The Great Arab Conquests

For 400 years before the Muslim conquest, Iraq had been an integral part of the Sasanian Empire.¹ Sasanian was the name of the dynasty that had revived and renewed the empire of Iran in the third century AD. Along with the Byzantine Empire, the Sasanian was one of the great powers of the ancient world, but the states had very different imperial styles. At the risk of gross oversimplication, it could be argued that while the Byzantine Empire was controlled by a bureaucracy and a standing army, the Sasanian kingdom was ruled by a warrior aristocracy. When the emperor Justinian had himself and his consort Theodora portrayed in mosaic on the walls of a church in Ravenna, they were on foot, calm, elegant, dressed entirely in civilian clothes. When the Sasanian monarch Chosroes II had himself portrayed in stone carving in the grotto at Tāqi Bustān it was as a man of action, a mighty hunter, mounted on a horse in full armour or showing his skills as an archer.

The Sasanian monarch ruled as King of Kings, Shhnshh, reflect ing the fact that the empire boasted a number of aristocratic families almost as ancient and famous as the Sasanians themselves. Their empire included all of modern Iran, Iraq to the west and much of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the east. The kings had a capital in the plains of Iraq at Ctesiphon, just south-east of modern Baghdad, but they seem to have spent much of their time on the move between one country estate and another, up and down the roads that led through the Zagros mountains from the plains of Mesopotamia to the highlands of Iran.

Whereas the upper classes of the Byzantine Empire tended to live in cities, in the Persian Empire they were based more in their country estates and palaces. The towns, too, seem to have looked very different from the cities of the Byzantine world. To begin with they were mostly built of mud brick or rubble masonry, they rarely had regular street plans and there had never been town councils to spend money on embellishing them. The typical urban settlement in Sasanian Iraq and Iran was a country town, possibly with a fortress and a walled city centre, known as the shhristn, serving as marketplace and manu facturing centre but devoid of any pretensions to civic greatness or self-government.

The Byzantine Empire was overwhelmingly Christian in religion, whereas the state religion of the Sasanian Empire was Zoroastriansim.² Zoroastrians believed that there were two great powers struggling to dominate the world, a good god called Ohrmazd and a wicked one called Ahriman. The worship was centred on fire-temples, for fire was believed to be a sacred element which should be kept pure and not contaminated. The fire-temples were tended by a caste of priests known as magi: it is possible that the three wise men who came to visit the infant Christ were Zoroastrian priests. The magi were supported by the Sasanian shahs and the fire-temples were granted extensive landed estates for their maintenance. Whereas in Byzantine Christianity the main churches were in the centres of population and were designed to accommodate large congregations who gathered to join in worship, the most important fire-temples seem to have been found in remote rural locations, and the small domed chambers that sheltered the sacred fires were certainly not designed to welcome large numbers of worshippers. The impression is of an elite-established religion, secure in its wealth and hierarchical structure but with little popular appeal. There were no Zoroastrian hermits to compare with the heroic ascetics of the Christian world and, as far as we know, no great Zoroastrian preachers whose words could move men to intense and passionate devotion. This was especially true in Iraq, where there were large Christian and Jewish populations. There were no major fire-temples in Iraq and it seems that the faith was confined to Persian administrators and soldiers.

Christianity had spread far in the Sasanian Empire. Iraq, the wealthiest and most populous part of the empire, was probably largely Christian, though there was a significant Jewish population as well.³ Most of the Christians belonged to the Nestorian, eastern Syrian church, which was regarded as heretical by the Byzantine authorities. This had some benefits for the churches under Sasanian rule because it meant that they were not tainted by connection with the Byzantine Empire. The fact remained, though, that a large proportion of the population of the Persian Empire did not share the religion of the ruling Persian aristocracy and that there could be no common bond against the claims of Islam.

Much of the revenue that sustained the splendour of the Persian monarchy was derived from the rich agricultural lands of Iraq.⁴ Members of the royal family and the great aristocratic dynasties had extensive and productive estates cultivated by large numbers of peasants who lived in serf-like conditions.⁵ There was a vast social and economic gulf between the aristocracy and the people who tilled their lands. In theory at least, intermarriage between social groups was strictly forbidden. The upper classes were exempt from the hated poll tax, which merchants and peasants were obliged to pay to the Sasanian shah. The aristocracy wore crowns, golden belts and armbands and the tall conical hats called qalansuwa. Rustam, the Persian general who led the army against the Arab invaders, came from this background and his qalansuwa is said to have been worth 100,000 silver dirhams. Below the greater aristocracy was a larger group of dehqāns, a word that might usefully be translated as ‘gentry’. These lesser landowners were the pillars of the Sasanian bureaucracy and taxation system.

There is an interesting description of the Persian army at the beginning of the seventh century in the Strategikon attributed to the Roman emperor Maurice (582-602). He begins by stressing that the Persians are servile and obey their rulers out of fear, an idea that is also found in the Arabic sources. They are also patriotic and will endure great hardships for their fatherland. In warfare they prefer an orderly approach to a brave and impulsive one. They prefer to encamp in fortifications and ‘when the time for battle draws near, they surround themselves with a ditch and a sharpened palissade’. When facing lancers they like to choose broken terrain and use their bows so that the enemy charge will be broken up. They also like to postpone battle, especially if they know that their opponents are ready to fight. They are disturbed when attacked by carefully drawn-up formations of infantry and they do not themselves make use of spears and shields. Charging against them is effective because ‘they are prompted to rapid flight and do not know how to wheel suddenly against their attackers as the [nomad] Scythians do’. They are also vulnerable to attacks on the flanks and from the rear and unexpected night attacks are effective ‘because they pitch their tents indiscriminately and without order inside their fortifications’.⁷ The description is interesting because it fits well with the narrative accounts of battles that we have from Arabic sources, notably the emphasis on fortifications and defensive warfare and generally playing safe. These conservative tactics may have put the Persians at a grave disadvantage against the more mobile, adventurous Arabs.

The great war between the Byzantines and the Persians which had so damaged the Roman Empire in the first three decades of the seventh century had also been a disaster for the Sasanians.⁸ At first Persian arms had been almost entirely successful. In 615 the Persian army had reached the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople, and in 619 Persian troops entered Alexandria and completed the conquest of Egypt. The tide began to turn in March 624 when the emperor Heraclius took his fleet to the Black Sea and began the invasion of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Persians were now outflanked and were forced to withdraw their army from Anatolia to face the emperor, who was now attacking from the north. In 627 he swept through north-western Iran, before descending to the plains of northern Iraq and defeating the Persian army at Nineveh (12 December 627). It was the greatest military disaster that the Sasanian Empire had ever suffered. Chosroes retired to the capital at Ctesiphon, leaving his palace at Dastgard to be sacked by the Romans. Here he began the search for scapegoats to blame for the spectacular reversal of fortunes that had occurred. He seems to have decided on the execution of his most important military commander, Shahrbarāz, but before he could act there was a coup. Chosroes was assassinated early in 628 and his son, who had agreed to his father’s murder, ascended the throne as Kavād II.

Kavād immediately set about negotiating a peace with Heraclius in which all prisoners were to be released and the pre-war frontiers restored. And all might yet have been well had the new king not died within the year, probably of the plague. He was succeeded by his infant son, Ardashīr III, but the general, Shāhrbarāz, refused to accept this and in June 629 seized the throne. This was the first time in four centuries that a man who was not a member of the Sasanian family had tried to take the throne, and there was considerable resistance. After just two months, he, too, was murdered and, since Chosroes II had left no other sons, the throne passed to his daughter, Būrān, who, although apparently an effective ruler, died, of natural causes, after a year. There then followed a bewildering succession of short-lived rulers until finally Yazdgard III, a grandson of the great Chosroes, was elevated to the throne in 632.

The details of these intrigues are not in themselves important. The overall effect was decisive, however. The Sasanian Empire had been ravaged by an invading army and any idea of its invincibility had been destroyed. Archaeological evidence suggests that many settlements in the richest part of Iraq were abandoned as a result of the war.⁹ Furthermore the house of Sasan, the mainstay and raison d’être of the state, had been torn apart by feud and murder. It is more than likely that Yazdgard, if he had been given time, would have restored royal control and prestige. But the year of his accession was the year of the death of the Prophet Muhammad: Arab tribes were already taking advantage of the chaos to make inroads on the settled lands of Iraq, and Khālid b. al-Walīd, the Muslim general, was on his way. In these circumstances, it is surprising not that the Persians were defeated by the Arabs but that they fought with such determination.

In many places the border between the irrigated lands and the desert is clear and precise: you can virtually stand with one foot on either side of this environmental frontier. But the frontier was no barrier to human movement and communication. The Arab tribes that roamed the desert areas along the west bank of the Euphrates had a long tradition of interaction with the settled, mostly Aramaic-speaking inhabitants of the Sawād.¹⁰ These might be peaceful - the exchange of the meat and skins that the Bedouin produced for the grain, wine and fine textiles of the settled lands. Or they could be more violent, with nomads demanding and extorting taxes, using their mobility and their military skills to terrorize the villagers. Some nomads also took military service with the Sasanian government, or, more simply, accepted subsidies from the authorities for not using their military power against the settled people.

One such tribe were the Banū Shaybān, who seem to have been concentrated in the desert lands east of the old Arab town of Hīra. Some of the shaikhs of the tribe had palaces in the city. Like many tribes the Banū Shaybān were far from united and different lineages competed to assert their leadership. At the time of the death of the Prophet, the old leaders were being challenged by an upstart, called Muthannā b. Hāritha, from a minor branch of the tribe. Muthannā was trying to make his reputation by leading anyone who would follow him in raids on the settled lands; by establishing himself as a successful collector of booty, he could expect to attract supporters who would accept him as a great tribal leader. For some years before the arrival of the first Muslim army in 633 he had been raiding the frontier lands, not settling or conquering but asserting the nomads’ rights to tribute.

Muthannā may not have been a man of deep, or any, religious conviction, but circumstances meant that he became one of the earliest Muslim commanders in Iraq. The dominant clan of the Banū Shaybān had followed the prophetess Sajāh and opposed the Muslim armies in the ridda wars. Muthannā could see his chance. When the Muslim armies under Khālid b. al-Walīd approached Iraq, he and his followers joined up with them, while the old leaders of Shaybān opposed them and were marginalized and excluded. Members of the same tribe were both the earliest supporters of the Muslims in the conquest of Iraq and their fiercest enemies. Tribal politics interacted with religious motivation in diverse and complex ways and Muslim leaders often took advantage of local rivalries to attract new supporters to the cause.

Khālid probably arrived at the frontiers of Iraq in the spring or early summer of 633.¹¹ The Muslim force he brought with him was small enough, perhaps around a thousand men,¹² but they were a well-led and disciplined group. He seems to have roamed along the frontier, no doubt mopping up any resistance he encountered among the Bedouin and defeating the Persian garrisons of the frontier forts.¹³ He then reached the ancient city of Hīra. Hīra was a fairly small city - one later Arab source estimated the population at 6,000 males,¹⁴ say 30,000 overall. It was not a compact town and there is no indication that it was ever walled; rather it was an extended settlement, where Arab chiefs lived in fortified palaces scattered among the palm trees.

One such palace was excavated in 1931 by an expedition from Oxford.¹⁵ The building was surrounded by a wall of fired brick and was on two storeys, the lower of which incorporated windowless cellars. In the interior, which was constructed in mud-brick, there was a courtyard surrounded by rooms. The excavators uncovered a number of stucco decorative panels with patterns on them, either abstract or vegetable, suggesting that the inhabitants lived in some style. Most of the population of the town were Arabs, many with family connections with the Bedouin in the nearby desert. Many of these Arabs were also Christian and there were famous monasteries and churches in among the houses. It was the seat of a Nestorian bishopric. The excavators discovered the remains of two basilica-planned churches built of brick, for, as in most of Mesopotamia, there was no good building stone available. The interiors were plastered and decorated with religious paintings, only small fragments of which survive.

Little fighting was necessary to persuade the inhabitants to make terms; the Arab notables fortified themselves in their palaces and peered over the battlements while the Muslim troops roamed the open spaces between them.¹⁶ Then negotiations were opened. The Arab notables were ready to make peace in return for a tribute and promises that neither their churches (bay^ca) or palaces (qusr) should be harmed.¹⁷ The tribute collected was the first that was ever sent from Iraq to Medina: it was just the beginning of a waterfall of wealth which was to flow from the Sawād to the capitals of the caliphs: Medina, Damascus and later Baghdad.

Many prisoners are said to have been taken in these early raids. As usual they were kept as slaves for a while, often being obliged to do hard manual labour; we are told of one man forced to become a gravedigger. Many of them were later freed, becoming mawli (non- Arab Muslims) of Arab tribes and entering the Muslim community as full members. Among those said to have been taken prisoner at this time was Nusayr, whose son Mūsā b. Nusayr was to lead the Muslim conquest of Spain in 712.¹⁸ This was typical of the way in which the Muslims won over many of the people they conquered and incorporated them into their military forces to make further conquests.

So far Khālid’s attacks on Iraq had been little more than unfinished business from the ridda. His objective was to secure the allegiance of the Arab tribes to the Muslim government in Medina. The defeats of the Persian frontier forces and the tribute taken confirmed his credibility as a military leader. As yet, he had not penetrated far into the settled lands, nor had he encountered the full might of the Persian army. He was never to do so because orders arrived from the caliph Abū Bakr in Medina that he should lead a force across the desert to aid the Muslim conquest of Syria, where resistance was proving unexpectedly strong: at this stage, Syria still had priority over Iraq among the Muslim leadership. He seems to have obeyed instantly.

The departure of Khālid left the remaining Muslim forces along the Iraqi border leaderless. For a while Muthannā seems to have taken over command, but when Umar became caliph he decided to send another army to the Iraqi borderlands to ensure the continued allegiance of the Arab tribes there. It was not a particularly impressive force, numbering at most five thousand and probably many fewer. Recruitment seems to have been difficult and we are told that men disliked going there ‘because of the Persians’ authority, might, power and glory and their victories over other nations’.¹⁹ Many of them were recruited from the ansār of Medina, not noted for their military skills, and they were led by a man called Abū Ubayd, from the Thaqīf tribe of Tā’if, the little city in the hills near Mecca. Probably in late 634 Abū Ubayd, who had met up with Muthannā and his men, encountered a Persian force in a conflict that became known as the Battle of the Bridge. The Arabic sources give an unusually consistent account of the battle.²⁰ The Persian forces were led by Rustam, who had recently been appointed commander-in-chief. They were said to have been well equipped, their cavalry horses wearing chain mail (tajfīf), horsemen bearing heraldic banners (shu^cur), and with a number of elephants.²¹ With them they brought the great tiger-skin standard of the Persian kings, 40 metres long and 6 metres wide.²² Between the two armies lay an irrigation canal with an old bridge which the people of nearby Hīra used to cross to reach their fields. Despite advice to the contrary, Abū Ubayd, who is portrayed as obstinate and very much afraid of being thought a coward, was determined to cross to meet the enemy. The elephants seem to have terrified the Muslims’ horses and Persian archers did devastating work among the Muslim ranks. As usual in the wars of the conquests, the Muslims dismounted and began hand-to-hand fighting with swords. Abū Ubayd himself is said to have tried to attack one of the elephants, either by spearing it in the belly or cutting off its trunk, but the elephants responded by trampling him until he was dead. The loss of their commander led to a rout among the Muslims. It was at this moment that one of them decided to cut the bridge to stop the Muslims fleeing and make them stand their ground, or so he said.²³ As a result many more Muslims perished by drowning as they attempted to swim across the canal to safety. Only a small number of survivors remained to be rallied by Muthannā and retreat into the desert.

In the immediate aftermath of defeat, the surviving Muslim soldiers, led by Muthannā, who seems to have been quite severely wounded at the Battle of the Bridge and died shortly after, were reduced to doing what Arabs had so often done before, raiding along the desert margin when Persian power was too weak to prevent them. Umar’s immediate response was to call on reinforcements. Manpower, however, was beginning to be a problem. The tribes of the Hijaz who had formed the core of early Muslim power were now widely dispersed, mostly in Syria, and the defeat had depleted their ranks still further. But Umar did not want to rely on men from those tribes who had, only a year or two before, challenged the Islamic leadership in the ridda. So he turned instead to tribesmen who had been more or less neutral in the war that had just ended. South of the Hijaz, towards the borders of Yemen, lay a mountainous area called the Sarat. It was from the villages and encampments of this area that most of the new recruits came, led by a rather larger-than-life tribal leader called Jarīr b. Abd Allāh al-Bajalī. Jarīr had good Islamic credentials, having converted to Islam a few years before the death of Muhammad and being hence entitled to the coveted status of Companion of the Prophet. On the other hand, he was a tribal leader, proud of his ancient lineage and high social status. He saw no good reason why the coming of Islam should undermine the power and prestige of a man in his position.

From the first, relations between him and Muthannā had been sticky, a rivalry that is reflected in the historical sources as supporters of each of them tried to exaggerate their hero’s achievements.²⁴ And new dangers were appearing on the horizon, for while the Muslim forces were restricted to desultory raids, the new young Persian king, Yazdgard III, had become strong enough to assert his authority and mobilize his troops to get rid of those irritating Bedouin for good and all.²⁵ The Armenian Sebeos, the writer closest to the events (Sebeos was writing in the 650s, little more than a decade later), says the Persian army numbered 80,000, and he may have had good inside information since a number of Armenian princes came with contingents of between 1,000 and 3,000 men to join the imperial army.

In response, Umar began to organize another army. To solve the problem of command, he chose a man who was very much part of the early Islamic elite. Sa^cd b. Abī Waqqās came from the Quraysh of Mecca but he had also joined the Muslim cause early and was one of that small band of veterans who could claim to have fought beside the Prophet in his first victory at the battle of Badr in 624. He has a reputation in the Muslim tradition of being something of a hothead. When Muhammad was being verbally abused by his enemies in Mecca before the hijra, Sa^cd hit one of them with the jawbone of a camel and drew blood. In later life he delighted in his reputation as the first man to fire an arrow in the cause of slam.²⁶ Neither Muthannā nor the newly arrived Jarīr could challenge his right to lead. The army he brought, however, was not especially impressive. Largely recruited in the Hijaz, Yemen and other parts of south Arabia, it was probably about four thousand strong when it left Medina in the autumn of 637, drawn from as many as ten different tribal groups.²⁷ Umar also ordered contingents from Syria to join these forces in Iraq, including, apparently, some of those who had previously left Iraq for Syria with Khālid b. al-Walīd. By the time of the confrontation between the Muslims and the main Persian army, Sa^cd’s forces probably numbered between 6,000 and 12,000,²⁸ significantly smaller than the Persians: as the most important modern authority on the conquests notes, ‘for all its importance, the Battle of Qādisiyya seems to have been a clash between two rather small armies’.²⁹

The story of the battle of Qādisiya formed the basis of great legends.³⁰ The memory of the victory of a small, improvised and ill-equipped Arab army over the might of imperial Persia has provided inspiration for Muslims and Arabs down the centuries. In Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, the quarter along the Tigris that housed most of the government ministries was called Qādisiya. When in 1986 Saddam issued bonds to raise money for the war against Iran, they were called Qādisiya bonds. Less appropriately, the Iraqi official media often dubbed the 2003 second Gulf War as Saddam’s Qādisiya. In all cases a conscious effort was being made to tap into popular memory of a time when the Arab armies had triumphed over enormous odds.

Despite the enormous importance of the battle and its iconic status, we know remarkably little about the actual course of the conflict, and many of the details are clearly formulaic. Even the year in which it occurred is quite uncertain. Arabic sources are typically contradictory about the dates, suggesting anything from 635 to 638,³¹ with most historians settling for 636. On the other hand, recent research in the Armenian sources suggests that the climactic battle may have happened on the Orthodox Christmas Day (6 January) 638.³² The descriptions of the battle run to some 160 pages in Tabarī’s great History, and although full of events and details, give no clear overall picture. The Armenian sources make it clear that the Persians were disastrously defeated, but that the Armenian princes, naturally, fought with great bravery, two of the most important of them being slain, along with many Persian notables.

The Arab accounts begin with the recruitment and dispatch of the army from Medina, careful attention being paid to the names and tribal allegiances of those who participated. After the arrival of the army on the borders of Iraq there are accounts of embassies between the Arabs and the great king Yazdgard III. We are told of debates and councils of war among the Muslims, and the point is made repeatedly that they should not penetrate deeply into the irrigated lands and canals of the Sawād but should fight on the desert margins, so that if things should go wrong they could escape into the wilderness, so stressing the precariousness of the position of the Muslims.

We also hear of debates among the Persians. When the Muslim forces arrived along the edge of the desert and began to raid the settled areas, the local landowners sent messages to the new young king Yazdgard in the capital of Ctesiphon requesting help and protection. The king ordered Rustam to lead an expedition against them. Rustam had been one of Yazdgard’s main supporters in the struggle for the throne. He was an experienced general and now became the effective regent of Iraq.³³ He is sometimes described in the Arabic sources as an Armenian, and the army he commanded certainly contained Armenian contingents led by their princes. Other sources say he came from Hamadhan or Rayy, and it seems as if his power was based in Media, west central Iran, while Yazdgard III had been supported first of all by the notables of Fars, further to the south. Regional rivalries may have undermined the Persian war effort. Rustam’s image in the Arabic sources is of a man of wisdom, experience and a generally pessimistic disposition.³⁴ In the great Persian epic, the Shahnāmah of Firdawsi, composed around the year 1000, he is described as ‘an astute, intelligent man and a fine warrior. He was a very knowledgeable astrologer who paid attention to the advice of priests’. Firdawsi also gives us the text of a long verse letter that Rustam is said to have written to his brother before the battle, foretelling defeat and the end of the Sasanian dynasty.³⁵

The accounts of the embassies to the Persians and the debates that ensued are among the most interesting parts of the conquest narratives, not because they represent an accurate record of what actually took place but because of the insight they give us into the attitudes of early Muslims to the conquest. One of the fullest narratives³⁶ begins with Sa^cd telling a group of his advisers that he is sending them on a mission to the Persians. One of them suggested that this was showing too much respect and that only one man should be sent, so the speaker, Rib^cī,^c was dispatched on his own. He was taken under guard by the Persian authorities to meet with Rustam. Before he was brought in to face the general, the Persians agreed that they should try to overawe this Bedouin. They set out to demonstrate the wealth and sophistication of the Persian court. Precious objects (zibrīj) were displayed, cushions and carpets laid out. Rustam himself was seated on a golden throne and it was decorated with rugs (anmt) and cushions em broidered with gold thread. The contrast between this and the condition of Rib^cī, who came in on a shaggy, stumpy horse, is played up in the sources.³⁷ His sword was finely polished but covered in a scabbard made of shabby cloth. His spear was bound with camel sinews. He had a red shield made of cowhide ‘like a thick round loaf of bread’ and a bow and arrows.

Instead of being overawed, the Bedouin was defiant. His appearance was deliberately provocative. He was, we are told, ‘the hairiest of the Arabs’, and he did nothing to smooth out his image. His coat was the covering of his camel in which he had made a hole, and he tied it round his waist with reeds. His headdress was the girth-rope of his camel tied around him like a bandana. On his head he had four locks of hair, which stuck up ‘like the horns of a goat’. His behaviour was as uncouth as his appearance. Instead of dismounting as ordered, he rode his horse on to the carpet, and when he did get down, he tore open two cushions to use them to tether his animal. When told to lay down his arms, he adamantly refused, saying that the Persians had invited him and they could take him as he was or he would go away again. When he was finally brought in to the presence of Rustam his behaviour was proudly destructive: he used his spear to make holes and gashes in the carpets and cushions so that none of them was undamaged. When asked why he did it, he replied, ‘We do not like to sit on this finery of yours.’

The Persians continued to argue among themselves about the proper response, and Rustam requested that Rib^cī return the following day. Instead the Muslims send another man, to make the point that they were all equal and united, and he too rode on the precious carpets and he defiantly offered them the three usual options: ‘If you embrace Islam, we will leave you alone, if you agree to pay the poll tax, we will protect you if you need our protection. Otherwise it is war.’ These three options were becoming the usual offer in negotiations between the Muslims and their opponents. Rustam suggested a truce. The Arab agreed, though only for three days, ‘beginning yesterday’.

On the Persian side the arguments continued and Rustam asked for a third man to be sent. This was Mughīra b. Shu^cba, altogether a more important individual than the previous two and a man who was to play a major role in the conquest and settlement of Iraq. Once again the Persians attempted to overawe their visitor; they were in their gold embroidered robes and wearing crowns. In front of them was a carpet a bow-shot long, and no one could approach them without walking on it. As they might have guessed, Mughīra was unimpressed and showed his contempt by jumping up on the throne beside Rustam. He was violently removed by the Persians, to which he responded by giving a short sermon on equality, speaking through an interpreter, an Arab from Hīra. He argued that the Arabs treated each other as equals and he was appalled that they did not, concluding that ‘a kingdom cannot be based on such conduct, nor on such minds as yours’. This too provoked an argument among the Persians: the lower-class people (sifla) said that Mughīra was right but the landowners (dahqīn) said that he was saying what their slaves had always been saying and they cursed their ancestors for not taking the Arabs more seriously.

Rustam made a joke to try to soothe the differences in front of Mughīra. Then there was a more formal disputation, Rustam and Mughīra each making a short speech with the translator³⁸ standing between them. Rustam began by stressing the glory and prestige of the Persians. Even if they were defeated temporarily, Allāh would restore their glory. He went on to say that the Arabs had always lived in poverty and when they were afflicted by famine and drought they would seek help at the border. He knew that that was what they were doing now, so he would provide each of them with a load of dates and two garments so that they could leave: he had no desire the kill any of them or take them prisoner.

Mughīra roundly rejected this patronizing proposition. He said that all the Persians’ prosperity was due to Allāh and that they had not been nearly grateful enough. The present position of the Arabs was not due to hunger or destitution but because Allāh had sent them a prophet. He went on to stress the religious position as the others had before. When he reached the sentence ‘And if you need our protection then be our slave [abd] and pay the jizya humbly, otherwise it is the sword’, Rustam lost his temper and swore ‘on the sun’ that dawn would not break the next day before he had killed them all. So negotiations were broken off. After Mughīra had gone, Rustam told the Persians that no one could withstand people of such honesty, intelligence and steadfastness of purpose.

Modern historians have tended to denigrate such set pieces in the Arabic texts; after all, they were written down a long time later, are full of conventional tropes and themes and cannot possibly describe real events and speeches. This account was passed down by at least two early narrators before being collected by Sayf b. Umar³⁹(d. after 786) and the chances are that it was composed in its present form within a hundred years of the events it purports to describe. It is also likely it was elaborated when Muslim forces were still expanding the boundaries of Islam in Spain and Central Asia. In a real sense it is an authentic document of the conquest mentality, and if we want to understand the mind-set of the early Arab conquerors, it is to such documents we must turn.

The most fundamental point conveyed in the text is, of course, that the Arabs were inspired by the knowledge that Allāh was behind them and the preaching of Muhammad. So far so predictable. What is more striking is the awareness of and attention to the cultural divisions between them and the Persians. The Persians are richly clothed and live among luxurious carpets and textiles, the Arabs are poor and ragged. The only part of the Arabs’ equipment which is not old and scruffy is the bright blades of their swords. The Arabs are contemptuous of the wealth of their opponents. There is also the strong sense that the Arabs believed that they lived in a more egalitarian society in contrast to the more hierarchical Persian one, and that this was an important source of strength to them. Finally, there is the theme of the Persians recognizing the power and moral superiority of the Arabs. In this case Rustam quarrels with his courtiers while acknowledging this and they remain ignorant and contemptuous.

There are numerous reports of the final battle at Qādisiya but the details are very confused and it is impossible to get an overall picture. Numerous short and disconnected Arab anecdotes tell us of the bravery of one man, the death of another, occasionally the cowardice of a third. Certain themes are consistent: the fact that the fighting continued for a number of days and nights, the fact that the Persians used elephants in the early phases of the conflict but that they were largely ineffective. It looks as if the most intense fighting was done on foot and those who were mounted got down to join in. One short Arabic account stresses the importance of archery in their success.⁴⁰ A soldier in the Persian army recalled, ‘I took part in the battle of Qādisiya when I was still a Magian [he later converted to Islam]. When the Arabs sent their arrows against us, we began to shout “dūk, dūk” by which we meant spindles. These “spindles” continued to shower upon us until we were overwhelmed. One of our archers would shoot an arrow from his bow but it would do no more than attach itself to the garment of an Arab whereas their arrow would tear through a coat of mail and the double cuirass we had on.’ The superior power of Arab archery may have been an important factor in the success of Muslim troops here.

In the aftermath of the battle, Muslim troops pursued the fleeing Persians through the canals and palm groves of the Sawād. Crossing the waterways could cause problems, but after the victory at Qādisiya, local Persian landowners wisely offered their help to the Muslims, like Bistām, the dehqān of Burs, who built pontoon bridges across canals and sent back intelligence about the movement of the Persian forces. The disintegration of the Persian command left many locals with little alternative but to make what terms they could with the invaders.

The Arab advanced guard caught up with the remnants of the Persian forces at Bābil, ancient Babylon. Here, by the mounds of the long-deserted capital of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, they defeated them ‘in less time than it takes to slip off one’s cloak’.⁴³ The surviving Persian commanders now scattered to try to coordinate resistance in the provinces. Fayzurān went to the little town of Nihāvand in the Zagros, ‘where the treasures of the Persian king were stored’, and began assembling an army. Hurmuzān fled south to the rich province of Khuzistān where he set about collecting taxes to finance resistance. Others fled along the main road to the capital at Ctesiphon.⁴⁴

each had his spear. Both were of sturdy build except that Shāhriyār was ‘built like a camel’. When he saw Nā’il he flung his spear down in order to grab him by the neck. Nā’il did the same. They drew their swords and hacked at each other. Then they took each other by the throat and crashed down from their mounts. Shāhriyār fell on top of Nā’il like a ton of bricks and held him down under one thigh. He drew his dagger and started to undo Nā’il’s coat of mail. Shāhriyār’s thumb happened to land in Nā’il’s mouth and Nā’il crushed the bone with his teeth. He noticed a momentary slackening in his opponent’s assault and, attacking him furiously, whipped him off on to the ground, sat on his chest, drew his own dagger [khanjar] and tore Shāhriyār’s coat of mail from his belly. Then he stabbed him in the abdomen and side until he died. Nā’il took his horse, his bracelets and his spoils.

After this triumph, Sa^cd rewarded Nā’il with the dead man’s equipment: ‘After you have put on this Persian’s bracelets, cloak and coat of mail, I want you to mount his horse.’ Bracelets were an important part of the accoutrements of Persian nobility⁴⁶ and Sa^cd warned Nā’il to wear them only when he was going into battle. This story gives rich detail and a good fight scene, and it repeats the two themes we saw in the Shahnāmah: the superiority of the Persians’ military equipment and the Arabs’ rejection of their luxurious and effeminate ways.

Persians built like camels were not the only hazards on the way across the Sawād. At one point the Muslims encountered a group of soldiers (katība) who had been recruited by Queen Būrān, who had sworn that the kingdom of Persia (mulk Frs) would not perish as long as they lived. They had with them a tame lion, called Muqarrat, which belonged to the Persian king. The lion seems to have gone into battle for them but was slain by an Arab soldier who jumped down from his horse and killed it. After this loss, the resistance of the Persians crumbled.⁴⁷ The Muslims also came across large numbers of Persian peasants (fallhīn) living in the villages along the Tigris. Many had been employed digging protective ditches for the Persian army, but they seem to have been unarmed and in no mood to resist. Shīrzād, a Persian dehqān who had come over to the Muslim side, persuaded Sa^cd that they should not be harmed as they were only underlings of the Persians (^culj ahl furs) who would never pose any sort of threat; 100,000 of them are said to have had their names recorded, so that taxes could be collected from them, and allowed to go. As long as they paid their taxes and did not undertake any hostile activity, the Muslims had no quarrel with these people and certainly made no attempt to convert them to Islam: it was the Persian aristocracy and army who were the enemy.

The Persian capital, which is generally known to western historians by the Hellenized name of Ctesiphon, was a sprawling collection of cities, a fact reflected in its Arab name of Madā’in, meaning ‘the Cities’. The site straddles the Tigris, which brought both life-giving water and death-dealing floods to the cities; at times it shifted its course dramatically as it made its way through the flat lands of the Sawād, carving up city centres and isolating one suburb from another. We have no detailed written descriptions of the city at this time, and archaeological excavation has been very patchy. The first major settlement seems to have been the Greek city of Seleucia on the west bank. From about 170 BC Ctesiphon became the winter capital of the Parthian kings of Iran. After they took the city in 224, the Sasanians continued to use it as a capital, although in practice the kings often resided on country estates in the hills. In about AD 230 Ardashīr I, the effective founder of the Sasanian dynasty, laid out a round fortified city on the west bank of the river, but in the middle of the fifth century the river shifted its course, cutting the round city in two. By the time the Muslims arrived, the main part of the city was established on the east bank, though there was still a significant settlement on the west. On the east bank there were palaces, gardens and residential areas where houses for the upper classes have been excavated, but there seem to have been no fortifications to speak of. The largely mud-brick houses have dissolved back into the Mesopotamian plain and the only major building to have survived the ravages of time is part of the great palace known as the Arch of Chosroes. This is the surviving fragment of a huge audience hall, probably built by Chosroes II (591-628) on a scale that far surpassed any other palaces constructed by the Sasanians or their Muslim successors. It has remained a source of awe to later generations and even in its sadly mutilated state still demonstrates something of the power and majesty of the great kings.

Soon the Muslims approached the sections of Ctesiphon on the west bank of the Tigris. This part of the city was protected by earthworks, guards and other sorts of military equipment. The Muslims began to bombard them with siege engines (majānīq and arrādāt), which are said to have been constructed by Shīrzād on Sa^cd’s orders. The reference to siege engines may be anachronistic - there is no confirmation of this fact in other texts. It remains one of the earliest examples of Muslim forces using artillery against fortifications. It also attests once again to a strategic strength of the Muslims, their ability to recruit local troops and put their talents to good use.

The Persians continued to defend themselves behind their walls and they made at least one unsuccessful sally in an attempt to break the siege. There are also reports that Yazdgard III, still in the main part of the city on the east bank of the river, sent a message offering to make peace on the basis that the Tigris would form the frontier between the Arabs and the Persian Empire, the Persians holding all the land to the east of the river. The Arab negotiator is said to have replied that there would never be peace between them until the Arabs could ‘eat the honey of Ifridūn [between Rayy and Nishapur in north-east Iran] mixed with the citrons of Kūthā [in Iraq]’ - that is until they had conquered the whole of the lands of Iraq and Iran.⁴⁸ The next day, as the Arabs approached the walls again and began bombarding them with their catapults, there was an uncanny silence; no one appeared on the battlements. One man remained, who explained that the Arabs’ self-confident rejection of the terms had led the Persians to abandon the city and evacuate to the east bank. Sa^cd now moved his men into the fortified enclosure to use it as a base.

Now the Tigris, swift flowing and treacherous, lay between them and the main part of the city. There was no bridge and people generally crossed the river by ferry, but the Persians had removed all the boats to the east bank. Crossing the river and attacking the fortified position was thus a very difficult proposition, but Sa^cd urged his men to try, pointing out that all the land behind them to the west was secure, so that they could save themselves if anything went wrong. Some local people showed the Arabs a place where the bottom of the river was firm and could be crossed on horseback. An advance guard, said to have been sixty men, volunteered to cross first to secure the quays so that the bulk of the army could land in safety. They divided their horses into a squadron of stallions and a squadron of mares, to make them more tractable, it was said, and plunged into the river: 600 more men prepared to follow them.

The Persians, meanwhile, saw what was happening and they too urged their horses into the water. A battle in mid-stream ensued. The Arab commander shouted to his men, ‘Use your spears! Use your spears! Point them at those horses, aim at their eyes!’ They fought hand to hand until the Persians retreated to the far bank. The Muslims caught up with them on the shore, killing many of them, and taking possession of the quays. The rest of the force followed closely so that the enemy would have no time to regroup: they rode through the waves, the dark waters of the Tigris throwing up white spume. The men kept talking to each other as they swam across, in close-knit groups, chatting as if they were marching on dry ground. They surprised the Persians in a way the latter had not thought possible.⁴⁹ We see the Arabic sources stressing the hardiness of the Arabs and their willingness to take risks that more conventional armies would avoid.

Stories about the crossing were later bandied around among the soldiers. All the Muslims made the crossing safely, according to one story, apart from one man, who slid off the back of his chestnut mare. ‘I can still see it clearly before my own eyes,’ the narrator went on, ‘as the horse shook its mane free.’ Fortunately a colleague saw he was in distress, urged his horse towards him, grabbed him by the hand and dragged him along until they reached the safety of dry land. The survivor paid his rescuer the ultimate compliment: ‘Even my own sisters would not be able to give birth to someone like you!’⁵⁰

More trivial incidents were remembered too. It was said that no one lost anything except for one man, whose cup, tied on with a frayed piece of string that broke, floated away in the water. The man swimming beside him remarked that it was God’s decree but the owner remonstrated with him. ‘Why just me? God would never take my only cup from among all the people in the army.’ When they reached the other side, they met a man who had been in the advance guard which had established the bridge-head. He had gone down to the water’s edge to meet the first people in the main force as they reached the shore. The wind and the waves had tossed the cup to and fro until it landed on the bank. The man retrieved it with his lance and brought it to the troops. Here the owner recognized it and took it from him, saying to his companion, ‘Didn’t I tell you ...?’ Such anecdotes, aside from being good stories, were opportunities for Muslims to remember how God had looked after their forebears.

Meanwhile in the city itself the Persians prepared to abandon their capital. Even before the Arabs had crossed the river, Yazdgard had sent his household away. Now he left himself, along the high road to Iran, catching up with the rest of his household at Hulwān. He travelled through a land ravaged by famine and plague, the same plague that caused such devastation in Syria.⁵¹ The men he left in charge seem to have lost the will to resist. Soon they were loading the most precious and portable goods and as much as they could from the treasury on to the backs of their horses and mules. Persian women and children were evacuated too. However, they left behind vast quantities of clothes and all sorts of precious objects, as well as all the cattle, sheep, food and drink they had collected to sustain the siege that never happened.

The Arab armies seem to have met little opposition when they entered the almost deserted city. There was some short-lived resistance around the White Palace, but that was soon overcome. Sa^cd then made it his headquarters and ordered that the great Arch of Chosroes should be made into the Muslims’ place of worship. Early mosques needed very little fixed furniture, possibly a mihrab facing Mecca and a minbar, a pulpit for Friday sermons.⁵² The huge arch must have made a grand setting for prayers, very unlike the simple enclosure and shelter of the mosques that the Muslims established in new cities like Kūfa and Basra in the years to come. This early conversion of an important piece of architecture into a mosque may have ensured its survival. Not only was the great arch preserved unharmed but the plaster statues (tamāthīl) that decorated it were left in place, even as the Muslims prayed beneath them.⁵³

There are stories about the recovery of the Persian royal regalia. According to one version, the Muslim advance guard was pursuing the retreating Persians along the road to the mountains. When they came to the bridge across the Nahrawān canal, the refugees crowded together to cross. A mule was pushed off into the water. With great effort the Persians struggled to retrieve it and the Arab commander observed: ‘By God there must be something important about that mule. They would not have put in so much effort to get it back nor would they have endured our swords in this dangerous situation unless there was something valuable they did not want to give up.’ The Arabs dismounted to engage the enemy, and when they had been routed the commander ordered his men to haul the mule out of the water with all its baggage. It was not until the party returned to the central collecting point in Ctesiphon that they opened the baggage and found it contained ‘all the king’s finery, his clothes, gems, sword belt and coat of mail encrusted with jewels. The king used to don all those when he was sitting in state’.⁵⁵ In another version, two mules are captured carrying baskets, one of which contained the king’s crown, which could only be held up by two jewel-encrusted props (istawntn), while the other contained his robes, woven with gold thread and encrusted with gems.⁵⁶ In a third account, the Arabs also found the king’s swords, aventail (mighfar), greaves (sāqā) and armplates (sā^cidā) and, in another bag, coats of mail that had belonged to the emperor Heraclius, the Turkish Khaqan, Bahram Chubin, and other foes of the Persian monarchs, kept as trophies.⁵⁷

Another set of stories deals with the great carpet that adorned the royal palace. This was called the King’s Spring (Bahri Kisr) in Persian. It was huge, about 30 metres square. The Persian court kept it for use in the winter, and when they wanted a drinking party, they could sit on it and imagine that they were in a garden with all the flowers blooming. The background was gold coloured, the brocade was inlaid, the fruits depicted were precious stone, its foliage silk and its waters cloth of gold.⁵⁸ The question then arose of what to do with this fantastic object. In a different situation, it would probably have adorned the palace of the new ruler as it had that of the old, and indeed some people suggested that the caliph Umar should have it, but the early Muslims were adamant about the fair distribution of the spoils. There was no alternative. It was sent as part of the tribute to the caliph in Medina. Here it was cut up into numerous different pieces. The Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Alī, who had played no active part in the conquests himself, received a fragment which he sold for 20,000 dirhams, and other members of the Muslim elite no doubt had their shares.⁵⁹

Meanwhile Persian rule was being challenged in the countryside as well. One story tells of a Persian cavalry man from Ctesiphon who was in a village that belonged to him when news came of the Arab invasion and the flight of the Persians. At first he paid no attention to it, for he was a very self-confident man, and went about his business until he came to a house where he found some of his serfs (a^clj lahu), packing their clothes and preparing to leave. On being questioned they told him that they had been driven from their houses by hornets (zanbīr). His immediate response was to try to solve the problem; calling for a crossbow and clay bullets, and he began to fire at the insects, splattering them against the walls. He must soon have appreciated that there was more to it than met the eye and, realizing that his serfs were escaping from his control, he lost his nerve. He ordered one of them to saddle a mount for him. He had not gone far when he was met by an Arab soldier, who drove his spear into him and left him to die.⁶¹ The defeat of Persian arms had clearly meant that the Persian ruling class were no longer respected and the peasants were no longer obeying their masters. The old order was coming to an end.

As the Persian forces retreated eastwards towards the mountains, the Muslim army, about twelve thousand strong, moved up the road behind them. When the Persians reached Jalūlā, they decided to make a stand. Jalūlā was a parting of the ways: beyond here the Persians of Azerbaijan and the north-west would go one way, those of Media and Fars another. If they were to make a stand it had to be here. The king moved on up through the Zagros mountains, leaving men and money with his general, Mihrān, while he himself avoided meeting the enemy in person. The Persians took up defensive positions at Jalūlā. As often, they seem to have preferred a static, defensive style of warfare, fortifying themselves and making occasional sallies, in contrast to the much more mobile tactics of the Arabs. At Jalūlā they created an earthwork enclosure, topped with pointed wooden stakes (hasak min al-khashab), later replaced by iron ones.⁶² The Muslims built no fortifications but launched repeated attacks on their opponents. According to one account, the fortifications were breached when the Persians made a sortie and opened breaches in the defences to let their horses back in.⁶³ Soon a group of Arabs had established themselves within the stockade and they opened the way for others to follow. The victory was complete and the slaughter terrible.

And there was booty to be taken and divided. Among the more notable trophies was a figurine of a camel, ‘about the size of a young goat when it was stood on the ground’, made of gold or silver, decorated with pearls and rubies, on it the figure of a man, similarly decorated.⁶⁴ There was also booty of a human sort. One of the Arab soldiers recalled how he had entered a Persian tent in which there were pillows (marāfiq) and clothes. ‘Suddenly I sense the presence of a human form hidden under some covers [farsh], I tear them away and what do I find? A woman like a gazelle, radiant as the sun! I took her and her clothes and surrendered the latter as booty [to be divided up] but put in a request that the girl should be allotted to me. I took her as a concubine and she bore me a child.’⁶⁵ Such were the pleasures of victory, and the Muslims had no inhibitions about enjoying them.

At the same time as the Sawād was being conquered, Arab forces were making their first incursions in southern Iraq. Military activities here followed roughly the same pattern as further north, beginning with raids by local tribesmen trying to take advantage of the weakness of the Sasanian defences. Soon Umar sent a commander, Utba b. Ghazwān, from Medina with reinforcements, probably only a few hundred men,⁶⁶ to make sure that any gains made came under the authority of the Muslim leadership. We are also told that the expedition was part of a broader Muslim strategy, to divert the Persians of southern Iraq and Fars from helping their compatriots further north.⁶⁷ Their first substantial conquest was the city of Ubulla. Ubulla (known to the ancient Greek geographers as Apologos) was at that time the leading port at the head of the Gulf. We are told little about the details of the conquest except that the Arabs found a new sort of bread made of white flour there.

From this base, expeditions went out to conquer the nearby towns and villages. As usual we have many details but no overall picture. Persian resistance was confined to local garrisons and dehqāns and there was no attempt to launch a major expedition against the invaders. As the various districts came under Muslim control, taxes were gathered and distributed among the conquering armies. Very few of the Bedouin could read or write and the task of keeping the accounts was entrusted to one Ziyād, ‘although he was only a boy with plaits on his head’. He was paid the substantial salary of 2 dirhams a day for his pains: it was the beginning of a glittering administrative career and the boy Ziyād grew up to be one of the founder figures of Islamic government apparatus.

After Utba died while returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca, he was replaced by Mughīra b. Shu^cba. We have already encountered Mughīra as the man who dared sit with Rustam on his throne. He was chosen by Umar to lead the Muslims in southern Iraq because he was not a Bedouin but a man from the settled areas of the Hijaz. Although he had converted to Islam just two years before the Prophet’s death, he could still claim the coveted status of ‘Companion of the Prophet’. Mughīra was a tough and resourceful leader but his career was soon engulfed in a scandal that almost cost him his life.

He began an affair with a woman called Umm Jamīl, who was married to a man from the tribe of Thaqīf. Other members of the tribe caught wind of the affair and were determined to preserve the honour of their kin. They waited until he went to visit her and then crept up to see what was going on. They saw Mughīra and Umm Jamīl, both naked, he lying on top of her. They stole away and went to tell the caliph Umar. He in turn appointed the righteous Abū Mūsā al-Ash^carī to go and take over command in Basra and send Mughīra to him in Medina to be investigated. When he arrived Umar confronted him with the four witnesses. The first was emphatic about what he had seen: ‘ I saw him lying on the woman’s front pressing into her and I saw him pushing in and withdrawing [his penis] as the applicator goes in and out of the make-up [kuhl] bottle.’ The next two witnesses gave exactly the same testimony. Umar now turned to the fourth, the young Ziyād, who has already appeared doing the army’s accounts. The caliph hoped that his would not be the testimony to condemn a Companion of the Prophet to death. Ziyād showed a talent for diplomacy and quick thinking which was to serve him well in the rest of his life. ‘I saw a scandalous sight,’ he said, ‘and I heard heavy breathing but I did not see whether he was actually penetrating her or not.’ Since the Koran stipulates⁶⁸ that conviction for adultery requires the unequivocal testimony of four witnesses, the case collapsed, and indeed we are told that Umar ordered that the other three witnesses be flogged for making unfounded allegations.⁶⁹ The story was often repeated by Muslim lawyers, for here was the great Umar, after the Prophet himself the most important law giver in Sunni Islam, making conviction for adultery very problematic indeed.

It now fell to Abū Mūsā al-Ash^cari, pious and effective, to lead the Muslim advance in the south, and it was he who commanded the Arab armies that conquered Khuzistān. After crossing the irrigated lands around the lower Tigris, where the city of Basra was soon to be founded, the Muslim armies naturally moved forward into Khuzistān. Khuzistān, named after an ancient but long-vanished people called the Khuzis, lay between the north-east corner of the Gulf and the southern Zagros mountains. It had been the land of the ancient Elamites, and the vast ziggurat they constructed at Choga Zunbil (Basket Hill), already 2,000 years old at the time of the Muslim conquest, still remains to bear witness to their power and wealth. The landscape of parts of the province was in many ways a continuation of the Mesopotamian plain, but as the land rose slowly towards the foothills, the endless flatness of Iraq changed into rolling hills and outcrops of rock became visible. Nowadays, Khuzistān, with its unlovely capital Ahvaz, is the centre of Iran’s oil industry, but when the Arabs arrived it was agriculture and textiles which made the region among the most prosperous in the Middle East.

Khuzistān is watered not by the Tigris and Euphrates, which flow and stagnate through the plains well to the west, but by a number of smaller rivers, the most important being the Karun, which follows a winding, tortuous course through gorges in the southern Zagros to reach the plains. The melting snows on the mountains provide ample water in the spring for irrigated agriculture. In the piedmont below the steep mountains, the rivers cut deeply into the rolling hills and great weirs were necessary to raise the water level to fill irrigation canals. Some of these, like the Sasanian dam and bridge at Tustar, have left enough traces to show the massive scale of this irrigation activity.

Like the history of the conquest of Iraq, the course of the conquest of Khuzistān is not at all clear, and the numerous stories about different encounters add to, rather than diminish, the confusion. There are, however, two differences. The first is that we can get a much clearer idea of the physical environment of the conquests. The cities and towns of seventh-century Iraq are little more than names to us. True, we have some idea about the topography of Ctesiphon and some fragmentary excavations from Hīra but towns like Ubulla and Qādisiya have completely disappeared, swallowed up in the alluvium of central Iraq or washed away by the constantly changing watercourses. In Khuzistān, where the rivers bite deeper into the rock, there is much more continuity and we can use the modern topography to help interpret the ancient sources. We also have a local source written shortly after the events of the conquest, which acts as some sort of check on the voluminous but very confused Arabic accounts. The so-called Khuzistān Chronicle was written in Syriac, the language of the Eastern Church, by an anonymous Christian author.⁷⁰ Most of the chronicle is very brief but the author, or one of the authors, takes some space to describe the conquest of his homeland by these new invaders. The source provides another voice, which corroborates many of the events in the Arabic sources, and thus we can be reasonably certain of the main outlines of the history of the conquest of this area.

The author of the chronicle begins by describing how the invaders took most of the fortified towns very swiftly, including the major city of Junday-shapur. Junday-shapur was a city with a bishopric and a considerable Christian population, and was famous as the home town of the Bukhtishu family of doctors, physicians to generations of caliphs. Sadly, the idea of a flourishing medical school here, entertained by historians since the nineteenth century, has had to be abandoned under the withering gaze of modern scholarship: certainly the Christian community here produced families of doctors, but there was no organized academy. The site is abandoned now, but aerial photography shows traces of both a round city and a square one, Sasanian foundations superimposed on each other. There were no natural defences and the Muslims seem to have had little difficulty in taking the city.

The conquest of the city provides the setting for one of those moralistic tales that seek to illuminate the virtues of the early Muslim. According to this story,⁷¹ the city resisted vigorously until one day, to the great surprise of the Muslims, the gates were flung open and the city was opened up. The Muslims asked the defenders what had come over them, to which they replied, ‘You have shot us an arrow with a message that safety would be granted to us. We have accepted this and set aside the tribute payments.’ The Muslims replied that they had done no such thing, but after extensive enquiries they found a slave, originally from Junday-shapur, who admitted that he had indeed written such a message. The Muslim commanders explained that this was the work of a slave with no authority to make such an offer, to which the inhabitants replied that they had no means of knowing that and finished by saying that they were going to keep their side of the bargain, even if the Muslims chose to act treacherously. The Muslims referred the matter to Umar, who responded that the promise was in fact binding, for ‘God holds the keeping of promises in the highest esteem’. The moral is clear: even the promise of a slave must be respected.

Soon, the Christian author goes on, only Susa and Tustar held out. Susa was one of the homes of the great Achaemenid rulers of ancient Iran; its palaces rivalled those of Persepolis in size and splendour. Alexander the Great sacked it, plundering its fabulous riches, and it was there that he arranged his famous mass wedding, when 10,000 Greeks and Persians were legendarily united in marriage. Later, in Sasanian times, it became an important Christian centre and, as a result, was destroyed by the Sasanian king Shapur II (309-79), who pursued an actively anti-Christian policy. It had recovered enough by the time of the Muslim conquest to put up some resistance, and the Muslims later built one of the earliest surviving mosques in Iran there. The site today is dominated by a castle, erected not by some medieval potentate, but by the French archaeological mission at the end of the nineteenth century to protect themselves against Bedouin attack. For the early Muslims, however, the most noteworthy feature of the town was not the Achaemenid heritage but the fact that it housed the tomb of the prophet Daniel. The Muslims took the city after a few days and killed all the Persian nobles there. In the Arabic sources the fall of the city is described as a sort of miracle.⁷² Apparently the Christian monks and priests had appeared on the battlements, taunting the attackers and saying that no one could take Susa unless the Antichrist was in their army. If he was not among them, they went on, the attackers might as well not bother and should go away now. One of the Muslim commanders, in fury and frustration, went up to one of the gates and kicked it. Instantly the chains snapped, the locks broke and it flew open. The inhabitants could only beg for peace.

They also seized the ‘House of Mār [Saint] Daniel’ and took the treasure that had been kept there on the orders of the Persian kings since the days of Darius and Cyrus, another example of the dethesaurization of precious metals that so often accompanied the Arabic conquest. They also broke open the silver coffin and carried off the mummified corpse within: ‘many said it was Daniel’s but others claimed it was Darius’. Daniel was much revered and the emperor Heraclius is said to have tried to take the body away to join his great relic collection in Constantinople. Daniel, unlike many Old Testament figures, does not appear in the Koran and the initial Muslim impulse seems to have been to destroy the cult, the caliph Umar ordering that the body be reburied under the river bed. The Muslims had removed the signet ring, which carried a picture of a man between two lions, from the corpse, and Umar ordered that it be returned.⁷³ But Daniel soon became a cult figure for the Muslims too. Muslims began to make pilgrimages to the site and the tomb of Daniel still exists in the heart of the city, a tall whitewashed dome overlooking the river. This is a very early example of the way in which Islam appropriated and Islamized an ancient pre-existing cult.

With the fall of Susa, only Tustar remained. The city was situated on a rocky outcrop beside the river and was defended by a castle, remains of which still survive. The river had been dammed by a weir and a bridge, both massive engineering projects which are said to have been constructed by Roman prisoners of war after Shapur I defeated the emperor Valerian in 260. It is known to this day as Bandi Qaysar, or Caesar’s dam, and Arab authors considered it one of the wonders of the world; much of it still exists. Behind the dam two tunnels were cut in the rock on which the city stood to lead water away to irrigate more fields to the south. The Khuzistān Chronicle describes it graphically: ‘this Shushtra [Tustar] is very extensive and strong, because of the mighty rivers and canals that surround it on every side like moats. One of these was called Ardashīragān after [the Sasanian king] Ardashīr who dug it. Another, which crossed it was called Samīrām after the Queen and another Dārāyagān after Darius. The largest of them all was a mighty torrent which flowed down from the northern mountains.’

Hurmuzān determined to make a last stand here and, according to the Khuzistān Chronicle, Tustar held out for two years. In the end it was treachery not military force which led to the fall of the city; two men with houses on the city walls conspired with the Arabs: in return for a third of the spoils, they would let them in.⁷⁴ Accordingly tunnels were dug under the city walls and the Arabs were able to enter the walls through them. Hurmuzān retreated to the citadel (qal^ca) and was taken alive, but a local bishop, along with ‘students, priests and deacons’, was killed.

The story of the conquest of Khuzistān has a curious coda in the accounts of the fate of Hurmuzān.⁷⁵ As in the case of the wise but pessimistic Rustam, the defeated general at Qādisiya, the personality of Hurmuzān is elaborated to make certain points about the differences between Arab and Persian, Muslim and non-Muslim and the connections between the two. After his surrender at Tustar, he was brought to Medina to be presented to the caliph. Before he and his escort entered the city, they arrayed him in all his finery, his brocade and cloth-of-gold robes and a crown studded with rubies. Then they led him through the streets so that everyone could see him. When they reached Umar’s house, however, they found he was not there, so they went to look for him in the mosque but could not find him there either. Finally they passed a group of boys playing in the street, who told them that the caliph was asleep in a corner of the mosque with his cloak folded under his head for a pillow.

When they returned to the mosque they found him as the boys had said. He had just received a delegation of visitors from Kūfa and, when they had left, he had simply put his head down for a nap. Apart from him there was no one in the mosque. They sat down a little way from him. Hurmuzān enquired where his guards and attendants were but was told he had none. ‘Then he must be a prophet,’ the Persian said. ‘No,’ his escort replied, ‘but he does the things prophets do.’ Meanwhile more people gathered round and the noise woke Umar up. He sat up and saw the Persian and the escort asked him to talk to the ‘king of Ahvaz’. Umar refused as long as he was wearing all his finery, and only when the prisoner had been stripped as far as decency allowed and reclad in a coarse robe did the interrogation begin.

Umar asked Hurmuzān what he thought about the recent turn of events, to which the Persian replied that in the old days God was not on the side of the Persians or the Arabs and the Persians were in the ascendancy, but now God was favouring the Arabs and they had won. Umar replied that the real reason was that the Persians had previously been united while the Arabs had not. Umar was inclined to execute him in revenge for the Muslims he had slain. Hurmuzān asked for some water, and when it was given to him he said he was afraid he would be killed while he was drinking. The caliph replied that he would not be killed before he had drunk the water, whereupon Hurmuzān allowed his hands to tremble and the water was spilled. When Umar again threatened to kill him, the Persian said that he had already been given immunity: after all, he had not drunk the water. Umar was furious, but the assembled company agreed that Hurmuzān was right. In the end, he was converted to Islam, allowed to live in Medina and given a substantial pension. The story of Hurmuzān’s trick is probably a folk motif grafted on to historical events, but it serves its purpose to illustrate the contrast between Persian pride and luxury and Muslim simplicity, the honesty of the Muslims and the integration of elements of the Persian elite into the Muslim hierarchy.

A notable feature of the conquest of Iraq, and one that certainly aided the Muslims, was the defection of substantial numbers of Persian troops to the Arab side and the willingness of the Muslims to incorporate these renegades into their armies and pay them salaries. Among these were the Hamra⁷⁶ (the Reds), some of whom defected to the Muslims before the battle of Qādisiya and participated in the division of the booty that had been taken from their old comrades in arms.⁷⁷ Others joined them afterwards and fought in the Muslim army at Jalūlā. Among them were 4,000 men from the mountains of Daylam, at the south-east corner of the Caspian Sea, who seem to have been an elite unit of the army (jund) of the Shahanshah. Many of them subsequently settled in the Muslim new town of Kūfa, where they had their own quarter.⁷⁸

The Muslims had now conquered a vast and wealthy country. They were a small number, probably no more than fifty thousand men among a much larger population. The question that confronted them was how they were going to hold it and exploit its resources. In the immediate aftermath of the victory in Iraq, the Muslims settled in two new, purpose-built towns, Kūfa and Basra. We are told that Umar ordered the Muslims not to disperse through the small towns and countryside of Iraq, nor to revert to a Bedouin lifestyle in the nearby desert. Instead they were to come together in newly constructed cities, which were to form their homes and their military bases.

We know much more about the foundation of Kūfa than of Basra and Sayf b. Umar gives a full account of what they did and why. Immediately after the fall of the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, the Muslim army had settled, or rather camped, there, as expeditions fanned out, east to Hulwān at the foot of the Zagros and north of Qarqīsiyā on the Euphrates. The climate in the old Persian capital was said to be unhealthy. Umar, we are told, noted that Arabs returning from there were looking worn out. Furthermore, they were putting on weight and their muscles were becoming flabby. One Arab commander arriving at the site asked, ‘Do camels thrive in this place?’ On being told that the answer was no, he commented that Umar had said that ‘Arab tribesmen will not be healthy in a region in which camels do not thrive’.⁸¹

Two men were sent out to look for a site on the desert margins. Separately they prospected along the banks of the Euphrates from Anbār to the south until they came together at a place called Kūfa, close to Hīra. Here they found three small Christian monasteries with huts made of reeds scattered between them. Both men decided there and then that they had found what they were looking for. They both dismounted and performed a ritual prayer. One of them also recited a poem, remarkable for what appears to be its pagan imagery:

This, at least, is how the choice of the site was remembered in Tabarī’s History. The word may never have been spoken as reported but the motives are convincing. Ctesiphon may well have been unhealthy for the Bedouin and their beasts and Kūfa provided much better pasture. There were probably other considerations as well. One was the need to maintain good communications with Medina, but perhaps the most important was to keep the Muslims together, manageable and militarily effective, rather than see them disperse and lose their coherence.

Most of the Muslims in Ctesiphon elected to move to the new site, and it has been plausibly suggested that the adult male population in this first phase of the growth of the city was around twenty thousand,⁸² though this was soon to be swelled by new immigrants from Arabia, hoping for a share of the action. Along with the rest of their possessions, they are said to have brought with them the doors of their houses to hang on their new residences. The first houses were built of the local reeds, but after a fire that damaged many of them, they asked Umar’s permission to build in mud brick (laban). This was granted on condition that no one built a house with more than three apartments (abyāt) and that the buildings did not become too high: once again we see the emphasis on modesty and equality among the Muslims.

The new settlement was planned with some care by a man called Abū’l-Hayyāj, who has claims to have been the first Muslim city planner. Roads radiated out from a central point and men were settled in their tribal groups along these routes so that, initially at least, men of different tribes were established in the same area. It must have reinforced tribal solidarity and rivalries between tribes. Umar is said to have specified the widths of the streets: 20 metres for the main roads (40 cubits), with side streets of 15 and 10 metres; the smallest alleys were to be 3.5 metres and no passage was to be narrower than that.⁸³ This was to be a clearly laid-out city, not a tangle of winding alleyways where people settled and built as they wished.

The mosque itself seems to have been roughly square in shape, about 110 metres in each direction.⁸⁴ In its earliest phase it is said to have had no walls at the sides and a partial covering at one end. It was probably constructed very simply in reeds or mud brick. Sitting in the interior, you could look out and see the neighbouring Christian monastery of Hind and, further in the distance, the gate that led to the bridge of boats across the river.⁸⁵ Shortly after its construction, the treasury in the governor’s palace was robbed and Sa^cd made the decision to bring the mosque right up to the palace so that they shared a common wall. The fact that the mosque was frequented day and night was felt to be the best protection against theft. This new mosque may have been rather more substantial. At one end there was a roofed area about 100 metres long, ‘whose ceiling resembled the ceilings in Byzantine churches’, by which he presumably meant open beams supported by columns of marble.⁸⁶ The columns are said to have come from Christian churches.⁸⁷ It was not until Ziyād’s governorate, in the time of the first Umayyad caliph Mu^cāwiya, that the mosque was walled in. New pillars, 15 metres in height, were made of stone from Ahvaz, fixed together with lead centres and iron clamps.

If the mosque was simplicity itself, the palace was a more complex building, and it became the subject of a vigorous dispute. Sayf, as preserved in Tabarī, tells the story.⁸⁸ According to him, the citadel was built for Sa^cd by a Persian from Hamadhan called Rūzbih b. Buzurgmihr, and it was made of fired bricks taken from an old palace of the pre-Islamic kings of Hīra. Because the palace lay in the centre of the city, in which there was a great deal of noise and commotion, Sa^cd had constructed a wooden door with a lock on it. When the caliph Umar heard about this, he sent a man to burn the door down, abusing Sa^cd for putting a barrier between himself and the ordinary Muslims, preventing them from entering any time they wished. The story is part of a polemical literature against rulers who attempted to separate themselves or put themselves above the rank-and-file believers. The story that Sa^cd’s palace was made of reused bricks may well be true, however.⁸⁹

The primitive mosque of Kūfa lay on the site of the modern mosque of the town. This was the place where the caliph Alī was assassinated in 661, and it has long been a place of veneration to the Shia, so no archaeological excavation has been possible. The palace, however, was excavated in the 1950s and 1960s. Three main building phases were detected, all superimposed, an early one, an Umayyad one and an early Abbasid one. By the ninth century the building was essentially abandoned and occupied by squatters. The first phase was demolished to its foundations when the second Umayyad building was constructed. All that remains are outside walls with square bastions projecting at regular intervals. Was this the foundation of Sa^cd’s palace, as the excavator thought, or the building constructed by Ziyād a generation later at the beginning of the Umayyad period, as the main historian of the city believed? It is impossible to tell.

We can, however, be certain that within a generation of the foundation of the city, it had acquired two public buildings, the mosque and the palace, which shared a common wall. In this way the classic central architectural layout of the Islamic city had been established, a layout that had no direct parallel in pre-Islamic architecture and which was to persist for centuries to come. To this official complex, a third element was added, the markets.⁹⁰ It is clear that Kūfa was provided with souks from the very beginning: after all, the victorious Arab troops had to spent the dirhams they had been given as booty somewhere. At a fairly early stage they were also being paid salaries, and these too they would have spent on both necessities and luxuries. It was the noise from the markets which is said to have induced Sa^cd to strengthen the walls and gates of his palace. We know nothing, however, of the shape or form of the early souks except that they came to occupy the open spaces around the mosque and palace. They do not seem to have been built structures until the late Umayyad period, a century after the foundation of the city. Before this, they were probably flimsy shelters, built of wood and reeds and roofed with mats. Nonetheless, the presence of the souks, in the heart of the town, surrounding mosque and palace, set the fundamental pattern for subsequent Islamic urbanism.

The Muslims operating in southern Iraq also founded a city on the margins of the desert at Basra. The accounts of the early settlement of Basra are very confused, though the Khuzistān Chronicle clearly ascribes it to Abū Mūsā al-Ash^cari, commander of the forces that conquered his homeland. It was also much smaller than Kūfa, perhaps only 1,000 men, as the army in the south was much smaller.⁹¹ The site of the first city of Basra is now known as Zubayr and lies about 20 kilometres from the centre of the modern city. It was some distance from the river bank and canals were required to bring water to it. Although the location of the site is well known and much of it is open semi-desert, there have been no published excavations and no serious survey. If conditions were more peaceful than they are as I write, it would present a wonderful opportunity for students of early Islamic urbanism to explore the archaeology of this early military settlement.

It was in these new cities that early Islamic fiscal administration developed most precociously.⁹² The inhabitants lived off the receipts of taxation, paid in cash as salaries (at). At first this was supple mented by payments in kind, grain, oil and other foodstuffs (rizq), but this was gradually phased out and replaced by money. The names of those entitled to payments were entered in registers known as dīwāns. The administration of this system was very complex. In Basra, for example, there are said to have been 80,000 men by the end of Mu^ca-wiya’s caliphate in 680, each of whom was entitled to at least 200 dirhams per year. This required the collection and payment of 16 million dirhams, a massive task demanding skilled workers. The Muslims were forced to employ accountants and officials who had worked for the defeated Sasanians, and they brought with them the old Persian traditions of financial administration and bureaucratic practice.

Both the new towns, Kūfa and Basra, played an immensely important part in the history of the early Muslim world, first as military bases from which armies set out for the conquest of Iran and the east and then as cultural centres. Kūfa was also politically important, a major centre of resistance to the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus and the centre of the movement of support for the family of the Prophet which was to develop into Shiism. The foundation of Baghdad, only a few kilometres to the north, in 762 dealt a fatal blow to the prosperity of the city. By the ninth century it was in full decline and only the status of the ancient mosque as a place of pilgrimage kept the city alive. Basra in contrast was far enough away to escape the gravitational pull of Baghdad and remained the major port at the head of the Gulf. Although the centre of the city has shifted, Abū Mūsā al-Ash^cari’s foundation has survived the centuries and is now the second-largest city of Iraq.

At about the same time, a force from Kūfa was marching up the Tigris towards the Jazira, accepting the surrender of towns and villages along the river banks and in the surrounding plains. When they came to the site where the city of Mosul now stands they found a castle, some Christian churches with a few houses near by and a settlement of Jews. Almost immediately after this small community was conquered, the Arabs set about developing a new town on the site, the origins of the modern city of Mosul. Plots for house building were distributed to the Arabs and the city grew rapidly to become one of the main urban centres of Iraq.⁹³

The absolute chronology of events is very difficult to ascertain, but we can be reasonably confident that by the end of 640 Muslim forces had taken control of the irrigated lands of Iraq from Tikrit in the north to the Gulf in the south and as far east as the foothills of the Zagros mountains. Muslim settlement remained very patchy and was largely concentrated in the newly founded garrison cities at Kūfa, Basra and, on a smaller scale, Mosul. There was a garrison holding the old Persian capital at Ctesiphon and there were probably others of which we know nothing. The numbers of the conquerors were very small to subdue and hold this large and populous territory. The 20,000 adult males who first settled in Kūfa were surrounded by a population in the surrounding countryside which is thought to number half a million men.⁹⁴ Although the number of Arabs was swelled by new immigrants, they were always a very small minority and cannot, in the first generation, have comprised more than 10 per cent of the total. Their problems would have been compounded by the nature of the terrain, criss-crossed as it was with irrigation ditches and canals. It would certainly not have been possible to conquer and hold the land if the Muslims had been faced with determined popular resistance. In the event, however, the only serious resistance came from the Persian royal army. For reasons that are not entirely clear, this army failed repeatedly to hold its own against the Arab forces. In field battles at Qādisiya and Jalūlā, and cities like Ctesiphon at Tustar, the Sasanian forces were decisively defeated. With the collapse of the Persian army, the Arabs were prepared to make fairly easy terms with the rest of the population - they did not massacre townspeople and villagers, they did not seize their houses or their lands, they did not interfere with their religions and customs, they did not even settle among them. They demanded only that taxes be paid and that the people did not aid their enemies. Whether the taxes were higher or lower than they had been under the previous administration we cannot tell, but we can be certain that most people in Iraq thought that it was a bargain well worth making.