s response was swift and overwhelming. Taking advantage of dissension among the rebels, he first crushed the uprising in the Hijaz and then, in 763, defeated the Alid forces in Iraq. He followed with an extended campaign of persecution against the remaining members of Shi’at Ali that ended only when his successor, al-Mahdi (r. 775-785), took the throne.
The Abbasid Golden Age
Despite the ruthlessness with which the regime consolidated power, the Abbasid dynasty has long enjoyed a glowing reputation among non- Shi’a Muslims. In fact, while the conventional Muslim narrative of world history is highly critical of the Umayyads, it lauds the early centuries of Abbasid rule as Islam’s golden age, an idealized time of prosperity, stability, and order during which the umma thrived under the dynasty’s enlightened, Islamic government. According to this interpretation, the good times peaked under the reign of the fourth Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid (r. 786-809). Cultured, intelligent, sophisticated, and, above all, empathetic to the needs and wants of his people, al-Rashid became the quintessence of the wise and caring Islamic ruler.
Ironically, a close examination of the dynasty reveals that its system of rule was far more similar than different from that of the despised Umayyads. Like their predecessors, the Abbasids oversaw a highly centralized and unrepresentative government that was fundamentally at odds with the egalitarian message of early Islam. They also enjoyed lives of luxury that at a minimum equaled the widespread-if- exaggerated stories of Umayyad excess and pleasure-seeking. As we have seen, moreover, the Abbasids could be every bit as capricious and tyrannical as their predecessors had been. Even that most celebrated of Abbasid caliphs, Harun al- Rashid, resorted at times to arbitrary and brutal methods. When he felt threatened by his old friend, Ja’far ibn Yahya Barmakid (767-803), for example, he had Ja’far and the entire Barmakid family brutally murdered, despite the fact that it had faithfully served the Abbasids since the beginning of the dynasty.
What then accounts for the Abbasid Dynasty’s continued good reputation? After all, the fact that the royal executioner stood at the side of the caliph during public ceremonies hardly suggests that the dynasty embraced restrained rule or Islamic egalitarianism. To some degree, the Abbasids’ enduring good press is the product of a sense of political cynicism that settled onto the Muslim world in the early years of the dynasty. When the social and political revolution that the Abbasids had promised failed to arrive, most Muslims grudgingly came to accept that all secular rulers were power hungry and thus bound to behave just as the Umayyads had. Accordingly, the majority of Muslims thereafter assumed a pragmatic attitude toward the ruling elite: so long as the Abbasid caliphs engaged in their worst and most excessive behavior behind closed doors and so long as they continued to uphold the stability upon which the success of Islam depended, they would look past the dynasty’s moral failings and give it their support. More importantly, as we shall see in Chapter Four, the Abbasids’ willingness to leave key religious questions, including the articulation and interpretation of Islamic law, to religious scholars secured for the dynasty the support of the influential clerical establishment, which was thereafter only too happy to celebrate the Abbasids and to buttress their rule.
The caliphate’s strong economy during the first few centuries of Abbasid rule also strengthened the dynasty’s reputation. In this regard, the Islamic world really did enjoy a golden age under Abbasid rule. The rapid growth of the Arab Empire had created a huge, unified, and stable market that was conducive to internal trade. The resulting expansion reached its apogee under the Abbasids. Indeed, by the early years of the dynasty’s rule, the economy of the empire had grown so large and sophisticated that it had begun to pull both nearby and distant regions of the globe into a growing, Middle East-centered commercial order. With Iraq acting as its center, a massive new network of trade routes rapidly emerged to connect the economies of the Middle East, North Africa, Africa south of the Sahara, India, Central Asia, and even China into a cohesive trading bloc for the first time.
The new commercial order that the Abbasids oversaw benefited both the rural and urban economies. In the agricultural sector, connection with distant regions brought valuable new crops such as rice, bananas, sugarcane, and cotton to the Middle East for the first time. Coupled with the attention that the dynasty lavished on the irrigation works of Egypt and Iraq and with the development of new innovations such as windmills and watermills, the adoption of these new crops increased agricultural productivity and contributed to the diversification of diets. Thanks to growing commercial contact with other cultures, meanwhile, new industries soon took root in the empire’s rapidly growing cities. For example, sugarcane and cotton brought to the Middle East from India stimulated the development of sugar refining and textile manufacturing in the cities of Iraq. The rapidly expanding paper industry likewise had external origins. A technology of Chinese origin, paper had spread to Central Asia in the centuries prior to the arrival of the Arabs in that region. The Arabs were quick to see its practical benefits. Indeed, within just a few decades, a substantial number of papermills existed in the cities of Iraq, and paper had become cheap and plentiful throughout the caliphate.
Finally, the Abbasids’ enduring reputation stemmed from the fact that their approach to governance, while similar in broad outlines to that of the Umayyads, also broke with their predecessors’ policies in a number of important ways. For example, aware of simmering popular anger at Syrian dominance of the empire under the Umayyads, the Abbasids had begun the dynasty’s reign by quickly relocating the center of power to Iraq. Likewise, they acted to placate the heretofore disgruntled mawali by permanently abolishing the remaining special rights that the Arabs had enjoyed and by replacing the Arab tribal forces that had constituted the core of the empire’s army since the time of Umar with a new, professional military dominated by the Muslims from Khurasan who had put the dynasty in power.
Less popular but still tolerable was a cultural shift. Whereas the Umayyad dynasty could be seen as an Arab-Greek fusion, the Abbasids gradually embraced Persian ideas and practices. The dynasty quickly made the Sassanid shahs’ claim that they ruled by divine right their own; they took imperious new titles such as God’s Deputy on Earth and revived older Persian designations like Shadow of God on Earth. By Harun al-Rashid’s time, the Abbasids had even adopted complex Persian ceremonies and court dress designed to exalt the status of the monarch and to cast him as detached from the day-to-day world of his subjects. Likewise, the caliphs soon required all subjects, even high-ranking ones, to prostrate themselves and kiss the ground when they approached him. Clearly, the position of caliph had changed considerably from the days when Umar took naps in the corner of the mosque in his homespun clothing! One might think that the gap between the severe-but-approachable Umar and the wealthy-and-aloof Harun al-Rashid would have produced resentment toward the caliph. Perversely, however, the sense of distance and remove that the Abbasids’ elaborate, Persian-style rituals created may have helped to insulate the caliph from popular anger. Thereafter, rather than blaming the ruler for actions they did not like, people held his viziers, the officials who were in charge of implementing those policies, responsible.
Baghdad
All of these trends, the embrace of the Umayyads’ centralized system of government, the expansion of the economy, the political shift to the east, and the adoption of Persian political practices, came together in the Abbasids’ new capital city: Baghdad established by Al-Mansur established in 762. Seeking a strategic location for his seat of government, he ordered his chief vizier to build the city on the west bank of the Tigris River at the point where it was nearest to the Euphrates. His choice of location was excellent. The city not only enjoyed ample water but also had easy access via river and canal to the abundant food of Iraq. Indeed, it was a natural spot for an important city, a fact attested to by its proximity to both the ruins of Babylon, the capital of Hammurabi’s (c. 1810-1750 BCE) ancient empire, and to Ctesiphon, the seat of the Sassanid Persian Empire. This too was important, as being geographically nearer to the Persians showed that population that this new dynasty was willing to put themselves at their mercy.
The city itself was very different from the Roman and Sassanid ones that the Abbasids inherited. Laid out as a perfect circle, it was an orderly, planned city that contained the caliph’s palace, a mosque, and buildings for the administration of the empire. As such, it was well geared both to the centralized system of government that the Abbasids borrowed from the Umayyads and to the ritualized court ceremonies that they adopted from the Persians.
Baghdad did not serve strictly administrative and ritualistic functions for very long, however. Instead, its central location and access to the court quickly drew large numbers of people and its population soon topped 500,000. A disproportionate share of those residents were intellectuals. Enticed by the patronage that the palace provided, legal scholars, scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers flocked to the city. As we shall see in Chapter Four, those thinkers would make Baghdad the greatest intellectual center of the Middle Ages. The city also had a huge population of merchants. Attracted by Baghdad’s central location, political importance, and easy access by river, they soon turned the city into a major global entrepot. Traders based in the city exchanged silk and porcelain from China; gold, enslaved people, and salt from Africa; metalworks from Syria; spices and textiles from India; and leather goods from Spain. Indeed, for several hundred years, it was the emporium of the world, standing, without challenge, as the nexus of the globe’s most important trading system.
The Historical Debate: The Arab Conquest
This chapter reflects the standard understanding of the Arab Conquest and the development of the caliphate through the reign of Harun al-Rashid. That is, it broadly summarizes both the conventional Muslim narrative and the dominant interpretation that Western scholars articulated in the twentieth century. However, this view has not gone uncontested. On the contrary, a number of historians have challenged the standard account in a variety of ways over the past few decades, particularly its treatment of the Arab Conquest. Some of these reinterpretations accept the general thrust of the traditional understanding of the Arab invasions of the Byzantine and Persian Empires while still making important corrections to it. Others go much further in reassessing the conquest. Building on the work of the Islamic Revisionist historians discussed in Chapter Two, these scholars have instead developed new interpretations that upend long-held understandings of who participated in the invasions, what their motives were, and how they dealt with the newly conquered subject peoples.
These reinterpretations of the Arab Conquest emerged as a result of the doubts that many scholars have about the reliability of the sources on which the standard account is based. Put simply, historians who study the first century of the Arab Empire face the unfortunate reality that there exists precious little firsthand evidence of the invasions. The extant primary sources on the conquest are fragmentary and can be counted on the fingers of one hand. What does exist, instead, are narrative histories authored by Muslim scholars like al-Baladhuri and al-Tabari. Writing centuries after the events they described, they based their accounts on long-lost works produced in the eighth century that were themselves derived from earlier oral accounts passed from generation to generation. Unsurprisingly, many modern historians doubt the reliability of these narratives. They question whether the original oral accounts were misrepresented and argue that writers like al-Tabari and al-Baladhuri were likely shaping their histories to support one side or another in the religious and political debates of the centuries in which they lived.
Some historians have applied methods of critical analysis to these sources to draw conclusions that make relatively modest changes to the traditional narrative. Pointing to al-Baladhuri and al-Tabari’s mention of Persian nobles joining forces with the conquerors without having to convert to Islam or pay the jizya tax, for example, Hugh Kennedy concludes that the Arabs treated the conquered people with substantially more flexibility than the tripartite, ‘convert, die, or submit’ ultimatum suggests. Meanwhile, Fred Donner’s critical reading of the ninth-and-tenth century sources leads him to conclude that the traditional narrative’s emphasis on religion as a major force in organizing and shaping the conquest is correct. However, he disputes the standard view that the invasion of the Byzantine and Persian Empires was a narrowly Islamic initiative. Instead, asserting that “the Believers,”his term for the early umma, initially practiced a “non-confessional” monotheism that accorded equal status to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, he argues that the Arab Conquest was, at least at first, an ecumenical venture and claims that Islam only began to develop as a distinct religion in the late-seventh century.4 Other scholars are even more dubious of the traditional account and the evidence on which it rests. Relying on non-Arabic, seventh-century sources, for instance, Robert Hoyland goes considerably further than Donner in downplaying Islam’s role in the Arab Conquest. While acknowledging that the religion’s similarity to the other Abrahamic faiths gave it an important “integrative capacity” that allowed it to secure the conquered people’s acceptance of the Arabs as rulers, he argues that the Muslim community, which he calls “Muhammad’s west Arabian coalition,” was but one group among many seeking to exploit the weakness of the established states in the mid- seventh century. Indeed, he claims that incursions by other, often Christian Arab forces predated the umma’s raids. However, he continues, ninth-century Muslim historians erased the significant role that non-Muslims played by revising the chronology of the conquest to give it a strictly Islamic character—a change in interpretation, Hoyland asserts, that gradually “airbrushed out of history” the contributions of Arabs who were not part of Muhammad’s group. Hoyland also takes issue with the conventional narrative’s implicit claim that the Arabs were outsiders seeking to conquer the established order; instead, he contends that they were insiders—clients or, in many cases, residents of the Byzantine and Persian Empires, who used the sophisticated weapons and tactics that they had acquired while serving in the armies of those states to effect what turned out to be a wildly successful effort to win a share of political and economic power from within. This particular argument has received limited support.
Conclusion
Regardless of the reason for the Arab Conquest, the results were enormously consequential. Indeed, the political, economic, and cultural changes that it brought about were so significant to the course of global history that its emergence conventionally marks the dividing line between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Politically, it established a new superpower of immense scale that ended the Persian Empire and severely reduced the Byzantine Empire. Economically, it produced a new system of global trade centered on Baghdad that displaced long-established commercial relations and that massively enriched the Middle East. Most importantly, the Arab Conquest resulted in the emergence of a new, enduring, Islamic-based civilization. It is to the evolution of the faith and to the social and cultural changes that accompanied its transformation that we shall next turn.
