The Great Arab Conquests

A thousand miles away across the Syrian desert to the east, the Lakhmids, managers of the desert margins for the Sasanian kings, also held court. The Lakhmids seem to have been more settled than the Ghassānids and their capital at Hīra, just where the desert meets the richly cultivated lands along the lower Euphrates, was a real Arab town. Like the Ghassānids, the Lakhmids were Christians. They were also great patrons of the earliest Arabic literature. Poets and story-tellers flocked to their court, and it was probably here that the Arabic script, soon to be used for recording the Koran and the deeds of the early conquerors, was perfected. A strong Arab identity was emerging, not yet ready to conquer great empires, but possessing a common language and, increasingly, a common culture.

Many Arabs lived as Bedouin in tribes, following a nomadic lifestyle and living quite literally in a state of anarchy, of non-government. These nomads depended on their flocks, above all on sheep and camels. The different sorts of animals led to different patterns of subsistence. Camel-rearing was the life-support system of the nomads of the inner desert. Camels can survive for two weeks or more without water, and this gave the Bedouin the capacity to move far away from the settled lands and take advantage of scattered grazing and remote water sources in areas where none of the armies of the imperial powers could hope to pursue them. Ovocaprids, sheep and goats, are much less self-sufficient. They need to be watered every day, cannot survive on the rough, sparse herbage that can sustain camels and need to be taken to market when the time comes for them to be sold and slaughtered. Sheep nomads lived within striking distance of the settled lands and had a much closer interaction with the settled people than the camel nomads of the inner desert. The camel nomads were more completely independent. Almost immune from attack in their desert fastnesses, they were the real warrior aristocracy of the Arabs.

Tribes, rather than states or empires, were the dominant political forces in the desert, and sometimes reading accounts of the early years of Islam and the great conquests, it is easy to get the impression that tribal loyalties and tribal rivalries were as important in motivating the Arabs to fight and conquer as the new religion of Islam or the desire for booty. But in reality, tribal loyalties were more complex and varied than at first appears. The Arabs pictured themselves as living in tribes. Each tribesman believed that all the members of the tribe were descended from a common ancestor and called themselves after him, so the tribe of Tamīm would call themselves, and be called by others, the Banū Tamīm. In reality this self-image was a bit misleading because large tribes like the Tamīm never met together and had no single chief or common decision-making process. The crucial choices about where to camp, where to find grazing and how to avoid the enemy were made in much smaller tenting groups, even by individual families. Furthermore membership in tribes was not entirely determined by biological descent. Men could and did move tribe to attach themselves to new groups. A successful leader might find that his tribe had increased in number quite dramatically while a failed chief would find his men slipping away. Because they thought in biological links, however, men would not say that they changed tribe but rather that they must have been in some way part of that kin all along.

Indeed, without kin a man and his family could not survive in the desert. This was an almost unimaginably harsh environment. Beasts might die, grazing fail, wells dry up and enemies pounce. There was no police force, not even a corrupt and inefficient one, no ruler to whom the victim could appeal: only the bonds of kinship, real or fictional, could protect a man, offer help in times of need, offer protection or the threat of vengeance in time of attack. A man without kin was lost. In some ways the early Muslim leadership set out to destroy or at least reduce the loyalty to tribe. The Muslim community, the umma, was to be a new sort of tribe, based not on descent but on commitment to the new religion, the acceptance that Allāh was the one true God and that Muhammad was his prophet. The umma would offer the protection and security that people had previously been given by their tribe. In reality it was not easy to dismantle the tribal loyalties that had served men so well for so long. In the early years of the conquests, men fought in tribal groups and gathered round their tribal banners on the field of battle. During these wars, members of the tribe of, say, Tamīm must have fought alongside fellow tribesmen whom they had never met and possibly had never heard of before. When they were settled in the new military cities in Basra and Kūfa in Iraq or Fustāt in Egypt, they were placed in tribal groups. When it came to the struggle for resources, for salaries and booty, tribal rivalries acquired a fierce and brutal intensity which they had seldom had in the more open and scattered society of the desert. Far from being diminished by the new religion of Islam, tribal solidarities were in some ways reinforced by the events of the conquest. It would be wrong, however, to overestimate the role played by tribes. In reality tribal loyalties were crucially important to some people at some times, literally a matter of life and death, but at other times they were disregarded, ignored and even forgotten.

Tribes were led by chiefs, normally called sharīf (pl. ashrf) in early Muslim times. Leadership within the tribe was both elective and hereditary. Each tribe or sub-tribe would have a ruling kin, brothers and cousins from whom the chief would normally be chosen. While there was no formal election, tribesmen would offer their loyalties to the most able, or the luckiest, member of the ruling kin. Chiefs were certainly chosen for their ability as war leaders, but bravery and skill in battle were far from being the only qualities required. A chief needed to be a skilled negotiator, to resolve quarrels between his followers before they got out of hand, and to deal with members of other tribes and even the imperial authorities. Chiefs also had to have intelligence - the sort of intelligence which meant that they knew where the fickle desert rain had recently fallen, and where they could find the small but succulent patches of grazing that would mean their followers and their flocks could eat and drink well. To do this, a successful chief needed to keep an open tent. The famed hospitality of the Bedouin was an important part of a complex survival strategy: guests would certainly be fed and entertained but in exchange they would be expected to provide information about grazing, warfare and disputes, prices and trading opportunities. Without these informal communication networks, news of the coming of Islam could never have spread through the vast, nearly empty expanses of desert Arabia, and the armies that were to conquer the great empires could never have been assembled.

With a very few exceptions, all adult male Bedouin could be described as soldiers. From an early age they were taught to ride, wield a sword, use a bow, travel hard and sleep rough, finding their food where they could. In conditions of tribal competition there were no civilians. The Bedouin lived in tents, painted no paintings and built no buildings: they are virtually invisible in the archaeological record. They did, however, excel in one major art form: their poetry. The poetry of the Arabs of the jhiliya (the period of ‘ignorance’ before the coming of Islam) is a unique and complex art form. Among later Arab critics it has often been held up as a model of poetic form, to be admired rather than imitated. Some modern scholarship has questioned its authenticity, but the general consensus is that at least some of the material offers a witness to the ideals and mindsets of the pre-Islamic Arabs.

The poetry is firmly set in the Bedouin desert environment. Much of it adheres to the fairly strict formula of the qasīda, a poem of perhaps a hundred lines, spoken in the first person, describing the loves and adventures of the poet, the excellence of his camel, the glories of his tribe or patron. The virtues of which he boasts are the virtues of a warrior aristocracy. He is brave and fearless, naturally, he can endure great hardships, he has admirable self-control and he is an irresistible lover and a great hunter. Poets are often subversive, even outlaw characters, seducing other men’s wives with shameless enthusiasm, and they often see themselves as loners, one man and his camel against the world. There is no sign of formal religion, no mention of a deity, just the power of blind fate, the threatening beauty of the desert landscape.

We came upon them at dawn with our tall steeds, lean and sinewy
and spears whose steel was as burning flame
And swords that reap the necks, keen and sharp of edge, kept carefully
in the sheaths until time of need
And war-mares, springing lightly, of eager heart, strongly knit
together, not to be overtaken
We came upon their host in the morning, and they were like a flock
of sheep on whom falls the ravening wolf
And there were left there on ground of them Amr and Amr and
Aswad - the fighters are my witness that I speak true!
We fell on them with white steel ground to keenness: we cut them to
pieces until they were destroyed;
And we carried off their women on the saddles behind us, with their
cheeks bleeding, torn in anguish by their nails.³

Truly War knows that I am her child
And that I am the chief who wears her token in fight.
And that I dwell on a mountain top of glory in the highest honour
And that I render restive and distrest
Mail-clad warriors in the black dust of battle.
And that I dash upon them when they flinch before me,
In an attack more fierce that the spring of a lion
With my sword I smite on the day of battle
Cleaving in twain the rings of the strongest mail.
This then is my equipment - would that the young warrior
Could see the length of days without fear of old age!
Truly the folk of Āmir know
That we hold the peak of their mount of glory
And that we are the swordsmen of the day of battle,
When the faint hearts hold back and dare not advance.⁴

These, then, were the values held by many of the Bedouin who participated in the early Muslim conquests. The poets glorify swiftness and strength in battle and the excellence of their riding animals. There is also a strong emphasis on individual valour. The poetic warrior is defending his tribe, laying waste rival tribes; but perhaps most of all he is concerned for his own bravery and reputation. The armies of Islam would have taken into battle many of these same ideals, especially the concern for reputation of both individual and tribe. Consciously or unconsciously, they would have been aware of the warrior poets of the jhiliya as role models.

While much of Arabia is desert, the peninsula also includes some surprisingly varied landscapes. In the highlands of Yemen in the south-western corner, and parts of Oman in the south-east, high mountains attract enough rainfall to allow permanent agriculture. Here the people lived, as they still do today, in stone-built villages perched on crags, cultivating crops on terraces on the steeply sloping hillsides. The people of the villages were grouped into tribes, like the Arabs of the desert, but they were not nomads. It is impossible to know what proportion of the Arabs who joined the armies of the conquests came from these settled communities. In modern times, the population of small Yemen is almost certainly higher than the whole of vast Saudi Arabia, and we can be certain that many of the conquerors, especially those who went to Egypt, North Africa and Spain, came from groups who were not Bedouin at all but whose families had cultivated their small but fertile fields for generations.

The people of the settled south had a very different political tradition from that of the Bedouin of the rest of the peninsula. From the beginning of the first millenium BC, there had been established, lasting kingdoms in this area, and temples built with solid stone masonry, great square monolithic columns, palaces and fortresses, and a monumental script had been developed to record the doings of founders and restorers.⁵ This was a society in which taxes were collected and administrators appointed. In the heyday of the great incense trade in the last centuries BC, a whole string of merchant cities existed along the edge of the Yemeni desert, caravan cities through which the precious perfumes, frankincense and myrrh were transported by trains of camels from the rugged southern coast, where the small scraggy trees that produced the precious resins grew, towards Mediterranean ports like Gaza, where the markets were. This was also a society that could organize massive civil-engineering projects like the great dam at Marib. Here, on the sandy margins of the Empty Quarter, the rainwater from the Yemeni highlands was collected and harvested, distributed through an artificial oasis to provide drinking water and to irrigate crops.

By the end of the sixth century, when Muhammad began his preaching, the glory days of the south Arabian kingdoms were well in the past. By the first century AD, the incense trade had shifted as improved navigation and understanding of the monsoons meant that the maritime route up the Red Sea became the main commercial thoroughfare. The last of the ancient kingdoms, Himyar, was based not on the old trade routes of the interior but on the towns and villages of highland Yemen. By the late sixth century, Himyar itself was in decay and the great Marib dam had been breached, never to be repaired again, the oasis abandoned to wandering Bedouin. The last dated inscription in the old south Arabian script was set up in 559. With the end of the kingdom of Himyar came foreign rule, first by the Ethiopians from the 530s and then by Persians. Some men could still read the old monumental inscriptions, folk memories remained of old kingdoms, and the final breach in the late sixth century of the Marib dam was recognized as a turning point in the history of the area.

There were scattered towns in other parts of the Arabian peninsula and networks of markets and traders. In the hilly areas of the Hijaz in western Arabia there were small commercial and agricultural towns, including Medina and Mecca, and it was the inhabitants of these small Hijazi towns who were the elite of the early Muslim empire. There were settled communities, too, in the great date-growing areas of Yamāma on the Gulf coast. Most of these towns and markets were mainly used for the exchange of the wool and leather of the pastoralists, and for the grain, olive oil and wine that were the main luxuries. From about AD 500, however, a new economic dynamic began to emerge, the mining of precious metals in the Hijaz.⁶ Why it began at this time, and not before, is unclear: possibly chance discoveries set off a wave of prospecting. Both archaeological and literary evidence show that this mining was increasing in importance around the year 600 and that some of the mines were owned and managed by Bedouin tribes like the Banū Sulaym. The production of precious metals greatly increased the prosperity of the area. Bedouin, or at least some Bedouin, now had enough money to become important consumers of the produce of the settled lands. Groups of merchants emerged to import goods from Syria, setting up networks between the tribes to allow their caravans to pass in peace.

The most important of these new trading centres seems to have been Mecca. Mecca is situated in a barren valley between jagged arid mountains, a very discouraging environment for a city, but it seems to have had a religious significance that attracted people. A shrine had grown up around a black meteoritic stone. The people of the town claimed that the shrine had originally been founded by Abraham and that it was already extremely ancient. Around the shrine lay a sacred area, a haram, in which violence was forbidden. In this area members of different hostile tribes could meet to do business, exchange goods and information. A commercial fair developed and Bedouin came from far and wide to visit it: shrine and trade were intimately linked.

At the end of the sixth century, the shrine and the sacred enclosure were managed by a tribe called Quraysh. They were not nomads but lived in Mecca. They looked after the sanctuary and, increasingly, they organized trading caravans from Mecca to Syria in the north and Yemen in the south. They developed a network of contacts throughout western Arabia and sometimes beyond: some of the leading families were said to have acquired landed estates and property in Syria. These contacts, this experience of trade, travel and the politics of negotiation, were to prove extremely important in the emergence of the Islamic state.

The nomads and the merchants and farmers of the settled areas had subtle symbiotic relations. Some tribes had both settled and nomad branches, some groups lived as pastoralists or farmers at different periods, and many did a bit of both. The Bedouin depended on the settled people for any grain, oil or wine they needed. They also depended on them to manage the shrines and fairs where they could meet and make arrangements for the passing of caravans that supplemented their meagre income. In many ways, the Bedouin were used to accepting the political leadership, or at least the political guidance, of settled elites. On the other hand, the settled people needed, or feared, the Bedouin for their military skills. When they were managed as the Ghassānids and Lakhmids managed the Bedouin of the Syrian desert, they could be a useful military support; when mismanaged or neglected, they could be a threat and a source of disruption and mayhem. It was this symbiosis of settled leadership and nomad military power which formed the foundation of the armies of the early Muslim conquests.

This is not the place to give a full account of the life of Muhammad and his teaching, but some knowledge of his life and achievements is essential for understanding the dynamics of the early conquests. He was born into an honoured but not especially wealthy branch of Quraysh in about 570. In his youth he is said to have made trading expeditions to Syria and to have discussed religion with Syrian Christian monks, but much of the story of his early life is obscured by pious legend. It was probably around 600 that he first began to preach a religion of strict monotheism. The message he brought was very simple. There was one god, Allāh, and Muhammad was his messenger, passing on God’s word, brought to him by the angel Gabriel. He also taught that after death the souls of men would be judged, the virtuous going to heaven, a green and delightful garden, the wicked going to a burning, scorching hell. Muhammad began to attract followers, but he also made enemies. Men did not like to believe that their revered ancestors would burn in hell and, more practically, they saw this new preaching as an attack on the shrine at Mecca and the prosperity it brought. Muhammad found himself increasingly unpopular.

By 622 matters had come to a head but Muhammad was saved by an invitation from the people to Medina, about 320 kilometres to the north. Medina was a town but a very different sort of town from Mecca. It had no shrine and the people lived in scattered settlements in a fertile oasis, farming wheat and dates. Medina was a city in crisis: tribal feuds and rivalries were making life unpleasant and dangerous but no one seemed able to put an end to the feuding. It was at this point that they invited Muhammad, an outsider from the prestigious tribe of Quraysh, to come and mediate between them. Muhammad and a small group of followers travelled from Mecca to Medina. Their journey was described as a hijra, or emigration, and the participants as muhājirūn, while the supporters of the Prophet in Medina were called ansār or helpers. The year of the emigration, 622, marks the beginning of the Islamic era. Among the small group of muhājirūn were Abū Bakr, Umar and Uthmān, who were eventually to be the first three successors of the Prophet, and his cousin and son-in-law Alī. The hijra marks the moment when Muhammad passed from being a lonely prophet, ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’, to being the ruler of a small but expanding state.

From the very beginning, Muhammad was a warrior as well as a prophet and judge, and the Islamic community expanded through conflict as well as preaching. The Quraysh of Mecca were determined to crush him and Muhammad gave as good as he got by attacking the trading caravans, the lifeblood of the rulers of Mecca. In 624, by the well of Badr, the Muslims inflicted a first defeat on the Meccans, taking a number of prisoners but not capturing the caravan, which safely made it to the city. Two years later the Meccans defeated Muhammad’s forces at Uhud, and the next year they made an attempt to take Medina itself. The Muslims were able to defeat this at the battle of the Khandaq (Trench) and a sort of stalemate ensued. A truce was made with the Meccans at Hudaybiya in 628 and in 630 Muhammad was able to occupy the city and most of the Meccan aristocracy accepted his authority. In the two years between his occupation of Mecca and his death in 632, Muhammad’s influence spread far and wide in Arabia. Delegations arrived from tribes all over the peninsula, accepting his lordship and agreeing to pay some form of tribute.

There was nobody more destitute than we were. As for our hunger, it was not hunger in the usual sense. We used to eat beetles of various sorts, scorpions and snakes and we considered this our food. Nothing but the bare earth was our dwelling. We wore only what we spun from the hair of camels and sheep. Our religion was to kill one another and raid one another. There were those among us who would bury their daughters alive, not wanting them to eat our food . . . but then God sent us a well-known man. We knew his lineage, his face and his birthplace. His land [the Hijaz] is the best part of our land. His glory and the glory of our ancestors are famous among us. His family is the best of our families and his tribe [Quraysh] the best of our tribes. He himself was the best among us and at the same time, the most truthful and the most forbearing. He invited us to embrace his religion . . . He spoke and we spoke; he spoke the truth and we lied. He grew in stature and we became smaller. Everything he said came to pass. God instilled in our hearts belief in him and caused us to follow him.

All the tribes whom he had invited to join him were divided among themselves. One group joined him while another remained aloof. Only the select embraced his religion. He acted in this way as long as God wished but then he was ordered to split with the Arabs who opposed him and take action against them. Willingly or unwillingly, all of them joined him. Those who joined him unwillingly were eventually reconciled while those who joined him willingly became more and more satisfied. We all came to understand the superiority of his message over our previous condition, which was full of conflict and poverty.

It is most unlikely that either of these speeches was actually made as described but they are still very interesting. The account as it has come down to us was probably elaborated in the first half of the eighth century, within two or three generations of the Prophet’s death and while the Muslim conquests of Spain, Central Asia and India were still continuing. They show how the early Muslims remembered Muhammad leading them out of poverty and internal divisions. They stress the importance of his descent from Quraysh and of his new religion, which most of them accepted, if not with enthusiasm, at least peacefully.

Muhammad’s military campaigns were, in one sense, the beginning of the Muslim conquests. His example showed that armed force was going to be an acceptable and important element first in the defence of the new religion and then in its expansion. The Prophet’s example meant that there was no parallel to the tendency to pacificism so marked in early Christianity. The history of his campaigns was well remembered by the early Muslims and it has been argued⁹ that the records of his military expeditions, both those he participated in himself and those he dispatched under the command of others, were the basic material of his earliest biographies. At the same time, diplomacy was certainly more important than military conquest in the spread of Muhammad’s influence in the Arabian peninsula. It was the network of contacts he derived from his Quraysh connections rather than the sword which led people from as far away as Yemen and Oman to swear allegiance to him. Military force had ensured the survival of the umma, but in the Prophet’s lifetime it was not the primary instrument in its expansion.

The Koran contains a number of passages instructing Muslims as to how they should relate to the unbelievers and different passages seem to give different messages. There is a group of verses that recommend peaceful argument and discussion with non-Muslims in order to convince them of the error of their ways. Verse 16:125, for example, exhorts Muslims to ‘Invite all to the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching: and argue with them in ways that are best and most gracious: For your Lord knows best who has strayed from His path, and who receives guidance’. A number of verses suggest that at least some Muslims were very reluctant to join military expeditions and they are rebuked for staying at home and doing nothing when they should have been fighting ‘in the path of God’. The number and urgency of these exhortations suggests that there was a quietist group among the early Muslims who were, for whatever reason, reluctant to fight aggressive wars for their new religion.

Among you is he who tarries behind, and if disaster overtook you [the Muslim force], he would say ‘God has been gracious unto me since I was not present with them’. And if bounty from God befell you, he would surely cry, as if there had been no friendship between you and him: ‘Oh, would that I had been with them, then I would have achieved a great success. Let those fight in the path of God who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoever fights in the path of God, whether he be killed or be victorious, on him shall We bestow a great reward.’

Other verses stress only the spiritual rewards. Verses 9:38-9, for example, read, ‘O believers! What is the matter with you that when it is said to you, “March out in the path of God” you are weighed down to the ground. Are you satisfied with the life of this world over the Hereafter? The enjoyment of the life of this world is but little when compared with the life of the Hereafter. If you do not march forth, He will afflict you with a painful punishment, and will substitute another people instead of you. You cannot harm Him at all, but God has power over everything.’ Here we find the idea, expressed in so many pious conquest narratives, that the rewards of the afterlife were, or at least should be, the motivating factor for the Muslim warrior.

There are also passages that suggest a much more militant and violent attitude to non-Muslims. The classic statement of these views in the Koran comes in verse 9:5: ‘When the sacred months are past [in which a truce had been in force between the Muslims and their enemies], kill the idolators wherever you find them, and seize them, besiege them and lie in wait for them in every place of ambush; but if they repent, pray regularly and give the alms tax, then let them go their way, for God is forgiving, merciful.’ This verse can almost be considered the foundation text for the Muslim conquests, and its terms are echoed in numerous accounts of the surrender of towns and countries to Muslim arms. It is somewhat tempered by other verses, such as 9:29: ‘Fight those who do not believe in God or the Last Day, and who do not forbid what has been forbidden by God and His Messenger [Muhammad], and those among the People of the Book who do not acknowledge the religion of truth until they pay tribute [jizya], after they have been brought low.’ This verse, and others like it, make it clear that the People of the Book (that is Christian and Jews who have revealed scriptures) should be spared as long as they pay tribute and acknowledge their position as second-class citizens.

Muslim commentators have worked hard to reconcile these apparently different views. The dominant opinion has come to be that the verses advocating unrestricted warfare on the unbelievers were revealed later than the more moderate ones urging preaching and discussion. According to the religious scholars, this meant that the earlier verses were abrogated or replaced by the later ones. The militant verses, especially 9:5 cited above, therefore represent the final Muslim view on Holy War. It would, however, be wrong to imagine that the argument was cut and dried at the time of the early Muslim conquests, and it was not until almost two hundred years after the death of the Prophet that the definition of jihād began to be formalized by such scholars as Abd Allāh b. Mubārak (d. 797).¹¹ The Koran certainly provided scriptural support for the idea that Muslims could and should fight the unbelievers, but at no point does it suggest that they should be presented with the alternatives of conversions or death. The alternatives are conversion, submission and the payment of taxes, or continuing war. In short, the Koranic exhortations can be used to support the extension of Muslim political power over the unbelievers wherever they are, but they cannot be used to justify compulsory conversion to Islam. Koranic discussions of fighting also made it clear that religious rewards, that is the joys of paradise, were more important than material success. In these ways, the Koran provided the ideological justification for the wars of the Muslim conquests.

The potentially confusing messages of the Koran seem to have been simplified into a rough-and-ready rule of thumb which provided a justification for the wars of conquest. When the Bedouin addressed the Sasanian King of Kings one of them explained what they were doing. When Muhammad had secured the allegiance of all the Arabs, ‘he ordered us to start with the neighbouring nations and invite them to justice. We are therefore inviting you to embrace our religion. This is a religion which approves of all that is good and rejects all that is evil’. It was, however, an invitation that was difficult to refuse:

if you refuse, you must pay the tribute (jiz). This is a bad thing but not as bad as the alternative; if you refuse to pay, it will be war. If you respond positively and embrace our religion, we shall leave you with the Book of God and teach you its contents. Provided that you govern according to the rules included in it, we shall leave your country and let you deal with its affairs as you please. If you protect yourself against us by paying the tribute, we will accept it from you and guarantee your safety. Otherwise we shall fight you.¹²

Along with an ideology of conquest, the Muslim umma in the last years of the Prophet’s life also produced an elite capable of leading and directing it. The inner circle was composed of men who had supported Muhammad in the early days at Mecca and who had joined him in the hijra to Medina in 622. Among them were the first caliphs Abū Bakr (632-4), Umar (634-44) and Uthmān (644-56). It was under the direction of these men that the initial conquests took place. They are all given distinct characters by the Arabic sources, Abū Bakr the grave and affable old man, Umar the stern, puritanical unyielding leader and Uthmān rich and generous, but fatally weakened by his predilection for appointing his own kinsmen to high office. None of these men actually led the Muslim armies in person and, apart from Umar’s probable visit to Jerusalem, none of them seems to have left Medina, the political capital of the new state, at all. How much control they actually exercised over their distant armies is very difficult to tell. The Arabic sources consistently portray Umar, during whose reign the most important of the early conquests took place, as the real commander. We have numerous accounts of how he wrote to commanders in the field telling them what to do, how he received booty and eminent prisoners at Medina and behaved as a very ‘hands-on’ commander-in-chief. Modern historians have tended to doubt this, seeing the image as an idealization of the early Islamic state in general and Umar in particular. In reality, the commanders on the ground must have exercised much more autonomy than the texts suggest.

Communication across the vast distances penetrated by the Arab armies are unlikely to have been as swift and continuous as the Arabic tradition suggests, but there clearly was a substantial degree of control from the centre. Commanders were appointed and dismissed on the caliphs’ orders and there is no example in the literature of a commander rebelling against his authority or defying his orders. This is in marked contrast with both the Roman and Sasanian empires, which were at different times effectively disabled by the rebellions of generals and governors against their rulers. The Muslim conquests were far from being the outpouring of an unruly horde of nomads; the campaigns were directed by a small group of able and determined men.

The political leadership of the early Islamic state was composed almost entirely of the muhājirūn, those members of the Quraysh in Mecca who had originally supported Muhammad: the ansār of Medina were largely, but not entirely, excluded from military command. It is unlikely, however, that the conquests would have been so successful without the military leadership and expertise provided by the rest of the Quraysh of Mecca. From about 628 onwards, more and more leading Qurashis pledged their allegiance to the Prophet. In return, many of them were rewarded with important positions in the new order. When the conquests began under Abū Bakr, he turned to this group to find many of his commanders. Among them was Khālid b. al-Walīd, who was sent by Abū Bakr to suppress the dissent in Yamāma in eastern Arabia and then on to lead the Muslim armies in Iraq and Syria. Another man from the same background was Amr b. al-Ās, an influential Qurashi who agreed to come over to Muhammad in 628 ‘on condition that my past sins [i.e. his resistance to Muhammad] be pardoned and that he give me an active part in affairs: and he did so’.¹³ Amr was typical of the new elite who considered themselves to be socially superior to many of those who had been Muhammad’s earliest supporters. He had inherited an estate, famous for its grapes and raisins, near Tā’if and, in an incautious moment, he told a messenger sent by the caliph Umar that his, Amr’s, father had been dressed in a garment of silk with gold buttons while Umar’s father had carried firewood for a living.¹⁴ Amr went on to play an important role in the conquest of Syria before leading the Muslim armies into Egypt. Perhaps the most striking example of the recruitment of old enemies into the new elite was the family of Abū Sufyān. Abū Sufyān was a rich Meccan of the old school and a dyed-in-the-wool opponent of Muhammad and his new religion. His sons were quick to see the possibilities of the new order and converted to Islam, one of them, Mu^cāwiya, serving as one of Muhammad’s secretaries. Mu^cāwiya and his brother Yazīd were dispatched with the early Muslim armies to Syria, where their father already owned landed estates. Yazīd became governor of the newly conquered territories before succumbing to plague, but Mu^cāwiya survived to become first governor of Syria and then, from 661, caliph. He can also claim to be the founder of Muslim naval power in the eastern Mediterranean.

Among the towns of the Hijaz is the ancient city of Tā’if, high in the mountains near Mecca. Tā’if was a walled and fortified city surrounded by orchards and gardens, a place of retreat from the scorching heat of the Meccan summer. It was dominated by the high-status tribe of Thaqīf, who were the guardians of the town shrine, dedicated to the goddess al-Lat. Like many of the Meccans, the Thaqafis, as members of the tribe were called, pledged their allegiance to Muhammad in the last four years of his life. They were to become junior partners to the Quraysh in the Islamic project, especially important in the conquest and early administration of Iraq.

The members of this new elite were emphatically not Bedouin. They came from urban and commercial backgrounds. They prided themselves on the virtue of hilm - that is, self-control and political understanding. This was in marked contrast to the Bedouin, whom they considered excitable and unreliable, useful for their military skills and hardiness but needing to be to be controlled and led.¹⁵ But the partnership, the complementarity, was the key to the success of the early Arab conquests, the result of the urban elite of the Hijaz using and directing the military energies of the Bedouin to achieve their aims.

When Muhammad died in 632 the whole future of the Islamic project hung in the balance. For a few weeks it was touch and go whether this new community would survive and expand or simply disintegrate into its feuding constituent parts. The future history of much of the world was decided by the actions of a small number of men arguing and debating in Medina. Muhammad had left no generally acknowledged heir. He had made it clear that he was the ‘seal of the Prophets’, the last in the great chain of messengers of God which had begun with Adam. It was quite unclear whether he could have any sort of successor at all. Different groups within the community began to assert their own needs. The ansār of Medina seem to have been happy to accept Islam as a religion but they no longer wished to accept the political authority of the Quraysh: after all, these men had come to them as refugees, had been welcomed into their city and were now lording it over them. It was particularly galling that new converts from the Quraysh, men who had vigorously opposed the Prophet when they themselves were fighting for his cause, now seemed to be in very influential positions. They met together in the shelter of the portico of one of their houses and debated, most apparently favouring the idea that the ansār should be independent and in control of their home town.

While the debate rumbled on and ideas were tossed around, other people were moving with speed and efficiency. Before the ansār had come to any firm conclusions, Umar b. al-Khattāb had taken the hand of Abū Bakr and pledged allegiance to him as khalīfat Allh, the deputy of God on earth.^a After this dramatic gesture, both the Quraysh and, more reluctantly, the ansār felt obliged to accept Abū Bakr’s leadership. This at least is the account in the traditional Arab sources, and it has the ring of truth. It was essentially a coup d’état. In doing this, Umar was making a number of points. He was saying that there should be one successor to the Prophet who would lead the whole community, Quraysh and ansār alike. He was also saying that the leader would be chosen from the muhājirūn, the early converts from Mecca. Mecca would be the religious focus of the new religion, but political power was based in Medina and it was from Medina that the first two caliphs directed the great conquests.

In many ways the elderly Abū Bakr was the perfect choice. No one could dispute his loyalty to the Prophet and he shared with Alī the honour of being the first converts to the new religion. He had been the Prophet’s companion when he made the dangerous hijra from Mecca to Medina in 622. He also seems to have been tactful and diplomatic, but perhaps his most important quality was his knowledge of the Arab tribes of Arabia, their leaders, their interests and their conflicts. These qualities were to be extremely valuable in the crucial two years of his short reign.

Umar’s coup ensured that Abū Bakr and the Quraysh were going to control the nascent Muslim state, but there were much wider problems in the rest of Arabia. The spread of Muhammad’s influence in the peninsula had largely occurred peacefully: tribes and their leaders had wished to be associated with this new power and some of them had agreed to pay taxes to Medina. Muhammad’s death brought all this into question. Many of the leaders who had pledged allegiance felt that this had been a personal contract and that it lapsed with his death. Others felt that they should be allowed to be Muslims without paying the taxes or acknowledging the political authority of Medina. Yet others saw this as an opportunity to challenge the primacy of Medina. Among the latter were the numerous tribe of the Banū Hanīfa of Yamāma in eastern Arabia. They now asserted that they too had a Prophet, called Maslama. They boldly suggested that the peninsula should be divided into two zones of influence; the Quraysh could have one and they should have the other. Other tribes in north-east Arabia chose to follow a prophetess called Sajāh. Muhammad had shown how powerful a position a prophet could hold and how much benefit it could bring to his or her tribe. It was not surprising that others tried to follow his example. The Muslim sources refer to all these movements as the ridda, a term that usually means apostasy from Islam but in this context meant all types of rejection of Islam or the political authority of Medina.

The new Islamic leadership decided to take a bold, hard line on these developments. They demanded that those who had once pledged allegiance to Muhammad now owed it to his successor and the Medina regime. No one could be a Muslim unless they were prepared to pay taxes to Medina. In making this decision, they set in motion the events that were to result in the great Arab conquests: if they had decided to let other areas of Arabia go and consolidate the new religion around the shrine in Mecca, or if they had decided that it was possible for men to be Muslims without acknowledging the political authority of Medina, or if they had decided not to use military force to assert their authority, the conquests would never have occurred in the way they did.

Having made this decision, the leadership set about enforcing it with ruthless efficiency. Any one group that would not accept rule from Medina was to be brought into line, by force if necessary. The Meccan aristocrat Khālid b. al-Walīd was sent to crush the Banū Hanīfa and the other tribes of north-east Arabia and other expeditions, almost all led by Qurashis, were sent to Oman, south Arabia and Yemen. They were helped by the fact that many of the tribesmen of the Hijaz and western Arabia remained loyal to Medina and agreed to serve in the armies.

The dynamics of these first conquests were significant. The Islamic state could never survive as a stable Arab polity confined to Arabia and desert Syria. The Bedouin had traditionally lived off raiding neighbouring tribes and extracting payment in various forms from settled peoples. It was a fundamental principle of early Islam, however, that Muslims should not attack each other: the umma was like a large and expanding tribe in the sense that all men were members of the same defensive group. If all the Arabs were now part of one big family, raiding each other was clearly out of the question.¹⁶ The inhabitants of the settled communities were also fellow Muslims. A peaceful, Muslim Arabia would mean abandoning both of the traditional nomad ways of surviving. The alternatives were stark: either the Islamic elite were to lead the Bedouin against the world beyond Arabia and the desert margin, or the Islamic polity would simply disintegrate into its warring constituent parts and the normal rivalries and anarchy of desert life would reassert themselves once more. Once the ridda had been subdued and the tribes of Arabia were brought once more under the control of Medina, the leadership had no choice but to direct the frenetic military energies of the Bedouin against the Roman and Sasanian empires. The only way of avoiding an implosion was to direct the Muslims against the non-Muslim world.

The numbers we are given for the forces vary wildly and are unlikely, at this early stage in Islamic history, to be very reliable. Muslim sources tell us that the combined might of the armies that conquered Syria was around 30,000 men,¹⁷ but these seldom came together and operated for most of the time in smaller groups. The forces that conquered Iraq seem to have been significantly smaller, and the Arabic sources quote between 6,000 and 12,000 men.¹⁸ The numbers in Egypt were smaller still: Amr’s initial force was between 3,500 and 4,000 men, though they were soon joined by 12,000 reinforcements. These numbers may be unreliable but they look realistic and are fairly consistent. This was not a horde that overwhelmed the opposition by sheer weight of numbers; indeed, at the crucial battles of Yarmūk in Syria and the Qādisiya in Iraq, it is possible that they were outnumbered by their Roman and Sasanian opponents.

We have a clear idea of the equipment of Roman soldiers from statues and sculptures of battles, which enable us to reconstruct the equipment with some confidence. Equally, we have a clear picture of the mounted warriors of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Islamic worlds from the superbly meticulous Persian manuscript illustrations of the period. In the case of the early Arab military, however, we have almost no visual evidence at all. There is no reliably dated archaeological evidence of Arab military equipment from this period, no surviving swords or armour. Instead we have to rely on incidental mentions in narratives and poetry which, except in exceptional circumstances, rarely provide detailed descriptions.¹⁹

The soldiers of the early Muslim armies were normally expected to provide their own weapons, or acquire them in battle. Military equipment was one of the most sought-after items of booty when an army was defeated or a city taken. A lively market in weapons and armour frequently ensued. There was no question of any uniform: each man would dress in what he could find, and what he could afford. They were also expected to provide their own food most of the time. There was no supply train, no lumbering carts loaded with victuals to hamper the progress of the army. Instead, each man would be expected to carry his own supplies or acquire them on the road. The soldiers in the Muslim army that invaded the Byzantine Empire in 716-17 were ordered by their commander to take two mudds (about 2 kilos) of grain each on the backs of their horses. In the event they did not need them because they acquired enough through raiding. They built huts for the winter and cultivated the land so that later in the campaign they could live off what they had sown.²⁰ Travelling light and living off the land, the Muslim forces were able to cover vast distances, feats that would never have been possible if they had had creaking wagon-loads of supplies to haul along with them.

The principal weapon was the sword.²¹ The early Arab sword was not the curved scimitar of popular imagination but a broad, straight, two-edged blade with a small hilt. It was contained in a leather or wooden scabbard and usually worn on straps around the shoulders, not on a belt. Surviving examples from the late Sasanian period have blades about a metre in length. These weapons must have required considerable strength and dexterity to use. The best swords seem to have been imported from India, though Yemen and Khurasan also had reputations as centres for the manufacture of high-grade weapons. Swords were certainly expensive and precious, given names, handed down in families and celebrated in poetry. The sword, wielded at close quarters, was the weapon of the true hero. They also seem to have been widely used, and it is possible that the growing wealth of parts of the Arabian peninsula in the late sixth and early seventh centuries had allowed more of the Bedouin to acquire these prestigious weapons.

Along with swords there were also spears. The long rumh was essentially an infantry weapon with a wooden shaft and a metal head, allowing it to be used as a slashing as well as a stabbing weapon. The shorter harba appears in the early Islamic period and may have been used on horseback, though there is no evidence of the use of heavy lances in mounted warfare. We also hear reports of the use of iron bars, maces and, of course, sticks, stones, tent-poles and anything else that came to hand. There were also bows and arrows, and archery was highly esteemed. The sources talk of ‘Arab’ bows and ‘Persian’ bows, and it is likely that the Arab ones were lighter and simpler. There is no indication that the Muslim armies had crossbows at this stage although they certainly did by the ninth century.

Chain-mail body armour²² was worn, although the number of men who could afford it must have been quite small: in 704 it was said that in the whole vast province of Khurasan there were only 350 suits of mail for about 50,000 warriors. Coats of mail were handed down from one generation to another, and new ones, brilliant and shiny, were extremely valuable. Head protection came in two forms. There was the mighfar, known in the history of Western armour as an aventail. This was essentially a hood of chain mail which was extended down at the back to protect the neck. Alternatively, there was a rounded helmet known as a bayda or egg. A fully equipped warrior must have been quite well protected, at least as much as the Norman warriors of the Bayeux tapestry, but most of the rank and file must have been much less fortunate, fighting in cloaks and turbans which would have left them very vulnerable.

We have very few detailed descriptions of the face of battle in this period and no military manuals from the time of the early Muslim conquests, but sometimes the sources give pieces of advice which provide some idea of tactics. In 658 an army of inexperienced Iraqis was invading Syria in one of the numerous Muslim civil wars of the period. A wily old Bedouin leader took it upon himself to give them some advice.²³ He urged them first to make sure that they had access to a good water supply. Their Syrian opponents were marching on foot but the Iraqis were mounted, and they should use the mobility this offered to station themselves between their enemies and the water. He then went on: ‘Do not fight them firing arrows at them and thrusting at them in an open space for they outnumber you and you cannot be sure that you will not be surrounded.’ They should not stand still or form a traditional line of battle because their opponents had both horsemen and foot soldiers and each group would support the other in close-quarter combat. If the line was broken, it would be disastrous. Instead, they should keep the advantages offered by their mobility and divide the army into small squadrons (kata’ib), each of which could support the others. If they preferred to remain on horseback they could, but they could also dismount if they wished. The emphasis on fighting on foot is interesting: having horses or camels was very useful for mobility, reconnaissance and, in this case, seizing control of battlefield advantages such as the water supply, but battles were usually decided by foot soldiers fighting at close quarters. They would throw away their spears and fight with swords, often ending up by wrestling their opponents to the ground. The lack of stirrups, at least in the early conquests, probably gave the foot soldier a comparative advantage. The Syrian army of the late seventh and early eighth centuries, which was victorious in this battle as in many others of the period, seems to have specialized in fighting on foot in close formation. When the troops were attacked by cavalry, they would form a spear wall, kneeling with the ends of their spears in the ground beside them with the points sticking up towards the enemy. They would wait until the enemy were upon them, before rising up and jabbing at the horses’ faces. It required discipline and a good deal of nerve to do this, but as long as the line held, it was very effective. Such systematic tactics were foreign to the Bedouin traditions of warfare with their accent on mobility and individual courage, but they were probably employed in the later phases of the conquest by Muslim armies operating in the Maghreb, and Central Asia.

Two innovations in military technology became widely diffused during the course of the conquests. Stirrups²⁴ were unknown to the mounted warriors of the ancient world. Precisely when and where they were invented is not clear. There are wall paintings from Central Asia, probably dating from the end of the seventh or the beginning of the eighth century, which show stirrups in use. Literary sources say that they were first used by Arab armies operating in southern Iran (mostly against other Arabs) in the 680s. By the eighth century they had been widely adopted. The importance of the coming of stirrups has been widely debated by historians. It has been suggested that in the Latin West they allowed the development of the heavily armoured knight with all the social and cultural results that flowed from it. It does not seem that this innovation had such far-reaching consequences in the Islamic world, though they would certainly have facilitated the long-range raids characteristic of the later phases of the conquests.

The second important military innovation of these early years of the conquests was the development of swing-beam artillery. Large pieces were known as manjanīq, smaller ones as arrda.²⁵ These engines were known before the Muslim conquests, the first well-attested example being their use by the Avars at the siege of Thessalonica in 597. These swing-beam engines were operated by men pulling down on ropes at one end of the beam so that the other end swung up very quickly and shot the missile from a sling attached to its tip. The only recorded use of siege artillery in the first phase of the Islamic conquests (632-50) comes from the account of the Arab assault on the Persian capital of Ctesiphon/al-Mada’in, where the Arabs are said to have used twenty such devices constructed by a renegade Persian engineer on the orders of the Arab commander, Sa^cd b. Abī Waqqās.²⁶ It is striking that siege engines are not mentioned at all in the accounts of the Arab conquest of fortified cities like Damascus, or the great Roman fortress at Babylon in Egypt, but it is impossible to tell whether this is because they were not used or simply because the sources do not mention them. In the eighth century we hear of Muslims using them to breach the walls of Samarqand in 712, and this information is clearly confirmed by the finding of a graffito showing the technology at work. At the same time we are told of an engine operated by 500 men which brought down the standard on the Buddhist shrine at Daybul in Sind. In general, however, siege warfare seems to have been fairly basic; only in the long and hard campaigns in Transoxania in the early eighth century do we get the impression that systematic and prolonged siege operations were conducted.

The fullest and most articulate discussion of the motivations of the Muslims comes in the series of speeches said to have been made by Muslim emissaries to the Persian authorities, some of which we have already seen. The Muslims repeatedly stress that they are not interested in the affairs of this world; rather, it is the rewards of paradise that spur them on, as well as the belief that the Persian dead would not enjoy the same rewards: ‘If you kill us, we shall enter Paradise; if we kill you, you will enter the fire.’²⁷ They were acting on God’s direct orders: ‘Now we have come to you by the order of our Lord, fighting for his sake. We act upon his orders and seek the fulfilment of his promise.’

The Muslim dead are frequently described as martyrs (shuhad). According to Muslim tradition, the idea that those who died in the jihād were martyrs first appears in accounts of the battle of Badr (624), and it seems to have been generally accepted that those killed in the Holy War would go straight to paradise; on one occasion the site of a battle where many Muslims have been killed is described as smelling of sweet perfume. There are stories of men deliberately seeking martyrdom, or at least putting themselves in danger to achieve it: ‘A member of the tribe of Tamīm called Sawād, who was defending his kinsmen launched an attack, courting martyrdom. He was mortally wounded after he began but martyrdom was slow in coming. He stood up against [the Persian commander] Rustam, determined to kill but was killed before he could reach him.’ In this case, it is interesting to note the combination of desire for martyrdom with the obligations of tribal solidarity.²⁸ There are a few extreme examples, such as the man who deliberately removed his armour in battle so that he might be slain more quickly²⁹ and so achieve a martyr’s reward, but these are exceptional: not unreasonably, most men wanted to enjoy the fruits of their victory in this world before passing to the delights of the next.

Another motive put into the mouths of early Muslim warriors is freeing the subjects of the Persians from their tyranny so that they can convert to Islam. ‘God has sent us and brought us here so that we can free those who wish from servitude to the people of this world and make them servants of God, so that we can transform their poverty in this world into affluence and that we can free them from evil religions and bestow upon them the justice of Islam. He has sent us to bring his religion to all his creatures and to call them to Islam.’³⁰

In general, however, conversion to Islam, or offering the opportunity for conversion to Islam, is not widely cited as a reason for fighting. More common is pride in Arabness and pride in the tribe. When Sa^cd, the commander of Muslim forces in Iraq, wanted to urge his men to great deeds, he appealed to their Arab pride: ‘You are Arab chiefs and notables, the elite of every tribe and the pride of those who follow you.’³¹ The speeches frequently contrast the austerity and honesty of the Arabs with the luxury and lying of the Persians. Pride in the achievements of the tribe remained an important motivating factor as it had in the jhiliya. This comes out most clearly in the poetry, such as this anonymous verse celebrating the achievements of the tribe of Tamīm at the battle of Qādisiya:

The delight in battle and slaughter come straight from the spirit of the pre-Islamic world. Individual glory and reputation remained important too. In one exhortation, the desire for paradise is combined with the old-fashioned desire for lasting fame in this world: ‘O Arabs, fight for religion and for this world. Hasten to forgiveness from your lord and to a garden whose breadth is as the heavens and the earth, prepared for the God-fearing ones. And if the devil tries to discourage you by making you think of the dangers of this war, remember the stories which will be related about you during the fairs and festivals for ever and ever.’³⁴

Desire for fame in this world was of course coupled with desire for wealth. One of the most consistent features of the early conquest narratives is the desire for booty and the delight in describing the riches that were obtained. The booty is usually described as money, portable goods and slaves; the acquisition of human booty was always important and in some areas, notably Berber North Africa, it seems to have been the dominant form of reward. Interestingly, given that these were pastoral people, animals are seldom mentioned, possibly because the warriors had largely abandoned their previous pastoral lifestyle. The concern for acquiring booty was matched by the concern for distributing it fairly. Many of these descriptions are no doubt didactic in turn and the fairness and justice with which it was done were certainly exaggerated, but the point remains valid.