12
CONCLUSION

THE DEFINING OF THE FRONTIERS

By the year 750 the Muslim Empire had reached frontiers that were to remain more or less stable for the next 300 years. The only significant conquests made in this later period were in the Mediterranean, Sicily and Crete. In size and population it was broadly similar to the Roman Empire at its height in the eighth century; only Tang China could rival it. About half the territories ruled by the caliphs from Damascus had been ruled from Rome in the first three centuries AD. These included Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa and Spain. The Romans had, of course, also ruled France, Britain, Italy, the Balkans and Turkey and, while France, Italy and Turkey all suffered Muslim raids and some temporary, limited occupation, they never came under Arab rule. On the other hand, the caliphate included Iraq, Iran, Transoxania and Sind, areas that were always outside the frontiers of the Roman Empire.
The confines of the Roman Empire were defined with firm frontiers, the limes. Sometimes, as with Hadrian’s Wall in north Britain, these were really a continuous line of masonry with forts placed at regular intervals. On many other frontiers, in the Syrian and Jordanian deserts, for example, there was no fortified line but a network of small castles and fortifications to shelter garrisons and so police the desert margins. The early Muslim Empire did not develop limes in the same way. In many areas the frontier was only very hazily defined, in others it was lost in the desert. Only in a few districts, along the Anatolian frontier with the Byzantine Empire, for example, or the places where Muslim and Christian outposts faced each other in the upper Ebro Valley in Spain, was there a fortified boundary that divided Muslims and non-Muslims.
The Mediterranean separated the Muslims from many potential enemies to the north and west. In the two centuries after the initial conquests, the Mediterranean coasts of the Muslim world were almost completely immune from attack. Only occasionally did Byzantine fleets manage to raid ports in the Levant and Egypt and, while they might pillage and burn, they were never able to establish a permanent presence.
The northern frontiers of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, lay along the foothills of the Pyrenees in the east and the Cantabrian mountains to the west, following the 1,000-metre contour line almost exactly. The Muslims were defended by a series of fortified towns - Huesca, Zaragoza, Tudela, Calatayud, Madrid, Talavera - often protected by Roman walls. In Portugal and the west of Spain there seems to have been a wide belt of no man’s land between the northern outposts of Islam and the small Christian kingdoms sheltered by the Cantabrian mountains, and further east in the Ebro Valley, Christian and Muslim outposts were only a few kilometres apart.
In North Africa, from Morocco in the far west to Egypt in the east, the frontier of the Muslim state lay along the northern fringes of the Sahara desert. In Egypt, too, the desert was the frontier. In the Nile Valley Muslim rule ended at Aswan. Here diplomacy with the Nubians secured the narrow and easily defended border. Around Arabia, along the Gulf and Indian Ocean shores of Iran, the sea coast formed the frontier and, despite occasional outbreaks of piracy, the Muslim world was never threatened from that direction.
In Sind the position was more complex. Muslim rule disappeared north of Multān but the frontier seems to have been comparatively peaceful; certainly there is no indication of major fortifications or the establishment of garrisons to defend the Muslim lands. The position in modern Afghanistan was, as ever, much more complex. The Muslims held a number of positions in the lowlands, to the north and south of the Hindu Kush. Bust, Herat, Balkh were all more or less frontier towns, but the unconquered people of the mountains were more an occasional nuisance than a serious challenge to Muslim rule.
In Transoxania the frontier was defined not so much by lines on the map as by points of control, the Muslims holding the cities and settled areas while the Turks roamed the deserts. In many areas the Muslims established ribts, fortresses inhabited and defended by ghzis, warriors who devoted themselves to the service of Islam.
In the Caucasus, it was again the 1,000-metre contour line which marked the limits of Muslim control. They dominated the plains and river valleys as far as Tblisi in the heart of the mountains, but the snowy peaks of the high ranges prevented them from going further and the plains of what is now southern Russia remained beyond their power. Only at the eastern end of the Caucasus, where the mountains come down to the Caspian Sea, was there a fortified border. The great stone fortress now known as Derbent but called Bāb al-Abwāb (Gate of Gates) by the Arabs had been established by the Sasanians to guard the border, and it was taken over by the Muslims, an Arab garrison being established there at a very early date. Beyond the gate lay the steppe lands of southern Russia, dominated by a Turkic people, the Khazars, who periodically made raids into the Muslim areas to the south.
The frontier with the Byzantine Empire in south-eastern Anatolia was the most heavily fortified of all the borders of the Islamic world and it occupied a unique place in the Muslim consciousness.1 By the year 700 this frontier was almost static. Again the Muslims controlled the lowlands while the mountains above 1,000 metres were in the hands of the Byzantines. The Byzantines, despite their defeat at the time of the first conquests, remained the enemy par excellence, the only power with whom the Muslims felt they competed on equal terms. Alone among the peoples who lived along their borders, the Byzantines had a highly developed state apparatus, a regular army, a state religion and an emperor who could correspond on equal terms with the caliphs. The Muslims knew that they were the possessors of the only true religion, but some of them at least also knew they had much to learn from the culture, philosophy and science of the Greeks.
In the years immediately after the conquest of Syria, and the Jazira, the Muslim provinces that bordered on the Byzantine Empire, the frontier was fluid and marked more by a no man’s land than by a firm line. The low-lying and potentially rich area of Cilicia, at the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean, was effectively deserted. Gradually, during the eighth century, the Muslims established frontier fortresses, defended by men paid from government funds. There was no wall but a series of fortified towns from Tarsus in the west to Malatya in the east, in which Muslim garrisons were established. These Muslim outposts were always in the plains or river valleys: the mountains of the Taurus and anti-Taurus belonged to the Byzantines. It was from these fortresses that the Muslims launched their summer, and occasionally winter, raids into Byzantine territory. Often these amounted to little more than cattle rustling, but sometimes there were major campaigns. These were the only wars in which the caliphs and their heirs actively participated, and many of the campaigns had an almost ritual character, the caliph leading the Muslims against their hereditary enemies.
In general, the Muslim Empire did not suffer the external pressures that threatened the Roman Empire on the Rhine, Danube and Euphrates frontiers. Christians from the north of Spain, Khazars from the plains of southern Russia and Turks in Transoxania might make occasional raids into Muslim territory, but their impact was limited and could be shrugged off by the inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo. The empire established by the great Arab conquests was economically self-sufficient and militarily self-confident. In the ninth and tenth centuries, this Muslim society survived the collapse of central government in a way in which the western Roman Empire, of the fifth century, threatened by barbarian invaders, had been unable to do.

THE SUCCESS OF THE ARAB CONQUESTS

Now is the time to return to the question asked by John bar Penkāyē with which this book began: why were the Arab conquests so swift and far reaching and why did they turn out to be so permanent?
Let us start off by looking at the lands they conquered to see how and in what ways they may have been vulnerable. There were long-term factors at work, difficult to pinpoint or quantify, but certainly important. Demographic decline may have been significant here. Of course, we have few useful figures for population in this period, but the impression given by a variety of sources is that many of the areas conquered had suffered from a declining population in the century after the first appearance of the bubonic plague in the Mediterranean world in 540, and that this loss of population was most severe in cities and villages. The Arab armies sometimes seem to have moved through an empty landscape. The rapid conquest of vast areas of Iran and the Iberian peninsula, with minimal resistance from the people, suggests this. The fact that so much of the booty taken in war was in the form of human captives again suggests that people were at a premium. When the Persians conquered Antioch in 540 or Apamea in 573, they deported large numbers of citizens to settle new or expanding towns in the Sasanian Empire, a policy that makes sense only if there is a population shortage. The large numbers of slaves taken in North Africa and imported to the Middle East show that people were a valuable and perhaps scarce resource. Towns of great antiquity and fame were apparently taken without any serious resistance. The fate of three of the most important cities of the late Roman world illustrates this clearly. Antioch surrendered with minimum resistance, probably in 636; Carthage seems to have been largely uninhabited when the Muslims eventually occupied it in 698; Toledo, despite its position as the Visigothic capital and its superb natural fortifications, failed to delay the Muslim armies for any length of time in 712. The evidence of demographic decline is scattered and often indirect, but it does, in the end, seem convincing. This decline did not, of course, cause the Arab conquests, but it may have meant that resistance was less fierce, that the way of the Arab armies was not barred by numerous populous cities whose inhabitants manned the walls, determined to resist. It was perhaps only in Transoxania that we find this sort of spirited defence mounted by a highly motivated local population.
Along with these long-term factors, there were the short-term effects of war and the dislocation it caused. There had been many conflicts between the Roman and Iranian empires since Crassus and his forces were defeated by the Parthians in 53 BC, but the war that broke out after the assassination of Emperor Maurice in 602 was the most far reaching and destructive. The effects of the Persian sweep through the lands of the Byzantine Empire affected society at many levels. It destroyed Byzantine imperial control over the lands of the Near East, it severed the links with Constantinople; governors were no longer appointed, armies were no longer dispatched and taxes were no longer paid. The Chalcedonian Orthodox Church lost its imperial patronage and became one Christian sect among many others. Many churchmen and other members of the elite fled to the comparative safety of North Africa or Italy. Archaeological work has suggested that, in Anatolia at least, the advance of the Persian armies did enormous damage to urban life and that people abandoned the spacious cities of the plains to take refuge in mountain-top fortresses.2 The restoration of Byzantine imperial control came only a year or two before the Arab armies marched from Medina, and in many areas there may have been no Byzantine military and political structures in place at all.
A distinguishing feature of this ‘last great war of antiquity’ was that it devastated both of the great empires with even-handed brutality. Heraclius’s invasion of the Persian Empire was as destructive as the Persian invasions of the Byzantine Empire had been; the great fire-temple at Shiz, where the Sasanian shahs had been inaugurated, was destroyed and the royal palace at Dastgard sacked. More crucially, the great king Chosroes II (591-628) was killed by his own generals. The Sasanian Empire, unlike the Byzantine, was formally a dynastic state; Heraclius’s assault undermined the prestige of the dynasty and the confidence of the Persian ruling elite. Infighting among the members of the royal family caused a period of great instability. By the time that Yazdgard III (632-51) was widely accepted as shāh, the Arab armies were already attacking the Iraqi frontier.
The success of the conquest was also aided by the succession disputes that paralysed the Byzantine state after the death of Heraclius in February 641. The power struggle at the Byzantine court seems to have been directly responsible for the otherwise inexplicable failure to mount an effective operation to defend Egypt. If Heraclius had been succeeded by a strong and energetic new emperor, the Byzantines might well have been able to mount a counter-attack in Syria or along the Mediterranean coasts, especially during the very disturbed period that followed the assassination of the caliph Uthmān in 656. The Muslims had a generation in which to consolidate their power and their hold over the lands won from the Byzantines.
Both great empires shared a common strength that was also, paradoxically, a weakness when things went wrong. In the Byzantine and Sasanian states, military power was heavily centralized, both depending on a professional army supported by state taxation. This was a comparatively new development. In the Byzantine Empire there had been limitanei, troops settled along the frontiers and given land and salaries to defend the borders of the empire. During the first half of the sixth century these were disbanded and replaced by the Ghassānid nomad allies of the Byzantines. After 582 these too were dispensed with and the empire relied on a standing field army for its defence. It seems that the Byzantines were completely unprepared for an attack from the desert. The Strategikon, the military manual of c. 600, gives instructions on how to fight Persians, Turks and Avars but never mentions the Arabs; clearly they were not considered to be a significant threat. Apart from the Arab allies, it looks as if few of the Byzantine soldiers who tried to defend the empire against the Muslim invaders were local to the area. They were either Greek speakers from other parts of the empire or Armenians. A similar evolution had taken place in the Sasanian Empire. In the first half of the sixth century the administration had been centralized by Chosroes I (531-79), who had established an imperial army paid from the receipts of taxation. Like the Byzantines in the same period, the Sasanians had decided that they no longer needed the services of the Lakhmid kings who had defended the desert frontier. Now it was only the army of the shahs which defended the state.
In many ways these developments can be seen as a sign of the increasing power and sophistication of government, but it paradoxically resulted in these apparently powerful states being unexpectedly vulnerable. If the imperial government was in disarray, if the imperial army was defeated in one major encounter, there were no forces of local resistance to take on the burden of defence. There were no town armies raised from local citizens, no peasant militia that could be called upon. It is significant that the areas where the Arabs encountered the most sustained resistance were areas like Transoxania, Armenia, the Elburz mountains and the Cantabrian mountains of northern Spain, places that had always been outside the direct rule of the empires and monarchies of the lowland areas. Here local people actively defended their homelands against the invaders.
There are indications from many areas conquered by the Muslims that the invaders benefited from internal tensions in the ancient empires, which meant that, in some cases, they were seen as liberators or at least as a tolerable alternative. Sometimes these tensions were religious: the Monophysite Christians of Egypt and northern Syria certainly had little reason to love the Byzantine authorities, although there is little evidence that they actually helped the invaders. The peasants of the Sawād of Iraq may well have felt relieved by the destruction of the Persian ruling class; the merchants and craftsmen of Sind are said to have cooperated willingly with the Muslims against the Brahmin military ruling class. In North Africa, the Berbers fought their battles against the invaders, made alliances with them, took service with them and left the Byzantines to their fate.
The subject communities did not develop a culture of resistance after the initial conquests. They complained about harsh and unjust governors but, as far as we can tell, no preachers or writers emerged to encourage active opposition to the new regime. The anti-Muslim propaganda from Christian sources resorts to apocalyptic literature in which a great emperor or hero figure from outside will come and deliver the Christian people. Meanwhile, all they can do is pray and keep steadfast in their faith. Their hostility to other Christians from different sects, and above all to the Jews, was always fiercer and more pressing than their hostility to the Arabs. None of the voices of the conquered was an incitement to take action to overthrow the new regime.
These internal events in the Byzantine and Sasanian empires were fundamental to the success of the Arab conquests. If Muhammad had been born a generation earlier and he and his successors had attempted to send armies against the great empires in, say, 600, it is hard to imagine that they would have made any progress at all.
The weakness of the existing political structures did not, by itself, guarantee the success of Arab arms. There were potent forces at work which made the Muslim forces much more powerful and effective than any Bedouin force had ever been before or was ever to be again.
Enough has already been said about the religious motivation of the invaders, the power of the idea of martyrdom and paradise as incentives in battle. This was combined with the traditional, pre-Islamic ideals of loyalty to tribe and kin, and admiration of the lone warrior hero. The mixture of the cultural values of the nomad society with the ideology of the new religion was formidable.
It must be remembered that the armies of the early Islamic conquests were exactly that - armies. They were not a mass migration of nomad tribesmen. They left their women and their flocks, their babies and their old people, at home, in tent or house. They were organized into groups and their commanders were appointed, usually after consultation, by the caliphs or governors. Only after victory had been achieved did their households join the warriors.
As we have seen, the Arab armies did not have access to new technologies that their enemies did not possess, nor did they overwhelm by sheer weight of numbers, but they did have some purely military advantages. The most important of these was mobility. The distances covered by Muslim armies in the conquests are truly astonishing. It is more than 7,000 kilometres from the furthest reaches of Morocco in the west to the eastern frontiers of the Muslim world in Central Asia. By contrast, the Roman Empire from Hadrian’s Wall to the Euphrates frontier was less than 5,000. All these areas were traversed and subdued by fast-moving Muslim armies. Much of the country in which they operated was barren and inhospitable, to be crossed only by hardy and resourceful people. Their armies moved without a supply train. It seems that the warriors carried their food with them and bought, stole or otherwise extracted supplies when these were exhausted. Both men and beasts were used to living off very little, the meagre diet of the Bedouin existence, and had experience of sleeping rough. Travelling by night, when the air was cooler and the desert stars bright enough to use for navigation, was an important part of desert life, and there are a number of conflicts recorded in the annals of the conquests in which the Arab armies showed their superiority at night fighting. This mobility meant that they could retreat into the desert, to take refuge, to regroup after a defeat or to take the enemy unawares.
The quality of leadership in the Muslim armies was clearly very high. The small elite of Hijazi city dwellers, mostly from the Quraysh and associated tribes, who provided the majority of the senior commanders, produced some extremely able men. Khālid b. al-Walīd in Syria, Amr b. al-Ās in Egypt and Sacd b. Abī Waqqās in Iraq were all military leaders of distinction. In the next generation we can point to Uqba b. Nāfi in North Africa, Tāriq b. Ziyād and Mūsā b. Nusayr in Spain, Qutayba b. Muslim in Transoxania and Muhammad b. Ishāq al-Thaqafī in Sind as great commanders. The Arabic sources also talk a great deal about councils of war and commanders taking advice before deciding on a course of action. This is partly a literary fiction, designed to outline the possible military activity and emphasize the ‘democratic’ nature of early Muslim society, but it may be a genuine reflection of practice, whereby decisions were made after a process of consultation and discussion.
The effectiveness of the leadership may be in part a product of the political traditions of Arabian society. Leadership was passed down from generation to generation within certain families and kins, but within those groups any aspiring leader had to prove himself, showing his followers that he was brave, intelligent and diplomatic. If he failed, they would look for someone else. He also had to take account of the views and opinions of those he hoped to lead. Being someone’s son was never qualification enough. The astonishment of the Iranian queen mother that the sons of the great Qutayba b. Muslim did not inherit his position are an indication of the difference in culture between Iranian and Arab in this respect. Incompetent or dictatorial commanders were unlikely to survive for long. Ubayd Allāh b. Abī Bakra in Afghanistan and Junayd b. Abd al-Rahmān in Transoxania are among the few examples of failure in command; they lasted only a short time and were savagely excoriated by the poets, the political commentators of their time.
There were other features of the Muslim command structure which led to success. The sources lay continuous stress on the roles of caliphs and governors, particularly the caliph Umar I (634-44), in organizing and directing the conquests. It is quite impossible that Umar could have written all the letters about the minutiae of military operations that are ascribed to him, but these narratives may reflect the fact that there was a strong degree of organization and control from Medina and later from Damascus. There are very few examples of commanders disobeying orders, equally few of rebellions against the centre by commanders in distant fields and provinces. This is all the more striking because it contrasts with events in the contemporary Byzantine Empire, where the military effectiveness of the state was constantly undermined by rebellions of military commanders hoping to take the imperial crown. The way in which successful generals like Khālid b. al-Walīd, Amr b. al-Ās, Mūsā b. Nusayr and Muhammad b. Ishāq accepted their dismissal and quietly made their way back to the centre, often to face punishment and disgrace, is very striking.
A key element in the success of the conquests was the comparatively easy terms usually imposed on the conquered. Arab commanders were normally content to make agreements that protected the lives and properties of the conquered, including rights to their places of worship, in exchange for the payment of tribute and the promise that they would not help the enemies of the Muslims. Defeated defenders of cities that were conquered by force were sometimes executed, but there were few examples of wholesale massacres of entire populations. Demands for houses for Muslims to settle in, as at Homs, or any other demands for property, are rare. Equally rare was deliberate damaging or destruction of existing cities and villages. There is a major contrast here with, for example, the Mongols in the thirteenth century, with their well-deserved reputation for slaughter and destruction. Although we cannot be clear about this, it is possible that the Arabs were, initially at least, less demanding of the resources and services of the ordinary people than their Byzantine and Sasanian predecessors, and the taxes they imposed may actually have been lower. It is not until the end of the seventh century that we get complaints about oppressive tax gathering. It must also have been the case that for many of the conquered the Arabs seemed a one-season wonder, a massive raid that could be bought off this year and would probably never happen again: better to pay up and sign the necessary documents than risk having your city stormed, your men killed and your women and children sold into slavery.
The Arab Muslim troops began to settle in the newly conquered areas very soon after the conquests. When they did so, they were almost always separate from the local population. In Iraq they were concentrated in the three Islamic new towns, Kūfa, Basra and Mosul. Arab settlement in Egypt was initially confined to Fustāt, much of it built on open land; in Africa the main early Muslim settlement took place in the new town of Qayrawān, while in Khurasan the largest Arab settlement was in Merv, where a whole new quarter was developed outside the walls of the old Sasanian city. In Syria, the Arabs tended to settle in extra-mural suburbs of existing cities like Chalkis and Aleppo, rather than taking possession of properties in the centre. To a great extent this prevented the inevitable friction that would have arisen between the conquering army and local inhabitants if they had shared the same narrow streets and courtyards.
The Arab conquest was also dispersed geographically. The Arabs rode along the main routes, and they stormed or accepted the surrender of the main towns. But away from the highways, in the mountains and more remote valleys, there must have been many communities that never saw an Arab, who heard only weeks, months or even years later that they were no longer ruled by the emperor or the shāh. The mountains of Azerbaijan, the ranges at the south of the Caspian Sea, the hills of Kurdistan, the High Atlas of southern Morocco, the Sierra de Gredos in Spain were probably all places where Arab Muslims were seldom seen. It was only in the two or three centuries that followed the initial conquest that Muslim missionaries, merchants and adventurers entered these lands and began to spread the new religion and news about the new political authorities. There was no incentive for the people of these areas to resist the invaders, because the invaders simply bypassed them.
As we have repeatedly seen, the Muslim conquerors put little or no pressure on the recently subjected populations to convert to Islam. Any attempt at compulsory conversion would probably have provoked widespread outrage and open hostility. As it was, the Muslim authorities established working relationships with the heads of the churches and other religious institutions that were now in their power. Conversion when it came was partly the result of fiscal pressures, the desire to escape the hated poll tax, but also because conversion provided an opportunity to escape from existing social constraints and to become a part of the new ruling class. Being a Muslim had always been essential for anyone who wanted a career in the military. By the tenth century, and before in some areas, it had become very difficult to have a successful career in the civil bureaucracy without becoming a Muslim. Attraction, not coercion, was the key to the appeal of the new faith.
During the first century, the Muslim Empire was a fairly open society. The elite of the new empire were the Muslims and Islam claimed to be a religion for all mankind. No would-be convert could be denied membership of this new elite. In contrast, Roman citizenship or membership of Persian aristocratic families was an exclusive, privileged position to be defended by those who enjoyed it. By converting to the new religion of Islam, conquered people could move to being conquerors, members of the new ruling class and, at least theoretically, equal to all other Muslims. Of course, problems soon arose and there were prolonged and violent clashes between old Muslims and new Arab and non-Arab Muslims, but this could not undermine the fact that Islam was open to all.
This is the other side of the collapse of the old social order and class boundaries lamented in aristocratic Persian sources of the period. There were some spectacular examples of this mobility. Nusayr was a prisoner of war, probably of humble Aramaean origin, captured in one of the early Arab campaigns in Iraq. He converted to Islam and his son Mūsā went on to become governor of North Africa and supreme commander of the Muslim forces in the conquest of Spain. At a humbler level, the peasants who refused to obey the orders of the Persian landowner in Iraq, the Copts who chose to stay in North Africa rather than being forced to return to their native Egypt, or the local men who served with the Arab armies in Transoxania may all have seen the coming of the Muslims as an opportunity to better themselves, taking advantage of the freedom and opportunities offered by the new order.
The early Muslims brought with them a great cultural self-confidence. God had spoken to them through His Prophet, in Arabic, and they were the bearers of true religion and God’s own language. It is interesting to compare this with the Germanic invaders of western Europe in the fifth century. When they occupied the lands of the Roman Empire, they abandoned their old gods and converted to Christianity, the religion of the empire they had just conquered, and, as far as we know, no one claimed that God spoke German. This cultural self-confidence meant that Arabic became the language of administration and the language of the new high culture. Anyone who wished to participate fully in government or intellectual activity had to be literate in Arabic and preferably a Muslim. Again the contrast with the Germanic west is revealing. Here Latin remained the language of administration and high culture until at least the twelfth century, the new ruling class adopted Latin titles like duke (dux) and count (comes), and the Germanic languages survived only as vernaculars. The Muslim titles, caliph (khalīfa), amīr and walī (governor) were all Arabic in origin.
Nonetheless, conquest was the prelude to conversion. It established the political and social framework within which the much slower, incremental processes of changing to Islam could take place. By the year 1000, it is likely that the majority of the population in all the different areas that had been conquered by 750 were Muslim.3 The conquest did not cause conversion but it was a major prerequisite: without it Islam would not have become the dominant faith in these areas.
The success of the Muslim conquests was the product of a unique set of circumstances and the preaching of a simple new monotheistic faith. There were many features of Islam that would have made it approachable to Christians and Jews. It had a Prophet, a Holy Book, established forms of prayer, dietary and family laws. Abraham and Jesus were both great prophets in the Muslim tradition. From the very beginning Islam established itself as a new faith, but it was one that claimed to perfect rather than destroy the older monotheistic ones. It had none of the strangeness of, say, Buddhism. These similarities, this common tradition, must have aided and encouraged conversion.
In many ways acceptance of Muslim rule was the result of Muslim policy towards the enemy: it was almost always preferable to surrender to the invaders and to make terms and pay the taxes than to resist to the last. The Islamization and Arabization that followed conquest over the next two or three centuries would not have occurred if political conquest had not already succeeded, but they were not a direct and inevitable consequence of that conquest. Instead, it was a gradual, almost entirely peaceful result of the fact that more and more people wanted to identify with and participate in the dominant culture of their time.
In the final analysis, the success of the Muslim conquest was a result of the unstable and impoverished nature of the whole post-Roman world into which they came, the hardiness and self-reliance of the Bedouin warriors and the inspiration and open quality of the new religion of Islam.