Donner, Fred - The Expansion of The Early Islamic State

TUE FORMATION OF TUE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD
General Editor: Lawrence 1. Conrad
Volume 5
The Expansion of
the Early Islamic State
THE FORMATION OF THE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD
General Editor: Lawrence I. Conrad
1 Byzantium on the Eve of Islam Averil Cameron

2 The Sasanian East on the Eve of Islam ShaulShaked
3 The Arabs and Arabia on the Eve of Islam Frank E. Peters
4 The Life of MUQammad Uri Rubin
5 The Expansion of the Early Islamic State Fred M. Donner
6 The Articulation of Islamic State Structures Fred M. Donner
7 Problems of Political Cohesion in Early Islam R. Stephen Humphrey
8 Arab-Byzantine Relations in Early Islamic Times Michael Bonner
10
9 The Turks in the Early Islamic World C. Edmund Bosworth
10 Patterns of Everyday Life David Waines
11 Production and the Exploitation of Resources Michael G. Morony
12 Manufacturing and Labour Michael G. Morony
13 Trade and Exchange in Early Islam A.L. Udovitch
14 Property and Consumption in Early Islamic Society Baber Johansen
15 Cities in the Early Islamic World Hugh Kennedy
16 Nomads and the Desert in the Early Islamic World Hugh Kennedy
17 Society and Individual in Early Islam to be announced
18 Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society Robert E. Hoyland
19 The Christian Communities in the Early Islamic World Sidney H. Griffith
20 The Jewish Communities ofthe Early Islamic World David Wasserstein
21 Archaeology and Early Islam Donald Whitcomb
22 Early Islamic Numismatics and Monetary History Michael Bates
23 Early Islamic Art and Architecture Jonathan Bloom
24 The Qur'än: Style and Contents Andrew Rippin
25 The Qur'än: Formative Interpretation Andrew Rippin
26 The Development of Islamic Ritual Gerald Hawting
27 The Formation of Islamic Law Wael B. Hallaq
28 I;ladith: Origins and Development Harald Motzki
29 Early Islamic Historiographical Traditions Lawrence I. Conrad
30 Early Islamic Theology Josef van Ess
31 Eschatology and Apocalyptic in Early Islam Wilferd Madelung
32 Early Islamic Visions of Community Wadad al-Qadi
33 Shi'ism: Origins and Early Development Etan Kohlberg
34 Khärijite Movements in Early Islam Ridwan al-Saiid
35 The Emergence of Islamic Mysticism Bernd Radtke
36 The Early Islamic Grammatical Tradition Ramzi Baalbaki
37 Early Arabic Poetry and Poetics Suzanne Stetkevych
38 Early Arabic Prose Literature Fedwa Malti-Douglas
39 The Rise of Islamic Philosophy Everett Rowson
40 The Rise of Arab-Islamic Medicine LawrenceI.Conrad
41 The Exact Sciences in Early Islam JamilRagep
42 Magic and Divination in Early Islam Emilie Savage-Smith
43 Education and Learning in the Early Islamic World Claude Gilliot
44 The Early Islamic Manuscript Tradition Jan Just Witkam
45 Early Islamic North Africa to be announced
46 The Formation of al-Andalus I Manuela Marin
47 The Formation of al-Andalus 11 M. Fierro/J. Sams6
48 The Modern Study of Early Islam Lawrence I. Conrad
TUE FORMATION OF TUE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD
General Editor: Lawrence 1. Conrad
Volume 5
The Expansion of
the Early Islamic State
edited by
Fred M. Donner
First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint 0/ the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition copyright © 2008 Taylor & Francis, and Introduction by Fred
M. Donner. For copyright of individual articles refer to the
Acknowledgements.
Published in the series The Formation of the Classical Islamic World
All rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN 9780860787228 (hbk)
British Library CIP Data

The expansion of the early Islamic state. - (The formation
of the classical Islamic world)
1. Islamic Empire - History - 622-661. 2. Islamic Empire -
History - 661-750. 3. Islamic Empire - History, Military
I. Donner, Fred McGraw, 1945-
909'.09767
US Library of Congress CIP Data

The expansion of the early Islamic state / edited by Fred M. Donner.
p. cm. - (The formation of the classical Islamic world)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-86078-722-8 (alk. paper)
1. Islamic Empire-History-622-661. Donner, Fred McGraw, 1945-
DS38.1.E972007
956'.013-dc22
2006102613
THE FORMATION OF THE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD-5

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements Vll
General Editor's Preface Xl
Introduction xiii
1. The Art of War of the Arabs, and the Supposed Religious Fervour
of the Arab Conquerors
Leone Caetani 1
2. Some Critical and Sociological Remarks on the Arab Conquest

and the Theories Proposed on this
G.R. Bousquet 15
3. Observations on the Nature and Causes of the Arab Conquest

G.R. Bousquet 23
4. The Nomad as Empire Builder: A Comparison ofthe Arab and

Mongoi Conquests
John J. Saunders 37
5. The Arab Expansion: The Military Problem

Marius Canard 63
6. The First Expansion of Islam: Factors of Thrust and Containment

Gustave E. von Grunebaum 81
7. The Conquest
Christi an Decobert 91
8. Another Orientalist's Remarks Concerning the Pirenne Thesis

Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz 101
9. Initial Byzantine Reactions to the Arab Conquest

Walter E. Kaegi 113
VI CONTENTS
10. Only a Change ofMasters? The Christians ofIran and the Muslim
Conquest
Stephen Gerö 125
11. An Apocalyptic Vision of Islamic History

Bernard Lewis 131
12. The Legendary Futül). Literature

Rudi Paret 163
13. On the Relationship in the Caliphate between Central Power and

the Provinces: The ':?ull).'-''Anwa' Traditions for Egypt and Iraq
Albrecht Noth 177
14. Ibn Abdell).akam and the Conquest of North Africa

Robert Brunschvig 189
15. The Birth of Islam in the Holy Land

Moshe Sharon 229
16. I:;;fahan-Nihawand. A Source-critical Study of Early Islamic

Historiography
Albrecht Noth 241
17. Centralized Authority and Military Autonomy in the Early Islamic

Conquests
Fred McGraw Donner 263
18. The Conquest of Khuzistan: A Historiographical Reassessment

Chase F. Robinson 287
19. Syriac Views of Emergent Islam

S.P. Brock 313
Index 331
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The chapters in this volume are taken from the sources listed below. The editor
and publishers wish to thank the authors, original publishers or other copyright
holders for permission to use their material as follows:
CHAPTER 1: Leone Caetani, Studi di Orientale (Milan, 1911), voLl, pp. 355-71.
Translation by Gwendolin Goldbloom. Copyright © 2008 Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 2: G.R. Bousquet, "Quelques remarques critiques et sociologiques sur la

conquete arabe et les theories emises a ce sujet", in Studi Orientalistici in Onore di
Giorgio Levi Della Vida I (Rome, 1956), pp. 52-60. Translation by Philip Simpson.
Copyright © 2008 Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 3: G.R. Bousquet, "Observations sur la nature et les causes de la

conquete arabe", Studia Islamica 6 (Paris, 1956), pp. 37-52. Translation by Philip
Simpson. Copyright © 2008 Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 4: John J. Saunders, "The Nomad as Empire Builder: A Comparison of

the Arab and Mongoi Conquests", Diogenes 52 (London, 1965), pp. 79-103.
CHAPTER 5: Marius Canard, ":Cexpansion arabe: le probleme militaire",

IJOccidente e l'Islam nell'alto Medioevo (Settimane di Studio deI Centro Italiano
di Studi sull' Alto Medioevo, 12, 2-8 April 1964), I (Spoleto: 1965), pp. 37-63.
Translation by Philip Simpson. Copyright © 2008 Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 6: Gustave E. von Grunebaum, "The First Expansion of Islam: Factors of

Thrust and Containment", Diogenes 53 (London, 1966), pp. 64-72.
CHAPTER 7: Christian Decobert, Le mendiant et le combattant (Paris, 1991), pp.

57-66. "La conquete". Translation by Philip Simpson. Copyright © 2008 Ashgate
Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 8: Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz, ''Another Orientalist's Remarks Concerning

the Pirenne Thesis", Journal ofthe Economic and Social History ofthe Orient 15
(Leiden, 1972), pp. 94-104.
CHAPTER 9: Walter E. Kaegi, "Initial Byzantine Reactions to the Arab Conquest",

Church History 38 (Washington, DC, 1969), pp. 139-49.
Vlll ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER 10: Stephen Gerö, "Only a change ofmasters? The Christians ofIran and
the Muslim Conquest", Studia Iranica 5 (Paris, 1987), pp. 43-8.
CHAPTER 11: Bernard Lewis, "An Apocalyptic Vision ofIslamic History" ,Bulletin of
the School of Oriental and African Studies 13 (London, 1950), pp. 305-38.
CHAPTER 12: Rudi Paret, "Die Legendäre Futül).-Literature", in La poesia epica e la

suaformazione (Rome, 1970), pp. 735-49. Translation by Gwendolin Goldbloom.
Copyright © 2008 Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 13: Albrecht Noth, "Zum Verhältnis von Kalifater Zentralgewalt und
Provinzen in Umayyadischer Zeit. Die ':?ull).'-''Anwa'-Traditionen für Ägypten
und den Iraq", Die Welt des Islams 14 (Leiden, 1973), pp. 150-62. Translation by
Gwendolin Goldbloom. Copyright © 2008 Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 14: Robert Brunschvig, "Ibn Abdell).akam et la conquete de l'Afrique

du Nord", Annales de l'Institut d'Etudes Orientales (University of Algiers) 6
(1942-1947), pp. 108-55. Translation by Philip Simpson. Copyright © 2008 Ashgate
Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 15: Moshe Sharon, "The Birth ofIslam in the Holy Land", in M. Sharon
(ed.), Pillars of Smoke and Fire: the Holy Land in History and Thought
(Johannesburg, 1988), pp. 225-35.
CHAPTER 16: Albrecht Noth, "I~fahän-Nihäwand. Eine quellenkritische Studie zur

frühislamischen Historiographie", Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen
Gesellschaft 118 (Wiesbaden, 1968), pp. 274-96. Translation by Gwendolin
Goldbloom. Copyright © 2008 Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 17: Fred M. Donner, "Centralized Authority and Military Autonomy in

the Early Islamic Conquests", in Averil Cameron (ed.), The Byzantine and Early
Islamic Near East, III: States, Resources andArmies (Princeton, 1995), pp. 337-60.
CHAPTER 18: Chase F. Robinson, "The Conquest of Khüzistän: A Historiographical

Reassessment", Bulletin ofthe School ofOriental andAfrican Studies 67 (London,
2004), pp. 14-39.
CHAPTER 19: S.P. Brock, "Syriac Views of Emergent Islam", in G.H.A. Juynboll
(ed.), Studies on the First Century ofIslamic Society (Carbondale and Edwardsville,
1982), pp. 9-21.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IX
Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been
inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary
arrangement at the first opportunity.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
The pagination of articles originally published in English has been maintained for
this volume. In articles translated into English, the original pagination has been
indicated in the text in bold-face type.
GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE
Since the days ofIgnaz Goldziher (1850-1921), gene rally regarded as the founder
of Islamic studies as a field of modern scholarship, the formative period in Islamic
history has remained a prominent theme for research. In Goldziher's time it was
possible for scholars to work with the whole of the field and practically all of its
available sources, but more recently the increasing sophistication of scholarly
methodologies, a broad diversification in research interests, and a phenomenal
burgeoning of the catalogued and published source material available for
study have combined to generate an increasing "compartmentalisation" of
research into very specific areas, each with its own interests, priorities, agendas,
methodologies, and controversies. While this has undoubtedly led to a deepening
and broadening of our understanding in all of these areas, and hence is to be
welcomed, it has also tended to isolate scholarship in one subject from research in
other areas, and even more so from colleagues outside of Arab-Islamic studies, not
to mention students and others see king to familiarise themselves with a particular
topic for the first time.
The Formation ofthe Classical Islamic World is a reference series that seeks to
address this problem by making available a critical selection of the published
research that has served to stimulate and define the way modern scholarship has
come to understand the formative period of Islamic history, for these purposes
taken to mean approximately AD 600-950. Each of the volumes in the series is
edited by an expert on its subject, who has chosen a number of studies that taken
together serve as a co gent introduction to the state of current knowledge on the
topic, the issues and problems particular to it, and the range of scholarly opinion
informing it. Articles originally published in languages other than English have
been translated, and editors have provided critical introductions and select
bibliographies for further reading.
A variety of criteria, varying by topic and in accordance with the judgements
of the editors, have determined the contents of these volumes. In some cases an
article has been included because it represents the best of current scholarship,
the "cutting edge" work from which future research seems most likely to profit.
Other articles-certainly no less valuable contributions-have been taken up for
the skillful way in which they synthesise the state of scholarly knowledge. Yet
others are older studies that-if in some ways now superseded-nevertheless
merit attention for their illustration of thinking or conclusions that have long been
important, or for the decisive stimulus they have provided to scholarly discussion.
Some volumes cover themes that have emerged fairly recently, and he re it has
been necessary to include articles from outside the period covered by the series,
as illustrations of paradigms and methodologies that may prove useful as research
Xll GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE
develops. Chapters from single author monographs have been considered only in
very exceptional cases,and a certain emphasis has been encouraged on important
studies that are less readily available than others.
In the present state of the field of early Arab-Islamic studies, in which it is
routine for heated controversy to rage over wh at scholars a generation ago would
have regarded as matters of simple fact, it is clearly essential for aseries such as
this to convey some sense of the richness and variety of the approaches and
perspectives represented in the available literature. An effort has thus been made
to gain broad international participation in editorial capacities, and to secure the
collaboration of colleagues representing differing points of view. Throughout the
series, however, the range of possible options for inclusion has been very large,
and it is of course impossible to accommodate all of the outstanding research that
has served to advance a particular subject. A representative selection of such
work does, however, appear in the bibliography compiled by the editor of each
volume at the end of the introduction.
The interests and priorities of the editors, and indeed, of the General Editor,
will doubtless be evident throughout. Hopefully, however, the various volumes
will be found to achieve well-rounded and representative syntheses useful not as
the definitive word on their subjects-if, in fact, one can speak of such a thing in
the present state of research-but as introductions comprising well-considered
points of departure for more detailed inquiry.
Aseries pursued on this scale is only feasible with the good will and
co operation of colleagues in many areas of expertise. The General Editor would
like to express his gratitude to the volume editors for the investment oftheir time
and talents in an age when work of this kind is grossly undervalued, to the
translators who have taken such care with the articles entrusted to them, and to
Dr John Smedley and his staff at Ashgate for their support, assistance and
guidance throughout.
Lawrence I. Conrad
INTRODUCTION
The Expansion of the Early Islamic State
Fred M. Donner
The First Expansion ofIslam as a Problem ofWorld History
If we are to judge the importance of historical phenomena by the range and

duration of their consequences, the appearance and rapid first expansion of
Islam, a process that began in the early seventh century CE and that continued, in
desultory fashion, well into the eighth century, must be reckoned among the most
important chapters in all of world history. For, there can be no doubt that this
process transformed much of the ancient world profoundly, and in some ways,
apparently, with noteworthy swiftness. The significance of this process was
indeed the focal point of the famous "Pirenne thesis" advanced by the great
Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935), who argued that the rise ofIslam in
the seventh century definitively ended the civilization of classical antiquity and
inaugurated, or generated, the Middle Ages.l Many aspects of Pirenne's thesis
were severely criticized by scholars in the years after its appearance, and it is now
no longer accepted in its original form; but Pirenne did put his finger on the
undeniable fact that the formerly unified "classical" world, clustered around the
Mediterranean Sea, rapidly evolved in this period into two quite different cultural
worlds on its northern and southern littorals-the early Medieval European and
the early Islamic worlds-even if the role of Islam (or Muslims) in this change
was not one of simple cause and effect as Pirenne had thought. Pirenne's work
raised significant questions that even today still stimulate productive debate.
At any rate, there can be no doubt that the changes that we associate with the
appearance and first expansion of Islam represent a kind of historical milestone.
This process of expansion has, however, often puzzled historians, who have
offered widely divergent explanations of why and how the expansion could
take place, and even of just wh at its actual nature was. Part of this challenge
of explanation is attributable to the fact that wh at we here call "the first
expansion of Islam" actually embraces two different, but intricately interrelated,
phenomena-the appearance and spread of a new religion, Islam, and the rise of a
1 Pirenne's theories were presented especially in his books Medieval Cities: their origins and the
revival of trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925) and Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris:
Felix Alcan, 1937). A good introduction to the debate over Pirenne's ideas is Alfred F. Havighurst (ed.),
The Pirenne Thesis: Analysis, Criticism and Revision (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1958).
XIV INTRODUCTION
new state, ideologically motivated by Islamic concepts, and its drive to imperial
expansion.
This dual character of the early expansion sometimes led historians to
confuse features of one aspect with those of the other. Many earlier studies of
the expansion, for example, focused above all on the military campaigns that,
our sources tell us, were a significant part of the process; hence they tended to
conceptualize the expansion simply as "conquest", sometimes ignoring other
aspects of the process of state-formation and state-expansion of which the
military campaigning was apart, as weH as ideological and social dimensions
related to the spread ofIslam as a faith and as a cultural system. To be sure, it can
sometimes be difficult to decide whether a particular change was a consequence
of the conquests themselves, or whether it is better seen as a consequence of the
emergence of the Islamic faith or of the Islamic state; indeed, in many cases one is
entitled to ask whether it is possible to separate the consequences of the three
processes of military conquest, state-formation, and establishment of religious
hegemony.
Basic Outlines of the Expansion
Except for revisionist studies appearing since the 1960s (which we shall discuss
subsequently), scholarship on the early expansion of Islam since the nineteenth
century has accepted the general outlines of the picture of "what happened"
conveyed to us by traditional Islamic sources. According to this consensus view,
Islam began with the prophet Mul:J.ammad (d. 632 CE), who preached strict
monotheism in the polytheistic surroundings of his horne town of Mecca and
brought forth the Qur'än as God's revelation. In the face of increasing opposition
from his fellow-townsmen of Mecca, Mul:J.ammad and his followers emigrated
in 622 CE to Yathrib (Medina), where they established the first autonomous
community of Muslims with Mul:J.ammad as its leader. In Medina, this first
Muslim community gradually grew in size and influence until, by the prophet's
death in 11/632, it had come to dominate most of western Arabia (induding the
other major towns and many nomadic groups) and could be seen as the embryo
of a new state. The prophet seems to have inaugurated the process of Islam's
expansion by dispatching, during the last years of his life, aseries of campaigns
against increasingly distant objectives in northern Arabia, such as Khaybar and
Dümat al-Jandal, and even on the fringes of southern Syria, such as Mu'ta.
The goal of these campaigns seems to have been to secure the aHegiance of
these communities to the idea of monotheism, and their submission of taxes to
Mul:J.ammad's regime.
Upon the prophet's death, his followers decided that they should remain a
united political community, and that one of the prophet's dose companions,
INTRODUCTION xv
whom they styled amir al-mu'minin or "commander of the believers", should lead
them. The choice ultimately fell on Abu Bakr (r. 11-13/632-634), Mul).ammad's
father-in-Iaw and one of his most intimate advisers, but not, apparently, without
some disagreement and intense debate within the community. During this period,
some groups in Arabia that had earlier submitted to the prophet's authority tried
to regain their political independence from Medina; some even attempted to take
advantage of the Muslims' temporary disarray to attack Medina. In response,
Abu Bakr and the Muslims in Medina organized aseries of military expeditions
against rebellious or hitherto unsubdued groups in Arabia to quell these strivings
for autonomy, which the (later) Muslim chroniders characterize as ridda or
"apostasy" .
The so-called ridda wars mark the beginnings of the new Islamic state's first
major expansion; during them the regime in Medina was able to reduce to
tax-paying status almost all the inhabitants of Arabia, even in distant Yemen and
Oman and in centers of powerful opposition like the large oasis of al-Yamäma
in eastern Arabia, horne of the powerful I:IaniJa tribe. The final campaigns of
the ridda wars brought the Muslim forces into contact with Arabic-speaking
groups on the fringes of Syria and Iraq; by subduing or drawing them into their
movement, the Muslims precipitated a dash with the Byzantine and Sasanian
empires, to which these groups had formerly been subject.
But the dash with the empires was not merely accidental; it appears that the
Muslim leadership had settled upon a policy of expansion that aimed to seize
as much territory from the empires as possible, and perhaps even to overthrow
them. Already in the last months of Abu Bakr's life, and under the second amir
al-mu'minin, 'Umar (r. 13-23/634-644), well-organized military columns were
being dispatched against key objectives in both southern Syria and southern Iraq.
Four major forces were sent against Byzantine Syria, and two against Iraq (one to
the center and the other to the south of the country, respectively). In several years
of on-and-off campaigning during the 630s, these forces managed to occupy major
cities and towns of these regions and to defeat the standing armies of the two
empires in a number of pitched battles that marked the decisive transfer of
regional hegemony from the Byzantines or Sasanians to the Muslims ruling from
Medina: in Byzantine Syria, the battles of Ajnädayn and, especially, Yarmuk; in
Sasanian Iraq, the battle of al-Qädisiyya. From Syria, a force marched along the
Sinai co ast into Egypt and seized this important province from the Byzantines.
Already by about 640 CE, then, a mere 18 years after Mul).ammad's death, the
Muslims ruling from Medina had come to control a vast area encompassing not
only the whole Arabian peninsula, but also most ofEgypt, geographical Syria, and
Iraq-in other words, Arabia and all the open lands adjoining it to the north, up to
the Taurus and Zagros mountain barriers.
The Muslims consolidated their control over these newly-conquered areas by
establishing a number of central garrison towns (am$ar); these quickly outgrew
XVI INTRODUCTION
their original character as places to billet troops and developed into large cities
that attracted both new migrants from Arabia, some of them families of the
soldiers, and many local people. In Syria, the Muslims seem to have used vacant
quarters in existing towns, notably I:Iim~, as their main military centers, whereas
in Iraq two new settlements, al-Küfa and al-Ba~ra, were established adjacent to
existing towns (al-I:IIra and al-Ubulla), which were soon absorbed by their new
neighbors. In Egypt, the Muslims created a new camp-town, al-Fustät, adjacent to
the old Byzantine stronghold ofBabylon (near modern Cairo).
These am~iir served as the staging-points for further conquests by the
Muslims to the north, east, and west. During the reigns of 'Umar and his
successor, the third amir al-mu'minin 'Uthmän ibn ~ffän (23-35/644-656), aseries
of campaigns were sent against the Iranian plateau. The remnants of the Sasanian
army were decisively defeated at the battle ofNihävand in the Zagros region, and
later expeditions, most launched from al-Ba~ra, brought ever more distant parts
of Iran and its main cities-Hamadhän, Qom, QazvIn, Rayy, Qümis, I~takhr,
Däräbgird, Käshän, Yazd, Harät in Afghanistan, and many others-within the
Muslims' control. Other forces subdued the lowlands of Khüzistän and the
highlands of Azerbaijan to the north of Iraq. From Syria, armies were dispatched
against northern Mesopotamia and Armenia and brought important towns,
such as Edessa, Mosul, and the Armenian capital at Dvin, under Medina's sway.
From Syria also were organized raids northward across the Taurus mountains
and deep into Anatolia, the Byzantine heartland; these were launched on an
almost annual basis, but Byzantine opposition here proved very stiff and, despite
some notably deep penetrations over the years (sometimes even to the walls of
Constantinople itself), the Muslims' fron tier with the Byzantines stabilized for a
long period just north of a chain of border-fortresses they established at Tarsüs,
Ma~~I~a (Mopsuestia), and other places ne ar the Taurus. From Egypt, periodic
raids were dispatched along the Mediterranean littoral into Cyrenaica and
Tripolitania, and treaties were made with the kings of Nubia, southward along
the Nile.
The murder of 'Uthmän in Medina by mutineers from the am~iir in 35/656
unleashed five years of struggle within the Muslim community that we call the
First Civil War (or, in the terminology of later Muslim chroniclers, the firstfitna).
This period saw several rivals competing for leadership of the new Islamic state:
above all Mu'äwiya ibn AbI Sufyän Ca relative ofthe slain 'Uthmän) and ~n ibn AbI
Tälib Ca cousin and son-in-law of the prophet). ~n was at first recognized by the
Medinese as the fourth amir al-mu'minin (35-40/656-661), but in the end it was
Mu'äwiya who emerged victorious after ~n was murdered by a disgruntled
supporter, and the Muslim community finally recognized Mu'äwiya as the fifth
amir al-mu'minin (r. 40-60/661-680). The civil war marked a lull in the process
of expansion, since key figures in the leadership of the community were too
preoccupied with it to worry about campaigning on now-distant frontiers.
INTRODUCTION XVll
Mu'awiya had been for many years 'Uthman's governor of Syria, so he moved
the capital ofthe Muslim empire from Medina to Damascus, and it was from Syria
that all of the succeeding rulers of Mu'awiya's family, the Umayyad dynasty,
exercised their rule. Under the Umayyads (661-750), the state was once more able
to devote attention to the expansion. Many of the campaigns in MU'awiya's days
aimed to consolidate Muslim control of areas, particularly in Iran, that had been
occupied earlier but were still only weakly controlled. In 680, the community
entered upon another period of turmoil over leadership, the Second Civil War
(680-692), that, once again, brought the expansion to a halt. When unity and order
were restored, however, the Umayyad 'Abd al-Malik (r. 65-861685-705) and his
sons al-Walld (r. 86-961705-715) and Sulayman (r. 96-991715-717) were able to
pursue vigorous campaigns of expansion and conquest. From this time forward,
moreover, the military and administrative institutions ofthe Umayyad state were
more fully developed and it is clear that campaigns were a deliberate and regular
part of imperial policy, intended to fulfil the ideological imperative of striving
to bring the whole world within the re alm of the empire. In eastern Iran, new
areas were brought within the Umayyads' domain: Gorgan and Khurasan, and
even the regions adjacent to and beyond the Oxus river. A force was dispatched for
the first time to distant Sind (the Indus valley, modern Pakistan) by 711 and
established a permanent Muslim presence there. Muslim control over Armenia
was strengthened and aggressive campaigns launched against Byzantium,
including a lengthy (but ultimately unsuccessful) siege of Constantinople in
971715-716. In the west, renewed campaigns across North Africa led to the
conquest of Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia) and other parts of the Maghreb, and in 711
a Muslim force crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and, within a few years, vanquished
the last Visigothic king and took control of most of the Iberian peninsula. From
there they mounted campaigns against southern and central Gaul, raiding as
far as the Loire valley (battle of Tours or Poitiers, 732 CE) and establishing
their control for several decades over some towns in southern France, such as
Carcassonne. These campaigns were now so distant from the center ofthe empire
in Syria, and even from the earlier am?ar, that additional "second-stage" am?ar
were established as centers of military and, eventually, cultural activity: in the
east, Marv in Khursa~an, to which thousands of fighting men and their families
were transferred from al-Ba~ra, and in the west, Qayrawan in Ifriqiya. In
al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), long a dependency of either Egypt or Qayrawan, a
provincial capital developed at Cordoba, and many towns and rural districts had
significant numbers of Muslim settlers, of Syrian, Arabian, or North African
origin.
Within little more than a hundred years following the death of the prophet
Mul)ammad, then, the early Muslim community had established astate in western
Arabia and engineered its expansion to embrace all of Arabia and most of the
N ear East, from Spain to India and Armenia to Yemen. Clearly military action was
XVlll INTRODUCTION
a central part ofthis process of expansion, so much so that most scholars who have
studied the expansion have referred to it as the "Islamic Conquest" or the ''Arab
Conquest". This emphasis on conquest, often neglecting other aspects of the
expansion, may be in part a reflection of the Islamic sources themselves, which
have a special genre offutu1;l, literature the object ofwhich was to relate how the
many towns and districts of this vast empire came to be part of it. Actually,
however, the word futu1;l, does not mean "conquest", although it is often so
translated; its use in relation to the expansion is probably to be associated with
the Quräanic use of the term to me an a favor or act of grace granted by God to
His faithful believers (cf. Qurän 2:76 and many other passages). The implication
being made by the purveyors of the futu1;l, literature, then, was that the
Muslims' domination of these territories was legitimate because they were
literally something bestowed upon them by God. In any case, the existence of the
futu1;l, genre may have contributed to the emphasis on "conquest" in scholarly
discussions of the expansion. We shall return to this point below, in discussion
recent revisionist views of the expansion.
Scholarly Interpretations of the First Expansion of Islam
The expansion sketched so briefly above posed many problems for historians,
who were puzzled by its astonishing sc ale, by its swiftness, by the Muslims'
success in overcoming the armies of well-established empires, by their ability
to maintain their hegemony over much larger populations of non-Muslims, by
the persistence with which an expansionist policy was pursued over several
generations, and by many other matters. Until the rise of revisionist scholarship
in the 1960s and 1970s, most scholars who worked on the early expansion of
Islam subscribed to a common set of assumptions in their work: (a) that the
Arabic-Islamic sources provided a generally reliable picture of the events of the
expansion, (b) that the religion of Islam, as taught by Mul).ammad, was clearly
defined from early in his career, particularly in terms of its relationship to
Christianity and Judaism, (c) that Islam provided the ideological motivation for
the expansion/conquest, particularly through the doctrine ofjihäd or "striving in
God's way", and (d) that the early Islamic state, headed by the amir al-mu'minin,
was the key institution in organizing and directing the waves ofmilitary conquest
that were a central component of the expansion.
Viewing the expansion through the lens of these assumptions (which, to
repeat, most scholars did), generated a number of interrelated problems of
interpretation. In the following, we discuss briefly several of the more salient of
these issues.
INTRODUCTION XIX
WHAT CAUSED THE CONQUESTS?
A first answer to this question had, of course, been offered by the traditional
Islamic sources, which presented an essentially theological interpretation of the
conquests. In this view, the expansion of Islam was an expression of God's will for
mankind, and was linked to the religious dedication of the first Muslims, who,
galvanized by the new faith, embarked on their march to establish the universal
sovereignty of Islam and the Islamic state. It was also due, in their view, to the fact
that God favored the Muslims and had a hand in their victories on the battlefield.
Most non-Muslim historians, however, either rejected this religious
interpretation outright, or sought to temper it by calling attention to other,
non-religious factors, that in their view contributed to the movement. Some
European authors ofthe late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, themselves
thoroughly steeped in contemporary concepts of nationalism of a decidedly
racialist cast, saw the expansion as one chapter in aseries of mass migrations of
Semites from the Arabian peninsula, and thus as not really related to Islam as a
doctrine. This "nationalist" interpretation was particularly pronounced in the
works of Hugo Winckler 2 and Leone Caetani (Chapter 1).3 The latter's work on
early Islam, in particular his massive Annali dell'Islam in ten bulky folio volumes,
was very influential at the beginning of the twentieth century, and his views were
picked up in subsequent years by Thomas Arnold and many others. Arnold noted
the religious tolerance of the conquerors-who did not require the conquered
peoples to convert to Islam-as evidence that the expansion movement was not
rooted in religious conviction. 4 Indeed, such ideas continued to be repeated even
many years later. 5
Other Western scholars saw the original impetus for the expansion movement
as Islam's goal of subjecting the whole world to Islamic rule. However, they
puzzled over how this broad goal was translated effectively into the military
conquests described in the sources. That is, they asked what drew or induced
people to join the conquest armies in the first place. They concluded that
the expansion was driven by economic factors-mainly by the cupidity of the
conquerors. Caetani argued that most Arabs had no real religious fervor and
2 Hugo Winckler, "Arabisch-Semitisch-Orientalisch", Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-Aegyptische

Gesellschaft, Berlin 6 (1901),151-374.
3 Leone Caetani,Annali dell'Islam (10 vols., Milano: U. Hoepli, 1905-1926), II, 855-61; idem, Studi di
Storia Orientale I (Milano: U. Hoepli, 1911),364-371.
4 Thomas Walker Arnold, The Preaching of Islam (2nd ed. London: A. Constable, 1913),45-71.
5 E.g., Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1950),55-56: "Initially the
great conquests were an expansion not of Islam but of the Arab nation, driven by the pressure of
overpopulation in its native peninsula to seek an outlet in the neighboring countries. It is one of the
series of migrations which carried the Semites time and again into the Fertile Crescent and beyond". It
should be noted that this passage remains unchanged in the revised edition of 1993 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993, p. 55).
xx INTRODUCTION
stated sarcastically that their "religion" could be reduced to the satisfaction of

their sensual desires. Carl Heinrich Becker, similarly, argued that economic
inducements, not religion, were of fundamental importance as a cause of the
conquests. 6
Adefinite advance came in 1956 with the appearance of two penetrating
studies by G.H. Bousquet (Chapters 2 and 3).7 In them he not only demonstrated
the serious weaknesses of the "nationalist"/Semitic migration and economic
motivation theories, but argued effectively that religious motivations could not
be reduced to being simply a cover for materialist incentives. As he pointed out,
Mul:J.ammad is universally recognized as having been the bearer of a religious
message, and a century after the conquests a new civilization was crystallizing
around fiqh, religious law-so it would be strange to argue that the conquests
that connected these two facts and established a new society was not religious
in character. 8 Moreover, the fact that the conquerors did not stress conversion
of subject peoples does not mean that the conquerors were not motivated by
religious idea. Bousquet also made, apparently for the first time, a number of
important analytical distinctions of crucial importance to understanding the early
expansion of Islam. One is to differentiate between the causes of the conquests
themselves-that is, the factors that caused the movement to begin in the first
place-and the causes of the conquests' success once it had gotten underway.
Another is the importance of distinguishing between different phases of the
expansion movement: particularly between the earliest phases (roughly up to the
First Civil War), before the state was well-articulated, and later phases, when
the Umayyad dynasty ruled over a more highly-developed state with a standing
army, the beginnings of a bureaucracy, and so on. 9 Building on Bousquet's work,
it was proposed by the present writer in 1981 that the conquests were in part the
result of the superior level of social and political integration introduced into
Arabian society by the rise of Islam, which resulted in the crystallization of an
embryonic state and put at its disposal the resources of manpower needed to fuel
the expansion. 10
6 C.H. Becker, "Der Islam als Problem", in his Islamstudien (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1924), I,
1-23 See also Henri Lammens, Le berceaude l'Islam (Rome, 1914), 116-21 and 174-77, who emphasizes,
in addition to climatological factors and hunger, the penchant for raiding of the bedouins. For Caetani,
see the works cited in note 3.
7 G.H. Bousquet, "Quelques remarques critiques et sociologiques sur la conquete arabe et les
theories emises a ce sujet", in Studi Orientalistici in Onore de Giorgio Levi Della Vida, I (Roma: Istituto
per l'Oriente, 1956),52-60; idem, "Observations sur la nature et causes de la conquete arabe", Studia
Islamica 6 (1956), 37-52.
8 Bousquet, "Quelques remarques ... " 59-60.
9 On these points see also F.M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton
U niversity Press, 1981), 3-9; idem, "The Islamic Conquests", in Y oussef Choueiri (ed.), A Companion to
the History ofthe Middle East (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 28-51.
10 Donner, Early Islamic Conquests, esp. 251-71.
INTRODUCTION XXI
The puzzle posed by the rapid expansion of Islam (that is, of the early Islamic
state) led some to consider more generally the relationship between a religious
leader and states in which nomads played an important part, and to look for
paralleis in other historical settings. Included in this collection is one such
exercise in comparative history, John J. Saunders's study ofthe first expansion of
Islam and the Mongoi conquests (Chapter 4).1l
At root, however, the question of wh at caused the conquests forces us to
consider wh at kind of movement we think Islam originally was. As noted above,
for almost all writers before about 1970, this was answered apriori by the
assumptions they embraced-that Islam was a proselytizing religious movement
bent on spreading Islamic hegemony. Since 1970, however, some other answers
have been proposed, but these take us into the terrain of recent revisionist
interpretations and so will be dealt with below.
WHAT FACTORS CONTRIBUTED TO THE CONQUESTS' SUCCESS?
Bousquet's articles had noted the importance of distinguishing between the

causes that initiated the conquests and the reasons for their success, once they
had begun. The question of why and how the conquests succeeded proved, in its
own right, to be quite challenging to historians, because the traditional view ofthe
conquests presents it as a movement that originated in and was first sustained
from an area-western Arabia-that had little, if any, of the resources and
infrastructure usually considered essential to sustain a military expansion. Yet,
somehow the movement succeeded in challenging the two "great powers" of the
day, which obviously did have access to such resources and infrastructure. In a
nutshell, the first expansion of Islam seemed to be a conquest that succeeded
against staggering practical odds in terms of political economy.
Medieval Muslim authors had sometimes attributed this success to God's
support for His believers on the battlefield. Western writers, rejecting such
supernatural interventions, attempted to explain the conundrum of Islam's early
success by resorting to a variety of mundane factors. One argument was that
the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires, after a long and bitter struggle with one
another, were in a weakened state and their armies too battered to offer effective
defense against the invaders from Arabia. 12 Although there may be some merit to
this argument for the Sasanians, it has recently been shown that the Byzantine
11 John J. Saunders, "The Nomad as Empire Builder: A Comparison of the Arab and Mongoi
Conquests", Diogenes 52 (1965), 79-103. Another eomparison of the same phenomena is found
in Patrieia Crone, Slaves on Horses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 18-26. The
relations hip of the early Islamie state to Arabian nomads was the foeus of analysis in Donner, Early
Islamie Conquests.
12 Caetani in partieular (see note 3) emphasized this view.
XXll INTRODUCTION
armies were still forces to be reckoned with at the time of their first contact with
the Muslims. 13 Other factors stressed were the zeal of the Muslim warriors
inspired by their new faith, the presence of good commanders and of leaders with
organizational skills and experience in the Muslim armies, or the disaffection of
the Monophysite populations of Syria and Egypt because of oppressive Byzantine
religious policy; these were advanced by both Bousquet and by Marius Canard
in an important essay on military elements in the conquest (Chapter 5).14 On the
military side, Gustave von Grunebaum stressed the advantage to the Muslims
of "inner lines of communication" (Chapter 6).15 In recent years, a renewed
emphasis has come to be placed on the importance of religion in the movement,
particularly in creating cadres of disciplined warriors in the armies of conquest;
a good example is found in the general book on the rise of Islam by Christian
Decobert (Chapter 7).16
WHAT WERE THE MAIN CONSQEUENCES OF THE CONQUESTS?
Surprisingly, fewer scholars have tackled this issue explicitly or comprehensively.

Some have addressed aspects of the consequences without linking them to
the conquests themselves. When we begin to consider wh at the impact of the
conquests was on the Near East, however, we quickly realize that a number of
major issues are involved-so many, indeed, and of such varied kinds, that it
is possible to include in this collection of essays only a very small selection of the
articles representing these themes.
(1) The most obvious consequence of the first conquests (which was the first
phase of the expansion of the new Islamic state based in Medina) was that it totally
transformed the political landscape of the Near East. The new empire that
gradually emerged not only had borders different from those of the earlier
Byzantine and Sasanian states, it also represented the rise to power in the region
of a new ruling elite (mainly of Arabian origin) and the humbling of at least the
upper echelons ofthe former Byzantine or Sasanian elites. Lower elements ofthe
former ruling establishments, such as tax administrators, sometimes remained
13 Michael Whitby, "Recruitment in Roman Armies from Justinian to Heraclius (ca. 565-615)", in
Averil Cameron and Lawrence I. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, III: States,
Resources andArmies (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995),61-124, esp. 119-24.
14 E.g., Bousquet, "Observations"; Marius Canard, "L'expansion arabe: le probleme militaire",
L'Occident e l'Islam nell'Alto Medioevo, I (Spoleto, 1965), 37-63. John W. Jandora, The March from
Medina: aRevisionist Study ofthe Arab Conquests (Clifton, NJ: Kingston Press, 1990) emphasizes the
military merits ofthe Muslim forces, whereas Bousquet and Canard deny that they had any advantage.
15 Gustave von Grunebaum, "The First Expansion ofIslam: Factors ofThrust and Containment",
Diogenes 53 (1966), 64-72.
16 Christian Decobert, Le mendiant et le combattant (Paris: Seuil, 1991) pp. 57-66.
INTRODUCTION XXI II
in place and simply worked for their new Arabian masters, but this phenonemon
has generated some discussion of the relative importance of continuity and
innovation in the early Islamic administration and of the pace of change. 17
(2) Another consequence of the early conquests was demographie-in particular,
the migration of large numbers of Arabians (whether settled people or nomadic
pastoralists) from their horne districts in Arabia to adjacent regions, especially in
Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. In some earlier studies of the expansion, as we have seen,
this migration was considered a cause of the conquests, confusing the analysis of
the causes of the conquests and of the nature of both the conquests (which were
undertaken by organized armies, not by migrating tribes) and the migrations. The
fact that these migrations followed the key conquests in Syria and Iraq, rather
than preceded them, had already been pointed out early in the twentieth century
by C.R. Becker,18 but subsequent scholars sometimes continued to put the cart
before the horse in this way (particularly those who continued to advance the idea
that the conquests were merely the latest in aseries of "Semitic migrations").
Unfortunately, relatively few scholars have tackled directly or comprehensively
the question of these migrations that resulted from the first conquests, probably
because we lack the kind of statistical evidence needed to draw a clear overall
picture. A few studies of specific localities, relying on scattered anecdotes and the
testimony of biographie al dictionaries, give us some idea of the influx of mi grants
in particular localities that resulted from the conquests and the establishment
of the first Islamic empire that followed,19 but a comprehensive and thoughtful
examination of this theme remains a desideratum.
(3) Economic changes of several kinds were clearly another important
consequence of the conquests, but the analysis of economic history has remained
confused. Of the various interpretations, only the Pirenne thesis and responses to
it have received much attention from scholars, for example, in an essay by Andrew
17 Above all, Michael G. Morony's magesterial Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), esp. Part I (27-164); the inadequacy of scholarship on administrative
development is discussed by him on pp. 575-93. See also Jprgen Bcek Simonsen, Studies in the Genesis
and Early Development of the Caliphal Taxaton System (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1988); M.
Sprengling, "From Persian to Arabic", American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 56
(1939), 175-224,325-36; on the military, the first chapters of Hugh Kennedy, The Armies ofthe Caliphs
(London: Routledge, 2001).
18 C.H. Becker, "The Expansion of the Saracens-the East", Cambridge Medieval History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 329-64.
19 See, for example, Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 236-64; Hichem Djalt, "Les Yamanites
a Kufa au Ier Siecle de I'Hegire", Journal ofthe Economic and Social History ofthe Orient 19 (1976),
148-81; F.M. Donner, "TribaI Settlement in Basra During the First Century A.H.", in Tarif Khalidi
(ed.), Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East (Beirut: American University of
Beirut, 1984), 97-120; F.M. Donner, Early Islamic Conquests, 226-50 on migration and settlement in
Iraq and Syria; ~alil~ al-'AlI, "Khitat al-Ba;;ra", Sumer 8 (1952), 72-83 and 281-302; Jamal Juda, al-'Arab
wa l-arr;1fi l-'Iraqfi l-qarn al-awwal al-hijri (Amman: al-Sharika al-'arabiyya li -tiba'a wa l-nashr, 1979).
XXIV INTRODUCTION
S. Ehrenkreutz (Chapter 8).20 To some extent, however, the Pirenne Thesis has
distracted scholars from analyzing other aspects of the conquests' economic
impact more closely. Among the other economic changes were shifts in the
balance between sedentary and nomadic peoples, which affected everything from
rural agriculture to urban life to overland commerce. 21 The conquest also resulted
in a massive redistribution ofwealth (some ofit from churches?); wealth was now
in the hands of groups that, in some cases, had hitherto had little of it (e.g., the
Arabian soldiery), and resulted in the emergence of a new propertied elite (mostly
Arabian townsmen in origin) that in time increasingly competed with or
supplanted the older elites, some of whom fled or were dispossessed. None of
these issues has been fully and properly studied to date, again partly because the
requisite detail is scarce in the extant sources.
(4) The cultural impact of the first conquests and expansion were also
significant; in some ways they were the most important and long-lasting of all
consequences of the expansion. Foremost among these was, of course, the spread
of Islam as a faith among new population groups, a process that continued for
many centuries but that had its decisive origins in the conquests and the
establishment of a new state directed by a self-consciously Islamic ruling elite.
In the seventh century, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians constituted the
overwhelming majority of the population of the Near Eastern and North African
territories taken over by the Arabian conquerors, but the amir al-mu'minins
seem not to have considered the conversion of these non-Muslim communities a
high priority. They did, however, strive to establish what we may loosely call
an "Islamic order" in the territories they ruled, and over time this created the
conditions under which significant numbers of non-Muslims came to embrace
Islam. Numerous studies of the Islamization process have been undertaken, but
all suffer from a dearth of detailed documentation for the processes involved and
must rely, largely, on anecdotal and stray reports, and most lack a coherent
methodological approach;22 a noteworthy exception is Bulliet's book Conversion to
20 E.g., Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz, "Another Orientalist's Remarks concerning the Pirenne Thesis",
Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 15 (1972), 94-104. Note especially the
stimulating volume of Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the
Origins of Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
21 See F.M. Donner, "The Role of Nomads in the Near East in Late Antiquity", in F.M. Clover and
RS. Humphreys (eds), Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity (Madison: University ofWisconsin
Press, 1989), 73-85; Walter Dostal, "The Significance of Semitic Nomads in Asia", Proceedings ofthe
Eighth International Congress ofAnthropologists and Ethnological Sciences 3 (1968), 312-16; A.H. Saleh,
"Les bedouins d'Egypte aux premiers siecles de I'Hegire", Revista degli Studi Orientali 55 (1981),
137-61; Henri Terasse, "Citadins et Grands Nomades dans l'Histoire de I'Islam", Studia Islamica
29 (1969), 5-15; Benjamin Z. Kedar, "The Arab Conquests and Agriculture: A Seventh-Century
Apocalypse, Satellite Imagery, and Palynology", Asian and African Studies 19 (1985), 1-15.
22 Laurence E. Browne, The Eclipse of Christianity in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1933), is grounded in religious polemic and is thus quite unsatisfactory. Daniel C. Dennett,
Conversion and the Poil-Tax in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950) discusses
INTRODUCTION xxv
Islam in the Medieval Period, which utilizes an ingenious, if highly speculative,

method of extrapolation to estimate conversion trends in various provinces of the
empire. 23
(5) Another important cultural shift associated by many with the conquests
was the process of Arabization, that is, the gradual spread of Arabic as the main
language in everyday spoken use, at the expense of other languages of the Near
East (Aramaie, Coptic, Berber, Greek, and so on), which gave ground. The degree
to which this process was related to the conquests or expansion obviously
depends on how large the Arabophone area was before the conquests; it is clear
that Arabic was already becoming established as a spoken language in parts of
Syria and Iraq before the appearance of Islam. The question of Arabization is
also related to the emergence with Islam of Arabic as a literary language for the
first time, first in the sacred text of the Qur'än, then increasingly in use as an
administrative language. This seems likely to have been a powerful stimulus to
the use of spoken Arabic by populations that had not formerly spoken it, but this
question remains to be properly explored. 24 The question of the rise of classical
Arabic is a different one from the question of Arabization; it is also is a highly
complex one, but the formal or "classical" language emerged after the conquests
and may plausibly be seen as one of the consequences of the expansion, which
created the political and socio-cultural conditions in which the formallanguage
was needed and could crystallize. Much remains to be explained about this
process, however. 25
the tax consequences of conversion but does not address the conversion process itself. More helpful
are some of the essays in M. Gervers and R.J. Bikhazi (eds), Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous
Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries (Toronto: Pontifical Institute
of Mediaeval Studies, 1990); Ira M. Lapidus, "The Conversion of Egypt to Islam", Israel Oriental
Studies 2 (1972), 248-62; Farouk Omar, "The Islamization ofthe Gulf', in C.E. Bosworth et al. (eds), The
Islamic Worldfrom Classical to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Princeton: Darwin
Press, 1989),247-57; Michael Brett, "The spread ofIslam in Egypt and North Africa", in M. Brett (ed.),
Northern Africa: Islam and Modernization (London: Frank Cass, 1973), 1-12; M.A. Shaban,
"Conversion to Early Islam", in Nehamia Levtzioin (ed.), Conversion to Islam (NY: Holmes and Meier,
1979), 24-29; Sam I. Gellens, "Egypt, Islamization of', The Coptic Encyclopedia (N ew York: Macmillan,
1991), vol. 3, 936-42.
23 Richard W. Bulliett, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: an essay in quantitative history
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
240ne of the few studies is A.N. Poliak, "L'Arabisation de l'Orient Semitique", Revue des Etudes
Islamiques 12 (1938), 35-63. See also Sidney Griffith, "From Aramaic to Arabic: The languages of
the Monasteries of Palestine in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Period" , Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51
(1997), 11-3I.
25 A first serious effort to address these questions was Johann Fück, 'Arabiya. Untersuchungen
zur arabische Sprach- und Stilgeschichte (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1950). The process is now being
explored mainly in the context of the emergence of Qur'anic language. The issue was raised in J ohn
Wansbrough, Quranic Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); see also Kees Versteegh,
Arabic Grammar and Qur'iinic Exegesis (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993).
XXVI INTRODUCTION
(6) Another cultural question related to the first expansion of Islam is the
re action to it by non-Muslim populations; Walter E. Kaegi's essay on Byzantine
Reactions was among the first to tackle this question (Chapter 9).26 Also important
to consider is the actual effect of the conquest on various non-Muslim
communities; an essay by Stephen Gerö on Iranian Christi ans provides an
interesting case study (Chapter 10).27 Sometimes the change to Muslim rule was
understood in symbolic terms (on which see below), and it is natural that the
immediate re action ofthe non-Muslim populations to the conquerors might differ
from the attitudes oftheir descendants a generation or more later, yet all too often
the evolution in such attitudes is not adequately considered.
(7) Finally, there is the need to see the first expansion of Islam in the context of a
whole panoply of changes in society, institutions and ideologies of the Near East
between about 500 and 800 CE, beyond those already mentioned. Some of these
broad changes might be considered simultaneously "causes" and "consequences"
ofthe expansion, or appear as symptoms of changes whose relationship to the rise
of Islam is impossible to characterize simply. They include such things as the
relationship between monotheism and a universalist, imperial conception of
statecraft;28 changing notions of piety and wh at constituted proper "public" and
"private" behavior;29 shifts in cultural identities;30 and changes in the countryside
and in the structure and functions of towns and cities, including (but not limited
to) the phenomenon ofthe new Islamic am$är. 31
26 Walter E. Kaegi, "Initial Byzantine Reactions to the Arab Conquest", Church History 38 (1969),
139-49.
27 Stephen Gerö, "Only a change of masters? The Christians of Iran and the Muslim Conquest",
Studia Iranica 5 (1987), 43-48. S.P. Brock, "Syriac Views of Emergent Islam", in Juynboll, Studies on
the First Century ofIslamic Society (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press,
1982), 9-21.
28 E.g., Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consqeuences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
29 A classic treatment is Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750 (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1971).
30 E.g., Averil Cameron, "The Eastern Provinces in the 7th Century AD: Hellenism and the
Emergence of Islam", in Suzanne Said (ed.), HELLENISMOS: Quelques jalons pour un histoire de
l'identite grecque. Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, 25-27 octobre 1989 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991),287-313.
31 See, for example, Hugh Kennedy, "From Polis to Madina: Urban Change in Late Antique and
Early Islamic Syria", Past and Present 106 (February, 1985),3-27; Yoram Tsafrir and Gideon Foerster,
"From Scythopolis to Baysan-Changing Concepts of Urbanism", in Geoffrey King and Averil
Cameron (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, 2: Land Use and Settlement Patterns
(Princeton: Darwin, 1994),95-116; Donald Whitcomb, "The Mi$1' of Ayla: settlement at al-'Aqaba in the
Early Islamic Period", in King and Cameron, 155-70; idem, "Islam and the Socio-Cultural Transition
ofPalestine-Early Islamic Period (638-1099 CE)", in T.E. Levy (ed.), The Archaeology of Society in the
Holy Land (London: Leicester University, 1995), 488-501.
INTRODUCTION XXVll
THE CONQUESTS AS SYMBOL OR SOURCE OF LEGITIMATION
Any comprehensive consideration of the expansion of Islam must take into

account not only the debates over its causes, motivation, and direct consequences,
but also the way such an epoch-making event was used retrospectively to
articulate diverse ideas in later times. Three particular arenas are identified here.
One is the role of the Islamic conquests in later eschatological writings, both
Muslim and non-Muslim. Later Muslims of an apocalyptic bent tended to see the
conquests not only as evidence of God's favor and divine plan for the Islamic
community, but as a portent of the impending Last Judgment; whereas Jewish,
Christian, and Zoroastrian apocalyptic writers saw the conquests as evidence of
Divine wrath, and looked forward to a coming reversal of their fortunes. Suliman
Bashear's essay on apocalyptic tendencies in Islamic historiography of the
conquests 32 can be contrasted with Bernard Lewis's study of a Jewish apocalyptic
version of Islamic history (Chapter 11),33 and both with essays on Christi an or
Zoroastrian apocalyptic writings that saw the conquests as some kind ofmarker of
God's favor or disfavor. 34
The conquests were also used in a second symbolic way-as a model for
political inspiration among Muslims engaged, in later centuries, in military
struggles against Christian enemies. At the time of the Crusades, for example,
there appeared a number of "Pseudo-Waqidi" works-that is, books attributed to
the famous early historian al-WaqidI-that offered completely spurious legends
about events that supposedly took place during the first conquests. The purpose
of this legendary literature was to inspire the Muslim community in its struggle
with the Christian Franks by offering heroic tales about the earlier struggle
against Christian Byzantium. This phenomenon was the subject of a key study by
Rudi Paret (Chapter 12).35
Third, the reports about the conquests came to be collected (and perhaps
fabricated) in later discussions among Muslims of the taxation policies of the state,
and fed into the systematization of tax issues in Islamic legal thought. This is
32 Suliman Bashear, "Apocalyptic and Other Materials on early Muslim-Byzantine Wars: a
Review", Journal ofthe Royal Asiatic Society (1991),173-207.

33 Bernard Lewis, "An Apocalyptic Vision ofIslamic History", Bulletin ofthe School ofOriental and
African Studies 13 (1950), 305-38.
34 E.g., G.J. Reinink, "Ps.-Methodius: A Concept of History in Response to the Rise of Islam", in
Averil Cameron and Lawrence 1. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, I: Problems
in the Literary Source Material (Princeton: Darwin, 1992), 149-88; idem, "The Romance of Julian", in
Pierre Canivet and Jean-Paul Caquot-Rey (eds), La Syrie de Byzance a l'Islam (Damascus: Institut
Fran<:;ais d'Etudes Arabes, 1992), 75-86; Han J.W. Drijvers, "The Gospel of the Twelve Apostles:
A Syriac Apocalypse from the Early Islamic Period", in Cameron and Conrad, op. cit., 189-214.
Zoroastrian materials are reviewed in K. Czegledy, "Bahram Chubln and the Persian Apocalyptic
Literature", Acta Orientalia Hungarica 8 (1958), 21-43.
35 Rudi Paret, "Die Legendäre Futu/;!,-Literatur", in La poesia epica e la sua formazione (Rome:
Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1970), 735-49.
XXVlll INTRODUCTION
because, in later Islamic law, the way an area was said to have been conquered or
first brought under the rule of the Islamic state-whether by conquest ('anwatan)
or by force of arms (?ulb,an)-determined the area's later tax status. Albrecht
Noth's classic study ofthis question demonstrates some ofthe issue's complexity
(Chapter 13).36
Revisionist Views of the Expansion
As with all other aspects of early Islamic history, our understanding of the first
expansion of Islam depends on the reliability of the sources from which we try
to reconstruct "what actually happened". Pride of place was generally given to
the thousands of narrative reports contained in the Arabic literary sources
(chronicles, biographie al dictionaries, etc.), most ofwhich were compiled between
a century and several centuries after the expansion. These belonged to the genre
offutub, reports (accounts ofthe campaigns of conquest and related issues, such as
treaty arrangements with various localities); others dealt more gene rally with the
coalescence and evolution ofthe state. As noted above, most Western scholarship
on the early expansion of Islam, from the nineteenth century and into the first
two-thirds of the twentieth century, accepted in large measure the validity of the
Islamic community's narratives of this futub, tradition. They favored this literary
material for two reasons. First, the amount of truly documentary information
actually dating to the time of the expansion, especially to its first years, is
vanishingly small-so a reconstruction of the course of the expansion from their
testimony alone would be difficult and, in any case, highly incomplete. The second
reason Western scholars long favored the Islamic narrative sources was because
they provided the historian with a "ready-made" picture of wh at had happened
that seemed plausible and fairly coherent.
Despite this generally positive view of the sourees, there were occasional
studies that called into question the sourees' reliability. The most important were
works dealing with Islamic tradition and law by Ignaz Goldziher and, a generation
later, Joseph Schacht.37 One study that related directly to the conquests was a
pioneering examination by Robert Brunschvig of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam's work on
the conquest of N orth Africa and Spain, which Brunschvig showed to have been
so shaped by later juristic debates that its relationship to the actual events of the
conquest was called into question (Chapter 14).38
36 Albrecht Noth, "Zum Verhältnis von Kalifater Zentralgewalt un Provinzen in Umayyadischer
Zeit. Die '$ull:,1' -"Anwa' -Traditionen für Ägypten und den Iraq", Die Welt des Islams 14 (1973), 150-62.
37 E.g., Ignaz Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien (Halle: Max Niemayer, 1889-1890); Joseph
Schacht, "A Revaluation ofIslamic Traditions", Journal ofthe Royal Asiatic Society (1949), 143-54.
38 Robert Brunschvig, "Ibn 'Abdell:,1akam et la conquete de I' Afrique du Nord", Annales de l'Institut
d'Etudes Orientales (University of Algiers) 6 (1942-1947),108-55. The essay by Noth cited in note 32,
above, bears similar implications.
INTRODUCTION XXIX
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, however, a number of scholars began to

raise fundamental challenges to the received picture of Islam's origins. Building
on earlier critical studies by Goldziher, Schacht, and others, they contended that
these sources could not in fact tell us even in general terms "what actually
happened" during the period of the conquests, or even if they happened at all,
much less lead us to satisfactory interpretations of those events. This view was
first advanced in the writings of John Wansbrough,39 and subsequently inspired
works in a similar vein by others, including G.R. Hawting, Yehuda Nevo, and
Moshe Sharon. 40 In their view, the Byzantine and Sasanian empires collapsed for
internal reasons or, at any rate, somehow lost their grip over vast provinces in the
N ear East, in the aftermath of which Muslims rose to prominence and eventually
emerged as rulers of the new empire; the new Muslim rulers then retrospectively
created the myth of a divinely-aided "Islamic conquest" emanating from Arabia
to explain and justify their rise to power. An essay by Sharon on "The Birth of
Islam in the Holy Land" represents one effort of this kind (Chapter 15).41 This
revolutionary view of the Islamic conquests raises profound questions about how
the Islamic community and a self-conscious Islamic identity managed to coalesce,
and must be seen as part of the broader effort to revise our understanding of just
how "Islam", as it came to be understood by about 150 AH, emerged.
Other studies focused closely on the historigraphical shortcomings of the
conquest narratives, but held back from complete rejection of the usual narrative
of the events of the early Islamic era, including the conquests. The works of
Albrecht Noth on conquest-historiography offered a sobering critique of the
sources that challenged the reliability of many of their features (Chapter 16).42 His
work was inspired by the work of Biblical critics, particularly studies of the
Deuternomistic history-a field to which Noth's own father, Martin Noth, had
been a major contributor. Like the Biblical critics, however, Noth stopped short
of rejecting the traditional sources as complete fabrications, insisting that if one
39 Wansbrough, Qur'iinic Studies; idem, The Sectarian Milieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978). Wansbrough's prose is so dense that the neophyte is well-advised to begin with an explanation
by one of his sympathizers, e.g. Andrew Rippin, "Literary Analysis of Qur'iin, Tafsir, and Sira: the
Methodologies of John Wansbrough", in Richard Martin (ed.), Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 151-63.
40 E.g., G.R. Hawting, "The Origins ofthe Muslim Sanctuary at Mecca", in G. Juynboll (ed.), Studies
on the First Century of Islamic Society (Carbondale and Edwardsville: University of Southern Illinois
Press, 1982),23-47; Y. N evo and J. Koren, "The Origins of the Muslim Descriptions of the Jähilj Muslim
Sanctuary", Journal of Near Eastern Studies 49 (1990), 23-44; for Sharon, see the next note.
41 Moshe Sharon, "The Birth of Islam in the Holy Land", in M. Sharon (ed.), Pillars of Smoke and
Fire: the Holy Land in History and Thought (Johannesburg: Southern, 1988),225-35.
42 Albrecht Noth, "I:;;fahän-Nihävand. Eine quellenkritische Studie zur frühislamischen
Historiographie", Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 118 (1968), 274-96. See
also Albrecht Noth, Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen, und Tendenzen frühislamischer
Geschichtsüberlieferung (Bonn: Selbstverlag des Orientalischen Seminars der Universität, 1993);
idem, "Futült-History and Futült-Historiography: the Muslim Conquest of Damascus", Al-Qantara 10
(1989),453-62.
xxx INTRODUCTION
painstakingly identified and set aside the elaborations and manipulations of

generations of transmitters one could eventually lay bare a kernel that went
back to early times and provided the modern historian with sound historical
information. Lawrence Conrad, inspired by Noth's work, demonstrated that the
narratives about the conquest of Arwäd are marked by discontinuity, instability,
and luxuriant literary elaboration and must be considered, essentially, fiction,43
but nonetheless has not voiced the opinion that the conquests never occurred.
Other revisionist authors also took a nuanced position-recognizing the
difficulties posed by the sources, but contending that somehow an historical
reconstruction could be achieved. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, for example,
in their epoch-making book Hagarism (which really established the need to take
revisionist views seriously and hence set the historical agenda for scholarship on
early Islam for the next generation) accepted that the movement began in Arabia
and that the conquests happened, but drew on earlier critiques of the sources
(including those of Noth and others) to challenge prevailing notions of what the
nature of the expansion was; in their view, it was an amalgam of messianic fervor
of Jews exiled from Edessa by the Byzantines and latent "nativist" feeling among
west-Arabians. 44 More recently, it has been suggested that, even if the expansion
did follow the general outlines laid out in the Muslimfutub, narratives, thefutub,
genre tended to overemphasize the military aspects of the expansion, responding
both to the desire of the conqueror's descendants to show their ancestors as
heroic, and to a theological des ire to demonstrate that the military victories were
achieved against overwhelming odds and hence were signs of God's favor for the
nascent community.45 This opens up the possibility that the original expansion of
the Believers' movement may have been far less violent and more a question of
accomodation than usually supposed, in keeping with a view that the movement
was originally a tendency to monotheistic reform that may have been broadly
acceptable to, and accepting of, many Christians and Jews.
These issues-both regarding the historicity of the early sources, and
regarding the nature of the conquest or expansion itself-are still matters of
active debate, but it seems that total rejection of the Islamic sources, and of the
notion of a conquest with some centralized impetus, is probably too extreme a
43 Lawrence I. Conrad, "The Conquest of Arwad: A Source-Critical Study in the Ristoriography of

the Early Medieval Near East", in Cameron and Conrad (eds), op. cit., 317-401. Its length precludes its
inclusion here.
44 Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: the making of the Islamic world (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977). While Hagarism largely sidesteps the Islamic narrative sources as
evidence, Crone's later works show a greater willingness to wrestle with these sources to win some
information; see Patricia Crone and Martin Rinds, God's Caliph (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses; eadem, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987).
45 See F.M. Donner, "Islamic Conquests", in YoussefChoueiri (ed.) Companion to the History ofthe
Middle East (Maiden, MA and Oxford: Blackwells, 2005), 28-51.
INTRODUCTION XXXI
judgment (Chapter 17).46 For one thing, some recent work, such as Chase F.
Robinson's essay on the conquest of Khuzistan, shows that aspects of the
traditional Islamic conquest narratives are confirmed by documentary evidence
or by the testimony ofnon-Muslim sources of early date (Chapter 18).47 In general,
the revisionist scholarship of the past four decades has underlined the need to
attain a fuller understanding of the historiographical complexities of the Islamic
sources for the conquest and for early Islamic history gene rally. It has also led to a
greater interest in exploring the testimony of the non-Islamic (often non-Arabic)
sources on the early expansion. An excellent example is Sebastian Brock's article
on how Islam first appears to Syriac authors (Chapter 19).48 The non-Islamic
sources are ofvalue not because they are automatically to be considered superior
to the Islamic ones, for they have their own deficiencies,49 but simply because they
offer us additional information and alternative prespectives that may prove
valuable to us as historians. Working patiently on the basis of a careful analysis of
all the available sources, both Islamic and non-Islamic, documentary and literary,
scholars should gradually be able to construct a comprehensive and historically
convincing picture of Islam's first expansion.
46 See F.M. Donner, "Centralized Authority and Military Autonomy in the Early Islamic
Conquests", in Averil Cameron (ed.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, III: States, Resources
andArmies (Princeton: Darwin, 1995),337-60.
47 E.g. Chase F. Robinson, "The Conquest of Khuzistan: a Historiographical Reassessment",
Bulletin ofthe School ofOriental and African Studies 67 (2004), 14-39.
48 S.P. Brock, "Syriac Views of Emergent Islam", in G.H.A. Juynboll (ed.), Studies on the First
Century ofIslamic Society (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982),
9-21. See also the essay by Kaegi cited in note 26 above. The most comprehensive effort of this kind is
Robert Hoyland's invaluable Seeing Islam as Others Saw It. A Survey and Evaluation of Christian,
Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton: Darwin, 1997).
49 This point is stressed by Conrad, "Conquest of Arwad", esp. 399-401.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Note. No bibliography on the subject ofthis volume could claim to be exhaustive,

given the thousands of relevant works that exist in dozens of languages. The
following bibliography lists items the volume editor deerns significant as major
works or representative contributions to one of the sub-themes covered in the
volume. Entries have been subdivided by major subthemes: I. General;
H. Origins-Causes-Early Phases; IH. Conquest of Specific Regions;
IV. Consequences; V. Symbolic Views; VI. Historiographical Studies. Recent
revisionist works have been integrated with other themes, mainly under sections I
and VI. Clearly, some works are germane to several sub-themes; they have been
placed where they seem to the editor most relevant, but such classifications are
always somewhat debatable.
I. General Works Relative to the Expansion ofthe Early Islamic State
Arnold, Thomas Walker. The Preaching of Islam (2nd ed. London: A. Constable,
1913).
Becker, Carl Heinrich. "Die Ausbreitung der Araber", in his Islamstudien
(Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1924), I, 66-145; English translation, "The
Expansion of the Saracens", in H.M. Gwatkin et al. (eds), The Cambridge
Medieval History, 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), chapters
11 and 12.
Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750 (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1971).
Caetani, Leone. Studi di Storia Orientale (Milano: U. Hoepli, 1911).
Crone, Patricia. Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987).
Crone, Patricia. Slaves on Horses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Crone, Patricia, and Michael Cook. Hagarism. The making of the Islamic World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Donner, Fred M. "The Islamic Conquests", in Youssef Choueiri (ed.), A Companion
to the History ofthe Middle East (MaIden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 28-51.
Fay~al, Shukrl. Ifarakat al-fat1;l, al-isliimi fi l-qarn al-awwal. Diriisa tamhidiya

li-nash'at al-mujtama' al-isliimi (Cairo: Matabi' Dar al-Kitab al-'Arabi:, 1952).
XXXIV BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fowden, Garth. Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late

Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Gabrieli, Francesco. Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1968).
Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World
Civilization (3 vols., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974).
Lewis, Bernard. The Arabs in History (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1950).
Ockley, S. The conquest of Syria, Persia, and Egypt by the Saracens (Cambridge,
1757).
Saunders, John J. "The Nomad as Empire Builder: A Comparison ofthe Arab and
Mongoi Conquests", Diogenes 52 (1965), 79-103.
11. Origins of the Conquests; Causes, motivations, earliest phases
Becker, Carl Heinrich. "Der Islam als Problem", in his Islamstudien (Leipzig:
Quelle und Meyer, 1924), I, 1-23.
Bousquet, G.H. "Observations sur la nature et causes de la conquete arabe",

Studia Islamica 6 (1956), 37-52.
Bousquet, G.H. "Quelques remarques critiques et sociologiques sur la conquete
arabe et les theories emises Ei ce sujet", in Studi Orientalistici in Onore de
Giorgio Levi Della Vida I (Roma: Istituto per l'Oriente, 1956), 52-60.
Butzer, K.W "Der Umweltfaktor in der großen arabischen Expansion", Saeculum
8 (1957), 359-71.
Caetani, Leone. Annali dell'Islam (10 vols., Milano: U. Hoepli, 1905-1926).
Canard, Marius. "Uexpansion arabe: le probleme militaire", IJOccidente et l'Islam
nell'alto medioevo: 2-8 aprile 1964 (Spoleto: Presso la sede deI Centro Italiano
di Studi sull'alto medioevo, 1965), I, 37-63.
Donner, Fred M. "Centralized Authority and Military Autonomy in the Early

Islamic Conquests", in Averil Cameron (ed.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic
Near East, III: States, Resources and Armies (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995),
337-60.
Donner, Fred M. The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981).
BIBLIOGRAPHY xxxv
Jandora, JohnJ. The MarchfromMedina: a Revisionist Study oftheArab Conquests

(Clifton, NJ: Kingston Press, 1990).
Lammens, Henri. Le berceau de l'Islam (Roma: Sumptibus Pontificii Instituti
Biblici, 1914).
Rabbath, Edmond. La conquete arabe sous les quatre premiers califes

(11/632-40/661) (2 vols. Beirut: :CUniversite Libanaise, 1985). [=Les chretiens
dans l'Islam des premiers temps, part 3.]
von Grunebaum, Gustave. "The First Expansion of Islam: Factors of Thrust and
Containment", Diogenes 53 (1966), 64-72.
Winckler, Hugo. ''Arabisch-Semitisch-Orientalisch'', Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-

Aegyptische Gesellschaft, Berlin 6 (1901),151-374.
IH. Conquest of Specific Regions
Abel, R.P. "La prise de Jerusalem par les Arabes (638)", Conferences de
Saint-Etienne, 1910-1911, II (Paris: J. Gabalda & Cie., 1911), 105-44.
Ahrweiler, Heh'me. ":CAsie Mineure et les invasions arabes (VIIe-IXe siecles)",
Revue historique 227 (1962), 1-32.
Alexander, Paul J. "Les debuts des conquetes arabes en Sicile et la tradition
apocalyptique byzantine-slave", Bolletino del Centro di Studi filologici e
linguistici siciliani 12 (1973), 7-35.
Amari, Michele. Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia (3 vols., Catania: R. Prampolini,
1933-1939).
Bir6, M.B. "Marwän b. Mul).ammad's Georgian campaign", Acta Orientalia
Hungaricae 29 (1975), 289-99.
Bocca, Claudio, and Massimo Centini. Saraceni nelle Alpi: storia, miti e tradizione
di una invasione medievale nelle regioni alpine occidentali (Ivrea [Torino]:
Priuli & Verlucca, 1997).
Brett, Michael. "The Arab Conquest and the Rise of Islam in N orth Africa",
Cambridge History of Africa II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1978), 490-555.
Brooks, E.w. "The Arab Occupation of Crete", English Historical Review 28 (1913),
431-43.
Butler, Alfred J. The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years ofthe Roman
Dominion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902).
XXXVI BIBLIOGRAPHY
Canard, Marius. "Les expeditions des Arabes contre Constantinople dans

l'histoire et dans la legende", Journal Asiatique 208 (1926).
Chiera, M.A. La lutte entre Arabes et Byzantins. La conquete et l'organisation des
frontiers aux VIIe et VIIle siecles (Alexandria: Societe de publications
Egyptiennes, 1947).
Christides, V. "The Coastal towns of Bilad al-Sham at the Time of the Rashidün
(632-661). Defence and Trade", Epeteris tou Kentrou Epistemonikon Ereunon
13-16 (1984-1987), 49-62.
Cocatre-Zilgien, Andre. "Amr ibn al-Ass et la conquete de l'Egypte par les
Arabes", Annales Africaines (1959), 201-44.
De Goeje, Michael J an. Memoire sur Za Conquete de Za Syrie (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1864). (2nd ed. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1900).
Gabrieli, Francesco. "Mul)ammad ibn Qasim ath-Thaqafi and the Arab conquest
of Sind", East and West 15 (1965), 281-95.
Gibb, H.A.R. The Arab Conquests in Central Asia (London: Royal Asiatic Society,
1923).
Gibb, H.A.R. "The Arab Invasion ofKashgar in A.D. 715", BSOAS 2 (1923), 467-74.
Hasan, S.A. "A Survey of the Expansion of Islam into Central Asia du ring the
Umayyad Caliphate", Islamic Culture 44 (1970),165-76; 45 (1971), 95-113; 47
(1973),1-13; 48 (1974), 177-86.
Hashimi:, Taha. "Ma'rakat Ajnadayn: mata waqa'at, wa-'ayna waqa'at?", Majallat

al-majma' aZ-'ilmi aZ-'iräqi 2 (1951), 69-102.
Hashimi:, Yüsuf 'Abbas, "Dhatu ':;;-:?awari:. A naval engagement between the Arabs
and Byzantines", Islamic Quarterly 6 (1961), 55-64.
J andora, J ohn. W "The Battle of the Yarmük: A Reconstruction", Journal ofAsian
History 19 (1985), 8-21.
Jarry, Jacques. ":CEgypte et l'invasion musulmane", Annales IsZamoZogiques 6
(1966), 1-29.
Kaegi, Walter E. Byzantium and the early Islamic conquests (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Kaegi, Walter E. "The First Arab Expeditions against Amorium", Byzantine and
Modern Greek Studies 3 (1977), 19-22.
Lacam, Jean. Les Sarrazins dans le haut moyen-age franc;ais (histoire et
archeoZogie) (Paris: G.P. Maisonneuve, 1965).
BIBLIOGRAPHY XXXVll
Landau-Tasseron, Ella. "The Participation of Tayyi' in the Ridda", JSAI 5 (1984),

53-71.
Levi-Provenc,;al, E. "Un nouveau recit de la conquete de l'Afrique du Nord par les

Arabes", Arabica 1 (1954), 17-43.
Lewis, Archibald. "The Moslem Expansion in the Mediterranean, AD 827-960", in

A. Lewis (ed.), The Islamic World and the West, AD 622-1492 (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1970).
Manandean, H. "Les invasions arabes en Armenie (Notes chronologiques)",
Byzantion 18 (1948), 163-95.
Marc,;ais, Georges. "Sidi Uqba, Abu I-Muhäjir et Kusaila", Cahiers de Tunisie 1
(1953), 11-17.
Mayerson, Philip. "The First Muslim Attacks on Southern Palestine (AD 633-
634)", Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philologieal Assoeiation
95 (1964), 155-99.
Papagna, Antonio. I Saraceni e la Puglia nel secolo decimo (Bari: Levanta, ca.
1990).
Reinaud, J. T. Les Invasions des Sarrasins en France et de France en Savoie, en

Piemont et dans la Suisse pendant les VIIIe, IXe, et Xe siecles d e notre ere (Paris:
Librairie "Orient", 1964). [reprint of original edition of Paris, 1836].
Shoufani, Elias. Al-Riddah and the Muslim Conquest of Arabia (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, and Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and
Publishing, 1972).
Simon, L.J. ''Jews, Visigoths, and the Muslim Conquest of Spain", UCLA
Historieal Journal 4 (1983), 5-33.
Taha, 'Abd al-Wäl)id Dhanün. The Muslim Conquest and Settlement of North Afriea
and Spain (London & New York: Routledge, 1989)[ =Exeter Arabic and Islamic
Series, no. 3.]
Talkudar, Muhammad H.R. "The Arab invasions of al-Sind and al-Hind", Journal
ofthe Pakistan Historieal Society 14 (1966), 104-29.
Vasmer, R. "Die Eroberung Tabaristäns durch die Araber zur Zeit des Chalifen
al-Man~ür (Mit einer Karte)", Islamica 3 (1927), 86-150.
Wood, David. "The 60 Martyrs ofGaza and the Martyrdom ofBishop Sophronius
in J erusalem", Aram 15 (2003), 129-50.
XXXVlll BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zarrinküb, 'Abd al-I:Iusayn. "The Arab Conquest of Iran and its Aftermath",
Cambridge History oflran IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975),
1-56.
IV. Consqeuences
al-'All, :?älil) AQ.mad. "Khitat al-Ba:;;ra", Sumer 8 (1952),72-83 and 281-302.

Brett, Michael. "The Spread ofIslam in Egypt and NorthAfrica", in M. Brett (ed.),
Northern Africa: Islam and Modernization (London: Frank Cass, 1973), 1-12.
Brock, Sebastian. "Syriac Views of Emergent Islam", in G.H.A. Juynboll (ed.),
Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1982),9-21.
Bulliet, Richard W. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: an essay in

quantitative history (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
Cameron, Averil. "The Eastern Provinces in the 7th Century A.D.: Hellenism and
the Emergence of Islam", in Suzanne Said (ed.), HELLENISMOS: Quelques
jalons pour un histoire de l'identite grecque. Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg,
25-27 octobre 1989 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991),287-313.
Decobert, Christian. Le mendiant et le combattant. IJinstitution de l'islam (Paris:
Seuil, 1991).
Dennett, Daniel C. Conversion and the Poll-Tax in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1950).
Djalt, Hichem. "Les Yamanites a Kufa au Ier Siede de l'Hegire", Journal of the
Economic and Social History ofthe Orient 19 (1976), 148-81.
Donner, Fred M. "The Role ofNomads in the Near East in Late Antiquity", in F.M.
Clover and R.S. Humphreys (eds), Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 73-85.
Donner, Fred M. "TribaI Settlement in Basra during the First Century AH", in
Tarif Khalidi (ed.), Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East
(Beirut: American University ofBeirut, 1984),97-120.
Dostal, Walter. "The Significance of Semitic Nomads in Asia", Proceedings ofthe
Eighth International Congress of Anthropologists and Ethnological Sciences 3
(1968),312-16.
BIBLIOGRAPHY XXXIX
Ehrenkreutz, Andrew S. "Another Orientalist's Remarks concerning the Pirenne

Thesis", Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 15 (1972),
94-104.
Fück, Johann. 'Arabiya. Untersuchungen zur arabische Sprach- und Stilgeschichte
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1950).
Gellens, Sam I. "Egypt, Islamization of", The Coptic Encyclopedia (New York:
Macmillan, 1991), III, 936-42.
Gerö, Stephen. "Only a change ofmasters? The Christians ofIran and the Muslim
Conquest", Studia Iranica 5 (1987), 43-48.
Gervers, Michael, and RJ. Bikhazi (eds). Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous
Christi an Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990).
Griffith, Sidney. "From Aramaic to Arabic: The Languages of the Monasteries of

Palestine in the Byzantne and Early Islamic Periods" , Dumbarton Oaks Papers
51 (1997), 11-31.
Hodges, Richard, and David Whitehouse. Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the

Origins of Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
Juda, Jamal. al-'Arab wa l-arg, fi l-'iraq fi l-qarn al-awwal al-hijri ('Amman:
al-Sharika al-'arablya li-tiba'a wa l-nashr, 1979).
Kaegi, Walter E. "Initial Byzantine Reactions to the Arab Conquest", Church
History 38 (1969), 139-49.
Kedar, Benjamin Z. "The Arab Conquests and Agriculture: A Seventh-Century
Apocalypse, Satellite Imagery, and Palynology", Asian and African Studies 19
(1985), 1-15.
Kennedy, Hugh. The Armies ofthe Caliphs (London: Routledge, 2001).
Kennedy, Hugh. "From Polis to Madina: Urban Change in Late Antique and Early
Islamic Syria", Past and Present 106 (February 1985), 3-27.
Lapidus, Ira. "The Conversion ofEgypt to Islam", Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972),
248-62.
Morony, Michael G. Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984).
Omar, Farouk. "The Islamization of the Gulf", in C.E. Bosworth et al. (eds), The
Islamic World from Classical to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Bernard
Lewis (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1989),247-57.
xl BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pirenne, Henri. Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1937).

Pirenne, Henri. Medieval Cities: their origins and the revival of trade (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1925).
Poliak A.N. "UArabisation de l'Orient Semitique", Revue des etudes islamiques 12
(1938), 35-63.
Saleh, A.H. "Les bedouins d'Egypte aux premiers siecles de l'Hegire", Revista
degli Studi Orientali 55 (1981), 137-61.
Shaban, M.A. "Conversion to Early Islam", in Nehamia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion
to Islam (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979),24-29.
Simonsen, Jprgen Bcek. Studies in the Genesis and Early Development of the
Caliphal Taxation System (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1988).
Sprengling, Martin. "From Persian to Arabic", American Journal of Semitic
Languages and Literatures 56 (1939), 175-224, 325-36.
Terasse, Henri. "Citadins et Grands Nomades dans l'Histoire de l'Islam", Studia
Islamica 29 (1969), 5-15.
Tsafrir, Yoram, and Gideon Foerster, "From Scythopolis to Baysan: Changing
Concepts of Urbanism", in G.R.D. King and Averil Cameron (eds), The
Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, 2: Land Use and Settlement Patterns
(Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994),95-116.
Whitcomb, Donald. "Am~är in Syria? Syrian Cities after the conquest", Aram 6
(1994), 13-33.
Whitcomb, Donald. "Islam and the Socio-Cultural Transition ofPalestine-Early
Islamic Period (638-1099 CE)", in T.E. Levy (ed.), The Archaeology of Society in
the Holy Land (London: Leicester University, 1995),488-501.
Whitcomb, Donald. "The Mi?r of Ayla: Settlement at al-~qaba in the Early Islamic
Period", in G.R.D. King and Averil Cameron (eds), The Byzantine and Early
Islamic Near East, 2: Land Use and Settlement Patterns (Princeton: Darwin
Press, 1994), 155-70.
V. Symbolic Views of the Conquests
Bashear, Suliman. "Apocalyptic and Other Materials on early Muslim-Byzantine

Wars: a Review", JRAS (1991),173-207.
Czegledy, K. "Bahräm Chub"in and the Persian Apocalyptic Literature", Acta
Orientalia Hungarica 8 (1958), 21-43.
BIBLIOGRAPHY xli
Drijvers, Han. J.w. "The Gospel ofthe Twelve Apostles: A Syriac Apocalypse from
the Early Islamic Period", in Averil Cameron and Lawrence 1. Conrad (eds),
The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, I: Problems in the Literary Source
Material (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1992), 189-214.
Lewis, Bernard. "An Apocalyptic Vision of Islamic History" , BSOAS 13 (1950),
305-38.
Noth, Albrecht. "Zum Verhältnis von Kalifater Zentralgewalat und Provinzen in
Umayyadischer Zeit. Die '$ulQ.'-'~nwa'-Traditionen für Ägypten und den
Iraq", Die Welt des Islams 14 (1973),150-62.
Paret, Rudi. "Die legendäre Futub,-Literatur", In La poesia epica e la sua
formazione (Roma: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1970), 735-49.
Reinink, G.J. "Ps.-Methodius: A Concept of History in Response to the Rise of
Islam", in Averil Cameron and Lawrence 1. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and
Early Islamic Near East, I: Problems in the Literary Source Material
(Princeton: Darwin Press, 1992), 149-88.
Reinink, G.J. "The Romance of Julian", In Pierre Canivet and Jean-Paul
Caquot-Rey (eds), La Syrie de Byzance a l'Islam (Damascus: Institut Franc;ais
d'Etudes Arabes, 1992), 75-86.
VI. Historiographical Studies of the Conquest Literature
Brunschvig, Robert. "Ibn ~bdelQ.akam et la conquete de l'Afrique du Nord",

Annales de l'Institut d'Etudes Orientales (University of Algiers) 6 (1942-1947),
108-55.
Conrad, Lawrence 1. "The Conquest of Arwäd: A Source-Critical Study in the
Hitoriography of the Early Medieval Near East", in Averil Cameron and
Lawrence 1. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, I:
Problems in the Literary Source Material (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1992),
317-401.
Donner, Fred M. Narratives of Islamic Origins. The beginnings of Islamic historical
writing (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1997).
Gateau, A. "Ibn ~bd al-Hakam et les sources arabes relatives a la conquete de
l'Afrique du Nord et de l'Espagne", Revue Tunisienne (1931), 233-60; (1932),
71-78; (1935), 247-70; (1936), 57-83; (1937), 63-88; (1938), 37-54; (1939), 203-219.
Idris, Hadi Roger. "Examen critique des recits d'al-Mälik"i et d'Ibn 'Idhärl sur la
conquete de l'Ifrlqiya", Arabica 11 (1964), 5-18.
xlii BIBLIOGRAPHY
Noth, Albrecht. "Futub,-History and Futub,-Historiography: the Muslim Conquest

of Damascus", Al-Qantara 10 (1989), 453-62.
Noth, Albrecht. "1?fahan-Nihavand. Eine quellenkritische Studie zur frühislamischen

Historiographie", ZDMG 118 (1968), 274-96.
Noth, Albrecht, and Lawrence 1. Conrad. The Early Arabic Historical Tradition. A
Source-Critical Study (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994).
Robinson, Chase F. "The Conquest of Khüzistan: a Historiographical
Reassessment", BSOAS 67 (2004),14-39.
Sizgorich, Thomas. "Narrative and Community in Islamic Late Antiquity", Past
and Present 185 (November 2004),9-42.
Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena zur Ältesten Geschichte des Islams (Berlin: Georg
Reimer, 1899).
1
THE ART OF WAR OF THE ARABS,
AND THE SUPPOSED RELIGIOUS FERVOUR
OF THE ARAB CONQUERORS
Leone Caetani
Military Art of the Arabs

After this brief and incomplete description of the Muslims' weapons and the
means of attack and defence of which they disposed at the time when they
crossed the frontiers of their peninsula, it is time to say something on the
subject of strategy and the art of fighting among the Ancient Arabs. Nobody
can deny that, in this respect, they were - at least theoretically - vastly inferior
compared to the Greek and Sassanid armies, who had had renowned schools
of the art of war, legacy of all the ancient civilisations of Asia and of Roman
military power. The art of moving great crowds of men on the battlefield,
like the pieces on a chessboard, was studied widely and furnished with the
immeasurable store of experience gained during the secular wars of which
Syria and the valley of Tigris and of Euphrates had been the favourite
battleground.
Among the Arabs, secluded as they were in their inaccessible deserts, the
complex and risky art of leading armed men on a battlefield and of achieving
victory was still in its infancy, and there can be no comparison whatsoever
between the lack of military skill among the Arabs and the knowledge of their
formidable adversaries. It might be said that there was no military knowledge
at all among the Arabs, for the simple reason that there had never been an
army in Arabia for as long as anyone could remember. It is true that everyone
was a warrior: at the moment of danger, all the adults took up arms, in
particular when it was a case of defending their own possessions against raids
from neighbours. The character of the Arabs was so warlike that no-one
shirked this obligation; the men were living in the desert armed, so to speak,
night and day, and they all shared [356] an unquenchable thirst for farne and
booty. Their innate passion for fighting found a further, particular incentive
when the danger oflosing their pos sessions appeared suddenly, or when it was
necessary to avenge a crime, a murdered kinsman or to re cover one's own
belongings.
What was lacking, however, was any concept ofmilitary organisation as we
understand it: that is to say that there was nothing besides a moral obligation,
2 THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE
2 Leone Caetani
created by custom and tradition, to take up arms when the need arose and to
fight with one's own clan or tribe; never did an Arab fight because of an order
he received. His participation was always and only ever voluntary: no-one
could prevent hirn from staying at horne if he did not have the inclination
or the courage to fight. Everyone feared only one thing: the scorn of his
companions or the satire of the poet, which would immortalise the memory of
his baseness forever.
Thus the hosts of armed men which gathered in every group of families
had no real organic formation, as they consisted of volunteers linked only by
blood ties and shared interests. We must take into account that the major part
of the Arabian peninsula was inhabited by these tribes, all of which were
independent units, without any kind of bond among them. Then it becomes
understandable how it could be that not only there was no military art in
ancient Arabia (among the nomads), but also that it could never emerge
unless the political situation ofperennial anarchy came to an end. We do know,
it is true, of tribal confederations that were formed by means of the ancient
tie of the 'hilf', or oath, but one could not really count on the practical value
of these unions. The obligations imposed by similar agreements were quite
flexible, and ifthe majority of a certain tribe did not consider it in their interest
to stand by their obligations, they would neglect them with Arab fickleness
and faithlessness.
[357] Under these circumstances, we cannot speak of real armies in
pre-Islamic Arabia, nor of any military art. At most, we may speak of a warlike
and martial tradition, which was created by the natural environment and the
primitive character of relations between the individual tribes. On occasion, in
truly exceptional instances, a formation might emerge which we could call an
army, such as the confederates of the Quraysh who moved to besiege Medina
in 5 AH and who were said to number as many as ten thousand men. However,
it was still only a group of volunteers, a jumble of unconnected units which
were clearly distinguishable among themselves and were completely free
from any kind of cohesion. All of the units fought in their own way, went to
fight where they pleased and even - as we can see from the traditions
concerning this very siege of Medina - stopped fighting when and where they
pleased.
At a certain point, each ofthese independent units, without waiting for an
order from above, folded its tents, picked up its baggage and left, without
giving the slightest thought to the others. Uniting these forces was a most
arduous and delicate enterprise because of the incredible touchiness, the
eternal jealousies, the immense pride and the fickleness of all these warriors
who refused to acknowledge any kind of authority or discipline, and whom
THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE 3
The Art oi War oi the Arabs 3
one careless word could in one moment cause to flare up with rage. Within
such precarious unions, no-one could give orders: every single decision had to
be taken in the assembly ofthe chiefs where the resolutions ofthe majority did
not restrict the freedom of the minority. Furthermore, each chief then had to
hold a meeting with his kin and speak to convince them before he could obtain
support for the resolutions of the larger council. Muhammad hirnself,
although he succeeded in concentrating in his hands the power over his
followers, was unable to break this ancient custom and it frequently took
hirn a long time to impose his will. The independence [358] of the individual
units, including those who were linked by close ties of blood rather than
opportunistic agreements oftahiiluf, or sworn confederation, is demonstrated
by many events during the Prophet's military campaigns.
We might feel compelled to wonder whether, considering the circumstances,
there was not some kind of science of war in Arabia, since, despite the
continual fratricidal conflicts, real battles between large groups of armed men
were always the exception? It is true that we have, in the traditions about
pagan Arabia, instances of historie battles fought between large groups of
tribes, the so-called 'days of the people' or ayyiim al-niis. Several Arab
writers give us more than just a little information about these; however, it is
imperative that we mistrust the literal contents of these narratives, as they
were compiled by later traditionists who were not aware ofthe true conditions
in ancient Arabia. With the exception ofvery rare instances, the 'battles' were
merely skirmishes, reckless brawls, during which no precise organisation was
observed and which were really only clashes between small groups, or else
single combat between individual warriors.
In general all fights started as surprise attacks: one tribe would swoop
down unexpectedly on an enemy camp, massacre the men who were unable to
escape, sometimes also raging against women with bloodcurdling ferocity,
and finally abducting the most beautiful girls and women, the children and
the livestock. Now the decimated tribe would appeal to its blood kin and its
allies and, having received assistance, use the first favourable opportunity
to swoop in its turn onto a camp of the enemies in exactly the same way,
taking ferocious revenge for the harm suffered; if possible, increasing the
dose.
The same way of waging war still survives in Arabia, and we may read
lively descriptions in the pages of Doughty, Dissard, and Jaussen, where we
might believe we were looking at scenes from the days of the Jahili:yya, or Age
of [359] Barbarity, as the pre-Islamic history of Arabia was later called. We
read of surprise attacks on nomads' camps, single combat, women slashed and
killed by lance blows after having seen their children die before their own
4 Leone Caetani
eyes; all those horrors ofbarbarity, in fact, to which Muhammad sought to put
an end, albeit in his own way. Despite the Prophet's orders, some women were
even slain at Hunayn 'and people came running to gape at their bodies!'.l And
the culprits were not even punished.
The Prophet attempted to put an end to this state of things and, although
he hirnself was not a natural warrior, without doubt made far-reaching
changes which survived long after his death. Muhammad was no general, nor
was he enamoured ofthings military; we even know that, when it was possible,
he preferred to stay safely behind the lines of his men. It is a strange fact
indeed that the founder of one of the most powerful military theocracies of all
times was hirnselfnot a warrior; but that is how it was, for Muhammad always
saw war as a means to achieving an end, never as an end in itself.
[360] Still, there is no doubt that, during the Medinan period, this
marvellous seducer of men, in order to ac hieve his ends, devoted much more
effort to founding a strong military and social order among his followers, and
to inculcate discipline and obedience, than to developing and perfecting
the moral and religious aspects of his doctrine. In that respect, his activities
marked a great progress in the art of warfare among the Arabs.
By the time of his death, the tribes that remained faithful to the new
religion had become accustomed to the military organisation and showed
themselves more willing to follow the command of one man than they ever had
in the past. While they were still divided into groups according to real or
imagined ties ofblood and followed their own chiefs, they had by then become
accustomed to recognise the authority of even a foreign leader, and they were
resigned to respecting and obeying the disciplinary orders of the generals
1 The bloody torturing of unarmed women, one of the most grim and horrific aspect of
ancient Arab society, was in fact very common. The custom remained in use for a long
time, and the bloodcurdling reports ab out the war between the Christian C!) Taghlib in
Mesopotamia towards the end ofthe first century AR, during wh ich either side habitually
eviscerated every pregnant woman, are enough to make any reader shudder. I regret to say
that the custom persists to this day in Arabia, and those looking for proof should read what
Doughty writes about the wars between the Anayzäh and the Qahtan. Among all these
horrors a more amusing incident narrated by the same author is worth mentioning,
because it is proof of how the hard and dangerous li fe of the desert sharpens the
intelligence and schools the spirit to find an ingenious and immediate way out, where the
softer city dweller might submit like a lamb to the slaughter. When the Arabs attacked the
camp, one woman wishing to save her absent husband's savings, grabbed a goatskin filled
with water, dropped all her husband's precious metals inside, closed it and, having torn her
clothes off, began to scream and fled into the desert, the goatskin on her shoulders,. The
enemies noticed her, some wanted to go after her, but then thought that she must have
been reduced to this state by the attacks of others of their number and let her pass with her
goatskin in order that she should not die of thirst in the desert.
appointed by the Prophet. The triumph of the Medinan theocracy over the
divided tribes of central Arabia after Muhammad's death, in the years 11 and
12 AH, was made possible by this strong and close-knit first community, which
furthermore paved the way for the great conquests. It was thanks to this group
that finally it became clear to all the Arabs that the advantages ofIslam offered
ample compensation for the odious taxation and ritual demanded by the new
faith - although, in truth, at the beginning these were hardly more than
nominal. The most unwilling tribes bowed their heads, and now the warlike
virtues as weIl as the extraordinary intelligence of this people so richly
endowed by nature were all uni ted in one single body, all driven towards a
common aim, and showed themselves to possess a force so surprising as to
stun the world.
Beyond the consciousness of a unity superior to the ties of mere
consanguinity, beyond getting into the habit of the duties of discipline and
obedience to aleader, which other innovations, [361] which improvements in
military science may we attribute to the Prophet, that could explain to us the
long series of great victories over the experienced veterans that were
Byzantium and Persia?
The answer is not easy, due to the lack of precise information. Even if the
Prophet had not improved the customs of war in any way, we could say that,
only by means of the unanimous union of so many forces and the teaching of
discipline, he had already forged a weapon out of the Arab anarchy; a weapon
which, even without further improvement, must be formidable and maybe
even invincible within the borders of the peninsula. But he most certainly did
more than this, and introduced several military innovations which marked
genuine progress in the art of fighting. These, however, were innovations
which had little intrinsic value when it came to campaigning against the
war-hardened armies of Byzantium and Persia. The Arabs of the Hijäz were
utterly ignorant of the art of attacking and storming fortresses; all their
warlike bravery was blunted and gave way before the sheer resistance of walls
and trenches.
Despite the sm all innovations introduced by Muhammad, theoretically
the art of warfare among the Arabs was still, compared to that of Greeks and
Persians, in a position of great inferiority. There are several European
historians, such as Muir, who, although aware of this, endeavoured to find a
reason for the Arab victories and glorified so me ofthe generals such as Khälid
b. al-Wali:d, Companion of the Prophet, elevated hirn among the greatest
generals in all history and declared hirn the main author of the Muslim
conquests. This explanation is not correct. Khälid became a famous general,
6 Leone Caetani
and his own great courage, his rich and audacious initiative and ingenuity
made hirn, it is true, the best and most capable strategist of primitive Islam,
but we really need not pursue this any furt her. [362] It is certain only that his
unique talent and his untiring energy contributed very much to the triumph
of the Arab armies in Syria; but the great pitched battles won in Babylonia
as weIl as the conquest of Iran and Egypt were fortunately led by others.
The Arab victories were due to very complex reasons, which we will now
try to present briefly, investigating the martial and moral virtues of the
ancient Arabs, virtues which carried the day even in battles which were not
commanded by men of genius.
Arab military art was of a patriarchal and primitive character, as is also
made clear from certain features in the nomads' way of fighting. One, for
instance, was the custom of single combat among warriors, which recalls the
most famous passages of the Iliad and of other ancient national epic poems,
and which shows how little unified battle action there was in those days.
Furthermore, we must not think that these encounters took place while the
two armies stood facing each other on the brink of battle. This is probably a
mistake of the traditionists of later centuries who did not know how the
ancient Arabs fought. We must, indeed, remember that the opposing armies of
the Arabs did not have regular organisation on either side, but that they were
divided into small groups rushing to and fro in the greatest possible dis order,
now launching themselves onto a handful of men if they thought they had the
advantage during an attack, now quickly avoiding confrontation ifthe position
or the time did not seem auspicious. Thus it happened that when a warrior
from the one side saw an enemy, he would challenge hirn to single combat
while the friends of either would halt their own, often rash movements in
order to watch the spectacle. Muhammad's victories are certainly due to the
measures he took to put an end to such primitive ways of fighting, and the
Arabs were not slow to discover the advantages of the new system, especially
when they [363] crashed into the closed phalanxes ofthe Greeks and Persians.
As we follow the military history of the Muslims we find fewer and fewer
mentions of single combat, until they finally disappear altogether, once the
Muslims had embraced, and maybe in some cases even improved, the military
technique of their enemies.
Another Barbaric characteristic of the early Arab wars was the warriors'
custom of taking more or less their whole family with them. After careful study
this custom, which at first seems surprising, will prove to be much less
unreasonable than it appeared at first. On the contrary, it will be seen to be
based on reasons similar to those that caused Germanic Barbarians to invade
the Roman Empire carrying with them most of their possessions. Indeed,
there are many similarities between the Barbarian invasions of the Roman
Empire and the Arabs' invasions of the crumbling empires of Asia, but this is
not the place to linger on this subject.
Now, we must bear in mind that in Arabia all adult males were warriors. If
an expedition promised victory and rich booty, they all went; if the duration of
the enterprise was uncertain, and ifit involved travelling to a faraway country,
it was not possible to leave family and livestock without protection in the
boundless solitude of the desert where a handful of evildoers could wreak
havoc with impunity, and then disappear.
Thus the Arab custom of going on their great expeditions in the company
of their families and livestock was more than just a custom, it was a necessity.
The Muslims maintained this custom, although one should have thought that
the law of Islam would have guaranteed the safety of women left at horne.
During the battle of Yarmük the Arab camp was full of the warriors' women
who inspired their husbands to fight when the Greek phalanxes threatened to
overrun the tents. Before the battle of al-Qädislyya, women and children were
left in Khaffän on the edge of the [364] desert, in a place that would be safe
even in case of defeat. At the battle of Marj al-Suffär, Sa'ld Ibn al-'A:;;'s new
wife, still covered with the perfumed ointments which women put on their
faces during the first night of marriage, fought the Greeks brandishing a tent
pole.
It is likely that this degree of precaution had become ahabit with the
Arabs, and that another reason for having their women follow them was to
enjoy their company and to have someone to look after the wounded or in
times of disease. The women probably also attended to cooking food, mended
their husbands' torn garments, looked after property left in the camp,
repaired goatskins, and so on. In Syria, many generals had their wives with
them and even contracted marriages on the eve of the great battles - thus was
their zest for life! The Prophet also followed this pleasant custom, and took
one or more ofhis wives with hirn on most ofhis campaigns. When he went on
the Farewell Pilgrimage, he took all ni ne of his wives.
Assumed Religious Fervour of the Conquering Arabs

To sum up the above remarks, we must needs conclude that as regards
weapons and strategy, the Arabs found themselves in a position that was
quite obviously inferior. If the outcome of the wars to come had depended
exclusively on the strength of their weapons and the strategie knowledge of
their leaders, the Greeks and Persians would have been certain of forcing
8 Leone Caetani
their new enemy back to his desert homeland. In the same way the Roman
legions, for more than two centuries, successfully drove the barbarians of the
North back into their native forests in central Europe. Even when the Roman
armies did not command powerful weapons, steadfast discipline nor skilful
generals, they still continued to meet the barbarians with fierce resistance,
and [365] it took another two and a half centuries until the last remaining
vestiges of the Roman Empire had been obliterated in Europe. Compared to
the Greeks and Persians, the Arabs were in a way like the barbarians
compared to the Western Empire; so now, before we tell the story of the
genesis ofIslam and its first great triumphs, it is our duty to explain how it was
possible that the work of the Arabs, which was destructive and creative at one
and the same time, could have been so much faster, more complete and more
enduring than that of the Western barbarians, despite the military inferiority
alluded to just now.
In another chapter, when we tell the story of the great conquests, we
will discuss the pitiful conditions in which the Byzantine and the Sassanid
Empires found themselves, and describe the extremes ofmisery, powerlessness
and decay into which they had sunk. Here, however, we will determine how
the Arabs could be mo rally and physically so superior to their opponents.
Indeed, the Arabs were able to defeat their enemies on the battlefield and to
change forever their civilisation, faith, language and nearly all the ancient
traditions in the Middle East.
Muslim historians evaded studying this question, believing that it was
more than enough to propose as explanation some vague and general idea,
and finding justification for everything within the religious fervour of the
newly converted Muslims. Ifwe believe these historians, the Arabs launched
themselves onto the Asian provinces in order to fulfil the command of the
deceased Prophet of converting the whole world to the new faith. These
historians believed that they must consider these victories to have been due,
above all, to the virtue of religious passion which impelled these fanatics
boldly to disregard death, and made their furious attacks on the battlefield
completely irresistible. This idea is based on an accumulation of errors, which
it will be our task to refute in the course of the present studies. Meanwhile, it
will be conducive to our understanding of what follows to set out in brief the
reasons why the ancient idea [366] of the Arabs' religious fervour at the time of
the great conquests is, in our view, fundamentally wrong. For the time being
we shall state our conclusions; a more detailed discussion will be undertaken
in the later chapters.
In the following chapter we will first of all and in detail show the true
religion of ancient, nomadic Arabia, as weIl as the true nature of religious
feeling among the inhabitants of the desert. Our discussion will conclude by
showing that there was no religious fervour whatsoever in the souls of the vast
majority of the Arabs who achieved the conquests, and that on the whole their
religion was merely coarse satisfaction of the senses.
Secondly, Muhammad's preaching did not kindIe true religious feelings
except in a small number of people, and although the Islamic movement he
led was begun as a religious reform, it soon degenerated into an essentially
political movement. Ritual and financial requirements of the new faith
were light enough in themselves, and while they were fulfilled only very
imperfectly, during the Prophet's lifetime they constituted a kind of political
discipline beneath which no truly religious passion lay hidden. Indeed, except
for a few tribes, the peoples of the desert wanted to emancipate themselves
from any Islamic duty as soon as the Prophet departed this life. Muhammad's
domain was made up of tribes which were mostly subjected by force, and
only to a small extent by considerations of interest or opportunity. These
tribes were without any kind of religious fervour, and due to their innate
indifference to all forms of religion they were entirely untouched by that
blinding emotion we call janaticism. Historians describe the Bedouins who
defeated the Greeks and Persians as fanatics who flung themselves into the
arms of death for the sake of their faith, but these historians are ascribing to
the seventh century, and to the Arab people, sentiments which were
characteristic of non-Arab nations in much more recent times. Alternatively,
they are thus depicting the Arabs as [367] mediaeval authors and theologians
imagined the early Muslims to have been. These writers appear to be ignorant
ofthe fact that the Arab armies sent out to conquer Asia were made up nearly
completely of volunteers from tribes cruelly subjected to the Caliph's will by
force of arms in pitched battles. These men, who had only a few months earlier
been rebels against Islam simply could not have become fanatic advocates of
the new faith. They were, as Döllinger already said so weH, simple raiders,
greedy for plunder and unbridled licence, men who were only too ready to
associate as brothers and colleagues with the enemies of the day before, as
soon as the latter had declared themselves willing to take some companions to
loot the civilised world beyond their own borders.
At Muhammad's death, there were indeed some among the Muslims
who, whether from genuine religious feeling or from blind enthusiasm for
the Prophet, their beloved master, professed an ardent faith and showed
particular zeal in fulfilling their duties as the true faithful. However, they were
only a negligible minority and, furthermore, they all belonged to the class
of the oldest and most reliable Companions who had stayed in Medina until
the end of the first great conquests. Very few among them fought in Syria
10 Leone Caetani
and Persia; the great majority of the warriors was made up of Bedouin
adventurers, the same Bedouins who knew nothing ofIslam beyond its name,
and who appreciated only the material advantages it gave them.
A further point, no less worthy of note, must be added to the three
previous, fundamental ones.
If we were to look in the Koran for an exhortation to die for the faith, we
would look in vain. Muhammad promises the faithful a generous reward in the
afterlife: charming untouched maidens who, after each intercourse, return to
being virgins as before; delicious drink, enchanting gardens, soft fruit and
eternal joy. This reward, however, was promised in exchange for services
rendered to Islam and the Prophet, alive. The idea ofmartyrdom, of dying for
one's faith, [368] was a highly Christian concept and seeped into Muslim
consciousness afterwards, as hundreds of Muslims were, in fact, apostate
Christians. If Muhammad had asked the Bedouin to sacrifice their life, these
sceptics would have laughed in his face as if he were joking, however much he
promised them paradise. Looking at the tragic corpses of so me of his men who
had been slain, the Prophet emphasised the rewards that were the right of
these generous men. He would not, however, have dreamed of requesting his
men to die: the warriors from Arabia burst into Asia like wild beasts, intent on
abducting and enjoying, but by no means intending to die. They would have
considered it the height of stupidity to give up these certain and much desired
advantages in favour of a vague and uncertain promise, a promise upon the
truth ofwhich nobody could, or indeed wanted to, depend.
The true reasons for the violence with which the Arabs burst forth from
the confines of the parched desert were practical and material ones, to a large
part due to the deep economic misery, the last result, that is to say, of the
impoverishment of which we have spoken in the preceding chapter. I am
hoping that the arguments collected there have proved sufficiently that the
Arabs were compelled by very urgent and pressing motives when they
invaded Persia and Byzantium at one and the same time. They were troubled
by a most profound and painful mental tension which required fast and
extensive satisfaction; they were, in short, driven by hunger and misery, by the
desperate necessity of escaping from the fiery prison of the desert which could
no longer sustain them. It was this need to leave their homeland that made
them fight at one and the same time on all frontiers, with a centrifugal, or I
might say convulsive, motion, which no human endeavour could have stopped
and which can only be compared to an irresistible force of nature.
What we must not look for in this movement is a religious impulse of
any kind, any more or less than we may seek [369] religious motives in the
invasions of the Germanic hordes who crossed the borders of the Roman
Empire, or in the Tartar invasions which inundated Asia in the 13th century.
The Arabs achieved their conquests only with material means and the moral
virtues innate in their character; and Islam had nothing to do with these.
We will have to describe and analyse in much detail the concatenation of
circumstances by which Islam became the temporary and necessary force
which compelled the Arab atoms, almost despite themselves, to fuse together
into one single organism. During this very brief period Islam fulfilled the
function of the mortar which binds the bricks and stones of a building together
and makes it possible to build walls and vaults, but which at the same time
does not change the essential character of the materials which it unites to form
the fabric. If the mortar disintegrates, the building crumbles and the bricks
and stones return to being the formless piles they were before construction.
In the same way, only a few decades after the end of the conquests, Arabia
returned to being what she had been before, picked up the threads of her
ordinary life, similar to the ancestral pagan life, not least as the tribes
remaining in Arabia could make free of their native pastures and live in
greater comfort than before because of the great drain of emigration.
Now let us turn to the true reasons for Arab superiority, which can be
classed in two categories: one is the sheer number of armed men who made up
the conquering armies, the other must include the moral qualities of the Arab
race.
Total Number of the Arab Forces who Achieved the Conquests

This particular argument requires a short examination, as it is necessary to
correct an erroneous idea which has spoiled nearly all the histories of the Arab
conquests. [370] In their explanations ofthe disastrous defeats suffered by the
Imperial armies, Byzantine historians never even hint at religious fervour
among the Arabs; their main argument to justify everything that happened is
that the Arabs arrived in innumerable crowds. Theophanes, for instance,
speaks of plethos apeiron. 2 Armies were counted in hundreds of thousands, the
dead in tens ofthousands. Muslim writers, who all love hyperbole, in turn give
2 Two lines further along, Theophanes adds that Baanes wrote to the Sacellarius asking
for help dia to plethos einai tous Arabas (Theophanes, ed. de Boor, I, 337, 11. 25-27). It may be
permissible to infer from these two vague hints that in many cases the Arabs were not only
bolder but also more numerous than the Greeks. It seems to me that such a deduction is
justified by what we know of the state of the Byzantine military and of the ease and
magnitude ofthe Arab victories. Until now it has always been believed that, as Arab sources
suggest, the Greeks were more numerous than the Arabs; I, however, would be inclined to
the opposite opinion.
12 Leone Caetani
huge numbers of armed men and dead. Their aim was to glorify Islam, to make
it appear like aglobai cataclysm, and in order to ac hieve this result, any means
was fair: the Greeks were counted as one or two hundred thousand men, with
their dead in proportion, in order that the numbers might give apreeise idea
of the dreadful defeat inflicted on the enemy.
However, having increased the numbers of the enemies to such an extent,
a historian then had to increase the numbers of the Muslims as weIl, in order
to avoid being accused oflying. Quoting a huge number for the armies ofIslam
had its advantages, as it would allow to show the whole of Arabia as converted
and taking part in the triumph. The larger part of the figures relating to the
warriors, which can be found in the traditions on the subject of the conquests,
are the product of similar flights of fantasy. Among European historians we
find a tendency to accept Muslim data concerning the numbers of victorious
Arabs at Ajnadayn and al-Yarmuk; indeed, even the gifted and conscientious
de Goeje bases some of his arguments on these figures, [371] thus showing
his acceptance of them as authentie and certain. In general, the opinion in the
West has been that only the number of Greek warriors and dead had been
exaggerated.
However, studying the argument impartially has convinced us that
Byzantine chroniclers as weIl as Muslim traditionists did indeed, and for
similar reasons, exaggerate all the numbers, those of the Greeks as much as
those of the Arabs, and with more than orientallavishness.
The Arab armies, which were first to invade Syria, were much less
numerous than was thought until now, and the figures given in certain sources
(not by any means the best) are aIl much exaggerated. There are no precise
arguments which would aIlow us to state with certainty the number of
invaders into Syria, but we are probably not very far from the truth in
asserting that fewer than ten thousand men began the campaign in Syria,
and that the 27,000 (which may weIl be also exaggerated) we find in the
sources refers to the total number of Muslim warriors at the end of the
three-year campaign, 12-15 AH, after the arrival of all the reinforcements
from Medina.
I believe, however, that at the same time we must consider that the enemy
forces of Greeks and Sassanids were also fairly paltry, and in so me cases
possibly even smaller than the Arab armies. The wonderful consequences of
these victories fired the imagination ofthe chroniclers, all ofwhom, Muslim or
Byzantine, wallowed in fantastic calculations. The ones were hoping to excuse
their defeats, the others intending to glorify Islam, and both sides ended up
exaggerating everything, the courage of the victors, the resistance of the
enemy, the numbers of the men who fought, and those who died.
To conclude, the armies employed on both sides were, so to speak, paltry,

and as far as numbers went, not so different. The true superiority of the Arabs
lay in other factors, mostly moral, which we shall now study with great
attention as they are rather complex and not very easy to determine.
2
SOME CRITICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL REMARKS
ON THE ARAB CONQUEST
AND THE THEORIES PROPOSED ON THIS
G.H Bousquet
[52] I
There is something extraordinary about the Arab conquest which has always
fascinated me. In world history, there are certainly examples to be found of
large-scale conquests: some have been slow, others rapid but then short-lived:
such conquests have left durable traces among the vanquished, but this
has depended on the pos session, by the victor, of a sophisticated level of
civilisation, superior to that ofthe vanquished. None of these factors apply in
our case: the rapidity of the Arab conquest, the inferior level of civilisation on
the part of the victor, the durability of the new institutions imposed on the
vanquished - all of this makes the conquest in question an event, I believe, sui
generis.
For a long time, scholars showed no inclination to study the phenomenon
scientifically.2 The theory, if theory it could be called - was that the Muslim
warriors hurled themselves upon their neighbours, "the Quran in one hand
and a sword in the other" and in short, the conquests were the product of
religious fanaticism. 3
[53] At the end of the Nineteenth Century, and during the years that
followed, various academics have turned their attention to the question, intent
on refuting the notion that the Arab conquest had a religious aspect.
It was Arnold who was the first to argue, in The Preaching of Islam (first
edition, 1896), that the Arabs did not seek to convert the Christians in Egypt,
1 This article is the abridged version of a lecture delivered on 30 March 1955 at the
"Instituto per l'Oriente" in Rome.
" If I am not mi staken, this applies to the two founders of Islamology: Goldziher and
Snouck-Hurgronje.
3 This thesis is even to be found, in vignette form, on the frontispiece of Tableau de
l'Empire Ottoman by the venerable Mouradgea d'Ohsson (1788 edition). Nobody has ever
observed that this thesis is islamologically or tactically inadmissible: the Qur'an cannot be
carried with the len hand, and military tradition tends to recommend that the sword be
held with the right hand!
2 G.H. Bousquet
in Syria, etc. and who, later, associated hirnself with Caetani's thesis, which
accorded with his own. In Arnold's work there is, in my opinion, a most
erroneous notion, which was later to be taken up by Schumpeter, or
developed independently by hirn: that a military conquest cannot be
explained in terms of religious fanaticism when the victor does not try to
impose his faith on the vanquished; it is true on the one hand that the facts
presented by Arnold are accurate,4 and on the other that those who, like
me, believe that a conquest can have a religious character without the
manifestation ofmissionary zeal, bear the onus ofproof, proofwhich I confine
myself to presenting elsewhere.
Subsequently, in 1901, it was H. Winckler who, in a book noted for its
peculiar typographical arrangement, Arabisch, Orientalisch, Semitisch, stated
emphatically that it was appropriate to consider the Arab conquest as the last
of the great Semitic emigration movements from the Arabian peninsula, this
land having long been in decline.
Some years later, Caetani (Annali dell'Islam, vol. 11), the best known of the
authors whom I consider here, took up and developed Winckler's idea. This is
the familiar thesis of inaridimento: the progressive desiccation of Arabia over
the millennia drove the Semites in general, and in particular the Arabs of the
seventh century, to conquer more fertile regions where [54] they were less
likely to starve to death. 5 This thesis has been accepted by numerous authors. 6
The negative idea at the basis ofthis theory, i.e. that the conquest did not have
a religious character, recurs in a fairly short but magisterial article by C.H.
Becker (in Der Islam, 1910, n° 1), in my opinion the most interesting and
profound of the articles owed to orientalists.
It was in fact someone still quite unrecognised in orientalist circles, an
Austrian economist and, to my mind, the greatest of his time, my teacher and
friend, J oseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) - who published in 1919, in the Archiv
fur Sozialwissenschaft, one of the very few sociological studies which he wrote:
4 Other cases could be cited here. For example, I have found in de Goeje (Mem. sur Za
conquete de Za Syrie, 2nd ed. p. 106) this declaration by a Nestorian bishop, 15 years after the
conquest: "The Arabs do not fight against the Christian religion, but rather they protect our
faith: they respect our priests and our holy men, and make donations to our churches and
our convents."
5 It may be said in passing, why has no one ever drawn attention to the implicit
contradiction between this thesis and that of Lammens regarding the prosperous and
flourishing commerce ofthe Meccan "capitalists"? This latter thesis is even less admissible
than that of Caetani; see, on this subject, my study, Une explication marxiste de Z'IsZam
par un ecdesiastique episcopalien (Hesperis, 1954), referring to Muhammad at Mecca by
Montgomery Watt.
6 For example, A.A. Vasiliev, History ofthe Byzantine Empire, 2nd ed., 1952, p. 207.
Some Critical and Sociological Remarks on the Arab Conquest 3
"Zur Soziologie der Imperialismen" which is highly relevant to our subject. 7

He displays there the most remarkable talent, which would come as no
surprise to those who knew this man, without doubt one ofthe most cultivated
individuals of his time. Approaching the subject in an absolutely novel
fashion, that of a psychological and sociological comparison between the
various imperialisms, over the course of time, Schumpeter also does not
believe that the Arab conquest was, primarily, a religious phenomenon. It was
a product of the mental disposition of the conquering tribes in the social and
economic milieu in which they previously lived. For the detail, I refer to my
translation of his arguments.
[55] 11
I propose now to present some critical observations on the subject of these

theses, confining myself to taking that of Caetani as an example, the essential
concept being that my predecessors should have been much more precise and
systematic in their approach to questions, which could not be reduced to
unduly unequivocal points of view. It is for this reason that I leave aside
certain errors offact which could be observed in his work,8 in order to arrive at
the essence.
a) Even if Caetani's theory was ac cu rate in its general form, it is not

admissible in the terms whereby it is presented to uso It was not because
Arabia was in the process of desiccation that the Arabs launched their
conquests, but because it was already dry. It was a case of aridita and not
of inaridimento. Historians are not geologists, and as far as they are
concerned Arabia was already as desiccated in 570 as it was in 632, as
desiccated in 632 as in 661, or in 732. Furthermore, if the desiccation was
progressive, it is hard to und erstand why these emigrations, and in
particular the Arab conquest, took place in waves. Although the contrary
is not inconceivable, it would be appropriate for the partisans of
inaridimento to supply us with a coherent theory in regard to this subject,
7 I have trans la ted and annotated the pages regarding Arab imperialism (Revue
Africaine, 1950, n° III) The two articles, translated into English and published in book form,
constitute his contribution to general sociology.
8 Studi di Storia Orientale, I, p. 367: "Invano si cercherebbe nel Corano un'esortazione a
morire per la fede"; the houris, etc. are definitely promised, in compensation for services
rendered to Islam, "pur conservando sempre salva la vita". Now, as is read in the Qur'än
(s. III, v. 194, Kazimirski): "I shall erase the sins of those who suffer for my cause, who fight
and are fallen. I shall bring them into gardens watered by rivers".
4 G.H. Bousquet
something which they are reluctant to provide. How could a cause which
proceeded slowly and in continuous fashion have such abrupt effects?9
[56] b) Authors have not distinguished, as in my opinion they should have
done, between the various phases of the Arab conquest; it is not by any
means certain and it is even improbable that similar causes - let alone a
single cause - could explain for example the first wave, that which
followed the death of the Prophet, as weIl as one of the later ones, for
example the conquest of Egypt and of southern France, by the Umayyad
rulers of Damascus. 10
c) Another cause of obscurity, which has engendered much confusion, is
the fact that no distinction has been made between two concepts which
should be rigorously separated in analysis, although in practice l l there are
connections between them - the nature of the Arab conquest and the
causes of its success.
A conquest can have a variety of sociological characteristics: economic,
religious, psychological, dynastic, etc. But this is something quite other
than the reasons for the success, or failure, of the conquest in question:
superiority of weaponry, or of commanders, or of troops, adroit diplomacy
leading to the conclusion of advantageous alliances, the element of
chance, in other words - unforeseeable events with causes too complex
ever to have been analysed by us, etc. 12
d) Finally, Caetani's thesis is at fault in that it is univocal, i.e. it tries, apriori,
to explain a phenomenon by a single cause; this is a tendency very
9 It is weil known that certain machines transform one movement into another that is
very different; for example, the piston of a locomotive transforms a rectilinear back-and-
forth movement into a continuous circular movement. Nature, in the form of geysers,
would offer us a type of Caetanian mechanism, but ... the explanation is never supplied to
us by Caetani. It should come as no surprise, observing me in search of analogies: others
could be found, according to certain theoreticians, in the mechanism of economic crises
which mark, sometimes, phases in the prosperity-depression cycles. To clarify my thinking
on ihis subject, I refer io a curious and liUle-known book: Michel Peirovitch, Mecanismes
communs aux phenomenes disparates, Paris 1921.
10 Although they were almost continuous, from 1792 to 1812, the military campaigns
launched by the French in Europe did not have entirely the same character at the
beginning and at the end of this period.
11 And perhaps even in theory: I am thinking of the theory of "cycles of mutual
dependence" of my revered Master, Vilfredo Pareto, Sociologie Generale, French ed.,

passim and in particular paras. 220 and f., 229 and f.: the element supposedly the "cause"
undergoes the reaction of the element supposedly the "effect", but I cannot insist he re on
this idea.
12 For example the death of the Empress Elizabeth wh ich led directly, in my opinion, to
the victory of Frederick the Great. (If she had been assassinated at his behest, chance
would not have been a factor.)
widespread among people,13 [57] and it can sometimes even be

advantageous, but it needs to be resisted when an overall view of things is
the objective. This tendency may be advantageous for the analysis of
reality, especially where the author detaches an important factor and
proposes to study its action in isolation, but synthesis is subsequently
necessary and then it is perceived, not only that numerous causes have
played apart, which is practically always the case in social reality, but also
that, even as an initial approximation,14 a single one does not give a clear
enough image of reality.
III
History gives us innumerable examples of social phenomena which have
complex causes or aspects, but very often there is a refusal to see them,
whether because, from a purely dispassionate point of view, one is seduced
by the theory of the single cause, or because political or religious fervour
prevents you from seeing the facts as they are.
And here are three examples chosen at random:
1) The Reformation of the sixteenth century was indisputably a major

religious movement which had a long gestation period (Huss, Savonarola,
etc.) but the reasons for its success should not be sought solely in this
domain: the major financial benefits that could be drawn from it by the
Princes, in England, in Germany, in Scandinavia, to say nothing of
Henry VIII and his love affairs, should be taken into consideration too.
Depending on the tendency to which the author subscribes,15 he will
neglect one of these aspects in favour of the other.
[58] 2) Another great religious movement (here in the psychological and
sociological, not in the theologico-dogmatic sense) swept across Europe
13 For example the historical materialism of Marx, in its strictest form, or indeed the
positive theory of interest promoted by von Bohm-Bawerk; as has been very weil
demonstrated by A. Landry (L'interet du capital) certain errors on the part of this great
economist are due to his unbelievable obstinacy in refusing to acknowledge more than one
single cause accounting for the phenomenon in question.
14 Consider the function F = ax + by + cz + ... ; there are cases where the variations ofF
are weil explained by the variation ofx alone; for example we have a = 10°, b= 10 1, C = 102,
etc. but this is a rare case.
15 For example, not only the Catholic but the Marxist too, if fanatical, will be impelled to
neglect the religious aspect.
6 G.H. Bousquet
later: the French Revolution and its conquests. 16 For a long time, its
adherents sought to emancipate, in the name ofthe new ideas, the masses
oppressed by their sovereigns: this continued, at least until 1848; but we
concern ourselves only with the military phase. It cannot be doubted that
if account is not taken, above all, of the religious fervour of a whole people
in arms, it will be impossible to understand the phenomenon of the
revolutionary conquest, but it is equally certain that the economic aspect
of the conquest, even as a way of explaining the ardour of the soldiers,
played its partP
[59] 3) Another example is supplied to us by the complex phenomenon of
the Resistance in France, which, according to one tendency or another,
is analysed in such varied fashion. It is vital to distinguish between, at
the very least: a) from the out set - summer of 1940 - the actions of
people motivated by simple patriotism who were to become the fanatical
adherents of this religion; b) from the end of June 1941 only, those of
fanatical communists; c) among both of the above there were also
adventurers - amateurs who sought out adventure no matter where,
without any moral scruple;18 from August 1944 onward, i.e. when there
16 Comparisons with the Arab conquest are indeed appropriate. I should point out that,
long before me, J. Wellhausen had this idea which he expressed in a single phrase but never
developed ("Prolegomena zur altesten Gesch. Des Islams" Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, vi,
p. 51). I hope that the comparison, which I take a little further, will prove this well-founded.
Bolshevism is a third of these waves, but worldwide this time.
17 Thus, to his soldiers dying of hunger in the mountains above Nice, Bonaparte said in
March 1796: "Men, you are ill-nourished, the Government can do nothing for you. I want to
lead you into the most fertile plains in the world: rich provinces and great cities will be
in your power. There you will find honour, glory and riches." Is this not a proclarnation
which could have been endorsed by 'Amr, or Khalid, or Shural;1bil? And in fact this was,
subsequently, the objective. From Piacenza, on 9 May, he wrote to the minister of war
Carnot: "We are going to establish substantial stores of grain, paddocks for 600 head of
cattle, we are going to kit out our army anew. All will put on weight: the soldier will eat only
bread from Gonesse, good victuals in plenty, good wine, etc. What we have taken from
the enemy is incalculable: we have the use of hospitals for 15,000 patients, numerous
warehouses full of grain and fiour. I am sending you 20 pictures by the greatest masters,
including Michelangelo." [My emphasis.] From Milan at around the same time he wrote:
"Piedmont is delivered from the Austrian tyranny. Thought has become free in Italy. There
is no longer any inquisition, any intolerance, any despotism." Here we have the religious
aspect: the fanaticism for "Liberty". The two aspects ofthe phenomenon are linked. This
liaison is admirably expressed on the great staircase ofthe Museum ofNaples, where this
inscription relating to the year 1799 is to be found (I quote from memory): I piu insigni
monumenti ne involava il vincitore straniero, in nome della Liberta. The reference is to the
troops of Championnet.
18 Such as Recy for example, a man of admirable courage, who was subsequently
imprisoned for theft, forgery and fraud, offences committed after the war.
was no longer any risk, a disreputable and cowardly mob, in the name of
the "Resistance", exercised all kinds of private vengeances and practised
reprehensible extortions. All of this was subsequently to bring electoral
advantages to many people. 19 According to which phase of the movement
is the focus of attention, judgement varies.
This then, is the thrust of my argument: if, for social phenomena with
which we are capable of being weIl acquainted, it is clearly perceived that
univocal theses are absolutely inadmissible, it is, apriori, entirely probable
that the same applies to the Arab conquest.
On the other hand, I have positive reasons to believe that the religious
factor played a far from negligible role in this conquest, as I shall demonstrate
elsewhere. Here I confine myself to formulating a pointer in the right
direction: everyone is, I think, in agreement that the rise of MUDammad was a
religious phenomenon, "purely religious" I would not hesitate to say. Everyone,
on the other hand, is obliged to admit that, 100 years after the death of the
Envoy of God, what was emerging [60] was a Muslim civilisation of typically
religious character (fiqh in particular). And is it not reasonable to suppose that
the transition from one to the other was facilitated by this religious character?
One last observation in conclusion: the criticisms that laddress to my
predecessors are purely objective and do not diminish the admiration which
I feel for them, still less the value of their work The greatest of men have
committed errors (to which they have obstinately adhered, furthermore).
Newton, towards the end of his life, wrote an absurd commentary on the
Apocalypse. Goethe - whose works in the fields of botany and osteology
deserve mention in the annals of science - wasted years of his life in pointless
studies oft he theory oflight, claiming to refute that ofNewton. Most absurd of
all, finally, is the refutation of the theory of Lavoisier20 contributed by one of
the greatest naturalists the world has ever known, the genial pioneer Lamark.
But all of this has been said before, and with far greater eloquence than I can
manage, by Pierre Corneille:
However great the kings may be, they are the same as you and me,
They can be wrong, like all humanity.
19 Since history often repeats itself, it was not too difficult for the scientific sociologist to
predict that soon to be observed, from this point ofview, was are-run ofthe Dreyfus affair,
i.e. a movement beginning with a disinterested minority and ending with its opposite. See
the article which I published in December 1944 (Revue economique et sociaZe) which had
some difficulty getting past the censor.
20 Rejutation de Za theorie pneumatiqe, ou de Za nouvelle doctrine des chimistes modernes,
in-So, Paris, chez Agasse, 1796.

3
OBSERVATIONS ON THE NATURE AND CAUSES
OF THE ARAB CONQUEST
G.H Bousquet
[37] The most important remark to be made at the beginning of this article
(forming a sequel to the one which I published in this very periodical:
Studia Islamica II) is as folIows: while the rise of an inspired Prophet is a
quasi-normal event in human societies, the phenomenon ofthe Arab conquest
is something, apriori, of a quite extraordinary nature, which never fails
to astonish me, and in particular, whenever I talk about it to my students.
This phenomenon definitely has extremely complex causes; it will be so me
considerable time before they can be unravelled. We are indeed far from
supplying an explanation here, but we take this opportunity to express
opposition to the tendency which has consisted, over the past half-century and
more, in reducing the influence of the religious factor in accounting for this
bewildering expansion;! as for the definitive formula [38] which will reveal to
us the secret of this rem ar kable social event, being more modest than certain
predecessors of mine - I concede this responsibility to a sociologist of the
future, whom I have yet to meet. 2
1 A slightly more thorough-going study ofthe subject would be a comparative one: there
are cases of slow expansion, that of the Roman Empire, and others wh ich are rapid, that of
the Empire of Alexander; there are numerous points of contrast between these two. There
are others too, perhaps more instructive for us: in the year 1854, Commodore Perry forced
the Japanese to renounce their total isolation from the rest ofthe world; less than 90 years
later, the fall of Singapore allowed this people to think it was on its way to conquering half
ofthe world. In the same order ofideas: in September 1574, the fall ofLeiden which would
mark the suppression of the revolt of the Low Countries, seemed imminent: seventy-four
years later (for a short time admittedly) the second nation of Europe, and hence of the
world, in terms of political power, was the United Provinces, which had conquered an
immense overseas empire. Subjects for meditation indeed!
2 If this formula could be expressed, let us say, by a system of equations, relating to a
dynamic equilibrium (for that is what is involved), only a few ofthem would be found he re
at best (or perhaps the givens are confused with the unknowns), and some indications of
the limits of size wh ich certain quantities may not exceed. I see well enough the complexity
of the problem, which I am incapable of resolving.
2 G.H. Bousquet
The phenomenon ofthe Arab conquest really is most disconcerting! Until

the rise of the Prophet, the Arabs constituted a people, whose historical role,
to say the least, had been one of the most mediocre, and its influence on
the civilisation of the rest of humanity negligible. Living in astate of utter
tribai anarchy, they never seriously threatened their neighbours, much more
civilised than them.
Now, in less than twenty years, these populations destroyed the Persian
Empire and dismantled the Byzantine Empire, taking possession of so me
its wealthiest provinces. The series of conquests continued, and after
approximately a century, they extended from Lisbon to India, and from the
South of France to the cataracts of the Nile.
Furthermore:
a) During the whole of this period, and beyond, rivalries between the
conquering tribes did not come to an end: thus, as is weIl known, in Spain,
quarrels dating back to thejähiliya continued for a long time to harass the
conquerors;3
b) During this period, and on numerous occasions, the Arab nation was torn
by civil wars. Understandably, on account of these internal dissensions,
military operations were temporarily suspended; what is extraordinary,
on the other hand, is that the peoples so recently conquered did not take
advantage of this weakness to rebel and destroy the Empire;4
[39] c) As a result of this conquest, a Muslim civilisation came into being
having in many respects a very pronounced Arab character. Obviously, for
certain aspects of the latter, this was impossible: thus, in terms of art, since
the Arabs had no art. But their language was imposed, and as for fiqh,
it was either an original creation of Muslim thought or it absorbed whole
fragments of pre-Islamic institutions.
3 A more or less analogaus phenomenon would be that of the rivalries existing at
the beginning of the Twentieth Century, in Dar es-Salam, or in German New Guinea,
between supporters of Frederick and of Marie-Therese. (We may observe in passing the
sociologically important fact that Islam has never known political struggles based on the
principle of legitimising a dethroned sovereign, irrespective of the personal merits of
the interested party, except in relation to ShI'ism).
4 As a way of approaching the nature of this phenomenon in a more thorough manner, it
would be useful to proceed to a comparative examination of these causes: a) in a similar
spirit, the attitude ofthe Italian League at the time ofHannibal's invasion; that ofthe entire
colonial French Empire in June 1940: b) a counter-example, the Kabilie rebelling in 1871,
etc.
Observations on the Nature and Causes o{ the Arab Conquest 3
I
I believe that it is necessary, at the out set, for the sake of clarity in this
discussion, to distinguish very carefully between two things (which are,
naturally, connected): the nature of the Arab conquest and its causes. This
distinction has never been systematically applied by my predecessors.
Why, first of all, did the Arabs, for a century, continually pursue their
attacks against their neighbours? To study the underlying motivations behind
these offensives it to study the nature of the said conquests. Why did these
offensives achieve such outstanding success? This is to study the causes of the
victory. It is understood, for example, that a war may have causes which are
ideological (wars of religion), political (dynastie interests), economic (taking
control of a prosperous region), social (the conquests of the Bolsheviks); but
the causes of final success need to be distinguished from these: it may be a
matter of military superiority (armaments, or leadership, or the spirit and
commitment ofthe troops), political superiority (successful diplomacy leading
to the conclusion of alliances), or simply chance.
For a long time, it has been gene rally thought that the Arab conquest was
of a purely religious nature and that religious fanaticism accounted for its
success. The famous image of the warrior, holding the sword in one hand and
the Quran in the other, illustrates this conception. 5
[40] Subsequently, ideas have changed and attention has been drawn to
other factors. Caetani is the most famous of the authors who have defended
them, but there are others. 6
5 It figures in vignette form on the frontispiece of the old Mouradgea of Ohsson.

Curiously, no Islamist has pointed how absurd this is: either it is the sword wh ich is held in
the left hand - inadvisable from a tactical point of view, or it is the QUr'än, which for a
Muslim is forbidden!
6 I shall not reveal the ideas of the authors in question here, not discuss them: see my
notes to the article in Revue Africaine, cited infra, and my contribution to Melanges Levi
Della Vida. I would like to draw the attention of Islamists to the remarkable sociological
study by the economist J. Schumpeter, my mentor, from which I have translated (R.A. 1950,
11) the section relating to Arab imperialism, which has so far gone unnoticed by the
academic establishment. In a domain neighbouring ours, we note, in addition, A. and E.
Kuliseher Kriegs-und Wanderzuge (Weltgeschichte als Volkerbewegung), Berlin 1932, who
accept the thesis of Caetani, as also does A.A. Vassilief, Hist. ofthe Byzantine Empire, 2nd
ed. 1952 (p. 207 and f.) but the latter adds some important remarks. The two great founders
of islamology do not seem to have taken an interest in the question, at least to my
knowledge; however Snouck, in a few lines, has declared that Caetani's theory was too
univocal (Verspr. Geschr. I. p. 370): "Geestelijke en materie eIe drijkrachten hebben het
bewerkt".
4 G.H. Bousquet
11
It is not only necessary to distinguish, in general, between the nature and
cause of conquests, but this also needs to be done in terms of the various
periods, which are, at least, three in number: a) the conquest of Arabia, which
coincides approximately with the warlike activity of the Prophet himself; b)
the major conquests which followed his death; c) the expansion of the
Umayyad Empire.
It is not claimed that these three phases necessarily had the same nature
and same causes, and here I shall refrain from commenting on the last: from
the moment when a powerful and well-organised state exists, the conquests
which the latter achieves do not seem to be such extraordinary phenomena.
a) Authors most often pay scant attention to the first phase. For the latter, I
propose to go further than they themselves are implicitly willing to go,
since I claim that, even in the time ofMul)ammad, the economic factor had
a role to play: were not the vanquished required to accept the Prayer, and
to pay tribute? There is thus a parallel which [41] can already be made
with wh at was to happen subsequently.7 Furthermore the Qur'än (IH, 146)
says explicitly with regard to the defeat ofUl)od: "Some ofyou desired the
goods of this world, others desired the life hereafter". Things are, in
reality, more complex: different motives induce people to act, to varying
degrees. The two categories which the Qur'än distinguishes are only
border-line cases.
b) It is here that we find what also existed outside the Arab conquest as such:
among the warriors, as well as fighters for the Holy War, there were men
eager to fight, hoping for the opportunity to obtain booty: whether we
focus our attention on one group or the other, unilaterally, we shall be
elaborating an extreme and partial theory which has to be rejected. For
example, if, in the French army, we turn our attention to the Foreign
Legion, or the Senegalese contingents, we will deny that patriotism should
be considered when accounting for their achievements, and yet this would
be false, in that it ignores the fact that their officers are French patriots.
7 That which van Vloten has to say, Recherches sur la domination des Arabes, etc., 1894
(Verh. Ak. der Wet., Arnsterdarn, Letterk., I, no 3): "The Arab occupation generally gave the
appearance of a people living at the expense of and in the charge of another," should be
placed alongside the account to be read apud Wellhausen (p. 29 and f.), regarding the
representatives of Mu\:larnrnad arnong the Arabs thernselves, conquered by hirn, charged
with the duty of collecting taxes (Pmleg. Zur Aelleslen Gesch., etc., Skizzen u. Vorarbeiten,
VI).
This should not be taken as meaning that Arab troops were anima ted by
the hope of booty, and their chiefs, by the hope of eternal reward,8 - since we
know for a fact that such was not the case for so me of these chiefs, the most
important ones - but that these two motivations are to be found in both
groups.
Furthermore, it is always to be observed, and always has been so, that in
human societies, it is possible, when considering any movement whatsoever,
to distinguish between at least three groups of persons: [42] fanatics on the
one hand, incorrigible adversaries on the other, and finally between the two,
the great mass: the unsure, the feeble and the undecided, as weIl as those
see king above all else to act in their own interest: all of this mass is ready to
"run to the aid of the victor", which creates in society astate of unstable
equilibrium: an advantage scored by one of the factions earns it the support of
the third party:9 equilibrium is thus essentially unstable.
But if success also engenders success, there is another element in our
case: was not success at the same time proof of the divine mission, of
Mul).ammad and of his successors? Whence there was a development of
religious fervour as such among those who had been recruited more or less
voluntarily, in any case not through religious enthusiasm. The following is
a parallel example, easier to understand: in 1870-71, on the battlefields of
France, and in the Galerie des Glaces, the German alliance was sealed
between the victors and the vanquished, of the battles of 1866, at Langensalza
and at Aschaffenburg, but, specifically, Worth, Metz, Sedan, etc. - did this not
lead to the birth of the patriotic religion of Unity among the vanquished,
becoming victors in their turn?
Thus we see how impossible it is to accept any univocal theory in this
matter, and how religious fervour has nevertheless succeeded in manifesting
itself among people who initially joined the ranks for other reasons.
8 The question which we are examining is complicated by the following fact which,
unless I am mistaken, Caetani and his supporters do not take into account, although in
some respects it could be seen as favouring their theses: this eternal reward is of a material
nature, it is "Muhammad's Paradise".
9 We take as an example what Caetani says (Annali, II, p. 77) regarding the conversion
of'Amr and ofKhalid, which comes ab out when the Prophet appears victorious, and they
see in hirn the me ans to satisfy their appetites. I shall cite only two paralleIs in the
contemporary history of France: the exploitation of the Dreyfus Affair, and that of the
Resistance, manifestations of the Religion of J ustice, and of Homeland, by people to whom
any kind of idealism was alien. Depending on whether these movements are observed
at their beginning or at the end, naturally enough the tendency will be to judge them
differently. This sociological mechanism is absolutely general.
6 G.H. Bousquet
Another point of view deserves to claim our attention, and I believe this
has never been addressed before, this being the conception that the ridda was
proclaimed in the name of"false" prophets ["false" because they had failed]. It
is true that, as Caetani has expressed it very well, the tribes subjugated by the
Prophet himselfrebelled because for them his death simply marked the end of
a purely political pact, not [43] a religious one, concluded intuitu personae. lO
However, this revolt was not made in the name of al-Lat, or of al-'Uzza, or
simply with the proclamation of adesire to return to the former state of affairs,
a quest for "Restoration". Not at all: the phraseology at least,ll and no doubt
the basis too, is religious. 1s this not proof that the rise of MUQammad had - in
wh at happened to be a favourable ambience - created major agitation of
spirits, agitation of a religious nature, among people with little inclination
towards fervour in this domain; then, with the success of the Caliphs, agitation
had been favourable to the success of the Muslim armies - where were the
victors and the vanquished of the ridda? I would be tempted to believe it.
How, on the other hand, is the religious motive to be set aside when we
read apud Zamakhsharl,l2 describing the famous battle of the Yarmuk: "The
Muslim preachers did not ce ase to encourage the combatants: Prepare
yourselves for the encounter with the houris of the big black eyes and for
meeting your Lord in the gardens ofbeatitude, cried Abu Horeyra. And to be
sure," adds the narrator, "never has a day been seen when more heads fell
than on the day of the Yarmuk." Here we have an account illustrating the
classical thesis of religious fanaticism, and belying that of the desiccation of
Arabia!
Now, who were those who died thus? Here there is another historical point
that is well known and accepted by everyone as [44] authentie, regarding the
history of the Qur'an. Everyone knows, in fact, that if 'Uthman undertook
the compilation of the sacred text, it was because little by little, those who
knew it by heart were disappearing, especially as martyrs on the battlefields.
10 Annali, 11, p. 454. For other "conversions" see p. 183 and f., the lists of gifts received by
the pagans in this eontext [whieh is entirely eompatible with the theory ofthe zekiit] and
p. 187 and f., the ease of the Hawäzln who, it seems, became Muslims in order to have their
wives returned to them.
11 I make this reservation because what we have here eould be what Pareto has called a
ease of "derivation" but I cannot expatiate on this point. Here, I eonfine myself to showing
that Caetani's supporters should at least have diseussed the important faet that I am
highlighting.
12 Fii'ik, eited by de Goeje, Mem. eonquete Syrie, 2nd ed., p. 117. De Goeje says this aeeount
is authentie. On the other hand I am weil aware that the egregious Abu Horeyra tends to be
regarded by Islamists as a less than entirely reliable souree, although it should be observed
that here he is not relating the statements of others; on the eontrary, these are others
relating their own, which is quite different.
Can it be said of these people - whose faith must surely have encouraged
others on the path of religious fervour - that they were not motivated by
spiritual impulses?
These are the numerous reasons which make it impossible for me to assert
that the Arab conquest was not, primarily, of a religious nature.
III
The opponents of this proposition have, it is true, one apparently very potent
argument in favour of their thesis: the Arab conquest, they say, was not of a
religious nature, since the victors did not seek to convert the vanquished, and
this argument seems all the stronger in that the fact adduced by them is, I
believe, indisputable. 13
Now on the one hand, the authors who have dealt with this question
were brought up in a Christian atmosphere, where the notion of universal
expansion goes without saying, and they were having to deal with Islam, a
religion which has not, in theory, renounced the intention of spreading
worldwide, and which was founded by a Prophet who du ring his lifetime, tried
by persuasion, then by force, to rally around hirn the greatest possible number
of adherents. Taking account of this fact, that the conquering Arabs were
not missionaries, they have concluded: "The Arab conquest did not have a
religious character".
I willingly recognise that in the facts which I have just mentioned
(tendency towards proselytism on the part of MUQ-ammad, and towards
universalism in Islam as an established faith) there is something which
surprises us, when they are compared with the attitude of the conquerors; but
this is because we are much too accustomed [45] to imagining that a religious
movement is necessarily directed towards proselytism. This is a false premise.
a) First there are religions which have never sought to make converts (for
example Hinduism and Parseeism) or which no longer seek them
(Judaism);
b) Then there are those conquests which did not have a religious purpose but
which did have conversion as a systematic result. This has been admirably
expressed by Schumpeter, speaking of the "characteristic fact that the
13 A Nestorian bi shop writes, fifteen years after the conquest: "The Arabs do not fight the
Christian religion, but rather they protect our faith. They respect our priests and our
saintly men, and make donations to our churches and convents". (De Goeje, Mem. conqu.
Syrie, 2nd ed., p. 106).
8 G.H. Bousquet
Spanish, though staunchly Catholic, never dreamed of motivating their

conquests by a religious cause."14 Here the objective was not religious,
only the result;
c) Finally and above all, this being what interests us most, there are military
expeditions of an indisputably religious character which have never been
aimed at the conversion of their adversaries. I will not elaborate on the
subject of conflicts between Hebrews and Philistines, although the
religious motive was not excluded in the former, but two later events
constitute an excellent illustration of our thesis. The first of these involves
the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus in Germany: it was the desire to
come to the aid ofhis co-religionists that impelled hirn to take this course,
and it is known that his troops, superbly disciplined, were motivated like
hirn by a religious spirit;15 the great German evangelical association was
known as the Gustav-Adolf Verein, and rightly so. However, he never
attempted to convert a single Catholic in the regions [46] conquered by
hirn. Exactly the same applies to the conquest of Ireland by Cromwell; his
troops, according to the Cavaliers, were "a mob ofpreaching peasants and
artisans" and he hirnself, before setting out on the campaign, "delivered a
sermon and commented on various texts from the Holy Scriptures,
analogous [sie] to his enterprise".16 One thing is absolutely certain: this
army of fanatics was not interested in converting a single Irishman, but
the taking of Drogheda was marked by horrendous massacres. ''All the
priests and monks have been put to death indiscriminately," he wrote and
Guizot notes: "Women and children were accorded no more mercy than
14 I would like to illustrate this thought on the part of my mentor with a single fact: the
contract of association (Panama, 10 March 1526) concluded between F. Pizarro and two
other associates (including a priest) with a view to the conquest o[ Peru, contains
stipulations concerning what each is required to contribute to the enterprise, and the
sharing of future booty, "cualquier riqueza de oro, plata, perlas, esmeraldas, diamantas, y
rubies", etc. The reading ofthis document is very instructive. I have found the original text
of it in the classic Prescott, Conquest 01 Peru, appendix vi.
15 Schiller, as a historian, has devoted so me treatment to this fact (Guere de trente ans, I, L.
II, p. 117 ofthe Reclam edition): "Eine ungekunstelte lebendige Gottesfurcht" he says. As a
poet, he summarised this in averse of his trilogy (I, Wallenstein, sc. VI), Gustave: "Der
machte ein Kirch aus seinem Lager".
16 We think that, among these texts, there should be, among others - but the Holy Bible
offers us only an embarrassment of choices - Joshua X, where it is only a question of

putting the inhabitants of conquered cities to the sword (this not demonstrating the
historicity ofthe facts), vv. 28, 30, 32, 35, 37, 39. Another individual, among the Catholics this
time, who put this pious Jewish tradition into practice was Tilly: in a spirit of Christian
charity, he massacred the 40,000 Protestant inhabitants of Magdebourg (May 1631).
the armed men".n Cromwell said "I am persuaded that this is a just
punishment inflicted by God on these barbarians" (referring to the troops
and the clergy at least).
But the best example of conquests with a religious character, where no

spirit of conversion was ever manifested, is that of the Crusades; the great
enthusiasm which aroused western Europe at that time and impelled the
Crusaders to rescue the Holy Places, not to convert the Muslims, which they
never did.
Thus the whole of this argument, "the Arab conquests did not have a
religious character, since the victors did not want to convert the vanquished",
has no merit, the postulate which it implies being belied by history: there is no
reason to suppose that religious incentive did not playa very important role.
There is in fact a very good reason which establishes this and which
deserves to be discussed in depth, although this has ne ver happened; if we
take the history of the first centuries of the Hegira [47] as a whole, we see, at
the beginning, an inspiration not at aH influenced by material interests, but
assuredly influenced by religious motives, and at the end, a new and
characteristically religious civilisation, and can anyone deny that what
constituted the transition from one to the other, the conquest, had a religious
aspect? For myself, I fail to understand the logic of such a denial, because this
seems to me a quasi-physical impossibility.
I can grasp weH enough the notion that the tribes, united by Mul).ammad,
were thrown into the attack on the surrounding provinces and subjugated
them, solely for non-religious motives. But how, subsequently, could the
Muslim civilisation have been born? Why did these people not blend into the
conquered populations, whose civilisation was superior to theirs, like the
Barbarians in the Roman west, the Manchus in China? This is what would
normaHy have happened.
Certainly, Muslim institutions owed a lot to the surrounding milieu, but
they could never have been born if, among the conquerors there had not
been men, themselves inspired, like the Prophet, by religious zeal, and having
trained disciples, this until the emergence of the first groups of Doctors of
Law. As is weH said by Schacht: 18 "The period of the first three generations
after the death of the Prophet. .. is, in many respects, the most important,
as weH as the most obscure, on account of the rarity of contemporary
testimonies, for the history ofMuslim law." He himself dated his enquiry back
17 Guizot, Revolut. D'Angleterre, ed. 1847, II, p. 108; La Republique et Cromwell, ed. 1864, I,
pp. 86, 93, 94.
18 Esquisse d'une histoire du droit musulman, p. 15.
10 G.H. Bousquet
to the beginning of the U mayyad period, 19 and he needed to go back no furt her.
But, for us, the problem is posed: who were these people ofthe first generation
who took this administration in hand, which teachers did they have among the
pious Muslims of the first times, arriving with the conquerors? The problem
may be insoluble for us, but it exists; since it must be that within the Arab
army (which at that time was barely to be distinguished from civil society),
there were [48] people intent on imposing institutions manifesting a certain
religious ideal.
This does not necessarily imply a mass conversion, as some Europeans
erroneously believe. From the outset, the Prophet had respected the religion
of the Jews (I do not say the Jews themselves) and that of the Christians. A
fact recorded by Tabar"i 20 is interesting: Khälid found it abnormal that the
Christian Arabs ofthe Euphrates sided with the Persians, since for hirn, Islam
was the common cause of the Arabs. Islam could thus have been, in the
beginning, a racial and warlike religion the objective ofwhich was to enslave
their neighbours, not convert them.
IV
We formulate now certain observations on the subject of the causes of the
conquest, in other words the reasons for the successes achieved by the Arab
armies.
One first point seems to be established: they did not have superiority in
weapons or in military organisation;21 on the contrary, they were foiled by the
fortifications ofByzantium, and they did not possess any gunpowder. If, under
the Umayyads, the Arabs had a navy, this was by way of imitation of their
enemies; they made no innovations in this sphere. On the other hand, chance
worked in their favour in two respects:
a) As in the case of revolutionary France, we find that there emerged among

the Arabs in the time of the Prophet, a certain nu mb er of individuals who
showed exceptional abilities in military command, when they were given
the opportunity to show it. Their names are weIl known. Furthermore, the
Muslims found in 'Umar a head of state of the highest order. Here there is
something which we must take as a datum of the problem, because we
19 Esquisse, p. 19, Origins oJ Muh. Jurisprudence, p. 190 and [.

20 Apud Wellhausen, p. 46.
21 Contra: Macedonian phalange, Roman legion, Spanish in[antry, usage o[ the horse
(Cortez), or of European armament (colonial conquests in the 19th century).

cannot go back further, the causes [49] of this being too complex for us to
unravel them.
b) On the other hand, the two empires which the Arabs attacked were in a
greatly enfeebled state (the same thing must have worked in their favour
at the time of the conquest of Spain, although not in Gaul). The empires
had recently been at war and religious dissensions within the Byzantine
Empire contributed significantly to the success of the Arabs who in
addition, in Syria, found themselves dealing with a population of the same
race as themselves, while Egypt was in astate of administrative anarchy:22
unity between governors was entirely absent and the army was very badly
organised. 23
The study of chance as a factor in the explanation ofhistorical events, is an

immense and emotive subject, and such a study, I believe, has never yet been
undertaken;24 it also seems dangerous, since it is virtually impossible for us to
say wh at would have happened, if this or that factor, owed to chance, had not
applied: we can, at the most, say that a certain thing would not then have
happened, in any case.
This said, and things being, at a given moment, the way they are, it is
possible to speak of chance, or otherwise, in the case of any human enterprise,
giving the term a more limited meaning: there would be subjective chance if
the person embarking on this enterprise were to be ignorant of the factors
favourable to hirn and took no account of them in making adecision; for
example, in the case of an equitable lottery, [50] chance is only a factor for the
one who participates in it; in the case of stock market speculation, it applies to
the foolish person who buys or seIls according to chance, it does not apply
to the one who foresees the future rise - or fall - in stock prices; finally, if the
22 Vassilief, op. cit., p. 207 and f., quoting Maspero, Organ. milit. de l'Egypte Byz., p. 119. In
Syria, excellent reception accorded by the inhabitants to the invaders: De Goeje, op. cit.,
pp. 29, 30, 103, 104.
23 Even according to more restrained points of view, chance has played a role favourable
to the Arabs, for example the fall of Alexandria (end of641, or early 642) is closely associated
with the death of Heraclius (Flugei, Gesch. der Araber, 2nd ed., 1867, p. 96). Of course, the
death of an individual is the most normal phenomenon, the only truly normal phenomenon
in his life, but not his death at a given moment and, when his adversary has neither seen it
nor, stilliess, caused it (political assassination), we have the right to talk about historical
chance, as in the case ofthe death ofthe Empress Elizabeth, which saved Frederick II from
dis aster. The reader may sense that I could have a lot to say on this subject, but it is not our
present concern.
24 At the time when this article was being wriUen, I was unaware of the work ofVendryes,
devoted to the role of chance in the conquest of Egypt by Bonaparte.

12 G.H. Bousquet
speculator, through manipulation, creates variations in price from which he

expects to profit, this is no longer an issue of chance, objectively speaking.
Now, in the case ofthe Arab conquest, there was, in my opinion, chance in
both senses of the term: objective chance, because the favourable historical
conjuncture existed without the Arabs having contributed to it in any way at
all, and subjective chance because - unless I am seriously mistaken - at the
moment of launching the attack, they were unaware of the existence of these
factors: they were in the position of someone playing the lottery.
In summary, the ac hieve me nt of this uncultured people, imposing its
domination from Narbonne to the banks of the Indus within the space of a
century, depended on a whole combination of circumstances: the birth of the
Prophet, whose activity, both religious and political, facilitated the unification
of Arabia, the fact that this country was then a reservoir of talented war
leaders and had also produced 'Umar, finally the fact that on three occasions,
at the most crucial of junctures, the Arabs were confronted by states,
apparently powerful but in fact, exhausted. In default of a single one of these
factors, the Arab conquest is inconceivable. 25
There is an instructive comparison to be made here with the Spanish
conquests in South America. If the state of affairs in Europe in the second half
of the fifteenth century is considered, it will be understood at once that it was
not a question of chance: a) that the Europeans had discovered America;
b) that the European powers conquered the territories thus discovered. The
birth of Columbus, or of Cortez, or of Pizarro, was not necessary for this. The
superiority ofEurope assures us that this would have happened in one fashion
or another (this does not me an that [51] the later course of history might
not have been entirely different,26 depending on which power took control of
which territory). This seizure of land by Europe was bound to happen,
whatever was the relative balance offorces between European powers. 27
25 In this last paragraph, I have adapted to my subject, almost word for word, the
penuHimate paragraph of a work of the very highest order, which has remained virtually
unknown: J. Cordier, Jeanne d'Arc (Paris 1948), where the author summarises the
absolutely exceptional circumstances which account for the rise of this extraordinary
historical figure. I regret the fact that I was unaware of the existence of this book until after
the composition of the present article.
26 Cf. L. Rougier, p. 226, of his remarkable Traite de la Connaissance (Paris 1955): " ... it
may happen that very minimal differences in the initial conditions of a system lead to
considerable divergences in the final phenomena. It is then said that these phenomena are
obedient to chance, which does not me an that these phenomena are exempted, in law, from
Laplace-style determinism ... but that knowledge ofthem is as impracticable as it would be
ifthey were effectively so".
27 Precisely analogous observations could be made regarding the conquest ofMorocco by
"a European power" at the start of the 20th century.

On the contrary, the Arab conquest is unthinkable without the birth of the
Prophet (it had to be hirn and not another) and without the balance offorces
then prevailing in the two Empires, as it existed at that moment. Thus we see
the total difference in the situation, in the historical mechanism.
Once the conquest was realised, it is quite understandable that in the new
empire, a new culture should appear, although it is strange, as we have noted,
that the Arab element should prove so important.
On the other hand, wh at for me remains very obscure is why, after a few
centuries, this civilisation stagnated almost completely for a millennium, in
such a way that it was very soon overtaken by European-Christian civilisation,
a situation which has persisted into the present day: it is here, after the rise of
Mul).ammad and the Arab conquest, that the third fundamental problem
arises of the general sociology of Islam.
A final word regarding the method employed in my double research: it
consists in trying to sift out from historical facts, types of social mechanisms,
which, during a certain period of time, seem to have been fundamentally the
same in the most diverse places and epochs. I believe it to be useful, even
fruitful, but like all methods, it has its limitations. Here the greatest dang er lies
in letting the imagination run and letting oneself be influenced by personal
aspirations. In social matters the thinker often imagines that he has
discovered [52] an idea, a theory, a principle, which must explain everything.
In reality, either these ideas, etc. explain nothing at all 28 in the view of the
scholar, or they are only partially true. 29 For my part, I say that my ideas
are essentially open to revision, according to the progress of science: my
conception of types of mechanisms 30 needs to be closely subservient to the
data of history. No theory explains everything. The only difference is that I
know this, while the builders of the above-mentioned systems do not.
28 "This long sequence of particular causes, wh ich make and unmake Empires, depends
on the secret commands of divine Providence" (Bossuet, Discours, in fine: III, eh. VIII).
This is the negation of the possibility of any kind of sociological science; in the present case,
His commands remain unknown to uso
29 Among other examples, Marxist dogmas: by the very fact ofbeing dogmas, they impede
the progress of independent science, while being, in part, compatible with the truth.
30 It is a known fact that explanations of the mechanist type are abandoned in our times in
favour of physics: our descendants, in future centuries, will be able to act accordingly, when
sociology will have the same status as physics in the 19th century.
4
THE NOMAD AS EMPIRE BUILDER:
A COMPARISON OF THE ARAB
AND MONGOL CONQUESTS
John J Saunders
History records innumerable assaults bythe barbarian nomads of

the steppes and deserts on the realms of civilization. In some
cases, the invaders overturned an organized state, as the Hyksos
did Egypt, the Ephthalites northern India, and the Kin northern
China. In others, they were thrown back, as the Huns were from
the Roman Empire and the Avars from Byzantium and Frankland.
So me shed their barbarism and acquired the arts of civilization,
like the Magyars and the Ottoman Turks, others remained
illiterate pastoralists to the end, like the Scythians and the
Cumans. Two created world empires as a result of conquests the
scope and magnitude of which still grip the imagination. These
were the Arabs of the seventh century and the Mongois of the
thirteenth, whose spectacular achievements pose problems concern-
ing the interrelationship of nomadic and sedentary societies and
of the nature of the "drives" which impe1 pastoral peoples to
burst out of their homelands not simply to raid and plunder but
to establish political domination over their civilized neighbors.
The Arab and Mongol conquests also raise the quest ion why the
T he N omad as Empire Builder
former cleared the ground for the erection of a distinctive new

world cuIture and the latter did not.
The historian who seeks to answer the manifold queries
which a study of these nomadic imperialisms poses is faced at the
outset by a startling contrast in documentation. Virtually no
contemporary accounts of the Arab conquests have come down to
us: the Byzantine and Arabic chronic1ers of the late eighth
century are our first witnesses for the conquests of the seventh/
and we can therefore never recapture the "feel" of this outpouring
from the Arabian deserts or understand how the men of that age
reacted to it in the way in which, for example, the letters of
Sidonius Apollinaris enable us to discern dimly how the life of
a cultivated Gallo-Roman provincia1 was affected by the Gothic
invasion of GauL The Mongoi onslaught on civilization took
place, by contrast, in the full light of history. Chinese and
Persians, Franks and Armenians, tell us what happened and
write of what they saw and heard at the time. Merchants and
missionaries travelled the 1ength and breadth of Asia, interviewed
the Mongol leaders, and watched the working of the mighty
military machine created by the genius of Chingis Khan. Our
information in this case is impressively copious and based on the
observations of intelligent and educated men of many different
races, from the Persian bureaucrat Juwaini to the Flemish
Franciscan William of Rubruck.
With this caution in mind, we may approach our first
problem: what triggered off these explosions?
We may remind ourselves that in ancient and medieval times
the majority of the human race did not belong to settled societies,
but were in Greco-Roman parlance "barbarians," hunters, fishers
or shepherds dwelling in tents or forests, governed by tribai
custom, knowing nothing of a territorial state, incapable of
building eities and destitute of a written literature. Civilizations
(Chinese, Hindu, Persian, Greco-Roman) were mere cases in
deserts of barbarism and were under constant threat of attack
from nomadic tribes. AIthough these primitive peoples were found
1 The earliest surviving Arabic account of the conquest is 'the Futuh al-
Buldan of al-Baladhuri, who died in 892: Eng. tr. Hitti & Murgotten, The
Origins 0/ the Islamic State, 2 vols., New York, 1916-24.
80
aIl along the broad "steppe belt" stretching from the Sudan to
Mongolia, the real nursery of nomadism was always Central Asia,
from the days of the Hiung-nu and Yue-chi before the Christian
era to those of the Uzbegs and Kalmuks of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The Negro peoples of the Sudan were
shut off from the civilized fringe of North Africa by the dreary
wastes of the Sahara, and the untamed Berbers, who lived north
of that desert, though they might on occasion break through to
the coast, never crossed the sea to threaten Europe till the Arabs
enlisted their support at the turn of the seventh and eighth
centuries and led them to the conquest of Spain and the invasion
of France.
ünce, and once only, did the tide of nomadism flow vigorously
out of Arabia. Bedouin raids on the towns and villages of Syria
and Iraq had been going on since the dawn of history, and
, occasionally an Arab tribe would· set up a semi-civilized kingdom
on the edge of the desert, as the Nabataeans did at Petra or the
Palmyrenes at Tadmur, but conquests only occurred at the rise
of Islam. It was the fashion a generation ago to subscribe to the
Becker-Caetani thesis that these conquests were explicable almost
wholly in economic terms, and that the preaching of Muhammad
was a mere occasion, not a eause. 2 It was argued that the
population of Arabia was rising, that climatic change had enlarged
the desert at the expense of the town, thereby precipitating the
decline of the old agricultural society of the Yemen (a decline
symbolized by the famous "bursting of the dam" of Ma' rib in
the sixth century), that nomadism was on the inerease, and that
shortage of food and grazing-land forced the Bedouins into a
poliey of military expansion northwards. Even if Islam had never
been, the defenders of this theory seem to say, the Arab conquests
would have' taken place all the same. In further support of their
contention that the new religion had litde or nothing to do with
it, they pointed out that the average Bedouin tribesman was
notoriously secular-minded and had no firm religious belief, and
that the invaders made no attempt to force their newly-acquired
2 L. Caetani, Studi di storia orientale, Milan, 1, 1911, "L'Arabia preistorica

e il progressivo essiccamento df'lIa terra." C. H. Becker, Islamstudien, Leipzig, 1,
1924, "Der Islam als Problem" (Reprint of an article published in 1910).
81
faith on the conquered. These considerations no longer carry the

conviction they did fifty years ago. Islam provided an incentive,
a rallying-cry, a unity which had never before existed among the
Arabs, and though economic motives are not to be denied, it is
improbable that a long, vigorous effort could have been so
sustained without the impetus of religious zea1.3 Islam was
admittedly an urban faith, to which the Bedouins adhered more
out of seH-interest than genuine conviction, but the conquests
were led and organized by townsmen like Abu Bakr and Omar,
who were sineere believers and honestly thought that God had
given their people the dominion of the world.
Even if we accept the theory that the resolve to attack the
Byzantine and Persian territories was a direet consequence of the
Ridda, the existence of Islam is necessary to explain what
happened. Many tribes which had acknowledged Muhammad in
his lifetime, renounced allegiance to his party at his death, on
the .ground that their compact with hirn was a purely personal
one and did not bind them to loyalty to his successors. This falling
away from Islam, known as the Ridda or apostasy, was resisted
by the Medinan chiefs, and with some difficulty the revolt was
suppressed. Abu Bakr and Omar realized, however, that the best
way to keep the Bedouins within the fold was to appeal to
their instinct for war and plunder and to mobilize, them in a
common profitable enterprise, namely, foreign conquest. Henee
the momentous decision was taken to launeh military expeditions
against Iraq and Syria, adecision which meant that Islam would
not stay contained within the Arabian peninsula. Whether this
is the whole truth is doubtful, but in any case religion cannot be
exduded from the argument. "Heaven is before you, the devil
and hellfire are behind you!" is a cry which must have had
same moral or propagandistic value: no Arab armies had been
urged forward in this manner before. When Othman became
Caliph in 644, he set to work to prepare a eanonical version of
3 "Islamic ideology alone gave the Arabs that outward-looking attitude which
enabled them to become sufliciently united to defeat the Byzantine and Persian
empires. Maay of them may have been concerned chiefly with booty for themselves.
But men who were merely raiders out for booty could not have held together
as the Arabs did." W. Montgomery Watt, "Economic and Social Aspects of the
Origin of Islam," lslamic Quarterly, 1, 1954.
82
the Koran, because so many "reciters" of the holy book had

been killed in action and there was a danger that the full text
would be lost. Was this not surely an indication of the strength
of religious motives?
It is doubtless tme that the astonishing success of the Arab
invaders was due partly to the weakness and disunity of the
civilized states which were their chief targets of attack. Byzamium
and Persia had fought one another to astandstill in a war
that had dragged on for twenty-five years. The Sassanid kingdom
was prostrated by war-weariness, and collapsed like Russia in
1917. The Christian Empire rested on a stronger basis, and had
been pulled together by Heraclius, but it was racked by religious
quarrels, and the Copts and Syrians, Monophysites almost to a
man, had no stomach for fighting for their Greek Orthodox
masters who had persecuted thei! church. But against this must
be set the fact that the Arabs had no superior military techniques
and no tradi~ion of military discipline. Their camels indeed gave
them a great mobility, but they brought no "secret weapons"
against their foes. Indeed they were woefully deficient in
everything but small arms, and had at first no siege-engines with
which to batter down fortified strongholds. We have no precise
information of the size of their armies, but it is unlikely that
they outnumbered the forces which the Byzantine Emperor and
the Sassanid Shah could put imo the field. Moreover, what
is most surprising is not the initial success of the Arabs, but the
continued victorious advance which carried them eastwards across
the Tigris, the Oxus and the Indus and westwards all round the
southern shores of the Mediterranean. They encountered the most
tenacious resistance, not from the troops of civilized nations, but
from nomads like themselves, such as the Berbers and the
Turks. Even when internal feuds and civil wars were raging at
home, the drive on the fromiers wem on. Surely some tre-
mendous inner compulsion was pushing them forward, and this
can on1y have been supplied by Islam itsele
4 The most remarkable of reeent investigations into the OClglOS of Islam

have been carried out by De. W. M. Watt in his two srudies, Muhammad in
Mecca (Oxfoed, 1953) and Muhammad in Medina (Oxford, 1956), wherein he
strives to explain the Prophet's success as a response to a total social situation,
83
The Nomad as Empire Builder
We may therefore venture to formulate as a principle that

nomad aggression is at its maximum when set in motion partly
by a powerful religious impulse.
How, then, does this apply to the Mongois?
At first sight the stimulus of a religious faith, which in the
case of the Arabs animated the leaders if not the rank and file,
would seem to have been lacking in the Mongois. Muhammad
was a prophet, Chingis only a warrior. Yet on eloser inspection
we find elear evidence of a very strong religious "drive" behind
the Mongol conquests. The ancient religion of the Asian steppes
differed in one important particular from that of the Arabian
deserts. While sharing a common nature-worship with the Be-
douins, the Turco-Mongolian peoples, ranging over the limitless
spaces of the heartlands of Asia, developed the belief that they
were destined, under T engri (heaven, the sky-god), to rule the
world.s As early as 584, a Turkish khagan, writing to the
emperor of China, styles himself "born of the Sky, the Son of
Heaven of the empire of the great Turks."6 And a successor
the new religion being specially adapted to a society changing from a nomadic
to a mereantile eeonomy. Against the charge of neo-Marxism brouiht against
him by G.-H. Bousquet he has defended himself in the artide eited above.
Bousquet himself seems to play down unduly the non-religious elements, in
his "Observations sur la nature et les eauses de la eonquete arabe," Studia Islamica,
6, 1956, for which he has been criticized by M. Rodinson, "The Life of
Muhammad and the Sociologieal Problem of the Beginnings of Islam," Diogenes,
No. 20, 1957. See Rodinson's summary of the controversy in his "Bilan des etudes
mohammadiennes," Revue historique, 229, 1963.
The conquests themselves have not yet been adequately studied from the
socio-religious standpoint. If and when this work is undertaken, the comparison
made by Eduard Meyer in 1912 between Islam and Mormonism eould perhaps
be pursued further. The historical circumstances of mid-nineteenth century Ameriea
prevented a great upsurge of conquest on the part of the Mormons, who could
only ride forth (a new Hijra!) and colonize Utah. But the Mormon trek to
the West is unthinkable without Muhammad and the Koran.
5 On the ancient religion of the Asian steppes, I see J.-P. Roux, "Tängri.
Essai sur le eiel-dieu des peuples altalques," Revue de l'Histoire des Religions,
149-150, 1956.
6 P. Pelliot, "Neuf notes sur des questions d'Asie Centrale," T'oung Pao,
26, 1929. Cf. J.-P. Roux, "La religion des Tures de l'ürkhon des VII" et VIII"
s1(:des," Rev. de l'Hist. des Relig., 161, 1962.
84
a generation later proclaims on the famous Orkhon inscdptions:

"When the blue Sky was created above and the black Earth
below, in between man was brought into being, and my ancestors
rule over the sons of men.,,7 No doubt this politico-religious
universalism owed something to the inffuence of China, whose
emperor was also the Son of Heaven ruling by its mandate. The
khagan is the divinized representative of Tengri, and military
success over neighboring tribes or over the Chinese easily
generated the hope and expectation that world dominion, thei!
manifest destiny, was speedily to be accomplished by the vic-
todous tribe or confederation.8 These beliefs and concepts
survived even the conversion of certain Turco-Mongolian peoples
to Islam or Nestorian Christianity or Buddhism: they remained
in their purest and strongest form among the Mongois proper,
who in Chingis Khan's day still dung to thei! ancestral
shamanism unaffected by contact with the higher religions. 9 The
brilliant victories of Chingis convinced him and his people that
global mastery was theirs, for so Heaven must have decreed.
Their task was clearly to establish the reign of peace and justice
throughout the world: resistance to them was resistance to
Heaven itself and must be punished accordingly. It is impossible
to doubt that this unshakable faith was a souree of enormous
moral strength to the Mongois. Onee Chingis had shown that
he could eonquer, they took for granted that thei! day had come
and that nothing could withstand them.
Chingis wrote no Koran, but he did formulate the Yasa,
or code of law, which was first promulgated on his assumption
of supreme power at the kuriltai of 1206 and was ever after-
wards treated by his people with the veneration due a divine
ordinance. lO It is difficult to form a just estimate of the Yasa,
7 V. Thomsen, Inscriptions de l'Orkhon, Helsingfors, 1896, p. 97.
8 See O. Turan, "The Ideal of World Domination among the Medieval
Turks," Studia Islamica, 4, 1955. The khagan told the Byzantine envoys in 568
that the spirits of his ancestors had revealed to him that it was time for his
people "to invade the whole world." Chronique de Michelle Syrien, tr. Chabot,
Paris, 1905, 3, 150.
9 N. Pallisen, "Die alte Religion der Mongolen," Numen, 3, 1956. See also
the supplementary volume (London, 1927) of Howorth's History 0/ the Mongois.
10 On the Yasa, see V. A. Riasanovsky, Fundamental Principles 0/ Mongol
85
for no complete copy is known to exist, and only fragments

have come down to uso Its provisions range from the lofty
enjoinment of toleration for all creeds to details of army
organization and the prescription of the death penalty for theft,
adultery and in the case of a merchant, a third bankruptcy. Curious
primitive superstitions about the sacred ele1Ilents are reflected in
severe prohibitions against urinating in water or on ashes and
washing dothes in running streams. The Yasa was presumably
designed to meet the needs of an expanding empire, to be
superimposed on rather than to supplant customary tribai law,
to help bind together the many nations now under Mongoi
sway. Chingis's son Jagatai was appointed the special guardian
of the Yasa; copies were kept in the treasury of the Mongoi
princes and consulted on occasion as an orade, and each Khan
began his reign by solemnly confirming its validity. Legends
gathered round it: the Armenian historian Gregory of Akner
teIls us that an angel appeared to Chingis in the guise of an
eagle with golden feathers and recited the Yasa to him, while
bidding hirn "rule over many countries."ll One is inevitably
reminded of the recitation of the Koran by Gabriel to Mu-
hammad, and just as the Koran was supplemented by the Hadith
or traditions of the Prophet so was the Yasa supplemented by
the bilik, sayings or maxims of Chingis, in which the great
conqueror expresses opinion, gives advice or teIls .stories of his
life. u Clearly Chingis was something more than a brilliant
soldier and outstanding chieftain to his people: he was the
spokesman of Heaven, the executor of the Divine Will, perhaps
even amortal god, for his cult flourished in Mongolia down to
our own day. Even the Communists have feit obliged to build
a special shrine to house his supposed relics. 13 His Yasa achieved
Law, Tientsin, 1937, where all the relevant texts are translated and commented
on, and G. Vernadsky, . "The Scope and Content of Chingis Khan's Yasa,"
Harvard Journal oi Asiatic Studies, 3, 1938.
11 Gregory of Akner, A History 01 the Nation 01 the Archers, tr. Blake
& Frye, Harvard, 1954, c. 2.
U The surviving fragments of the bilik are collected in Riasanovsky, cited
above.
13 On the cult of Chingis, see the anicle by Pallisen, cited above, R. A.
86
widespread farne. Even the Mamluks of Egypt, the bitterest

enemies of the Mongols, adopted it as the basis of their
public law. 14
Nowhere is this religious imperialism more strikingly displayed
than in the orders of submission dispatched by the Great Khans
to the sovereigns of Europe. 15 These astonishing documents usually
began with: "We by the power of the Eternal Heaven (Mongke
tengri), Supreme Khan of the great Mongol nation, our order..."
Guyuk, in his letter of 1246 answering Innocent IV's complaint
that the Mongoi had wantonly attacked Christian nations and
committed dreadful atrocities, told the pope: "I do not understand
these words of yours. The Eternal Heaven has slain and
annihilated these lands and peoples, because they have neither
adhered to Chingis Khan nor to the Khagan, both of whom
have been sent to make known Heaven's command." Mongke
haughtily warned Louis IX in 1254: "In: Heaven there is only
one Eternal Sky, on Earth there is only one Lord, Chingis Khan,
the Son of Heaven," and he went on: "When by the power of
the Eternal Heaven the whole world from the rising of the
sun to the setting shall be at one in joy and peace, then it will
be made clear what we are going to do: if when you have
Rupen, "Mongolian Nationalism," Journal 0/ the Royal Central Asian Soeiety,

45, 1958; C. R. Bawden, "Some Recent Work in Mongolian Studies," Bulletin
oi the Sehool of Oriental & African Studies, 1960, and the reports of modern travel-
lers in Mongolia, e.g. Henning Haslund, Mongolian Journey, Eng. tr. 1949, p. 119.
14 A. N. Poliak, "The In/luence of Chingis Khan's Yasa upon the General
Organization of the Mamluk State," Bulletin 0/ the School 0/ Oriental & A/rican
Studies, 1941.
15 The imperial edicts and letters of the Mongol Khans have been closely
scmtinized since Abel·Remusat published his great pioneer study, "Les relations
politiques des princes chretiens avec les empereurs mongols," in the Memoires
of the French Academy of Inscriptions, tom. 6 & 7, 1822-24. See P. Pelliot,
"Les Mongols et la Papaute," Revue de i'Orient ehretien, 23, 24, 1922-24; W.
Kotwicz, "Formules initiales des documents mongols aux XIIle et XIV· siecles,"
Rocznik Orjentalistyezny, 10, 1934; and E. Voegelin, "The Mongol Orders of
Submission to the European Powers," Byzantion, 15, 1941. The most accessible
and accurate translations are in C. Dawson (ed.), The Mongol Mission, London,
1955. The text of the Mongol demand for surrender addressed to the Mamluks
of Egypt by Hulegu in 1260 is given in Maqrizi, tr. Quatremere, Histoire des
sultans Mamelouks, Paris, 1837, 1, 101.
87
understood the decree of the Eternal Heaven, you are unwilling

to pay attention and believe it, saying, 'Our country is far away,
our mountains are mighty, our sea is vast,' and in this confidence
you bring an army against us, we know what we can do. He who
made easy what was difficult and near what was far off, the
Eternal Heaven, knows." The conviction that the Divine Sky
was fighting for them and that they had a mission to unify
mankind and bring peace and order to the world was one of
the strongest forces urging the Mongois on to global conquest. 16
We may now turn to a second point: nomad conquerors
never establish a durable political order unless they have
previously been in touch with civilized societies and are intelligent
enough to keep the traditional machinery of administration
running in the lands which they occupy.
Neither the Arabs nor the Mongols were savages living in
remote isolation. Arabia had been subjected to external influences
since the days of the Assyrians: in the Yemen the kingdoms
of Saba (Sheba, later Himyar) Ma'in, Qataban, etc. enjoyed a
high degree of prosperity because of the region's natural fertility
and its position athwart wh at was then one of the main highways
of international trade, and on the northern border kingdoms
like those of Ghassan and Hira arose under the protection
respectively of the Romans and Persians, and through them some
knowledge of Greek and Iranian culture filtered through to the
oases of the interior. Jewish and Christian communities were
established in most of the main centers of Arab life. Islam grew
up not in the deserts but in the towns, and the men of Mecca
and Medina were traders and businessmen who knew the value
of records and good administration. Omar, the second Caliph,
was mainly responsible during his ten years' rule (634-644)
for laying down the principles on which Syria, Iraq and Egypt
were to be governed: the officials of the old regime were
encouraged to stay at their posts, the natives were guaranteed
continued possession of their lands, houses, shops and businesses
and allowed to follow their ancient laws and customs, and Arab
16 w. Kotwicz, "Les MongoIs, promoteurs de l'idee de paix universelle,"

Rocznik Orjent, 16, 1950. For Tengri as a war god, see the article by Roux
cited in note 5:
88
tribesmen were forbidden to acquire property outside Arabia. i7

Full toleration was extended to Jews and all sects of Christians.
Governmental ordinances were published in the local tongues:
not till fifty years later, in the reign of Abd al-Malik (685-705),
did Arabic become the ofllcial language of the Caliphate. Thus
once the initial fighting was over, the Arab Empire came into
being with the minimum of disturbance, and the conquerors,
whose leaders were far from unlettered, learnt from their
. subjects the arts of civilized administration.
The Mongois were, it is tme, farther removed than the Arabs
from the centers of civilization. Their horne lay in the relatively
remote upper Onon Basin; they had no towns, nothing
comparable to Mecca or Medina or Ma' rib, and no written
literature or even oral poetry as rich as that produced in sixth-
century Arabia. It is a mark of the genius of Chingis that he
realized the intellectual poverty of his nation and the necessity
. of borrowing heavily from his more advanced neighbors. For
steppe society was · not all of a piece: some tribes were primitive
hunters, some pastoral nomads, some combined livestock breeding
with non-irrigated agriculture, and a few led a semi-commercial
life in small towns enclosed by mud walls. 1B The most advanced
were the Uighurs/9 a Turkish-speaking people who had once
inhabited Kara-komm in Mongolia and had later been forced
to migrate to the Altai country, where a place named Bish-balik
C'Five Towns"), probably in the Chu Valley, became the center
of their power. Here, near the famous Silk Road, they were
exposed to the many influences emanating from Persia, India and
China, and to the preaching of Manichaen, Buddhist and
N estorian missionaries, all of whom made converts among them.
Caught up in the trading activities of the region, they were
obliged to learn writing, and they provided themselves with an
alphabet derived apparently from Soghdian. The Uighur script
17 See the arricle "Omar b. al-Khattäb" in the Enc. 0/ Islam, and the
references cited therein. ..
18 For the different "layers" of steppe society, see Owen Lattimore, Inner
Asian Frontiers 0/ China, 2nd ed., Boston, 1951, part 1.
19 See G. Vernadsky, "Notes on the History of the Uighurs," Journal 0/
the American Oriental Society, 56, 1936.
89
became widely diffused over the steppe, and Chingis, acquainting

hirnself with it, resolved to employ it for his own language.20
An Uighur official, T'a-t'a-tung'a, was charged with the task of
creating an imperial chancery, instructing young Mongoi princes
in the use of the script, and publishing the Khan' s decrees in
the new written Mongolian. Chingis sought talent wherever he
could find it; he was wholly destitute of race-prejudice, and his
successors followed his example of employing generals, admini-
strators, officials and advisers from men of all countries which
the Mongoi arms subdued. One of the luckiest of his "finds" was
Ch'u ts'ai, a member of the Khitan dynasty of North China
which the Mongois overthrew. Chingis took hirn into his service,
and allowed the shrewd and brilliant civil servant to persuade him
hirn not to massacre the urban population of China and turn
the country into pasture. This tamer of Mongol ferocity showed
his master that war and conquest would be of no avail if the
subjugated lands were not properly and efficiemly administered
and that regular taxation was better than indiscriminate plunder.
He repeated this lesson to Chingis's successor Ogedei, telling
hirn: "The Empire was created on horseback, but it won't be
governed on horseback."21
None the less, the Khans were perhaps less successful than
the Caliphs in building up an efficiem civil service to run the
Empire, precisely because they were products of a more barbarous
and backward society.22 The Caliphs were not Bedouin shaikhs,
20 P. Pelliot, "Les systemes d'ecriture en usage chez les anciens Mongols,"
Asia Major, 2, 1925.
21 See the biographies of these persons collected from the Chinese sources
in Abel-Remusat, Nouveaux Melanges Asiatiques, Paris, 2, 1829.
22 It may be noted here that the sodal and economic background of the
Mongol conquests still awaits detailed investigation. The first serious studies were
made by the great Russian orientalists oE the last generation, V. V. Barthold
and B. J. Vladimirtsov. As early as 1896 Barthold detected a class conflict in late
twelfth century Mongolia between the nomad aristocracy (to which Chingis
belonged) and the ordinary tribesmen, and saw in Jamuka, the chief of the
Borjigin clan, the friend and later the rival and victim of Chingis, a champion
oE democracy against the nobles. See his Four Studies on the History 0/ Central
Asia, Leiden, 1, 1956, Eng. tr. p. 32. Vladimirtsov, while not accepting this,
argued in his life of Chingis (Eng. tr. 1930) and his study of Mongol society
(Fr. tf. Le regime social des MongoIs, 1948) that the old clan community was
90
but townsmen from the commercial aristocracy of Mecca: the

Khans were nomad tribal chiefs writ large, who revelled in the
freedom of the boundless steppes and thought of towns as
prisons. Indeed, the massacre and destruction the Mongois
perpetrated in city after city (in Nishapur in 1221, we are told,
not only men, women and children but the very cats and dogs
in the streets were slaughtered),23 exercises in genocide to which
no parallel is to be found in the Arab conquests, may possibly
be ascribed, not so much to a cold and callous military design
to terrorize their foes into submission, as to a blind unreasoning
fear and hatred ofurban civilization. Only reluctantly did they
come to realize the necessity of a fixed capital, a eentralized
administration for their rapidly expanding imperial domain, and
chose for that purpose the old settlement of Kara-korum, a
"city" by courtesv, whose erude building of mud and pIaster
excited the surprise and eontempt of envoys and visitors from
civilized states; the Flemish Fnneisean, William of Rubruck;
scornfully pronouncing it inferior to the Paris suburb of St.
Denis! The Mongol conouests proeeeded by two stages, the first
resulting in the unification of the Eurasian steppe from Manehuria
to Hungary (this was relativelv easy, and hOld been larQ"ely aehieved
onee before, by the Turks in the sixth eenturv), the seeond in the
moredifficult and protr~eted subiugation of old, settled territorial
states like China and Persia. The former could be run by a
primitive ci"il service staffed by clerks and secretaries from
the Uighurs and other Turco-Mongolian peoples who were not
being broken up and replaced by what he called "feudal nomadism." This

interpretation was for a time generally aceepted by Soviet historians, e.g. Grekof
and Yakubovsky in their study of the Golden Horde (Fr. tr. La Horde d'Or,
1939), but has been sharply attacked by 1. Krader, "Feudalism and the Tartar
Poliey of the Middle Ages," Comparative Studies in Sodety and History, 1, 1958,
who points out the total absence of a lord-serf relationship among the Mongols,
and according to A. M. Belenitsky, "Les Mongois et l'Asie Centrale," Journal of
World Histary, 5, 1960, has now been abandoned by Soviet seholars themselves,
who have dedded that a nomad eeonomy cannot be purely feudal and define
the sodal relations of thirteenth century Mongolia as "semi-feudal, semi-patri-
archal." Cf. Owen Lattimore, "The Sodal History of Mongoi Nomadism," in
Historians of China and Japan (ed. Beasley & Pulleyblank), London, 1961.
23 D'Ohsson, Histoire des Mongols, The Hague, 1834, 1, 290.
91
wholly unlettered: the government and exploitationof the latter

demanded a highly trained and educated bureaucracy with an
expertise the Mongoi did not possess or understand. The Khans
came to feel themselves in a painful dilemma. They despised
city-dwellers and held aloof from them, fearing that the virile
and martial qualities of their people would be lost in the
enervating luxury of wealthy towns. 24 But how could these lands
be properly governed and taxed without putting power back
into the hands of the old ruling dass? A partial solution was found
in the lavish employment of foreigners. Even Kubitai, who was
credited with a deep admiration for Chinese culture, was careful
to exdude the old mandarinate from all but subordinate office,25
and China during his reign was ron by Muslims from the Arab
and Persian lands, Nestorian Christians from Turkish-speaking
races, and Europeans like the Polos.26 In Persia the native officials
could not be so easily dispensed with, and members of old
bureaucratic families like ]uwaini and Rashid al-Din Fadl-allah
served the Il-khans, but even here non-Persian Christians, lews
and Buddhists were given high ministerial rank wherever
possible.27
24 Chingis was alleged to have warned his people against this. "After us
the descendants of our clan will wear gold-embroidered garments, eat rich and
sweet food, ride fine horses, and embrace beautiful women, but they will not
say they owe all this to their fathers and they will forget us and those great
times." Quoted from the bilik in Riasanovsky, op. eit., p. 88.
25 "Il ne pla~a jamais aucun Chinois dans le ministere, et i1 n'eut pas
pour ministres d'etat que des etrangers qu'il so;ut choisir avee diseernemenr...
Plusieurs Chinois, gens de lettres er tres-habiles qui vivoient a la cour de Houpilai-
han (sie), pouvoient rendre a ce prinee les plus grands services dans le gouver-
nement de ses etats s'ils en eussent ete eharges, mais on ne leur confia que des
emplois subalternes." De Mailla, Histoire generale de la Chine,. tom. 9, Paris,
1779, p. 460, translating the annals of the Yuan (Mongoi) dynasty. A good
crideal study of the life and reign of Kubilai is much to be desired. üdd that,
despite Marco Polo (and Coleridge!), no biography of this great ruler appears
to exist in any European language.
26 Though Marco Polo governed a Chinese dty for three years, he seems
to have been ignorant of the Chinese language. Yule-Cordier, The Book 01 Ser
Mareo Polo, London, 1903, 1, 29, note.
27 For MongoI rule in Persia, see B. Spuler, Die Mongolen in Iran, 2nd.
ed. Berlin, 1955, and Ann S. K. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia,
London, 1953, c. 4. The most valuable eontemporary sources are Juwaini, tr.
92
In consequence the Mongois remained strangers in these

lands, hated. alien conquerors, an army of occupation, putting
down no roOts, and winning no loyalty. It is significant that
their rule was much more short-lived in civilized countries than
in the steppe lands. The Khanate of Persia disappeared in 1335,
only eighty years after Hulagu's invasion of 1255, and the
Mongois were driven from China by the nationalist Ming uprising
in 1368, only ninety years after Kubilai had destroyed the
Sung dynasty in 1279. But the Golden Horde, which ruled the
stepp es of south Russia from its headquarters on the lower Volga,
survived undl 1480, and the descendants of Chingis's son Jagatai
continued to reign over what is now Turkestan till the second
half of the seventeenth century.
The questions arise here: why was the collapse of the huge
Mongoi Empire much more rapid than that of the Caliphate,
and why did the conquests of Chingis and his successors not
call into existence a great Mongolic civilization comparable tO
the brilliant Arabic civilization which arose a century or so after
the expansion of Islam?
The rise of the Mongoi power had in many respects paralleled
that of the Arab: in each case, the aggressor was helped by the
weakness and disunity of his foes. The rottenness of the Sassanid
Empire had its counterpart in the rottenness of the Khwarazmian
Empire. The bitter strife between Orthodox and Monophysite
in the Byzantine world was matched by the Sunni-Shi'ite feud
in Islam and the violent contest between the Sultan Muhammad
and the Caliph Nasir on the eve of the Mongoi invasion. The
political anarchy which delivered Russia into Mongoi hands
resembles the confusion and fecklessness which allowed the
Arabs to overturn the Visigothic kingdom in Spain in a single
batde. With the long exhausting war between Byzantium and
Persia may be compared the internal dissensions of China, divided
between the Kin and the Sung, which enabled the Mongois to
playoff one against the other and in the end to destroy both.
But here the parallel ends. The Arab Empire remained a going
Boyle, The. History oi the World Conqueror, 2 vols. Manchester, 1958, and
Rashid al-Din, tr. Quatremere, Histoire des Mongols de la Perse, Paris, 1836.
93
concern for two hundred years, at least untit the death of Harun
al-Rashid in 809: the Mongoi broke up in less than a century,
and Kubilai, the last of the Great Khans, was only the fifth to
hold that rank. It is, of course, easy to point in explanation to·
the sheer size and unwieldiness of the Mongoi realm, and to the
split in the ruling family on the occasion of the election of
Mongke or Mangu as Great Khan in 1251, when the house of
Tuli supplanted that of Ogedei, a change comparable in some
ways to the overthrow of the Omayyads by the Abbasids in the
revolution of 750. But clearly the matter goes deeper. It was
more even than the trouble already alluded to, the difiiculty a
ruling dass of inexperienced and untutored nomads must find in
maintaining political control over sophisticated sedentary societes.
The root of the matter was the irresistible attraction which
civilizations exert on nomads when the latter are encamped
among them, combined with the fact that the Mongois did not
possess a "higher" religion ofuniversal appeal and their subjects
did.
The great civilizations wh ich developed in the valleys of the
Hwangho and Yang-tse and in the Iranian plateau radiated, so
to speak, waves of influence which spread into the steppelands of
Central Asia along the commercial routes running north and
south of the Tarim Basin. Chinese culture in a diluted form,
and occasionally Chinese political control, penetrated as far
west as Kashgar and Yarkand: Persian influences spread beyond
the Oxus and Jaxartes, and the regions now known as Turkestan
were occupied for centuries by peoples of Iranian speech. When
the Turks entered history in the sixth century and moved rapidly
westwards as far as the Crimea, they soon experienced the rival
"pulls" of China and Iran, and the division between "Eastern
Turks" and "Western Turks," which wrecked the strength and
unity of their empire, reflects this cultural deavage and
foreshadows the similar deavage among the Mongois. U nlike
the early Turks, whose rule was confined to the steppes, the
Mongois completely subjugated China and Persia, and were in
consequence much more exposed to the subtle spell of these
distinctive civilizations. Kubilai, the last of the Great Khans,
was also the first Mongoi Emperor of China, who took the
94
decisive step of abandoning Kara-korum in Mongolia and

transferring the center of empire to Khan-balik (Cambaluc,
modern Peking). His brother and riyal, Arik-boga, acting whether
he consciously wished to or not as the representative of the
old conservative Mongol traditionalism, set himself up as Great
Khan at Kara-korum: his defeat by Kubilai in 1264 marked
the victory of the "civiiizers" over the "barbarians." Kubilai and
his party however much they might dis trust the Chinese scholar-
gentry and hold them at arm' s length, grew more and more
receptive to Chinese manners, customs, ideas, art and ideology
and posed as patrons of Chinese culture.28 In the West, Persia
took captive her Mongol conquerors, as she had done the Arabs:
the Il-khans finished up, like the Arab Caliphs, as passable
imitations of the Sassanid Shahs. But the Sinised Mongol and the
Iranized Mongois entered into two totally different cultural
traditions and spiritually -drifted further and further apart.
Moreover, theMongol leadership itself was divided over this
aping of foreign manners: the old-fashioned repudiated it as
a betrayal of the national past.
Yet something like this had happened to the Arabs, who had
entered into the heritage of Greek and Persian culture and whose
"conversion" to civilization had been followed by a great flore-
scence of intellectual and artistic life, expressed through the
medium of the Arabic language. Nothing of the kind took place
in the case of the Mongols, who found themselves involved in
a fateful struggle for the soul of Asia on the part of the three
28 The literature on Mongol China in European languages is depressingly
meagre. The onIy important monograph in English is H. F. Schurmann, Economic
Structure 01 the Y üan Dynasty, Camb., Mass. 1956, a translation of and
commentary on two chapters on economic and financial matters in the Yüan shih,
the official history of the dynasty. Some idea of social conditions in China under
Mongoi rule may be gathered from the notebooks and jottings of one Yang yü,
a scholar official who died in 1361, translated by H. Franke as Beiträge zur
Kulturgeschichte Chinas unter der Mongolenherrscha/t, Wiesbaden, 1956. The
civil service examinations in the Confucian classics were revived in 1313; see
H. Franke, "Could the Mongoi Emperors read and write Chinese?" Asia Major,
new series, 1953. Some useful indications of the way Mongoi policies and practices
in -China had been anticipated by earlier nomad invaders, notably the Ch'i-tan
(Liao), are given in K. A. Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, "History of Chinese
Society, Liao 907-1125," Transactions 01 the American Philosophical Society, 36,
Philadelphia, 1949, especially the "general introduction," pp. 1-35.
95
T he N omad as Empire BuiZder
great world religions-Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.29 The

Mongol leadership was at the outset committed to none of them,
and unlike the Arabs, it had not recently acquired a prophet,
a sacred book and a firm conviction of the possession of all
truth. It was pulled this way and that, and had to grapple with
issues the Arabs never had to face.
Notwithstanding the powerful religious drive behind the
Mongois, their primitive paganism was bound to be eroded by
contact . with the higher faiths, of which before the conquests
of Chingis they had known little or nothing. Buddhism was the
most widespread religion of China and Eastern Asia generally;
it had converted a large number of the Uighur Turks, and
was not unknown in Transoxiana and Eastern Persia. Islam had
won over most of the West Turkish peoples as far east as Kashgar
and as far north as the Bulghars of the middle Volga, but had
never penetrated into Mongolia. Christianity in its N estorian form
had been carried into the heart of Asia, as far east as Manchuria,
and though expelled from China in 845, had converted the
Keraits,3O Naimans and Onguts, tribes living to the south-west of
the Mongois, had captured a portion of the Uighurs, and was
weIl organized from its bases in Persia and Iraq.31 From the 1240s
onwards the Nestorians were joined by intrepid missionaries from
Latin Christendom, some of whom, like John of Plan Carpini,
William of Rubruck and Friar Odoric, have left invaluable
descriptions of their travels and of conditions at the Mongoi
court. 32 The curiosity of the Mongois was aroused as they learnt
29 Much material relating to the religious situation in Central Asia in the
Mongoi age is contained in E. Bretschneider, Medieval Researches from Bastern
Asiatic Sourees, 2 vols., London, 1888, and Yule-Cordier, Cathay & the Way
Thither, Hakluyt Society, 4 vols., London, 1913-16.
30 On this important Christian people, whose chief was almost certainly the
original "Prester John," see D. M. Dunlop, "The Keraits," Bulletin of the School
0/ Oriental and African Studies, 11, 1943-46.
31 For the Nestorian Church in Asia, see P. Pelliot, "Chretiens d'Asie Centrale
et d'Extreme-Orient," T'oung Pao, 15, 1914; WalEs Budge, The Monks of Kublai
Khan, London, 1928; A. C. Moule, Christians in China before 1550, London,
1930 (a most valuable collection of source-material); and L. E. Browne, The
Eclipse 0/ Christianity in Asia, Cambridge, 1933.
32 The narratives of John of Plan Carpini and William of Rubruck are
96
more of these competing faiths. Chingis hirnself sought wisdom

from a holy Taoist monk of high repute, Ch'ang Ch'un, who was
summoned to attend hirn on his great Western campaign in
1219-24, and was greeted with the words: "Sainted man, you
have come from a great distance. Have you a medicine of immor-
tality?,,33 Chinkai, a Nestorian Kerait, was confidential adviser to
Chingis and his successors Ogedei and Guyuk. Mongke, who
received William of Rubruck and other Western envoys, was
fond of listening to religious debates, and once remarked that
these different creeds were like the fingers of the hand, in that
they were essentially sprung from the same base.34 Kara-komm
in those days was filled with monks and priests, lamas and bonzes,
all cherishing the hope that this huge uncommitted Empire would
be won to their particular faith. For a time Christian expectations
ran high. The Mongol ruling family married into Turkish
Christian clans: Tuli had a Nestorian Kerait wife, Hulegu's
mother and wife were both Christians, and Mongke and Kubilai
had Christian mothers. Guyuk was reported to have been
baptized, and Sartak, the son of Batu, the conqueror of Russia,
was pretty certainly a Christian. Hulegu was strongly anti-Muslim;
he horrmed Islam by sacking Baghdad in 1258 and killing the
last Caliph, and when his attempt to conquer Mamluk Egypt
came to grief at Ain Jalut in 1260, he and his successors, the
Il-khans of Persia, sought an alliance with the Crusaders and the
Western powers against the Muslims, promising to help the West
recover Jerusalem and hinting that they might turn Christian.
Had they done so, the history of the world would indeed have
been changed. But in the end the Mongols in the east turned
Buddhist and those in the West Muslim. Christianity suffered a
crushing defeat, and faded out of Asia.
The reasons for these momentous decisions are not far to
seek. When the conquests were over, the Khans had to keep
available in the Hakluyt series, tf. W. W. Rockhill, London, 1900, that of Feiar
Odoric in Cathay & the Way Thither, vol. 2, 1913.
33 See the account of this interview in A. Waley, Ch'ang Ch'un, Travels 01
an Alchemist, London, 1931.
34 William of Rubruck, rr. Rockhill, p. 235.
97
T he N amad as Empire Builder
them, and this could best be done by identifying themselves as

far as possible with their subjects' beliefs and customs. They were
far from popular as it was, and it would be foHy to be anti-
Muslim in Persia or anti-Buddhist in China.35 Kubilai, while
maintaining the old Mongol poliey of tolerating all cults, showed
more and more favor to the Buddhists. Marco Polo (or rather
Ramusio) teIls us that when his father and unele urged him to
adopt Christianity, he replied in effect that he eould not risk the
opposition of his nobles and "other people who are not attached
to the faith of Christ."36 Hulegu's great-grandson Ghazan accepted
Islam in 1295, and followed up his conversion by sharp measures
against Christians, Jews and Buddhists.37 There was no great
civilized Christian state in Asia, so the Mongois doubtless feit
they had no choice save between Buddhism and Islam. But by so
choosing, the one in China, the other in Persia, they hastened the
disruption of their vast realm. 38
35 The unpopularity of Mongoi rule in China and Persia was accenruated by
the extortion and corruption of their fiscal agents. The daim of Soviet historians
that the peasant masses were reduced to serfdom under the Khan would seem to
be substantiated at least as far as Persia is concerned. See the evidence collected
by Lambton, op. eit., who notes that owing to the Mongoi policy of exempting
dergy and religious officials of every creed from taxation, the .qadis prospered,
merged with the landlord dass, and ceased to fill their former role as mediators
between the people and the government. For fiscal maladministration in Mongol
China, see de Mailla, op. eit., pp. 401-461 (reign of Kubilai). For peasant revolts
in the ex-Sung provinces, see Schurmann, Eeonomie Structure, and his artide,
"Mongoi Tributary Practices," Harvard Journal 01 Asiatic Studies, 19, 1956.
36 Yule-Cordier, The Book 01 Ser Mareo Polo, 1, pp. 348-349, note.
37 The conversion of the Mongoi leadership in Persia to Islam was dearly
prompted by the desire to wln popular support against the Mamluks of Egypt
(who since Ain Jalut had posed as champions of Islam against the wicked "pagans"
who had destroyed the Caliphate) and the Golden Horde, the Il-Khans' rivals
for the domination of the western half of the Mongoi Empire.
38 It may be asked why the Golden Horde did not turn Christian and adopt
Byzantine-Slav culture, holding sway as it did over Orthodox Russia? To this it
may be replied that Russia was a marginal land so far asthe Horde was concerned,
and the heart of the khanate (the lower Volga) was in a Turkish-speaking region,
already partly Islamized before the Mongoi invasion. Even so, permanent con-
version to Islam was delayed here longer than elsewhere in the Mongoi West.
Batu's son Sartak is said to have been baptized, and though his unde Berke, who
succeded him in 1257, was strongly pro-Muslim, the ruling house was not finally
converted to Islam till the reign of Ozbeg (1312-1340). The dose relationship
98
The Mongois in East and West thus adopted a ready-made

culture, and created nothing for themselves. As Pushkin re-
marked: "The Tatars had nothing in common with the Moors.
If they conquered Russia, they gave us neither algebra nor
Aristotle!" At first there were signs that a respectable native
Mongol literature might develop: the famous Secret History,
the epie of the Mongoi nation, compiled about 1250 ot latet, is
a vigorous and spirited blend of fact and legend not unlike the
. best of the Icelandic sagas.39 But this remained an isolated phe-
nomenon, and whereas Arabic grew into a noble international
language of science and philosophy as weIl as of pure literature,
Mongolic never really emerged from the shadows tO become
anything more than the vehicle for the propagation of folktales. 4O
One obvious reason for the contrast was the fact that Arabic,
sinee the publication of the Koran, was for millions of men a
sacred tongue, the one chosen by God for his final revelation to
humankind, and was read and recited in the original wherever
Islam spread. Under the Caliphs, Greek and Syriae, Pahlawi and
Coptic, dwindled to be the speech of small minorities, and Arabic
rose to a position of unchallenged supremacy, never to be re-
plaeed, so long as Islam might last, as the lingua prima of
Muslims. But there was no Mongolic Koran or Bible or Gita'or
Avesta, and even the Yasa had to be translated into the languages
of the Great Khan's subjects.
Not only did Mongolic possess no religious aura, it was the
speech of a far from numerous people. It has been calculated
(on not very precise data, admittedly) that the population of
Mongolia in Chingis's day was no more than a million or so,
berween the Horde and Mamluk Egypt, based on common hostility to the Il-Khans
of Persia, almost certainly tipped the balance against Christianity. See R. Grousset,
L'Empire des Steppes, 4th. ed., Paris, 1952, pp. 470-483.
39 See Arthur Waley's translation, The Secret History 01 the Mongois and
Other Pieces, London, 1963. Professor Cleaves of Harvard is preparing a new
critical edition and translation.
40 The conversion of the Mongois to Lamaist Buddhism in the late sixteenth
century produced a faint literary renaissance, and a few mediocre chronicles were
composed in the next age. See C. Z. Zamcarano, "The Mongol Chronicles of the
Seventeenth Century," Göttinger Asiatische Forschungen, Wiesbaden, 3, 1955.
99
The Nomad as Empire Builder
and Rashid al-Din teIls us that at the time of the eonqueror's

death in 1227 the Mongoi Army numbered 129,000 men. These
are not high figures, and they indicate, not only what a heavy
drain of Mongoi manpower the conquests imposed, but also how
the Mongois were, so to speak, swallowed up in their own
ereation. The Mongoi imperial expansion was not amigration
of people seeking fresh territories to settle, but a resolute bid by
Chingis to seize the empire of the steppes at a time most favorable
to the execution of such a design, the military maehine he built
being of such excellent construction that it went on operating
almost automatically after his death. Whereas it was decades
before the Caliphs drafted Berbers, Khurasanians and Turks into
the Arab armies, Chingis was prepared at an early stage to
reeruit Keraits, Naimans, Uighurs, Alans, Tanguts and other
non-Mongol tribes into his forces, nor did a man need to be of
Mongol birth to reach the highest eommand.41 In the end the
army of the Khans was more Turkish than Mongol in eom-
position, and the vast eonquests were not aeeompanied by large-
seale Mongoi settlement. The Mongols were too few in number
to impose their language on their Empire, and it is no more
widely diffused today than it was before the time of Chingis.
little trace of Mongoi appears to survive in Persia or Russia or
any other land whieh onee owed allegianee to the Great Khans;42
Even at the height of their imperial greatness, the language most
eommonly employed in their ehaneery was not Mongoi but
Persian, whieh for a time was a kind of lingua franca throughout
Asia and even aeted as link between China and the West.43
Barthold remarked that "the poliey of reeonciling twO
incompatible things-nomadie life and intellecmal culture--was
41 See H. Desmond Martin, "The Mongoi Army," Journal 01 the Royal Asia-
tie Soeiety, 1943.
42 See, however the remarks on Mongoi and Turkish loan-words in Persian
in G. Doerfer, "Prolegomena zu einer Untersuchung der altaischen Lehnwörter
im Neupersischen," Central Asiatie Journal, 5, 1959-60.
43 P. Pelliot. "Notes sur l'histoire de la Horde d'Or," (Euvres posthumes,
1, Paris, 1949, pp. 164-165. Guyuk's letter to Innocent IV in 1246 was written
in Persian, the original being found in the Vatican archivies in 1920. Marco Polo
used Persian in China, but not Chinese! Persian continued to be studied in China
even under the Ming dynasty.
100
the weakest spot in Chingis Khan's system, and the principal

cause of its fall."44 In the case of the Arabs, the nomadic element
was kept under fair control by the urbanized leaders (after the
conquests the turbulent Bedouin soldiery were eorralled in camp-
eities like Basra, Kufa, Fustat and Kairawan), the new religion
of Islam supplied not only a driving force but a language already
divinized in the eyes of the faithful, the Arab race and speech
was spread over a wide area from Khurasan to Spain,45 and the
ancient civilizations of Persia and the Greco-Roman worId began
to exert their influence on Muslim society largely through the
medium of the Nestorians and other Syriac-speaking Christians.
The possession of Islam, a thing purely Arab in origin, immunized
the Arab invaders .against the ereeds of their more civilized
subjects.
The Mongois were in a different position. Their leader, a
genius of war, built a gigantie empire, but was after all the nomad
chief of nomads. The religion of the steppes, the cult of the sky-
god, was a· powedul stimulus to conquest, but the Mongois
nonetheless had no prophet and no Koran, and were thus in a
sense at the mercy of the "higher religions." A small nation, they
were soon hopelessly outnumbered in their own empire, made no
permanent settlements outside their original homelands, and
within a century or so retreated back to their native pastures.
Nothing that they possessed could serve as an effective nudeus
for the building of a new civilization, nothing like Islam was
there to provide the peculiar flavor or distinctive language of a
higher culture. The Nestorians, who had helped to educate the
Arabs, were but poody equipped to educate the Mongois, for they
themselves had suffered a cultural dec1ine in the intervening
centuries, were more scattered and isolated and removed from
the original sources of their intellectual life.46
44 W. Barthold, Turkestan down to the Mongot Invasion, Eng. tr. 1958,
p. 461.
45 On the spread of the Arabic language, see A. N. Poliak, "L'Arabisation de
1'0rient semitique," Revues des Etudes Islamiques, 12, 1938.
46 William of Rubruck, who strikes one as an intelligent and relatively
unprejudiced observer, gives a higly unfavorable account of the Nestorian clergy
he met at Kara-korum whom he portrays as ignorant and immoral. On the other
101
The contrast cannot be more strongly pointed than by con-

sidering the case of Persia, which was conquered both by the
Arabs and the Mongois. The Arab conquest transformed the
whole life and ethos of Iran, a clean break was made with the
Sassanid and Zoroastrian past, the nation began its his tory afresh,
its ancient language was submerged and when it later revived
was choked with Arabic words which modern patriotism has
scarcely managed wholly to expel. The Mongoi conquest roared
over Persia like a hurricane, yet when it had passed, the character
of the nation had undergone litde change. The Persians had
accepted the Arab religion, but the Mongois accepted the Persian
religion. Cultural continuity was maintained, despite enormous
physical damage, and the Persian language was not only almost
unaffected by Mongoi but acmally rose to be virtually the official
language of the Mongoi Empire.
In the light of these considerations, it is perhaps permissible
to draw these conclusions:
1. Pure nomadism could never hold an empire.
2. Successful nomad imperialism required an ideology, i.e.
the leadership had to be impelled by something more than a tribai
chiefs desire for plunder .and booty, had to possess some non-
material aim or goal. The early Turks and the Mongois both had
the idea of world dominion and the ideal of universal peace and
justice under their rule.
3. To become empire builders, as distinct from mere raiders,
the nomad leadership had to be previously in contact with peoples
of a higher culmre, to be aware, however vaguely, of the problems
of dvil administration as weH as of military conquest, and be able
to draw on educated personnel outside its own ranks to run the
occupied territories.
4. Conquest of a sedentary society by nomads most often
resulted in the latter being ultimately absorbed in that society
and losing their language and national identity. This was due to
the fewness of the invaders and the strong "puH" a sophisticated
hand, the Efe of the Nestorian missionary Rabban Sauma (Eng. tr. Waillis Budge,
The Monks 0/ Kublai Khan), who visited Europe at the dose of the thirteenth
century, affords a brighter picture of his community. A good critical study of
Nestorianism in medieval Asia is urgently needed.
102
society commonly exerts on an unlettered one. The Hun language

vanished complete1y. The Bulgarians were speaking Slavonic a
few generations after crossing the Danube in 679. The Mongois
of the Golden Horde, a small ruling dass dominating Turkish
peoples, became rapidly Turkicized. If the leaders tried to prevent
absorption by a policy of segregation, induding a ban on marriage
between the invaders and the natives, the conquerors remained a
mere army of occupation and were finallly thrown out leaving
scarcely a trace of their presence behind them. The Mongois in
the end "evacuated" China as the Goths did Italy.
5. Nomad religion was usually of a primitive type, with a
rudimentary organization and no written sacred literature. Hence
it had no appeal to more advanced peoples. Nomads were by
contrast often impressed by the appurtenances of the higher re-
ligions (temples, priesthoods, sacred books), and barbarian con-
querors commonly embraced the faith of their subjects. Thus in
Europe the Germans, Vikings and Magyars turned Christian, the
Mongois in the East adopted Buddhism, and those in the West,
Islam.
6. The strongest basis for nomad imperial power was, as Ibn
Khaldun noted,47 a "higher" religion which taught them unity
and restraint. Of all the nomad conquerors, only the Arabs pos-
sessed such a thing. They received a prophet and a holy book
be/are they set out on their conquests; they entered the lands of
their civilized neighbors with a full conviction of spiritual su-
periority, and they never forgot that Arabic, being the language
in which God had revealed himself to man, was immeasurably
above the speech of Greeks and Persians and Hindus. Mongoi
had no such advantage. The Arabs were under no temptation to
embrace religious faiths which they knew were but caricatures
of their own, and wherever they went, the holy language of the
Koran went with them. Hence it became possible to build an
Arabic civilization, but not a Mongol one.
47 See the section in Ibn Khaldun's Muquaddimah (Eng. tr. London, 1958,
vol. 1, pp. 305·306) entitled: "Arabs can obtain royal authority only by making
use of some religious colouring, such as prophecy or sainthood, or some great
religious event in general."
103
5
THE ARAB EXPANSION:
THE MILITARY PROBLEM
Marius Canard
[37] The Arab expansion, the rapidity and the relative ease with which the
Arabs accomplished their conquests and extended their domination from
Central Asia to the Atlantic, are still an astonishing phenomenon. The fact
that, recently and barely unified by Islam, they were capable of taking control
of Palestine and Syria, conquering Persia, continuing in their progress
towards East and West, defeating the forces of imperial powers such as
Byzantium, Sasanid Persia, the Visigoth kingdom, subjecting numerous
populations to their dominion when they did not accept Islam or integrating
them into their new state when they adopted it - all ofthis could seem difficult
to explain. The Arabs themselves were perhaps surprised, and their relatively
easy successes were undoubtedly one of the reasons why many Muslims
tended to attribute them to the intrinsic worth and the superiority of the new
religion, the religion of Allah, and were convinced that it had particular
strengths and qualities, by virtue ofwhich it was destined one day or another
to be extended over the whole of the world and to supplant all other religions.
Their expansion had far-reaching consequences. Persia and North Africa
became Muslim, [38] and in Egypt only a minority ofChristians remained. The
Arabs were expelled, not without difficulty but quite rapidly, from the South of
France, Italy and Sicily in the Eleventh Century, from southern Spain not until
the Fifteenth.
The principal stages in the progress of the Arabs in the Levant and in the
West were as follows:
634. Sack of Palestine.

636. Battle of the Yarmük which decides the fate of Damascus and of
Syria.
637. Battle of Qadisiyya which decides the fate of Lower Mesopotamia
and of Persia.
640. Battle of Nehavend, which opens the route into Central Asia for
the Arabs and marks the end of the Sasanid Empire.
639. Entry of 'Amr b. 'Ä"} into Egypt.
2 Marius Canard
641. Seizure of BabyIon (Egypt).

642. Evacuation of Alexandria by the Byzantines.
645. Loss and recovery of Alexandria.
647. The Patrice Gregory is defeated at Suffetula (Sbeitla) in Tunisia,
by 'Abd Allah b. al-Zubayr.
649. Start of the maritime war, with Mu'awiya governor of Syria for the
caliph 'Uthman.
655. First major naval victory of the Arabs (Battle of the Mats).
670. After the crisis of the caliphate, 'Uqba b. Nafi' takes control of
Ifriqiya (Tunisia) and founds Kairouan.
675. First maritime raids from Egypt and Tripolitania against Sicily
and the coast of N orth Africa.
681. The famous march of'Uqba as far as Tangier and the Atlantic.
683. The disaster suffered by 'Uqba on the returnjourney.
695. Capture of Carthage by I:Iasan b. al-Nu'man, and its recovery by
the Byzantine fleet.
[39] 698. Definitive expulsion of the Greeks of Carthage by I:Iasan b.
al-Nu'man.
700-701? Death of the Kahina and end of Berber independence.
706? Subjugation ofthe Maghrib by Musa b. Nu~ayr.
711. Incursion into Spain. Capture of Toledo.
712. Completion of the conquest of Spain.
717. First occupation of the N arbonnaise, subsequently lost.
719. Reoccupation ofthe Narbonnaise.
721. Victory of Eudes of Aquitaine over the Arabs before Toulouse.
725. Sack of the Velay and of the Rouergue. Capture of Carcassonne.
Surrender ofNimes.
731. Burning of Autun (or 725).
732. Capture of Bordeaux.
732 or 733. Battle of Poitiers.
734-735. Sack of Provence. Capture of Avignon by Yusuf, governor of
Narbonne, with the consent ofMaurout, Duke ofMarseilles.
735. Capture of Arles.
737. Unsuccessful but devastating expedition ofCharles Martel against
Narbonne and Nimes.
738-739. Expedition ofthe Franks against Maurout and his Arab allies.
751. Defeat of Gaifer, Duke of Aquitaine, before Narbonne.
752. Pippin the Short recaptures Nimes, Agde, Beziers.
759. Pippin retakes Narbonne with the support oft he Gothic aristocracy.
The Arab Expansion: The Military Problem 3
793. Last Arab campaign against the South ofFrance. Death and defeat
of Guillaume, Count of Toulouse. Sarrasin attack foiled.
827. Conquest of Crete by Cordovan emigres based in Alexandria.
[40]827. Start of the conquest of Sicily by the Aghlabids of N orth Africa.
831. Occupation of Palermo.
837. Installation of the Arabs in southern Italy.
841? Capture of Bari.
842-843. Capture of Messina with the aid of the N eapolitans.
846. Arrival of the Arabs at the gates of Rome.
878. Fall of Syracuse.
882-883. Installation of the Arabs on the Garigliano.
891. Installation of Arab pirates from Spain at Fraxinet (La Garde-
Freinet).
902. Fall of Taormina, last Byzantine base in Sicily.
915. End of the Arab colony of Garigliano.
972. End of the Arab colony of Frazinet.
In this list, there are durable and extensive conquests ofterritory as weIl as
limited occupations of more or less ephemeral positions. They were effected
by military or maritime forces sometimes operating far away from the centre
of the Islamic state or of the new Islamic states which had been constituted,
against prosperous populations, enjoying the advantages of an ancient
civilisation and ofthe political organisation which they owed to the empires or
the king doms ofwhich they formed a part. These conquests were the activity,
at the outset and for some time, not of important and organised armies, but of
groups or bands with a special aptitude for the performance of razzias.
It is thus necessary to try to explain this military expansion and to seek out
the factors contributing to its success.
Sometimes there have been attempts to explain it in terms of the religious
enthusiasm of the Muslim combatants which led them to view death with
disdain, in terms of the irresistible strength inspired in them by the sense of
fulfilment of a sacred duty, that [41] of jihiid (holy war), which made it an
obligation to fight the Infidels until they either converted to the new religion,
or committed themselves to payment of khariij and jizya (property tax and
capitation), and thus accepted the status of protected subjects, preserving
their right to the free exercise of their religion, so long as this was not
paganism. At other times, it has even been considered that the principal
motivation of Muslims in the era of conquests was the desire to convert
non-Muslims. But it has been known for a long time that the Muslims did not
gene rally convert by force, that, as Goldziher has pointed out, the champions
4 Marius Canard
ofIslam were less interested in converting the Infidels than in subjecting them
to tribute, and that in the majority of cases conversions took place by the force
of circumstances, on account of the advantages to be gained by integration
into the Muslim community.
As for religious enthusiasm and ardour for the holy war, it is certain that
numerous Muslims were moved by this sentiment. Besides obedience to the
sacred duty of jihad, there was also the attraction of the heavenly reward for
those who fell on the battlefield. There are numerous accounts describing
combatants going to their deaths with joyful heart, seeing visions of the
celestial hauri who is calling to them and signalling to them. Ifadith-s exalt
sacrifice;jihad is the monachism ofIslam; Paradise is in the shadow of swords;
every wound is an open door leading to Paradise etc. But the mass of the
Bedouin who at the outset constituted the bulk of the troops, and whose
recent conversion had been purely self-interested and exterior, was not
motivated by an ardent faith, but rather by the attraction of booty. They had
nothing ofthe fanaticism ofCromwell's Roundheads. In the Umayyad period,
religious enthusiasm was no greater than it had been in [42] the period of the
first caliphs. The campaigns directed against Byzantine territory across the
multiple gorges of the Amanus and the Taurus, the darb which had even
frightened 'Umar, were viewed with apprehension. Some women tried to
prevent their husbands participating in certain campaigns; Yazld, son of
Mu'äwiya, showed little enthusiasm to join the army which was besieging
Constantinople, and on his arrival, he promised to undertake no further naval
expeditions or winter campaigns, which certainly corresponded to the wishes
of the troops; Tyane and Antioch of Pisidia were regarded as "cities of Hell"
according to a ly,adith. It is probable that in other theatres of operations,
enthusiasm would not have been more universal.
It would however be amistake to disregard the role of religion. Islam
had effected a substantial revolution in effacing the former distinctions and
making all Muslims equal servants of Allah, distinguished only by the zeal-
whether more or less - which they demonstrated in his service. The highest
form of this service was the practice of holy war, and in this context the first
Muslim to present hirnself could be the equal ofthe greatest of chieftains. This
sense of democratic pride could inspire acts of devotion and even vocations
and military promotions.
A further addition to these sentiments, in the Umayyad era, was a surge of
enthusiasm which could be described as national. Islamism and Arabism had
become synonymous and a spirit of Arab imperialism had developed. The
Umayyads wanted to destroy the Byzantine empire which they both admired
and detested, and substitute for it an Arab empire professing the Muslim
religion. Such astate of mind was not readily perceptible among the
proletariat. It existed nevertheless.
To return to the role of religious enthusiasm, [43] it was barely
comprehensible to the Byzantines, even though they were in astate of
constant warfare against the Arabs. They failed to take into account the
influence which could be exerted on combatants by the promise of heavenly
reward. The emperor Leon VI thought that the Arabs were animated solely by
the expectation of booty and by a barbarous love of war. Only Nicephorus
Phocas understood, trying in vain to persuade the Byzantine church to adopt
a doctrine similar to the Muslim doctrine of martyrdom.
It was indeed religious enthusiasm allied with love of booty which brought
large numbers of volunteers flocking to the ribät of Tarsus where they were
trained militarily and religiously to participate in expeditions against
Byzantine territory.
Religious enthusiasm should therefore be considered an important factor
in the Arab expansion, but its role should not be exaggerated. It is not
sufficient to explain the military successes and the conquests, no more than
are the ambitions of the Umayyad caliphs who had sometimes been
apprehensive, like 'Um ar who was afraid of the sea and of the remoteness of
his armies.
There have also been attempts to see in the Arab expansion an irresistible
flux of Arab tribes driven by hunger and poverty to leave Arabia and spread
out across the wealthy countries; the attraction of pillage and of booty, the
prospect of an easier life would have undermined the familial pressures of the
Arabs. It seems that there are certain facts which could be invoked in support
of this thesis. It was through the bait of booty that Abu Bakr succeeded in
transforming the wars of the ridda (the period of apostasy of tribes following
the death of the Prophet) into wars of conquest. The Arab tribes would not
have succumbed so easily ifthe conquests had not offered them a diversion, if
they had not provided a satisfactory solution [44] to the economic problems
of the Arabian Peninsula. According to Balädhurl, the Persian Rustam said
to the Arabs: "It is hunger that has drawn you out of your deserts." But
Khälid al-Walld objected strongly to affirmations of this kind and, when
offered gifts by a Byzantine chieftain in return for withdrawing his forces,
he replied: "It is neither hunger nor poverty that has driven us from our land.
We, the Arabs, are drinkers ofblood and we know there is no blood more tasty
than that of the Greeks. That is why we have come, to spill and to drink your
blood."
Nevertheless, it is quite certain that Arabs living in penury were
susceptible to the promises of booty which the holy war would enable them
6 Marius Canard
to acquire, promises made to them by Abu Bakr as weIl as by 'Umar, as

Balädhurl has shown.
The attraction of booty was furthermore linked to religious enthusiasm.
Thus it could be said that thejihad was a lottery in which every player could be
assured of winning: those who died had the guarantee of Paradise, those who
survived had their share of the booty.
However, the economic factor should not be accorded too much
importance. Ifthe Arabs had been impelled by poverty alone into conquering
Syria and Mesopotamia, then once secure and established in these countries,
enjoying an easier life, they would have needed to go no furt her. But they did
not stop there.
If it is to be considered that the Arab expansion, and the successes
achieved, are not adequately explained by religious enthusiasm, nor by an
exodus offamished tribes, nor by the ambitions of caliphs, nor the incentive of
booty, then supplementary explanations need to be sought. Thus the question
is raised as to whether conquests were achieved thanks to superiority in
number, superiority in [45] weaponry, or in deployment of troops or in
command, in other words thanks to material superiority over their
adversaries, whether the Muslims were better led, enjoyed better morale, and
were capable of greater endurance and more warlike ardour than their
enemies. Furthermore, it is necessary to examine the possibility that there are
political factors which explain the military success of the Arabs.
First of aIl, it seems that the Arabs did not have superiority in numbers.
It is hard to believe the fantastical figures supplied by Arab historians in
relation to the forces of the Byzantines and the Persians. These figures are
manifestly exaggerated: states as enormous and powerful as Sasanid Persia or
the Byzantine Empire could not, they reckoned, have at their disposal armed
forces of fewer than 100,000-200,000 men. This is why, at Qädisiyya, they
estimate the Persian army at 120,000 men and 30 elephants, at Nehavend at
60,000 or 100,000 men. At Ajnadayn, the Greeks would have had 100,000 men,
at the Yarmuk, 200,000. In Egypt, the total strength oflocal forces is estimated
at 25,000-30,000 men. This figure is not exaggerated although the preceding
figures certainly are.
The Arab totals are meagre by comparison: 9,000-10,000 at Qädisiyya:
in Syria Abu Bakr deployed in aIl, vanguard and reinforcements, 24,000
men; Khälid b. al-Walld, when he left Iraq to go and reinforce the troops in
Syria on the caliph's orders, had with hirn no more than 500 or 600 or 800
horsemen. At the siege of the fortress of Babyion, Qasr al-Sham', there were
no more than 15,000 Arabs, a figure inferior to that of the Byzantine army of
Egypt.
[46] The troops invading Ifriqiya, if the figures given by historians are to be
trusted, were more numerous: 20,000 men with 'Abd Allah b. Sa'd according to
Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam's figure given for the battle of Sbeitla, against 120,000
adversaries. The army of I:Iasan b. al-Nu'man would have comprised 40,000
men, but a Tunisian historian, Ibn Naji', reduces this figure to 6,000. W.
Marcais has evaluated the strength of the Arab contingents moving from Syria
and Egypt into North Africa, combining the expeditions of the Umayyad
period and the 'Abbasid period, at 150,000 men.
No one knows exactly the number of troops, including Berbers, who
crossed into Spain. It seems that Täriq b. Ziyad had with hirn no more than
7,000 men who were subsequently reinforced by 5,000. Later, with Musa b.
Nu:;;ayr, 18,000 men arrived, predominantly Arabs. The estimate of 100,000
men for Rodrigo's army is no doubt exaggerated.
It is also difficult to assess the number of troops who crossed the Pyrenees
in the various raids undertaken by Arab governors before the Umayyad
period in Spain. It is not easy to assess the total strength that they were
capable of mustering.
All in all it is probable that, except in isolated cases, in their various
encounters the Arabs were never superior in number to their adversaries.
Was their armament superior? It is an exaggeration to say that the
armament of the Arabs was entirely rudimentary, that in the early days only
chieftains and a few privileged individuals possessed coats of chain mail. In
the pre-Islamic period, it was certainly a luxury to have a good coat of mail.
But the poets describe to us in such a wealth of detail the armament of
warriors of tribes at war between themselves - heImet, shield, lance, [47]
sword, bow and arrows, coat of mail and coif of mail- that there is no reason to
suppose that these weapons were not in widespread use. They also speak of
manufacturers of arms and means of maintaining and repairing arms. In this
period, many arms originated from Yemen and Syria, but throughout Arabia
there were armourers, often highly regarded. It can be seen from ancient
poetry how much value the Arabs attached to the possession of weapons.
There is no need to imagine the warriors of the Prophet's time armed in
rudimentary fashion, while conceding that not all would have had the full
complement of arms, just as not all would have possessed a horse.
In the era of the first caliphs, the first campaigns acquired sufficient booty
to equip a much larger number of combatants than had been possible in the
past and the Arabs found among the Syrians a surplus of armourers.
We have papyrological documents describing the army of 'Amr b. al-'Ä:;;
who conquered Egypt, which shows us that this army was weIl equipped: co at
of mail extending from the shoulders to the ankles, mail coif serving as visor
8 Marius Canard
and nape-cover (mighfar) , conical heImet, round shield, lance, short and
straight Roman sword suspended from the shoulder on a diagonal belt. The
army was accompanied by a train consisting of smiths and repairers of
weapons. A document of 647 mentions 342 men and 12 manufacturers of coats
of mail, another from the same year speaks of boatmen, of cavalry and of
heavily armed infantry. At the siege of Qasr al-Sham', there is reference to an
Arab mangonel and to rope-Iadders. It is said that at the siege of Damascus,
the soldiers of Khälid b. al-Walld, equipped with rope-Iadders and lassos,
crossed a mo at full of water on inflated goatskins which they then replaced on
their backs, threw the [48] lassos to latch onto the battlements, scaled the walls
and let the rope-Iadders down for the other assailants. Such exploits are not
impossible.
There is no reason to suppose that the Arabs were not sufficiently armed;
but they certainly did not have a net superiority of armament over their
Persian, Byzantine or Visigoth adversaries.
Their military organisation was without doubt inferior to that of their
enemies. But given the resources possessed by the Qurayshite aristocracy,
having at its disposal trained staff experienced in making calculations and
planning projects and displaying military and political talents, this group was
certainly capable of organising armies. It is recorded by Balädhurl that
Medina was always in rapid communication with the expeditionary forces, for
making changes in the command structure, for the dispatch of provisions.
'Um ar sent from Medina to the troops operating in the region of the Lower
Euphrates ready-fattened sheep and cattle. The army of 'Amr b. al- 'A~, as we
have seen, had a substantial supply train. The provision by the local Egyptian
administration of forage, of animals for butchery, of meals composed of three
or four courses, in return for payment, is recorded in papyrus documents.
'Amr b. al-'Ä~ was adept at changing the deployment ofhis troops according to
the seasons and each tribe found itself assigned zones of spring pasturage.
Some passages from Ibn 'Abd al-J:Iakam are instructive in this respect and are
to be compared with the well-known text of Qudäma on the organisation of
spring, summer and winter expeditions. The institution of the camp-cities
of Küfa, Ba~ra, Jäbiya, also testifies to the same spirit of organisation.
Journey-stages and the rearguard were organised. Similarly the
remounting oftroops on horse and camels. Thus, in [49] North Africa, 'Uqba,
after his victory at Baghay, confiscated a number of horses from the
inhabitants, having been particularly impressed by the stamina of the horses
of the land. Theoreticians of the Holy War were later to insist on the vigilance
that the emir was required to exercise over the horses, which should be
chosen on account of their rebellious spirit.
So at an early stage there was a kind of commissariat.

It is certain on the other hand that chieftains like Abu 'Ubayda, Khälid
b. al-Walld, 'Amr b. al-'A~, had experience of command which they acquired
in the battles which marked the end of the Prophetie era, and in the
struggles against the tribes. Using methods imitated from those of Persia
or of Byzantium, they succeeded in disciplining and training the untamed,
quarrelsome and belligerent Bedouins, whom they recruited and transformed
into soldiers through the guarantee of regular payments for them and their
families assured by the institution of the Diwän. It is furthermore worth
noting that the first Arab armies were composed exclusively of Bedouins. In
that of 'Amr b. al-'A~, in particular, contingents from the Yemen, i.e. from a
country which enjoyed a civilisation superior to that of the Arabs of Central
Arabia, were important.
In the Umayyad period, military organisation reached a high degree of
development. The Umayyad army was aware of the division into vanguard,
centre, wings, rearguard, the distinction between heavy cavalry (in chain-
mail) and light cavalry, baggage-train, logistics, siege machines, each of those
groups being under separate command. At the end of the U mayyad period, the
division into karädi-s emerged, separate battalions or squadrons, which led to
changes in tactics. However some things which had existed since the time of
the Prophet were preserved, for example, the basic unit, [50] the 'iräfa of 10
to 15 men, and the tribai division, each tribai group having a particular flag.
For this period, TabarI, as utilised in a small work by N. Fries, supplies us
with a wealth of information regarding armament, tactics, discipline, the
distribution of booty, the compatibility of shares, logistics, etc. He sometimes
gives us details of provisions, foodstuffs and beverages, prepared in advance
of campaigns. There were shops and depots storing victuals, as are often
mentioned in accounts of the expedition of Maslama. Sometimes these
reserves were left untouched in anticipation of long campaigns and local
razzias were conducted. Otherwise forage was usually taken from the country
invaded and that is why there was a preference for summer expeditions, so
that crops could be requisitioned. Armies took with them flocks of sheep
which were carefully guarded against any cause ofpanic. Provisions were also
obtained from the markets of enemy countries, under the terms of treaties.
As far as tactics were concerned, there can be no doubt that from the
outset, Arab chieftains were perfectly capable of manoeuvring. In Syria,
Khälid b. al-Walld successfully conducted a tactical retreat before the forces of
Heraclius who hadjust retaken Horns and Damascus, towards the Yarmuk. At
the Yarmuk, his turning movement was a decisive element in his victory. 'Amr
b. al-'A~ had revealed his tactical talents as early as the time ofthe "War ofthe
10 Marius Canard
Trench". In the Egyptian campaign, he showed prudence and skill in his

march on Babyion. Needless to say, the ruses of war, ambushes, defensive
trenches, etc., were continuously employed. The frontal attack in line, the
attack followed by a rapid retreat and redeployment in readiness for another
attack, were part of the tactical repertoire of the separate squadrons at the end
of the U mayyad period.
Given the spirit of anarchic liberty and the tribai rivalries, discipline
seems to have been more lax among [51] the Arabs than among the Byzantines
or the Persians. In the U mayyad period, the troops of Iraq were less
disciplined than those of Syrian origin who were the mainstay of the dynasty.
But the rivalry between Arabs ofthe North (Qaysites) and Arabs ofthe South
(Kalbites), which continued even in Spain, was seriously detrimental to the
unity of the army. However, in external wars this spirit of indiscipline was
less manifest than in internal wars. Furthermore, chieftains were adept at
provoking religious enthusiasm or at appealing to a point of honour, and this
could nip indiscipline in the budo
The military prowess of the Arabs, whatever may be thought of their
defects, especially where Bedouins were involved, was without any doubt not
inferior to that of their adversaries, and in addition to their innate qualities as
spirited warriors they had the advantage conferred on them by their offensive
role, whereas their enemies were most often reduced to standing on the
defensive. As for the Berbers, who constituted an important element of the
Muslim forces in Spain, in Sicily, and in Italy, it is known that they were superb
fighters and Ibn I:Iawqal praised their contribution to the success of the
Fatimid army. Arabs and Berbers had the advantage over their adversaries of
being accustomed to a frugallife, and hence capable of enduring privations,
including hunger and thirst. We learn from anecdotes that the conquerors had
never seen white bread, or rice, when they arrived in Iraq. They were used to
the desert, to long stretches without water, and the obstacles presented by the
desert to a Byzantine army posed no problems for them. Whether they were
mounted on horses or camels, the desert did not impede them. Thus, for their
invasion of Syria, the Arab columns chose the desert route rat her than that of
the coast where the towns were populated and defended. The march effected
by [52] KI:lalid b. al-Walld from Iraq into Syria through the desert is famous.
Once in Egypt, the Arabs had no difficulty crossing the desert of Tripolitania
and, in North Africa, following the route via the arid plains rather than that of
the littoral. It was this familiarity with the desert which induced them to found
Kairouan on the fringes of the steppe, for protection from the Byzantine fleet.
These advantages were matched by defects. The Arabs were as prone
to panic and stampede as they were to launching audacious attacks, to
indiscipline as to enthusiastic obedience. Cases of desertion, treachery, pillage

of their own camps, were not uncommon among them. Very often their
success was the result of the weakness of their adversaries, and when the
latter showed tenacity and mounted effective resistance, then despite their
initial fervour and a temporary advantage the Arabs failed to win decisive
victories.
As a whole, ifwe consider the different military factors whereby we might
attempt to explain the expansion of the Arabs, we conclude that their military
qualities were supplemented by the advantages of frugality and familiarity
with the desert, by the stimulus ofreligious enthusiasm and the attractions of
booty, but that they were not lacking in defects, and in numbers, armament,
military organisation, tactics, discipline etc., they did not enjoy a marked
superiority; rather the opposite, since it takes a young state a long time to
acquire wh at older states possess as a result of tradition and secular efforts.
The success of the Arabs, even in the period of the apogee of the Umayyad
era, cannot be explained by an incontestable superiority in the military
domain.
Thus other reasons need to be taken into consideration if we are to
account for the Arab expansion.
[53] The principal reason is that their adversaries were for various
reasons found to be in astate ofmaterial or moral inferiority in relation to the
invaders.
Such was the case of the Byzantines and the Persians. On the one hand
they were not protected by powerful natural obstacles. On the Byzantine side,
the Arab expansion was only halted when the Arabs found themselves
confronting the barrier of the Taurus; although they crossed this range in a
series of spectacular raids, these did not lead to a permanent occupation of
territory. Similarly, while divisions among the Armenians and the inefficiency
ofByzantium enabled them to occupy Armenia, they were unable to subjugate
the Khazars beyond the Caucasus. No insurmountable obstacle hindered
their advance into Persia. On the other hand the Byzantine empire and the
Sasanid empire had been reciprocally enfeebled by the wars which they had
waged, and which had exhausted them in terms of manpower and finance.
Persia had invaded Syria, Palestine and Egypt, a Persian army had advanced
as far as the Bosphorus. Heraclius did admittedly regain the lost Byzantine
provinces and then carried the war into Persian territory. But as a result of
these wars, at the time of the Arab invasion neither of the two empires was
capable of wielding the power of former times. Heraclius was faced with a
massive programme of reconstruction after the Persian war and the war
against the Avars. In Persia, anarchy had followed the dis aster of 628.
12 Marius Canard
Nevertheless, it seems astonishing that the two empires could not have
put up a bett er resistance to the still poorly equipped Arab troops who invaded
Syria and Iraq. But in neither ofthese provinces was there a situation entirely
free from danger. Although the capital of the Sasanid empire was in Iraq, the
country was Semitic and in part Christian, and the Arab tribes populating it
[54] were naturally disposed towards siding with the invaders. Furthermore,
it was the Bakr b. Wa'il who appealed to the Arabs and invited them to attack
I;Iira. Monophysite Syria was infuriated by the religious oppression exerted
by Byzantium as well as by its own administration which imposed crippling
burdens of taxation. While certain tribes remained faithful to Byzantium and
fought alongside it, others, aware that the empire had suppressed the subsidy
to the Arabs oft he limes, took the side oftheir compatriots from the Peninsula.
The two empires which, fundamentally, felt a certain co nt em pt for the Arabs,
and had few contacts with them except through their Lakhmid and Ghassanid
phylarchs, were unaware of their state of mind and could not imagine that
these Arab populations would one day be ranged against them, ai ding the
invaders.
After several engagements in the course ofwhich the Arabs became aware
of the weakness of the Persian command structure, the battle of Qadisiyya
delivered Mesopotamia into their hands and the Sasanid empire was soon
reduced to a defensive role on the territory of Persia proper. In Syria, where
Byzantium had no effective bases inside the country, troops had to be brought
in over long distances, and these were composed largely of Armenians whose
entente with the Greeks was far from perfect, often resulting in the out break
of dissension even in the heat of battle.
Thus, the military weakness of the Persians and the Byzantines, overt or
latent hostility towards them on the part of sections of the countries invaded,
explain the success of the Arabs in Syria and in Iraq.
In Egypt there was only a disorganised and diverse army, occupied
primarily with a policing role and the protection of tax-gatherers, torn
between riyal chieftains and without [55] central direction. It was for the
most part composed of Copts, recruited in situ by conscription or voluntary
engagement, serving elose to their hornes. Although adequately manned in
terms of numbers, this army was of poor quality. For the same reasons as in
Syria, the population looked forward eagerly to the end of the political and
religious domination ofByzantium. We know through a Christian author that
'Amr b. al-'Ä~ was powerfully aided, mo rally and materially, by the Copts.
In N orth Africa, Byzantium barely held more than the coastal towns.
As for the interior of the country, it was in astate of political and religious
disarray eminently favourable to the enterprises of the Arabs. The links of the
empire with the Berbers were fairly loose. But successes were initially less
spectacular than elsewhere. The raid of 647 as far as Sbeitla had no lasting
effects. Subsequently, with Byzantium still in control of the co ast, the Arabs
were obliged to establish their base on the edge of the desert at Kairouan
and Byzantium renewed its links with the Berbers. Carthage did not fall
definitively to the Arabs until 698. Two years later, the Berber resistance
collapsed with the death of the Kahina, and in 700 Byzantium lost North
Africa entirely. The hostility of the population towards Byzantium was
perhaps less strong than elsewhere, but he re too the Arabs were aided by the
Berbers who adopted Islam and became the allies of the conquerors.
In Spain, the Visigoth army ofRoderick was in disarray, since part ofit was
commanded by supporters of one of the king's rivals. The kingdom was in a
state of decadence. The dissensions prevailing there were made known to the
Arabs by the famous Count Julian, exarch of Ceuta; it is not definitely known
whether he was Greek or Berber. The population of the countryside was
indifferent. A single battle was enough to defeat Roderick's army. When [56]
Musa b. N u:;;ayr marched into Spain, he encountered no strong resistance, and
the conquest proceeded without difficulties.
In Septimania, the Arabs and the Berbers easily took possession of the
ruins of the Visigoth kingdom and the Narbonnaise, taken for the first time
in 717, then lost, retaken in 719 or 720, remained in Arab hands until 759.
However the Arabs were unable to pass beyond southern France except in the
context of raids for the purposes of pillage, sometimes launched over long
distances. But it was less the battle ofPoitiers in 732 (or 733) which halted their
conquering drive, than the difficulties that erupted in the Maghrib al-Aq:;;a
between Berbers and Arabs.
A lot of ink has flowed around the battle of Poitiers. There is still
discussion of the precise localisation of this famous Balat al-Shuhada' Ca term
also applied to the battle ofToulouse) and ofthe importance and the causes of
the Arab defeat. In his study of the reign of the caliph Hisham, Gabrieli was of
the opinion that the limits of Arab expansion were attained at that time, and
that the Arabs would have been unable to exceed them without endangering
their unity, without weakening the supremacy which they exercised over an
extensive tract of territory, from the steppes of Central Asia to the Atlantic;
furthermore they did not have in central France a strategic or moral objective
to be attained, and they never wanted to strike a major blow in this area, with
implications for the Holy War. Attracted by the riches of the monastery of
Saint Martin ofTours, they intended nothing more than a razzia like any other.
The victory of Charles Martel has been considered crucial and has been
compared with the defeat ofMaslama before Constantinople. But this parallel
14 Marius Canard
is not exact. There was no vital centre in this region of France, while
Constantinople was the capital ofthe empire. Their defeat did not have much
effect on the [57] Arabs. The victory of Eudes of Aquitaine before Toulouse in
721 had a far greater impact on them. Did Poitiers save Christianity and
western culture, as has been claimed? It is probable that ifthe Arabs had been
victorious at Poitiers and advanced to the north of the Loire, they would not
have been able to stay there because they were too far from their bases in
Spain. An Arab victory would, no doubt, only have delayed the movement
which led the Franks, their unity restored by Charles Martel, towards the
conquest of the South of France. In any case the Franks did not attach
particular importance to the victory at Poitiers. When, under Louis the Pious,
the walls of the palace of Ingelheim were decorated with tableaux glorifying
the achievements of the great leaders, it was not this victory which was chosen
to illustrate the activity of Charles Martel, but the surrender of Frisons.
However, the battle of Poitiers illustrates what has already been underlined.
When the Arabs found themselves confronting the forces of a chieftain
determined to mount a tenacious resistance to the fervour of the Arab
squadrons, in a country where they could not rely on the complicity of the
local populace or on other favourable circumstances, they were repulsed.
Encountering the "ice-wall" of the Franks, they hastily beat a retreat.
The Arabs often had the good fortune to be aided, not only by the
weakness of their enemies, but also by various circumstances. As Ibn
Khaldun has rightly commented, victory does not depend only on the strength
of armies, on the skill and courage deployed in combat, but also on luck
and accident. Among these circumstances we may mention: the dislike of
Byzantium on the part of the Syrians and the Copts; in North Africa the
complicity ofthe Count Julian who offered his cooperation to Musa b. Nu~ayr
and lent his four ships [58] to Täriq b. Ziyad for the purpose of crossing the
Strait; in Spain, the assistance which the Jews, persecuted by the Visigoths,
offered to the same Täriq du ring his march on Toledo. It mayaiso be noted that
in North Africa, without the complicity of certain Berber dignitaries, the
subjugation of the land would only have been achieved with considerable
difficulty; that in Septimania, the Arabs were aided by the Gothic nobility
whose privileges they guaranteed; that in Sicily, the treason of the admiral
Euphemius opened the way to them; that in Provence, the treason ofMaurout,
Duke of Marseilles, facilitated the taking of Avignon; that in Italy, rivalry
between the Lombard duchi es, the hostility against Byzantium of the
Lombards and of cities like N aples or Amalfi, helped the Arabs immeasurably;
that several cities allied themselves with them and used Arab contingents in
their internecine conflicts; that N aples, in particular, was "for nine years,
another Africa"; that thanks to these circumstances, the colony of Garigliano

was able to sustain itself for so long. A typical case is that of Hugues of
Provence, who having in 942 contributed with the fleet of Romain Lecapenus
to the defeat of the Arabs of Fraxinet, subsequently negotiated with them and
used them against his riyal for the throne of Italy, Beranger.
On the other hand, they had the good fortune that the conquered
populations were easily accommodated to the new regime, often more liberal
than the previous one, and to the imposition of taxes which were sometimes
vexatious, but less oppressive than the previous, and that they did not rebel,
except in North Africa and later in Egypt, their docile behaviour facilitating
subsequent progress.
Thus, weakness oftheir adversaries, conjunctions ofvarious circumstances
- such were to a great extent the causes of the successes of the Arabs. This is
not to belittle the merits and qualities of chieftains like Khalid b. al-WalId, 'Amr
b. al-'A$, 'Uqba b. Näfi', Musa b. NU$ayr, Asad [59] b. al-Furat and others who
were capable of making the best use of the sometimes meagre forces at their
disposal and profiting from circumstances. While we do not need to attach
credence to the opinion according to which 'Amr b. al-'A$ would have invaded
Egypt despite opposition from 'Umar, it is certain that a more timorous leader
than Musa b. NU$ayr would not have decided on the invasion of Spain for
which the caliph Walld showed little enthusiasm. Thanks to the circumstances
and also thanks to the upheaval caused by the new religion, rat her as
happened at the time of the French Revolution - talents came to the fore.
But having examined the issue from a terrestrial perspective, the
maritime aspect also requires attention since, from a certain moment
onwards, it was as a result of the constitution of a navy that the Arabs were
enabled to carry out certain conquests especially in the western section of the
Mediterranean. Ibn Khaldun has highlighted this fact in a well-known page of
the Prolegomena. Having noted that, thanks to their naval power, Romans and
Byzantines had rendered the Berbers of North Africa utterly powerless, he
shows how the Arabs ultimately freed themselves from the aversion to the sea
for which 'Umar had been responsible and, using the maritime populations of
the conquered countries who had volunteered their services, they acquired
experience of maritime affairs and, with the aim of conducting the Holy War at
sea, set these populations to constructing warships. It was thus that the caliph
'Abd al-Malik ordered l;Iasan b. al-Nu'man, governor of Ifrlqiya, to construct
an arsenal at Tunis; it was thus that Sicily was conquered in the time of the
Aghlabid Ziyadat Allah I, while a first expedition in the time of Mu'awiya had
been unsuccessful. "The Muslims," he says, "controlled the Mediterranean on
all sides. Their strength and their power were considerable. Nowhere on this
16 Marius Canard
sea could the Christian nations [60] do anything to resist the Muslim fleets.
They crisscrossed this sea incessantly as conquerors and obtained successes
there marked by conquests and acquisition of booty. Thus, the Muslims took
possession of all the islands situated far from the Mediterranean co asts such
as Majorca and Minorca, Ibiza, Sardinia, Sicily, Pantellaria, Malta, Crete,
Cyprus and the other Frankish and Byzantine possessions."
It is known that it was Mu'awiya who, in the time of'Uthman, inaugurated
the maritime policy. In the list provided by Ibn Khaldün, it is to be noted that
he does not specify the dates of the capture of the islands, which were not
conquered simultaneously.
Sardinia was not taken until1014-1015, by Mujahid ofDenia.
From this point ofview, it is interesting to study the respective evolution of
Byzantine naval power and Arab naval power, and the effect of this evolution
on Arab expansion. It is observed that, when Byzantium had a powerful fleet,
Arab progress was retarded or halted; when the Byzantine fleet was weak, the
Arabs advanced. Conversely, when the Arabs had a powerful fleet facing a
depleted Byzantine navy, their conquests were facilitated. This parallelism
has been well illustrated by Archibald R. Lewis in his work Naval Power and
Trade in the Mediterranean, A.D. 500-1100, Princeton 1951.
After 655, the Arabs who had been quick to utilise the arsenals of
Alexandria and of Syria, which had fallen into their hands intact, won the
naval victory known by the name of Battle of the Masts off the co ast of Lycia.
But Byzantium used its fleet to maintain control over the co asts of North
Africa, while seizing the opportunity to forge a coalition with the Berbers of
the interior. This had fatal consequences for 'Uqba, who died in battle,
attacked by the Berber Kusayla [61] commanding a contingent ofBerbers and
ofRüm, in 683, when returning from his foray towards the Atlantic. When ~bd
al-Malik, to avenge this defeat, sent an expedition led by Zuhayr b. Qays, the
Byzantine fleet landed troops at Barqa and Zuhayr was forced to retreat and
was then defeated. It was thanks to its fleet that Byzantium was enabled to
take Carthage, albeit on a temporary basis. It was ~bd al-Malik again who
ordered F.Iasan b. al-Nu'man to create a naval base in North Africa: he sent
hirn 1,000 Coptic artisans along with their families, to build the ships, and it
was Tunis which was chosen as the port of preference, rather than Carthage
which was more exposed.
The expeditions ofthe Arabs in North Africa had great importance for the
Mediterranean policy of Byzantium, since as a result of them the maritime
right flank of Byzantium was turned. The empire defended itself better in
the East where it inflicted a defeat at Maslama despite the mustering of 1,800
Arab warships, from Syria, Egypt and Ifrikiya. Between 720 and 725, the
Byzantine fleet was capable of mounting raids in the Egyptian delta. But the
consequences of the installation of a naval base at Tunis were soon to make
themselves felt: between 727 and 752, there were six raids on Sicily and two on
Sardinia.
However, in 747, Byzantium won a decisive naval victory off the coast of
Cyprus. Furthermore it still held the islands: the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia,
Sicily, Crete. The Arabs were forced to organise their defences in N orth Africa,
founding the ribät of Monastir, fortifying Tripoli. In Egypt itself, Härun
al-Rashid abandoned the project of building a canal across the isthmus of
Suez, fearing that the Byzantine fleet might take control of it and gain access
to the Red Sea. But, du ring the reign of the Empress Irene in the early ninth
century, Byzantium having neglected its fleet, the number of Arab maritime
raids increased, on [62] the Balearics, Corsica and Sardinia, on the Italian
coastal regions ruled by the Franks. The civil war of Thomas the Slav,
supported by maritime elements, led to the destruction by the imperial fleet of
Constantinople, which had remained loyal, of the fleet of these elements and
the overall enfeebling of the Byzantine navy. Then we observe almost at the
same time, in 827, landings in Crete and in Sicily. In Sicily, where Byzantium
was reduced to a defensive role and was never able to muster sufficient forces
to undertake a reconquest and maintain its last bases, Syracuse fell in 878;
in southern Italy, as we have seen, the complexity of the political situation
favoured the Arabs, and it took an alliance ofFranks and Byzantines to regain
Bari in 871. All the coasts, as far as the base of the Adriatic, were the object of
Arab attacks; in the East, Cretan or Syrian pirates made numerous raids (the
sack of Thessalonika in 904 is notorious), but the Byzantine fleet also won
victories and the empire was never in danger. It was however incapable of
retaking Crete until 961.
The Arab expansion, halted in 717 before Constantinople, encountered
the same fate in France at the end ofthe Eighth Century, and in the second half
of the Ninth in southern Italy. However, there remained points of occupation
such as Garigliano and Fraxinet from which raids were launched. But it was
no longer a case of conquests and expansion. The expansion stalled when the
Christian states reasserted themselves: Byzantium menaced in its capital,
Gaul with its Frankish unity reconstituted, Spain with the formation of young
kingdoms which, without the intervention of the Berber power of Morocco,
would without doubt have accomplished the reconquest sooner. The Arabs
had definitely lost the verve which had anima ted them at the start.
I have tried to show what were the causes ofthe expansion ofthe Arabs and of
their successes. These can be attributed on the one hand to the religious
18 Marius Canard
enthusiasm of the Muslims, without this being a determinant element, on the

other hand to their military prowess as weH as that of some of their leaders,
but especially to the weaknesses and divisions of their adversaries. It is
definitely the case that the expansion of the Arabs cannot be explained solely
by referring to accident, chance and the various circumstances which worked
to the disadvantage of their enemies. But it still is not evident that the Arabs
had in themselves, even taking into account the strength given them by the
new religion which unified them, the exceptional resources, qualities and
energies which would be sufficient to make comprehensible the breadth of
their extraordinary successes. A curious fact is that their most rapid conquests
were not the action of a single person, as was the case with the great
conquerors of history, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon. Not
one of the Arab chieftains had the stature of these great captains, or could caH
upon armies as massive, as weH organised and equipped as the armies at the
disposal of these conquerors.
These being the conditions, the Arab expansion is by no means
inexplicable, but its facility and relative rapidity will never cease to perplex uso
6
THE FIRST EXPANSION OF ISLAM:
FACTORS OF THRUST AND CONTAINMENT
Gustave E. von Grunebaum
Viewed frorn Mecca, its place of origin, or from Medina, its first
capital, the expansion of Islam is impressive not least because
it extended in every direction. There is one area of limited failure
nearby, in the Ethiopian highlands across the Red Sea; otherwise
a cohesive Islarnic belt stretches with only minor interruptions
or enc1aves into India, Central Asia, past the Bosporus, throughout
North and much of West Africa into the center and down the
Eastern coast of the Black Continent-not to rnention, apart
from minor concentrations elsewhere, for example in the Western
hemisphere, the solid blocks of Muslims in Indonesia, parts of
China and the Southern Philippines.
Speculation has been generous in supplying theories to account
for the success as well as the limitations of the geographical
outreach of Islam. Compatibility or incongruity with arid or
semi-arid zones, tropical forests and savannahs, accessibility to
nomadisrn, physically and intellectually, a negative affinity to
moderate, let alone cold climates-all such endeavors to order and
82 - - - THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE
explain a highly difterentiated complex of facts by means of one

or the other principles of organization are rather easily disproved
by a glance at a historical atlas, or where they seem to fit, at
least partially invalidated by consideration of ethnic, socio-econo-
mic and, above all, political (and military) factors.
It is a datum of history, as simple as it is incontrovertible, that
during the first phase of Muslim expansion-almost entirely car-
ried forward by Arab leadership with Arab manpower and extend-
ing from about A.D. 633, the beginning of planned raids on
Persian and Byzantine territory, to ab out A.D. 751 the consoli-
dation of Muslim control over Central Asia by the turning back
of the Chinese at T alas-no area was lastingly acquired, or
converted to Islam which was not brought under continuous
political domination by a Muslim government. This is as true for
Spain {later lost to Christianity) as it is for Iran, Transoxiana,
or the Ifriqiya. Besides, the initial Muslim expansion failed to
obliterate any organized states of the same or superior administra-
tive texture as the caliphate wh ich it did not manage to crush at
its very inception, such as Iran, or by a single major military effort,
such as Visigoth Spain.
Within the span of activity of one generation Muslim political
control reached its limits owing to three reverses-the siege of
Constantinople had to be lifted in 717, Charles Martel stopped
the Muslim raiders between Tours and Poitiers in 733 (rather
than as usually stated, in 732), the victory of Marwan b. Muham-
mad over the Khazars in 737 proved ineftectual and the exit tnto
the plains of Southern Russia remained closed to the Arabs. (In
India, stabilization for almost three centuries was reached in 70
with the conquest of Sind and parts of the Punjab.) The Chinese
defeat of 751 consolidated a previously won area of influence
but did not open an avenue of conquest eastward. And yet, the
ability of the caliphate to extend its sway as far as it did on the
thin demographie base provided by its Arab ruling caste is perhaps
the true miracle of the development of early Islam. The fact that
conquest did not as a rule entail forcible conversion no doubt
helped to secure the acquiescence of the overrun. So did the
advantages accruing from integration in an enormous political
compound. It must never be left out of sight that however desir-
able Islamization would appear to many Muslims and frequently,
65
The First Expansion 0/ Islam
to the Muslim government as weIl, the immediate aim was, down

to a fairly recent past, the establishment of Muslim control. The
country rather than the souls of the inhabitants was to be won
for Islam.
The där al-isläm is ultimatelv to absorb the där al-harb, the
"household oE submission" the -"household of resisters.,,1 Resist-
ance must be overcome. For to the Muslim, the finality oE his
faith can and must be realized in terms oE political structure which
guarantees the sway to the Religious Law, the shari'a. But since
this very law .'ldmits the unconverted monotheist individual eon-
version remains secondary to a hierarchical ordering of religious
communities. Such ordering requires Muslim dominance.
As la te a reformer and conqueror as 'Uthmän dan Fodio (1754-
1817), the founder of the kingdom of Sokoto (in today's Northern
Nigeria), stated: "The government of a country 1S the government
of its king without quesdon. If the king is a Muslim, his land is
Muslim; if he is an Unbeliever, his land is a land oE Unbelievers."2
It 1S true that even before the incisive ehanges brought about
by the Mongois or oeeurring in their wake Islam aequired adher-
ents in South Central Russia and that Muslims from other parts
of the där al-isläm came to settle there, for example in Gurküman
(near Kiev).3 It is also true that the Rüs, at dmes against Khazar
obstruction, traded with the Muslims to the South East; nor is
there any inclinadon to play down the importanee and hence, the
influence, of Islamic eontaets as far North and \Vest as Seandina-
via. But however high the signineanee of trade relations and the
(erratic) diplomatie relations may be assessed, it cannot be claimed
that connection with the European North and even with European
Russia as a whole has in any way whatever contributed to form
the faith, the power structure and the dvilization of Islam. The
converse statement may be made for pre-Mongol Russia and for
Scandinavia, although it may have to be conceded that one or the
1 Ta use Kenneth Cragg's sensitive rendering in his Sandals at the Mosque

(Landon, 1965), p. 36.
2 T anbzh al-ikhwän, trans. H. R. Palmer, « African Affairs" (Journal 01 the
Royal African Society), XIII (1913-14), 407-414; XIV (1914-15), 53-59, at XIV.
53 (Seetion iii of Tanbih).
3 For the localization of Gurkuman cf. C. E. Dubler, AM Hämid el Grenadino
y SZi relaci6n de viaje por tierras eurasiaticas (Madrid, 1953), pp. 232-233.
66
other political move of Varangians and Rüs was motivated by a

desire to bypass the Khazars or in other ways to keep open the
trade routes to the Muslim territories. One need but reflect on
the contribution of Byzantium to its Northern neighbors and that
of the Central Asians to the edifice of Islam to become aware
of the marginality of the Islamic connection with the European
North. I t may be useful to restate that the basis of this judgment
is essentially religious and cultural; it does not militate in any
way against due appreciation of the migrations of objects and
techniques of material civilization.
To comprehend somewhat more precisely than has hitherto
been suggested, its development and with it its powers of attraction
and absorption, the following aspects of the growth of an Islamic
civilizational area must be envisaged and their implications fol-
lowed through.
(1) Religious Islam precedes political Islam but only by a
brief span. In conquering vast masses of land, for the most part
to the East (North East) and the \"XTest of their homeland the
Arabs, in the second half of the seventh century, established
themselves as a thin Herrenschicht. Ideally at least and according
to the hopes of the rulers, to be an Arab would coincide with
being a Muslim. There was no eagerness to admit others to Islam
and to rule. But there was, increasingly, the attraction of pow-
er-not always to be distinguished from that of the Muslim
religion as such-and the need for assistance and identifieation on
the part of some at least among the subject groups. The dirigeants
of that power nucleus w hieh was early Islam could not but use
available traditions, skills, techniques, attitudes in solving as they
arose, the problems implicit in managing a multinational empire
and in preserving an intellectual identity in a culturally superior
milieu.
The irruption of the Arabs into Byzantium reminds one inevi-
tably of the earlier irruption of Germanie peoples into Rome.
Leaving considerations of dimension and stability to one side,
the decisive difference between the Germanic and the Arab
invasions was the Arabs' sense of spiritual superiority of which
pride of language and pride of race were integral parts. The
greatest and last of God's prophets had been an Arab bringing
a revelation in Arabic. There was no urge to "Romanize," to
67
become civilized by integrating into "classieal" cuhure, hmvever

inferior in almost every area of human attainment the conquerors
may objectively have been vis-a-vis their Byzantine or Sassanian
subjects.
The language curtain held and so did the sense of religious
election, with religious precedence entailing a sense of collective
moral and political superiority. The bearer of the higher truth
rules as of right. The spiritual possessions of the communities,
Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, whieh the Muslim revelation has
rendered obsolete, are bonne prise when serviceable and compat-
ible-more realistieally put, when needed and assimilable-;
otherwise they must be shunned. Adoption of earlier achievement
of the non-Muslim heritage is a natural process during the great
age of the Islamie development (through the tenth century).
Political supremacy and the self-assurance of the elect make
borrowing into a joyful enlargement of the material and the
psychologieal horizon. Rarely is there a trace of that xenophobie
combativeness whieh is the constant companion of a feeling of
inferiorlty. So the evolution of Isiamie culture must be visualized
as the clustering about a potent magnet of meta! parings that are
drawn into its field; the magnet remains the basic constant howev-
er den se the agglomeration of parings around it and however
restlessly the hand holding it may, in fact, be moving in search
of suitable and badly needed parings to cover the magnet's bare,
blank sides.
(2) Isiamic civilization may thus rightfully be described as
having grown out of ablend of cuhures, provided it is kept in
mind that this process of creative combination or integration divi-
des into two phases. The first both precedes and coincides with the
preaching of the Prophet himself in which pagan, Jewish and
Christian elements are readily identifiable. His doctrine prejudged,
as it were, orientation and range of spiritual receptivity of the
Arab Muslims entering the Iarger world in consequence of the
conquests, by skating out areas of compatibility-the one Creator
God, the finality of Reve1ation, the confinement of man to the
human condition, a style of religious behavior coloring if not
determining social and political mores, these positions and postu-
res represent so many positive and negative affinities that would
ren der possible absorption of so me and compel rejection of other
68
elements in the intellectual universe of Greek Christendom, Greek

philosophy, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism, and later, Hin-
duism, most aHen of all svstems encountered.4
The fundamental "opti~ns" had been made irrevocably when
the Empire was established; they had not been lived and thought
through; their problematics had not yet been fully explored or
even experienced; and they needed formulation. This formulation,
tied as it was to the drcumstances which created the need for it,
reflected the challenges against which the Muslim identity had
to be realized; "Islamicity" itself was affected and, on the whole,
enlarged and enriched by contacts whose dangers were neutralized
by the double compactness of Arab power and Arab solidarity.
To the Arabs, the new religion had opened new ways of
self-realization. It had made possible sodal, cultural and, :first of
all, political and religious achievements, from curbing of the
corrosive particularism of the tribes (whose resurgence was to
contribute in no small measure to the early displacement of the
Arabs from imperialleadership ) to the winning of an empire
buttressed by the religious unity of the rulers; and it had allowed
to sweep aside an obsolete societal setting by helping the towns-
man to supremacy over the nomad and rural setder . The attrac-
tion of power on one hand, fissures, ethnic, religious and sodal,
within the conquered territories on the other, compensated for a
certain intellectual rawness. Neither at the founding of the caliphal
empire nor, for example, at the decisive arrival of the Muslims in
India, almost four centuries later, was Islam associated with the
culturally leading local stratum or was able immediately to furnish
such a stratum from its own recruits. But this initial cuhure
differential did not impair the spread of Islam; it was, besides,
overcome fairly sonn by dint of a process of attraction and inges-
tion which left the continuity of the community intact, making
it in fact the more self-assured as the basis of identity shifted
from the political to the cuhural sphere.
The absence of a competing power gave Islam the time to
4 The sincretistic movements in seventeenth and eighteenth century India
although affecting in large measure Muslims and Hindus who, in the last
analysis, did share the same cultural background bear out, by their failure, the
alienness of the fundamental outlook of the two religious groups; they have
resulted in a keener prise de conscience of their spiritual individuality and
hence have tended to accentuate separateness and antipathy.
69
The First Expansion 01 Islam
consolidate. Consolidation, in this context, has two aspects.

(a) The creation of a large and continuous domain which undet
the logistic conditions of the age was practically self-sufhcient,
drawing its political motivations overwhelmingly from within;
(b) the implementation of that universalism which was inherent
in the original message but found itself in rivalry with a con-
ception of Islam as preserve, prerogative or privilege of the Arabs
(and their military assodates in ruiership), a conception which,
apart from the realities of the seventh century, had some Koraruc
support to point to but which, in the last analysis, confused
the circumstances of revelation with its ultimate intent. In fact,
the consdousness of this universalism, i.e., the appropriateness
of the faith and its practices to all mankind and its corollary, its
detachment from the conditions of its original Iocale, was devel-
oped early and is traceable in explicit statement to 110 Iater than
the ninth century (and probably sooner).
(.3) To the outsider Islam appeared above all as a style of
lite identifying a community. The very grouping of its principal
beliefs and obligations accentuated the devotional act and com-
munity practice. This practice would accommodate local custom
but more importa11tly perhaps, be open to various types of reli-
gious experience: the security of legalistic and ritualistic regulation
as much as the submergence of the barrier betwee11 creature and
Creatot in communal ecstasy or the relentless self-subjugation
of the ascetic bent on that divine mercy which can never be
metited and held with certainty. Infringement on divine unity,
the negation of prophecy or the assertion of its continuance and
renewal past the death of Muhammad, explicit derual of the
authority of Scripture and the Prophet, and separation from the
community-these were the unforgivable grounds of exc1usion.
Behavior proved beionging. Theology, however sophisticated and
specific it was to become, and the Law with all its shrewd preci-
sion, never succeeded in abolishing the latitudinarian 10calism
of the community whose actual differentiation from country to
country, schoo1 to school, only rarely affected (before modern
times) an intense feeling of cohesiveness, remarkable especially
in view of the size of the community and its lack of formal
organization.
The Muslim style of life eliminated the remnants of the Graeco-
70
Roman, though to some extent incorporating it, and the Iranian

insofar as it tended to an independent posture, blended uncertainly
with the Latin and Germanic in Spain, and clashed for ineffectual
domination with Hinduism. In a less conspicuous manner its
impact broke against the oIder Armenian and Georgian cuhures,
barricaded as they were behind their Ianguages and the teligious
tradition of Christianity that had become inseparable from ethnic
and national identity. Political domination was both too erratic
and unrewarding to expose Georgians and Armenians to that
sustained pressure wh ich alone could have shatteted their resis-
tance. Islam' had nothing to offet. It did not come as liberator
from prolonged sectarian tribulation, its beaters were cuhurally
strangers and racia1ly as alien as the Byzantine and Persian at-
tackers had been.
Pirenne has been criticized for charging the Arab conquest of
the Eastern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean with the
final breakup of the Mediterranean unity which was the greatest
achievement and the heartpiece of the Roman Empire, and the
subsequent northward turn of the Carolingian state; it was pointed
out that trade, especially luxury trade, continued, the pilgrims
visited the Holy Land as before, and that it was much sooner than
the emergence of Arab Islam that the basic economic and political
changes occurred which were to result in the shrunken outreach
of the Germanic Middle Ages as contras ted with even the last
stages of the Western Roman Empire. Yet it cannot be denied
that the establishment of Muslim control e1iminated the Latin
and, in terms of cultural interaction across the sea, rendered
ineffective the Greek centers on the long North African coastline;
nor can it be denied that Muslim control resulted in the deve1op-
ment of an autonomous zone that received its determining impul-
ses from the East and whose principal concern with the Mediter-
ranean was to extend domination; and even this impulse was
irregular and tended to weaken after the conquest of Sicily.
Besides, the contacts of raids and piracy, a modicum of dispen-
sable trade and voyaging, in no way compensated for that unity of
the Mediterranean which was, in asense, the basic and the deci-
sive fact of the Graeco-Roman period. From the seventh century
onward the Mediterranean is divided among three culture areas
and never less than three sovereign powers whose kinship is in
71
their cultural ancestry and spiritual aspiration, but that do their

best to encroach upon, and, failing this, to insulate one another. 5
There has not been enunciated a Pirenne thesis in regard to
the steppes and forests north of the Caucasus; it would presu-
mably be difficult to argue for political isolation and economic
and cultural decline in what is now European Russia as a result
of the Muslim advance to Derbend. In fact, the connections
between Iran and the North (or Northwest) do not seem to have
suffered; if anything, trade and the import of artifacts would
seem to have increased. 6 But it sufhces to read the report of an
Ibn Fadlän (921/22) and au Abü Hämid of Granada (1080/81-
1169/70; the relevant travels extend with interruptions from
1131 to 1153) to realize the distance between the culture of the
North and the culture( s) of Islam. The Arab travellers report
in a tone one might use of savage and at best, of strange and
bewildering men and peoples. Where there are Muslims they are
recipients not contributors; they are, in every sense of the word,
on the outside, and no urge is felt to win those lands for the falth.
Beyond the orbit of Turkic groups affinity to Islam appears to
end. The pagan culture of the North is still intact and when it
succumbs it vields to Christian encirclement. The ruthless self-
assurance of the Norseman is reminiscent of the ruthless. self-assu-
rance of the early Arab conqueror. The same fascination of power
that surrounded the Arab Muslims radiated from the Northern
conquerors of Russia. The superiority of Byzantium emerged from
bitter testing. No shared spirituality drew together two areas that
geography and the limitative stabilization of Islam tended to keep
apart.
; It is perfectly true that most major traits of the early Middle Ages in the
West, economically as weil as eulturally, were in evidenee way before the Arab
invasion. But this invasion made the Tyrrhenian Sea into a frentier and the
southern (and eastern) coastlands of the Mediterranean into foreign eountry-in
point of mores, language, culture, religion, style of public and private life.
The underlying similarities would not have sufficed to make the visitor from
Christendom feel at home. Marc Bloch suceeded in evoking the significance of the
change brought about by the Muslim conquest in one brief and balanced
page; d. "Une Mise au point: les invasions," Melanges historiques (Paris, 1963),
I, 110-141, at pp. 122-123. .
6 Cf. the article, rieh in referenees, by T. Lewieki, "Il commercio arabo eon
la Russia e con i paesi slavi d'Occidente nei secoH IX-XI," Istituto Universitario
orientale di Napoli, Annali, n.s., VIII (1958), 47-61.
72
7
THE CONQUEST
Christian Decobert
[57] For the purpose of understanding some aspects of the history of naseent
Islam, it is neeessary to assess all the implieations of the two following
statements. On the one hand the diffusion of Islam was not, like that of
Christianity, a slow and tenaeious movement of infiltration and seepage into
the interior of an empire whieh it claimed to have no intention of touehing; it
was in itself imperial. It was at the outset an episode of violenee, a eonquest of
land and ofpeople. On the other hand, the Arab eonquest and migration were
ehronologieally distinct and should be logieally distinguished. The former is
the hegemonie extension of a eommunity basing itself on a prophetie
revelation; the seeond is merely a subsequent movement of populations. The
formulation of these two statements - linked intimately one with the other, it
goes without saying - aspires to be neither polemieal nor original. It does not
prevent the revelation of these facts being presented in the most evident
fashion to all those who are interested in the subject, to say nothing of the
multiple inferential propositions whieh they should raise. In a word, the facts
themselves were not always retained, that whieh they signified was not always
eonsidered.
A rapid, seintillating eonquest: mueh has been written about the mode and
the seansion ofthe penetration ofthese bodies oftroops into the Syrian plains,
into the marshes of the Euphrates, to the furthest reaehes of the Iranian
plateau, to the north ofthe Nile, on the littoral of[58] white Afriea, and as far as
the Iberian Peninsula... The dates, the battles are known. The historieal
atlases and general works on Islam (Cahen: 1970;1 Mantran: 1969;2 SourdeI
& Sourdel-Thomine: 19683 ) depiet a prodigious advanee in various eloquent
maps. There is no point in harking baek to this. On the other hand, there
are questions whieh are still to be posed: in wh at eonditions, intrinsie to the
groups of eonquerors, did the eonquest eome about and, as a eorollary, who
preeisely were these eonquerors. The answers so far proposed have been of
1 C. Cahen, L'Islam, des origins au debut de l'empire ottoman, Paris 1970.

2 R. Mantran, L'expansion musulmane (VIIe-Xle siecle), Paris 1969.
3 D. SourdeI & J. Sourdel-Thomine, La Civilisation de l'Islam classique, Paris 1968.
2 Christian Decobert
several types. They may lay emphasis on the accidental nature of the event -
the conquest would be a kind of flight in advance, a more or less controlled
reaction to aseries of perceived factors: impoverishment, desiccation of
Arabia (Caetani: 1911 4 ), closure of commercial networks in southern Arabia
and the quest for prosperity in the Fertile Crescent (Shaban: 1971 5 ). Or on the
contrary, it is a positive trait that is put forward, in terms ofits absence among
those whom the Arabs conquered: existence of fast cavalry and more
gene rally, military superiority (Lammens: 1928;6 Canard: 1926 7). But it can
happen that the thing regarded as the motivation for their migration is more of
a permanent, atavistic aptitude of the Arabs - one which defines them - than a
contingent quality, valid for one time and in precise circumstances (thus
it could be with the military superiority): the penchant for plunder, the
taste for booty, the passion of the raid (Muir: 18988 ; Lammens: 1928 9). Socio-
political factors, linked to the religious revolution that Arabia experienced,
are elsewhere presented as the genuine motivations behind the Arab
expansion: enthusiasm of a neophyte group, promise of salvation, of divine
reward (Butz er: 1957;10 Bousquet: 1956 11 ). A final mode of response which,
quantitatively, we cannot ignore, comes back to say that in the final analysis
there is some truth in each of the preceding explanations and that we should
neither belittle nor exaggerate the religious aspect, that the economic factor
also has its laws, but that at the same time the relative military weakness ofthe
Byzantines and the Sasanids must be taken into account (Cahen: 1970;12
Mantran: 1969 13 ). This solution has the advantage of avoiding recourse to the
single principle which explains all, whether it be a non-historical definition
of the object (the marauding Arabs: [59] but what is it that makes it so, that
in the seventh century precisely, this permits them to consume towns and
provinces?) or a historically decisive but simply stated characteristic (military
superiority: but why at this specific moment?). Similarly it declines to endorse
a category which would be dressed up in the double mask of function and
4L. Caetani, Studi di Storia Orientale, I, Milan 1911.
5M.A. Shaban. Islamic History: a New Interpretation, I, Cambridge 1971.
6 M. Lammens, L'Arabie occidentale, Beirut 1928.
7 M. Canard, Les expeditions des Arabes contre Constantinople dans l'histoire et dans la
legende in Journal Asiatique (JA) 108 (1926), 61-121.
8 W. Muir, The Caliphate, its Rise, Decline and Fall, London 1898.
9 See note 6.
10 K.W. Butzer, Der Unwelifactor in der grossen arabischen Expansion, in Saeculum 8
(1957), 359-371.
11 G.H. Bousquet, Observations sur la nature et les causes de la conquete arabe, in Studia
Islamica (SI) 6 (1956), 37-52.

12 See note 1.
13 See note 2.
The Conquest 3
cause (the religious, political, economic, technical...) Conversely, such a

mitigated reasoning, which deals with each area and does not decide, often
has the defect ofjuxtaposing levels of explanation without seeking to integrate
them. For fear of falling into the trap of a single factor from which everything
proceeds, one ultimately misses what could have been significant.
Returning to the more definitive responses, as areminder and making
no judgment, one could retain certain key-words: military conquest, booty,
economic gain, religious revolution. I would at the outset defend the following
proposition. The Arabs who invaded Byzantine Syria and Sasanid
Mesopotamia were neither savage and dusty hordes of bandits greedy for
booty, nor hungry gangs fleeing from poverty, nor merchants in search of
new networks, but warriors first and foremost, few in number and highly
disciplined. The conquest was not the result of aseries offortuitous accidents
but a warlike machine, which preceded and determined the Arab migration. It
was the process whereby a community was constituted and consolidated,
uniting in the same war the various populations of Arabia.
A relatively assiduous and attentive reading of the Arabic sources gives, in
fact, a full illustration of the phenomenon of the conquest. An illustration
which has, for present purposes, the eminent merit of articulating together
the actions of social structuring which had forged the Arab milieu of
pre-Islam, the practice of Muslim preaching and the realisation of a warlike
political project. The rapid survey which follows will be based on arecent
study (Donner: 1981 14), but equally, will often diverge from it. Certain aspects
of this survey will be reviewed at greater length at a later stage. 15
Before Islam, two Arabias were in opposition, a central Arabia and a
peripheral Arabia. In the centre, in the arid regions, [60] a more or less loose
system of tribaI confederations was organised around petty aristocracies.
Among the nomads, albeit the minority, these elites firmly welded together
a warlike function and a religious investment. Among the sedentary,
their religious role consisted in the control of sacred territories (haram-s),
commercialised sanctuaries, places of pilgrimage. The sedentaries had
succeeded in asserting their authority over the nomads and semi-nomads who
set out on pilgrimages from urbanised centres and generally observed the
rules of a circulation of goods managed by their mercantile elites. Mecca
was, in the time of MUDammad, the most visible of these centres of attraction.
14 F. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, Princeton 1981.

15 This is not only a method of investigation, it is also, for me, a method of exposition,
returning constantly to the same subject and restating it - returning after adetour, having
gleaned some new information or finding myself obliged to take a slighUy different view.
There are many repetitions, but they are never exact repetitions.
At the periphery, towards the South in the weaIthier region of Yemen, to

the East and to the extreme North, certain aristocracies had been moved,
under the influence of exterior federalising tendencies (the Byzantine and
Sasanid empires, into the status of small kingdoms, either vassal (Lakhmid,
Ghassänid) or largely autonomous (Himyärite).
The policy of the Prophet Mu0.ammad was simultaneously to preserve, to
a certain extent, the power oft he aristocracies, and to create a new conception
of social linkage. A community (umma) , hitherto quite unheard of, was
founded on the law of one God and in opposition to the common lex talionis. It
was considered by its founder to be stable, unlike the federations which made
and unmade themselves (la hilfafi l-islam says the tradition, there will be no
federation in Islam, in other words: Islam as a society would be one). And the
empire of this community was to be established equally on each of its
constituents. To realise this, Mu0.ammad founded a haram in Medina - on the
model of the ancient haram-s - of which the only chieftain was he himself;
where new recruits offered allegiance, where alliances were concluded with
the chieftains of other cities, on payment of an obligatory tax (zakat: sacred
levy and token of allegiance) against the promise of reward. And above all, a
rigorous system of taxation seems to have been rapidly imposed on the tribes,
through the services of agent-collectors ('ummal).
A new aristocracy was established very quickly. At the summit, there were
the emigrants from Mecca (muhajirun) and the Medinan auxiliaries (ansar).
Nevertheless the sedentary elites, even those fervently [61] opposed to the
Prophet at the start of his preaching career, were subsequently not only
integrated into the community (umma), but also awarded responsibilities
there of the highest importance. On a broader basis, the sedentaries were
explicitly welcomed into the charismatic community and rewarded with gifts
(gifts "to attract hearts") in exchange for their allegiance. So, after this second
level of the hierarchy, that of the sedentary and sedentarised allies, there was
the inferior level, that of the nomads: they were the least trustworthy, the ones
most naturally removed from the stable system of community links which
Mu0.ammad aspired to create. The latter did not succeed in integrating
them entirely. The wars which Abu Bakr, the first caliph, conducted against
a number of them, "wars of apostasy" (ridda: term actually denoting the
refusal to pay tax on the part of nomads who feIt themselves no longer bound
to a structure whose founder, Mu0.ammad, was dead), were no more than a
gesture of consolidation ofwhat was beginning to be a "community" and ofits
internal hierarchy.
F. Donner, meanwhile, suggests an antagonism between nomads and
sedentaries which to me does not seem at all plausible. While it is accepted
The Conquest 5
that economic rivalries were not lacking and that, more specifically, the
caravans organised by the sedentaries hardly lent themselves to the razzias
which constituted, to a greater or lesser extent, the livelihood of a number of
nomadic tribes, while it is therefore true that the sedentaries feIt a great deal
ofmistrust regarding these tribes (a mistrust reflected even in the Qur'än- IX,
97, 101, for example), this does not mean that the two worlds were really
separate and antithetical. And, when tackling the descriptions oftheir leaders,
it is hard to maintain that for the nomads they were warlike, and for the
sedentaries, religious. Anticipating a future discussion, it should at this point
be affirmed that the Arab nomads and sedentaries lived in one and the
same world, and that the warlike and religious functions, far from being
dichotomous, existed in dose conjunction. However our guide touches an
essential point with the relationship that he establishes between the religious
function ofthe leaderships and their attachment to a sacred territory (haram).
Furthermore he is right to insist on Mul;tammad's awareness [62] of this
fact. That which the Meccan Prophet effectively retained from the Arab - and
not strictly city-based/ sedentary - milieu, reproducing and accentuating it
at Medina, was the connection with sacred territory of collective ownership
(haram) of organic units of people (tribe, lineage). Mul;tammad found in the
haram that which could found a new community. He adopted the religious
values of his milieu, while transforming them, while changing their sense.
Going further, F. Donner makes this split, fundamental in his opinion,
between nomads and sedentaries the tension from which, by circuitous
means, a political entity could be realised. It is certain that the sedentary
chieftains were the leaders of the Muslim movement, equally so that the
nomads were reduced and recruited to fight wars outside Arabia. It appears
however that our author veers off course and that some thread has been lost
along the way. An intuition perhaps has not been sufficiently analysed - and it
concerns this question of the Meccan and Medinan haram-s. We have he re in
effect, with the recourse by Mul;tammad to the creation of a haram, an example
of the immediate mode of religious organization. In other words, for the
convert to the new way, reference to the sacred was expressed, in a manner
which requires precise analysis, by reference to specific territories and to
those who controlled them. Now, this took place at a time when a discourse
was making itselfheard, arguing the case for strict monotheism (a single God,
creator). And it is convenient to suppose that this discourse was, in some way,
homogenous with the type of reference to the sacred and to the procedures
of mediation in foreign affairs, engendered by conservative recourse to the
haram. If then there is to be talk of the political construction that was realised
around the Medinan and Meccan sedentary leaderships, if it is to be stated
as a fact that the one or the ones through whom the event came about -
Mul).ammad and his first companions - were at least the carriers of a certain
religious discourse (on the divine), it would seem to be methodologically
prudent to propose the hypothesis, that engaging in this discourse
conditioned the formation of the political structure in question. When it is
admitted, on the other hand, that these leaderships had something to do with a
sacral function linked to the management of sacred territories, [63] we can
find here a possible articulation, if this is wanted, between the domain of the
religious (of discourse and of rite) and that of politics (of the structuring of
society around a centre of power). At the outset, the simple fact of the
existence of haram-s should be given elose consideration. It is not irrelevant to
make the comment, again, that in these places warlike and religious function
were intimately conjoined.
We revert he re to the facts. The campaigns from Arabia and the battles in
Syria and Iraq certainly corresponded to a double strategy of integration:
strategy of the nomads, whose interests elearly lay in submitting to the
Medinan chiefs and profiting from booty, and the strategy of the Medinan
chieftains, which consisted in keeping these troops enthusiastic for conquest,
deploying them, training them and controlling them completely. The conquest
and the first Arab settlement which ensued show, in fact, that after abrief
period of mistrust towards the nomads who had rebelled and been subdued,
general mobilisation was possible, giving a new impetus to the expansion and
facilitating a push weIl beyond the Euphrates.
The troops of the conquest were not disorganised hordes, descending
on the Syrian countryside or the ancient cities of the Euphrates. According
to the Arab historians, a vigorous discipline, unified command, aseparation
both military (in branches: archers, cavalry, vanguard, wing ... ) and tribaI
(by factions) in relatively small units, gave them remarkable effectiveness in
confrontation with heavy enemy contingents, often composed of mercenaries.
Added to all this was regular pay, and assured profits. 16
We may say, likewise, that the first settlements in Syria and in Iraq were
the activities ofthese hardly numerous "militaries" and the genuine and mass
migration came at a later stage.
All considered, was the conquest the process whereby astate, seen
as a religious movement, was born, consolidated itself, and integrated the
populations of Arabia, starting with the sedentaries and their mercantile
elites, followed by the nomads? Was it more than this, or indeed less?
16 We shall see this at a later stage (1.2) The very fact that there had been salaries, and an
auihoriiy io adminisier ihem, since ihe years following ihe firsi movemeni of conquesi
outside Arabia, is treated as an indirect reason by Arab historians.
The Conquest 7
Certainly, it can be said that the Arabs ofIslam owed only to themselves, to the
policy of their Prophet and of their first caliphs, the foundation of an [64]
empire: a policy which was the centralised unification of the Arabs and which,
to realise this, projected them outside Arabia. Certainly, the picture sketched
by F. Donner is appropriate for those who have attempted to situate the Arab
conquest not as an epiphenomenon or the effect of a cause totally exterior
to itself, but as a political realisation whereby a new structure of power
was constructed. However, the issue seems to be simultaneously thicker and
broader, thinner and more tenuous.
More tenuous, because the sources which inform us so promptly are
neither reliable nor, more importantly, sufficient. While it appears that the
conquerors were disciplined, organised, it has not been established that a
pre-existing and firmly established political structure controlled them.
While it is true that they travelled towards the Euphrates as weIl as towards
Syria, it is not certain that these two movements were programmed by
an omnipresent 'Umar Ibn al-Khattäb. The sources are late and demand
considerable prudence on the part of the historian. To propose the existence,
contemporaneously with the Prophet, of a kind of state (which decided to go to
war) seems to be more the effect of a re-reading made by the Arab informants
themselves than the plain reality. It is perhaps unwise to affirm that a
recognised sovereign authority, a coercive and unifying apparatus, could have
existed even be fore the conquest - it is moreover not much easier (however
serious the attempt: Donner: 1986 17) to find manifestations of this for the
beginning of the Umayyad era, or several decades after the first conquering
wave.
On the other hand, on the his tory of western Arabia in the early seventh
century, the most sceptical of historians accept as authentic or highly
plausible certain facts: the emergence of a radical monotheism, the formation
at Yathrib of a community (umma) consisting of immigrants and autochthones
(Athamina: 1987 18 ), the creation of a sacred space marking the communal
existence, the existence of a chieftain called Mul:J.ammad, the attraction of
Arab tribes towards this new centre. If we fall back prudently on these few
facts and, on the other hand, consider wh at it is possible to know about
western Arabia at that time, about its social and religious organisation (power
of chieftains and sacred areas, economic aspects [65] of aIliances ... ) it is
permissible to assert that a minimum of internal cohesion effectively existed
prior to the war of conquest undertaken by these Arab groups who had
17 F. Donner, The Formation of the Islamic State, in Journal of the American Oriental
Society (JAOS) 106-2 (1986), 283-296.
18 K. Athamina, A'rab and MuhöjirUn in the environment of Amsar, in SI 66 (1987), 5-25.
rallied to Mul;tammad or to his successors, and that this [war of conquest]

considerably reinforced an external cohesion - a disparity in comparison with
others - [that was] probably weak at the outset.
But the issue of conquest also seems larger than as defined by F. Donner,
because, in contradiction to the assertion ofthese same sceptics (cf. Serjeant:
1964,19 3-4) the Arab community that was formed at Yathrib-Medina was
religious, a point to which I will often return; it involved itself little by little in
a consistent monotheism, and it was in the process of transforming itself
in these terms. Also the war of conquest, and this is for the moment only a
starting hypothesis, must have shared in its religious values, ancient and
modern. To paraphrase Clausewitz, the war was not only a political act, the
reproductive act of a new society, it was also a political instrument, the
instrument of asserting of a specific form of monotheism. The construction
of a new political entity - which we shall call nascent Islam - and what
engendered it, i.e. the phenomenon of conquest, were certainly more than the
solution of a tension between antagonistic groups by the formation of astate
which subsumed them and controlled their aggression and projected this
tension towards the exterior. Not having fully considered the importance of
wh at he proposed (sacred territories and chiefdoms, conservative measures
of the Prophet), F. Donner definitively situated his comprehension of the
conquest somewhat outside what he had set in motion in his researches.
If it is commonly admitted that the attraction of Arab tribes towards
Medina was a communal reality, and if there was subsequently a dispersion
which did not negate this reality, because it had become so durable, it is
appropriate to accept that it became a fact of reflection, in terms of which
the his tory of the tribes, past and present, should be understood. And this
reflection comes to be articulated in a discourse of the conquest. In effect,
the terms used to speak of the conquest themselves became values, in the
Durkheimian sense of the word, that constituted a religious language. And
this process was possible because there was a hiatus - certainly chronological
and [66] soon reflexive - between the conquest and the Arab migration,
because there was thus the possibility of isolating the conquest and the
possibility of describing it. Finally, and only finally, came the state as a moral
institution, and the institutions.
Having taken the decision, which is certainly disputable, to proceed in
a recurrent manner, I shall begin by reviewing the facts which are the
material for those who are interested in the phenomenon of the conquest
and the establishment of the Arabs in the conquered regions. In the mass of
19 R.B. Serjeant, The Constitution of Medina, in Islamic Quarterly (IQ) 8 (1964) 3-16.
The Conquest 9
documentation at our disposal, attention should first of all be given to that

which assists understanding of the relations which the conquerors and
their immediate descendants maintained with the conquered and subjugated
populations. What in fact could be more revelatory of the manner of living,
thinking and self-representation of a group than its way of behaving vis-a-vis
others, vis-a-vis those whom it considers foreign?
It will thus not be a question, in this section, of describing the Arab
management of the conquered countries, nor of laying stress on taxation and
the system which the Arabs put in place to levy from the inhabitants of
these countries a proportion of their goods, or even considering in itself the
organisation ofthe redistribution ofthese goods in the Arab milieu; numerous
studies of these points have been published, to which reference is made in the
bibliography in fine. The course followed here has no other concern than
to clarify the image of the relations between the Arab group and the group
considered subjugated. This free approach does not exhaust any of the
issues encountered (administration, fiscality, circulation of goods). On the
other hand, and to address a question of methodology, it seems reasonable
to use, directly and through cross-referencing, the different categories of
documentation (archaeological, papyrologieal, literary, Qur'änic, kerygmatic):
the purpose being to reconcile the two figures, too drastically dissociated, of
the "warrior in the way of God" (religious figure) and of the "conquering
Arab" (historie figure). The origin of this manner of being, in relation to the
self and to others, can, subsequently and in a more leisurely fashion, be
explored (chaps. 11 and IV).
8
ANOTHER ORIENTALIST'S REMARKS
CONCERNING THE PIRENNE THESIS
Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz
By now fifty years have elapsed since the initial publication of Henri
Pirenne's brilliant concepts regarding the causes of the decay of the
Ancient order in Wlestern Europe 1). His provocative contributions
to .i\ledicval European history are sufficiently infl.uential to warrant
further comments today 2). In my view, however, the half-a-century
old dcbate, stimulated by his controversial ideas, has suffered from
two shortcomings. First, although the validity of Pirenne's thesis
depended decisively on a proper understanding of the 110slem Near
East and its relations with Europe in the early Middle Ages, no special-
ists in the field of Islamic history-three isolated instances excepting-
made themselves heard on the poiemical subject. And second, although
the impact of the dramatic changes in the Near East on the situation
in \Vestern Europe has constituted the focal issue in the Pirennean
controversy, nobody has raised the question of the immediate effect
of the Arab victory upon the economic conditions in the Near East
itself.
*) Paper presented at the Sixth Conference on Medieval Studies, May 1971,

sponsored by the Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalama-
zoo, Michigan.
I) H. Pirenne, 'Mahomet et Charlemagne', Revlle belge de philologie el de I'histoire,
I. 1922, p. 77-86.
2) For a summation of several opinions concerning the validity of H. Pirenne's
thesis see Anne Riising, 'The Fate of Henri Pirenne's Theses on the Consequences
of the Islamic Expansion,' Classica cl jl1edievalia, 13, 1952, p. 87-13°; also, Alfred F.
Havighurst, ed., The Pirenne Thesis, Analysis, Criticism, and Revision, Boston, 1958.
THE PI RENNE THESIS 95
The three exceptional inst::tnces involved the contributions of pro-

fessional Orientalist scholars: Daniel C. Dennett, Jr., 1) Claude Cahen 2),
and more recently, Elie Ashtor 3). Cahen's artide concerned itself
primarily with the methodological aspects of the role of Moslem
coinage in the commercial relations between the Near East and Euro-
pe 4). Furthermore, it concentrated on the advanced stage of Near
Eastern economic expansion, rather than on the situation which had
arisen shortly after the subjugation oE the near East by the Caliphate.
On the other band, Dennett :lnd Ashtor addressed themselves, even
if not exdusively, to the ccntral issue of the causal relations hip between
the expansion of Islam and the collapse oE the traditional order in
Western Europe.
Dennett rejected Pirenne's interpretation of the Near Eastern role
in the European decay. According to Dennett, the profound changes
in early Medieval Europe should not be :lttributed to adverse economie
trends-especially in the sphere of trans-Mediterranean commerce-
whieh were allegedly genetated by a hostile poliey of the victorious
Moslem regime. To quote Dennett : "There is no evidence to prove that
the Arabs either desired to dose, or actually did dose the Mediterranean
to the eommerce of tbe \Y/est either in the seventh or eighth centuries 5)".
I) 'Pirenne and Muhammad,' SpeCliluRI, 23, 1948, p. 165-19°.
2.) 'Quelques problemes concernant l'expansion economique musulmane au
Haut Moyen Age,' Settilllone di Studio del Cenlro Itoliono di Studi sull' Alto llfedioevo,
12., 1965, p. 391-431..
;) 'Quelques observations cl'un Orientaliste sur la these de Pirenne,' JOllrnal 0/
the Economic ol1d Socia} Histo'J' 0/ tbe Orient, 13, 1970, p. 166-194; also, 'Nouvelles
reflexions sur la these de.Pirenne,' Revue SIIisse d'histoire, 2.0, 1970, p. 601-607.
4) The problem of the bearing of Moslem coinage on monetary developments in
Western Europe was discussed by a number of 'Occidentalists', e.g. S. Bolin, 'Mo-
hammed, Charlcmagne :md Ruric,' The Scandil1aviOlI Economic History Review, 1,
1953, p. 5-39; C. M. Cipolla, 'Sans Mahomet, Charlemagne est inconcevable,'
Annales (Econolllies, Sociitts, CiL'ilisotions) 17, 1962, p. 130-136; J. Duplessy, 'La circu-
lation des monnaies arabes en Europe occidentale du VIII e au XIIIe siede,' Revlle
Nllmismatique, Ve serie, 18, 1956, p. 101-163; Ph. Grierson, 'Themonetary reforms
of (Abd al-Malik. Their metrological basis and their financial repercussions,' JOllrnal
of the Economic ond Social Histo'J' 0/ the Orient, ;, 1960, p. 241-264; Fr. Himly, 'Ya-t-il
emprise musulmane sur l'economie des Etats europeens du VIIIe au Xe siede,'
Revlle misse d'histoire. 5, 1955, p. 31-81.
5) D. C. Dennett, Jr., art. eit., p. 189.
103
A different pos1t1on was taken by Ashtor. Having Eoeused his

observations on the problem of the Mediterranean trade in the ninth
and early tenth eenturies-i.e., the period of the Carolingian state in
the West, and oE the domination of the <Abbäsid Caliphate in the
East-he has eoncluded that the volume oE transit trade moving
aeross Italy and Spain was "tres reduit ou meme infime 1)". One of
the main faetors behind this decline was general maritime inseeurity
prevailing in the Mediterranean beeause oE the almost incessant warfare
involving Byzantine and Moslem fleets. In support of this argument,
which is in agreement with the main thrust oE Pirenne's thesis, Ashtor
adduced evidence pointing to the rapid deeadence of Syrian :md Egyp-
ti an coastal towns in the wake of the victory of the Arabs 2).
But neither Dennett, nor Cahen, nor Ashtor has ever claimed that
his contribution offered alt that the Orientalists eould and should
state on the subject of the Pirennean dispute. The current increase in
interest und research in the field of IVIedieval Near Eastern economic
history 3) seems to portend that a more eomprehensive interpretation
of the historieal role oE 1Ioslem Near East in the formation of Medieval
Europe would soon be forthcoming.
In the meantime, however, I wish to make a few observations of
my own on the Pirennean thesis in the context of Medieval Near
Eastcrn eeonomie his tory. Although based on solid heunstie Eoun-
dations, my remarks, like those oE Pirenne and of his supporters and
adversaries, are speeulative in nature. Perhaps they will not add mueh
to the quality level oE the Pirennean debate, but at least they will
increase by 25% the number of Orientalists actively participating in
the famous eontroversy.
If, as postulated by Pi renne, the alleged cessation of the Mediter-
ranean trade had been eapable of ruining Europe it would have pro-
duced similar eonsequences, iE not even more disastrous consequences,
I)E. Ashtor, 'Quelques observations ... ,' p. 188; also, idem, 'Nouvelles re-
flexions ... " p. 602.
2) !dem, 'Quelques observations ... " p. 170; 'Nouvelles reflexions ... " p. 60S.
3) Cf., M. Cook, ed., SIlIdies in the EGonom;G His/ory of the Middle East from /he
Rise 0/ Islam 10 the Present Day, London, 1970.
THE PIRENNE THESIS 97
for the· Near Eastern economy_ International commerce in the Near

East gave its sodety important benefits from the lucrative transit
trade, as weil as import and export transaetions whieh flowed across
that strategie area eonnecting European markets with Afriea, India,
and Far East and South East Asia 1). For that very reason, the economie
poliey of the Arabs in the eonquered territories-especiaily their
indifferenee to or their interferenee with trade-was of crucial impor-
tance to the Near East, and only secondarily to Western Europe.
Although the economie and social fate of the Near East in the Middle
Ages, and by extension that of \Vestern Europe, depended on the
fundamental decisions of the Caliphate in the seventh and early eight
eenturies, their historical significanee has not been incisively inter-
preted or persuasiveIy explained. The conflicting opinions of Dennett
and Ashtor may serve as an illustration. "There is no evidence to
prove that the Arabs . _. desired to elose. .. the Mediterranean to
the eommeree of the West either in the seventh or eighth eenturies"
stated Dennett 2). On the eontrary! There exists textual evidence
explicidy proving that thc Arab regime insisted on freedom of mari-
time trade. It eonsists of aseparate artiele in the solemn fiseal decree
issued between A.D. 717-720 by Caliph (Umar II, proelaiming: "As
for the sea, we hold that its way is the way of the dry land. God hath
said: 'God it is Who hath subdued to you the sea that the vesse1s may
sail thereon by His command and that ye may seek of His bounty!'
Therefore He hath given permission therein that who so wills may
ttade thereon; and I hold that we should place no obstaele between
it and any one of the people. For dry land and sea belang alike to
God; He hath subdued them to His servants to seek of His bounty
for themselves in both of them. How then should we intervene be-
tween God's servants and their means of livelihood 3)?"
Of course, it does not neeessarily follow that the official govern-
mental declaration in favor of the "open sea" policy eonstituted a
I) For arecent authoritative discussion of the significance of the Near East as
transit area see J. Innes Miller, The Spiee Trade 0/ the Roman Empire, Oxford, 1969-
z) D. C. Dennett, Jr., 10(. eil.
3) CJ., H. A. R. Gibb, 'The Fiscal Rescript of (Umar II,' Arabica, z, 19550 p. 6.
103
guarantee of healthy trade conditions. Indeed, the fact that <Umar

made such an unequivocal statement suggests that Mediterranean
trade eonditions left something to be desired.
As for Ashtor's opinion regarding the responsibility of maritime
inseeurity for dwindling Mediterranean eommerce, one is tempted
to reverse the alleged causal relations hip. Could it be the maritime
insecurity had resulted from a lack of interest on the part of "inter-
continental" business to invest their eapital in trans-Mediterranean
operations? With Mediterranean trade thus becoming "tres reduit ou
meme infime 1)," Arab authorities had little motivation to commit
their resources for the maintenance of strong naval forees and burden-
some coastal fortresses and shipyards in Syria and Egypt. It is this
factor which may weil have accounted for the spread of inseeurity
in the Mediterranean, and which may have precipitated a rapid decline
of formerly flourishing towns along the eoast of Syria and Egypt.
1s it plausible to postulate that "inter-continental" commerce
operating from the Near East ,or using that area as its strategie transit
zone, had lost interest in the markets to the oorth of the Mediterranean?
Very definitely so. Indeed, one of the most significant results of the
Arab victory on eeonomie history was a natural, organie redirection
of commercial activities in the sensitive area of the Near East, brought
about by a specific fiscal policy of the new regime, and by the ensuing
emergence of lucrative markets within the borders of the Caliphate.
To understand the nature of that significant evolution one has to
consider the basic aspects of the economic situation arising from the
Arab domination in the Near East.
Unlike their effects in the sphere of politics, religion and culture,
the victories of the Arabs and the establishment of the Caliphate did
not result in any drastic or revolutionary changes in the eeonomic
life of Near Eastern society. As in pre-1slamic times, agriculture,
artisan production, and interna! and external commeree, as weil as
the institution of metallic currency, continued as the basic features
of the economy of the Near East. Moreover, the entire tax base survived
I) E. Ashtor, 'Quelques observations ... " p. 188.
THE PIRENNE THESIS

99
virtually intact in spite of the downfall of the Säsänid monarchy and

the expulsion of the Byzantine hierarchy. The main reason for such
developments was the non-destructive charaeter of the great eonquest.
Certainly, battles were fought and some eities endured prolonged
siege operations, but in general the dramatie takeover was aeeomplished
without substantiallosses by the tax-paying eivilian population or by
revenue-yielding establishments.
A major transformation, however, oeeurred in the nature of the
exeeutive power structure of Near Eastern fiseal organization. State
revenue was no longer administered by two different and mutually
hostile imperial treasuries, the Byzantine in Constantinople and the
Säsänid in Ctesiphon. Responsibility for determining the nature
of taxation, for the system of eolleetion as weil as for the aIloeation
of the revenue, was taken over by one eentral and supreme finaneial
institution, established by Caliph 'Dmar I (A.D. 634-644), to serve
the needs of the Caliphate 1). The way in whieh the new administration
diseharged its fiseal responsibility during the initial period of its
existenee proved to be instrumental in ushering in a new and dynamie
era in the history of Near Eastern eeonomy.
As regards the level of taxation and the method of tax eolleetion,
the poliey of the Caliphate towards the eonquered areas was eharaeter-
ized by eonservative moderation. Exeept for minor loeal modifieations
Arab eonquerors did not interfere initially with the system or systems
of taxation inherited from their predeeessors 2). It was in the matters
of distribution of the aeeumulated wealth that the policy of the early
Caliphate aequired a truly innovative eharaeter. To understand the
essenee and implieations of the drastie fiseal innovations one has to
consider a demographie change whieh the Near East uderwent in
the wake of Arab vietory.
As it happened, one of the outstanding demographie problems
1) Cf., Matti 1. Moosa, 'The diwän of 'Umar ibn al-Khanäb,' SI/dies in Islam,
2.,1965, p. 67-78; Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, Der Diwän von 'Umar ibn al-lja//äb. Ein Beitrag
zur friihislamischen Verwaltll11gsgeschichte, 1970.
2) Cf., D. C. Dennett, Jr., Conversion and the Poil Tax in EarIJ Islam, Cambridge,
195°·
100
of the Arab invasion was the mass immigration of the surplus popu-
lation from the Arabian peninsula to the sedentarized zone of the
Near East. It is true that eertain segments of the Near Eastern seden-
tary population were displaced as a result of the Arab vietory. CI
refer to the Byzantine and Säsänid ruling elite whose members were
either expelled or exterminated by the Arabs). There is no doubt,
however, that the number of the newcomers exeeeded by far the dis-
plaeed Byzantine and Säsänid elements, for to aeeommodate the mass
of Arab immigrants it was not enough to take over premises vacated
by the ousted population. Irtdeed, entire new quarters had to be added
to old towns, or completely new urban settlements had to be founded 1).
With the exeeption of a small minority, the mass of the Arab immigrants
represented unskilled labor wrueh under normal political and social
conditions could hardly have been absorbed by or integrated with the
loeal sedentary population of the Fertile Crescent without causing
a major eeonomie and social upheaval. As it was, that mass immi-
gration did not impede normal economie activity. The healthy trans i-
tional integration was accomplished because of the introduction
by the Caliphate of an unusual system of fiscal benefits, according to
wruch all full-fledged members of the victorious Arab people were
entitled to regular cash stipends, called (a!a'"), in addition to their lower
taxation rates 2). Because of that ingenious system, the early Arab
immigrants, far from being a liability, constituted a strongly subsidized
sodal and ethnic group capable of growing economic roots in the new
territories, with litde dis advantage to the locallabor or artisan force.
One may argue, of course, that the operation of the system of
(a/ti' eonstituted a fiscal burden on the Iocal population. After all,
the money distributed among the members of the privileged dass was
normally obtained from ta."'1:es impos~d on the non-Arab Near Eastern
1) Cf, E. Reiterneyer, Die Städtegründungen der Araber im Islam, Leipzig, 1912;

E. Pauty, 'Villes spontanees et villes creees en Islam,' Annales de I' Institut d' Etudes
Orientales (Alger), 9, 19P, p. 51·-71·
z) Cf, Cl. Cahen, '<Atä',' The Encyclopaedia 0/ Islam, new edition, i/7Z9-730;
A. S. Tritton, 'Notes on the Muslim System of Pensions,' Bulletin 0/ the School of
Orien/ai and African StIldies, 16, 19H, p. 170-172.; Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, op. eit.
THE PIRENNE THESIS 101
population. But as stated above, the eonquerors did not levy any ta..'Ces
that the population of the Near East had not been paying for the benefit
oE the earlier politieal regimes. Like the Byzantines and the Säsänids
before, the Arab eonquerors assumed responsibility for maintaining
politieal and administrative eohesiveness in Near Eastern territories.
Unlike pre-Islamie times, no center of politieal and administrative
gravity enjoying jurisdietion over Near Eastem territories, was loeated
outside the Near East, as had been the ease of Rome and Constanti-
nople. Consequently, none of the monies colleeted by the Caliphate
supported an external capital and its policies, but by means of the
<ata' system, all of them were retained, re-invested, diffused for the
benefit of the loeal Near Eastem population.
It is obvious that the rise of a political and administrative power
structure in the central regions of the Near East, in Syria under the
Umayyads and in Mesopotamia under the <Abbäsids, was aeeompanied
by a powerful injection oE ready cash into the Near Eastern economy.
In pre-Islamic times economie production in the Mediterranean pro v-
inces of the Near East had been geared to meet the needs of huge
consumer centers such as Rome, and later Constantinople. Henee the
importance of the coastal towns in Egypt and Syria. But wirh the
establishment of the Arab regime, new consumer centers arose in the
Near Eastern regions themselves. Arab setders, whether ruling elite
or members of rank and file, constituted a potent consumer dass.
By establishing themselves in the sedentarized lands of the Near East
they necessarily generated a substantial increase in economic produc-
tivity. The expansion of old towns and proliferation of new urban
settlements created a boom in the housing industry. Ashtor refers to
the decline of some coastal eities, but he forgets to mention the foun-
dation and growth of Fustät in Egypt 1), or Ramlah in Palestine 2),
of Ba~rah, Küfah and \Väsit in Mesopotamia 3), and oE several other
inland towns which came into prominence following the victory
I) Cf., J. Jomier, 'Fustät,' The Encydopaedia 0/ Islam, new edition, ü/957-959;
G. T. Scanlon, 'Housing and Sanitation,' The Islamic City, Oxford, 1970, p. 179- 1 94.
1.) Cf., E. Reitemeyer, op. cit.~ p. 73 f.
3) IbM., p. llf; 2.9f; 46f.
102
of the Arabs. Some wealthy residents or protectors of various towns

and communities encouraged refined architectural and artistic creativity.
Monumental architecture or sumptuous mosaic decorations ceased to
be a monopoly oE the Säsänids or oE the Byzantines. Byzantine crafts-
men were now employed in the construction oE Islamic shrines 1).
Furthermore, the growth of the urban population generated a
strong demand for food supplies, thus stimulating speculative agri-
culture and interest in acquisition of landed property 2). Likewise,
internal trade benefited from the new situation by performing economic
functions between the urban and rural population 3).
All these favorable economic trends were reflected in the concurrent
monetary developments. The best known event in the monetary
history of the period is the great reform of Caliph <Abd al-Malik
(A.D. 685-715)whointroduced trimetallic Arabic coinage (gold, silver,
and copper, i.e. dinär, dirham, and jals) to serve as the classical model
for Near Eastern coinage production in the Middle Ages. Various
numismatic and ideological ramifications of that reform have already
received adequate scholarly attention 40), but not its internal economic
implications. Maurice Lombard, who investigated the function of gold
in the economic supremacy of the Moslem world, defined that particular
phase of Moslem history (8th-9th centuries) as the age of adminis-
trative reforms, marked by the return to circulation of precious metals
accumulated in church treasuries 5). He failed, however, to elaborate
I) O. Grabar, 'Islamic Art and Byzantium,' Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 1964, p.
69-88; also, H. A. R. Gibb, 'Arab-Byzantine Relations under the Umayyad Ca-
liphate,' Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 12, 1958, p. 219-233.
2) Cf, Saleh A. Ali, 'Muslim Estates in Hidjaz in the First Century A.D.,'
Journal 01 the Economic and Sodal History 01 the Orient, 2, 1959, p. 247-261; O. Grabar,
"UmayYad 'Palace' and the 'Abbäsid 'Revolution'," Studia Islamica; 18, 196;, p.
5- 18 , esp. p. 7-8; 14-15.
;) For the importance of the Near Eastern mercantile dass in that early period
see S. D. Goitein, 'The Rise of the Near Eastern Bourgeoisie in Early Islamic Times,'
Cahiers d'histoire mondiale, ;, 1957, p. 58;-604.
4) Cf; G. C. Miles, 'Dinär,' The EncycIopaedia 01 Islam, new edition, ü/297-299;
idem, 'Dirharn,' ibid., ii/3I9-;20; A. L. Udovitch, 'Fals,' ibM., ii/768-769.
5) M. Lombard, 'Les bases monetaires d'une suprematie economique. Vor
musulman du ,VIIe au Xle siede,' Annales (Economies, Societis, Civilisations), 2,
1947, p. 143-160.
THE PI RENNE THESIS 103
on the economic justification behind the decision oE the Arab adminis-

tration to release vast quantities oE gold, silver, and copper coins for
the use of Near Eastern markets. Under normal conditions the volume
of coinage in circulation represents the total value oE economic activi-
ties a given society happens to be engaged in. In other words, the
volume of coinage in use is regulated by the actual state of the economy.
An expanding economy calls for an increase of coinage, a shrinking
economy for its withdrawal, debasement or hoarding. And certainly,
an indiscriminate release or oversupply of coinage, with its unavoidable
inflationary consequences, is as disastrous for economy as ruthless over-
taxation. In the case oE early Islamic history, the monetary reEorm
of <Abd al-Malik-its alleged religious or ideological background
notwithstanding-must have been undertaken in response to the
expanding market conditions. Although the supply of new coins as-
sumed tremendous proportions, and although their production kept
on being expanded during the early Caliphate 1), no inflationary
developments were set off by such a monetary policy 2). General
stability of prices or 3), to be more precise, lack of source references
to any drastic rise in the prices of commodities-seems to suggest
that the sustained intensive output of coins in the early Caliphate bore
witness to the great vitality oE the Near Eastern market in that period.
All these developments could not have left the position oE the inter-
continental commerce unaffected. In a certain sense the political
consequences of the great Arab victory had contributed to a major
change in this area. With the expulsion of the Byzantines and the
destruction oE the Säsänids, the political barrier which had hitherto
divided the Near East into two separate blocs ceased to exist. The
removal oE this artmcial barrier, which had been at the root of many
destructive wars between the pre-Islamic powers, meant that the
natural trade exchange between the western and eastern regions of
I) W. G. Andrews Jr., et al., 'Early Islamic Mint Output,' Journal of tbe Economic
and Social History of tbe Orient, 9, 1966, p. 211-241.
2) E. Ashtor, Histoire des prix et des salaires dans "Orient mMievale, Paris, 1969, p. 40.
3) Ibid., p. 453 f.
1°4
the Near East could operate without harmful obstructions motivated

by political considerations. Indeed, before one proceeds to consider
the validity of Pirenne's allegations that the Arabs were guilty of dis-
rupting the unity of the Mediterranean wodd, one should credit them
with the integration of almost entire Near Eastern subcontinent into a
common market area with obvious benefits to long-distance trade
investors.
"L'economie marchande du Moyen Age musulman, eomme eelle
de l' Antiquite, etait surtout une economie de speculation et d'acqui-
sition", declared Cl. Cahen referring to the flexibility and economic
adaptability of commerce in Islamic :Middle Ages 1). In view of the
expanding economy of the Caliphate, in view of the emergence of
large consumer" centers, in view of the rapid growth of Iocal market
demand, the long-distance merchants had small need for the markets
of Western Europe. Instead of crossing or circumventing the Medi-
terranean, the Far East trade merchants, like those of the India and
Africa trade, or even the distributors of the fruits of Iocal Near Eastern
production, could meet their profit requirements by directing their
shipments or caravans to Damascus, Fus~ä~, Baghdäd or Qayrawän.
ObviousIy, it was trus natural economically motivated re-orientation
of trans-continenta1 commerce, which precipitated a catastrophic decline
in trans-Mediterranean trade, deplored by Pirenne and his supporters.
And today, so far as the Pirennean debate is concerned, the time has
come when more attention should be devoted to the nature and conse-
quences of the Near Eastern economic developments in the eady Middle
Ages. Instead of debating the issue of the Mediterranean trade following
the Arab conquest, the Pirennean polemicists should consider the
positioh oE commerce to the east oE the former mare nostrum. Above all,
they should admit the possibility thatthe roots of some of the issues in the
Pirennean controversymay befoundin the progressive and constructive
economic policy oE the Arabconquerors.
1) Cl. Cahen, 'Quelques mots sur le declin comrnerclal du monde musulman a

la fin du moyen age,' Studies in Ihe Economic Hislory of Ihe Middle Easl, London,
1970, p. 35.
9
INITIAL BYZANTINE REACTIONS
TO THE ARAB CONQUEST
Walter E. Kaegi
Numerous competent studies have appeared on Christi an apo1-
ogetics-both Byzantine and Western Medieva1-against Islam. A
significant gap, however, remains. The Byzantines, of course, first
encountered Islam because of the Arab conquest in the second and
third quarters of the seventh century. Yet the earliest known Byzan-
tine apologist against Islam is Saint J ohn Damascene in the eighth
century. But what initial impression did the Arab conquest and Islam
make upon seventh-century Byzantine contemporaries? The seventh-
century Byzantine sources on Byzantine reactions to the Arab con-
quest are scarce, inconvenient1y located, and insufficiently studied.
There is no known individual Byzantine tract of the seventh century
devoted specifically to the problem of Islam and/or the Arab con-
quest. But even though seventh-century sources are re1ative1y rare-
on any subject-by a elose reading of those which are avai1ab1e one
can glean some interesting and, in my opinion, important indications
concerning Byzantine reactions to the Arab conquest. Obvious1y such
a major historica1 event as the 10ss of Egypt, Pa1estine and Syria
wou1d greatly have impressed the Byzantines and wou1d have caused
them to ponder its significance. 1
Our first two sourees, the Christmas sermon of Patriarch Soph-
ronius of Jerusa1em (Patriarch 634-638), and the Doctrina Jacobi
nuper baptizati, date from 634, only two years after the death of
Muhammad. They are, therefore, quite early documents. Both of these
sources have been pub1ished for some time in critica1 editions, but they
have never been elose1y ana1yzed for their interesting historica1 con-
tents. Sophronius de1ivered his sermon at Christmas, 634, in the face
of dire circumstances. The Arabs had successfully overrun much of
Pa1estine and had occupied Beth1ehem, preventing Christian pilgrims
from visiting the scene of the Nativity for the first time in memory.
The sermon, therefore, is a contemporary record of the deep impres-
sion which the very beginnings of the Arab conquest made upon a
foremost Byzantine bishop and theo10gian. Sophronius found many
01d Testament parallels to the current situation. He be1ieved, more-
over, that this extraordinary Arab invasion was a divine1y sent punish-
ment for Christian sins:
Because of countless sins and very serious faults, we have become un-
I. On weM;ern medieval views of Islam: N.A. Daniel, Isla;m and the West: Making of an
Image (Edinburgh, 1958); R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle .Ages
(Cambridge Mass.,1962). Byzantium and Islam: C. Güterboek, Der Isla;m Vm Lichte der
byzantinisc"li,en Polemik (Betlin, 1912); D. Eichner, "Die Nachrichten über den Islam
bei den Byzantinern," Der Islam, XXIII (1936) 133-244; J. Meyendorff, "Byzantine
Views of Islam," Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 18 (1964), 115-132; Manuel II Palaeologus,
Entretiens (lliJec un Musulman. 'Je c.ontroverse, ed., tr_ Th. Khoury (Sourees Chretiennes,
No. 115, Paris, 1966). On the Arab eonquest: A. J. Butler, The .Arab Conquest of Egypt
(Oxford, 1902); P. K. Ritti, The Origins of the Islamic State (reprinted, Behut, 1966) ;
and M. J. DeGoeje, Memoire sur la conquete de la Syrie (Memoires d 'histoire et de
g~ographie orientales, II, Leiden, 1900).
worthy of the sight of these things [the sights of Bethlehem] and are
prevented from entering Bethlehem by way of the roads. Unwillingly,
indeed contrary to our wishes, we are required to stay at horne, not bound
c10sely by bodily bonds, but bound by fear of the Saracens, and we are
prevented from experiencing such heavenly joy, and are enguHed by a
grief suited to our wretchedness which is unworthy of blessings. 2
Sophronius then compared the situation of the sinful Christians
to that of Adam after the Fall, whom the flaming sword barred from
paradise: "We do not see the twisting, flaming sword, but rather the
sword of the Saracens, beastly and barbarous, which truly is filled
with every diabolic savagery. This sword, which flashes forth fear-
fully and which shines forth inc1ined to murder, banishes us from that
blessed sight [Bethlehem] and orders us to stay at horne and does
not set us free to go forth.»3
Sophronius continued, pointing out that the situation of the Jeru-
salem Christians was also analogous to that of David: "But just as
we, so David was prevented from running to holy Bethlehem and
drinking at that time because of the slime of the gentiles (like the
Saracens now). This slime hindered David from reaching God-receiv-
ing Bethlehem just as it now prevents uso Through fear it prevented
hirn from satisfying that very longing and blessed appetite, beyond
which there is nothing more blessed or more dear and more delight-
ful.'"
Sophronius apparently was not cognizant of the Islamic religious
springs of this outpouring of Arab marauders. Thus he did not men-
tion Muhammad. In his view, the Arabs were simply terrible, god-
less invaders without any religious impulse (indeed many of the in-
vading tribesmen only recently had converted from paganism to Islam
and probably had only a slight or no understanding of Muhammad's
religious message) :
But we have the Davidic desire and thirst, to see, just as David farn aus
in song, the water and we are prevented from feasting our souls through
fear of the Saracens alone. For now the slime of the godless Saracens
[Sarakenon gar atheön] , like the gentiles at that time, has captured
Bethlehem and does not yield the passage, but threatens slaughter and
destruction if we leave this holy city and if we dare to approach our be-
loved and sacred Bethlehem.5
Finally, Sophronius regarded this calamity as the proper occasion
for a rededication to Christian principles and he boldly predicted a
Christian triumph over this new enemy who had appeared so sud-
denly (an interesting anticipation of the mentality of the Crusades) :
2. 8ophroniue, "Weihnaehtepredigt dee Sophronoe," ed. H. Usener, Rheinische8 MU8eum
für PhUoT,ogie, N.F. 41 (1886), 506·507. On Sophronius: 8. ImpeJlizzeri, La -letteratura
bizantina da Costantino agH Iconoclasti (Ban, 1965), pp. 208-209, 357; B. Altaner,
Patrologie (7th ed.; Freiburg, 1966), pp. 520-521; G. Bardenhewer Geschichte def' alt·
1citrchlichen Literatur (Freiburg, 1932) V, 36-41; H.-G. Back, Kirche und TheoZogitche
Literatw im byzantinischen Reich (Munieh, 1959), pp. 434·436; cf. aleo, H. Usener,
BeligWnsgeschichtliche Untef'suchungen, I: Das Weihnachtspredigt (2nd ed.; Bonn,
1911), 335-336.
3. Sophronius, "Weihnaehtspredigt " 507. Cf. Gen. ili. 24.
4. 8ophroniue, (( Weihnaehtepredigt" 513.
5. 8ophroniue, "Weihnachtspredigt " 514.
140
Therefore I call on and I command and I beg you for the love of Christ
the Lord, in so far as it is in our power, let us correct ourselves, let us
shine forth with repentance, let us be purified by conversion and let us
curb our performance of acts which are hateful to God. If we constrain
ourselves, as friendly and beloved of God, we would laugh at the fall of
our Saracen adversaries and we would view their not distant death, and
we would see their final destruction. For their blood-loving blade will
enter their hearts, their bows will be shattered and their shafts will be
fixed in them. They will furnish a c1ear way for us having neither hills
nor thorns nor impassible points so that we, running boldly and dauntlessly,
may possess the child of life, may love the God-receiving chamber, may
prostrate ourselves before the holy manger. Weshall embrace the God-
producing city [Bethlehem] dancing with lambs, shouting with the magi,
giving glory with the angels: "Glory to God in the Highest and on earth,
peace and good will to men."6
Thus this passage contains fascinating contrasts of bloodshed, victory
and peace.
The Doctrina ] acobi nuper baptizati is a dialogue which appar-
ently took place on 13 July 634 between Jacob, arecent compulsory
convert to Christianity, and several Jews. The tract airs contemporary
doubts about the condition of the "Roman (i.e., Byzantine) Empire,"
and is, therefore, an interesting and neglected source on Byzantine
eschatology and an important link in the history of the concept of im-
perial decadence. Jacob contrasts the former grandeur of the empire
with its tarnished contemporary condition: "For the Romans sub-
jugated, through the will of God, all of the races. But today we see
the Romans humbled. 117 Several times he refers to the Roman or By-
zantine Empire as the famous fourth beast of which the prophet Dan-
iel had spoken. He comments on the condition of the empire and on
the "relation of the empire's situation to Daniel's prophecy: "If the
fourth beast, that is, the Roman Empire, is reduced, torn asunder and
shattered, as Daniel said, verily there will be no other, except the ten
claws and the ten horns of the fourth beast, and afterwards a little
horn, completely different, which has knowledge of God. Immedi-
ately there will take place the end of the universe and the resurrection
of the dead."8
Justus, one of the participants in the dialogue of the Doctritna, re-
ports that his brother Abraham of Caesarea "wrote to me saying that
a deceiving prophet appeared amidst the Saracens." Justus asserted
that Abraham referred the matter to an old scribe: "What do you
tell me, lord and teacher, concerning the prophet who has appeared
among the Saracens? And the scribe told me, with much groaning,
'He is deceiving. For do prophets come with swords and chariot?
Verily, these events of today are works of confusion .... Yet depart,
6. Sophronius, "Weihnachtspredigt" 514·515. Cf. Luke Ü. 14.
7. DoctriM Jacobi nuper boptizati, ed. N . Bonwetsch (Abhandlungen der Königliehen
Gesellschaft der WiS8ensehaft~n zu Göttingen, Philologisch·historiche Klasse, N.F. Bd.
XII, Nr. 3 [1910]), 62.
8. DoctriM Jaoobi nuper baptizati, 63. Cf. Dan. vii. 17·27. On the fourth beast: H. H.
Rowley, Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the BooTe of Daniel (reprinted,
Cardiff, 1964); J. W. Swain, "The Theory of the Four Monarchies. Opposition History
under the Roman Empire," Classical Philology, xxxv (1940), 1·21.
141
Lord Abraham, and leam about the prophet who has appeared.' And
taking more than enough pains about it, I, Abraham, ... heard from the
followers of the prophet that you will discover nothing true from the
said prophet except human bloodshed. . . . These things my brother
Abraham wrote to me, Justus, from the east.,,9 The identification of the
Roman Empire with the fourth beast of Daniel's prophecy is not un-
usual, but it is interesting to see Byzantine contemporaries, whether
J ewish or Christian, attempting so soon to fit thd new phenomenon
of Islam into the familiar scheme of Daniel's apocalyptic prophecy.
To my knowledge, the DO,ctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati is the earliest
Byzantine literary text which refers to Muhammad and his religious
message (although it is true that it does not mention hirn by name).
It is also the earliest Byzantine tract to place a judgment upon Islam.
Sometime between 634 and 640 Maximus the Confessor, the firm
monastic opponent of Monotheletism, expressed feelings of shock and
revulsion at the progress of the Arab conquest. In his letter to Peter
the Illustrious he makes no specific mention of Islam, but he asks:
"What could be more serious than the evils now enveloping the in-
habited world? What could be more terrible to those perceiving it
than what is happening? What could be more piteous or fearful to
those who are now suffering than to see a barbarous people of the
desert overrun a foreign land as though it were their own, and' to see
wild and untamed beasts, whose form alone is human, devour civilized
government ?11l0
Late in the seventh century, St. Anastasius the Sinaite wrote a
sermon in which he related the Arab military successes to the excesses
of Emperor Constans II against the orthodox, that is, catholic, church.
Anastasius in particular deplored the mistreatment of the Roman pope,
Martin I:
Martin was exiled by the grands on of Heraclius [Constans III and
swiftly arose Amalik [the Islamicized Arab tribes] of the desert,
who struck us, the peqple of Christ. That was the first terrible
and incurable fall of the Roman [Byzantine] army. I am speaking of the
bloodshed at Yarmuk and Dathemon, after which occurred the capture
and buming of the cities of Palestine, even Caesarea and Jerusalem.
After the destruction of Egypt there followed the enslavement and in-
curable devastation of the Mediterranean lands and islands. But those
ruling and dominating the Roman Empire did not understand these
things. They summoned the foremost men in the Roman Church, cut
out their tongues and cut off their hands. And what then? The requital
from God was the virtually complete destruction of the Roman army
at Phoenix and the destruction of the fleet and the destruction during
his reign of the whole Christian people and all places. This did not
cease until the persecutor [Constans II] of Martin perished by the
sword [A.D. 668] in Sicily."ll
9. Dootrina J aco"bi n'Uper baptizati, 86-87.
10. Maximus Confessor, epist. 14, ad PetTum illustT61n, PG 91. 540. Date: P. Sherwood,
An Annatated Date-list af the WOTks of Maxim'U8 the 00nfes80T (Studia Anselmiana,
fase. 30, Rome, 1952), 40. In general: O. Bardenhewer, Geschichte d.8T oUkir:ohlichen
Literatur (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1932) V, 28-36; B. Altaner, Patrologu;7, pp. 521-524;
Beek, Theologie und Kirohe, pp. 436-442. . .
11. Anastasius Sinaita, Sermo 3, PG 89, 1156. Cf. Beck, Theologte und Ktrche, pp. 442-443;
F. Da Sa, "Anastasius Sinaita, St." N ew Catholio Enoyol,opedia I (1967), 481.
142
Anastasius then pointed to the external peace which Byzantium en-

joyed while the Arabs destroyed themselves in civil war. This, he em-
phasized, took place only after Emperor Constantine IV restored peace
and unity within the church. Thus Anastasius, like Sophronius, per-
ceived the Arab conquest as a divine retribution for Christian sins,
in this ca se, the sins of Emperor Constans II (641-668). But already
some inaccuracies in the history of Arab conquest were appearing, for
the battle of Yarmuk (636) took place under Emperor Heraclius, not
under his grands on Constans II; the reference to "Amalik" seems
garbled. 12 Therefore the reaction of the seventh-century Byzantine
Christians bears similarity to Byzantine reactions to the decline of the
Western Roman Empire (for fifth-century Byzantine observers also
sought to find religious explanations for the barbarian victories and
for the collapse of imperial defenses) .13
The seventh--century apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius regarded
the Arab Conquest as the fulfillment of theOld Testament prophecies
of Danie1 and Jeremiah. The author of this apocalypse asserted that
destruction would befall the Romans or Byzantines in a manner an-
alogous to their annihilation of other peoples: " ... the rulers of the
Greeks, that is, the Romans, will fall on the point of the sword. Just
as the Romans killed the ruiers of the Hebrews and Greeks, so they
themselves will fall on the point of the sword of the seed of IshmaeI,
who was called the wild ass, because in anger and wrath they will be
dispatched on the face of the earth against men, cattle, all wild beasts,
plants and every kind of fruit."14
The Pseudo-Methodius apocalypse attributed the success of the
Arabs to the sins of the Romans or Byzantines, in particular to their
sexual license:
Thus not because He loved thern did the Lord God give to the power
to seize the land of the Christians, but because of the lawlessness of the
Christians. The likes of it never had occurred nor rnay it occur in the
entire generations of earth. For why did rnen put on the clothes of
adulterous warnen and prostitutes, adorn thernselves as warnen and
openly stand in the squares and rnarkets of towns and change their
natural practice for an unnatural one .... ? Likewise, wornen did the same
things as the rnen had done. Father, son and brother had intercourse
with one wornan who touched every kinsrnan, for they were not recog-
nized by the prostitutes. . . . For this reason God delivered thern into the
hands of the barbarians, that is, because of their sin and stench. The
women will pollute themselves through the men who al ready are polluted
and the sons of Ishmael will cast lots [for them].15
12. Anastasius Sinaita, PG 89. 1156·1157. Yarmuk: BaladhurifP· K. Ritti, Origins ot the
Islamic State, pp. 207-212; Theophanes, Chronographia, A.M. 6126, ed. C. De Boor
(Leipzig 1883, I, 338-339); J. B. Bury, History ot the Later Roman Empire (1st ed.;
London, i889) II, 263·265; De Goeje, Memoire Bur la conquete de Syrie, pp. 31·34, 103·136.
13. Cf. W. E. Kaegi, Jr., Byzantium and the Decline pt Rome (Princeton, 1968), chapters 4-6.
14. Otkrovenie Mefodiia Patarskago i Apokriticheskiia Videnia Daniela v Vizantiiski i
Slaviano·Russkoi Literaturakh, ed. V. M. Istrium, Chtenlia v Imperatorskom Obshchestvie
Istorii i Drevnostei Rossiiskikh pri Mos'kovs'kom Universitetie, No. 193 (Moscow, 1897),
Te'ksty, 26·27. Cf. brief discussion in the valuable article by P. J. Alexander, "Medieval
Apocalypses as Ristorical Sourees," American Historical Review LXXIII (1968),
1000-1002.
15. Otkrovenie Mefodiia Patars'kago 27-28.
The author. was careful to emphasize that God had no love for the
Muslim Arabs, that their victories did not signify divine approval of
them or Islam, but instead resulted from strong divine disapproval
-supported by appropriate scriptural quotations--of recent Christian
conduct. The author apparently wished to point out that Arab military
successes did not justify any Christian conversions to Islam.
The Pseudo-Methodius apocalypse proceeded to catalogue and ex-
plore, in the most lurid detail, the various horrors wh ich accompanied
the Arab conquest. The author allowed his imagination to run wild
concerning the bloodthirsty and rapacious acts of the conquerors. He
wished to make the conquest appear as horrible as possible to effect
the maximum shock and contrition on the part of his audience:
The land of Persia will be delivered over to ruin and destruetion and
her inhabitants to eaptivity and the sword. Cappadocia and her in-
habitants will be swallowed down in similar ruin, eaptivity aand slaughter.
Sieily will become desolate and her inhabitants will meet slaughter and
eaptivity. Hellas and inhabitants will meet destruction, eaptivity and the
sword. Romania [Asia Minor] will undergo destruction and her peo-
pIe will be turned to flight. The islands of the sea will beeome desolate
and their inhabitants will perish through the sword and captivity. Egypt,
the East and Syria will be loaded with an immeasurable yoke of affliction.
They mereilessly will be pressed into service and their souls will be lured
by an irresitible amount of gold. The inhabitants of Egypt and Syria will
experience distress and afflietion seven times worse than captivity. The
land of the Gospel will be smitten from the four winds beneath the
heavens and will be as dust in a mass which is gathered by the wind.
There will be plague and famine upon them. The hearts of the destroy-
ers will be uplifted and raised in contempt and they will babble exees-
sively until their appointed time. They will gain mastery ove!;" the en-
trance and exit from the north and east to the west and the sea. All
men will be beneath their yoke and birds and all waters of the sea will
be subject to them, and the deserts,' where their inhabitants hunt, will
be theirs. They will register claim for themselves of the mountains as
weil as the deserts, fish of the sea, wood of the hills, soi! of the land, rocks
and the land's produetivity will be their revenues. They will possess
the labors and sweat of the farmers, the property of the rieh, the offer-
ings to the saints, whether gold, silver, precious stones, copper or iron,
the holy and glorious vestments, every food and all honorable things.
Their hearts will be exeeedingly exalted until they demand the eorpses
themselves equally of widows, orphans and saints. They will have no
meTey on laborers, the poor, they will dishonor the aged and will afflict
and have no merey on the weak and infirm, but will mock and laugh at
those who are distinguished in wisdom and in political and civie affairs.
Everyone will be shamed into silenee and will be afraid sinee they will
not have the strength to reply or to say anything plainly. All of the in-
habitants of the earth will be astonished and their wisdom and educa-
tion, of evil origin, will be powerless to retort to or to alter their [the
Arabs'] proclamations. Their course will be from sea to sea, from east
to west, and from the north to the desert of Yathrib. Their way will be
named the way of diffieulty and presbyters and presbyteresses, poor and
rieh, laborers and the thirsty and prisoners, will travel it and will
bless the dead. . . . For apostasy is education and it will edueate all
ot the earth's inhabitants. Since God called Ishmael, their father, a
wild ass, aceordingly, wild asses and scorpions of the desert and ev~ry
kind of wild and tarne beast will be captured, all oi the wood of the hlll-
144
side will be extirpated, the beauty of the mountains will vanish, cities
will become desolate, lands will hecome impassible because of the reduc-
tion of the human population and the earth will he polluted by blood
and they [the ArabsJ will gain hold of its fruit. For the tyrannically con-
quering barbarians are not men, but sons of the desert who will come to
desolation, are ruined and will welcome hate. And in the heginning, at
the time of their exodus, pregnant women will be won by their [the
Arabs'] swords and will become food for the wild beasts. They will
slaughter the priests at horne, defiling the holy places, and they will lie
with their wives in the revered and holy places where the mystical and
bloodless sacrifice is performed. Their wives, sons and daughters will put
on tbe holy vestments, they will place these on their horses, tbey will
spread them on their beds and tbey will tie their cattle in the coffins of
the saints. They will be corrupted murderers, like a fire testing the race
of tbe Christians. 16
The author of the Pseudo-Methodius apocalypse foresaw a sub-
sequent period in which many Christians would convert to Islam. Yet
he by no means was wholly pessimistic about the future. He remained
a loyal Byzantine Christian and confidently predicted and joyously
looked forward to, the ultimate triumph of the Byzantine emperor and
the eradication of the Arabs and Islam. Patriarch Sophronius, one
must remember, also had predicted such a Christian recovery. It is
interesting that the Pseudo-Methodius apocalypse described and dwell-
ed with bitter satisfaction on the sufferings which the Arabs would
undergo, perhaps to a greater degree than the apocalypse recounted
the more positive benefits which would accompany the restoration of
the former limits of the Byzantine Empire:
Then suddenly the Emperor of the Greeks or Romans will rise up
against them with great wrath and will be awakened like a man from his
sleep who had been drinking wine, whom men had thought to be a
corpse and of no use. This man will come out against them from the
sea of the Ethiopians and will thrust his sword and desolation as far
as Yathrib, that is, into their fatherland, and will make captive their
wives and children. The sons of the emperor will descend upon the in-
habitants of the land of the Gospel and will eradicate them from the
earth. Fear will fall upon them from all directions. Their wives and
children, those nursing babes, all of their encampments and the property
of their fathers in their lands will be delivered into the hands of the Em-
peror of the Romans, that is, to the sword, captivity, death and destruc-
tion. The yoke of the Emperor of the Romans will be seven times worse
upon them than their own yoke had been. Great distress will seize them
--dirt, thirst, affliction-they and their wives will be the slaves of their
[former] slaves. Their slavery will be a hund red times more bitter and
painful. The earth, which they had desolated, will be at peace and
each man will return to bis own property and to that of his fathers.
Armenia, Cilicia, Isauria, Africa, Hellas, Sicily and everyone who was
abandoned will return to his property and to that of his fathers. Men
will multiply on the desolate earth like the locusts of Egypt. Arabia will
be devasted by fire, Egypt will be burned and the coast will be at peace.
The entire wrath of the Emperor of the Romans will be upon those who
deny our Lord Jesus Christ. The earth will be at peace and there will
be a general calm on earth such as never has existed and will not again
exist, as it is the end. There will be merriment on earth and men will
16. Otkrovenie MefoiUiß Patars7cago 28·33.
145
dwell in peace and rebuild eities, will free priests from their pains and
men will cease to have afflictions in that time.17
Yet the author of the Pseudo-Methodius foretold another calamity
after this per iod of peaceful bliss. The gates of the north would open
and wild tribes would pour forth to conquer and devastate the world
for seven years. Then the Byzantine emperor would descend to Jeru-
salem, and at Golgotha he would offer up his crown to Jesus Christ,
after which more destruction would ensue until terminated by the com-
ing of Christ on earth. In this manner the author of the apocalypse
viewed the Arab conquest as part of a much broader scheme of ulti-
mate Christian eschatology.
Another late seventh-century writer, the Armenian historian Se-
o
beos, attempted to re1ate the appearance of the Arabs to the prophecies

of Danie1. He asked:
But who would be able to tell of the horror of the invasion of the Ishmael-
ites [= Arabs], which embraced land and sea? The fortunate Daniel
foresaw and prophesied evils similar to those which were to take place on
earth. By four beasts he symbolized the four kingdoms which must arise on
earth. First, the beast with a human form, the kingdom of the west, which
is that of the Greeks. That is c1ear by his saying, 'lts wings fell and it
was effaced from the earth.' He is referring to the destruction of dia-
bolic idolatry. 'And it made to stand as on human feet, and a man's heart
was given to it.' And here is the second beast, similar to a bear. 1t was
raised up on one side, the eastern side. It signifies the kingdom of the
Sassanids. 'And having three sides to its mouth,'-he means the king-
dom of the Persians, Medes and the Parthianso This is evident by the
fact that one says to hirn: 'Arise, devour several bodies.' As, more-
over, the world knows he devoured them so thoroughly. 'And the third
beast, like a leopard, with wings of a bird on hirn and four heads of a
beast.' He means the kingdom of the N orth, Gog and Magog, and their
two companions, to whom was given the power to f1y with force in their
time from the northern direction. 'And the fourth beast, terrible, dread-
ful, his teeth of iron, his c1aws of bronze; he ate and crunched and
trampled the rest underfoot.' He is saying that this fourth kingdom,
which rises from the south [east], is the kingdom of Ishmael. As the
archangel explained it, 'The beast of fourth kingdom will arise, will be
more powerful than all of the kingdoms and will eat the whole world.
His ten horns are the ten kings who will arise, and after them will arise
another who will surpass in evil all of the preceding ones.'18
Indeed, Sebeos defined his aims as an historian with reference to
the Bible:
I shall continue to tell of the evils which occurred in our time, includ-
ing the topic of the ren ding of the ancient faith, and of the burning and
mortal simoom wind which blows on us and bums large and beautiful
trees and gardens. And we have merited it, for we have sinned against
the Lord and we have enraged the holy of Israel. 'If you take pleasure
in Iistening to me,' he says, 'you will enjoy the good things of the
earth, but if you do not wish to listen to me, the sword will devour you,
for the word of the Lord has so spoken.'
The tempest in question passed over Babyion, but it unleashed
itself also on all lands, for Babyion is the mother of all the nations and
its kingdom is the kingdom of the regions of the N orth and also the
17. Otkravenie Mefodiia Patarskago 40-43.
18. Sebeos, Histoire d'Heraclius, tr. F. Macler (Paris, 1904), 104-105. Cf. Dan. vii. 3-24.
146
South, that is to say, over the Hindus and over the nations which in-
habit, for their part, the great desert, or the sons of Abraham who were
born of Hagar and of Ketur: Ishmael. . . . It came from the great and
enormous desert which Moses and the children of Israel had inhabited,
following the word of the prophet: 'Like a hurricane, it will come from
the south, coming from the desert, a formidable place,' which is to say,
coming from the great and terrible desert from which the storm of these
nations surged, occupied, conquered and defeated the whole world. And
what had been said, 'The fourth beast will be the fourth kingdom on
earth, more deadly than all of the kingdoms, which will change the whole
earth into a desert," was accomplished. 19
Thus Sebeos believed that the most reasonable way in which to
understand the phenomenon of the Arab conquest was to regard it as
the fuIfillment of divine prophecy (just as fifth-century pagans re-
garded the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as foretold by the
ancient orades, and just as fifth-century Christians regarded the fall
of the Roman Empire in the west as the implemention of the divine will
and the words of the Scriptures). In fact, Sebeos regarded his own
history as a reflection of the truth of ancient prophecy; he considered
himseIf to be a continuator of the prophets:
N ow, although speaking vainly, I cause my words to file past according
to the order of this history, following the feeble thought of my mind, and
not according to the dignity of science. While bearing in mind the in-
structions oi the friends of this study, I shall also confirm the prophetie
word which has spoken according to God's order. In the last events, up
to the consummation of the centuries, as it happened in the beginning,
the word of the Lord will accomplish itself; Him who said, 'The heavens
and the earth will pass, but my words will not pasS.'20
After repeating Daniel's prophecy concerning the fourth beast once
more, Sebeos conduded his history.
It is interesting to note that Sebeos' interpretation of the historical
phenomenon of Islam represented a change from the perspective of
such earlier sources as the Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati. True,
both works view the appearance of Arabs and Islam from an Old
Testament frame of reference. But for Sebeos, the fourth beast of
paniel's ancient prophecy is no longer the Roman Empire, but rather,
the new Islamic Empire! Thus, in a certain sense, Sebeos, like his
other late seventh-century contemporary St. Anastasius, are beginning
to accept (although they still abhor and regard it as a divine-sent ca-
lamity) the existence, for better or worse, of the Islamic Empire. The
Arab conquest is no longer seen as a temporary historical aberration,
but they still hoped, and honestly be1ieved, that perhaps by acts of con-
trition and rededication to fundamental principles, they could improve
their own position vis-a-ms Islam. Perhaps, then, after true contri-
tion, as Patriarch Sophronius had predicted, they would triumph over
Islam. This was a subtle alteration in the Eusebian doctrine that
the condition of the church and the condition of the state, i.e., the By-
zantine Empire, was intimately related. Thus St. Anastasius thought
that Constantine IV's correction of church affairs brought not only
19. SebeoB, Hietoire d'Heraelius 129·130. Cf. Dan. vÜ. 23.
20. SebeoB, Histoire iI'Heraclius 147. Cf. Matth. xxiv. 35.
147
internal peace to state and church, but also caused internal dissension
arnong the arch-enemies of Christendom, the non-believing Arabs.
Sebeos, of course, was a Monophysite. He believed, however, that
the Arab conquest of the Armenian and Byzantine peoples had oc-
curred because of Christian sins. Similarly, another la te seventh-
century Monophysite, the Coptic Bishop J ohn of Nikiu, in Egypt, em-
phasized that these events had taken place because of divine anger.
Unlike Sebeos, however, John of Nikiu specifically attributed the ca-
larnity to the errors of the 'heretical" Chalcedonian Christians. He
stressed that God took vengeance on Byzantine/Chalcedonian author-
ities for the bloody repression by Byzantine soldiers of a Gaianist
Monophysite riot against Cyrus, Orthodox/Chalcedonian Patriarch of
Alexandria: "But God, the guardian of justice, did not neglect the
world, but avenged those who had been wronged: He had no mercy on
such as had dealt treacherously against Hirn, but He delivered them
into the hands of the Ishmaelites. And the Moslem thereupon took the
field and conquered all of the land of Egypt.'l21 John of Nikiu also
interprets the Arab capture of the citadel of Babyion (in Egypt) as
a divine punishment for Chalcedonian sins: "Thus God punished them
because they had not honoured the redemptive passion of our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave his life for those who believe in
Hirn. Yea, it was for this reason that God made them turn their back
upon them (i.e. the Moslem). "22 Again, speaking of the Arab capture
of Alexandria, John commented: "And they had none to help them,
and God destroyed their hopes, and delivered the Christians into the
hands of their enemies. ll23 A contemporary observer, John emphasized
that the Muslims were "the enemies of God" and he refers to Islam
as 'the detestable doctrine of the beast, that is, Mohammed."24 Thus
as far as he was concerned, Islam was indeed a new religion, and a
hateful one, and not at all another heresy. Thus by the end of the
seventh century, both Chalcedonian and Monophysitic Christians re-
luctantly had come to accept the existence of Islam although they still
loathed it. They had not yet sought to understand it (only men with
the perspective of St. John of Damascus could do that, in the eighth
century).
It is significant, in my opinion, that these first two seventh-
century attempts to write histories of the Arab conquest were both
Monophysite eHorts. Not that Sebeos and John of Nikiu prirnarily
wrote their respective histories as propaganda, however. But the
earliest extant Orthodox, that is, Chalcedonian, histories which describe
21. Thß Chronicle of Jphn, Bishop of Ni"kiu, eh. 116. 13·14, tr. R. H. Charles (Oxford, 1916),
p. 186; cf. A. H. M. Jones, "Were Aneient Heresies National or Soeial Movements in
Disgnisef," Journal of Theological Stuaies, N. S. 10 (1959), 289.
22. John of Nikiu, ChrlJnicle 117. 4 (187 Charks); on the siege of BabyIon (= Cairo):
Bntler, Arab Conquest of Egypt, pp. 249·274.
23. John of Nikiu, Chronicle 121. 7 (201 Charles); on the siege and surrender of Alexandria:
24. John of Nikiu, Chrcmicle 121. 10 (201 Charles).
Butler, Arab Oonquest 0/ Egypt, pp. 310·327.
148
the Arab conquest date from the early ninth century. These are, spe-
cifically, the chronicles of Theophanes Confessor and the Patriarch
Nicephorus of Constantinople. 25 They may depend on lost prototypes.
There are doubtless many possible explanations for the absence of
earlier Orthodox Byzantine histories on seventh-century events, includ-
ing the disruptive nature of events in the seventh and eighth centuries
(yet this did not prevent two Monophysites, Sebeos and John of Nikiu,
from writing histories ).
One may venture a hypo thesis which may serve as at least a par-
tial explanation. 1t would have been easier for the heretical Christians
to make a facile explanation of seventh-century catastrophes as irre-
futable examples of divine retribution for the Chalcedonian errors of
the Byzantine government. These events, then, were a "pragmatic"
confirmation of the non-Calcedonian theological position. Thus Nes-
torians and Monophysites had also developed theological interpretations
of the breakdown of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth cen-
tury.26 But unlike the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Orthodox
Christians (i.e., Chalcedonians) had been able to interpret satisfac"-
torily within a Eusebian framework both the breakdown of the Roman
Empire in the west and its successful survival in the east as the By-
zantine Empire, it was extreme1y difficult for Orthodox Christians to
find a suitable theological and historical framework in which to ex-
plain the fortunes of the Byzantine Empire and the Chalcedonian Or-
thodox Church in the seventh century. Perhaps that is why both Theo-
phanes and Nicephorus employed the chronicle form rather than the
model of Eusebius. The last previous use of the Eusebian framework
had been the Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius in the late sixth cen-
tury. Evagrius had expressed great confidence in the union of empire
and church,27 but within a few years, the murder of the Emperor
Maurice (602), the Sassanid, Avar, Slavic invasions, and finally the
Arab conquest would surely have caused deep soul-searching. Perhaps
this soul-searching took until the ninth century. Only then did the
Chalcedonian Orthodox venture an historical account of the seventh
century disasters. These first accounts, moreover, offered Httle ex-
planation of the events; they mainly sought to place them in chrono-
logical framework. These are simply my speculations, of course, but
it is hoped that this paper will inspire further studies by other scholars
on the (1) impact of Islam upon Byzantium in the seventh century
(2) greater interest in seventh-century patrology.
25. Critieal editions: Theophanes Confessor, Ghronographia, ed. C. de Boor (2 vols. Leipzig
1883; reprinted Hildesheim 1963); Niceplwri Archiepiscopi Gonstantinopolitani Opuscula
Historica (Leipzig, 1880), Cf. G. Moravesik, Byzantinoturcica (2nd ed.; Berlin 1958),
I, 531-587, 456-459, and the thorough study of Nieephorus by P. J. Alexander, The
Patriaroh Nicephorus 01 Constantinople (Oxford, 1958), esp. pp. 157-162.
26. W. E. Kaegi, Jr. Byzantium and the Decline 01 Rome (Prineeton, 1968), pp. 218-223,254.
27. The Ecclesiastical History 01 Evagrius, ed. J. Bidez aud L. Parmentier (London, 1898).
See esp. 3. 41 (141-144 Bidez-Parmentier). Cf. B. Altaner, Patrologie?, 229; Moravesik,
Byzantinotourcica, I, 257-259.
149
10
ONLY A CHANGE OF MASTERS? THE CHRISTIANS
OF IRAN AND THE MUSLIM CONQUEST
Stephen Gerä
In his still standard history of Persian Christianity during Sasanian

times Joseph Labourt closes his summary account of the Muslim
conquest of the Sasanian empire - a conquest in the course of which,
says he, the Christians either showed a neutrality favorable to the
invaders or at least did practically nothing to help the Persians - with
a simple explanation for this passivity. It only continued a pattern of
behavior: the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia had been dominated and
exploited by the stronger for over a millenium. «11 importe peu a
I'esclave a servir tel ou tel mahre» 1. Taking this sweeping (and widely
accepted 2) judgment as the point of departure, some early evidence for
the Christians attitude to this great divide in Iranian history will be
here briefly presented and examined.
The fate and fortune ofthe so-called Nestorian church, the «Chureh
of the East» according to its own official designation, was tied up for
better or worse with the Sasanian state since at least the early fifth
century. Tlis is not the place to rehearse the ups and downs of this
symbiosis 3. It should be noted that the Christian community did
flourish, despite internal divisions as weIl as repeated (and severe)
persecution and repression; Christi ans may weIl have come to form
the single largest religious community in Mesopotamia at the time of
the Muslim conquest. The relatively abundant still surviving Christi an
literature in Syriac from this period is of course almost exclusively
preoccupied with matters of abstruse theology, mysticism or at best
internal church affairs; but some good early sources give us a few
authentie glimpses into what one could call the religiopolitical attitude
1 Le christiallisme dalls ["empire perse sous La dynastie Sassanide (224-632), (Paris, 1904),
p.246.
2 E.g. J. Neusner, A HislOry oJ/he Jews in Bab)'Lonia, vol. 5 (Leiden, 1970), p. 121; A.R. Vine,
The Nestorian Churches (London, 1037), p. 70.

3 See now S.P. Brock's suggestive and well-documented study, «Christians in the Sasanian
Empire: A Case ofDivided Loyalties», S/udies ill Church His/ory 18 (1982), pp. 1-19.
126 - - - THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE - - - -
44 S. GERÖ
of the Christi an clergy during the crucial transition period of the

Muslim conquest.
The chronologically earliest source of import in the collection of the
letters of ISo'yahb III, catholicos (patriarch) of the Nestorians from
649 to 659; the Arabs are mentioned in two of his letters. In one letter
written sometimes prior to his elevation to the patriarchate, perhaps
when he was still bi shop of Niniveh, ISo'yahb claims that the Muslim
Arabs do not help those who say that God suffered and died 4 - i.e.
that the monophysite ecclesiastical opponents of the writer found no
favor with the conquerors. No elaboration of the background is given;
this is at most an oblique acknowledgment of the monotheism of the
Muslims, and dear evidence for the fact that the several Christian
confessions very early started competing for Muslim patronage. The
second mention of the Arabs comes from a later letter, written by the
catholicos during the reign of the caliph 'Uthmän. ISo'yahb castigates
the Christians of Oman (ethnic Arabs?) for giving up their faith and
apostasizing to Islam for pecuniary reasons - the Arabs only de-
manded half ( !) their possessions as tribute as an alternative to conver-
sion. To show how unnecessary this later step was, ISo'yahb, as part of
his argument, paints a very positive picture of the divinely ordained
Arab rule, and describes the benevolent attitude of the Arabs toward
Christian ecclesiastics and church property 5. Seemingly significant is
the fact that - by choice or because of lack of information? - the
catholicos does not say anything specific ab out the apostasy of the
Omanis; he refuses to acknowledge or to meet head on the religious
challenge of Islam. Th~ immediate deep satisfaction with the (un-
expectedly?) light yoke of Arab rule is in any case evident - one
should note that ISo'yahb hirnself wrote an account of the martyrdom
of a Christi an convert from Zoroastrianism, one of the last confessors
under Sasanian rule 6 • Toward the end of his life ISo'yahb however
may have come to think very differently about the blessings of Arab
rule; according to one (late) source he was thrown into prison and
tortured for refusing to give a large sum - as bribe or ranson? - to
the Arab emir of al-Madä'in, an appointee of the caliph 'All; the emir
also proceeded to lay was te the churches of Kiifa andI:Iira 7.
4 Ed. R. Duval, ISo'yahb III patriarcha, Liber epistularum, Corpus Scriplorum Christianorum
Orientalium, Scriptores Syri, series secunda, tomus LXIV (Leipzig, 1904), p. 97, lines 4[f.
5 Ed. Duval, p. 251, lines 13ff. On Ihis text see further J.F. Fiey, «ISo'yahb 1e Grand ... »,
Orientalia Christians Periodica 36 (1970), pp. 33 ff and H. Suermann, «Orientalische Christen und
der Islam. Christliche Texte aus der Zeit von 632-750", Zeitschrift fur Missionswissenschaft und
Religionswissenschaji 67 (1983), 128 ff.
6 Ed. J.B. Chabot, «Histoire de Jesus-Sabran, ecrit par Jesus-Sabran, ecrite par Jesus-Yab
d'Adiabime», Nouvelles archives des missions scientiflques el lilteraires, vol. 7, pp. 485-584.
7 Gregorii Barhebraei chronicon ecclesliaslicum, ed. J.B. Abbeloos-T.J. Lamy, Tomus In
(Paris-Louvain, 1877), col. 131. See further Fiey, ap. dl., p. 43.
- - - - THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE ---127
ONL Y A CHANGE OF MASTERS 45
Tbe second pertinent early source, the so-called anonymous chron-,

icle of Guidi 8, datable to at latest ca. 680 9 , again gives no systematic
account of the Arab conquest, but describes aspects of it along with
other secular and religious matters. The chronicle, or rat her the extant
cxtract, gives a detailed and valuable account of Persian history during
the reign of Khosrau II and his successors. It asserts that the Arab
triumph was a result of divine dispensation 10 - but this triumph is
not causally linked to the misdeeds of the Persians, in contrast to
Khosrau's earlier conquest of the Byzantine dominions, which is
explicitly described as divine punishment for the murder of the em-
peror Maurice and his children 11. The last futile resistance of the
troops of Yazdkart III to the seemingly numberless children of Ismael
(Ied by Mohammed 1), whose divinely ordained advance simply could
not be hai ted, is described in measured terms 12. The death of
Yazdkart is noted, somewhat indifferently, without either exulting
over the demise of the last of the persecutors, so to speak, or in any
way indicating a Christian pity or sympathy for the hunted refugee.
(The romantic story of Christian c1erics or monks giving honorable
burial to the last of the Sasanian kings is only found in Muslim
sources 13). More realistically ~ or honestly - than ISo'yahb the
chronicle notes - without apportioning blame or bestowing crowns of
martyrdom - that Christians of course could not remain unaffected
by the hostilities. It relates that upon the capture of Suster after a long
siege the Arabs massacred civilians indiscriminately and killed priests,
deacons, students, teachers and even the bi shop of the city in the
sanctuary itself l4 • Significant is what this source says - or does not
say - about the two leaders of the Nestorian church who preceded
ISo'yahb III as patriarchs - namely ISo'yahb II (628-645) and Mar
Emmeh (646-49), who were the heads of the Persian Christi an com-
8 Ed. I. Guidi, Chronica minora I, Corpus Scrip/orum Christianorum Orientalium, Scrip/ores
syri series tertia Tomus IV (Paris, 1903), pp, 15 ff. See further Th, Nöldeke's translation and
commentary (" Die von Guidi herausgegebene syri~che Chronik», Sitzungsberichte der kaiserl.
Akad, der Wiss" phil,-hist. Classe, vol. 128, (Vienna, 1&92), Abhandlung No, IX (separate
pagination), The recent attempt to identify the aulhor as Plias of Merw, a e10se collaborator of
Iso'yahb II (P. Nautin, «L'auteur de la «Chronique Anonyme de Guidi» EHe de Merw», Revue
de l'histoire des religions 199 (1982), 303ft) is not particularly convincing,
9 Nöldeke, op. ci!. p, 3.
10 Ed, Guidi, p. 38, line 5,
11 Ed. Guidi, p. 25, lines 10 ff,
12 Pd. Guidi, p, 31, lines I ff.
13 Ta'alibi (ed, H. Zotenberg, Histoire des rois de Perse ... (Paris, 1900), p. 748, lines 1-2);
Firdaisi (ed. J, Mohl, Le Livre des rois par Abou'lkusim nrdousi, voL 7 (Paris, 1876), p. 484, lines
498 ff), Rather curiously, J.M, Fiey uncritically accepts this late anecdote as historical (Jalons
pour une histoire de I'Eglise en lraq, CSCO, voL 310 (Louvain, 1970), p. 64).
14 Ed. Guidi, p. 37, lines I ff.
46 S. GERÖ
munity during the Arab conquest itself. ISo'yahb II simply left the
hunger-plagued and plundered capital Ctesiphon soon after the Arabs
occupied it 15. There is no word about his negotiating for proteetion of
Christi an sanctuaries and clerics, in telling contrast to ananchronistic
reports of medieval Christian Arabic sources, which claim that the
patriarch tried to pay homage to the prophet Mohammed in Arabia
and that he received diplomas of privilege from Abu Bekr as weIl as
from 'Umar I6 ! As far as Mar Emmeh is concemed, that chronicle
laconically states that after his inthronization as catholicos he was
much respected by the Ismaelite authorities 17 - nothing more. It is of
course possible that this high repute is explicable by the pro-Arab
attitude of Mar Emmeh - according to later sources he provided
supplies for the invaders in his capacity as bishop of Niniveh, and
(obviously anachronisticaIly) was rewarded by a diploma of protection
from the caliph 'AHIS. That the seventh-century chronicle however
does not intimate any active collaboration of this sort should give us a
pause 19.
The third early source of interest is the world chronicle of
Y ol,lannän bar Penkäye, written perhaps around 690 20 . The divine
sanction of the Arab conquest is again a basic theme - but interest-
ingly, for once an explicit connection is made with the punishment of
the Persians. God sent forth the barbarian Arabs to destroy the sinful
kingdom and to humble the arrogant pride of the Persian rulers. Arab
conquest of the Byzantine dominions is also registered; but, in con-
trast to West Syrian, Monophysite writers who link the Byzantine
defeat to the persecution of their party, Yol).annän makes no such
theological nexus. Rather he introduces the notion that the invasion of
Persia was provoked by divine anger at the schisms and transgressions
of the Christi ans in Persia themselves. In a manner similar to
15 Ed. Guidi, p. 31, lines 7[f.

16 E.g. Chronicle of Se'ert, ed. A. Scher, Patrologia Orientalis 13 (1918), p. 619. On the !ife
and works of ISo'yahb II see now L.R.M. Sako, Lettre christologique du patriarche syro-oriental
/So'yahb II de Ggälä (628-646), (Rome, 1983).
17 Ed. Guidi, p. 32, lines 3-4.
18 Chronicle of Se'ert, ed. Scher, Patr. Orient. vol. 13, p. 630; Märi' ibn Sulaymän, ed. H.
Gismondi, Maris ... de patriarchis nestorianorum commentaria, Rome 1899, p. 62, !ines 9ff.
19 Even more suspicious is the statement, again only in one late source (Bar Hebraeus, Chron.
ecel., ed. Abbeloos-Lamy, Tomus III, cols. 123-25) that the newly appointed leader of the Persian
monophysite community, the «maphtian>' Marutha, opened thc gates of Tagrit to the invaders;
this cannot be in any case reconciled with the several Muslim accounts of the taking of Tagrit by
siege.
20 Partial edition by A. Mingana in his Sources syriaques, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1907). See A.
Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn, 1922), p. 210. All of the following material
is laken from Chapters 14 and 15 of the work, ed. Mingana, pp. 142* ff.
ONLY A CHANGE OF MASTERS 47
lSo'yahb's, he emphasizes the genuine benevolence of the Arabs

toward Christi ans, in particular to monks. Since they followed the
divine command (mediated to them through Mohammed!) to respect
Christianity, the poorly equipped Arabs were able to gain control of
two great empires practically without encountering resistance; But
then, complicating matters, Y ol).annän asserts that the Arabs in turn
were punished for their depredations by the outbreak oE a civil war
between «Easterners» and «Westemers». He proceeds to describe the
tolerant and peaceful reign of Mu'awiya; interesting here is his disap-
proval of the intellectual anarchy, of how all heresies were allowed to
thrive during this caliph's all too tolerant rule. Then he seems to
predict an apocalyptic destruction of the Muslim empire (and of what
remained of the Byzantine) through the plague and the rise of the new
group of the Surte, the armed slaves of the Sieite pretender Mubtar ...
These are just some of the high points, so to speak, of this intriguing,
but difficult and stilI inadequately investigated text 21 •
The following picture begins to emerge, on the basis of these and
some other sources. The East Syrian Christian community as such did
accept the imposition of Arab rule relatively passively, though there
were numerous Christi ans in hoth the Arab and the Persian armies.
There is evidence for the early levying of Arab taxation, which soon
was feit to be burdensome, but there is no reason to regard tbis tax as
the sign of imposition of full communal dhimmf-status. To a great
extent the church was left to its own devices in dealing with dissidents
within and without its ranks. The «disestablishment» of the Mazdaean
religion certainly gave new impulse to the ongoing conversion of
Zoroastrians, and (though this point should not be overemphasized)
the church did provide a sphere of action and new career opportunities
for Persian nobility. The general atmosphere of tolerance is un-
mistakable, in contrast to the rigid interpretation of the dhimma in the
Abbasid period. The boundaries may have been more flexible between
the several religious groups in the seventh century than one would
think; there was more than just the familiar one-way traffic of
Christians converting in droves to Islam 22.
21 See R. Abramowski, Dionysius von Tellnlilhre, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des
Morgenlandes, vol. XXV, 2 (Leipzig, 1940), pp. 5-8 :lnd W.G. Young, Patriarch, Shah and Caliph
(Rawalpindi, 1974), pp. 99ff.
22 The well-known Nestorian mystic Joseph Hazzäyä .\;ame from a high-ranking Zoroastrian
family; he became first a Muslim, whiIe still a child, as slave of an Arab master, and then a
Christian after he was sold again, to one Cyriacus of Qanlu, who in the end gave Joseph his
freedom in order to allow hirn to became a monk. (lso'dnal;! üf Busra, «Book of chastity», ed.
J.B. Chabot, in Melanges d'archeologie et d'hisloire 16 (1896), p. 64, tr. p. 278. See Baumstark, op.
eil., p. 222).
48 S. GERÖ
In conclusion, just some general reflections on the reasons for the

relative indifference to the passing away of Sasanian rule will be
presented. The contract, the concordat if one will, between the epi-
scopate of the church of the East and the Persian imperial authority,
impressively illustrated in the synodal acts of the fifth and sixth
centuries, was not followed by the appearance of a Persian
Constantine, who would have converted the Sasanian empire to
Christianity. Khosrau 11, despite his several Christi an wives and
favorites and his personal dabbling in at least peripheral aspects of
Christi an religiosity, did not continue the former policy of state
support of the Nestorian church, but favored the monophysites and in
the end may even have begun to turn against Christians in general.
The toleration practiced by Khosrau's weak successors, in part moti-
vated by political difficulties, did not restore the concordat. At the
time of the Arab conquest the Christian leaders no longer feit, it
seems, that the church was bound to the Sasanian imperial system.
Impressed by the ease and rapidity of the Arab conquest, which they
naturally interpreted, in theological terms, as signs of divine approb-
ation, they made their submission to the new order, which initially at
least was characterized by a large degree of laissez-jaire. There was a
- to us curiously myopie - lack of comprehension of Islam as a new
aggressive spiritual movement. Despite the noteworthy beginning of
large-scale missionary enterprise around this time, the Nestorian
church did not take advantage of the speIl of relative freedom in the
seventh and early eighth centuries to consolidate its previous gains.
Rather one can see the appearance of a certain communal exhaustion
after intense internal jurisqictional and confessional struggles in late
Sasanian times. The way was being prepared for the imposition and
supine acceptance of inferior, marginal dhimml-status in the Abbasid
period. If, after the initial euphoria, the Christians did come to realize
that it made a great deal of difference, in the long ron, which master
they served, by then they had really no choice at all in the matter.
11
AN APOCALYPTIC VISION OF ISLAMIC HISTORY
Bernard Lewis
D URING the first four centuries of Islamic rule Messianic hopes ran high
among the peoples of the Caliphate. Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians,
subjected to the rule of a new and alien religion, cherished and embellished
their traditions of a Messiah or Saoshyant of a God-chosen line who, in God's
time, would come or return to the world, end the sufIerings of the faithful
and the dominion of their opponents, and establish the kingdom of God upon
earth. Before very long Islam itself was afIected. First in the heresies of
the newly-converted, dissatisfied with the status assigned to them in what was
still an Arab kingdom, grafting their old beliefs on their new faith; then in
the orthodoxy of all Islam, the belief arose in a Mahdi, a "divinely guided
one " who, in the words of the tradition, WOuld "fill the earth with justice
and equity as it is now filled with tyranny and oppression".
With the passing of empires and the Howering and disappointment of succes-
sive hopes, the tradition of the Coming grew and developed. One oppressor
after another added something of himself to the portraits of the Antichrist,
while the many false Messiahs, in their failure, bequeathed new details and
new tokens to the Messiah yet to come. Each group had its own traditions;
yet they were in no way separate and water-tight, and many ideas and
beliefs passed, through converts and other channels, from one religion to
another.
By no means the least impatient in their expectation of Redemption were
the J ews. When the crumbling of empires under the blows of internal revolutions
and externat invasions seemed to portend the long awaited end, anxious J ewish
eyes scanned the Time of Troubles in which they lived for signs of the coming of
Messiah, and sought to identify, in the events taking place about them, the vague
prophecies and traditions handed down to them of the last wars of the Messiah.
It was in such times that the apocalyptic books were written. Their authors
had several purposes-to console the oppressed with hopes of imminent triumph,
to justify the ways of God to men by showing that their sufIerings were not
arbitrary but part of a divinely ordained scheme of things culminating in the
establishment of God's will on earth, and often, in addition, to buttress the
claims of an actual pretender to the Messianie function. Their method was
usually the same: they took or adapted earlier apocalyptic writings of similar
origin, added an account of the events of their own time, not as a straight
historical narrative, but rather as a re-editing of earlier prophecies and traditions
revised and expanded to fit these events, and then lovingly developed the
growing legend of the final struggle and triumph. The whole was cast in the
form of prophecies and attributed to some great figure of antiquity, to Daniel
or Elijah, to Enoch or Moses, to Zerubabel or to Rabbi Simon ben YÖ~ay.
AN APOCALYPTIC VISION Ol!' ISLAMIC HISTORY 309
. It is to the last named, one of the great Rabbis of the second century A.D.,
that one of the most interesting of Jewish apocalypses is attributed. The
" Prayer of R. Simon ben YöJ)ay " was fust published by Adolph Jellinek in
1855, from a unique manuscript in the possession of Marco Mortara, the chief
Rabbi of Mantua. l It appeared to be in part based on an earlier work of similar
type entitled "TheSecrets ofRabbiSimon ben Yöl}.ay". The Secrets were first
published in a Salonica collection of 1743, and thence reprinted by J ellinek. 2
Jellinek attributed the work to the period of the Crusades, but the historian
Heinrich Graetz,3 by a careful examination, was able to show that the events and
rulers referred to are those of the patriarchal and Umayyad Caliphates, and
that, with the exception of an added passage of later origin, the work was
written during the conflict that ended the Umayyad Caliphate. Despite the
objections of Steinschneider,4 who still preferred the Crusades identification,
this view has been generally accepted. Another version of the Secrets is also
to be found in the Midra~h called Ten Kings, published by Horvitz. 5 This
includes a passage beginning " These are the future things that were revealed
to Rabbi Sillon ben Yöl}.ay" and corresponding broadly, though with some
significant differences, to the contents of the Secrets. Horvitz' claim that his
version is older than that of the Secrets is difficult to accept, since it contains
references to events after the probable date of composition of that work. On
the other hand, the Ten Kings version contains important details not in the
text of the Secrets, and may weIl be based on another, perhaps earlier, version
no longer extant. It is probably such aversion that formed the starting point
of the author of the Prayer.
The date of the Prayer has not hitherto been seriously disputed. Jellinek
assigns it to the period of the Crusades, and finds in it "klare und deutliche
Anspielungen auf die Kreuzzüge". 6 Graetz,7 on the strength of a passage
in which he claims to identify the MongoIs, attributes it to the thirteenth
1 A. Jellinek: Bet ha·Midrasch, Leipzig, 1855, vol. iv, pp. viii-ix and 117-126. Reprinted
Jerusalem, 1938. The text was re-edited, with an introduction and notes, hy J. Kaufman in
MidJJ.rl§!!e Ge'ulä, Tel-Aviv, 1943, pp. 254-286 and 411-14. Dr. Kaufman's edition contains
mainly valuable suggestions, but its value is reduced by his numerous and often pointless emenda-
tions.
• Jellinek: BM., iii, pp. xix and 78-82. A Geniza fragment containing a variant version of
the opening paragraphs of the Secrets was published by S. Wertheimer under the title
"'Nn" 1::1 1,.v1.:lt!7 '" i"~" in BätJJ.e MidJJ.rai!!fJIl!:, Jerusalem, 1894, vol. ü, pp. 25-6. There is
also aversion of this work in Munich Hebrew MS. No. 222, 107v-l11v, with one major and a
few minor variants from the Salonica text. My thanks are due to Dr. A. Spitaler for sending
me photographs of this MS.
3 Geachichte der Juden, v, note 16, pp. 441-9.
, " Apocalypsen mit polemischer Tendenz", ZDMG., xxviii, 1874, pp. 627-659, and xxix,
1875, pp. 162-5. See especially pp. 635 et seq.
• Bell!: Eqed Ha-Aggadoll!:, ed. H. M. Horvitz, 1891, i, pp. 16-32. Jellinek's text ofthe Secrets
and the relevant passage from Horvitz's text of the Ten Kings are reprinted in Kaufman, pp.
401-5. Dr. Kaufman's ingenious attempt (pp. 162-198) to reconstruct an Urteret from the
different versions is better left aside.
• BM., iv, p. viii.
7 GeBchichte, vii, note 7, pp. 449--451.
310 BERNARD LEWIS-
century. The presence of trus passage in the earlier " Secrets " is explained
by him as an interpolation from the later text-i.e. from the Prayer itseH.
Though this particular interpretation has not been accepted by subsequent
writers, most have eonceded that the passage in question was indeed added.
Buttenwieser 1 regards the Crusades dating as beyond question. Baer,2 followed
by Kaufman,3 refers the apocalypse more especially to the time of the Third
Crusade, and attempts a detailed identifieation of the events to which it refers.
All these views have been based on the assumption that the whole Of
the historical material in the Prayer subsequent to the passages also found
in the Secrets is due to a single author, and refers to the events of his time.
Some, as we have seen, have even attributed part of the Secrets to the author
of the Prayer. In the eommentary that follows I hope to show that trus is not
the ease, and that the Prayer is made up of the following sections :-
(1) Are-edition of the matter contained in the earlier Apoealypse of Simon
ben Yö1}.ay. It does not appear to be based direetly on either of the versions
available to us, in the Seerets and the Ten Kings, but probably derives from
a lost recension, eloser to the Secrets than to the Ten Kings. In this material
our author has made a number of changes. While some of these may be due
to earlier, missing intermediate recensions, some are certainly the work of the
final author of the Prayer. These changes are of three main types :-
(a) Literary-the improvement of the presentation, the addition of legendary
material from other sourees, etc.
(b) The omission of certain passages the rustorical significance of whieh
was no longer elearly understood.
(0) The addition of allusions to the final author's own time.
The material of the first seetion is made up as f.ollows :-
(i) The introduetion and framework of the vision. This is closely related
to the version of the Secrets, but with considerable additions.
(ü) An apoealyptic vision of the rise of Islam and the Caliphate up to
the fall of the Umayyads. Trus is related to the versions of the Seerets and
the Ten Kings. Ey the time the Prayer was written these events were long past
and imperfeetly remembered, and the Prayer version has therefore important
omissions. It ean, however, be reeonstructed with the aid of the two earlier
versions. Trus apocalypse was written during the wave of Messianie hopes
eonneeted with the fall of the Umayyad dynasty. It is quite possible that, as
Kaufman 4. suggests, this version is itself not a single vision, but incorporates
fragments of an earlier apoealypse, dating from the time of the Islamie conquests.
(ili) An apoealyptie vision of the rise of the 'Abbäsids and the reigns
of Safiä"Q. and MaDllfu. Versions of this vision are also to be found in the Seerets
1 Jewiak EncyclopaJdia, vol. i, S.v. "Apocalypses: Neo-Hebraic Apocalyptic Literature ",

p.684.
I "Eine jüdische Messiasprophetie auf das Jahr 1186 und der dritte Kreuzzug ", MGWJ.,
Ixx, 1926, pp. 113-122 and 155-165. See espeoially pp. 162-5.
I MUf,. G., pp. 254 et seq. • MUf,. G., pp. 162-174.
AN APOCALYPTIC VISION OF ISLAMIC HISTORY 311
and the Ten Kings. Graetz was right in his argument that it is of different
provenance and was added to the previous matter, but wrong in attributing
it to the thirteenth century. It was written during the reign of Ma~ür, and was
the result of Messianic hopes at that time, possibly connected with the Shi'ite
revolt of Mul,lammad an-Nafs az-Zakiya.
(2) Aversion of an apocalypse of Syrian or Palestinian origin, based on the
events of the years 969-976-the Fä1iimid conquest of Egypt, the Carmathian
campaigns in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, the coming of AIptakin and his
Turks, and the Byzantine invasion of Byria under John Tzimisces. It was
probably written before the defeat of AIptakin in 978. Though no such previous
apocalypse is known to me, echoes of it are to be found in the Ten Kings
and other works.
(3) The additions of the final author of the Prayer describing the arrival
of the First Crusade in Palestine, an event which he probably witnessed hirnself.
(4) Developing from this, the vision proper-the wars of Rome, Ishmael,
Israel, Antichrist, and the rest, ending in the triumph of the Messiah.
The fo11owing translation is based on Jellinek's text. Where I have adopted

an emendation I have indicated it in the notes. In some cases it has been
possible to correct the text by reference to the Secrets. I have used the Revised
version for a11 Biblical quotations, and also for Biblical a11usions as far as
possible without injury to the sense.
The division in sections and paragraphs is added, except where indicated.
THE PRAYER OF RABBI SIMON BEN YÖI;IAY
I
(1) These are the secret and revealed things that were revealed to Rabbi
Simon.
This is Rabbi Bimon who had been hidden 1 in a cave previous to this from
the Emperor. He had fasted for forty days and nights and prayed to God. Thus
did he say in his Prayer: BIessed art Thou, 0 God, our God and the God of our
fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the great
God, mighty and terrible, merciful Master of heaven and earth, living and
enduring for ever and ever and for a11 eternity; Thou art glorified, praised,
adomed, magnified, unified; Thou, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, One,
whose Name is in Thee and who art in Thy Name, Thou art hidden from the
eyes of allliving and Thy Name is hidden, Thou art a wonder and Thy Name ia
a wonder, Thou art One and Thy Name is One. Thou art He " who didst choose
Abram, and broughtest him forth out of Ur of the Chaldees" (Neh. ix, 7),
and madest him to know the sorrow of servitude to the kingdoms that would
1 zz.o':ln. I read ":ln, a8 in a11 the other versiona.
312 BERNARD LEWIS-
enslave his sons (cf. Gen. xv, 13). And now I ask Thee, Lord God, to open
to me the gates of prayer and send me an angel to tell me, when will the Messiah,
the son of David, come and how will he gather the exiles of Israel from all the
places in which they are scattered, and how many wars will they undergo
after this reassembling 1-that he may make the thing clear to me, by the grace
of the Lord God, and "How long shall it be to the end of these wonders 1 "
(Daniel xii, 6).
Rabbi Simon said: At once the gates of heaven were opened to me and I saw
visions of God (cf. Ezekiel i, 1). I fell on my face, and behold, a voice spoke
to me. "Sirnon, Simon !" Then I answered the one who spoke to me, and
said " What do you say, Lord 1" He said to me: "Stand upright ", and when
he spoke to me I stood trembling (cf. Daniel x, 11), and I asked him: "What
is your name 1" He said: "Why do you ask after my name, seeing it is
secret 1 " (cf. J udges xiii, 17-18). I asked him: "When will the Redeemer of
Israel come 1" He said to me: "God saw the children of Israel, and God
took knowledge of them" (Exodus ü, 25).
(2) At once he caused the Kenite to pass before me. I asked him: "What
are these things 1" He answered: "These are the Kenite ". Then he showed
me the kingdom of Ishmael, which would follow after the Kenite. At once I wept
greatly, and said to him: "Lord! Has he then horns and hooves that he may
trample Israel with them 1" He answered: "Yes" .
And while yet I spoke with him, behold, another angel, whose name was
Metatron, touched me, " and waked me as a man that is wakened out of his
sleep " (Zech. iv, 1). And when I saw him I stood trembling, my sorrows turned
upon me and I retained no strength, and pangs seized me like the pangs of a
woman in childbirth (cf. Daniel x, 8 and 16). He said to me: "Simon!"
and I answered " Here am I ". He said to me: "Know that the Holy One,
blessed be He, sent me to you to inform you concerning the question that you
put before Hirn. Now that you have seen the Kenite and the kingdom of
Ishmael you wept, and you should have wept for the kingdom of Ishmael 1
only, for at the end of that kingdom they will make great slaughter in Israel,
beyond reckoning, and make harsh decrees, saying: 'Whoever reads the Law
shall be pierced with the sword " and they shall convert some of Israel to their
religions. And the kingdom of the Kenite will come in that time to Jerusalem,
and capture it, and slaughter in it more than 30,000.
" And because of their oppression of Israel, the Holy One, blessed be He,
sends Ishmaelites against them, who make war against them in order to save
Israel from their hands. Then a crazy man possessed by a spirit arises and
speaks lies about the Holy One, blessed be He, and he conquers the land, 2
and there is enmity 3 between them and the sons of Esau."
1 Sie. Probably an error for the Kenite, v. infra, p. 321.

• Presumably Palestine.
3 n:l~N. Thus also in the Geniza fragment of the Secrets. The printed and Munich texts
of the Secrets have n7:l~N-terror.
.AN APOCALYPTIC VISION OF ISLAMIC HISTORY 313
I answered Metatron, and said to hirn: "Lord! Are the sons of Ishmael
then the redemption of Israel 1" He said to me: "Did not Isaiah the Prophet
say: 'And when he seeth a troop, horsemen in pairs, a troop of asses, a troop
of camels ' 1 " (Isaiah xxi, 7). ' Troop , is the kingdom of Media and Persia,
, pairs' is the kingdom of Greece, 'horsemen' is the kingdom of Edom,
'troop of asses' is the Messiah, as it is said: 'lowly, and riding upon an ass'
(Zech. ix, 9), 'troop of camels ' is the kingdom of Ishmael, in whose days the
kingdom of the Messiah will arise. Therefore the 'troop of asses ' preceded
the ' troop of camels " and the 'troop of camels ' will rejoice when the Messiah
comes: and the wise men will die and the hands of the sons of Belial will be
strengthened. . . .
(3) "Again: 'And he looked on the Kenites ' (Numbers xxiv, 21). What
parable did the wicked Balaam see 1 Only this, that Balaam saw a Kenite
tribe that was destined to rise up and enslave Israel, and he began to say :
, Ethan is thy dwellingplace '-I see that you live only by the bell of Ethan
the Mizrahite 1 (cf. Psalm !xxxix, 1).
(4) 2 "The second king that will arise from the sons of Ishmaelloves Israel;
he repairs the breaches of the temples, makes war with the sons of Esau, and
slaughters their armies.
" Then a king will arise whose name is Marwän. 3 He will be a herdsman
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
of Edom will come against him and kill ~.
" Another will arise in bis place, and he will have peace on all sides, and
he will love Zion 4 and die in peace.
"And another king will arise in his place, and hold firm the kingdom
with his sword and his bow, and there will be strife in his days, sometimes in
the east and sometimes in the west, sometimes in the north and sometimes in
the south. He will make war on all, and when the Gairün 5 in the west falls on
the sons of Ishmael in Damascus, the kingdom of Ishmael will fall. And of that
time it is said: 'The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked ' (Isaiah xiv, 5).
While the strong men of the sons of Kedar are still with ~, a north-east
wind will rebel against him and many armies 6 will fall from him: the first on
the Tigris, the second on the Euphrates, the third in between. He flees before
them, and bis sons will be captured and killed and hung on trees.
(5) ", And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall hiss for
the fly , (Isaiah vii, 18). And the Holy One, blessed be He, shall hiss for the
bees that are in the land of Assyria (cf. ibid.), and they make war with the
1 'n"t:ln 71"N n'lrt:lt:l. The Secrets has 'n"NM 7n'N n"lrt:lt:l-" From the good
deeds of Ethan the Ezrahite ", who in Midrashic writings ia often Abraham.
• New paragraph in Jellinek's text.
37'1'1'%:l.
• 7Nlr-sheep. Kaufman emends to 7"lr-Zion.
• 7"";], read 1"';], as in the Secrets.
• c'"n, read c',"n, as in the Secrets.
VOL. XliI. PART 2. 24
314 BERNARD LEWIS--
people of Ashkenaz. Tbe first king who leads them and brings them forth
is a servant who rebelled against his master,l as it is said: 'Thus saith the
Lord ... to him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth, to
a servant of rulers' (Isaiah xlix, 7). Who is he ' whom the nation despiseth ' 1 2
Say, it is the sons of Canaan, who are despised by all the nations. And' a
servant of rulers ' means, that there will be a servant of rulers ('EMedh Möshlim) ,
who rebels against his masters, and they throng to him, and they make war
against the sons of Ishmael and kill their strong men and inherit their wealth
and possessions. They are very ugly men and wear black and come from the
east, and they are bitter and hasty, as it is said: 'For, 10, I raise up the
Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation' (Habakkuk i, 6). All of them are
horsemen, as it is said: 'The horseman mounting' (Nahum iii, 3), and they
come from a distant land, to possess the dwelling-places that are not theirs,
and they go up to the peaks of mountains, that is, to the mountain of the
height of Israel (cf. Ezekiel xvii, 23; xx, 40; xxxiv, 14), breach the temple
and quench the lights and tear the doors.
"Tben four other kings will arise, two of them revealed and two others
who will rise against them, and in their day the son of David will arise, as it
is said: 'And in the days of those kings .. .' (Daniel ii, 44).
"Tbe likeness of the first king: an experienced man, but he is not very
01d. 3 The king is humble, has handsome eyes and fue, black hair, and they are
led astray by him.
" And after him another will arise in dispute, and place great armies on
the Euphrates, and in one day his armies in the north and in the south will
fall, and he will flee and be oaptured and imprisoned, and as long as he is in
prison there will be peaoe in the land.
" Tbe fourth king loves silver and gold, he is old and tall, snd he has a mole
on the big toe of his right foot. He makes ooins of brass and hides them and
stores them under the Euphrates with silver and gold, and they are stored for
the King Messiah, as it is said: 'And I will give thee the treasures of darkness,
and hidden riohes of seoret plaoes ' (Isaiah xlv, 3). In his day the horn of the
peoples of the west will rebel, and he will send two armies, and they kill some
of the sons of the east, and he sends others.
(6) "And at the beginning of the one week there is no rain, and in the seoond
shafts of hunger, and in the third there will be great hunger and no rain, and
the fourth it will be moderate, and in ·the fifth there will be great satiety,
and in the sixth a single star will arise from the east, and on top of it a rod
of fire like a lance, and the nations of the world will say: 'There shall come
1 Cn"~"K ~.17 "Crt' Klr'C' CJ'1'K :I'mc 7'rt'K' ,~C" This seems to be 90 corrupt
version of the phrase in the Secrets "Crt' ,:l.17 K'l"I C~'lr1C' CJ'1'K :I'mcrt' 7'rt'K.,.' "cm
"~"K ~.17.
2 The text has 'Ehl!e!lli Möshlim-an obvious scribal error. I have restored the version of the
Secrets.
• l"I:l" lpT '~'N' ~rt" ~K. PerhapB an allusion to Job, where the word rt"rt" chiefly
ODeurs, and u8ually denotes wisdom and experience (e.g. xii, 12 and xxxü, 6).
forth a star out of Jacob' (Numbers xxiv, 17). The time of its shining will
be in the fust watch of the night, until two hours; it will spend fifteen days
in the east, and revolve to the west and spend fifteen days, and if more it is good
for Israel."
II
(7) 1 I returned again to my prayer and also to my fast for forty days,
until this angel was revealed to me and said to me: "Ask!", and I said to
him: "Lord, what will be the end of these things 1" The angel said to me :
" After all these things the sons of the west prevail, with great armies. They
come mingled and make war against the sons of the east that are in their land
and kill them, and those who remain fiee before them and come to Alexandria.
Some of the sons of the west will pursue them and come there, and there will
be a great battle there, and the sons of the east will fiee from there and come to
Egypt. They will besiege it and take booty and make it desolate, to ful:fil
what is written: 'Egypt shall be a desolation ' (Joel iii, 19). They will pass
through Palestine spreading utter destruction, and whoever is captured by
them will not return until the Messiah comes."
And when I heard this thing I wept exceedingly. The angel said to me:
" Simon, why do you weep 1" I answered: "Will there be no deliverance for
the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in his (sio) days 1" He said to me :
" The thing is grievous indeed. If you put meat on the fue, you cannot escape
from its smell; thus Israel are not saved; but whoever enters in the chamber
and flees and hides will be saved, as it is said: 'Come, my people, enter thou
into thy chambers ' (Isaiah xxvi, 20), and: 'Every one that is found shall be
thrust through; and every one that is taken shall fall by the sword ' (Isaiah
xiii, 15). They pass through Palestine and pillage, as it is said: 'and he shall
enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass through ' (Daniel xi, 40).
They came in the desolate valleys (cf. Isaiah vii, 19), and they are in the midst
of it, and there a great battle will take place, which all the prophets have
prophesied, and the streams and the waters of the Euphrates will be turned
to blood, and those who remain will not be able to drink of it, and thence the
kingdom of the east will be broken.
(8) "And after all these things a king of fierce countenance will arise, and
last for three and a half years. At the beginning of his kingdom, when he
arises, he takes the rich and seizes their money and kills them, and money will
not save its owner, as it is said: 'their silver and their gold shall not be
able to deliver them ' (Ezekiel vii, 19), and his counsel and intention will not
protect him. Whoever recites 'Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God " he kills,
and whoever says 'God of Abraham' will be killed. They will say: 'Let us
all return and be as one nation,2 and abrogate the Sabbaths and festivals and
1 New paragraph in Jellinek's text.
• MQ'IN-probably used in the sense of the Arabio ~I.
316 BERNARD LEWIS-
N ew Moons from Israel " as it is said: 'and he shall think to change the times
and the law' (Daniel vii, 25). 'Times' are festivals, and 'law' is the Law
as it is said: 'a fiery law unto them' (Deuteronomy xxxiii, 2). In his day
there will be great trouble for Israel. Whoever is exiled will escape to Upper
GaIilee, as it is said: 'for in mount Zion and in J erusalem there shall be those
that escape ' (Joel ü, 32), until he reaches Meron. 1 He kills in Israel until he
reaches Damascus, and when he reaches Damascus the Holy One, blessed be He,
gives help and good fortune to Israel. In his day there will be strife and war
in the world, each town will war agaiust its neighbours, city against city and
people against people and nation against nation, and there will be no peace
for those who go and come, as it is said: 'And I will bring distress upon men,
that they shall walk Iike blind men ' (Zephaniah i, 17). The people of God are
driven about, and great trouble will beset them for three years, and they will
be deIivered into his hand until the end of three years, as it is said: 'and
they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and half a time '
(Daniel vii, 25). 'Time' [is a year],2 'times' is two years, 'half a time' is
half a year, making three [and a half] 2 years, at the end of which the decree
and the folly are abrogated, as it is said: 'And from the time that the con-
tinual burnt offering shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh
desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days ' (Daniel
xii, 11 )-that is, three and a half years.
" Then a king will arise who will restore them to unbeIief, as it is said: 'and
they sha11 set up the abomination that maketh desolate' (Daniel xi, 31).
And he rules three months.
(9) "After that the sons of Ishmael make war with the Edomites in the
plain of Acre, and at once Assyrians come upon them and capture 3 them,
as it is said: 'Until Asshur shall carry thee away captive ' (Numbers xxiv, 22),
and ' ships shall come from the coast of Kittim' (ibid. xxiv, 24). These are the
Edomites who are destined to arise in the end of days. When they go forth,
they go as thieves, as it is said: 'If thieves came to thee' (Obadiah 5).
They make war against the sons of Ishmael and kill many of them; they
assemble in the camp of Acre, and the iron breaks the day in pieces, the legs
break the fingers' (cf. Daniel ü, 31 fI.), and they fiee, naked and without
horses. Legions will join them from Edom, and they will come and make war
in the plain of Acre, until the horse sinks to its thighs in blood. The children
of Israel will fiee until they come to the plain of J ericho, and there they will
stand, and say to one another: 'Whither do we fiee ~ Let us leave our children
and our wives '-and they return and fight another battle in the plain of
Megiddo, and the Edomites will fiee and go aboard ships, and a wind will go
1 1"Q ,tQQ"'! "'!l1. Kaufman emends the llUlt word to 1,Q, and reads "until our Master
comes".
• Missing in the text. I restore in accordance with the sense and the parallel texts (cf. p.
334 infra).
3 C'::1W" read C'::1'tz1'11
• Jellinek suggests an emendation to "the legs are broken even to the fingers (= toes) ".

forth, and earry them to Assyria, and they aftliet the Assyrians and 'Ebher
han-Nahar (cf. Numbers mv, 24). And at the end of nine months the sons of
Assyria will go forth and destroy the sons of Israel! and the sons of Rome,
as it is said: 'Until Asshur shall earry thee away eaptive ' (Numbers mv, 22).
And when you see Assyrians 11 going forth and treading in the land of Israel,
they make peaee, and Elijah, of blessed memory, goes forth and gives the tidings
of peaee, as it is said: 'And this man shall be OUT peaee; when the Assyrian
shall eome into our land' (Mieah V, 5). The sons of Italy seek to make war
with them, and to the sons of Ishmael the kingdom will almost return; they
do not have time to send away their wives before Assyria captures them.
" And at onee the daughter of a voiee goes forth and proclaims in an the
places where Israel is 3: 'Go forth and avenge the vengeanee of God on Edom "
as it is said: 'And I will Iay my vengeanee upon Edom by the hand of my
people Israel' (Ezekiel xxv, 14). And at onee the young men of Israel gather
and give ear, and they enthrone a king of the seed of David, and diseord arises
between these and these, and the sons of the land of Israel rebel against the
seed of David, to fulfil what is said: 'So Israel rebelled against the house of
David, unto this day' (rr Chronicles, x, 19). 'Unto this day' means unto
the day the king Messiah will eome. The two parties eome to grips, and the
daughter of a voice goes forth and twitters: 'That which hath been is that
whieh shall be' (Ecclesiastes i, 9)-He is the Holy One, blessed be He, who
was berore the creation of the world and will be after the destruetion of the
world-' and that which hath been done is that whieh sha11 be done ' (ibid.).
Then she speaks again and says: 'As Joshua did to Jerieho and to its king,
thus do to the nations of the world '. And they say: 'But we have not the
ark of the eovenant with us, as J oshua had " and she answers them: 'There
was nothing in the ark but two tablets of stone, with the seal" Rear 0 Israel" '.
At onee they all make a great shout and ery: 'Rear 0 Israel, the Lord our
God, the Lord is One " and they compass Jericho, and at onee the wall falls
down fiat, and they enter inside and find the young men dead in the streets,
to fulfil what is said: 'Therefore shall her young men rall in her streets,
and all her men of war shall be brought to silenee in that day' (Jeremiah I, 30).
They will kill in the town for three days and three nights, and then they will
gather all her booty into the street, and a rumour will eome upon them !rom
the land or Israel, and they will be in great fear."
III
(10) 4 I returned to prayer again before God, in fasting and sackcloth and
ashes, until I saw, and behold, a hand touched me and caused me to stand on
1 Sie. Read Ishmael t

2 C'",tZ1. Jellinek emends to C"'tZ1N.
3 ~N'tZ1' ',::ltZ1 n'O'i'0il ~::l::l. Jellinek emends ',::ltZ1 to '~::ltZ1. Kaufman to C::ltZ1. I have
adopted the latter reading.
- - - - THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE - - - 141
318 BERNARD LEWlS-
my feet, and he said to me: "Ask, righteous man, what you would ask ".
Then I asked him, and said to him: "And at the end of these things how will
all Israel be gathered together from the four corners of the earth, and what will
be the manner of their going forth from under the hand of the kingdoms 1
And if they go forth, whither will they go, and what will be the manner of their
going, and what will they be able to do 1 I wish you to tell me these things and
their like until the end of the matter."
Then he answered me from the doors of heaven and said to me: "At
the end of the kingdom of the sons of Ishmael the Romans will go forth against
J erusalem and make war with the sons of. Ishmael, and the land 1 will be
conquered by them. They enter into it and kill many of the sons of Ishmael
there. They make many in the city to fall dead, and take many captives among
the daughters of Ishmael, and dash out the brains of the children, and every
day they slaughter children to Jesus. At that time Israel will suffer great
sorrow. And at that time God will awaken the tribes of Israel and they will
come to Jerusalem the Holy City, and they will find it written in the Law:
, And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud ' (Exodus xiii, 21)-
and it is also written: 'for the Lord will go before you; and the God of Israel
will be your reward ' (Isaiah lii, 12). They will go about in mist and in cloud,
and they will make war against the Edomites and kill many of them, and
desolation will go forth in the world, for the tribes have come. And in that time
the verse will be fulfilled in Israel: 'and there shall be a time of trouble, such
as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time
thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book '
(DanieI xii, 1). The nations shal1 rise up against Israel and kill many of them,
and many of the 'people of the land' 2 transgress, and they torture with
chains many of the pions to make them leave God's Law.
IV
(11) "And while for a short time they are in this trouble God will bring
a great and strong wind, a great thunder and a black cloud the like of which
has not been seen in the world, and from the midst of that wind the Holy One,
blessed be He, will scatter the tribes in every town, and concerning them it
is said: 'Who are these that Hy as a cloud 1 ' (Isaiah Ix, 8). A few men of
Israel will gather to Jerusalem, and they will find no bread, and theHoly One,
blessed be He, will turn the sand into flour for Israel, and concerning that
time it is said: 'There shall be abundance of corn in the earth upon the
top of the mountains' (Psalm lxxii, 16). Nehemiah ben J;[Ü§!!iel will arise and
give signs in the word of God. A king will arise and deny religion and pretend
to be a servant of God, while his heart is not true with him, and a great thunder
will go forth into the world, and all the world will fear it. And Israel will .
gather to Nehemiah ben I;Iü§hiel, and the king of Egypt will make peace with
1 Presumably Palestine.
2 r,~n 'QlI'Q-i.e. the ignorant mass of the population.
rum, and he will kill all the cities that are about Jerusalem, as Tiberias and
Damascus and Ascalon. The nations of the world will hear, and fear and terror
will fall on them. The sign that will be in that time, is that the stars will be
seen in blood. And of that time it is said: 'The sun shall be turned into
darkness, and the moon into blood' (Joel ii, 31). And the Holy One, blessed
be He, sends ten plagues to the nations of the world, as He sent to Egypt,
to fulm what is said: 'And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord
shall set rus hand again the second time to re cover the remnant of rus people '
(Isaiah xi, 11).
"They said that there is in Rome astatue of wrute marble, in the form
of a beautiful girl, created since the six days of the Beginning, and the sons
of Belial come from the nations of the world and lie with her, and she falls
pregnant, and at the end of nine months she bursts, and a male in the form of
a man comes forth from her, twelve cubits long and two cubits wide, with red
twisted eyes. The hair of rus head is red as gold, and the soles of rus feet are
green, and he has two heads, and they call him Armilus. He will come to
Edom and say to them: 'I am your Messiah. I am your God '. He leads
them into error, and at once they believe in him and enthrone rum, and all the
sons of Esau join together and come to rum, and he goes and brings tidings to
all the cities, and says to the sons of Esau: 'Bring me my Law wruch I gave
to you '. The nations of the world still come and bring a scro1l 1 ••• and he
says to them: 'Trus is what I gave you " and says: 'I am your God'
and 'I am yom Messiah and your God '. And in that hour he sends to
NeheIniah and to all Israel and says to them: 'Bring me your Law and bear
witness to me that I am God '. And at once all Israel are astonished and
afraid. And in that hour NeheIniah will arise with three men of the sons of
Ephraim. They go with rum, and they have a scroU of the Law with them,
and cry before rum: 'I am, and Thou shalt have none other '. 2 And he says :
'There is notrung of trus in YOur Law, and I will not let you rest until you
believe that I am God, as the nations of the" world have believed in me '. At
once NeheIniah rises up against him and says to him: 'You are not God,
but Satan'. He asks them: 'Why do you give me the lie 1 I shall command
that you be killed', and he says to rus servants: 'Beize NeheIniah '. At
once he rises with 30,000 strong men of Israel and makes war on him and
kins 200,000 of the army of Armilus. And Armilus will grow angry and gather
aU the arInies of the nations of the world, and he makes war on the cruldren of
Israel and kiUs a thousand thousand of them, and even kills NeheIniah at
noontime. And of that time it is said: 'And it shall come to pass in that day,
saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will
darken the earth in the clear day , (Amos viii, 9). Those who remain of Israel
wiU fiee to the wilderness of the peoples (cf. Ezekiel xx, 35), and dweIl there
1 A word in the text is effaced here.

, A reference to the first two commandments.
320 BERNARD LEWIS-
forty-five days without bread or water, but only the grass of the fields will be
their food. And after forty-five days Armilus will come and make war in Egypt
and capture it, as it is said: 'and the land of Egypt shall not escape ' (Daniel
xi, 42). Then he tums his face again towards Jerusalem to destroy it a second
time, as it is said: 'And he shall plant the tents of his palace between the sea
and the glorious holy mountain ; yet he shall come to his end, and none shall
help hirn' (ibid. xi, 45).
" , And in that time shall Michael stand up, the great prinee ' (Daniel xii, 1),
and blow the trumpet three times, as it is said : 'And it shall come to pass
in that day, that a great trumpet shall be blown' (Isaiah xxvii, 13). That
trumpet is the right horn of the ram of Isaac, and the Holy One, blessed be He,
lengthens it to a thousand cubits. He blows ablast, and the Messiah son of
David and Elijah reveal themselves. They both go to Israel who are in the
wilderness of the peoples, and Elijah says to them: 'This is the Messiah "
and he restores their hearts and strengthens their hands, as it is said:
, Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them
that are of a fearfuI heart, Be strong, fear not' (Isaiah xxxv, 3-4). And an the
children of Israel will hear the sound of the trumpet, and they will know that
He has ransomed Israel, as it is said: 'For the Lord hath ransomed Jacob '
(Jeremiah xxxi, 11). ' And they shall come which were ready to perish in
the land of Assyria ' (Isaiah xxvii, 13). And at onee the fear of God falls upon
the peoples and all the nations, and Israel returns with the Messiah until they
come to the wilderness of Judah, and an the children of Israel meet, and they
eome to J erusalem, and go up to the heights of the house of David that remain
from the destruction. The Messiah will sit there, and Armilus will hear that a
king has arisen to Israel. He gathers the armies of all the nations of the world
and they will eome to the king Messiah and to Israel. The Holy One, blessed be
He, will fight for Israel, and says to the Messiah: 'Sit thou at my right hand'
(Psalm ex, 1), and the Messiah says to Israel: 'Stand still, and see the salvation
of the Lord' (Exodus xiv, 13). And at once the Holy One, blessed be He,
goes forth, and fights them, as it is said: 'Then shall the Lord go forth, and
fight against those nations' (Zechariah xiv, 3), and it is written: 'At that
time will I bring you in, and at that time will I gather you: for I will make you
a name and a praise among all the peoples of the earth ' (Zephaniah iü, 20)."
Amen! May that time and that hour draw near.
COMMENTARY
(1) This contains the introduction and describes the circumstances in which
Rabbi Simon received his revelations. After the first line some legends of
Talmudic origin relating to the lifetime of Rabbi Simon are told. They are
omitted from the translation, as of no interest to our present purpose. The
AN APOCALYPTIC VISION OF ISLAMIC mSTORY 321

remainder of the introduction is a very much expanded version of the earlier
texts, which begin as follows :-
Secrets Ten Kings
These are the secrets which were These are from the future things
revealed to Rabbi Simon ben Yol,tay that were revealed to Rabbi Simon
when he was hidden in a cave from bar Yol,tay when he was hidden for
the Emperor, the king of Edom, and thirteen years in a cave from the
stood in prayer for forty days and dominion of Edom, who had decreed
forty nights. He began thus: "Lord destruction on Israel. He stood in
God, how long wilt Thou be angry prayer and fasting for three days and
against the prayer of Thy servant ~" three nights, and at the end he began
(cf. Psalm !XXX, 5). At once the and said: "Lord God, how long wilt
secrets of the End and the Hidden Thou be angry against the prayer of
things were revealed to him, and he Thy servant "? At once the secrets
began to sit and expound.... of the End and the sealed things (cf.
Daniel xii, 4 and 9) were revealed to
him, and he began to expound....
It will be seen that the version of the Prayer is closer to the Secrets than
to the Ten Kings. The actual prayer is introduced from the Hechalot.
(2) Here the vision begins. Rabbi Simon is shown the two Empires that were
still to rule, the Kenite and Ishmael. The first is apparently here identified
with Edom, and means Rome and Byzantium. The second is obviously Islam.
The Islamic Empire comes, says the angel, to rescue Israel from Byzantium,
and Rabbi Simon's doubts about an Ishmaelite redemption are silenced with a
quotation from Isaiah 21.
The corresponding passages in the Secrets and the Ten Kings are
as follows:-
Secrets Ten Kings

He saw the Kenite. When he saw Rabbi Samuel says, concerning
the kingdom of Ishmael that was the words of Rabbi Ishmael, who
coming, he began to say: "Was it used to say: "How do we know
not enough, what the wicked king- that the Holy One, blessed be He,
dom of Edom did to us, but we must only brings forth the kingdom of
have the kingdom of Ishmael too 1 " Ishmael in order to save Israel by
At once Metatron the prince of the it ~" As it is said by Isaiah the
countenance answered and said: prophet, who saw 'a troop, horse-
"Do not fear, son of man, for the men in pairs, a troop of asses, a troop
Holy One, blessed be He, only brings of camels'. This teaches that at
the kingdom of Ishmael in order to first he will return to the custom
save you from this wickedness. He of the seed of his nation who oppress
raises up over them a Prophet and distress the worId with heavy
according to His will and will taxes. ' He shall hearken diligently
conquer the land for them and they with much heed' (Isaiah xxi, 7).
will come and restore it in greatness, " Heed " : Rabbi Simon says :
322 BERNARD LEWIS-
and there will be great terror between "When Isaiah saw that there was
them and the sons of Esau ".1 Rabbi peace in his mouth he rejoiced".
Simon answered and said: "How And Rabbi Simon [also] said:
do we know that they are our "What is written 'And when he
salvation 1" He answered: "Did seeth a troop, horsemen in pairs, a
not the Prophet Isaiah say thus, troop of asses, a troop of camels'
that he saw a troop with horsemen means this: 'troop' is Babyion,
in pairs, etc. Why did he put the , pairs' is Medea, 'horsemen' is
troop of asses before the troop of Greece, 'troop of asses' is Edom,
camels, when he need only have , troop of camels ' is the kingdom of
said : 'A troop of camels and a Ishmael. When he saw the salvation
troop of asses l' But when he goes that was to come about he said:
forth riding a camel the dominion 'The burden upon Arabia, in the
will arise through 2 the rider on an forest of Arabia sha11 ye lodge,
ass. Again: 'a troop of asses " since o ye travelling companies of Deda-
he rides on an ass, shows that they nites' (Isaiah xxi, 13)". Rabbi
are the salvation of Israel, like the Simon says: "When Isaiah saw
salvation of the rider on an ass . . . that wicked things were to arise from
[i.e. the Messiah]. . . ." him who would oppress Israel and
take the reward of life from the
living and the reward of the dead
from the slain, he began to cry out
and say 'much" heed'''. Thus
Rabbi Simon used to say: "At
the beginning of his dominion, when
he goes forth, he will seek to do harm
to Israel, but great men of Israel
will join with him and give him a wife
from among them, and there will
be peace between him and Israel.
He will conquer a11 the kingdom
and come to Jerusalem ...•"
It will be seen at onee that the version of the Prayer differs in several
important respects from the two earJier ones, which in turn differ from one
another. In the first place, it contains several additions. While most of these
seem to be purely literary in intention, one at least is historically significant-
the reappearance of the Kenite at the end of the dominion of Ishmael and his
conquest of Jerusalem, with great slaughter. In this it is not difficult to see a
reflection of the final author's own time, and a reference to the entry of the
Crusaders into Jerusalem in 1099, in which, as we sha11 see later, he saw the
1 The Geniza fragment reads " He raises over them a crazy prophet, possessed by a spirit,
and he conquers tbe land for them and they come and seize dominion in grea.tness and there
will be great enmity between them and the sons of Esau " (Wertheimer, pp. 25-6). The Munich
MB. (107v) offers a third reading, cl08er to this version than to the printed text. (Cf. Btein.
•' '::l,
schneider, " Apooalypsen •••", ZDMG., xxviii, p. 635, note 25.)
reaa '''I''::l ?
first sign of the approaching end. The" great slaughter" of Jews and Muslims
by the Crusaders is attested by the Arabic sources.1
Kaufman 2 has suggested that the whole of this passage is based on a frag-
ment of an earlier apocalypse, dating from the time of the conquests, the
author of which saw in the rise and spread of Islam itself the preliminaries of
redemption. When these hopes were dashed, says Kaufman, later writers deleted
the eschatological conclusion and revised the "prophecy" itself in the spirit
of their own time. A comparison of the three versions and of the variants of the
Secrets tends to confirm this hypothesis, and to show that, while the text in
the Secrets expresses a Messianie hope from these events, the others are
subsequent and probably independent reftections of disillusionment.
In the Secrets, the role of Ishmael as redeemer is clearly and forcefully
stated by the angel, and Rabbi Simon's interjection amounts to no more than
a rhetorical question. In the Ten Kings, on the other hand, he expresses some
doubt, and the whole topic is reduced from a divine pronouncement to a
Midrashic debate between Rabbi Simon and a supporter of Ishmael's role
who is himself significantly named Rabbi Ishmael.3 The blessings of Ishmael
are moreover to be tempered by heavy taxes and wicked and extortionate
kings.
Again, in the Salonica text of the Secrets, Mu~ammad appears as a Prophet
whom God "will raise up over them according to His will". In the Ten Kings
there is no reference either to God or to Prophet, and the very portrait of
MuQ.ammad has become confused with that of the early Caliphs. In the Prayer,
the disillusionment has gone still further, and he has become " a crazy man,
possessed by a spirit ".4 This phrase, probably an allusion to Hosea ix, 7,
became in time the familiar term for MuQ.ammad in Jewish polemies against
Islam. 5 The allusion in the Ten Kings to his seeking " to do harm to Israel "
is presumably an echo of MuQ.ammad's dealings with the Jews in Medina, while
the reference to the " great men of Israel" who join him derives from a legend
1 Cf. Ibn aJ-Qalänisi, Dhail Ta'riM! Di11la§!!q, ed. Amedroz, Beirut, 1908, pp. 136-7 (=
H. A. R. Gibb, TM Da7lUZ8cua Okronicle 01 the Oruaaaes, London, 1932, pp. 47-9); Ibn al-Afuir,
al-Kämilli't-Ta'rilih, ed. Tornberg, Leiden, 1851-1876, x, 193--4 (= Reeueil des Historiens des
Oroisades, Pa.ris, 1841 ff., Historiens Orientaux I, pp. 198-9); Ibn Muyassar, Annales d'Egypte,
ed. Masse, Cairo, 1919, p. 39 (= Reeueil, Hist. Or., II!, 463--4).
aMid. G., pp. 162-174.
• This is the Rabbi Ishmael to whom fifteen prophecies eoneerning the aetions of the Arab
eonquerors are attributed in the Pirqe d' RalJbi Eli'ezer, ehapter 30 (English translation by G.
Friedlander, London, 1916, p. 221). This work was used by the compiler ofthe Ten Kings.
• This version also appears in the Geniza and Munieh versions of the Seerets. The first has
m'M W'N' MtlI'W N'::l', the seeond :V::I1WQ, N'::l, MtlI'W. It is possible that the Saloniea
version is an editorial emendation intended to forestall objeetions from the Muslim authorities ;
but the disagreement between the Geniza and Munieh versions makes it likelier that they are in-
dependent revisions, and that the Saloniea version js authentie.
• Cf. A. Berliner, QueUenschrilten zur jUdiacMn Geschichte und Literatur, I, Frankfurt, 1896,
pp. ix-x.
THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE - - - 147
324 BERNARD LEWIS-
occurring in both Christian and Jewish sources, and is probably based on a

distorted version of one or two episodes in the Muslim tradition. 1
Metatron-the name of the Chief of the Angels in Rabbinic literature.
"They will make great slaughter, etc. "-the subject of this sentence
is probably the Kenites, i.e. the Crusaders, and not Ishmael. Cf. § 10 below.
"And because of their oppressions "-i.e. the Byzantines, to whom the

narrative now returns, after the parenthesis on the Crusaders.
The passage from lsaiah is a popular one with apocalyptic authors. It

will be noted that the interpretation in the Prayer differs somewhat from
both the other versions, though not on the essential point of the identification
of the camels with Islam. The identification of the asses with the Messiah,
implicit in the Secrets and explicit in the Prayer, is omitted entirely from
the Ten Kings, and the other identifications are adjusted there accordingly.
This too may reflect the disappointment of the earlier Messianic hope connected
with the rise of Islam.
The same passage from Isaiah was of course also used in favour of Islam
by Muslim writers like 'All at-+,abari (ninth century) and Birüni (d. 1048),
and was refuted by a Christian writer as early as the beginning of the tenth
century.2 It occurs also in the letter to Yemen attributed to Maimonides.
" Tbe wise men will die, etc. "-this sentence may be corrupt or out of
place.
(3) This passage is reproduced from the Secrets, and would seem to be a
Midrashic gloss on the foregoing.
(4) An abridged and fragmentary account of the patriarchal and Umayyad
Caliphates. Tbe final author has made drastic cuts in the earlier versions. To
understand this passage we may refer to the versions of the Secrets and the
Ten Kings, which are as follows:-
Secrets Te;n Kings
The second king who arises from he will conquer all the king-
Ishmael will be a lover of Israel; he dom and come to J erusalem and bow
restores their breaches and the down there and make war with the
breaches of the temple. He hews Edomites and they will flee before
Mount Moriah and makes it all him and he will seize the kingship
straight, and builds a mosque 3 by force and then he will die.
• Cf. J. Mann, .. A Polemioal Work against Karaite and other Sectaries", JQR., n.s. xii,
1921-2, pp. 123-150; J. Leveen, .. Mohammad and his Jewish Companions ", JQR., n.s. xvi,
192~, pp. 399-406; M. Schwabe, "Mohammed's Ten Jewish Companions ", Tarbiz, ii, 1930,
pp. 74-89. A Christian form ofthe legend occurs in Theophanes (ed. De Boor i, 342), and thence
in the De Admini8trando Imperio ofConstantine X. For a discussion see the commentary to the
forthcoming English translation of the last·na.med work.
• Cf. G. von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam, Chicago, 1946, pp. 17-18 .
• M',nl'1t!'M-a. litera.l equivalent of the Arabio ~.
AN APOCALYPTIC VISION OF ISLAMIC mSTORY 325

there on the temple rock,! as it is
said: "thy nest is set in the rock"
(Numbers xxiv, 21). He makes war
against the sons of Esau and kills
his armies and takes many captives
from them, and he will die in peace
and with great honour.
And a great king will arise from One will arise from Hazarmaveth
Hazarmaveth 2 and rule for a short in his place, and another will arise
time, and the strong men of the sons and kill him, and he will go up to
of Kedar 3 will rise up against him Jerusalem and hew Mount Moriah
and kill him. and make it all straight.
And another will arise and rule
after him for a short time.
They will raise up another king And another king greater than
whose name is Mryaw, 4 and they will all will arise, and they will call
take him from the sheep and asses him Marwan, and four arms will
and raise him to kingship, and four rise from him, and they will repair
arms will rise from him and they the wall of the temple.
will repair the temple.
At the end of the kingdom of the
four arms another king will arise and
reduce the measures and weights and
spend three years in peace. And
there will be strife in the world in
his days and he will send great
armies against the Edomites and
there they will die 5 in hunger, and
they will have much food with them
and he withholds from them and
none will give them, 6 and the sons of
Edom will rise up against the sons of
Ishmael and kill them and the sons of
Ishmael will rise up and burn the
food and those who remain will Hee
and go forth.
Then the great king will arise and And another king will arise and
rule 19 years. These are his signs: rule 19 years, and he will eat the
reddish, cross-eyed, 7 and with three tranquillity of the sons of Ishmael.
1 i'1'T1W 7:lN.
2 Cf. Genesis x, 27. This is usually equated with Hadramawt.
S A common tenn for the Arabs in Hebrew literature.
• 'N"t:l. A very slight emendation gives 7N"t:l-Marwän.

• T1't:l\ read m't:l'.
• Munich MS. reads: "They will have food with them, but he will withhold it from them
and not give it to them."
, 7'Yi'1 7E1'W. Graetz emends to 7'Yi'1 l=1'ElU1, Steinschneider (p. 638, n. 25) connects with the
Arabic root~. Either could bear the meaning cross.eyed. The word may be connected with
.jL,.. from C1a"',v,~ (cf. Hirschberg and Lippert, Die Augenheilkunde des Ibn Sina, Leipzig,
1902, p. 172).
326 BERNARD LEWIS-
birthmarks, one on his brow, one

on his right hand, and one on his left
arm. He will plant young trees and
build ruined towns and burst open
the abysses to raise the water to
irrigate his trees. The grandsons of
his Bons 1 will eat much, and who-
ever rises up against him will be
delivered into his hand. The land
will be quiet in his days and he will
die in peace.
Another king will arise and seek And another will arise and seek
to deßect the waters of the Jordan; to scrape from Memre (SiC),2 but
he will bring distant men from his intention will not be fulfilled,
strange lands to dig and to make a and the chiefs of Kedar will rise up
canal and to raise the waters of the against him and kill him.
Jordan to irrigate the land. And the
excavation of the land will collapse Another will arise who will
upon them and kill them 3 and their reduce the weights and measures.
chiefs will hear and rise up against the
king and kill him.
Another king will arise with Another will arise and struggle
might, a man of war, and there will In east and west, and after that
be strife in the world in his days, "there is no peace" , said the
and this is the sign for you; when Lord.
you see that the western GairÜll
in the west of the mosque of the sons
of Ishmael in Damascus falls, bis
kingdom falls. They enter and go
out with taxes, and even the king-
dom of Ishmael will fall, and of them
he says: "The Lord hath broken
the staff of the wicked" (Isaiah
xiv, 5).' And this is indeed Marwan.
While the strong men of the sons
of Kedar are still with him, the north-
eastern corner will rebel against him,
and they will go against bim, and
three great itrmies will fall from him
on the Tigris and in Persia. 5 He
ßees before them and is captured
and killed, and they will hang his
sons on the tree.
The Secrets then goes on to speak of the coming of Messiah, while the Ten
Kings continues with the historical narrative.
1 ",:l ',:l ',:lt Kaufman suggests an emendation to "",:l, "and bis buildings ".
• '''0'00 M".,;,.
• c.:t.,n'" reaa C.:t.,nM1.
• Munich MS. adds: "The staff is none other than Ishmael."
6 c.,!). Munich MS. Tellds M"EI-Euphrates.

In these two texts we clearly have earlier and fuller versions of an apocalypse
written during the co11apse oI. the Umayyad Caliphate, on which this section
of the Prayer is based. The significance of this passage of the Secrets was first
recognized by Graetz,l and despite the objection of Steinschneider,2 his analysis
is in essentials correct, though not in a1l details. With the much greater know-
ledge of early Islamic history that we now possess, a more accurate identification
is possible, and most of Steinschneider's objections can be met.
Some of the Umayyad Caliphs are easily recognizable. Marwan lappears by
name in the Prayer and the Ten Kings, and in a slightly corrupt form in the
Secrets. The" sheep and asses" are an allusion to the obscurity in which he
spent the last year of Mu'äwiya's reign. The" four arms" are of course the
four sons of 'Abd al-Malik who became Caliphs. This succession of brothers
also struck the author of the apocalyptic fragment published by Levi. 3 The
repair of the temple refers to the building of the mosque in J erusalem by
'Abd al-Malik.
Sulaiman is easily identified by his unsuccessful campaign against
Constantinople. The shortage of supplies in the Arab camp and the burning of
the reserves by Maslama.is well-known from Arabic sourees. 4 The reference to
weights and measures may be an echo of the fiscal measures imposed on
Sulaiman by the cost of the campaign, or possibly an echo of the reorganization
begun under 'Abd al-Malik. In the Ten Kings this rubric has got out of place.
The great king who rules for 19 years and overcomes a11 his enemies can
only be Hishäm. His activities as a builder and as a " planter of trees" are
we11 known. 5 The Arabic sources attest his squint,6 his numerous progeny,7
and the tranquillity of the land in his days.8
All would seem to point to WaUd 11 as the king who sought to deflect
the Jordan-his position immediately after Hishäm, his activities around
Palestine, his violent end at the hands of "the chiefs of Kedar ". Even the
canal is confirmed. 'fabari records a conversation in which the Caliph enquires
about a canal he had dug in the Jordan distriet, and asks how much of it
remains. 9
This confirms the reading of the Secrets against the obscure and probably
1 Ge8chichte, v, 100. oit.
2 .. Apocalypsen ", 100. oit.
3 Israel Lßvi, .. Une Apooalypae Judeo.Arabe", REJ., lxix, 1914, pp. 177-182. Cf.
Wertheimer, Ü, p. 30 .
• Tabari, Annale8, Leiden, 1879-1901, ii, 1316; cf. Kitäb al.'Uyün (in Fragmenta Hiatoricum
Arabicorum, ed. De Goeje, Leiden, 1871), p. 29; Ibn al.AJ!lir, v, p. 18.
S Cf. tbe interesting observations of J. Sauvaget, "Remarques sur les Monuments
Omeyyades", JA., 1939, pp. 1-13.
o E.g. Mas'üdi, MUrilj, ed. Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille, Paris, 1861-1877,
v, p. 466; Tanbik, ed. De Goeje, Leiden, 1894, p. 322 (= Carra de Vaux, Le Livre ae L'Avertiaae.
ment, Paris, 1897, p. 417).
7 Cf. F. Gabrieli, Il Oaliffato ai Hiahäm, Alexandria, 1935, p. 139.
s Ibid., p. 141.
• ü,1803. Quoted by I. Braalavski, "Hat Walid II den Jordan ablenken wollen?", JPOS.,
xiii, 1933, pp. 97-100.
328 BERNARD LEWlS-
corrupt reference to an unknown Memre in the Ten Kings. The whole of this
rubric is strikingly reminiscent of the oft-quoted passage from Severus ibn
al-Muqaffa', which Lammens referred to the building of Mshatta.1 The two
differ in two important respects-that Severus makes no mention of the Jordan,
and that the Secrets speaks of no town or building. They agree on the movement
of water, on the importation of workers from other parts, and on their revolt.
The possibility cannot be excluded that both passages refer to the same events,
in which case the Mshatta identification of the Severus text would be very
unlikely in view of the distance of the site from the Jordan, and some other site
nearer the Jordan would have to be found.
The last king is of course Marwän II, whose hopeless struggle against
the 'Abbäsid advance is clearly depicted. The Gairün, as Steinschneider 2
showed, is the Bäb J airnn, the eastern gate of the mosque of Damascus, named,
according to the Arabic sources, after a pre-Islamic temple. The Ten Kings
and the Prayer both place the Gairün in the west. The Secrets mentions it
twice, once in the west and once in the east. The passage may refer to the " Day
of Jairün ", the clash in the mosque between Qais and Kalb, that culminated
in the battle of Marj Rähit. If so, the seer who saw in it a portent of the fall
of the kingdom of Ishmael was not far wrong.
Some uncertainty remains concerning the beginning of the passage, where
the patriarchal caliphs and Mu'äwiya all seem to be confused. If one remembers
that the writer was probably a Palestinian Jew, for whom Arab rule was for
long directly represented by Mu'äwiya, first as governor and then as Caliph,
this is not surprising. The vicissitudes of the Caliphate in Arabia and Iraq
cannot have made any deep impression on such aperson. The" second king"
who dies in peace and honour after many victories can only be Mu'äwiya,
to whom some of the a/1tions of 'Umar in Syria during Mu'äwiya's governorship
are erroneously attributed. The king from Hazarmaveth who was murdered
by the strong men of the sons of Kedar is a distant echo of the reign and death
of 'All in Iraq. In the Ten Kings version the personality of 'Umar is confused
with that of Mul;tammad himself, probably by the omission of some linking
phrase like "then another king arose ", or something of the sort, and Mu'äwiya
comes in his proper place after 'Au. The implication that Mu'äwiya murdered
'Ali obviously means no more than that he was the beneficiary of his death.
There is abrief reference to Mu'äwiya's coronation visit to J erusalem and to the
reign of Yazid I after him.
Very little of all tbis remains in the version of the Prayer, wbich retains
only four kings. Yet even in these there are important divergencies from the
earliest versions. Marwän is surprisingly killed by the sons of Edom. Tbis is
probably due to the addition to bis rubric of a misunderstood fragment from
the account of Sulaimän a little further down. The account of Marwän II is
1 Etudes Bur le Sieele des Omeyyades, Beirut, 1930, p. 348 et seq. Cf. Sauvaget, "Remarques ",
pp. 31-5.
• " Apocalypsen ", ZDMG., xxvili, pp. 638-645.
AN APOCALYPTIC VISION OF ISLUIC mSTORY 329

longer, and may derive from an earlier variant text. One king is entirely new.
It is the sueeessor of Marwän, who "will have peaee on a11 sides, and ... will
love Zion [1], and die in peaee ". Re is probably 'Abd al-Malik, who appears
in the other versions only in indireet a11usions.
(5) Graetz 1 quite correetly pointed out that this was not part of the same
apocalypse as the foregoing, but a later addition, dealing with other events.
His suggestion was that it was in reality apart of the Prayer, inserted in the
Seerets by later copyists, and referring to the MongoI invasions in the thirteenth
century. Baer and Kaufman, while accepting the first part of his theory, rejeet
his specific identification. The first regards it as part of the general apocalyptic
matter, the second as an allusion to the Seljuq invasions of the eleventh century,
superimposed on a misplaced description of four Umayyad Caliphs.
Both explanations present obvious difficulties, and even the reference of
the passage to the author of the Prayer is open to grave objection. The elear
assertion of the coming of Messiah during the reign of the fourth king is diffieult
to reeoneile with the long historical narrative that follows if both are the
work of one author, and suggests that what we have here is an independent
apocalypse of some date in between the original Secrets and the Prayer.
Starting from this hypothesis, it is not difficult to identify the four kings.
The " bitter and hasty " men who come from the east to overthrow the kingdom
of Ishmael are the 'Abbäsid armies-Mawäli and subjeet peoples rebelling
against their Arab masters. Canaan is Khuräsän. Rorsemen (Päräshim)
may be a pun on Persians, and the rebellious servant of rulers ('Ebhedh Mö~lim)
is eertainly a pun on Abü Muslim, the leader of the 'Abbäsid propaganda. The
wearing of blaek, explained by Kaufman as a referenee to the Seljuq acceptanee
of 'Abbäsid suzerainty, applies mueh more forcefully to the rise of the 'Abbäsids
themselves. Ashkenaz is mentioned only in the Prayer; the Seerets h88 Egypt.
Krauss has suggested that Ashkenaz means the Khazars and points out that
the term is so interpreted by Karaite eommentators of the Bible.1l
The identity of the four kings becomes elearer when we compare the versions
in the Seerets and the Ten Kings :-
Secrets Ten Kings
Four kings will arise over them, These are the kings who will
two princes and two deputies: rise from them :
(1) A ... 3 man who enthrones a (1) The first is 'Ebhedh Mö~,
king in his lifetime, of the seed of as it is said: "Thus saith the Lord
royalty. etc. ".
(2) The king who rules over them (2) The second is of royal seed.
1 Oe8{)kichte, v, p. 449, and vü, p. 449 et seq.

• A. H. Silver, MeaBianic 8peeulation in Israel, New York, 1927, p. 47.
• i'j~'i' IZ.'~N. I can find no meaning for this expression which ooeurs in both the printed and
Munieh texte. An emendation of the final i' to C would give .. a elownish man", whioh hardly
aeems satisfaotory.
VOL. XIII. l'ABT 2.
- - - - THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE - - 153
330 BERNARD LEWIS-
is humble, has handsome eyes and

fine hair, and dies in peaee....
(3) After him a king will arise in (3) The third will arise in dis-
dispute and raise great armies on pute.
the Euphrates, and they will all fall
in one day, and he will fiee and
be imprisoned, and as long as he is
imprisoned there will be peaee in the
land, and his brothers rule in every
land.
(4) The fourth king who will rise (4) The fourth is a brother of the
over them loves silver and gold. He seeond ... the horn of the south-
is dark and tall and old and glutton- west will rebel against the fourth
OUS, l and kills those who brought king, and he will send very many
him forth and enthroned him. He armies there. In the first war the
will make ships of brass and fill sons of the west will eonquer and
them with silver and gold and hide in the seeond the sons of the east
them under the waters of the will conquer.
Euphrates to coneeal them for
his sons ... in his day the horn of
the west will rebel and he will send
many armies there and kill the sons
of the east, and again he sends many
armies, and they eome and kill the
sons of the west and dwell in their
land.
Both versions then go on to speak of the fall of the Gairun in Damascus

and of the coming of Messiah.
The four kings-two princes and two deputies-thus stand revealed from
the three texts as Abü Muslim, the Caliph Saffäl}., the rebel 'Abdallah, and the
Caliph Ma~ür, " the brother of the second ". The physical deseriptions of the
two Caliphs are supported by the Arabic historians. Saffä"Q., says Mas'üdi, was
"taU and fair, with an aquiline nose, a handsome face and eurly, plentiful
hair ". 2 He was 33 years old when he died. Ma~ür was" taU, dark, and slender,
thin-bearded and blaek-haired ".3 It was Ma~ür who ordered the execution
of Abü Muslim and his associates. He was notorious among the Arabs for his
thrift, which won him the nickname of Abü-d-Dawäniq, the Father of Farthings
(= " coins of brass " 1). His struggle with the west and south-west is a reference
to the Sufyäni and Shi'ite risings in 8yria and Arabia.
From all this it would soom that this apocalypse was written early in the
reign of Ma~ür, probably in Iraq or 8yria.
There ia some other evidence of Messianie expectation among the Jews
1 ,:1,:1, reaa 7':':1.

• Tanbih, p. 339 (= Carra de Vaux, p. 436). On the ce humility" of Saffib. v. A. K. DiirI',
Al··A~ al.'Abb48i al-Awwal, Bagbdad, 1945, pp. 6~.
• Tanbih, p. 341 (= Carra de Vaux, p. 439); cf. Tabari, iii, 391.
during his reign. A Geniza fragment on the signs of the coming of Messiah 1
mentions Ma~ür by name as a mIer of Ishmael during the last days, and a well-
known passage in the Pi'l'qe d'Rabbi Eli'ezer, after prophesying the activities
of the sons of Ishmael, concludes that the Messiah will come after the reigns of
two brothers. These have been identified as Amin and Ma'mün,2 'Abd al-Malik
and bis brother 'Abd al-'Aziz,3 and even as Mu'äwiya and Ziyäd.' Taken with
this other evidence, they are more likely to be Saffäl}. and Ma~ür. According
to Shahrastäni the Jewish pseudo-Messiah Abü 'Isä of Ispahan made his final
appearance during the reign of Ma~ür. Though most scholars prefer an earlier
dating, based on other sources, 5 Shahrastäni's statement may well reftect
another Messianic movement of the period. It was a time of high Messianie
hopes, encouraged by the propaganda of the 'Abbäsids themselves. In Persia,
the death of Abü Muslim was followed by aseries of sectarian revolts, usually
with a Messianie colouring. In Syria and Arabia first a Sufyäni claimant and
then the 'Alid Mul;tammad an-Nafs az-Zakiya led movements of Messianic
revolt against the 'Abbäsids, and the latter was proclaimed as Mahdi in Medina.
It was probably during the struggle between his supporters and the Caliph
that this vision was written.
(6) This passage is expanded from the Secrets, and is derived from Talmudic
accounts of the signs of the coming of Messiah. It would appear to be part of
the eschatological tail-piece of the immediately preceding apocalypse.
II
(7-9) S "I returned again to my prayer ". . . . These words introduce a
new vision, hitherto accepted as that of the final author of the Prayer. Jellinek
regarded the convulsions referred to in this and the following passages as allu-
sions to the Crusades, and this identmcation has been generally accepted as
certain. The coming of the " sons of the west" with great armies to make war
against the " sons of the east ", the ftight and pursuit to Egypt, the devastation
of Palestine, all seem to fit weIl enough, and Baer 7 has with plausibility
identified these last events with the incursions of the Crusaders into Egypt in
1166-7 under Amalric. Following this, he claims to recognize the Third Crusade
in § 9 below.
At first sight this identification seems satisfactory enough. Though not
everything in the text can be fitted into that particular historical frame-
work, one cannot expect detail and accuracy in what is after all an apocalyptic
1 A. Marmorstein, "Les Signes du Messie", REJ., lli, 1906, pp. 176-186 (cf. Kaufman,
p. 294 and p. 3Il).
S Graetz, Geschichte, v, 198.
a S • .Assaf and L. A. Mayer (editors), SeJer hay. YiBkBküM, Jerusalem, 1944, Ü, p. 70.
• Silver, M esaianic Speculation, pp. 40-1.
i Chießy Qirqisäni. But for a dissenting view see I. Friedländer, " Jewish Arabio Studies ",
JQR., n.s. i, 1910-Il, pp. 183-215, especially 203 If.
7 Eine judiache Me88;aapropkdie, pp. 162 et seq.
332 BERNARD LEWIS-
and not an historieal narrative. Yet eertain questions stand out, to whieh one
would desire an answer. Why is there no indieation that the " sons of the west"
are Christians 1 One would expect some referenee to " Edom " or " Esau " or
one of the usual pseudonyms applied in this literature to Rome and its Christian
sueeessors. Why do the Crusaders reaeh Egypt before Palestine and Alexandria
before Cairo-a reversal in both eases of the historie order? Why is the passage
eoneerning the "king of fieree eountenanee" (§ 8), explained by Baer and
Kaufman 1 as general apoealyptie matter with possible referenee to the persecu-
tion of the Almohades, inserted, apparently quite irrelevantly, between the
campaigns of Amalric and the Third Crusade? And, finally, why does the
unmistakable account of the First Crusade (recognized by Baer 2 and Kaufman 3
as such) come after the Third Crusade and just before the eschatological
conclusion ?
All these difficulties can be, and indeed have been, explained away as
due either to apocalyptic vagueness or textual eorruption; and indeed this
answer might have been aeceptable, had there not been another set of historical
circumstanees that fit our text far more closely, and with far less need for
emendation or rearrangement.
When Jellinek and his successors read in our text of annies from the West
that would invade the East, they fell into an error from whieh their subsequent
errors all derived. The West, they assumed, could only be Christian Europe,
the East the world of Islam, and the invaders necessarily the Crusaders. But
to regard the eonfrontation of Christendom and Islam as one of West and
East is a European practice, and a comparatively modern one at that. Medieval
Islamic soeiety, stretching to the Atlantic shores of Morocco and Spain, did not
eonceive the lands of Christendom as "the West ", but rather, where it classified
them geographically, as the North, and this could hardly be otherwise. Yet
the tenn West-Arabie Maihrib, Hebrew Ma'rabh-was used generally of a
eertain region-of North Africa and sometimes Spain. It is there, rather than
in Europe, that we must seek for the origin of the " sons of the west " of our
text. And the answer is not diffieult to find. In 969 the Fätimid armies from
Tunisia invaded and eonquered Egypt, and followed up their vietory by
advaneing into Palestine. In the light of these events and their sequel, our
text beeomes clear and eonsistent. The Ikhshidid withdrawal eastwards to
Alexandria, the vietory of the Fätimids by that eity and their vietorious advance
on Fustät (= Egypt), and their subsequent invasion of Palestine under Jawhar
are all clearly recognizable in our text. The" king of fierce eountenanee"
who rules for three and a half years is the Carmathians, who ravaged south
Syria and Palestine in 971-4. By expropriating the rieh and abolishing festivals
in favour of a religious interconfessionalism, they would be earrying out, if
not the real tenets of their seet, at least those attributed to them by eontem-
porary opinion. The passage that follows mirrors the eonfused and multi-
partite struggle in Palestine between the Fätimids, the Carmathians, the
1 Mid. G., p. 277. • Eine jUd. Me88., p. 165. 3 Mid. G., pp. 281 et seq.
Turkish general Alptakin, and the Palestinian Tayyi Bedouin under Ibn
al-Jarräl}..l The incursion of the Edomites that follows would be the campaigns
in Syria and Palestine of the Byzantine Emperor John Tzimisces in 974-6. 2
It is this last event that probably caused the writing of this apocalypse. Since
ancient times a Roman victory in Palestine was regarded as one of the necessary
signa of the coming of Messiah. The Babylonian Hai Gaon (d. 1038), for example,
in a Responsum on the coming of Messiah, states this quite clearly and remarks :
" Therefore, when we see Edom prevaiI in the land of Israel, we believe that our
salvation has begun ".3 When the author of this tenth century apocalypse
saw the unresisted advance of the Byzantines through Syria towards Palestine,
following on the conquest of Egypt and the clash in Palestine of Fätimids and
Carmathians-both of them incidentally conducting Messianie propaganda
on their own accounts-he believed that the end was approaching. His con-
viction of imminent salvation and parts of his eschatological conclusion survive
even in the re-edited version that the final author of the Prayer incorporated
in his own text.
Echoes of these events, and in some cases even of the apocalypse on which
our text is based, may be found in other works. The Midrash of the Ten Kings
does not end, like the Secrets, with the reign of Ma~iir, but adds a further
paragraph that is clearly related to our text :-
" . . . the sons of the west will come against the sons of the east to destroy
and ruin them, and the survivors will :!lee and they will pass into Palestine and
all of it will be in their hands. And the kingdom of the sons of. the west will
hold firm in Egypt and from the Nile until the Euphrates.
And after a11 this, if Israel is not deserving, a king of fierce countenance will
arise and kill the king of the sons of the east in the month of Äbh, and make
decrees against Israel and abrogate the festivals and sabbaths, as it is said:
, and he shall think to change the times and the law; and they shall be given
into his hand until a time and times and half a time' (Daniel vii, 25). 'Time'
is a year, 'times' is two years, and 'half a time' is half a year.
Then a king will arise whose name is Mw~yb, 4. and he will restore all who
worship idols and be angry against the holy covenant. He will rule for 9
months."
The Ten Kings then goes straight on to the descent of Satan and his mating
with the statue in Rome.
Again, in the Midrash Leqa~ Töbh of Töbhiyah b. Eli'ezer (twelfth-
thirteenth century),5 we find a passage, certainly based on earlier texts, on the
1 The chief contemporary source for these events is Thiibit ibn Siniin, of whom I am now
preparing an edition. Other main souroes are Ibn al-Qaliinisi (pp. 1-21); Ibn al-Al;hir, viii,
452-3,469-472, 483-5; Maqrizi, Itti'ii~, ed. Bunz, Leipzig, 1909, pp. 100 and 130 et seq. Cf.
De Goeje, Memoire 8ur leB Oarmathea . .. Leiden, 1886, pp. 187-195.
• v. G. Sohlumberger, L' Epopfe Byzantine, Paris, 1896, i, 280-308.
• Text in Kaufman, p. 135. On oorresponding Christian beliefs cf. A. A. Vasiliev, History
0/ tM Byzantine Empire, Madison, 1928, i, p. 290.
, :::1'zzm::l. • Text in Jellinek, iii, p. 141 (cf. Kaufman, pp. 102-3).
334 BERNARD LEWIS-
coming of Messiah, and containing the following: "And the sons of the west
will wax proud and will seize the kingdom peaceably (cf. Daniel xi, 21). They
will come to Egypt and take all captive. And in those days the king of fierce
countenance will arise over a poor and impoverished people, and he will
, obtain the kingdom by fiatteries' (Daniel xi, 21). And of that time, Isaiah
said: 'Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, etc. ' (Isaiah xxvi, 20).
The sages said: 'Rabbi I;Iiyya commanded his generation: When you hear
that the king of fierce countenance has arisen, do not dweIl there, for he decrees
that whoever says: "One is the God of the Hebrews" will be killed. And he
says: "Let us all be one language and one nation", and he abrogates seasons
and festivals and Sabbaths and New Moons and abrogates the Law from Israel,
as it is said: 'and he thinks to change the times and the law; and they shall
be given into his hand until a time and times and a half a time '. 'Time'
is a year, , times' is two, and ' half a time' is half a year. They said to him:
"Master, whither shall we escape 1" and he answered them: "to Upper
Galilee, as it is said: 'for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be
those that escape ' (Joel ii, 32), and 'in Mount Zion there shall be those that
escape, and it shall be holy' (Obadiah 17)".
The text then relates how Israel gather in Upper Galilee and then follow
the Messiah ben-Joseph to J erusalem.
These two passages are certainly related to our text, and probably to
the tenth century apocalypse on which the final author of the Prayer drew.
The second contains one or two details not in the Prayer text, but easily
applicable to the Carmathians, and probably deriving from the lost original.
The disappearance of the allusions to the Tzimisces campaign from the later
versions is not surprising; later writers, no longer acquainted with these
events, would take them as part of the final wars of Messiah, and incorporate
them into their own eschatologies.
There are also other, more distant echoes. In a Messianic text of uncertain
date and provenance,l we find among the signs of the end: "A king of fierce
countenance will arise and issue evil decrees in his kingdom, and a great king
will go out against Alexandria with an army. There will be great evil in the
world and for three and a half years he will rule and rebel. And the princes of
Edom will fall and there will be ten wars and then Israel will triumph, etc."
A further search in medieval Hebrew literature would no doubt reveal other
paralleIs. At the same time it is significant that discussions of the coming
of Messiah written before the tenth century-e.g. Sa'diya's chapter on Redemp-
tion, the apocalypses of Elijah and Zerubabel-do not refer either to the three
and a half year interlude of interconfessionalism or to the conquest of Egypt
from North Africa.
One other possible parallel may be noted, in a text which, though probably
unrelated to ours, may weIl refiect the same events. The Judaeo-Persian
1 Text in Jellinek, iii, p. 71. He Buggests (p. xix) a Persian origin, in the Gaonio period.
apooalypse of Daniel,1 after desoribing aseries of mIers apparently ending with

Ma 'mÜll, gives an aooount of the final wars, introduoed by two mIers of the
west and a king of the Romans. The first king of the west orders the wearing
of white garments, and abolishes the blaok. The seoond also imposes white
garments, makes war on the rulers of both east and west, and wreaks great
destruotion. The king of the Romans wears red garments, and fights against
the children of Ishmael " as far as Damascus ". 2 The wearing of white garments
was generally recognized in 'Abbäsid Persia as a symbol of revolt against the
'Abbäsid Caliphate, and the "two kings" may weIl be the Fätimids and
Carmathians. The king of the Romans who reaches Damasous would then
be the Emperor John Tzimisces. His red garments may be an allusion to the
imperial purple, or perhaps a pun on Edom (Adam = red), introduoed to
oomplete the colouring matter. A less likely explanation is that they are an
allusion to the alleged Armenian origin of Tzimisces' name. 3
The following points of detail may be noted :
(7) "The sons of the East that are in their land "-the Ikhshidid garrisons
in the western desert. This signifioant phrase aocords ill with the Crusades
identification, and is acoordingly dismissed by Kaufman as a corruption.
" If you put meat in the fire, etc." Presumably a proverb meaning here
that while such great convulsions are taking place, Israel oannot hope to esoape
unsoathed. The words that follow advise the Jews to avoid becoming involved,
as far as they can.
"They shall pass through Palestine, etc." The Fätimid armies invade
and conquer Palestine.
(8) "Three and a haU years". In Dhu'l-Qa'da 360/Aug.-Sept. 971, the

Carmathians under I.Iusain b. A1;tmad b. Bahräm captured Damasous, and
proceeded to invade Palestine and Egypt. After a bitter struggle they were
defeated and expelled in 363/973-4 by the Fätimid foroes who temporarily
occupied Damascus. Carmathian bands again played some part in the
disturbance of 364-5i97 4-6.'
I know of no evidence from any other souroes of particular anti-Jewish
measures by the Carmathians, and it seems likely that the author is here
referring to the general suffering of the people of 8yria during the Carmathian
1 Published by H. Zotenberg, .. Geschichte Damels ", Archiv Jür Wissenachajtliche ErJorschung

du Alten Testamentes, i, 1867-9, pp. 385-427-
• Ibid., pp. 412-13.
I From an Armenian word meaning red shoes. 8ee Schlumberger, L' Epopee, p. 4, n. 2.
• The" King of fierce countenance " may even be a direct allusion to the word Carmathian,
one p08sible etymology of which is from Qarmata, to frown or wrinkIe the face. Cf. Lewis, TM
Origina oJ Ismä'ilism, Cambridge, 1940, pp. 82-3. I am indebted to Dr. D. S. Rice for this
suggestion.
336 :BERNARD LEWIS-
ravages, and possibly to a Carmathian appeal to men of all faiths to join

them. 1
"To upper Galilee"-the gathering of Israel in Galilee on the eve of

their redemption is s recurring theme in Jewish apocalypses.
" In his day there will be strife, etc." A reference to the confused struggle
in Palestine between Fätimids, Carmsthians, Jarräl;tids, Byzantines, Turks,
etc.
" And they shall be given into his hand, etc." This verse is a favourite
with " calculators of the end", i.e., those who attempt to calculate the date
of the coming of Messiah by the manipulation of Biblical verses.
"Then a king will arise, etc." Presumably Mu'izz, who ends the Carmathian
terror and restores order. "Unbelief " is of course an ironic reference to Mu'izz's
own religion. The" three months" probably refer to the brief interval of
Fätimid authority in Damascus and Palestine between the expulsion of the
Carmathians and the coming of AIptakin. In the Ten Kings version (v. supra)
the restorer rules for nine months.
(9) "The plain of Acre". This struggle was not unnaturally identified by
Baer and Kaufman with the battles around Acre during the Third Crusade.
But it is unnecessary to find any specific event for this phrase. A battle in the
plain of Acre is a recurring theme in Jewish apocalypse, and occurs as early as
the poem" On that Day ", now generally believed to have been written in the
period of the Arab conquests-
" Edom and Ishmael will fight in the plain of Acre
Till the horses sink in the blood and panic". 2
According to Tzimisces himself, in his letter to the Armenian king Ashut IH, 3
he and his army went southward from Damascus' towards the lake of Galilee,
snd received the submission of Tiberiasand then of Nazareth. He appointed
officers to Beisän, Genesareth, and Acre, the Muslim rulers of which made
submission, and marched to the coast at Caesarea, which he captured. The
Byzantines then marched northward and occupied Beirüt after a fierce resistance
by the Fätimid garrison.
" Assyrians will come upon them, etc." Assyrians are required by the
prophecies. They were conveniently to hand. Towards the end of 974, a party
of some 300 Turkish Mamlüks arrived at Damascus from Iraq, whence they
had fled as the result of an internal conflict in the Büyid camp. The Damascenes,
1 The text of Buch a.n a.ppeal of la.ter date is preserved in the Risälat as-Sa/ar ilä'&-Säda,
& Druze letter to the Carma.thians of:Ba.J;u-a.in, written in 1058 (MB. Pa.ris, Ara.he, 1424, ff. 172-3).
• Se/er luJy-YiahahüM, ü, p. 70; Ka.ufma.n, pp. 154-l60.
• In Remuil du HiatorieM du Oroisadu, Dooumenta ArmenieoB, i, 13-20.
AN APOCALYPTIC VISION OF ISLAJrIIC HISTORY 337
weary of the depredations of the Fätimid troops, invited Alptakin, the Turkish
commander, to take over control of the city and restore order. He did. l
"Ships sha11 come, etc." The Byzantine forces, probably with naval
support, occupied or invested several of the coastal fortresses, and ".broke the
clay" of Arab resistance in pieces. The children of Israel would have bad
good reason to flee before a Byzantine advance.
" The vale of Megiddo ". This battle may be part of the vision of the end,
or may alternatively refer to a Byzantine set-back on the eve of their departure.
On the participation of Israel, it will be remembered that Jews like Ya'qub b.
Killis were prominent in the Fätimid camp, and in 371/981 we have a reference
to a Fätimid force in Palestine commanded by the Jew Manasseh. 2
"They sha11 afHict the Assyrians, etc." Probably a reference to the

Byzantine campaigns in Mesopotamia.
" The sons of Asshur will go forth, etc." A complimentary account of the
extension of Alptakin's authority after the departure of the Byzantines. Israel
here is probably an error for Ishmael, and refern to the Palestinian Bedouin to
whom, under the Jarrä1}.ids, "the kingdom " almost did return at this time.
"The sons of Italy" This reference forms the only serious objection
to the identification submitted. If the rest is correct, this is probably a textual
corruption, due to the misguided correction of an unfamiliar to a familiar name
by a later copyist. The word in Jellinek's text is N~S"to~N. Could this have
been N~~to (Tayya)-a common name for the Arabs in Syriac and late Hebrew,
and in addition the name of the dominant Arab tribe in Palestine at the time 1
" And at once, etc." The remainder of this section contains the remnants
of the Messianic portion of the tenth century apocalypse, probably edited by the
final author. The material is of familiar type, and has many paralleis in other
apocalyptic works. The story of the rejection of a king of the seed of David
and the resulting conflict may reflect an abortive Messianie movement of the
time.
III
(10) "I returned to prayer, etc." This phrase again introduces a new
vision, this time that of the final author of the Prayer. His vivid description of
the advance of the Crusaders and their capture of Jerusalem, to which he also
refers in his introduction, heraids his vision of the end. Every line suggests the
horror of a contemporary witness, and his hopes of imminent redemption.
" They will come to Jerusalem, etc." It is by no means unlikely that Jews
1 Thibit ibn Sinän, &UnO 364 "'.D.; Ibn &I.A!hir, viii, 483.
s Ibn al.Qalä.ni8i, p. 25.
338 AN APOCALYPTIC VISION OF ISLAMIC mSTORY
fieeing from the advance of the Crusaders sought refuge in J erusalem. J ewish
participation in the defence of Palestine against the Crusaders is attested by
Albert of AU, l who teIls how the J ews of Haifa" in moenibus armis exsurgentes,
multum in defensione obstiterunt ... Judaei cives, commixtis Sarracenorum
turmis, sine dilatione viriliter resistentes, a turri oleum, picem ferventem,
ignem et stuppas opposuerunt.... "
"The tribes have come". The steady decay of Fätimid power during
the eleventh century favoured the resurgence of the nomadie and semi-
nomadic Arab tribes of Syria and Palestine, many of which were able to create
independent principalities in various parts of the country. The 'fayy group in
the south had for long challenged Fätimid authority in Palestine, and the
anarchy in the Muslim world in this period gave them new opportunities.
IV
(11) The remainder contains of the final author's vision of the end. Its
personalities and events are familiar from Jewish apocalyptic literature
generally . Baer and Kaufman have attempted to find a historical foundation
for the first paragraph. They see Saladin in the "king of Egypt " who kills
in Tiberias and Damascus and Ascalon, and identify the Nehemiah of the
text with the pseudo-Messiah David Alroy. The difficulties in the way of such
an identification are considerable. There is no evidence whatever of any
connection between Saladin and Alroy, and it is by no means certain that their
careers were even contemporary. Moreover, AlrOY operated in the east, far
from these events. Again, the list of cities conquered does not taUy with
Saladin's campaigns. On the whole it seems far more likely that the Nehemiah
ben I.Iii!!iel of our text, like the Antichrist Armilus, is an apocalyptic figure,
borrowed, along with his trappings, from earlier visions. The historical back-
ground of the paragraph would then probably be a J ewish Messianic movement
of the period of the First Crusade. So portentous an event, accompanied by
such sufierings for Israel, could hardly fail to revive Messianic speculation
among the Jews, and we have several indications of Messianic movements at
this time among the J ews in Europe, Byzantium, and Palestine.2
1 Bwtori" Biuo8olymitana, vii, chapters 22 a.nd 25. Cf. Sefe.. Aay-YiahsMih...l!, ü, p.121l.
• See Silver, MeI/8ianic SJ*ulation, pp. 77-8, where severa.l references Me given.
12
THE LEGENDARY FUTÜI.l LITERATURE
Rudi Paret
Mul;tammad's establishment and consolidation ofthe city state in Medina and

the Arab-Islamic conquests achieved under the first Caliphs are among the
truly significant events in history. We may be certain that contemporaries
were already aware of this: the Prophet himself, the first Caliphs and the
emirs and warriors who contributed to the success of the campaigns within
Arabia and the conquests beyond its boundaries. However, the actual actors
in these gigantic events did not yet have any cause, and most likely no
opportunity either, to consider them from a literary point of view. They
made history, but did not write about it. 1 Information about the maghäzi,
Mul;tammad's campaigns, and the jutü1;t, the Arab-Islamic conquests, were
collected systematically and evaluated for historical representation only by
following generations. Of the many monographs written about the maghäzi,
the best known is by al-WaqidI, because it was not only used and copied
by later historians but because it has come down to us in its original form.
In 1882 Julius Wellhausen published an abridged German edition, entitled
'Muhammed in Medina. Das ist Vakidi's Kitab aIMaghazi', and since 1966 we
have had the complete Arabic text in Marsden Jones's edition. Some books
about the jutü1;t are also attributed to this same Waqidl (who came from
Medina, but spent the last thirty years ofhis life in Baghdad, where he died in
823). According to Fuat Sezgin the Istanbul manuscripts ofthesejutü1;t books
are 'apparently genuine'. However, he also says that 'even so, the authenticity
of all surviving Waqidl manuscripts concerning jutü1;t must be examined
thoroughly'.2 However that may be, the books Futü1;t al-Shäm, Futü1;t al-'Iräq,
Futü1;t Mi$1' and Futü1;t Ijriqiya, which exist in printed form and so me of which
are extensive, were in reality not composed by this author but must be
designated later, legendary accounts, expanded with fictional material, of the
Arab-[736]Islamic conquests. Waqidl was a historian who reported matter-of-
factly and who was particularly interested in dating and chronology of the
1 This should be accepted as a general statement, despite Fuat Sezgin's references to
the early date of written tradition (Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums I, Leiden 1967,
p.251-6).
2 Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums I, p. 296, n.1.
2 Rudi Paret
military events he reported. 3 According to Ibn 'Asakir, al-Khap:b al-Baghdadi

and Ibn Sayyid al-Nas, he systematically interrogated the descendants of
those contemporaries of Mulfammad's who had taken part in the wars
concerning the exact details of the events, and personally went to visit
al-MuraysI', I:Iunayn and other battle sites in order to see them for himself.4
If one reads only a few pages in one of the printed futub,-books allegedly
written by WaqidI, one will quickly co me to the conclusion that it cannot have
been composed by an author using such strictly scholarly methods. In a word,
just as we must distinguish between historical and legendary accounts of the
maghazi, so we must distinguish between historical and legendary traditions
about Arab-Islamic conquests. I have studied the legendary maghazi
literature in great detail in a monograph published in 1930. In the following I
will state a few points concerning the legendary futub, literature, points which
will be of a provisional nature. The result of my study, which I can summarise
in few sentences towards the end of this hour, is also no more than a
temporary attempt at finding an answer to the question asked in the subject,
namely 'The legendary futub,literature - an Arab national epic?' Ifwe wanted
to arrive at a valid answer, we would first have to carry out several intricate
and time-consuming individual studies.
In their early days, European Oriental Studies did not recognise correctly
the legendary nature of the abovementionedfutub, literature; for this we can
adduce two reasons. Firstly, the historical accounts of the conquests became
known comparatively late, such as Baladhurl's Futub, al-buldan in de Goeje's
edition in 1863-6, and the relevant passages in TabarI's Annals in the Leiden
edition (First Part rv.v, 1890.1893). Secondly, the legendary futub, works do in
fact contain a wealth of historical material, be it chronological, topographical
or quite generally factual, as they were not free inventions, but, so to speak,
were developed out of the historical futub, works. Within the field of futub,
literature, they consequently correspond to the type ofwriting I called 'fiction
with historical background' in my mono graph about the legendary maghazi
literature, and contrasted clearly against the 'fiction without historical
background'. While no reliable sources were extant, or immediately available,
sc hol ars had to be glad to be able to glean information about the history of the
conquests from books which today must be counted as legendary futub, books.
[737] As early as the beginning of the 18th century Simon Ockley,
Professor of Arabic in Cambridge, presented the conquest of Syria based on a
manuscript of Waqidl's Futub, al-Sham in the first volume of his history of the
Saracens (1708). Incidentally, Ockley's historical work was translated into
3 Wellhausen, Muhammed in Medina, p.15ff.
4 Kitäb al-Maghäzi I, p.6 (in the editor's Arabic introduction, with references).
The Legendary Futul; Literature 3
Dutch in 1741, into German in 1746 and into French in 1748, a sign of its wide
popular appeal. In 1825 H. A. Hamaker edited the Arabic text ofthe conquest
of Lower Egypt, with a multitude of learned notes;5 in 1827 Heinrich Ewald
published his edition of a fragment of the Conquest of Mesopotamia. 6 In 1847
B. G. Niebuhr translated the Arabic 'His tory of the Conquest of Mesopotamia
and Armenia by Mohammed ben Omar el Wakedi'; it was edited, with
explanatory notes and additions, by A. D. Mordtmann and published in
Hamburg. In 1854-62 W. Nassau Lees's edition of the Kitiib Futü1;L al-Shiim
followed in the Bibliotheca Indica. 7 Criticism of the authenticity of the texts
and the reliability of the tradition began early as weIl. Hamaker's and Lees's
editions already indicate in the title that the original is only attributed to
WäqidI; in his 1860 Akademie dissertation D. B. Haneberg from the outset only
speaks of 'Pseudo-Wakidi's' History of the Conquest of Syria and states that
it is unlikely that the work was composed before the Crusades. 8 The most
detailed criticism was M. J. de Goeje's, directed at a book also called Futü1;L
al-Shiim, edited by W. N. Lees in 1854, but attributed not to Wäqidl but to a
certain Abu Ismä'll Mul;ammad b. 'Abdalläh al-Azdi al-Ba~r1.9 Finally it must
be mentioned that Leone Caetani also voices criticism of the information in
the Kitiib Futü1;L al-Shiim in several passages of his monumental work Annali
dell'Islam. 10
The main interest of the historians listed in the previous paragraph,
who expressed criticism ofthefutü1;L literature, is in reconstructing the history
of the conquests. The more historicalor topographical information the text
provides, the more [738] faithfully it appears to document what really
happened, the more highly it will be rated. On the other hand, explicitly
fictitious and embroidered episodes as well as 'works of rhetorical and
stylistic art'll will be considered as worthless trimmings, or even rejected
as interpolation. However, it would be possible to use a radically different
5 Henricus Arentius Hamaker, Incerti auctoris liber de expugnatione Memphidis et
Alexandriae, vulgo adscriptus Abou Mohammedi Omarijilio, Wakidaeo, Medinensi (Leiden

1825).
6 G. H. A. Ewald, Libri Wakedii de Mesopotamiae expugnatae historia pars (Göttingen
1827).
7 The Conquest of Syria, commonly ascribed to Abou 'Abd Allah Mohammad b. 'Omar
al-Waqidi, Edited with not es by W. Nassau Lees (three volumes, Calcutta 1854-62). This
edition only contains the history of the conquest of Syria. The text ends with volume II, p.22
of the Cairo edition (1343/1925) used by me.
8P.5.
9 Memoires sur le Fotouho's-Scham attribue a Abou Ismail al-Bacri (Leiden 1864
Memoires d'Histoire et de Geographie Orientales par M. J. de Goeje, n.2).

10 See note 17 below.
11 Niebuhr-Mordtmann, p.V.
4 Rudi Paret
measure, and take the text as a whole, without exceptions, trying to

comprehend its formal literary elements and its overall tendency. Haneberg
concludes his critical discussion ofPseudo-Wakidi's history ofthe conquest of
Syria with a statement to this effect, which will also be the starting point for
our own deliberations and which I will consequently quote, with certain
abridgements, verbatim: 'All things considered, we do find that, if we wish to
appreciate the work properly according to the author's apparent bias, we
must not regard it from the historicalor the geographical side only. What
appears to us as detracting addition is exactly what to hirn was undeniably
the main thing, namely the romantic scenes the work contains, and the
theological effects it aims at. In the first respect it might have been one, or
indeed the, Arab epic poem if the author had submitted hirnself to the
shackles of met re and rhyme. With the greatness of events and the diversity of
the actors it would not have to take second place behind any other heroic epic:
the emperor Heraklius is the Priam, Khälid the Achilles of this Iliad. It is the
equal of medieval sagas because knightly humour is not lacking either: it
appears personified in the character ofthe incomparable hero Dämis, with the
epithet 'the Father of Terror' ... The unity within this manifold variety is
provided by the glorification ofIslam, which is present in all forms. The author
uses every opportunity to show the merits of Islam, the signs and mission of
the Prophet as weIl as the lives of the first followers of Islam in the most
dazzling light. He is more familiar with the customs of Christianity than most
Muslim authors known to us ... If it was indeed his intention, as seems
probable to us, to raise the Muslims' enthusiasm in the face of the successes of
the crusades, his work is weIl composed.'12
For my part I shall now attempt a closer characterisation of the legendary
futu1;L literature in all its iridescence, precisely as fiction with a historical
background. My basis is a two-volume quarta printed in Cairo in 1343/1925;
the author's name is given as Wäqidl. The title is throughout Futu1;L al-Shäm,
although it does not describe the conquest ofSyria only but also (in the second
volume) the conquest of Lower Egypt, Mesopotamia and Armenia, the
conquest ofIraq and, at the very end, ofBahnasä and the rest ofUpper Egypt.
[739] The first question to be clarified is whether these different parts
really belong together and form a literary unity, or whether they have been
joined only superficially. I should like to answer this very briefly in the
following way: that on the whole it is permissible to speak of unity. The
emphasis is on reporting about the conquest of Syria (and the geographical
term Syria is used to include Palestine). The history ofthe conquest ofLower
12 Haneberg, p.38-40.
The Legendary Futu!). Literature 5
Egypt, Mesopotamia and Armenia follows organically. According to Pseudo-

Wäqidi, not only Khälid, 'the sword of God', was immediately involved in
all these military enterprises, but also the former Byzantine commander of
Aleppo, named Yuqannä. The latter was a Christian who converted to Islam
and now, adorned with the characteristics of a fictional hero, campaigned with
great ardour for the further spread of Islam. Of course, the conquest of Iraq,
and later Persia, also forms part of this whole story. However, compared to
Syria, these two are mentioned only in passing, ending (in the two-volume
edition I am using) rather abruptly. Only the conquest of Bahnasä has its own
character, in that it appears to be connected to the feast of a saint (mawlid),
during which Bahnasä honoured (and possibly still does) all those Muslims
who died a martyr's death in the Holy War of conquest and are said to have
been buriedjust there. 13 However, as regards the way in which it is presented,
the conquest of Bahnasä and other places in Upper Egypt fits harmoniously
into the whole history, and the general is once again Khälid ibn al-Walld.
Finally it should be mentioned, only in passing, that there is also a legendary
Kitäb Futul:! Ifriqiya which is also attributed to al-Wäqidl. I am using a
two-volume edition published in Tunis in 1966.
More important than the question of the unity of the text and the
connection between its individual components is the question of its age.
However, at the moment it would be premature to discuss it, as we must first
characterise the contents and the form of presentation in more detail. Maybe
we will obtain certain criteria to help us determine the date at which the text
was composed. If I already consider the isnäds, the chains of transmitters that
are part of the text and [740] are meant to, as it were, guarantee that the
respective information about events has been handed down reliably from one
authority to the next and thus certainly originated in times long past, I do so
with a specific reason. I am not concerned with a chronological problem, but
with a structural one: not with determining the point in time to which a text
can be traced back, but with proving a formal element which, as we shall see,
plays an essential part in determining the literary character of the legendary
13 The story of the conquest of Bahnasa is usually transmitted as an independent account.
It survives in many manuscripts and has been printed a number oftimes and is attributed
to several authors. See C. Brockelmann, Geschichte der Arabischen Literatur I, p.136,
Supplement I, p.208; Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums I, p.296. 1909 a
French translation appeared in Cairo from the estate of Emile Galtier, but without any of
the literary and historical evaluation planned by the translator, wh ich should have followed
in a second volume (Emile Galtier, Foutouit al-Bahnsa. Memoired de l'Institut Frangais
d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire, Tome XXII). 'All Ba~a Mubarak's (d.1893) Al-Khitat
al-Tawfiqiya al-jadida contains a short reference to the anniversary (mawlid), in honour of
the 'martyrs' who fell in Bahnasa at that time (Vol. X, Bü.laq 1305, p.4, 1.26f.)
6 Rudi Paret
fUtil1;L literature. My observations are, this must be repeated, provisional

in character. When studying the entire history, I only marked the passages
with remarkable isnads; completeness was only aspired to in the section
concerning Lower Egypt. Furthermore, I had to take a fairly summary
approach to the evaluation of the material collected in this way if I did not
intend to spend weeks on individual threads of biblio- and biographical
research. This made the results of Hamaker's and Nassau Lees's studies of
several isnads all the more welcome.
The situation is confusing, to say the least. On the one hand the great
majority of the authorities cited in the isnads - their number ranges from
two to nine - cannot (or not yet) be identified. This also applies to the six
transmitters who are mentioned each in different passages as experts in the
field of fUtil1;L tradition. 14 In the section on the conquest of Lower Egypt, on
the other hand, we cannot find any one of the authorities cited by Ibn
~bdall)akam in his Futu1;L Mi~r wa-l-Maghrib, or those named by Fuat Sezgin in
the relevant section of his Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (I, p.354f.).
The sources mentioned in the futu1;L book itself thus appear to be of rather
doubtful value. However, we must bear in mind (Nassau Lees was the first to
point this out) that some of the links in the collective isnad which prefaces the
whole book correspond (despite certain divergences) to the collective isnad at
the beginning of Waqidl's Kitab al-Maghazi. 15 The author or the transmitter
14 'Abdallah ibn Sulayman al-Dlnawari (I, 173; Lees IIl, 23); 'Abdarral)man al-Mazini
(I, 188; Lees IIl, 63f.; Nu'aym ibn 'Abdarral)man al-Madani); Munazil (Ibn Nazzal)
al-~aydalani (1,204; Lees IIl, 106); Jarir bn al-Bakka' (Il, 18; Lees IIl, 187: Jaril). (Jurayj?) ibn
al-Bakka'); Ibn Jarir (Il, 57); the grandfather of a certain Nu'aym (Il, 124).
15 They are the following paralleis:
a) Maghazf: 'Umar ibn 'Uthman ibn 'Abdarral).man ibn Sa'Id ibn Yarbii' al-MakhziimI
wa-Miisa ibn Mul).ammad ibn Ibrahlm ibn al-I;Iarith al-TaymI wa-Mul).ammad ibn
'Abdallah ibn Muslim;
Lees: 'Umar ibn 'Uthman ibn 'Abdarral).man ibn Sa'id ibn Yarbii' al-Makhziimi
wa-Nawfal ibn Mul).ammad ibn Ibrahlm ibn al-I;Iarith al-TamlmI wa-Mul).ammad ibn
'Abdallah ibn Mul).ammad ibn Maysara ibn Ru'aym (?);
Cairo edition: (Abii Bakr Mul).ammad ibn al-I;Iasan ibn Sufyan ibn) Nawfal ibn
Mul).ammad ibn Ibrahlm al-TamimI wa-Mul).ammad ibn 'Abdallah al-An~ari;
b) Maghiizf: wa-Sa'Id ibn 'Uthman ibn 'Abdarral).man ibn 'Abdallah al-TaymI wa-Yiinus
ibn Mul).ammad al-ZafarI wa-'A'idh ibn Yal).ya wa-Mul).ammad ibn 'Amr wa-Mu'adh ibn
Mul).ammad al-An~arI ... wa-'Abdarral).man ibn 'Abdal'azIz ibn 'Abdallah ibn 'Uthman
ibn I;Iunayf;
Lees: wa-Rabi'a ibn 'Uthman wa-Yiinus ibn Mul).ammad al-Mu~affari wa-'A'in ibn
Yal).ya ibn 'Abdallah al-DarqI (?) wa-Mul).ammad ibn 'Umar al-RaH'I wa-Mu'adh ibn
Mul).ammad al-An~ari wa-'Abdarral).man ibn 'Abdal'aziz ibn 'Abdallah ibn 'Uthman ibn
Jubayr al-I;Iarithi;
Cairo edition: all these names are missing.
The Legendary Futü!). Literature 7
did definitely not just [741] pick all the names of authorities out of the air. A
somehow eredible impression is also ereated when there are a few referenees
whieh mention that the transmitter Yünus ibn 'Abd al-NUt (d. 877) had a
tradition 'read' to hirn (with the aim of giving hirn the lieenee to transmit it
onwards: the teehnieal term is qirä'atan 'alayh). This is said to have happened
onee in Kufa (I, 58 = Lees Il, 3), another time in Ashkelon (Il, 22 = Ramaker,
3), also in Ramla in the year 220 AR = 835 AD (II, 61 = Niebuhr, 1: 28 AR = 649
AD!), and finally in Jerusalem, but the year given he re would date the event to
26 years after the death of the transmitter (Rahi I 290 = 903 AD; II, 133). It
seems permissible to assurne that the ehains oftransmitters used in the Futü1;l,
al-Shäm were substantiated by souree material whieh has now been lost or not
yet been studied in suffieient detail, and that at least apart of the isnäds still
indieates these sourees, although the names have been eorrupted and
eonfused. 16 Rowever that may be, [742] one thing is sure (and that is wh at is
important to me in the present eontext): the legendary futü1;l, literature
pretends to have seholarly eharacter. It claims to be historiealliterature, in the
narrowest sense of the term. Proof of this are the numerous isnäds whieh are
used throughout the text to introduee smaller and larger sections.
What, though, is the aetual eontent of the futü1;l, literature? What is the
tendeney behind it? And to wh at extent should it be ealled legendary?
There is one instanee (I, 125, repeated 165; Lees III, H.) in whieh the
author expresses hirnself eoneerning the intention and aims of his work.
After emphasising the truthfulness of his aeeount, he eontinues: 'It was my
c) Maghäzi: wa-Malik ibn Abi-l-Rijal wa-Isma'Il ibn Ibrahim ibn 'Uqba;

Lees: wa-Malik ibn Abi-l-l;Iasan wa-Isma'Il ibn Ibrahim ibn 'Utba (read: 'Uqba?) mawla
al-Zubayr;
Cairo edition: wa-Malik ibn Abi-l-l;Iasan wa-Isma'Il mawla al-Zubayr.
16 A remarkable source is quoted in the history ofthe conquest ofEgypt (Il, 27; Hamaker,
18[.). The text is parUy corrupt; also the two versions di[[er in several passages. One isnad
mentions in fifth place (third, in Hamaker) a certain Abu (or Ibn) Is}:taq al-Umawl. He is
stated to be the main authority (al-mu'iamad 'alayh) in the history ofthe conquest o[Egypt,
the land of the Rabi'a and Persia (or: the Persians). According to 'Umar ('Amr) ibn l;Iaf~,
no-one except hirn (Mu}:tammad ibn Is}:taq) specialised in the his tory of the conquest of
Syria and Egypt, as all the other biographers concentrated on the battles and the conquest
of Iraq and on what passed between Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas and Kisra Anushirwan.
According to hirn, Ibn Is}:taq received all his information from reliable authorities of the
Makhzum whom he met after the conquest in Ramla; namely from Nawfal ibn Saji'
(Musaji') al-Makhzumi, nephew of Khalid ibn al-Walld. He was one of the mu'ammarün
who was present at the battles of Tabuk and later (earlier) l;Iudaybiya and also on the day
of al-Yamama and Musaylima; together with 'Amr ibn al-'A:;; he took part in the whole
conquest of Egypt (and Syria). Another named authority is Fahd ibn 'A~im ibn 'Amr ibn
Sa}:tl (Su}:tayl) ibn 'Amr al-Makhzumi; others are just as reliable and all took part in the
conquest of Egypt.
8 Rudi Paret
intention to present clearly the excellent qualities ofthe Companions ofGod's

Messenger and their endeavour in the Holy War (jihädahum), in order to teach
a lesson to (ly,attä uraghghima) the apostates who reject custom and law ... For
if it had not been for those Companions of God's Messenger - thanks to God's
will - the country would not have become Muslim, and the knowledge of this
faith would not have spread. Wh at fine men they were! They were striving for
God's sake as they should, and helped his faith to victory! When they met the
enemy, they stood their ground and feared no exertion. They fought for their
faith until unbelief had been toppled off its throne and finally surrendered.'
Indeed, the whole book is one great paean to the Arab warriors of the time
of the conquest and praise for their bravery and religious zeal. The bravery
and fighting strength of the Muslims is exaggerated into fantasy. They are
always in the minority, but console themselves with the frequently quoted
verse from the Koran 'How many a little band of men has overcome a large
one with God's permission! God is with them that are patient,' (2:249). When
'Um ar asked Abu 'Ubayda to send 4000 horsemen to help 'Amr ibn al-'Ä$
in Egypt, Abu 'Ubayda was worried about the long distance, whereupon
Khalid suggested he should begin by sending four Muslims. These could take
the place of the 4000 horsemen (11, 38). In another context we read that sixty
Muslims fought against 60,000 enemies, and after the victory only ten of
the Muslims had fallen, as opposed to 5,000 on the opposing side (I, 113f.).
However modest the Muslims may have been in their attitude towards one
another, they are very aware of their worth: when they visit the enemy camp
as emissaries, they refuse to alight from their horses and hand in their swords
(I, 6; 11, 33). The Arabs [743] never commit treason or lie (I, 58.88); when they
make a promise their word can be relied on. This is how it was in their heathen
days, and all the more so after they found the path to the true faith (I, 48).
Among themselves they are agreeable, imbued with a sense of justice and
generally a paragon of virtues. Above all, however, they are pious and their
minds are on the afterlife. Their Christian opponents are exactly the opposite,
which is why they are doomed from the very beginning. I must confine myself
to recounting two instances.
A spy of the Christian king Mahan, who has been hanging about the
Muslim camp unrecognised for a whole day, and has become thoughtful,
reports: 'I am coming from people who fast du ring the day and pray during the
night; who command what is right and forbid wh at is wrong. In the night they
are monks, during the day, lions. If any one of them, and be it their highest,
were to steal, they would cut (his hand) off; if he were to commit fornication,
they would stone hirn ... Their emir is just like the weakest among them, but
they obey hirn ... Their wish is to fight, their desire to go to battle, their resolve
to die in battle as martyrs. They have so far refrained from battle with you so
that if you attack them, you shall be in the wrong,' (I, 132). In another passage
the Byzantine emperor Heradius asks why the Arabs were so victorious, and a
wise old priest answers hirn: 'Because our people have confused their religion
and forsaken their faith, and do not want to obey Jesus Christ, son of Mary,
anymore, and are doing each other wrong. There are none among them who
command what is right and forbid what is wrong, none that practise justice
and do good. They neglect showing obedience to God, do not observe the
times for prayer, they practise usury and fornication. They are all recalcitrant
and vile. These Arabs, on the other hand, are obedient to God and follow the
rules of their religion. At night they are monks, during the day they fast. Their
minds are on their Lord God at all times and they speak the blessing on their
Prophet. Among them there is neither injustice nor violence, and they do not
let pride arise among themselves. Their watchword is truth, their garment,
the worship of God. If they attack us, they do not yield; if we attack them, they
will not turn their back. They have seen that this world is ahorne that will
pass; the next world ahorne that will last.' (I, 103)
These two passages are typical of the way in which the futu1;L literature
accentuates. It paints primitive black-and-white pictures. All that is good is
attributed to one's own party, all that is bad, to the enemy, and the theological
and apologetic keynote can be heard throughout. Descriptions of more or
less entertaining details run parallel: episodes of conversions to Islam, of
dissimulation and stratagems, of Muslim women who take part actively in the
battle, of miracles, magical statues and inscriptions and much more. [744]
We also occasionally find wise sayings of old masters as weIl as theological
contemplations and excursions. It is impossible to give even a selection from
this colourful medley in such a short paper, to say nothing of listing the
passages that use motifs from traditions the core of which can be found in
historical writings. I can, however, say a few things about the form of the
presentation.
As regards language, the legendary futü1;L literature is on a high level. It is
written in flowing, pleasant High Arabic which only infrequently changes to a
more factual and austere tone, for instance when an isnäd is inserted or a
military event dated exactly, as it would be in a work of history. The narrative
of an episode is often livened up by changing from a factual, third-person
introduction to the first-person account of events narrated by an (alleged) eye
witness. Instances of this transition between external narrative and internal
narrative can also be found in historical writings; but it was in the futü1;L
literature that the first-person narrative became a literary topos. Now and
again, the speeches and accounts are interspersed with descriptive similes.
10 Rudi Paret
Very frequently, indeed nearly throughout, we find the author using the
stylistie deviee of Arabie rhyming prose (Arabie saj'). Short seetions made up
out of few words and with similar structures will reeeive the same end rhyme
and then be joined together. In shorter passages of rhyming prose one single
rhyme will end the sections; in longer passages the rhyme ean change onee or
more frequently. This stylistie deviee is often used in the deseription ofbattles,
but also in many other instanees - whenever the narrative needs to be raised
to rhetorieal pathos. Lyrieal interludes are also used, although less frequently
than rhyming prose. They are lyrieal and thus subjeetive, as opposed to the
more faetual, 'epie' nature of the saj'. In my monograph ab out the legendary
maghazi literature I have attempted to differentiate between these two
stylistie deviees, rhyming prose and lyrieal interlude, and to determine more
closely their respeetive literary functions (pp.163-7). It is not neeessary to
repeat he re what I have already said there, but aremark of a fundamental
nature is required in the present eontext. I will express it with reservation, as
my purely personal opinion, and I am speaking, as it were, in the 'unreality' or
'potential' mode, as I am not proposing for diseussion a fact but merely a
theoretieal possibility.
In the passage quoted above, Haneberg expresses the opinion that 'in the
first respect it might have been one, or indeed the, Arab epie poem if the
author had submitted himselfto the shaekles ofmetre and rhyme'. I would beg
to differ. In my opinion whether or not a work of literature may be ealled an
epie poem should not be dependent on whether it is eomposed throughout in a
uniform metre. [745] An Arabie epie poem, whieh made use of the stylistie
forms of prose and rhyming prose in a sensible interchange and in addition
eontained lyrieal interludes to loosen and aeeentuate its internal strueture
was - purely theoretieally, as I have already said - thinkable. These stylistie
deviees partieularly suited to Arabie would serve to satisfy the highest artistie
demands. If despite all this an Arab national epie was not eomposed, it is
hardly beeause authors refused to 'submit themselves to the shaekles of metre
and rhyme'.
Thus we have really reaehed the essenee ofthe problem under diseussion.
But before the end of the hour, when I shall summarise the result of my
thoughts and attempt to find an answer to the question expressed in the title
'The legendary futu1y, literature - an Arab national epie?', I must briefly diseuss
the time at whieh this literature took shape.
It is not neeessary onee again to give reasons why the book entitled Futu1y,
al-Sham, whieh is attributed to WiiqidI, eannot have been eomposed by Wiiqidl
in the form in whieh we have it now. Hamaker, Haneberg, de Goeje and
Caetani have expressed suffieient eritieism. The opinion whieh appears to
have prevailed generally is that the book originated in the time of the
Crusades. 17 Brockelmann is more cautious in his Geschichte der arabischen
Literatur and writes 'many futu1;L books have been attributed to Waqidl and
were disseminated in particular du ring the Crusades in order to inspire the
warriors for the faith' (I, p.136, 2nd edition, p.142). I should like to endorse this
wording. A legendary, idealising representation does not necessarily have
to originate in later times. It may date back to a comparatively early time
and have run parallel to a more scientific historical representation. We only
have to remember the account of Sayf b. 'Umar, which Caetani, incidentally,
correctly considers to be aprecursor of the Pseudo-Waqidl. 18 Sayf died du ring
Harun al-Rashld's reign, at least two decades before the historian Waqidl.
Furthermore, we must not overestimate the effect the Crusades had on the
Muslim contemporaries. For the Muslims in the Middle East, especially in
Syria and Mesopotamia, until the beginning of the Crusades the most
dangerous enemies were the Byzantine Christians, and Byzantine Christians
are the people we find so obstinately resisting the Arab Islamic conquerors in
the descriptions in the futu1;L literature. Thus it is indeed possible that the
legendary futu1;L literature took shape in the [746] ninth, tenth or eleventh
century, or evolved from the historical futu1;L literat ure. This statement does
not, however, intend to doubt that the futu1;L literature with its anti-Christian
bias drew new strength from the Crusades, starting in the twelfth century, and
thus gained more popularity and effectiveness throughout the populace. In
that context, new passages inspired by current events may have been grafted
onto the text. It is in fact the case that we should imagine the development
of the futu1;L literature as a process taking some time, during which several
strands of traditions ran parallel. If one really wanted to attempt more
detailed study in this field, one would be weIl advised to investigate the
individual stages in the development of this literature and, insofar as that is
possible, differentiate between them. 19 This will probably lead to better results
than an attempt to date the whole composition in one particular century, or
even decade, and to discover the identity of the author.
17 Hamaker, S.X; Haneberg, S.5-7, 39f.; M. J. de Goeje, Memoire sur le Fotouho's-Scham

attribue a Abou Ismail al-Biicri, Leiden 1864, p.38f.; Caetani, Annali dell'Islam II, 1, p,568
(AH 11, para. 80, n.1); II, 2, p.1159 (AH 12, para.362, n.1).
18 Concerning Sayf b. 'Umar see J. Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur iiltesten Geschichte des
Islams (Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, Sechstes Heft) Berlin 1899, p.1-160; Caetani, Annali
dell'Islam II, 1, p.568 (AH 11, para.80, n.1)
190ne interesting point is that in the futub, text edited by W. Nassau Lees, which is
attributed to a certain Abu Ismä'll al-Ba~ri, the exceedingly legendary person that is the
renegade Yuqannä of Aleppo is not mentioned even with a single word (p.124), while he
plays an important role in Pseudo-Waqidi (Cairo, I, p.166f.; Lees III, p.4ff.).
12 Rudi Paret
I am now reaching the conclusion of my paper. Is it, then, possible to call

the legendary futü1;l, literature an Arab national epic poem? After careful
weighing ofthe evidence, the answer to this question must be in the negative.
It is true that some things speak in favour of a positive answer. The subject
matter - the Arab-Islamic conquests - appears to suggest the idea of an epic
poem as a matter of course. It was during the reigns of the first Caliphs that
the Arabs lived through their heroic age. The bravery of the generation of
conquerors, their enthusiasm and sense of religious mission inspired later
generations again and again, down to our own time. The achievements of that
generation of pioneers were seen as a mirror of each later generation's own
strength, even if the reflection and the reality did not actually correspond; in
fact, even more so in that case. In addition to this there are the possibilities of
stylistic expression. As I have pointed out in a different context, an Arabic epic
poem, which made use of the stylistic forms of prose and rhyming prose in a
sensible interchange and in addition contained lyrical interludes to loosen
and accentuate its internal structure was - purely theoretically, as I have
already said - thinkable.
But subject matter and stylistic devices alone are not sufficient for
producing a literary work of art. Wh at is needed above all is the genius of an
artist, and that was lacking. The Arab world did not produce a Firdausi. The
men ofletters who devoted themselves tofutü1;l, literature and tried to create
a form in which it was appetising and palatable for the populace, [747] were
- let us say it bluntly - small minds. In their black-and-white painting they
represented a primitive way of life, too primitive to be great; straight and
unbroken, but precisely because of this without internal tension. There is no
trace of anything remotely like tragedy in the representation. 20 Everything
happens at surface level only; the lacking depth is compensated for by
quantity and hypertrophy.
And there is something else. The author or transmitter did not even have
the intention of using the history of Arab Islamic conquests simply as subject
matter to create a literary masterpiece. He did make use of the stylistic devices
offered by contemporary Arabic literature, in particular rhyming prose, in
order to address his readers, or more exactly listeners, with as much effect as
possible and awake in them enthusiasm for events of a heroic past. In this
respect, artistic intentions were present. However, the author's true desire
was to be a historian and taken seriously as such; which is proved by the
numerous isnäds found in the text. In these circumstances, the legendary
futü1;l, literature could not evolve into an epic poem. It remained bound up with
20 See R. Paret, 'Das Tragische in der arabischen Literatur' (Zeitschrift für Semitistik 6,
1928, p.247-52; 7 1929, p.17-28).

historiography and thus became - as a literary type - a kind ofhermaphrodite.

It is neither fish nor fowl: on the one hand pseudo-history hoping to be
genuine history, on the other hand literature that cannot perceive itself as
such and has consequently never moved beyond the beginnings of its own
literary genre.
I shall conclude with this mostly negative observation. I dare not inquire
into the deeper reasons for this faulty development - if I may say so. Saying
that the literary genre of epic poem is simply not suited to Arabic seems to me
to be too facile a theory. What we might possibly say is that the study ofhistory
and tradition in the Arab-Islamic world is too predominant to allow the
evolution of aseparate and independent national Arab epic.
13
ON THE RELATIONSHIP IN THE CALIPHATE BETWEEN
CENTRAL POWER AND THE PROVINCES: THE '~ULIJ'
"ANWA' TRADITIONS FOR EGYPT AND IRAQ
Albrecht Noth
The numerous early Islamic traditions that discuss the subject of law and
administration in newly conquered provinces can - roughly - be divided into
two groups:
1. Those that are, or purport to be, objective reports about events and
conditions; accounts oftreaties with conquered peoples co me especially to
mind.
2. Those that relate opinions, theories and claims.
One particular body of traditions stands out most noticeably from this second
group, namely those which discuss in the most va ried ways the question of
whether certain conquests were peaceful, by treaty ($ulT,l,an), or 'by force'
('anwatan).
These '$ulT,l,an'-"anwatan' traditions - these are the terms by which we
shall refer to them - have not been studied in their entirety;l a more detailed
1 Concerning the necessity of selecting the traditions according to their subject matter
from the various historical compilations of the early times and study those together
which treat of the same subject, cf. A. Noth, "Isfahan-Nihawand. Eine quellenkritische
Studie zur frühislamischen Historiographie", in: ZDMG 118 (1968), p.274ff., esp. p.295f.;
cf. also id., Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen und Tendenzen frühislamischen
Geschichtsüberlieferung, in: Bonner Orientalistische Studien 25 (1973), p.l0ff.
So far, $ul1;an-'anwatan traditions have been referred to in the following studies on early
Islamic administrative history:
- M. v. Berchem, La propriete territoriale et l'impotfoncier sous les premiers Califes (1886);
- C.H. Becker, Beiträge zur Geschichte Ägyptens unter dem Islam, Fascicle II (Strasbourg
1903), p.8lff.;
- Poliak, "Classification of Lands in Islamic Law and its Technical Terms", in: American
Journal of Semitic Languages 57 (1940), p.60ff.;
- F. Lpkkegaard, Islamic Taxation in the classic Period (Copenhagen 1950);
- D.C. Dennett, Conversion and Poll Tax in Early Islam (Cambridge 1950);
- A. FaUal, Le statut legal des Non-Musulmans en pays d'Islam (Beirut 1958).
2 Albrecht Noth
study might, however, [151] contribute to a better understanding of early

Islamic administrative history. The present article is an attempt at analysing
them by means of source criticism, and to categorise them historically.
While the exact meaning of '?ul1;tan' is usually quite clear in the
'?ul1;tan'-"anwatan' traditions, it is frequently difficult to understand exactly
what "anwatan' means. Let us therefore begin by clarifying this term.
If there is a mention of "anwatan', it is important to distinguish whether
this is merely adescription of the manner of conquest of places or cities, or
whether it is used as a classification from which legal consequences will be
drawn. In the former case, the term denotes quite literally the invasion by
force of a city or fortification, the consequences of which might be, at most,
pillaging and enslaving the population and defending forces. 2 After this kind
of "anwatan', a treaty (?Ul1;t)3 was still perfectly possible, as the fact that
gene rally fortresses did not surrender voluntarily but had to be conquered by
force was no obstacle to a ?Ul1;t.4 In a case such as this "anwatan' and '?ul1;tan'
were not opposites at all. This is certainly the original, concrete meaning of
"anwatan', which is devoid of legal distinctions, and which may safely be
assumed to be referred to when a place is said to have been conquered
"anwatan' as such. 5
Conquered "anwatan' undoubtedly assumes a different meaning when it
is used to classify whole countries, such as especially Egypt 6 [152] and the
Sawad (Iraq),7 but also Syria,8 Jazlra (Mesopotamia),9 Urdunn (Transjordan),l0
2 E.g. Say[ b. 'Umar in Tabari, Tarikh (ed. de Goeje) I/2565, 13[[; Anon. in Tabari 1/2696,
6ff.; Anon. in Baladhuri, Futilit al-buldan (ed. De Goeje, Leiden 1866) p.246, 20ff.; 'Ata'
al-Khurasani ibid. 381, 22ff.
3 E.g. the first two quotations from the previous note, ; al-I:Iajjaj b. Abi Mani' in Baladhuri,
Futilit, p.176, 20f.; Waqidi ibid., p.326, 10ff.; al-Walid b. Hisham and 'Abd Allah b. al-Mughira
in Khalifa b. Khayyat, Tarikh (ed. Akram l;>iya' al-'Umari, Najaf 1967), p.114, 12f.
4 E.g. Waqidi in Baladhuri, Futilit, p.176, 14ff.; Anon. ibid., p.203, 9ff.; Anon. ibid., p.212,
7f.; Anon. ibid., p.318, H.; local traditionists ibid., p.326, 1.f.; al-Kalbi ibid., p.333, 18; Anon.
ibid., p.376, 18; Ibn al-Kalbi in Khalifa b. Khayyat, Tarikh p.95, 2ff.
5 E.g. I:Iaritha b. Muqarrib in Tabari, Tarikh I/2387, 5f.; Mada'ini (?) ibid., 2887, 1; Anon. in
Baladhuri, Futilit p.312, 4f.; ibid. p.382, 12f.; Anon. ibid. 387, 11; Anon. ibid. p.391, 9ff.
(repeatedly).
6 Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, Futilit Mi$r wa-akhbaruha (ed. Torrey, New Haven 1922), pp.84-90
(several traditions).
7 Tabari, Tarikh 1/2372-75 (several traditions).
8 Baladhuri, Futilit p.151, 20f.
9 Sayfwith collective isnad in Tabari, Tarikh I/2507, 2.
10 AI-Haytham b. 'Adi in Baladhuri, Futilit p.115, 16f.; Ya'qubi, Tarikh II (Beirut 1960),
p.140,22.
'f;mll).'-"anwa' Traditions 3
Kuhistän 11 and the Maghrib. 12 It is safe to assume that the meaning was simply
'subjected without treaty'; it is irrelevant whether there was fighting or not. In
general, it means peaceful non-treaty conquest, as will become clear from the
following examples:
In traditions concerning the conquest of the Jazlra we find statements
to the effect that cities and towns in this area were conquered '$ully,an', the
countryside (arr;l), on the other hand, "anwatan'P However, we do know that
there was most certainly no fighting over the open country in Mesopotamia;
it would have passed more or less automatically into the hands of the
conquerors. It will have to suffice to refer only to comparable traditions
concerning the conquest of other areas. 14
There is general agreement concerning the "anwatan' conquest (with few
'$ully,' exceptions) of the Sawäd, and in the discussion about its status we find
the phrase: 'The people of the Sawäd have no treaty ('ahd), they surrendered,
leaving the decision (to the victors) (nazalu 'alä-l-ly,ukm)'.15 Nor do we know
anything about battles with the country population in the Sawäd. Finally,
in the '$ully,an'-"anwatan' traditions concerning Egypt, the stereotypical
comment on "anwatan' is 'without treaty or contract' (bi-ghayr 'ahd wa-lä
'aqd).16
Our conjectures from historical sources we find confirmed in grammatical
commentaries: Ibn Sikklt (d. 858)17 explains the word "anwa' in verses by
Kuthayyir as meaning 'obedience, voluntary action' (taw'); in this meaning it
was used by the inhabitants of [153] the Hijäz. 18 In Lisän al-'Arab we read,
'conquering something "anwatan' could also mean 'by surrender (taslim) and
submission (tä'a) on the part of the adversary',19 i.e. by voluntary submission,
without a fight.
Thus the pair '$ully,an'-"anwatan' is probably correctly rendered as
'conquered withl without a treaty'.
11 Anon. in Balädhuri, Futu{! p.403, 16.

12 Wäqidi in Balädhuri, Futu{! p.222, 6f.
13 Wäqidi in Balädhuri, Futu{! p.175, 5ff; I:Iätim b. Muslim in Khalifa b. Khayyät, Tarikh
p.ll0, 3ff., 10, 21.

14 'Abd Alll;1 b. al-Mughira in Khalifa b. Khayyät, Tarikh p.94, 14ff. (countryside belonging
to Damascus); Khalifa's father ibid. p.105, 9ff.; Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat (ed. Sachau) Vol. V p.32,
23ff. (Merv and the surrounding countryside).
15 Yal;1yä b. Adam in Balädhuri, Futu{! p.266, 20ff.
16 E.g. Ibn Lahi'a in Balädhuri, Futu{! p.217, 16; 'Abd al-Ral;1män b. Ziyäd in Ibn 'Abd
al-I:Iakam, Futu{! Mi$r p.88, 16f.; Yazc) b. Abi I:Iabib in Balädhuri, Futu{! p.216, 3.
17 Cf. EI (2nd ed.) VoI.III, s.v.
18 Quoted in Yäqüt, Mu'jam al-Buldan (ed. Wüstenfeld, Leipzig 1866ff.) Vol.IV p.538, 5ff.,
s.v. 'mushriP.
19 Reprint, Beirut 1955/56 Vol.15 c.101b, s.v. '-n-w.
4 Albrecht Noth
The '~l1.wn'-"anwatan' traditions are - and this is important to know

when assessing them - obviously secondary, i.e. they do not represent
problems and discussions that concerned thefutub, fighters themselves. Not
only do the opinions on whether a region came under Muslim dominion
'$ul1;tan' or "anwatan' diverge,20 but the traditions - especially those concerning
the Sawad - frequently assume the form oflegal opinions (whether on request
or out of personal interest) by later men of law. 21 Furthermore they present
themselves - and this is particularly the case for those traditions referring to
Egypt - as critical discussions of primary futub, reports, usually traditions
concerning treaties. 22
Secondary, yes, but into which historical context do they belong? The
answer will be established by determining wh at actually came under Muslim
dominion 'without a treaty': this was, as is clear from the traditions concerning
the conquest of Jazira and Sawad quoted above,23 the entire agricultural
land, as treaties had been entered into only with cities, towns and fortified
settlements.
Consequently the question of '$ul1;tan'-"anwatan' can only have evolved
du ring the second stage of integrating the conquered provinces into the
Islamic state, at the time when the Muslims had gradually taken control of
existing administrative institutions, [154] which made discussion of the legal
status of agriculturalland relevant.
This assumption is confirmed most impressively by a tradition surviving
in Khalifa b. Khayyat, stating that Ziyad b. Abihi, MU'awiya's governor in Iraq
(665-673) endeavoured du ring his rule to separate '$ulb,' lands from "anwa'
lands. 24
Having thus determined the historical preconditions for the emergence of
the '$ul1;tan'-"anwatan' problem in a general way, we must ask next which
aspect of the problem our traditions are concerned with in particular, and
whether it is possible to glean more detailed information from their contents
as to wh at was the cause, purpose and time of their origin.
As we have already said, the '~lb,an'-"anwatan' traditions concentrate in
particular on Egypt and the Sawad (Iraq); this is likely to be connected to the
fact that these two provinces were the most important agriculturalland with
by far the highest yield of all the Islamic empire.
E.g. in Khalifa b. Khayyät, Tiirikh p.l06, 10 and 17.

20
In TabarI, Tiirikh 1/2367ff. and 2467ff. and repeatedly.

21
22 In Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam, FutuQ, Mi$'/' p.84ff., esp. 88ff.
23 See p.152 above and notes [14 and 15].
24 Al-Walid b. Hishäm-Maslama b. Mul;1ärib-Qal;1dham in Khallfa b. Khayyät, Tiirikh
p.l07, H.
The traditions referring to Egypt and those referring to Sawäd must be

discussed separately for, as we shall see, they differ substantially. Let us begin
with the Egyptian traditions.
All these traditions have the purpose of claiming "anwatan' conquest in
the case of Egypt and of refuting claims to the contrary. This endeavour
becomes all the more understandable when we consider the primary
traditions, most of which are certainly authentie, on the subject of the
conquest of Egypt. The treaties entered into by the first conquerors in Egypt
laid down a poIl tax of two dinars, and the provision of food for the Muslim
warriors. 25 These and similar conditions were very much dependent on the
individual situation,26 and the tax agreed is unlikely to have been in any
way proportional to the possible yield of the rich agricultural country Egypt.
Thus correcting this state of affairs appeared advisable, especially when we
consider the legal consequences that could result from "anwatan' conquests;
in the main the following:
[155] - Right of ownership In "anwatan' lands passes to the Muslim

community (it becomes 'fai"); the yield can be used to benefit Islam. 27
- Taxation on "anwatan' lands is in the hands of the respective ruling
power. 28
- The inhabitants of "anwatan' lands have the status of slaves. 29
Claiming "anwatan' conquest to have taken place in Egypt thus implied that
the Muslims had practically unlimited control over this country.
Now we are in a position to categorise the "anwatan' classification of
Egypt, and the claims linked to it, historically quite exactly, as a number of
Egyptian "anwatan' traditions are traced back to the Caliph 'Dmar b. 'Abd
al-'Azlz (717-720).30 This establishes with certainty the correct terminus ante
quem non for the creation of these traditions, while attributions to 'Amr b.
25Instances in Dennett, Conversion and Poll Tax, p.70ff.

26 Concerning this topic there will be more detailed information elsewhere.
27 Mujähid b. Jabr (?) in Balädhuri, Futii{! p.266, 6ff.; Mälik b. Anas in Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam,
Futii{! Mi$r p.155, 9ff.; Rabi'a b. Abi 'Abd al-Ra\:lmän ibid. p.89, 9ff.
28 Ibn Is\:läq-Al-Qäsim b. Quzmän in Tabari, Tö,jOikh 1/2584, Hf.; Wäqidi in Balädhuri,
Futii{! p.217, 21f. (indirectly); Musä b. Ayyub and others in Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, Futii{! Mi$r
p.83, Hf.; Al-I:Iasan b. Thawbän ibid. p.154, 2ff.
29 Ibn Is\:läq-Al-Qäsim b. Quzmän in Tabari, Tö,rikh 1/2584, 2f.; Ibn Lahi'a in Balädhuri,
Futii{! p.217, 9ff.; id. in Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, Futii{! Mi$r p.89, 19.
30 Ibn Lahi'a in Balädhuri, Futii{! p.217, 15f.; id. in Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, Futii{! Mi$r p.89,
17ff.; id. ibid. p.90, 4ff.; 'Ubayd Alläh b. Abi Ja'faribid. p.90, 7ff.; Yazid b. Abi I:Iabib ibid. p.90,
11f.; Ya\:lyä b. Ayyub ibid. p.90, 13f.
6 Albrecht Noth
al-'A~, the conqueror of Egypt, to eyewitnesses of the conquest, and to the

Caliph 'Umar I, should be seen as backdatings with the purpose of providing
more convincing proof. It is unlikely that we will have to go much furt her
than the reign of 'Umar II for purposes of dating. Thus an Egyptian authority
of Ibn Isl).aq's explains Egypt's dassification as "anwatan' by means of the
endeavour of the Umayyad rulers (until 750) to raise taxes at will in that
country.31 Furthermore, some traditions on the subject of"anwatan' which are
linked with 'Umar II are also transmitted from 'Ubayd Allah b. AbI Ja'far
(d. between 752 and 754),32 an Umayyad dient, and from the Egyptian YazId b.
AbI I:IabIb (d. [156] 745/6).33 Consequently we can assurne these traditions to
have originated in the time between 717 and ca. 740.
Allocating our traditions to a concrete historical event, however, can be
only hypothetical, although they may indeed belong in the time of 'Umar b.
'Abd al-'AzIz. In that case their aim was to justify the measure introduced by
hirn that the living had to pay taxes for the dead, i.e. collective responsibility
for a fixed amount of taxes, in order that the total tax yield in Egypt should
remain constant. 34 Maybe they are linked to 'Ubayd AllAh b. I:Iabl).ab's tax
reform which, whether it was justified or not,35 was feIt to be so unjust that
725/6 saw the first great Copt uprising. 36
However that may be, one thing is dear not only from Ibn Isl).aq's tradition
quoted above - that the Umayyad Caliphs had an interest in the Egyptian
"anwatan' theory37 - and from frequent mentioning of the Caliph 'Umar II,
but also, and in particular from the substance of the Egyptian "anwatan'
traditions: these traditions did indeed have the purpose of buttressing fiscal
demands or measures ofthe later Umayyad Caliphs.
The nature of the '?U17;wn'-"anwatan' traditions concerning Iraq is
completely different from that of the Egyptian traditions; in fact it is possible
to say - cum granD salis - that they amount to the exact opposite. In the case
of Egypt the aim is to deny the treaties entered into by the first conquerors,
which certainly did take place. The traditions referring to Iraq, on the other
hand, attempt to transform the universally known and recognised subjection
of the country without treaties ("anwatan') into a treaty-like Muslim
In Tabari, Tärfkh 112584, Hf.; with isnad ibid. 2581, 1.

31
In Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam, Futiil,t Mi?r p.90, 6; für his vita see Khalifa b. Khayyat, Tabaqät
32
p.259, 19f. and Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqät VII (2) p.202, 13ff.
33 In Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam, Futiil,t Mi?r p.90, 11; für his vita see Türrey's intrüductiün tü Ibn
'Abd al-l;Iakam p.6.

34 Ibn Lahi'a in Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam, Futiil,t Mi?r p.89, 17ff.; cf. Becker, Beiträge 11 p.105f.
35 Cf. Becker, Beiträge 11 107ff.
36 Ibid. p.116.
37 See p.155 abüve and n.[3l].

assumption of power. The only exceptions mentioned are [157] the actual
treaties, with I:Iira and others, entered into during the first campaign in Iraq
near the Euphrates, which we know to be true.
The argument in most of the Iraqi traditions runs as follows: While Iraq
(Sawäd) was conquered "anwatan', afterwards the previous owners of the
land were asked to pay a tax (in most cases jizya and jizä') in return for
protection, and they agreed to do this. 38 The aim of the traditions is now to
present this arrangement with the original land owners, which did not involve
a treaty, as equivalent to an actual treaty. Thus some instances use the word
'$ull),' (treaty) to refer to asking the inhabitants (to pay tax).39 The following line
of argumentation - quite obviously apologetic - is even clearer: The account
of the call to pay dhimma and jizä' is followed by the re mark that there was
a precedent involving the Prophet, in e.g. Dümat al-Jandal. Khälid had
conquered Dümat "anwatan', and the governor had even been taken prisoner,
but despite all this, people were asked to pay dhimma and jizä'. After two
furt her examples from the Prophet's days follows the final ruling: 'He who
transmits anything but the deeds of the just imams and the Muslims will have
called these liars and reviled them'.40 This is obviously a polemic in the name
of the Prophet against people who were of the opinion that in the case of a
conquest without treaty there was no chance of a later agreement to pay
dhimma andjizä', i.e. a treaty-like settlement.
The Kufan legal scholar al-Sha'bi is even more blunt. When consulted with
reference to the people of Sawäd, he replied: 'They had no treaty; but once
there had been an agreement far them to pay tax (kharäj), they received a
treaty ($ära lahum 'ahd)'.41 The latter is probably not to be understood in the
concrete sense [158] of a written document but is likely to mean: '(Because of
the agreement) they had something which was equivalent to a written treaty.'
Sayf b. 'Umar's authorities express very similar opinions. 42
It is our task to ask for the reason why there was such a clear endeavour to
argue away the "anwatan' character of the Sawäd. As we know,43 among the
legal consequences of "anwatan' conquest af a country was that the awnership
ofthe land passed to the Muslims as a whole and that the status ofthe previous
38 Sha'bl in Tabarl, Tärikh I/2372, 7ff.; Mähän ibid. 2372, 13ff., l;Iasan al-Ba;;rl ibid. 2373,
2ff., Sha'bl ibid. 2373, 5ff.; Sa'ld b. Jubayr ibid. 2375, 13ff.; Mähän ibid. 2468, 12ff.; Sha'bl ibid.
2471, 14ff.
39 Sayfwith collective isnad in Tabarl, Tärikh 1/2371, 8; Sha'bl ibid. 2372,10; Mähän ibid.
2372,16.
40 Mul:mmmad b. Shlrln in Tabarl, Tärikh I/2373, 1 Hf.
41 In Balädhurl, Futul;t p.267, 2ff.
42 In Tabarl, Tärikh I/2371, 7.
43 See p.155 above.

8 Albrecht Noth
owners sank to resemble that of slaves. Among our Iraqi traditions, which
play down the "anwatan' character of the Sawäd, we find several instances
in which these consequences are openly rejected. Once the Sawäd had been
conquered "anwatan', there had been an agreement with the land owners to
pay tax in return for protection, as a consequence of which they remained in
pos session of their lands. 44 Sha'bl speaks out against the slave status of the
Sawädians: because of the agreement they could not be considered to be
slaves. 45
In order to explain the tendency behind these and similar arguments, we
have to look briefly at a set of traditions that is partly linked to the Iraqi
'$ull:wn'-"anwatan' traditions, namely the reports of a planned distribution of
conquered lands among the Muslim warriors involved (qismat al-arär;lin).46
The content of all these traditions is the same in principle: At the
conclusion of the first greatfutul;!, under 'Umar I the question arose whether
the countries conquered without a treaty ("anwatan') - and, characteristicaIly,
the countries mentioned are once again in most cases Iraq (Sawäd) and Egypt
- should not be distributed among the Muslims who had taken part in the
[159] campaigns; after aIl, those countries were really booty. The question of
distribution, however, was decided in the negative, usually for the reason that
if the land were distributed, only the conquerors (and their descendants)
would profit, while later generations of Muslims would be practically
destitute. 47 Consequently the agreement reached made the "anwatan' lands
common property of all Muslims and set them aside to be used to the benefit of
them all.
There are, however, formal as weIl as factual reasons against the
authenticity of these qismat al-arär;lin traditions. They are often clothed in
the very suspicious form of Caliph's writings or correspondence. 48 In several
Mähän in Tabari, Tärikh I/2372, 16f.; Sha'bi ibid. 2028, 18.

44
In Tabari, Tärfkh 1/2373, 5ff.' cf. Sulaymän b. Yasär in Balädhuri, Futil!?, p.266, 1Off.
45
46 These are the most important instances in the context: 'Abd Alläh b.Qays al-I:Iamdäni in
Balädhuri, Futil!?, 151, 18ff.; an alleged eye witness ibid. 214, 2ff. = ibid. 218, 6ff = Ibn 'Abd
al-I:Iakam, Futil!?, Mi$r p.88, 4ff.; Yazid b. Abi I:Iabib in Balädhuri, Futil!?, p.265, 18ff.; Abu
Is}:täq al-$abi'i-I:Iäritha b. Mu<;larrib (?) ibid. p.266, 12ff.; Ibrähim al-Taymi ibid. p.268, 16ff.
Instances writings of early law scholars: e.g. Yal).yä b. Adam, Kitäb al-kharäj (ed. Juynboll,
Leiden 1896) p.27ff.; Abu 'Ubayd al-Qäsim b. Salläm, Kitäb al-amwäl (ed. Cairo, 1353 H)
p.58ff.
47 We also find the argument that there would be quarrels in the case of distributing the
land (e.g. in Balädhuri, FuiU(! p.266, 18ff.), or that the parcel ofland each individual Muslim
received would be too small (e.g. ibid. p.266, 12ff.).
48 Cf. Noth, "Der Charakter der ersten großen Sammlungen von Nachrichten zur fruhen
Kalifenzeit", in: Der Islam 47 (1971) p.180ff. and the literature quoted there; also, in more
of them we find the topos 'deliberation of Caliph and people (or Prophet's
Companions)'.49 Not only 'Umar is said to have raised the question of
distribution, but also 'Ali;50 the former can take both a supporting51 and a
rejecting role. 52 The decisions have the character of pointed legal maxims.
Factual objections must be raised against the "anwatan' classification,
which hardly belongs within the time of the early conquests,53 and above all
against the fact that it is only this particular group of traditions that mentions
the intention to distribute the lands, whereas the narrative jutü1y, tradition
does not, as far as I can see, refer to it at all. Finally, the recurrent argument of
'consideration for the descendants' points clearly towards these traditions as
having been created in the time of the first or second generation after the
conquerors.
There are no doubts, on the other hand, concerning the objective ofthese
traditions - which were probably backdated to the time of the second Caliph
in order to make them carry more conviction. [160] If the lands conquered
without a treaty were classed as booty belonging to the Muslims, the
indigenous population lost every right of ownership. By furt her asserting
that the distribution of the booty, although in itself justified, did not take
place because it should be the property of all Muslims and used to the
greater good of all, claims of individual Muslims were also refuted: if the land
belongs to everyone, it does not belong to anyone. The control over the land
would then be in the hands of the Caliph as the representative of the Muslim
community.54
It is most likely that the objective of the qismat al-arac;Iin was to declare
private ownership of the conquered agriculturallands as unlawful and to give
the administration into the hands of the central power in the person of the
Caliph. Consequently they are based on the same tendency that we saw in the
'~ul1y,an'-"anwatan' traditions concerning Egypt, discussed above.
detail, id., Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen und Tendenzen frühislamischer

Geschichtsüberlieferung, in: Bonner Orientalistische Studien, Vol. 25 (1973), Chapter:
'Briefe'.
49 Cf. Noth, Quellenkritische Studien (see n.48) p.124ff.
50 Abu 'Ubayd al-Qasim b. Sallam, Kitiib al-amwiil p.80.
51 'Abd Allah b. Qays al-I;Iamdani in Baladhuri, Futui), p.151, 18ff.; Abu 1sl).aq al-Sabi'i ibid.
p.266, 12ff.
52 In the vast majority o[ traditions.
53 See p.153f. above.
54 Thus explicitly Abu 'Ubayd al-Qasim b. Sallam, Kitiib al-amwiil p.74, Hf.
55 Sayfwith collective isnad in Tabari, Tiirikh 1/2371, 3ff.; Mahan ibid. 2372, 17ff.; Sa'id b.
Jubayr ibid. 2375, 10ff.; 1brahim al-N akha'i, ibid. 2375, 15ff.; Sayf with collective isnad ibid.
2468, Hf.
10 Albrecht Noth
The legal claims of the Caliph's central power as laid down in the qismat
al-aräc,lin traditions are rendered invalid by the Iraqi '$ul"(Lan' -"anwatan'
traditions in two ways:
1. By proclaiming a near-contractual agreement with the non-Muslim

Sawadians and thus denying the 'anwatan position of the Sawad;
2. By claiming that the question of whether the lands should be distributed
or not only referred to the Sassanid crown land, and land whose owners
had fled, but not to the entire country of the Sawad. 55
With the first argument the state's claim of ownership as such was disputed,
with the second it would be at least much restricted. H, then, the lands of the
Sawad (or at any rate the main part of them) were not booty, they remained
with their original owners and could be sold and bought - and consequently
become Muslim property. It is safe to assume that the aim of the Iraqi
'$ul"(Lan'-"anwatan' traditions was to justify Muslim land ownership in Iraq,
[161] be it existing or still to be acquired,56 against differing claims of the
central government.
The earliest attempts of the state to use the "anwatan' claim to assume
control ofthe conquered lands in Iraq date back to the time ofMu'awiya. This
is clear from the report quoted above that Mu'awiya's governor in Iraq, Ziyad
b. AbYhi (665-673), tried to distinguish between '$ul1;tan' and "anwatan' lands
but, the report goes on, was unable to do SO.57 We must put a slightly later date
to the group of '$ul1;tan'-"anwatan' traditions studied here, as can be deduced
from the dates of their last provable transmitters - all of whom, incidentally,
came from Kufa and Basra in Iraq:
1. Mahan (Kufa, d. 702/3, executed by I:Iajjaj)58

2. Sa'Yd b. Jubayr (Kufa, d. between 712 and 714; executed by I:Iajjaj)59
3. IbrahYm al-Nakha'Y (Kufa, d. 714/15)60
4. 'Ämir al-Sha'bY (Kufa, d. between 721 and 728)61
56 Concerning the question of Muslim ownership oflands in Iraq cf. Abu 'Ubayd al-Qasim
b. Sallam, Kitab al-amwal p.83ff.

57 Cf. p.154 above and n.[24].
58 Cf. Ibn l;Iajar al-'AsqalanI, Kitab tahdhib al-tahdhib (ed. Hyderabad, 1325-27 H) Vol. 10
p.25f.; he transmitted 'fabarI, Tarikh I, 2372, 13ff.

59 Cf. Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat VI, 178ff.; he transmitted 'fabarI, Tarikh I/2375, 8ff.
60 Cf. Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat VI, 188ff.; he transmitted 'fabarl, Tarikh I/2375, 13ff.
61 Cf. EI (1st edition) Vol.4, col.260a ff.; he transmitted 'fabarl, Tarikh 1/2372, 7ff.; ibid. 2373,
5ff.; ibid. 22471, 14ff.; BaladhurI, Futu/:l, p. 266, 22ff.

5. I:Iasan al-Ba~ri (Basra, d. 728)62

6. MuQ.ammad b. Sirin (Basra, d. 728).63
According to this information, we must assurne that our traditions date from
the late seventh/early eighth century.
At this time precisely, I:Iajjäj b. Yüsüfwas governor ofIraq and the eastern
provinces of the Empire (694-714). While it is not really clear to this day which
form his trenchant administrative measures took, a clearly recognisable
characteristic of his rule is his determination to use every means at his
disposal to enforce the claims of the central power represented by hirn, in
particular where fiscal matters were concerned. The Iraqi '$ulb,an'-"anwatan'
traditions, [162] which quite obviously deny, or at the least restrict, important
claims of the imperial government, may weIl be areaction against the
centralistic policy of the famous, or better infamous, Iraqi governor. A furt her
point in favour of this assumption is the fact that Mähän, Sa'id b. Jubayr,
Ibrähim al-Nakha'i and 'Ämir al-Sha'bi, the transmitters of the traditions
discussed here, were professed opponents ofI:Iajjäj.64
The question ofwhether our traditions were aimed specifically at I:Iajjäj or
merely gene rally against the ideas ofthe Caliph's control over the lands ofthe
Sawäd prevalent around the beginning of the eighth century must, however,
remain unanswered. What we can say with certainty is this: they show the
endeavour of certain circles (probably Muslim landowners in Iraq) to enforce
their putative rights by using historical arguments against the opposing - and
also based on historical arguments - claims of the imperial government. 65
To conclude briefly, the '$Ulb,an'-"anwatan' traditions concerning Egypt
and Iraq are not a product ofthe time oft he conquest, although the majority of
them pretends to be, and they must not be used as source material for the
conditions ofthat time. On the contrary, they date from the later Umayyad era
and are indicative of a not unimportant aspect of the political situation of that
time. The traditions concerning Egypt and the substantially similar qismat
al-arag,in traditions are proof of the attempts of the Caliph's government to
assurne control of the new provinces which after the conquest were only
loosely connected with the central government. That there was opposition,
found especially in Iraq, is clear from the Iraqi attitude to '$ulb,'-"anwa'.
62 Cf. EI (1st edition) Vol.2 col.289b f.; he transmitted Tabarl, Tarikh I/2373, 2ff.
63 Cf. EI (1st edition) Vol.3 col.447a f.; he transmitted Tabarl, Tarikh I/2373, 1 Hf.
64 Cf. their biographies, quoted in notes [58 to 61] on p.161 above.
65 The government theory became the prevalent one in the end. In works by early law
sc hol ars contrary opinions are only mentioned marginally. Cf. e.g. Yal).ya b. Adam, Kitab
al-kharaj p.27ff. and Abu 'Ubayd al-Qasim b. Sallam, Kitab al-am wal.
188 THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE - - - -
12 Albrecht Noth
People were unwilling to have the rights, real or imagined, they had acquired
during thefutüb-, curtailed by the Caliph's central government.
In order to justify their claims both parties - and this is typical not only
for political arguments in the Muslim State in those days - used historieal, or
rather pseudo-historical, arguments.
14
IBN ABDELI;IAKAM AND THE CONQUEST
OF NORTH AFRICA
Robert Brunschvig
A Critical Study
[108] We now have at our disposal a convenient edition - text and annotated
translation - of the chapter of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam's work which deals with the
conquest of N orth Africa and Spain by the Arabs, and their history until the
middle of the eighth century, in other words until the end of the Umayyad
dynasty ofDamascus. Albert Gateau has reproduced there,l with some minor
variations,2 the Arabic text of the Futa1;L Mi?r published by Charles C. Torrey
in 1922,3 and, with some light fine-tuning, the French translation which he
himself had published in the Revue Tunisienne in 1931, 1932 and 1935; the
contribution of the Revue Tunisienne to the study of this subject deserves
acknowledgement. The Introduction includes several clear and welcome
pages on the sources of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam: this had already appeared, in
almost the same form, at the beginning of a study - thereafter somewhat
overlong and involved - which Albert Gateau devoted, in the same revue, from
1936 to 1942, to Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, historian of the Muslim West.
In his introduction, A. Gateau rightly underlines, following Torrey, the
character of 1;Ladith - or tradition transmitted in the mann er of religious
Traditions, with a chain or isniid [109] of successive transmitters - which the
work presents in numerous parts, especially for the most ancient period, that
of the Conquest proper. Here there is, in fact, an assertion which has become
commonplace for all of the early stages of Muslim historiography; but it does
no harm to repeat it and demonstrate it for a work which remains, on the facts
1 Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam, Conquete de l'Afrique du Nord et de l'Espagne ... by Albert Gateau,
163 p., Algiers (Carbonel, Bibliotheque arabe-francaise), 1942.
2 We have no qualms about accepting, with A. Gateau (pp. 79,155), the reading Tubruq for
the locality mentioned in the Pentapolis, some distance from Derna. Military events of
re cent years, which have made the name of "Tobruk" famous, would seem to authorise the
use of the latter form.
3Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam, Futü~ Mi;;r, ed. Charles C. Torrey, New Haven (Yale Oriental
Series, Researches, vol. III), 1922.
2 Robert Brunschvig
of the very highest importance, the most detailed and ancient account that has
survived into the present day.
Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, who died a septuagenarian in 870 or 871, wrote at the
time when the great canonical collections of Tradition had finally been put
together. He belonged, by origin and by education, to a milieu ofwell-known
Egyptian scholars, of the Mälikite rite, connoisseurs of ly,adith. All of the last
seetion of his Futüly, Mi$r, longer than the pages relating to the conquest
of Barbary, is a veritable collection of ly,adith-s, most of them claiming to
originate with the Prophet through his Companions who came to Egypt; they
concern various subjects and are classed following the name of the reporting
Companion. Found here are so me of the ly,adith-s which, in sequence,
constitute the account of the Conquest: we shall have occasion to return to
precisely these texts.
A. Gateau, drawing attention to the names oftransmitters most often cited
in the chapter on the conquest of North Africa and of Spain, has had no
difficulty identifying them with those of western or Medinan traditionists or -
this is the greatest number - Egyptians, of the period or the school of Mälik. It
emerges from his study, as could moreover be expected apriori, that an
Ifrlqiyan tradition and a Spanish tradition on the conquest coexisted with
an oriental tradition, principally Egyptian, which is the essential source of
our author. All three have, in the course of time, undergone interference
on certain points which, through the names of certain transmitters, it is
sometimes possible to unravel.
That Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam made history as a muly,addith, is thus the evidence,
and is the impression at first sight. But there is more. As close examination
of the work reveals, it is not only the form or the personality of in formers
who are seen to be linked to the religious tradition, it is also through [110]
judicio-religious concerns and ideas that there is explained, fundamentally,
more than a page, of soothing appearance or on the contrary, of strange
and unexpected aspect: the re marks which follow asp ire before all else to
demonstrate this.
I. - Treaty with Cyrenaica, Conquest of Fezzan
1. - At the end ofthe chapter translated by A. Gateau (pp. 31, 33), some curious
remarks relating to the conquest of Barqa and the Pentapolis, in what is now
Cyrenaica, deserve to hold our attention. The conqueror 'Amr b. al-'A:;;, to
whom Islam already owed Egypt, is supposed to have negotiated with the
Lawäta Berbers, inhabitants of the Pentapolis, who committed themselves to
Ibn 'Abd Al-Ifakam and the Conquest of North Africa 3
paying ajizya of thirteen thousand dinars; to meet this obligation they would,
if necessary, seIl their own children whom they would remain entitled to
designate. 'Amr is supposed to have subsequently sent the text of the treaty
('ahd) to a governor of the territory, named Ibn Diyäs, and he is supposed
to have proclaimed these words from the throne: "The inhabitants of the
Pentapolis have a treaty of pe ace which must be scrupulously observed
towards them (Li-ahli Antäbulusa 'ahdun yufa lahum bihi)". Then it is affirmed
that in ancient times these people ofBarqa, oftheir own accord, regularly paid
the total amount of their jizya on a fixed date.
Why this insistence and these surprising details, the only ones supplied to
us on this campaign against Barqa?
We may note first that, at an earlier stage in his book, with reference to
Egypt, Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam had already lent to 'Amr an affirmation with the
same meaning, comparing the Copts "with neither contract nor treaty (mä ...
'aqdun wa-lä 'ahdun)" to the people ofthe Pentapolis: "The latter have a treaty
of peace which must be scrupulously observed towards them".4 Another
historian of the Conquest, only slightly more recent, the Persian of Baghdad
al-Balädhurl (d. 892), in speaking ofthe Copts [111] ofEgypt and the capture of
Barqa, essentially reproduces the data given above.
He only omits the speech from the throne; but on the other hand he
extends to the wives of the Lawäta the dispositions affecting their children,
and he adds regarding the legal status of these wives and these children two
opinions that are supposed to have been transmitted, one by the traditionist
al-Layth, the other by the pious Umayyad caliph 'Umar b. 'Abd al-'Azlz. 5
And now we turn our attention, in the attempt to uncover the precise
signification of these passages, to the ancient collections of 1;l,adith-s and
certain classical works ofjiqh. We will see if they do not supply us with the key
necessary for the understanding of our narrative.
A widespread Tradition relates that thejizya was levied by the Prophet on
the "Majüs" of Bahrain,6 and by the caliph 'Umar b. al-Khattäb on those of
Fars. One version, which seems to be based on the traditionists ofMedina and
claims to date back to Ibn Shihäb al-Zuhrl, adds that thejizya was also levied
on the Berbers by the caliph 'Uthmän. This version is encountered in the work
4 Torrey edition, p. 89.

5 Baladhurl, Kitab FutuiL al-Buldan, ed. de Goeje, Leiden 1863, pp. 217, 224-5, tr. I:Iitti,
New York 1916, pp. 342, 352-4. The version ofIbn 'Abd al-I:Iakam is also found, in almost
identical form, in the work ofthe 11th century Spanish geographer al-Bakrl, Description de
l'Ajrique septentrionale, tr. de Slane, Algiers 1913, p. 14 (the translation needs correcting),
and in the work of other authors.
6 With the variant "Hajar", principal city of Bahrain.
4 Robert Brunschuig
of al-TirmidhV (d. 892); but it already exists in the Kitäb al-Amwäl by Abu
'Ubayd b. Salläm,8 (d. 839) and in the Muwatta' ofMälik,9 (d. 795). According to
another Tradition, transmitted under the name of'Abd al-Ra}:lmän b.'Awf, the
Prophet would have declared on the subject of the Majus: "Treat them like
the people ofthe Book", in other words like the Jews and the Christians, who
pay thejizya. 10 Furthermore we may consult the Kairouanese Mudawwana of
Sa}:lnun, (d. 854), where the Iman of Medina appears through the medium of
his [112] Egyptian disciples. There we read in the book of the holy war (111, 46):
"Mälik said on the subject of the Berber Majus: 'Uthmän b. 'Affän levied
the jizya on them." And we can also learn, through manuals of Ikhtiläf or of
divergences between the rites, that all the orthodox schools accepted thejizya
of the pagans classed as "Majus", while for the worshippers of idols ('abadat
al-awthän) different solutions applied. I:Ianafites and Mälikites accepted it,
but not the school of al-Shäfi'l. AI-Awzä'l, founder of the rite which preceded
Mälikism in Spain, declared that all pagans were "Majus".l1
Do these remarks not enable us already to lift a corner of the veil, and
would they not suffice to make comprehensible all the doctrinal, as well as
practical, interest which was attached, in the view of religious personneI,
to the case of the subjugation of non-Arab populations, whether Jews, or
Christians, or converts to Islam? As the Islamic conquests were progressively
extended, the problem presented itselfmore broadly and with more variety. It
was necessary at an early stage to except from among the pagans, originally
considered permanent enemies and in principle doomed to choosing between
conversion and death, the "Majus" or followers of Zoroaster, worshippers of
fire. Through a convenient and well-known extension, "Majus" was applied,
as a way of avoiding theoretical discussion, to the pagans with whom there
were hopes of concluding agreementsY It is in this direction no doubt, and
perhaps more precisely in the persistent influence of the rite of al-Awzä'l,
that it would be appropriate to search for the reason why, in an astonishing
manner at first sight, the "Norman" pirates of the Middle Ages were called
7 Tirmidhl, $alyily" with commentary by Ibn al-'Arabl, ed. Cairo 1350/1931, vol. VII, p. 86,
reading given in note 1.

8 Abu 'Ubayd b. Salläm, Kitiib al-Amwiil, ed. Cairo 1353 H., pp. 32-34.
9 Mälik, Muwatta', with commentary by al-Bäjl, ed. Cairo 1331 H., II, 172-3.
10 With, however, according to the commentaries and even some extensions to the text of
the ly,adith, certain restrietions, especially with reference to diet and connubium.
11 Abu Yusuf, Kitiib al-Khariij, tr. Fagnan, Paris 1921, p. 101; Tabarl, Kitiib Ikhtiliij
al-Fuqahii' ed. Schacht, Leiden 1933, pp. 199-203; Dimashql, Raly,mat al-Umma fi khtiliif
al-a'imma, ed. Cairo, undated, p. 306. See also Ibn Rushd, Muqaddimiit, ed. Cairo, 1325 H., I,
285.
12 Buchner, EI (first ed.), art. Madjiis.
"Majus" in Arabic; since the time of their first appearance on the co asts of
Spain in 844, there had been peace negotiations between them and the emir
of Cordova. 13 Were our Lawata [113] of the Pentapolis, for the juqaha' at the
end of the eighth century and for the duration of the ninth, not a useful
example of "Majus", accepted as dealing with the Muslims, a precedent,
genuine or fictitious, which could be conveniently highlighted and invoked?
However, we are justified in pressing on, thanks in the first place to four
passages of Abu 'Ubayd b. Sallam. We may recall that Ibn Sallam, born in
Herat to an emancipated Byzantine father, died in Mecca at around the age of
sixty-five, in 839, some thirty years before Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam. He could have
met the latter, still young, in Egypt, a country which he visited, we are told,
in 828; he did, in any case, hear the traditionist 'Uthman b. ~ali0. there, the
most frequently cited direct source of the Futüb, Mi§r. 14 He is cited hirnself as a
source by al-Baladhuri, specifically on the subject of the Berbers of Barqa.
His doctrinal sympathies accorded in general, it is said, with the rites of
Malik and of al-Shafi'i:; but our assertion is that he was capable, when the
occasion required, of distancing hirnself from them. His Kitab al-Amwal
recalls quite closely, in subject and in genre, the Kitab al-Kharaj of the great
I:Ianafite master Abu Yusuf and - from further afield - that of Ya0.ya b. Adam,
which could have served hirn partially as a model. It is, after the manner of
the Muwatta' and the ancient books of fiqh, a collection of b,adith-s classed
according to subject, among which from time to time the author expresses
opinions of his own.
A) The first of the four passages of the Kitab al-Amwal which interest us
confirms, in terms identical to those used by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, and with a
very similar isnad, the declaration of 'Amr b. al-A:;; comparing the Copts of
Egypt, who have no contract, with the inhabitants of the Pentapolis: "The
latter have a peace treaty which must be scrupulously observed towards
them" (p. 135). Ibn Sallam inserts this b,adith in a chapter where the
enslavement of people subjugated "by force" is discussed.
13 Levi-Proveneal, EI (first ed.) art. Madj1ls. A doubt is however raised by the same author
in Byzantion, 1937, p. 15; but it eoneerns a later diplomatie mission rather than immediate
negotiations. See, similarly, on the "small islands ofMajüs who, in the end were obliged to
submit and thus, so it seems, saved their lives," Histoire de l'Espagne musulmane, vol. I,
Cairo 1944, p. 157.
14 See the Introduetion to K. al-Amwäl, and Ben Cheneb, Classes des savants de l'Ijriqiya,
Algiers 1920, p. 203, n. 1. Sinee the K. al-Amwäl several times mentions 'Uthmän b. ~äliQ.,
this book must date from the last ten years ofIbn Salläm, from 829 to 839.
6 Robert Brunschuig
B) The second passage occurs in another chapter where there is a statement

of the conditions to be imposed on peoples who submit [114] "by treaty" and
retain their religion (p. 146). The following is a translation:
"'Abd Allah b. $alil) teIls us, according to al-Layth b. Sa'd, according to
Suhayl b. 'Uqayl, according to 'Abd Allah b. Hubayra al-Siba'I: 'Amr b. al-'A~
concluded a treaty of peace with the inhabitants of the Pentapolis - which is
part ofthe territory ofBarqa, between IfrIkiya and Egypt - in exchange for the
payment of the jizya, on the condition that they would seIl such of their
children as they wished to discharge this jizya.
"Sa'Id b. AbI Maryam has told me, according to Ibn LahI'a, according to
Yazid b. 'Abd Allah al-I:Ia<;lramI: Ibn Diyas brought to hirn, when he was
appointed governor of the Pentapolis, the written text of their treaty ('ahd).
Abu 'Ubayd says: Ibn Diyas was a Christian Nabatean 15 ofEgypt, a Copt."
We note immediately as an accessory detail that the text of Ibn Sallam
requires a modification of A. Gateau's translation, which is plausible in itself
and which we provisionally accepted above, in regard to Ibn Diyas. He is the
one who delivers the peace treaty (atähu bnu Diyäsin bi ... ) and not the one
who receives it. The ambiguity of pronouns, one of the habitual bugbears of
the Arabic language, does not allow us to determine with certainty to whom
the treaty was sent, or even who, on this occasion, was governor of the
Pentapolis. This is not the place to discuss this further.
C) A few lines lower down in the same chapter, regarding black populations
linked to the Muslims by a treaty of peace, our third passage reads as follows
(pp. 146-7):
"'Abd Allah b. $alil) teIls us, according al-Layth b. Sa'd ... If they seIl their
children and their wives, I see no objection to buying them.
"AI-Layth has said: Yal)ya b. Sa'Id al-An~arl saw no objection to this. He
said: Ifpeople who are enemies (ofIslam), linked (to us) by a treaty (ahl al-~ul/;L
min al-'aduww) seIl their children, there is no objection to buying them.
[115] "Abu 'Ubayd says: Such was the personal opinion (ra'y) of al-Awza'I,
who said: There is no objection to this, because our judicial rules do not apply
to them. But Sufyan and the Iraqis denounce this practice.
"Abu 'Ubayd says: of the two opinions, it is the latter which I prefer; in
effect, where there is accord, there is safeguard (li-anna l-muwäda'ata amän).16
How then can we make slaves ofthem?"
15 "Nabatean" is to be taken in the sense of non-Arab sedentary cultivator"; see
Honigmann, EI (first ed.) art. Nabateans.

16 On the meaning of muwada'a, see Heffening, Das islamische Fremdenrecht, Hanover
1925, p. 31, n. 4.
- - - - THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE 195
Ibn 'Abd Al-lfakam and the Conquest of North Africa 7
D) The fourth of our passages, situated in a different chapter, takes up this

question of the enslavement of the ahl al-$ul1;l,. First there is a fairly lengthy
discussion of an old case, on the basis of which Ibn Salläm re-affirms: These
people are in a condition of freedom and they cannot become slaves either by
capture or by purehase. Then he continues (pp. 183-4): "Yal)ya b. Bukayr has
told me, according to 'Abd Alläh b. Lahi'ä, according to Yazid b. Abi I:Iabib:
'U mar b. 'Abd al-'Azlz has written on the subject of the Lawätiyyät: Whosoever
lets one of them go has no right to her price, that is to say, the price the
payment of which renders legal her status as a wife - although he used another
term in the sense of price. And he added: Whosoever has one of them in his
horne should ask her father for her hand in marriage or send her back to her
kinsfolk."
"Abü 'Ubayd says: Lawätiyyät signifies wives of the Lawäta, a segment of
the Berbers who are known by this name. I believe that they had a treaty ('ahd)
and it is to them that Ibn Shihäb was referring; 'Uthmän imposed thejizya on
Berbers. Subsequently they provoked disorder and were imprisoned: it was
then that 'Umar wrote about them.
"'Abd Alläh b. ~älil) teIls us, that according to al-Layth b. Sa'd: 'Amr b. al-~
addressed this clause in writing to the Lawäta Berbers, inhabitants of Barqa:
You seIl your sons and daughters to discharge your debt of jizya. AI-Layth
said: If they were slaves, they could not have done it legally."
Thus we find in these fragments of Ibn Salläm, bearing in mind three
omissions which we shall shortly be analysing, the text of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam,
and more precisely still, as [116] is natural since he is their avowed source, that
of al-Balädhurl. Notably, the formulas lent to 'Umar b. 'Abd al-'Azlz and to
al-Layth are those maintained by al-Balädhurl, while suppressing the first half
of the instructions of 'Umar. Are we not certain now that all of this is tightly
linked to the problems discussed by fiqh?
Once the principle of treaty and jizya in relations with the pagans or
with some among them was accepted, it was still necessary to determine the
consequences of this, and establish the status of these people with regard to
Islam. And on this issue the schools were far from unanimous. One of the most
delicate problems was the following: was it permissible to buy as slaves
members of these foederati peoples? Or, in a slightly different form: was it
permissible to accept as slaves, as part of the tribute paid by the foederati,
their own wives and their children? It is this question which should be
answered by the texts that we are about to study.
AI-Layth b. Sa'd, the great Egyptian traditionist and jurist, and al-Awzä'l,
accepted, so Ibn Salläm tells us, the purehase of the wives and children of
"federated" peoples. Sufyän, i.e. Sufyän al-Thawri, founder of a rite which was
8 Robert Brunschuig
to prove very short-lived, and the Iraqis, i.e. the partisans of Abü I;Iani:fa,
disapproved of it; and Ibn Salläm sided with them. We have confirmation
elsewhere of an identical position, affirmative in the case of al-Awzä'I, negative
in the case of Abü I;Ianlfa, dealing not with sale as such, but with delivery
by virtue of tribute. 17 Al-Shäfi'I is in favour of this last clause in a pact with
foreign elements. 18 Mälik forbids both the purehase of these children and the
acceptance of them as tribute, at least when these peoples have dealt with
the Muslims for only one year or twO. 19 The account of Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam,
borrowed on this point from al-Layth hirnself, is manifestly in favour of the
affirmative solution, that of al-Layth and of al-Awzä'I, [117] at least insofar
as children are concerned: did the Traditions which he relates, raising no
objection, originally have the purpose ofjustifying this legal solution? Ibn 'Abd
al-I;Iakam, to the extent that he takes responsibility for the account, departs
he re from the teaching of Mälik to accept that of an Egyptian master.
We now turn to examining the sayings of al-Layth and of 'Umar, reported
by Ibn Salläm and retained, one in its entirety and the other in its second half,
by al-Balädhurl. Al-Layth declares that, if the Lawäta were slaves, they could
not have proceeded to the regular sale of their children: a judicial re mark,
establishing the status of the free men of the ahl al-$ulb" even in the eyes of
those fuqahii' who permitted the purehase by Muslims of the said children as
slaves. It could be that Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam or some intermediary narrator was
not intent upon insisting on this point: putting too much emphasis on the
notion of liberty no doubt entailed the risk, at the end of the day, of seeing it
turn against the very thesis which had been adopted, with Layth, and which
authorised the enslaving of these children.
The suppression by Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam of 'Umar's statement perhaps
derives from the same sentiment. But it could be accounted for by another
tempting explanation, if the commentary supplied by Ibn Salläm is studied
with care: for hirn, the precept of 'Umar was formulated in the wake of
incidents provoked by the Lawäta and the arrest of the latter. Now the two
parts of the precept, suppressing with regard to Lawätian women the ordinary
rights of a master over a fern ale slave (collecting her dowry or cohabiting with
her without marriage) had a common and evident objective: to have them
considered free women. And this could have only one meaning: the treaty
Tabari, Ikhtiläf, p. 20.
17
Kitäb al-Umm, ed. Boulak, 1321-26 H., IV, 188. Al-Mäwardi, Shäfi'ite theoretician ofthe
18
11th century, writes in his A/tkäm al-sultäniyya, tr. Fagnan, Algiers 1915, p. 287, that it is
permitted to buy, but not to reduce into captivity, the children of "allied" peoples (ahl
al-'ahd), while both of these procedures are forbidden with the children of "protected"
peoples (ahl al-dhimma).
19 Mudawwana, X, 16-8, Heffening, ap. cit., p. 52.
concluded with these Berbers remained valid; it was not abrogated by their
momentary outburst. This accords with the indulgent solution proposed in
this case by the schools of Abu I:Ianifa and al-Shäfi'1.20 Mälikism was more
severe and [118] and quicker to announce the invalidation of the pact on
account of an offence committed by the non-Muslim partners. 21 For this
reason it was quite natural for the Mälikite Ibn ~bd al-I:Iakam not to accept
the statement attributed to 'Umar.
It is in the same order of ideas that we will find the best explanation of
the solemn declaration put into the mouth of ~mr b. al-'Ä.:;;, which, featuring
neither in Ibn Salläm nor in al-Balädhurl, is owed to the pen of Ibn ~bd
al-I:Iakam. If we consult a book of Ikhtiliif: "When a treaty is concluded with
the polytheists, it must be scrupulously observed with regard to them (idha
'ühida l- mushriküna 'ahdan u'ufiya lahum bihi)" is the view of the founders
of the orthodox rites, with the exception of Abu I:Ianlfa. For the latter, the
interests of the Muslim nation authorised the unilateral abrogation of the
contract. 22 The Mälikites would have liked to cite proofs of the contrary,
predominant opinion: the formula lent to ~mr ('ahdun yüfa lahum bihi) is
precisely that of the scholars ofjiqh.
We may finally ask wh at is the significance of the two other remarks which,
absent from the Kitab al-Amwal, are to be found in the works ofboth Ibn ~bd
al-I:Iakam and al-Balädhurl. Both of them bear on the jizya of our Lawäta
of Pentapolis: one of them states the amount, thirteen thousand dinars; the
other affirms that in ancient times the Lawäta regularly paid this jizya of
their own accord, and on the due dates. On the figure, whether thirteen is
correct or not, we shall not linger. We only make the remark that, given the
aggregate amount, it represents not a "capitation" as A. Gateau translates,
but a "tribute": this is the ancient sense of the term, very widely and
definitely attested. It has survived in classical Islamic law which, alongside the
20 The statement by 'Um ar raises a difficuHy however in authorising marriage with the
Lawätiyyät. Tradition in effect makes two exceptions in regard to the assimilation of

the "Majus" into the "People of the Book"; Muslims should not eat animals slaughtered
by them, nor marry their non-converted women. These two prohibitions are reeorded
for example by the I:Ianafite Abu Yusuf, K. al-Kharäj, tr., p. 101, and by the Shäfi'ite
al-Mäwardl, A(i,kam sultäniyya, tr., p. 302; Ibn Salläm, in his K. al-Amwäl, p. 31, has
enunciated them. Concubinage with a captive, non-converted majilsiyya is also most often
forbidden: cf. Abu Yusuf, ap. eit., p. 319, K. al-Umm, IV, 186.1t is thus probable that 'Umar,
or the one speaking through hirn, did not consider the Lawäta in question as "Majus"
whose status is somewhat particular, but as ahl al-sul(i, or ahl al-dhimma, without distinction
between the "People of the Book" and them.
21 Dimashql, Ra(i,mat al-Umma, p. 309.
22 Ibid., p. 308.
10 Robert Brunschuig
capitation-jizya, is perfectly weIl aware [119] of the jizya ~ul1;tiyya, based on a

law-making pact,23 and consequently liable to take on the form of an aggregate
and contractual contribution on fixed terms.
As for the precise information supplied on the punctual and spontaneous
delivery of the jizya, this needs to be linked to a subsequent passage of Ibn
'Abd al-I:Iakam (p. 77), relating to events which he locates a half-century later,
in 697. I:Iassan b. al-Nu'man was returning after completing the conquest of
Ifrlqiya: "Passing through Barqa, he entrusted the collection of the kharäj
there to Ibrahlm b. al-Na$ranl." And a little further on, the same page: "After
the departure of I:Iassan, the Byzantines launched an expedition against
Pentapolis. Ibrahlm b. al-Na$ranl fled, abandoning the inhabitants and the
protected peoples of the Pentapolis (ahla Antäbulusa wa-ahla dhimmatihä),24
in the hands of the Byzantines." In the spirit of our author, a change of
administrative and fiscal regime had definitely co me about since the time
of 'Amr b. al-'A$.25 As he does not explain this issue, we are reduced to
hypotheses; some clues plausibly direct us towards a solution in accord with
those proposed a little earlier.
All in all we have, on the one hand, the first insistence found in our text on
the obligation of Muslims to observe the pact and on the punctuality of the
non-Muslim partners; and here on the other hand, without a reason given, the
fiscal autonomy of these last-named, an essential and legitimate clause of
the contract, is presented as being abolished. And who is this who is collecting
the kharäj from them?26 The "son of a Christian", Ibn al-Na$ranl, who flees,
at the first alarm, before Christians engaged in a raid. In fact we know of the
role which Christians and the sons [120] of Christians played in Egypt and
elsewhere in the financial organisation ofthe Arab empire; and we have seen
that on several occasions, Tradition allocated a role to a Copt, Ibn Diyas, in the
affairs of the Pentapolis in the early years of Islam. Without expressing it
overtly, has Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam or one of his sources not heard denunciation,
through an example, authentie or otherwise, of some or other measure of
public law? And in the very attitude, hardly a glorious one, which he assigns
to Ibn al-Na$ranl, is there not an echo of the discontent which could or did
23 See for example Averroes, Bidäya, ed. Cairo 1935, 1. 392.

24 Should these ahl al-dhimma be explained by referenee to what has been stated above
(note 20) ofthe opinion attributed to 'Umar b. 'Abd al-'AzlZ?
25 The sparse items of information eolleeted by Yäqüt, Mu'jam al-Buldän, art. Barqa, do
not bring any real clarity to the subjeet. They only reeord the assimilation ofthe majority of
the inhabitants, then the breaking of the treaty.
26 This is doubtless not the plaee to expatiate on the differenee between the terms: jizya /
kharäj. AI-Balädhurl furthermore onee uses kharäj where Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam says jizya,
and to denote what he himselfwas to ealljizya in other passages.
prevail in the world of thefuqahä', regarding those non-Muslims or recently

converted Muslims who became too involved in the financial administration
of the state?
If the Traditions collected in works of the Ninth Century on the events of
the Seventh Century or the early Eighth Century serve to illustrate theses or
to support points of view, is there not here, over and above the considerable
interval of time which separates them from the facts, grave cause for
suspicion? Certain fluctuations, furthermore, come to light, with the effect of
augmenting our legitimate mistrust and further consolidating, if needed, the
explanation ofthese accounts with the aid ofjiqh.1t would be possible without
too much difficulty to reconcile the episode of Ibn al-Na~ränl with the
statement of 'Umar b. ~bd al-~zlz, which would necessarily be some twenty
years later. But, on the very conquest of the Pentapolis and the condusion of
the treaty with the Lawäta Berbers, a serious contradiction remains, which
Ibn Salläm has not perceived: on the one hand, there seems to have been an
aspiration to associate both these episodes, as he did himself, to the caliph
'Uthmän; and on the other hand, an explicit Tradition gives responsibility for
these, at a date prior to the reign of'Uthmän, to ~mr b. al-~.
2. - An uncertainty of the same kind is no doubt attached to another phase of

the conquest, that concerning Fezzan. Ibn ~bd al-I:Iakam writes, in the course
of that kind of epic in prose which narrates the exploits of the great conqueror
'Uqba b. Näfi': "When he was dose (to Jerma, capital of the Fezzan), he sent
messengers to invite the inhabitants to embrace Islam (fa-da'ähum ilä l-Isläm);
they accepted."27 [121] This episode gives the impression ofhaving taken place
around 668. The feature of the invitation to convert does not recur in reference
to any other conquests on the part of'Uqba.
Once again we refer to the Mudawwana, a few lines below our quotation
on the Berber "Majus". Here we read (III, 46): "Mälik was questioned on the
subject of the Fezzanese (al-Fazäzina), who are a race of Ethiopians (jinsun
mina l-Ifabasha). When asked, he replied: "I am not of the opinion that they
should be fought before being invited to embrace Islam (ly,atta yud'aw ilä
l-Isläm) ... If they do not accept this, they will be invited to pay the djizya
while retaining their religion; if they respond favourably, this will be accepted
of them. This shows you the opinion of Mälik on the subject of all peoples
whosoever they may be; because, what he says of the Fezzanese applies
equally to the Slavs, to the Avars, to the Turks and to other non-Arabs who are
not People of the Book."
27 Page 59 of the translation by A. Gateau, slightly modified. The same account occurs in
al-Bakrt, op. cit., pp. 33-4.

This text, which it seems to me has escaped to this day the attention of
academics specialising in study of the Fezzan, offers in my opinion two
interesting features: 28 that of regarding the Fezzanese as "Ethiopians" in the
Eighth or Ninth Century (the Mudawwana emanates from Egyptian and
Kairouanese circles, among which some could have had some serious
information on the subject) and that of dating, so it seems, the conquest and
islamisation of Fezzan to the time of Mälik, i.e. the se co nd half of the Eighth
Century, under the first of the 'Abbäsids, a hundred years later than in the
Tradition ofIbn 'Abd al-I:Iakam. 29
Is it by the same token that the Mudawwana does not suggest any
explanation, or at least one of the reasons, for this projection into the past? "I
am not of the opinion that they should be fought before being invited to
embrace Islam," said Mälik. To reinforce this precept, was it tempting [122] to
show it being applied prematurely by an illustrious hero ofthe earliest times?
Before fighting the Fezzanese - and this would not even be necessary - 'Uqba
invites them, according to the rule to be enunciated by Mälik with regard to
this people precisely, to embrace Islam. 30
11 - Distribution of Booty
If there is one aspect ofjiqh which takes its place easily, and even naturally, in
an account ofvictorious campaigns, it is indeed the distribution ofbooty. So it
comes as no surprise to find in the work of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, describing the
conquest of the West, numerous passages referring to it.
28 See, for more details on this subject, R. Brunschvig, Un texte arabe du IXe siede
interessant le Fezzan, in Rev. Africaine, 1945, pp. 21-25.

29 According to the Schacht edition of the K. al-Ikhtiläfby al-Tabari, p. 200, Mälik would
also have been asked about the imposition of the jizya on "the Fazazina and the races of
Turks and Hindus without religion". But since the ms. has U)};JI.}\, there are reservations
to be made over the reading Fazazina.
30 A passage of the Mudawwana, III. 3, gives, under the name of Ibn Wahb, eminent
disciple ofMälik, an interesting Tradition, according to 'Uqba b. Näfi', according to Rabi'a:

the last-named taught that the enemy should be persistently invited to convert be fore being
attacked. Is the reference he re to our 'Uqba b. Näfi'? Ifthis is the case it would prove that
one or two generations before Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam there was effectively a tendency, among
the Mälikites of Egypt, to associate our hero with this norm ofjiqh. The fact is all the more
worthy ofnote in that 'Uqba does not feature among the traditionists habitually mentioned.
Another passage of the Mudawwana, X, 108, which marks the desire to attach the
international public law to a major figure ofthe Conquest, and at the same time uncertainty
over the period of the deed invoked: Malik heard it said that it was 'Amr b. al-oN? or 'Abd
Allah b. Sa'd who "negotiated" ('ahada) with the "Nubians".
1. - The first concerns the expedition of 'Abd Allah b. Sa'd, the most ancient
wide-ranging raid mounted against wh at is now Tunisia, which could be
situated, as we have indicated, around 647: "He divided the booty between us,
having set aside a fifth. The share of each cavalryman amounted to three
thousand dinars: two thousand for the horse, one thousand for his master.
Each infantryman received one thousand dinars. One of the soldiers having
died at Dhat al-Humam, his family received a thousand dinars" (p. 41).
It is immediately clear that it is appropriate to divide this text into three
parts, into three elements: A) the setting aside of a fifth, B) the share of the
cavalryman and that of the infantryman, C) the share of the deceased soldier.
The two latter parts are repeated immediately afterwards, and in almost
identical terms, with partially different chains of informants: it is a classical
and confirmed procedure of apparent precision.
[123] A) The setting aside of the fifth is of canonical order (Qur'an, VIII, 42),
and does not in itself call upon any particular commentary. It is mentioned
again at a later stage, when the Umayyad caliph Sulayman is invited to put
it into practice (pp. 101-103) and in a procedure which is presented as being
correct, after the battle ofPoitiers (p. 117). A connected question will oblige us
presently to return to this setting aside of booty.
B) The cavalryman receives three times as much as the infantryman: one
share for hirn and two for his horse. This is the same as the ratio indicated by
Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam for a later expedition in Ifrlqiya which, in 655, would have
ended in the taking of Jalula (p. 55); and it is found in the writings of other
historians. Such was, in fact, the solution which all orthodox jurists had
ultimately adopted as conforming to the practice of the Prophet. Only Abu
Hanlfa objected to this, claiming that it would be improper to give more to the
animal than to the human being: accordingly he awarded only two shares to
the cavalryman, one for hirn and one for his horse. But his disciples refused to
follow hirn on this point: Abu Yusuf reverted to the dominant solution as
taught by Malik and by all the other imiim-s. 31
C) The share of a soldier who dies before the distribution is reserved for his
natural heirs. It is as weIl to pause at this point, because this was a question
much discussed, generating various fine distinctions. What was the position
on this of the principal masters ofjiqh?
31 Mälik, Muwatta', ed. eit., III, 196; Mudawwana, III, 32; Abu Yusuf, K. al-Khariij, tr. pp.
28-29; the same, Al-Radd 'aliisiyaral-Awzii'i, ed. Cairo, 1357 H., p.17; K. al-Umm, IV, 69, VII,
306,320; Tabari, Ikhtilaj, pp. 80-1; Dimashqi, Ra1tmat al-Umma, p. 298.
Abu Hanj:fa, supported this time by his pupil Abu Yusuf, demanded that,
for the deceased to be taken into account, the man should have died, not only
after the taking of the booty, but also after the safe delivery of the latter into
Islamic territory. AI-Shafi'i was content with the proviso that the man died
after the taking of booty. Malik accepted the reservation of his share for his
family if he had fought and been killed before the victory and the taking of
booty, but refused it if the individual had died in the course of the expedition
before fighting. AI-Awza'i, the least demanding [124] of all, on the basis of an
example attributed to the Prophet, allowed this posthumous sharing in the
booty, provided that the deceased had died having joined in a campaign "in
the way of Allah". 32
In the case presented to us by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, the man died,
apparently of a natural death (tuwuffiya, mata), at Dhat al-I:Iumam, i.e. on the
fringes of Egypt and of the desert. 33 A. Gateau translates the second of the
1;I,adith-s relating to this anonymous individual: " ... an infantryman who had
participated in the Ifriqiya expedition was killed at Dhat al-Humam." The
text does not say "infantryman" here (rajil) but "man, soldier" (rajul): it does
not say "was killed" but "died"; the formula "kharaja fi ghazwati Ifriqiyata"
indicates only that the person involved set out on a campaign with the army,
not, as the translation could be taken to imply, that he was on the way horne.
The distribution in which he participates after his demise also gives the
impression of taking place at long range, in enemy territory. He died, we are
given to understand, before fighting. The solution conforms, not with the
opinion of Malik, but with the rite of al-Awza'i, and is based on an argument of
traditional order. It would no doubt be more accurate to say: our account
reinforces this solution of traditional order.
2. - The second passage to be examined on the distribution of booty refers to

an important and very delicate question, that of nafal: in what measure and
according to which norms could a warrior chieftain favour certain combatants
or a group among them in the distribution of booty?
Here as supra, Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam gives consecutively on the same page
(p. 53) two similar vers ions of the same action, distinguished by one or
two variants in the list of informants. We are witnessing the second major
campaign which the Arabs would have launched against Ifriqiya: commanded
32 Abu Yusuf, Al-Radd 'alii siyar al-Awzii'i, pp. 23-30; K. al-Umm, VII, 307; Tabari, Ikhtiliij,
pp. 76-8.
33 Bakri, ap. cit., pp. 10-11: Idrisi, Descriptian de l'Ajrique et de l'Espagne, ed.-tr. Dozy/ de
Goeje, Leiden 1866, p. 137/164.

by Mu'awiya b. J:Iudayj, it would have taken place in 654 at the end of the
caliphate of 'Uthman.
[125] The first version reads: " ... according to Sulayman b. Yasar,34 who
said: We made an expedition into Ifrlqiya with Ibn J:Iudayj, in the company of a
large number of Muhajirun and of An~ar. Ibn J:Iudayj gave us in the form of
praecipuum (naffalanä) half (of the booty) having set aside the fifth. I saw no
one who disapproved ofthis, other than Jabala b. 'Amr al-An~arl."
The second version is in these terms: "I questioned Sulayman b. Yasar on
the subject of the nafal practised in the course of an expedition. He answered
me: I never saw anyone do this other than Ibn J:Iudayj; in Ifrlqiya he gave us
half(the booty) having set aside the fifth. There were with us alarge numberof
Companions ofthe Prophet among the first Muhajirun: Jabala b. 'Amr refused
to take whatever this was."35
The lines which have just been read correct the translation by A. Gateau
on a number of points. In the first version, Jabala did not "refuse" (abä) as in
the second, but "disapproved" (ankara). In the second version, the informant
interrogates Sulayman, not "on the subject of the sharing of booty, in the
course of the expedition," but rather on the familiar judicial question of the
"praecipuum in the distribution of booty in the course of an expedition" ('ani
l-nafali fi l-ghazw): the article here has the generic sense which, in this type
of expression, is characteristic of it;36 the precision "in Ifriqiya" given in the
response confirms it. The text does not say "Only Ibn J:Iudayj carried out this
distribution," but "I saw only Ibn J:Iudayj carry it out." And above all, in one
and the other version, the translation "Ibn J:Iudayj gave us in distribution half
of the booty in addition to the fifth" needs to be rectified: first because it is
silent on the issue of nafal, which is however articulated; then because the
expression ba'da l-khumusi does not signify, as it had al ready been translated,
[126] erroneously, by Ben Cheneb in a similar account,37 "in addition to the
fifth" but "after the fifth had been set aside"; numerous judicial tests prove
(we shall be showing an example of this shortly) that the expression is
synonymous with ba'da ikhräji l-khumusi.
34 Traditionist and jurist of Medina, died circa 720; see, on hirn, a notice by Ben Cheneb,
Classes des savants de l'Ifriqiya, Algiers 1920, p. 49, n. 2. It will be noted that he was probably
too young to have taken part in the carnpaign in question.
35 These two versions are revived by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakarn in the collection of{i,adith-s wh ich
concludes his book, cf. Torrey edition, pp. 317-18.

36 A chapter ofthe Muwatta' ofMälik, ed. eit., III, 176. is intitled Jämi'u l-nafalifi l-ghazw.
37 Abü l-'Arab, Tabaqät, in Ben Cheneb, Classes des savants de l'Ifriqiya, ed. tr. Paris-
Algiers 1915-20, pp. 15/49.

Here we once again consult the Kitab al-Amwal of Ibn Salläm. Dealing at
length with nafal and its connections with the setting aside of the fifth, this is
how the author expresses hirnself (p. 308):
"For the nafal which the Imam awards, there are four (different) solutions:
one relates to nafal without the fifth,
the second, the nafal which is taken on the booty after having set aside the
fifth (ba'da ikhraji l-khumusi),
the third, the nafal which is taken on the fifth itself,
the fourth, the nafal that is taken on the totality of booty before anything
has been set aside according to the principle of the fifth."
"The first solution," Ibn Salläm continues, "had to do with salab, stripping
an enemy combatant killed in hand to hand fighting. The second, that of the
nafal which is taken on the booty after the fifth has been set aside (ba'da
l-khumusi), is for the benefit of detachments sent ahead into enemy territory
and bringing back booty: each detachment receives a third or a quarter of
wh at it brings back, after the setting aside of the fifth (ba'da l-khumusi)".
Is the synonymy of ba'da l-khumusi with ba'da ikhraji l-khumusi not thus
demonstrated?
In the third solution, in conditions not specified by Ibn Salläm, the imam
proceeds to the setting aside of the fifth on the totality of booty, then, on the
booty itself, he distributes as nafal according to his personal choice. The
fourth and last solution is for the benefit of guides or spies who have rendered
services to the army. And our author, adding that one or the other of these
solutions has its 1;I,adith-s and its controversies, devotes to each of them an
entire chapter.
The first and the fourth solution are no more, in sum, [127] than particular
cases. It was principally between the se co nd and the third that choices had to
be made: is the nafal a praecipuum, for the benefit of a military detachment,
on the four fifths of the booty before the distribution, or does it consist in the
attribution, over and above these four fifths, of apart or of the totality or
the fifth? The implication is that the account which is the object of our
study corresponds to the second solution. To whichjudicial school should this
practice be attributed?
The position ofMälik, forcefully declared, is weIl known, reproduced in all
the works ofjiqh: "la nafala illa mina l-khumusi, there is no nafal except on the
fifth".38 Sufyän al-thawri: taught the same. 39 Al-Shäfi'i: was even more strict,
38 See espeeially Malik, MuwaHa', ed. eit., III, 194-5; Mudawwana, III, 30; Ibn Sallam, K.
al-Amwiil, p. 320; 1'abarl, Ikhtiliij, p. 128; Averroes, Bidiiya, I, 382-3.

39 Ibn Sallam, ap. eit., pp. 320, 323.
limiting the nafal to the fifth of the fifth, in other words to the bare minimum
which was all that was due, according to hirn, to the imäm. 40 All of this
conforms to the third of Ibn Sallam's solutions.
Abu Hanlfa and al-Awza'I, on the other hand, stood by the second ofthese
solutions. But Abu Hanlfa demanded a prior decision by the chief ofthe army:
the latter should have promised in advance to the men of a detachment, to
incite them to fight with greater valour, a praecipuum on the booty to come. 41
This does not seem to be the case in our account; furthermore, the distribution
takes place there in enemy territory, which is contrary to the doctrine of Abu
Hanlfa. AI-Awza'I did not make such a promise a sine qua non. Referring to a
1;Ladith transmitted under the name of I;Iabib b. Maslama, he recalled that the
Prophet had awarded to his military contingents, on top ofthe four fifths ofthe
booty due to the army in total, a praecipuum of a quarter on departure and of a
third on return (al-rubu'fi bad'atih wa-l-thuluthfi raj'atih); and he considered
each of these figures as a maximum. 42 The higher rate for the return was
justified, it seems, by [128] the need, at this stage of the campaign, to bolster
the fighting spirit of men impatient to march back to their hornes.
Our account thus accords with the view of AI-Awza'I except on one point:
the rate of the nafal, which for hirn was a third at the most, and which he re
is a half. We have another version of this 1;Ladith of Sulayman b. Yasar in the
Tabaqät of Abu l-'Arab al-TamlmI,43 who was born in Kairouan at ab out the
time ofthe death ofIbn 'Abd al-I;Iakam: this version, very similar to the one we
are studying, specifies the third, in conformity with the precept of al-Awza'I,
and not the half. Which proportion is the older? Perhaps we have here an
indication in favour of the antiquity of our text in the fact that it contains a
solution which is slightly aberrant in relation to the established rites.
We may now note that Abu l-'Arab's account does not include the final
phrase referring to the disapproval or the refusal of J abala: according to hirn,
the agreement of the onlookers, the first Muslims, to allow this to happen, was
not marred by any opponent; there was, locally at least, ijmä' al-?a1;Läba,
consensus of the Companions of the Prophet; and the 1;Ladith - related
elsewhere by the great Malikite jurist SaQnun without commentary - to all
appearances, supports the solution of al-Awza'I against the personal opinion of
the imäm Malik.
The text of Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam requires more delicacy in interpretation.
There is no general consensus, but unanimity minus one. The one who
40 K. al-Umm, IV, 68; Tabari, Ikhtilaj, p. 127.

41 Abu Yusuf, K. al-Khariij, tr., pp. 305-6; Tabari, op. eit., p. 128.
42 Ibn Salläm, op. eiL, pp. 315-320; Tabari, op. eiL, pp. 118-125.
43 In Ben Cheneb, loe. eit.

disrupts the ijma', without having attained any celebrity, is mentioned by

other authors and praised as a virtuous Companion wen versed in matters of
religion. 44 It is not clear whether he denounces the very principal of nafal
levied on the four-fifths of the booty, or just the high level of the rate. 45 If it is
the rate that he has in mind, the ly,adith has to be taken [129] in the same sense
as the version ofSal:mun and of Abu l-'Arab; in one form or the other, we thus
have the testimony - the phenomenon is not unique, far from it - that eminent
members ofthe primitive Mälikite school thought otherwise than their master
on certain points.
3. - It is still in the context of the campaigns of Mu'äwiya b. I:Iudayj that two

other passages from Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam refer to the manner of distributing the
booty.
A) After the taking of J alulä, in Tunisia, by a detachment of troops, since
there was no agreement, we are told, on the distribution, Ibn I:Iudayj
consulted in writing the caliph of Damascus Mu'äwiya b. Abi Sufyän. The
latter replied: "The troops as a totality are the life-blood of a detachment (inna
l-'askara rid'un li-l-sariyyati); you should therefore share among an" (p. 55).
Another classic question, but resolved in this instance, in the same fashion
and in identical terms, by an orthodoxy.46 Whether or not there has been
setting aside of a praecipuum after that of the fifth, the remainder of the booty
must be distributed equally between the personnel of the detachments which
took the booty and the detachments of the rest of the army. Only one of the
most ancient founders of a rite, a short-lived rite as it turned out to be, the Iraqi
Ibrähim al-Nakha'i, taught that the imäm who sent a detachment into action
could subsequently, as he chose, set aside the fifth on the booty collected by
the detachment or award to it the booty in its entirety as nafal. And the treaties
ofjiqh, whenjustifying the dominant solution, adopt precisely the expression
used by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam. Ibn Salläm writes for example: "li-anna hadhä
l-'askara rid'un li-l-saräyä"; and the Mälikite Averroes was to write that the
44 Ibn Najl, Ma'alim al-Iman, vol. I, ed. Tunis 1320 H., p. 110 (the source of which is the
Riyae,l al-Nufiis of al-Malikl, 11th century). See also Ibn al-Athlr, Usd al-Ghiiba, ed. Cairo,
1286 H., I, 269 (where our I;!adfth is reproduced, with the "third") and Ibn I:Iajar, I$aba, ed.
Cairo, 1328 H., I, 223-4, n° 1080.
45 In the version of the Ma'alim al-Iman, there is neither rate, nor fifth: Jabala seems to
be denying here any kind of nafal. Is this the first form of the I;!adith, or conversely a
degenerate form?
46 See especially Tabarl, Ikhtiliif, p. 71 and Ibn I:Iazm, Maratib al-Ijma', ed. Cairo 1357 H.,
pp. 117-8.
people of the 'askar have the right to the booty of the sariyya: "an yakuna
rid'an li-man 7y,ar;1,ara l-qitäla (wa hum ahlu l-sariyyati)".47
B) Further on, our author disereetly mentions the granting [130] by the
caliph 'Uthmän to the Umayyad Marwän b. al-I:Iakam of the fifth set aside
from the booty which Ibn I:Iudayj had taken in IfrIqiya (p. 57).
Aceording to other historians, this was one of the blunders on the part of
'Uthmän which alienated a signifieant section of publie opinion and was to
hasten his tragic end. 48 Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam - we shall return to that subject
shortly - may have wanted to salvage the memory of this caliph, and hence not
to dweIl on such a gesture which would have denounced hirn for poor political
judgement. But it should also be recognised that in striet legal terms it was
not easy to criticise hirn: the procedure was entirely in accordance with the
doctrine of Mälik, which allowed the leader of the Muslim state full and free
disposition of the fifth, to dis tribute as he pleased or to keep for hirnself. 49
4. - The conquest of Spain and the raids against islands such as Sardinia gave
rise to accounts of pillage, and although the details seem to belong to legend,
the phenomenon as a whole must have been authentie. The conquerors
cherished for a long time the memory of their amazement on encountering
the riehes of Iberia, compared with the relative poverty of North Africa, and
sueceeding generations took pleasure in describing preeious booty and
recounting how treasures were seized.
However, among our transmitters ofTradition, the judicial-religious spirit
was as strong as ever, and attention should be given to two curious episodes
reported in the text of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam which, one immediately after the
other, recount the supernatural punishment of certain pillagers. In the first,
which in itself comprises two versions given one after the other, the culprits
hear in the open sea, on the ship which is transporting them with their loot,
a voice crying: "My God, drown them!" Surrounding themselves with copies
of the Qurän is to no avail and atempest engulfs them, sparing, the seeond
version adds, two innocents mentioned by name, known to be religious
figures. In the second episode, the culprit, who has hidden the pilfered object
47 Ibn al-Sallam, K. al-Amwal, pp. 317, 321, Averroes, Bidaya, I, 381. In Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam,
p. 141, it is perhaps again, in accordance with the reading adopted by A. Gateau, a case of
nafal; for the translation "a supplementary distribution ofbooty" a better substitute would
be "a preferential sharing ofbooty".
48 See especially al-Baladhurl, Ansab al-Ashraj, V. ed. Gotein, Jerusalem 1936, pp. 25, 27,
28,88.
49 Dimashql, Ra1;tmat al-Umma, p. 297.
[131] in a sack of pitch, cries out at the moment of death: "In the pitch, in the
pitch!" (pp. 95-99).50
Why these scenes and these punishments? The translation by A. Gateau
includes on a number of occasions, on the subject of these incidents, the terms
"fraud" or "defraud": " ... were guilty of numerous frauds ... that day, they
defrauded as much as they could ... who were not reckoned guilty of any
fraud ... having carried away the proceeds of hisfrauds ... " This is undou btedly
"fraud"; but it requires more precision, if the text is not to be deprived of its
full meaning.
The Arabic uses, each time, the verb ghaUa and its verbal substantive
ghulul; for example: "ghalla (pI. ghallu) ghalulan kathiran". Now ghulul is, in
religious Tradition, something very precise which is formally proscribed: it is
the concealment of booty and its misappropriation to the disadvantage of
other members of the army. The Prophet himself had been obliged to defend
himself against such an accusation, hence Qur'än III, 133: "It is not the deed of
a prophet to misappropriate booty (an yaghuUa); he who misappropriates
booty will appear with the object ofhis misappropriation (wa-man yaghlul ya'ti
bi-mä ghaUa) on the Day of Resurrection"; hence also numerous 1;Ladith-s,
which denounce this particular kind of malpractice. The orthodox rites were
unanimous in recognising its extreme gravity. Mälik devotes a section to it,
with five 1;Läqith-s, in his Muwatta';51 it is thus not insignificant that he himself
features in the first episode related by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam.
These edifying accounts had the purpose - and this also reveals their
origin - of illustrating the teaching of the scholars who, following in the wake
of the Prophet, made of ghulul a major sin. 52
III. - Fasting, Prayer, Other Questions of Fiqh

[132] The judicio-religious problems raised by the holy war are not the only
ones touched on in Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam's account. We are now going to see two
50 This last episode is to be found again, with the name ofthe same informant, al-Layth b.
Sa'd, in the Kitab al-Imama wa-l-Siyasa, ofpseudo-Ibn Qutayba, wh ich probably dates from
the end ofthe 9th century, ed. Cairo 1901, H, 123; in place of "pitch" (ztft) it is in this case a
"sack treated with pitch" (muzajjat).
51 Mälik, Muwatta', ed. cit., IH, 198-204; l'abari, Ikhtilaj; p. 110.
52 It is again in reference to booty and its sharing that another question ofjiqh arises: the
exchange between precious metals, he re between unrefined gold and gold coinage (p. 43).
Our text tends to show, in accordance with the orthodox rule, anxious to avoid "usury" or
riba, that this exchange should be made on a basis of equality: the "surplus" lfaifl) cannot be
abandoned by its owner in the form of a "gift" (hiba).
examples relating to cultic practices which are institutions fundamental to

Islam: the fast of Rama<;lan and ritual prayer.
1.- The first example puts the spotlight on 'Amr b. al-'A~ during the expedition
which enabled hirn to seize Tripoli. One of his old comrades in arms states:
"We were debating the question ofthe compensatory observance ofthe fast of
Rama<;lan (qac}ii'a dayni ramac},äna). It should not be interrupted, said Hubayb
b. Mughfil. It is not inappropriate to interrupt it, replied 'Amr b. al-'A~, on
condition that the number of days required is respected (lä ba'sa an yufarraqa
idhä ulp~iyati l-'idda)" (p. 35).53
As above in the case of nafal, it is a matter, in the first phrase, of a classic
question offiqh, and not of a particular case, although it is in the instance of a
particular case that the general question is effectively posed. The translation
of A. Gateau: "There was debate over the question of the observance of the
fast of Rama<;lan which we have not been able to accomplish," should thus
be modified, all the more so since this question risks applying the sequel "it
should not be interrupted" to the feast of Rama<;lan itself, while the point at
issue is its later compensatory observance. 54 A little further on, "It is not
inappropriate" is closer to the text than "I see nothing inappropriate": it is not
given as a personal opinion (ra'y) held by 'Amr.
[133] It is known that according to Quran II, 181, travellers may - indeed
should according to the interpretation of some - postpone the fast to a later
date for an equal number of days: ''fa-'iddatun min ayyämin". We are entitled
to wonder, and the question has been debated by scholars, whether this
compensatory fast, once begun, must be pursued all the days without
interruption, and whether the one who breaks it will be held to account, as is
the case with voluntary and unjustified breaking of the fast in the month of
Rama<;lan. The majority of orthodox authorities have opted for the liberal
solution: they do not regard as obligatory the uninterrupted succession
(tatäbu') ofthe days ofthe qac},ä', provided that there is observance ofthe total
number of days required. "I would prefer," says Malik for example in the
Mudawwana (1, 213) "to have continuity, but if someone acts otherwise he can
(nevertheless) do his duty".55
53 'Idda seems to me a better reading than 'adad, although having the same sense. It is
definitely 'idda that Torrey has read (p. 287) in the text ofthe !tadith as it is found in the final
collection ofIbn 'Abd al-l;Iakam.
54 As would be proved, should this be necessary, by an explicit variant in the revivalofthis
!tadith, ed. Torrey, loc. cit.

55 See also Ibn AbI Zayd, Risala, tr. Fagnan, Paris-Algiers, 1914, p. 80; Averroes, Bidäya, I,
289; Shafi'l, K. al-Umm, II, 85 (idha u!t$iyati l-'idda).

A little furt her on, the same page, the Mudawwana relates in the name of
Ashhab, eminent Egyptian disciple of Ibn Lahi'a, of Layth b. Sa'd and
especially ofMalik - as follows: "Ibn 'Abbas, Abü Hurayra, 'Amr b. al-'A$, 'Urwa
b. al-Zubayr, 'Ata' b. Abi Rabal), Abü 'Ubayda b. al-Jarral), Mu'adh b. Jabal
said: It is not inappropriate to interrupt the compensatory fulfilment of the
fast of RamaQan, on condition that there is observance of the number of days
required (la ba'sa bi-an yufarraqa qac;la'u ramac;lana idha ul;!,$iyati l-'idda). Ibn
'Umar, All b. Abi Talib, Sa'iQ b. al-Musayyab have declared it an offence to
interrupt the compensatory fulfilment of RamaQan."
Are these not the same formulas that are to be found, penned by Ibn
'Abd al-I:Iakam? Here too 'Amr b. al-'Ä.? is mentioned as a guarantor of
permissibility. Hubayb b. Mughfil, holder of a contrary opinion in the Futül;!,
Mi$r, is not named in Ashhab's list; he was regarded as a light-weight
alongside the three eminent individuals listed here as sharing his point of
view. This Hubayb b. Mughfil al-Ghifari, Companion of the Prophet, was
mentioned by the Egyptians in a number of l;!,adith-s: one specifically
concerning prayer, and another, better known, forbidding carelessness,
resulting from pride, in the wearing of [134] clothes; a valley to which he used
to withdraw in the western desert of Egypt apparently owed its name to
hirn: he was mentioned as one of the comrades-in-arms of 'Amr b. al-'fu:; in the
conquest of the latter country.56 In default of one of the illustrations of Islam
listed by Ashhab, this highly honourable individual is renowned solely for
featuring in a judicio-historical l;!,adith alongside 'Amr who contradicts hirn.
The opinion which 'Amr is credited with defending, which thus benefits, so it is
hoped, from his considerable prestige, conforms to the solution preferred by
orthodoxy; it is this which prevails, it seems, in the eyes of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam
or of his informants.
2. - The other episode, the one relating to prayer, is associated with the first
serious campaigner in Tunisia, 'Abd Allah b. Sa'd. "One day in Ifrlqiya he was
leading the public prayer of sunset (maghrib). He had prayed two rak'a, when a
muffled and obscure sound was heard in the mosque. The faithful, startled,
believed that their enemies had arrived, and Ibn Sa'd interrupted the prayer.
Then, seeing that nothing was happening, he preached to those present and
added: This prayer has been curtailed. He gave the order to the muezzin to
make a second call, then he restarted the prayer (a'adaha)" (p. 45).57
56 Torrey edition, pp. 94, 286-7; Ibn al-Athlr, Usd al-Ghaba, V, 54; Ibn I:Iajar, I$aba, III, 599,
n° 8934.
57 This text is reprised by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam in his final collection of fl,adith-s, ed. Torrey,
p. 263. It is immediately preceded by another version which differs from it in apart of the
At first sight, it might be tempting to associate this text with the question of
the prayer offear ($alät al-khawj); but neither the special ritual for this prayer,
in which the faithful pray in relays while some stand guard, nor the prior
condition offear ofthe enemy, are present in our account: there is a surprise in
the middle of the prayer which is communal and shared by all. Wh at precisely
is signified by this incident and by the attitude attributed to 'Abd Alläh b. Sa'd?
The end of the episode suggests the explanation: wh at is at issue here
is the resumption of an interrupted prayer. The fuqahä', in fact, were not
at all in agreement in [135] determining, if and when it took place, after
an interruption of the ritual prayer, whether to repeat it in its entirety (i'äda)
or to resume it (binä') at the point of interruption, or furthermore to add to
this simple resumption a compensatory prostration. The principal debate
was focused on i'äda and binä', and the divergent solutions, according to the
various rites, also differed in terms of the causes and the modalities of
the interruption. For Mälik, speaking, even intentionally, in the course of the
prayer, did not annul it if it was necessary to speak in the interests of the
prayer, for ex am pIe to warn the imäm that he was making amistake;
otherwise, voluntary interruption had the effect of annulment. AI-Awzä'i was
content with a praiseworthy motive unconnected with the prayer itself, such
as warning a blind person or setting someone who had strayed on the right
path. 58
In the present case, 'Abd Allah b. Sa'd, functioning as imäm had, we are
told, "interrupted the prayer", without any doubt as to the propriety, not only
of stopping the prayer, but also of using voluntary gestures and words which
destroyed its continuity. The decision that he subsequently took to start the
whole prayer again rather than confining himself to the third obligatory rak'a
for the maghrib, conformed to the dominant opinion within orthodoxy and to
the Mälikite position, in opposition to the rite of al-Awzä'i. It is not irrelevant
that the one who informed Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam of this episode was his own
father, head of the Mälikite school in Egypt after Ashhab. 59
isnad, in a few slight variants of form, and most of all in the absence of any mention of the
maghrib and of the rak'a.
58 Dimashql, Rab,mat al-Umma, p. 39. See also Mudawwana, 1,105, and Averroes, Bidaya I,
173.
59 It is again his father who relates to hirn a b,adith according to which the Prophet, having
involuntarily forgotten a rak'a, would have returned to the mosque to perform this rak'a
without recommencing the prayer (p. 95). Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam has numerous other passages
about prayer, especially (p. 62) on the interrupted prayer. See also in Abu l-'Arab, Tabaqat,
p. 19/61-2, a b,adith concerning Ifrlqiya on supplementary prayer in Rama<;lan.
24 Robert Brunschvig
3. - With the end of the period of Conquest, there is a change in the character
of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam's account. It loses much of its b-adith-related form, and
the facts, more recent and more precise, also seem to be more confidently
stated. Elements of fiqh become very rare. They are no Ion ger one of the
principal sources of inspiration.
[136] It could be that that the two following passages have a judicio-
religious bearing, without it being appropriate to affirm this explicitly: the first
concerns a governor of Ifrlqiya who, in 720, had the hands of his bodyguards
tattooed - tattooing being forbidden by religion - and perished soon
afterwards, a victim of assassination (pp. 109-111); the second recounts the
application, in 740, of a Qur'anic punishment, amputation of a hand and a foot,
to a governor of Tlemcen who was suspected of misconduct (p. 121).
The last two instances of this kind which are encountered in our text relate
to Berber heretics, the ~ufriyya Kharijites, around the year 742. "They
considered licit," A. Gateau's translation tells us, "the captivity of women",
and a little further on it is added that they took captive the "proteges" (ahla
dhimmatihä) of the Nefzaoua (pp. 133-135). The author manifestly sought to
point out here two actions contrary to orthodoxy: he states furthermore, soon
afterwards, that the orthodox, conquerors of the ~ufrites, redressed the wrong
suffered by the dhimmi-s of the Nefzaoua. In this conditions, wh at is the licit
nature of the "captivity of women" supposed to tell us? The orthodox were
perfectly happy to accept this. It should probably be understood that the
~ufrites "considered licit the use of their captives" in contravention of the
rules which, among the orthodox, limited this right. "YastaMllilna sabya
l-nisä''': saby can mean "captives" as weH as "captivity" and the expression
istal;wlla l-nisä' in the sense of "considering licit the use of women" is so
current as to create no difficulty.
These solemn allusions to jiqh in the last third of our text contrast with
the spirit that has animated it hitherto. We shall now without delay retrieve
something of this spirit by studying the greatest individual of the Conquest, as
presented to us by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam.
IV. - 'Uqba b. Näfi' and the Foundation of Kairouan

1. - This redoubtable personality is 'Uqba b. Nafi' al-FihrI, whose story is told
us for the period between the years 666 and 683 (pp. 57-71). He is the hero
of the conquest of Barbary, outclassing even Musa b. Nu:;;ayr and Tiiriq, the
heroes ofthe [137] conquest of Spain. For these last two, the relations between
them and their relations with the Umayyads, it would be necessary to pay
close attention to the position taken by our author: the Traditions that were
current were for Musa, or against Musa, and from the attitude taken towards
hirn by such or such a historian it is possible to deduce some of his own
tendencies or the tendencies of his sources. In the present study, which deals
essentially with North Africa, we shallleave this task to one side. 60
The exact date ofthe birth of'Uqba b. Näfi' remains unknown: he belongs
to the generation of the first "successors" or tiibi 'uno This Qurayshite of ardent
will, conqueror and converter, founder of the great Arab-Muslim city of
Kairouan and of its mosque, subsequently falling as a martyr to Islam, is a
great figure made still greater by legend. "You are perhaps," it was said to hirn
one day, "one of those who will enter Paradise fully prepared" (p. 69). For a
great many Muslims he represented the realisation of the ideal: it was easy for
them to add to his exploits and enlarge his conquests, to accentuate the
religious character of his work with the miraculous and with supernatural
predestination. This blend of warlike heroism, of religious propaganda and
wonders - is it not enough to transform a vague and distant historical basis
into a work of epic proportions, a literary creation which though moving, is
all too often far removed from the truth? The epic element is certainly there
in the form, and the first part of the saga of 'Uqba, that which shows hirn
subjugating "one after the other" the diverse regions of southern Tripolitania,
is not unworthy - in its succinct and powerful dialogue, rapid action, the
brutal demise of the hero soberly recounted, the systematic repetitions and
their symmetry - to be put alongside other, better known, passages of epic.
It has been stated above that the conquest of Fezzan was probably not the
action of'U qba. Doubt is legitimate for the majority of operations attributed to
hirn in southern Tripolitania. Similarly we have the right to be sceptical about
[138] the terminal point of the great expedition described in the third and
final part of his saga, which was to end with his death. He is seen there,
returning to North Africa after falling into disfavour, dragging behind hirn in
chains the governor who had temporarily replaced hirn, and setting out on an
adventurous raid, in a single stage, as far as the Ocean. "Arriving on the shores
ofthe sea, 'Uqba drove his horse forward until the water lapped his breast. 'My
God,' he said, 'you are my witness: I can go no further, but if I found a way
forward, I would ride on'" (p. 69). On the returnjourney, to the south of Aures,
near Tahudha, he was attacked by Berbers and died in combat; his tomb, in
the oasis which bears his name, is still venerated today.61
60 Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakarn sornetirnes shows hirns elf less than benevolent towards Musa and
his line, but this attitude is not systernatic in his work; perhaps it should be associated with
a certain syrnpathy that he seerns to feel for the Kalbites (see below).
61 On the sanctuary of "Sidi Okba" see the re cent study by G. Marcais published in the
Annales Institut Etudes Orientales d'Alger, val. V, pp. 1-15.

The folkloric theme is evident in the image of the horseman who can be
stopped only by the sea, and replicas of this are to be found elsewhere. To
attribute to a famous hero conquests and far-flung expeditions is to enhance
his renown, but it is also to associate with his prestige, and give a portion ofhis
baraka to, whichever territory bears witness to his achievements. If 'Uqba's
long-range raid may be regarded as authentic, it is reasonable, in the absence
of evidence to the contrary, to limit it to central Algeria; perhaps, at the most, it
might have reached as far as what is now Orania, and the valley ofthe Chelif.
2. - The central panel of the triptych constituting the epic of 'Uq ba is occupied
by the foundation of Kairouan: is this not in the eyes of Muslims his greatest
work, which perpetuates his memory in the most magnificent manner?
We do not at the moment have any proof in hand which would qualify us to
declare decisively for or against the historical character of this foundation.
Tradition appears constant, and it could well be that Kairouan was born
at around this time. 62 But there is also sometimes mention of a previous
Kairouan, or in addition a concurrent and neighbouring city with an almost
identical name, of Berber consonance: [139] Tikarawan; and there are so me
on the other hand who attribute the foundation of Kairouan to a homonym
of our hero, 'Uqba b. 'Amir, a Companion of the Prophet, while 'Uqba b. Nafi'
was only a tabi': themes of uncertainty which add to the doubt created by the
legendary allure ofthe account ofthe foundation. However, the substitution of
'Uqba b. 'Amir for 'Uqba b. Nafi', which nothing seems to substantiate on the
historicallevel, would be explained by the desire to involve a Companion of
the Prophet, even to the detriment of an illustrious tabi'. While recording a
minor hesitation, it is reasonable to assume, on a provisional basis, that the
founder ofKairouan was indeed 'Uqba b. Nafi'.
As in other passages, Ibn 'Abd al-J:Iakam presents two versions in
immediate succession (pp. 61-63). The first is a little shorter than the second,
and lacks an isnad. On arriving at the site, "a valley covered with trees and
bushes, a veritable lair of ferocious beasts, wild animals and reptiles, 'Uqba
cried: Inhabitants of the valley, leave these places - may God have mercy on
you! - for we are settling here. On three successive days (thalathata ayyamin)
he uttered this proclamation. Then, without exception, all the ferocious
beasts, all the wild animals, all the reptiles, moved out. He had the place
cleaned up and divided it into lots. Then, having populated the town, he
planted his spear there and said: Here is your Kairouan."
62 On the site and the foundation ofKairouan, see J. Despois, La Tunisie Orientale, Sahel
et Basse Steppe, Paris 1940, pp. 164-6, and H.H. Abdulwahab, in Revue Tunisienne, 1940, pp.
51-3.
The second version, which supposedly dates back to al-Layth b. Sa'd,

starts with 'Uqba spending the night on the site. "In the morning, standing at
the entrance to the valley, he cried: Inhabitants of the valley, go, for we are
settling here. He said this three times (thaliitha marriitin). And creeping
serpents, scorpions and other animals, of unknown species, left the place. The
people, standing, watched this exodus from the morning to the time when the
sun became uncomfortable for them and when they did not see any more of
these beasts; then they settled in the valley. Al-Layth adds: Ziyäd b. al-Ajlän
has told me that, during the forty years which followed this event, the people
have been unable to find a single snake or scorpion, not even for a bounty of a
thousand dinars".63
[140] This last version recurs in the Tabaqiit of Abu l-'Arab. 64 It is preceded
by a similar version, which makes no mention of the repetition of the call
but concludes with the words: "We shall kill all those that we find there."
Al-Balädhuri: has no direct appeal to the beasts but an invocation from 'Uqba
to God; and he subsequently shows the wild animals leaving and taking their
young with them. 65 Other versions, in the later texts, also have this feature,
and furthermore some of them declare that the Berbers were converted to
Islam by this spectacle, or go further and reinforce 'Uqba's proclamation by
the express mention of Companions of the Prophet who were present, or
rather by their discreet intervention. 66 According to Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, 'Uqba
alone was in charge and he deserves the credit. But wh at is it that separates
one of these two versions from the other?
In the process of the expulsion of the savage beasts, a difference is noted:
the warning is given, sometimes on three successive days, sometimes three
times consecutively in one day. Does this discrepancy have any significance?
We propose to convince ourselves of this by consulting works of l),adith and of
fiqh.
There exist numerous religious Traditions concerning the killing of
snakes, its restricted licitness, its conditions. These generally deal with the
snakes which are found within the houses of Medina. Two species considered
particularly dangerous could be killed on the spot: to the others, a formal
legal injunction should be addressed, calling upon them to leave, since they
could be "Muslim jinns": only if they resisted the ritual abjuration, thus
63 The translation by A. Gateau has been modified on several points of detail.
64 Abu l-'Arab, Tabaqat, pp. 8-9/21-5.
65 Baladhuri, Futu/:l, al-Buldan, p. 228/358-9.
66 Ibn 'Idhari, Bayan, tr. Fagnan, Algiers 1901, I, 15; Ibn al-Athir, Annales du Maghreb et de
l'Espagne, tr. Fagnan, Algiers 1901, p. 19; al-Nuwayri, Historia de los musulmanes de Espana
y Afriea, ed.- tr. Gaspar Remiro, Vol. H, Granada 1919, pp. 11-12; Ibn Naji, Ma'alim al-Iman,
I,8.
demonstrating their impiety or their satanic nature, was their killing

authorised. Al-Layth b. Sa'd, supporter of one of the above-mentioned
versions of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, is among the transmitters of these ly,adith-s,
also Malik in his [141] Muwatta'.67 The injunction to the snakes, the Traditions
tell us, should be done "on three occasions" (thaläthan), unclear terminology
which has given rise to discussion: is this "three times" (thalätha marrätin),
one at each appearance of the reptile, or the three consecutively, or "three
successive days" (thaläthata ayyämin)? This last interpretation is explicit
apud Malik, who introduces it into the text of one of his ly,adith-s; it also finally
prevailed in his rite, for example in the writings of the commentators on the
Risäla of Ibn Abi: Zayd, where thaläthan is prudently used. 68 But does this
prudence, in the work of a classical author of the Tenth Century, not prove that
among the first Malikites the issue was controversial? How is it possible now
to fail to see the link which unites in this debate our two vers ions and the
variant which we have noted? Each of the two solutions, with no decision
being made between them, is represented here.
There remain however two elements of disharmony between our account
and the Traditions relating to the snakes ofMedina. Many scholars accept that
the rules imposed by the latter are valid, at least in terms of the practice
recommended, outside Medina, but only in houses, not in the countryside or
in the desert. On the other hand, these Traditions only concern snakes, and
not all the species ofwild animals expelled by 'Uqba.
Without doubt, in fact, the conjunction between the legend of 'Uqba and
the Medinan ly,adith-s is the result of a secondary development, the work of
religious scholars. The "three day" version, from this point of view, appears
suspect. The figure of the conqueror could at an early stage have given rise to
accounts of supernatural powers or ofmiracles (karämät) [142] of a type which
is, in the final analysis, quite bana1. 69 Somewhere in southern Tripolitania,
where people are dying of thirst, 'Uqba recites a prayer of two rak'a, then he
67 Malik, MuwaHa' ed. eit., VII, 300-2; UbbI, Ikmal (eommentary on Muslim), ed. Cairo,
1328, H., VI. 50-3.

68 Zarruq and Ibn NajI, Commentaires sur la Risala d'Ibn Abi Zaid, ed. Cairo 1914, II, 418;
Abu I-I;Iasan, Commentaire sur la Risala d'Ibn Abi Zaid, 4th ed. Cairo 1930, II, 396. In the
translation of the Risala, Fagnan aeeordingly writes: "three different days", p. 267; and ibid,
n. 1, he attaehes to this preeept the ae count ofthe foundation ofKairouan: thisjustified, but
disereet point seems to have remained unnotieed. - There would have been a ease for
traeing this legendary theme in the work of the Iba<;lite Kharijites of North Afriea; they
adopted it with referenee to the foundation of Tahert; cf. Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, tr.
Masqueray, Algiers 1878, p. 50.
69 The term karamat, fa miliar to hagiography, is also found, with referenee to 'Uqba b.
Nafi', in Ma'alim al-Iman, loc. cit.

invokes God; his horse, scraping the ground with his hooves, uncovers a
subterranean water-course, which is subsequently reached through seventy
excavations (p. 61). At another time, it is his imprecation against a riyal that is
realised (pp. 65-67). Is it very surprising that this hero beloved of God should
be given the power to expel wild beasts,7° when the object is to make a place
suitable for the construction of a Muslim city and a mosque?71 Then, aided
by the similitude despite certain persistent differences, the fuqahii' would
associate this episode to Medinan 7;tadith-s, deforming it according to need in
so me details and making it serve, for the question of "three times" or "three
days", to illustrate one or other of their solutions.
V. - Orthodox, Umayyad, Arab and Berber Caliphs

1. - The traditionist masters of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam liked to put into the scene,
wherever possible, individuals who were closely associated with the Prophet72
or with his very first successors. The latter themselves could not be absent
from accounts relating to the Conquest. Abu Bakr al-$iddlq, "the Veracious",
who could not be held to have been involved in these events, is nevertheless
evoked in a flattering mann er with reference to his grandson Ibn al-Zubayr
(p. 47). 'Umar b. al-Khattab forbids, [143] during his lifetime, an attack on
Ifrlqiya as such, after the seizure ofTripoli (p. 37). On the other hand, 'Uthman
b. 'Affan incites the Muslims to launch an assault on wh at is now Tunisia
(p. 39). As for the silence on the subject of 'All, whom others found ways of
introducing into the tapestry of these events, it is assumed that the orthodox
had no reason to falsify historical truth in his favour. 73
The attitude lent to 'Umar could have as its primary motive the desire,
widely spread at this time, to attribute a conscious and deliberate policy to
70 BaladhurI's version, which speaks of an invocation to God and not of a summons to the
beasts, harmonises more closely with two prior incidents. It is hard however to take the
view that it represents the primary state of the legend: it would seem rather to be an
aesthetically emended edition.
71 AI-BaladhurI has collected, pp. 229/360, an Ifrlqiyan version about a dream which
would have shown 'Uqba the correct position for the minaret. The blessing ofthe town by
'Uqba is recounted by several authors, in particular Ablll-'Arab, Tabaqat, p. 8/20-1.
72 In relation to a Tradition which placed in year 27 of the Hegira (647-8) the date of the
expedition of 'Abd Allah b. Sa'd against Ifrlqiya, it was recalled that the same year,
according to the imam Malik, saw the death of I:Iaf~a, wife of the Prophet (p. 51).
73 The expression ma maqalat'ayni al-ma'u does not signify "as long as my eyes can be
moistened by tears" as it has been translated (p. 37) but "as long as a liquid will moisten
my eyes", in other words, "as long as I shall be alive"; it is a synonym of "ma baqitu" which
occurs a little earlier.
individuals who in reality did no more than, on one occasion, satisfy the
conjunctures of the moment. If the Arabs could not, for a certain period of
time, after the lightning-conquest of Egypt and victorious forays as far as
Tripoli, push on further - wh at could be more natural? But it was tempting to
explain this temporary halt in the middle of aperiod of expansion in terms
of the very conceptions of the supreme leader. An excellent opportunity too
to put in his mouth certain remarks ho stile to North Africa which must
have been coined rather later and spread by Arab warriors having to confront
the determined resistance ofthe Berbers. Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam has retained the
play on words Ijriqiya al-mujarriqa ("the land which disperses") and also the
formula "Ifriqiya tricks the one who lets himselfbe tricked by her" (ghiidiratu
maghdurin bihii).74
It was indeed during the reign of 'Uthman, apparently, that the first great
Arab raid against Tunisia took pI ace. 'Abd Allah b. Sa'd, who led it, had to be
acquainted with the internal situation of the country which was propitious
for a foreign intervention. We are not necessarily convinced that 'Uthman
approved this raid in advance, stillless helped to organise it; it could be that
some gave hirn the credit for this after the event; there is something suspicious
about the very insistence on the part of [144] certain authors, al-Waqidi for
example,75 on showing hirn busily manoeuvring to obtain the support of his
entourage for the idea of the expedition. Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam has maintained
this merit for 'Uthman, but with discretion. He retains the essential account
of al-Waqidi, on the caliph's invitation, after consultation with prominent
Medinans,76 to attack Ifriqiya, but he declares formally that there was a prior
request for authorisation (isti'thiin) on the part of 'Abd Allah b. Sa'd: an
example of istidhiin addressed by the chief of the army to the sovereign, as
recommended by the juqahii' for new military expeditions.
If perhaps Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, as a concession to the anti-Umayyad
tendency of the 'Abbasid jurists, was not tempted to magnify 'Uthman unduly,
it was not his intention to reduce his prestige to a level too low: his own family
was associated, by links of clienthood, to a freedman of this caliph;77 and, a
74 It is repeated at a much later stage, ed. Torrey, p. 315.

75 Apud Abu l-'Arab, Tabaqät, p. 12/36 and f. We may recall that the Egyptians had little
regard for 'Uthman until al-Layth b. Sa'd (see subsequently, pp. 48-49) circulated among
them b,adith-s regarding the merits o[ this caliph; cL al-Damiri, quoted by Goldziher,
Muhammedanische Studien, II, 140.
76 A. Gateau did not translate "ba'da l-mashürati minhufi dhälika" wh ich me ans "after
consultation on his part about this subject". The practice of"taking counsel" or "mashüra"
by the prince or the judge is recommended by orthodoxy.
77 Khazraji, Khulä{m, ed. Cairo 1322 H., cited by A. Gateau, p. 10.
little further on in his account, he was to accord hirn a sympathetic role, then
refer on two occasions to his assassination, an emotive and pious theme, to
which orthodoxy did not remain insensitive.
2. - The anti-Umayyad attitude is much more clearly in evidence as regards

the very dynasty of cali phs of Damascus and their enemies. Not yet, however,
as regards the Sufyanid sovereigns: Mu'awiya b. Abi: Sufyan even gives, as we
have noted, an orthodox solution of law (p. 55). But the Marwanids are less
weIl treated, beginning with their eponymous author Marwan b. al-I:Iakam.
A) A fairly long episode, which confirms the prediction of the assassination

of 'Uthman and the accession of Marwan to power [145] "in the Holy Land"
(the prediction is made to the latter individual in a convent) presents it as a
lamentable day: no doubt he is overwhelmed by the prediction of the fate
which awaits his relative and friend currently on the throne, but he is also a
wretched figure, learning that he hirnself is called upon to reign; the Christian
who reveals to hirn his elevated future despises his weakness and lashes hirn
with his contempt (p. 49). And this scene is all the more instructive in that a
modern historian has feIt able to stress, insistently, the energy and decisive
spirit of Marwan, even before his caliphate. 78
B) His son and successor ~bd al-Malik was involved, before becoming
caliph, with the affair of the taking of J alllla, in the course of a campaign led by
Mu'awiya b. I:Iudayj. Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam relates that the defensive walls of
the city collapsed suddenly, as ~bd al-Malik was beating a retreat following
a fruitless siege: the Muslims then had no difficuIty taking possession of the
place and sacking it. Another version, immediately after, attributes the same
adventure to Ibn I:Iudayj personally (p. 55).
These two versions recur textually in the work of a more recent author, the
Spanish geographer al-Bakri:; but they are followed here by a complementary
episode, which seems ancient, and could be the nucleus of this story, or even
its genuine key.79 When, in the aftermath ofthis campaign, ~bd al-Malik had
occasion to complain of a lack of respect on the part of Ibn I:Iudayj, a known
78 Lammens, in Melanges de la Faculte Orientale, 1926, p. 28. The theme of prophecy by a
Christian monk or rahib is quite widespread in the early times of Islam. But our account,
put strangely into the mouth of Marwän himself, who he re appears scorned, is surely a
pejorative distortion of the edifying scene in which a pious person laments his accession to
power and declares himself unworthy of it. A parallel attitude has decidedly Christian
associations, cf. Becker, Islamstudien, Leipzig 1924, 1. 410.
79 Bakrl, ap. cit., pp. 71-3. See also Ibn 'Idhärl, Bayiin, 1,10-12, forvariants on this account.
traditionist, l;Ianash al-$an'anI 8o who was then in the army, predicted his
accession to the caliphate. Later, this l;Ianash was taken prisoner when he was
fighting for Ibn al-Zubayr, and sent to the caliph 'Abd al-Malik. "Since it is
you," the latter said to hirn, "who predicted that I would succeed [146] to the
throne, why have you left me to follow Ibn AI-Zubayr?" "Because I saw hirn
working to merit the favour of God, whereas you directed your efforts towards
the good things of this world", replied the warrior, a man of religion.
It is hard to understand why Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam, if he knew this
anti-Umayyad tradition, would omit this from his account, at the risk of
enfeebling it. Did he perhaps recoil from a second prediction of accession to
the throne, having already dealt at so me length with the one relating to the
father? Perhaps he reckoned that the other features hostile to the Umayyads-
to be found he re and there in his work - were sufficient.
C) One of these features, which recurs on a number of pages, is greed,
especially manifest in terms of the booty emanating from conquests. As we
have already seen, under 'Uthman, Marwan one day took possession of an
entire fifth (p.57). His son 'Abd al-Malik, on coming to power "delighted in the
conquests and the booty" achieved by l;Iassan b. al-Nu'man; and his other son,
'Abd al-Azlz, governor of Egypt, took control of the trafficking of captives,
including some beautiful Berber girl-slaves, who were apart of this booty
(p. 77). Under the reign of al-WaHd b. 'Abd al-Malik, it was again a brot her of
the caliph, Sulayman, who tried, through trickery, to have "the booty and the
presents" brought by Musa b. Nw?ayr and finally, after the death ofhis brot her,
obtained them (p. 101).
D) Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam could not pass over in silence the nomination as
governor of Ifrlqiya, in 718, under 'Umar b. 'Abd al-Azlz, of the pious Isma'll b.
'Ubayd Allah, a traditionist ofDamascus. 81 "He was of exemplary conduct, and
under his administration, there was barely a single Berber who did not accept
conversion to Islam" (p. 107). But our author does not specify, as was to be
done a century later by Abu l-'Arab, that this nomination was part of a plan on
the part of 'Umar b. 'Abd al-Azlz to complete the islamisation of Ifrlqiya: the
sending of a mission of tabi'iln expressly charged with the propagation of the
faith. 82 [147] Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam, apparently, had no reason to diminish the
religious glory ofthis U mayyad caliph, the only one to find favour in the eyes of
80 See, on hirn, a notice by Ben Cheneb, op. cit., p. 57, n. 2. He is rnentioned several tirnes
by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakarn.

81 See, on hirn, a notice by Ben Cheneb, ap. eit., p. 63, n. 1.
82 Abu l-'Arab, ap. eit., pp. 20-1/ 62-5. See also Ibn 'Idhärl, Bayan, I, 44.
all the orthodox: in addition, was it not one ofhis dosest relatives who wrote a
Sirat 'Umar b. 'Abd al-Aziz, which has survived into the present?83 Was the
Tradition representing the work of Isma'Il b. 'Ubayd Allah and of other men
of religion, his contemporaries, as approved by the sovereign, only current,
in the Ninth Century, in Ifriqiya, or was it later than the time of Ibn ~bd
al-I:Iakam?
E) The anti-Umayyad vein makes itselffelt, here as in other works reflecting
the Tradition of Medina or emanating from pro-~bbasid cirdes, in the
exaltation of persons hostile to the caliphs of Damascus, and before all others
the caliph of Mecca ~bd Allah b. al-Zubayr. Ibn :Abd al-I:Iakam has noted,
without accepting responsibility for it, the assertion that Ibn al-Zubayr had
killed with his own hand, in Tunisia, the patricus Gregory in the course of
the raid of ~bd Allah b. Sa'd (p. 39).84 But it is above all as a messenger of
victory, sent by :Abd Allah b. Sa'd to the caliph 'Uthman, that Ibn al-Zubayr
is indulgently and effusively feted: a master of improvised oratory, he
enchants his audience, and his talent earns hirn on the part ofhis own father a
compliment which refers to the virtues of his mother 85 and those of his
maternal grandfather, the caliph Abu Bakr (p. 47).
Perhaps, having regard to the wide diffusion ofthe Zubayrid legend in the
works of a number of writers and historians, it may be legitimately supposed
that our text did not exploit it inordinately.
F) In the conquest of N orth Africa, a fairly large part is accorded to a valiant
general, Zuhayr b. Qays al-Balawi,86 given as a lieutenant of 'Uqba b. Nafi',
[148] then as the victor over the great Berber chieftain Kusayla (pp. 57, 69-73).
The account of this last exploit deserves special attention.
The Muslims had just heard that the Byzantines had landed troops in
Cyrenaica; before them, Ibn al-N a~rani, whom we have mentioned previously,
had fled. The Umayyad ~bd al-Aziz b. Marwan, governor ofEgypt, decided to
send Zuhayr to restore the situation, but an altercation erupted between them
with regard to a certain Jandal b. ~akhr, of the tribe of ~adif, "a coarse and
83 Cairo edition, 1927; the sending of a propaganda mission to Ifrlqiya is not mentioned
there.
84 See on this subject, with a great wealth of detail, Kitäb al- Aghäni, ed. Cairo, VI, 56-7,
Ibn 'Idhärl, Bayän, I, 5-8, and other late works.

85 Asmä', sister of 'A'isha: ~adith-s relate that the Prophet preached her eulogy and
promised her, as reward for a goodwill gesture, "two girdles" in Paradise.

86 See, on hirn, a notice by Ben Cheneb, op. cit., p. 56, n. 3, where traditional data and
references are given.

hard man",87 whom the governor wanted to place alongside Zuhayr. "Now
~bd al-Aziz bore a grudge against Zuhayr b. Qays, who had fought hirn when
his father Marwan b al-I:Iakam had sent hirn in the direction of Aila before his
entry into Egypt. "I have always known you, Zuhayr," he told hirn, "as a
wicked and tyrannical man." "Son of Layla," replied Zuhayr, "I did not think
that a man who collected the revelations of God to MuQ.ammad before your
father and mother had even met was capable ofbeing coarse and hard. No, it is
not so! I shall go, but I pray God not to bring me back to you!" Near Derna,
accompanied by only seventy warriors, Zuhayr would fall, with all of his
entourage, as a martyr (p. 79).88
Could it be the case that this Muslim hero of ancient times was not
regarded with much sympathy by our author and his mentors, and was
not glorified by them, on account of his unfriendly relationship with the
Marwanids, which Tradition took pleasure in underlining?
3. - By way of conclusion, it is not impossible, exercising all necessary

prudence to define the attitude ofIbn ~bd al-Hakam [149] or ofhis informants
vis-a-vis certain categories of human beings.
A) As regards the Arab tribes, Quraysh retains in his eyes a natural primacy.
He hirnself be ars in his name the ethnic qualification of "Qurashi", although
this is only through right of clienthood. His central hero, 'Uqba b. Näfi'
al-FihrI, is Qurayshite, and how indignant is he to see the latter deprived ofthe
governorship of IfrIqiya to have named in his place a "slave ('abd) of the
An:;;ar", in fact already a "freedman (mawla)" (p. 65).89
The preference attributed to Qurayshites for senior positions of this kind
is also underlined in a saying of the Umayyad caliph Yazld b. ~bd al-Malik:
87 Are there not grounds for suspicion in the very name of this individual? It is strange
that "Rock, son ofBoulder" is described as a "coarse and hard man", from a tribe whose
name is also from a root signifying "hard".
88 Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam adds that, in his time, the location of their tombs was known.
AI-Balädhuri specifies, p. 229/360, that they are called "the Tombs ofthe Martyrs" (Qubür
al-Shuhada'). This is an example of those toponyms or geographie al names of which the
historicalor pseudo-historical explanation is to be found in ac counts of the Conquest; of
this type, we have in the work ofIbn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, for Barbary: Bi'r al-Kahina, Ma' Faras,
Nahr al-Bala', Qal'at Busr, Qu;;ür I;Iassan (pp. 61, 73, 75, 85).
89 In reference to the slave or freedman, governor of the province, there is an episode
that should be noted, recorded by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam (p. 81): a slave called Talid - a
characteristic name! - being governor of the Pentapolis under the Umayyads, the people
were chagrined at having for imam a person of servile status: once freed, he could continue
as head ofthe province. There is here, evidently, another thesis ofjiqh.
but he re the consideration ofreligious merits already appears: a Qurayshite,90

known furthermore as a traditionist, a good soldier and seafarer, having been
dismissed, the caliph has to confirm the nomination of a descendant of the
An~ar, virtuous and versed in the religious sciences, himself a pioneer of
the holy war at sea (pp. 111-113).
B) In reference to the Tunisian expedition of 'Abd Allah b. Sa'd, our author
names only three tribes, who would have supplied, out of a total of twenty
thousand men, contingents regarded as important: six hundred for one of
them, seven hundred for each of the other two. These are the Mahra, and two
factions of the Azd: the Ghanth and the Mayda'an (p. 41). It is curious that
these names, as A. Gateau asserts (note 30) do not recur in the list supplied by
Abu l-'Arab on the authority of al-Waqidl. 91 There is aremark here which has
not yet [150] been made but which should be: the eight tribes cited by Abu
l-'Arab were indigenous to northern Arabia, while the Mahra and the Azd
were Arabs from the South.
Abu I-Arab was a Tamimite: he would not be indined to extol the
hereditary enemies of the Tamim. Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam or one of his teachers
would have been drawn, on the other hand, to glorify the Arabs of the South.
The informant ci ted for the Tradition in question, Ibn LahI'a, had been a
pupil of the traditionist YazId b. AbI I:IabIb, dient of the Azd;92 should we be
looking in this direction? Or could there have been broader politico-religious
reasons? Previously, our author had reported another statement, following
the lead ofthe same Ibn Lahi'a: "The Mahra kill and are not killed".93 Further
on, he was perhaps to show a little more goodwill towards the Kalbites than
towards the Qaysites, their rivals of northern origin;94 but the touch is barely
perceptible, and nothing definitive should be deduced from it.
C) A Yemenite tribe ofthe South, the MadhQ-ij, receives honourable mention
following the ac count of the death of Zuhayr b. Qays. It is a member of this
tribe who avenges the hero, hurling himselfwith seven hundred comrades-in-
arms against the Byzantines and put them to flight (p. 81).
Other historians do not have this feature. Why was Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam
intent on recounting this exploit by a member of the MadhQ-ij? He himself had
90 He was ealled al-MughIra b. AbI Burda; see, on hirn, a notiee by Ben Cheneb, ap. eit.,
p. 68, n. 1.
91 Abul-'Arab, ap. eit. pp. 14/46-7. The tribes that he narnes are the following: Muzayna, B.
Dhu'ayl, :Qarnra, Ghifär, 'Abd Manät, Ghatafän, Fazära, Murr.

92 Ben Cheneb, ap. eit., p. 5, n. 3 and p. 6, n. 1.
93 Torrey edition, pp. 76-7.
94 For exarnple, pp. 113-119. See [urther, pp. 125 and 137, the di[[erenee in eharaeter
between two governors of IfrIqiya, the Qaysite Kulthurn and the Kalbite l;Ianzala.
collected, this time still relying on Ibn Lahi'a, the following 1;Ladith of the
Prophet, which was current in his Mälikite Egyptian milieu: "The majority of
tribes, in Paradise, will be MadhQij".95 This flattering reputation could be the
real motive for attributing [151] to one of the MadhQij an act of courage
making amends for the death of a martyr. 96
D) A word, finaIly, on the Berbers and Arabs in general. Our author is

somewhat severe towards the former. Without doubt he recognises their
valour, and sometimes their talent for war, in spite of their rudimentary
equipment and armament (p. 125, quite remarkable in this context); they are
above all very good infantrymen: their chief, Kusayla, tough and stubborn, is
by no means belittled in his account, and the portrait that he paints of the
famous Kähina is not without grandeur (p. 75). An epic convention perhaps:
homage to the vanquished as weIl as to the military virtue oftheir conquerors.
Man ofreligion that he is, he insists in general that the subjugated Berbers
should be treated no worse than Islam requires. But he cannot ignore their
obstinacy in the struggle against the faithful, nor their incessant heresies
from the time of their mass conversion. He knows their coarseness, their
uncouthness: in the conquest of Spain, where they distinguish themselves by
their gallantry in the ranks of the Muslim army, they are also noted for their
savagery in the business of pillage: "When they happened to discover carpets
inlaid with gold thread, being unable to carry them off, they cut them into two
with an axe" (p. 95). And Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam did not omit, towards the end of
his book, to reproduce one ofthose anti-Berber 1;Ladith-s which for a long time
was current across Islam: "Of the seventy turpitudes, the Berbers have
sixty-nine of them, the jinns and the human race only one."97
[152] E) As for the Arabs and for their prestige, we re-read, in the epic
of 'Uqba b. Näfi', the account of his triumphant campaign in southern
95 Torrey edition, p. 126. See also Ibn Wahb, al-Jami', ed. David-Weill, Cairo 1939-41, I, 1,
and 11, 1. The majority of the Madhl,lij had been partisans of 'All against Mu'äwiya;
Lammens, in Melanges de la Faculte Orientale, 1907, p. 10, n. 8.
9B It is probably in the same order of ideas that the explanation would be found for another
episode: that ofthe man ofthe Banu Mudlij who, accompanied by seven comrades-in-arms,
with a cry of "Allahu akbar", brought about the fall of Tripoli (pp. 33-5). No doubt it is
not unintentionally than Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam underlines the Medinan quality (min ahli
l-Madina) of an individual who reminds the caliph ofDamascus, ab out to disregard it, ofthe
Qur'änic rule of the fifth to be levied on the booty (p. 101). Medina is favoured by people
adhering to the tradition ofthe Prophet and by thefuqaha' ofthe school ofMälik.
97 Torrey edition, p. 287. The Berbers themselves, Islamised and domiciled in cities, were
for a long time ashamed of their origins: see W. Marcais, in Annales Institut Etudes
Orientales d'Alger, vol. IV, p. 16. It was only later, in reaction, that a start was made in
writing ofthe "glorious titles" (mafakhir) ofthe Berbers.
Tripolitania. On three occasions he is seen overpowering a chieftain and

humiliating hirn physically; in the first case, and in the third, he even mutilates
the vanquished, either the ear or the finger; and when the victim complains
over this apparently unjustified treatment, he replies each time: "This will
serve you as a lesson and remove from you the desire to make war upon the
Arabs" (pp. 57-9). Is it the ancient Bedouin and Arab pride that is resurgent
here, in barbarous and hardly Muslim actions, accredited to the most Muslim
of the heroes of the Conquest, for the greater glory of the conquerors and the
exaltation oftheir epic?
Summary and Conclusions

There are, in the part of Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam's book which deals with the
Conquest of North Africa - and something of an excursus into Spain - a
certain number of passages where the precise significance can only be
penetrated with the aid of fiqh. They are fully explained only through
consideration of judicio-religious problems, which are themselves without
any doubt, all too often, not so much the outcome of a given historical
situation, but the raison d'etre or the point of departure ofthis or that account.
Thus, the 1;tadith is not only an exterior form, it also affects the content:
Tradition is simultaneously judicial and historical (or pseudo-historical), like
many of its congenerics in classical collections of 1;tadith-s. The narration,
more fictive than true, suspect at the very least, is only there to support with
memorable examples, destined to constitute authority - almost jurisprudential
authority we could say - certain solutions ofjiqh.
In respect of individuals and groups, the actions and the attitudes which
our author attributes to them, it is also appropriate to allocate a major role
to legend and to prejudices. And he re furthermore the religious motif
intervenes. Or, to express it more accurately, it is [153] in the politico-religious
conceptions of a determinate milieu that we should search for the key to
more than one adventure, to more than one adulatory or disapproving trait.
This milieu is essentially that of the traditionists andfuqahä' of Egypt, of the
time or of the school of Mälik, in the second half of the Eighth Century and
throughout the following century. They are the ones who laid on the shoulders
of individuals of the earliest times of Islam, involved with the great events of
the Conquest, the burden of the legal solutions which they championed.
What is, in these circumstances, the personal responsibility of Ibn 'Abd
al-I:Iakam ?
First of aIl, and this is undeniable, he was himself interested in the

"science ofTraditions", outside history as weIl as in relation to his subject, and
he paid particular attention to certain problems ofjiqh. This is proved by the
1;Ladith-s which he has assembled at the end of his book, the Traditions which
he presents he re and there on questions relating to Prayer, and the numerous
pages which he devotes, in regard to Egypt, to recounting all the Traditions
concerning the origins of its territorial and fiscal status in Islam. Many of the
1;Ladith-s which we have noted in his account of the Conquest recur in his
final collection. In the whole course of his work, he does not separate - or he
separates badly - history, not only from the 1;Ladith genre, but also from the
question ofjiqh. 98
As for the basics, it is beyond doubt that he received from others, from his
traditionist masters whom he cites in each instance, the greater part of the
materials, elaborated by them or before them, which he presents to uso His
personal intervention is exerted almost exdusively on the arrangement
and on the choice; but this is certainly not always without personal reason
or without consequence: in general terms, he seems to dass himself as a
moderate.
It is, evidently, impossible for us to specify, in different cases, the primary
source, the probable author of this [154] or that Tradition: there have also
been, most often, successive corruptions, adaptations and variations, partial
mitigations or embellishments. However there are, in the lists of transmitters
supplied by Ibn 'Abd al-I:Iakam, at least two names which should, in all
probability, be given star-billing: Ibn Lahi'a and al-Layth b. Sa'd, two
Egyptians, deceased respectively in 790 and 791, precise contemporaries of
Mälik.
These are, at a distance of two generations, the two most significant
and frequent sources of our author. Of the first, Ibn Lahi'a, his biographies
tell us: "Traditionist of disputed worth ... major collector of more or less
authentic stories ... he seems to have passed on a great number of rejectable
traditions".99 The second, al-Layth, who passes for a traditionist more worthy
of confidence, left the I:Ianafite school to attempt to found a school of his own;
he was certainly at the court ofBaghdad and in Fustat, and he was the teacher
of Ibrähim b. al-Aghlab, founder of the Aghlabid dynasty of Kairouan;100
98 A. Gateau notes (p. 13) that none of the works of his brother Mul)ammad, a jurist of
repute, deals with the Muslim conquests, and he adds: "It is natural that he would not
trespass on his brother's domain." It cannot be said that 'Abd al-Ral)man returned the
compliment and refrained from touching law.
99 See, on hirn, a notice by Ben Cheneb, ap. eit., p. 5, n. 3.
100 Ibn 'Idharl, Bayan, I, 112.
he wrote a "Book of History" (Kitäb al-Ta'rikh) which is today 10st. lOl Was
this historian-jurist, in some respects a riyal to Mälik with whom he was
nevertheless in elose contact, not responsible, with Ibn Lahi'a, in spite of his
better reputation, for a certain number ofhistorical traditions ofvery dubious
authenticity?
A number oftheir disciples and the elose entourage ofIbn ~bd al-I:Iakam
were more resolutely Mälikite in the face of nascent Shäfi'ism,102 but this was
the Mälikism ofthe first scholars ofthe rite which was not at an intransigent.
Doctrine [155] was not yet as firmly fixed as it was to be after the composition
of the Mudawwana; the diversity of editions of the Muwatta' elearly illustrates
this fluidity. Each scholar can diverge, without too much difficulty, on certain
points, from the opinion of the founding imäm. There was no scandal in
sometimes adopting, against the advice ofthe master, the opinion ofanAwzä'i
or of a Layth. It is precisely this position of a still quite eelectic Mälikism which
the text ofIbn ~bd al-I:Iakam seems to represent, in matters ofjiqh. Is it not,
furthermore, because the latter is Mälikite, that he is particularly interested in
the history of Spain and of Barbary?
Have we in this way removed an historical value from his account of
the Conquest (the Conquest as strictly defined, of course)? By giving to this
narrative, on almost every page, an interpretation which renders it suspect,
we have manifestly aggravated the doubt which is legitimised, in addition to
certain contradictions, by the length of time that has elapsed between the
events and their narration. From an these data there remain in the final
analysis, as certain or as simply probable, only the outlines, a summary
sketch in the wake of great events, some proper names, a small number of
date-references: enough to give an overall impression of the fairly slow
process and the difficulties of the Conquest of eastern Barbary (for that of the
West, the matter is very obscure): but we cannot elaim any confidence over the
details.
Perhaps, after an, it would be reasonable to consider as useful historical
documents this anecdote or that remark - inauthentic in their particular form,
but expressing reality in their own way. The celebrated meditation on the
kerne I of the olive, the account of pillages and disputes over the distribution
101 See, on hirn, a notice by Ben Cheneb, ap. cit., p. 23, n. 2; add to this the reference ofthe
preceding note.
102 The brother of our 'Abd al-Ra]:lmän, Mu]:lammad, having assiduously cultivated the
imam al-Shäfi'I, was subsequently, out ofresentment at not being appointed his successor,
to oppose his principal Egyptian disciples, and he would revert to a militant Mälikism. This
is at least the version which was circulating in Shäfi'ite circles, and which al-Subki for
example, collected in his Tabaquat, vol. I, passim. In any case, the Fihrist ofIbn al-Nadlm,
ed. Cairo 1348 H., p. 298, confirms the Shäfi'ism, albeit temporary, ofMu]:lammad.
of booty, the echo of disappointments occasioned by the first maritime

experiments, and a certain number of sparse comments on the Berbers - have
more to say, if removed from their illusory contingence, than the most
meticulous and most precise of accounts.
Algiers, January 1945
(N.B. In the second edition of his translation, 1947-48, A. Gateau has, in

numerous instances, taken note of the above comments.)
15
THE BIRTH OF ISLAM IN THE HOLY LAND
Moshe Sharon
103
The formative period of Islam and Islamic civilisation is probably one of the best-
documented periods in history. Yet, in spite of the tremendous abundance of traditions
relating to every conceivable aspect of the inception and development of early Islam, the
questions concerning the nature and circumstances of the appearance of Islam in history
are becoming more and more fundamental and difficult to answer.
The fact that Islamic history has had to be reconstructed almost solelyon the basis of
Islamic tradition, and the fact that this tradition has been shaped and reshaped and
contaminated by later political rivalries, theological disputes and social tensions, throws
the whole field of Islamic histography open to debate. The attitude of modern historians
of Islam oseillates between complete and almost complete rejection of Islamie tradition as
an inadequate souree for the reconstruction of early Islamic history, as was done by
Crone and Cook in Hagarism,' and full acceptance of the tradition as an authentic
reproduction of Islamic history.
II
For more than a eentury modern orientalism has created the tools needed for the
appropriate evaluation of Islamic tradition, taking into consideration that, in most cases,
this tradition represents the history not as it was, but rather as it should have been,
according to the motives and needs of whoever compiled the tradition. 2
Already in 1916, Snouck Hurgronje, commenting on Paul Casanova's Mohammad et
la Fin du Mond, published in 191 I, summarised the problems facing modern Islamic
historieaI research:
The generations that worked at the biography of the Prophet were too far removed
from his time to have true data or notions; and, moreover, it was not their aim to know
the past as it was, but to construct a picture of it as it ought to have been according to
their opinion. 3
Although Snouck Hurgronje's remarks are concerned mainly with the sTrah, they are
valid for Islamic tradition relating to the inception of Islamic civilisation in general.
The extent of the falsification and invention of tradition was put on record by
Goldziher, who described the methods of invention and the historical circumstances in
which invention took place, as weIl as the motives behind such invention. 4
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Julius Wellhausen laid the foundations for the
critical reading of the historical account along the same principles. He made it clear that
information can be gathered even from doubtful statements. Such statements, he re-
marked, do not necessarily lose their significance, "for invention must have its motive,
and motive is aIl that we require."5
The abundance of material of this nature naturally allows for many interpretations. Far
from wishing to deny the existence of the Prophet or from discarding Islamic tradition
altogether, I wish to offer another interpretation of Islamic historical tradition wh ich
deviates from the classical, gene rally accepted, framework for the birth of Islam. At this
stage, I shall follow Paul Casanova's example, namely to present the theory and leave the
more detailed proofs for other publications. 6
III
The generaIly accepted picture of the birth of Islam follows the lines of Islamic tradition,
in that it accepts the fact that Islam was created in Arabia as a result of Mul,lammad's
activity in Mecca and Madlnah. From the Arabian Centre it went out to conquer the
remnants of the world of antiquity and create a riew Empire and a new civilisation.
The fact that at its inception as a political and religious force Islam experienced
tremendous convulsions in the form of civil wars which led to permanent schisms in it,
has been explained by the assertion that after the death of Mu~ammad the authority of his
successors in Madlnah was chaIlenged by various groups of Muslims. 7
In opposition to the theory of the unified beginning, I believe that Islamic tradition teIls
us a different story. The activity of the Prophet in Arabia, the nature and details of which
we can only guess, brought into existence groups or communities of mu 'minun, believers
first in Arabia and then, after the collapse of both the Sassanians and the Byzantines, also
outside Arabia - notably in Iraq, Syria and Mesopotamia, in addition to the community
in Madlnah and probably also in North and East Arabia. Each one of these communities
had aleader called amTr al-mu 'minTn -literally, the chief of the faithfuls. This is why it is
possible to find few amTrs at the same timeThe group called khawarij had its amTr
al-mu'minTn as weil as the Kufaite community which was led by 'AlT, who came to be
ealled amTr al-mu'minTn par excellence,8 and a group of mu'minum in Yamamah. 9
One of the most important groups of mu 'minun was led by members of the Umayyad
family in Syria, while another, the mu'minun of Madlnah, was led by 'Abdililah b.
226
Zubayr. At this early stage, namely during the first half of the seventh century, the term
Islam did not yet denote a common defined faith for these mu'minun communities. They
derived their initial monotheistic inspiration from the Prophet (or perhaps from more
than one Prophet), but under the influence of the lewish, Christian and c1assical environ-
ments they developed along separate lines.
IV
The most important development took place in Syria. Following the tradition of the Arab
rulers ofthe Syrian desert, the Ghassanides, the first Umayyad leaders, obtained - most
probably from the Byzantine emperor - the title of Phylarch or malik, in addition to
being the chiefs of the faithfuls, amTr a!-mu 'minTn. 1O
The later, unified Islamic traditions, which on the whole assumed an anti-Umayyad
character, stressed the fact that the Umayyads were mu!uk. The term malik in these
traditions has a negative connotation: the aim of the enemies of the Umayyad was to
show that the Umayyads should not be regarded as legitimate khu!afo', or caliphs -
substitutes to the Prophet - but rather as temporal "kings". In reality, however, the
traditions preserved an accurate historical message. The title malik was the tradition al
title of the Ghassanid Arab kings of Syria, who are known in Arab legend as mu!uk
ash-sham. 11 At least one ofthese kings, al-I:Järith V, obtained from the Byzantine emperor
lustinian in 529 the titles ofpatricius and Phylarch. 12 The Umayyads, who had established
themselves in Syria long before the date suggested by tradition for the appearance of
Islam, emerged eventually as the heirs to the Ghassanid authority as wen as to the
Ghassanid title. There are also grounds for assuming that the Umayyads forged positive
relations with the Byzantine mlers in Syria and probably even with the emperor in
Constantinople. The story about the meeting between Abu Sufyan and the Byzantine
emperor Heraclius around the year 628, although of a legendary-polemic nature, could
not have been invented without some factual basis. It would have been difficult to
describe this legendary meeting had Abu Sufyan or any other prominent Umayyad not
indeed met high-ranking Byzantine officials. It should not be surprising, therefore, that
the Umayyads emerged and were accepted as the mu!uk of Syria as weil as the amTrs,
leaders of the faithfuls, mu'minun. 13 It is the term khaiifah which is of no meaning or
relevance in this period prior to the creation of the unified and standardised Islamic
historical tradition. The first known Umayyad leader of the mu 'minun in Syria was
Mu'awiyah, although there are indications that his brother Yazld must have preceded
hirn.
The appearance of the Umayyads as the leaders of the mu 'minun and the "kings" of the
Syrian Arabs constitutes an internal contradiction within the standard Islamic history. On
the one hand, the majority of the Umayyads have been presented as bad Muslims and
usurpers, but on the other hand the first two known Umayyad ruiers of Syria were
"nominated" by no less than 'Umar, the second Caliph in the standard Islamic heilige
Geschichte.
It is c1ear that in the history of the unified beginning of Islam, the existence of
227
Umayyad rule in Syria could not have been ignored. The only way to incorporate it into
the ideal, centrally controlled Islamic state, carefully and conveniently arranged by the
later Muslim historians, was by having the Umayyad rulers of Syria "installed" in their
positions by the second and third Caliphs of the standard unified beginning. In reality,
however, we must treat the U mayyads in Syria as an independent phenomenon in the
long process of the creation of Islam.
Mu'awiyah crowned hirnself as a malik in Jerusalem. An act of this kind, if the
tradition is true, would have been meaningful for both the Christian Arabs of Syria and
the mu 'miniin community, without really challenging the supreme Byzantine authority,
which, as we have pointed out, bestowed similar titles on some of the great Arab leaders. 10
It is difficult to ascertain exactly wh at Mu'awiyah's iman or faith was. Even if one takes
into consideration the fact that the later anti-Umayyad traditions made an effort to
blemish hirn and his son, it is elear that his relations with Christianity were very elose. He
relied in his rule on the Arab tribe of Kalb that was, on the whole, Christian, and
consolidated his alliance with this tribe by marrying the Christi an daughter of one of its
leaders, who bore hirn a son, Yazld, whom he chose to be his heir. A prince who had
grown up among both Christian and mu'miniin communities was the natural choice to
lead the Christian Arabs of Syria as weil as the mu 'miniin community there.
The faith of these early Umayyad amTrs of the faithfuls far from resembled the Islam
which evolved later. Around the eore of the mu 'miniin community was a large eontingent
of Christian Arabs, lews and Samaritans with a very sophistieated seriptural tradition
based upon the names of biblieal prophets, kings and saints. This scriptural tradition, in
addition to being recorded and popular, was supported by the holy places of antiquity.
These impressive holy places were connected with the Christian dogma of salvation as
weH as with the eoncrete message of the lewish prophets, and the lewish historical and
eschatological tradition.
Accepting the historical seniority of the lewish and Christian revelations, the mu 'miniin
of Syria shared with the lews and Christians not only their prophets and saints, but also
their places of worship. Whichever way one looks at it, the fact is that mu 'miniin and
Christians shared the Cathedral of St lohn in Damascus, and in all probability many
other Christian houses of worship tOO. 14
For Mu'awiyah and other early Umayyads, ineluding 'Abd al-Malik, lerusalem was a
holy city in the biblical sense of the word. For the populations of Syria, of all religions,
she was the stage of ancient prophecy and linked in one way or another with such great
names as Abraham, David, Solomon and 1esus of N azareth.
The earliest existing inscriptions, with which we shaH presently deal, attest to the fact
that the mu'miniin in Syria and the official church were locked in a fundamental debate
concerning the nature of lesus. There was nothing new in such a debate: the church itself
had been tom because of it for centuries, and every ecumenical council ca lied to deal with
the problem had only led to the birth of yet another Christian "heresy". In this context,
one can easily understand the involvement of the mu 'miniin in this debate.
lerusalem was important in the context of this debate: the mu'miniin stressed its
connection with the general prophetie side in which lesus was also included, while the
228
Christians emphasised its being the place where the history of salvation began and would
be completed. lt was Jerusalem of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Second
Coming.
This brings us to the enigmatic building of the Dome of the Rock. According to the
much-discussed tradition recorded by Ya'qiibl,'5 'Abd al-Malik is said to have conceived
the idea of diverting the Iiajj from Mecca to Jerusalem, and for this reason he built the
Dome over the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Goldziher accepted the
tradition completely, while Goitein rejected it as a Shl'ite fabrication. 16
In fact, Ya'qiibl's tradition teils us a story in the reverse. The Dome of the Rock, a
unique monument with apparently no real function, is the key to the re-evaluation of the
circumstances surrounding the beginning of Islam. Once we understand the true meaning
of the Dome of the Rock we will have a true picture of the birth of Islam as a unified
religion out of the diversity of the mu 'minun communities.
v
'Abd al-Malik was a mler with great vision and no less ambition. After a long crisis, he
re-established Umayyad mle in Syria with hirnself at the head of the mu'nimun com-
munity, and proceeded to bring under his rule the two other major centres of mu'minun:
Iraq and I:Iijaz. His problems in Syria were more theological than political, for under the
influence of both Christianity and Judaism, the mu'minun community could have easily
lost its independent identity, taking into consideration that the great Arab tribes of Syria
had long ago been converted to Christianity. There was a great need, therefore, to erect
for the Syrian mu 'minun a centre of worship that took into account the attachment to
past holy history and yet emphasised the uniqueness of the new faith. The inscription,
dated 72/691, some 240 metres long in the Dome of the Rock, teils the story.17 The
inscription has three distinct motives: first, the acceptance of all prophets as true prophets
and of their revelations as authentic; second, the absolute rejection of the Sonship of Jesus
and the insistence on his being a human prophet, though with a divine spirit; and third,
for the first time, the presentation of Muhammad as the most important of all prophets
and of Islam as the name of the tme religion. 18 The Dome of the Rock was thus built as
the major sanctuary of Islam and as a symbol of its superiority over the other religions. 19
Islam was born as a term which was to unify all the groups of mu'minun under the slogan
of dTn al-IJaqq, the "tnie religion" with which Muhammad was sent in order to mle over
all the other religions. 20 Islam was also declared the religion of the state, though the state
was not yet unified.
VI
The Dome of the Rock was built mainly for the mu 'minun of Syria, with no relation
whatsoever to the ka'bah in Mecca, for at that time the ka'bah was not in 'Abd al-Malik's
hands, and was not yet part of his reforms. When they did not use the Christian churches
for worship, the muininun of Syria and Egypt {who shared the same religious cultural
229
world) built their own mosques, with the qiblah, the direction of prayer, turned to the
east.
The traditions about east-facing qiblah in the mosque of 'Amr b. al-'Äs in Fustat
cannot be accidental. Yaqut, who wrote early in the thirteenth century, quotint?; earlier
sources, says that "eighty disciples of the Prophet (~ahiibah)" supervised the building of
this mosque. "The qiblah," he says, was "very much turned towards the east" (musharraqah
jidan)". True, the printed text of Yaqut's geographical dictionary says that the qiblah was
only "slightly turned to the east" but, Yaqut's sources, as we shaII presently see, attest to
the correct reading. Yaqut himself or, more probably, one of the copiests of his book
erroneously copied the word qatTtan (slightly) from the foIIowing sentence in his book.
Ibn Duqmaq, on the authority of earlier sources, refers to a similar tradition which also
points out the fact that "eighty of the ~ahabah (the names of few of whom are mentioned)
were present when the qiblah of the mosque was built, and it is said that it was very much
turned to the east, and that Qurrah b. Sharlk, after he had destroyed the mosque at the
time of (caliph) Walid b. 'Abd al-Malik, (he rebuilt it and) turned its qiblah slightly to the
south (tayiiman bihii quatltan) ':
Also Maqrizi, quoting al-Kindi, describes in detail the building of the same qiblah. In
his tradition not eighty ~ahabah attended the building but eight and some say that there
were only four. 'Amr b. al-'Ä~ instructed the builders saying "turn the qiblah to the east
and you will be facing the sanctuary" (sharriqii al-qiblah tu~Tbii al-Ifaram)': The "sanc-
tuary in this tradition, cannot me an the sanctuary of Mecca. Yazld b. Hablb who is
quoted as the source for this account adds that the qiblah was then "built turned very
much towards the east (j"a-shurriqat jiddan) and 'Amr b. al-'Ä~ when he prayed in the
Friday mosque (masjid al-jiiml) used to turn in prayer almost completely towards the east
(yu~allT nii/:liyat ash-sharq ilfii ash-shay' al-yasTr). "
The end of this tradition is, however, of extreme importance for our discussion. An
eyewitness is quoted as saying: "I saw 'Amr b. al-'Ä~ entering a church and he prayed
therein and he did not turn away from their (namely, the Christians') qiblah but very little
(dakhal kanTsahja-sallaflhii wa-Iam yansarif'an quiblatihim iIlii qaITtan)."
The number of t·he ~ahiibah, mentio~ed as present at the building of 'Amr's mosque
alternates in the various traditions between eighty, eight, four and two. The number,
however, is not the important factor, because the ~ahiibah presence was indicated to lend
the traditions about the eastern qiblah a status of high authority.
The fact that 'Amr b. al-'Ä~ is said to have prayed in a church could not be unusual, for
the early mu 'miniin shared the churches with the Christians. The additional note that
'Amr turned a fraction from the Christian qiblah may very well be a later insertion
indicating that 'Amr did not want to look completely like a Christian.
These traditions about the mosque of 'Amr b. al-'As in Fustat with its east-facing
direction of prayer should not surprise uso For the mu 'miniin-in the Christian-dominated
territories mosques could not have been different from the churches that had their apses
facing east. 21
Exciting archaeological proof of the tradition concerning the eastward direction of
prayer in the early mosques of Syria exists not far from Be'er Orah in the Negev. There I
230
- - - - THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE 235
103
FIGURE 17.1 Schematic plan of the mosque in Be'er Orah
231
Medinah
Medinah
Medinah
• Medinah
Medinah
Fus~~ in relation to Mecca
found an open mosque with two mil)rabs, one facing east and one facing south (Figure
17.1). The one facing south was clearly a later addition made after 'Abd al-Malik's
reforms came into effect.. This littie desert mosque symbolises the last stage of our
theory.22
The building of the Dome of the Rock did not provide 'Abd al-Malik with a fully
satisfying ans wer to the problem of how to emphasise the superiority of Islam and turn it
into the religion ofthe unified state. Jemsalem could weil have been an adequate religious
place of worship for the Syrians and the Egyptians, but it meant nothing to the Iraqis, the
Hijazies or the Mesopotamians. A place of worship which would represent the centrality
of Mul)ammad, the Arab nature of the new religion and which would be totally
independent of all other religions, yet connected with the biblical genealogy, had yet to be
found. The choice fell on Mecca and the ka'bah. On the one hand there existed the
ancient tradition connecting the ka'bah, or Mecca in general, with Abraham, and on the
other hand there was no question that the activity of the Prophet had begun there. 'Abd
al-Malik decided to make Mecca into the sanctuary par excellence of the new state
religion that he had begun in Syria, but first he had to conquer it, as it was mied by
232
another amTr al-mu'minTn, 'Abdallah b. Zubayr. Moreover, there was a unique con-
nection between 'Abdallah b. Zubayr, the Prophet and the ka'bah. This connection was
stressed by traditions originating in the Zubayrid family.
The poet al-'Uqayll praises 'Abdallah b. Zubayr as a righteous person who had the
knowledge to interpret the Prophet's words and as a godly man who dweils in the ka'bah
like one of its doves.
The Prophet was so fond of '~bdallah b. Zubayr that he called his beloved wife,
'Ä'ishah, who in reality was 'Abdallah's matern al aunt, "umm 'abdallah'; 'Abdallah's
mother. The special relation of'Abdallah to the ka'bah is further attested by the fact that
he was called '{j 'idh al-bay t, he who finds refuge in the House (namely, the ka'bah). 23
In 693, two years after the building of the Dome of the Rock, Mecca was conquered .
The conquest of Mecca was the final stage in ascertaining the establishment of the unity
of Islam. In the Islamic tradition the event is marked as the time in wh ich the various
mu 'minun communities rallied around 'Abd al-Malik. It is not far-fetched to assume that
'Abd al-Malik's conquest of Mecca, which marks the beginning of Islam's imperial
history, was retrospectively introduced into Mulfammad's sTrah as the major event in the
Prophet's career. In the sTrah, it was the Prophet who conquered Meeea and purified the
ka'bah, with the Umayyad Abu Sufyan playing a major role in the whole affair.
'Abd al Malik ordered the ka'bah to be destroyed and rebuilt aeeording to what was
officially declared to be the Prophet's original plan. Symbolieally it meant that Ibn
Zubayr's sanetuary was not really the Prophet's sanctuary. In the year 76/ 695 'Abd
al-Malik prepared the pilgrimage to Meeca, demonstratively inaugurating the new ka'bah
and giving an offieial publie expression to the elevated position of Mecca.24
The new ka'bah thus represented the culmination of'Abd al-Malik's reforms: a central
independent Arab sanetuary was finally established with the Prophet at its centre, and
now the Bajj could be diverted , also for the Syrians, from Jerusalem to Meeea. Ya'qubl,
either intentionally or beeause in his time the true meaning of 'Abd al-Malik's reforms
was forgotten, inverted the tradition and reported a story whieh made sense to him that
the I:Iajj was diverted from Meeca to Jerusalem. All the mosques were then ordered to
have their former eastward-directed qiblahs changed to face Mecca. This is when OUf little
mosque in the Negev had its southern qiblah added to it. The traditionalists, who could
not envisage the birth of Islam in the Holy Land, could not have known that in the order
of the development of early Islam, Jerusalem preceded Mecca. That they had, however, a
notion of this development is attested by the fact that a tradition was preserved in the
slrah stressing the fact that Jerusalem was the qiblah before Mecca. It is probably here
that we have to look for the roots of the tradition which assure us that at the End of Days
the ka'baiz will be conducted to lerusalem "like the bride condueted to her bridegroom".25
NOTES'
I P. Crone, and M. Cook, Hagarism. Cambridge, 1977.

2 That tradition was invented to suit political, social, religious, eco nomic and other needs was a
well-known fact to Muslim scholars. They even c1assified the motives behind the invention of
233
I;adfth, but they used methods of I;adfth criticism that were almost no use for ascertaining
anything about either the information included in the traditions or their origins. See Abu
al-Faraj, 'Abd ar-Ra~man b. 'All b. al-lawzT, Kitiib al-Mawcfü'iit, ed. 'Abd ar-Ra~man
Mu~ammad 'Uthman, Madinah, 1966, I, pp. 37-47; 'AlT b. Mu~ammad b. 'Araq al-Kinan~
Tanzfh ash-Sharf'ah al-Marfü'ah 'an al-akhbar ash-Shanf'ah al-Mawcfü'ah, ed. 'Abd al-La!lf
eta/., Beirut, 1979, I, p. 13.
3 C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mohammedanism, New York and London, 1916, p. 23.
4 I. Goldziher, Muslim Studies, ed. S.M. Stern, 11, Oxford, 1971, pp. 126f.
5 l. Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall, translated by Wier, 1927, Khayats reprints,
Beirut, 1969, p. 505.
6 For another view of Arab conquest of Syria see M. Sharon, "The military reforms of Abu
Muslim" in M. Sharon (ed.), Studies in Islamic History and Civilization, lerusalem, 1986, pp.
105-12, and forthcoming"The Umayyads as ahl al-bayt" in lSAI, 1988.
7 The idea that harmony and unity characterised the beginning of Islam was expressed in a
tradition which attributes to one of the Prophet's disciples the following words: "At the time of
the Prophet, may Allah save hirn and give hirn peace, our faces were all turned in one
direction, but after the death ~f the Prophet ... we turned ourselves hither and thither"
Nu'aym b. I;Iammad al-Marwazi, Kitiib al-Fitan, MS BM or 9449 fol6b.
8 Muhammad b. Abu al-Qasim b. 'AlT at-Tabari, Bishiirat al-Mus!afo li-Shi'at al-Murtadii
Naj~f 1383/ 1963, p. 186. . . . .
9 These were the followers of the prophet Musaylimah, who was called amir al-Mu'minin.
There can hardly be a question that the term, describing the leadership of a community of
monotheists, existed before Muhammad and during his time, and the usage of this term by
hirn and by his successors was not a novelty. See Mughul!ay, Az-Zahr al-Basimji Sirat Abi
al-Qasim, Ms. L<:.iden, or 370 fols, 213b-214a, (on the title used by Musaylim~h). A~mad b.
Hajar al-Haytami, a~-$awii'iq al-Muf;riqah, ed. 'Abd al-Wahhilb 'Abd al-La!if, Cairo, 1375,
p. 88 regarding its usage by the Prophet for 'Abdullah b. la~s~ (I wish to thank Professor M.l.
Kister for furnishing me with these important sources.)
10 The fact that Mu'awiyah was called concurrently with the others by the title of amir
al-mu'minfn is attested by the fact that later traditions tried to prove the contrary. See DhahbT,
Siyar A'l~m an-Nubalii, ed. Munajjid, Cairo, n.d. I, p. 82; 'Abd ar-Razzaq, Mu.<;annaj. ed.
al-A'~ami, Beirut 1392/ 197~ X, p. 371, where Mu'awiyah reportedly says: "You are the
mu'miniin and I am your ami,:
II Y a'qubl, Ta'rfkh, Beirut, 1379/1960, I, pp. 206-7.
12 M. Sharon, "The cities of Palestine under the Islamic rule" Cathedra, 40, lerusalem, 1986,
p. 99 (Hebrew) and note; C. Brockelmann, History ofthe Islamic Peoples, London, 1956, p. 7.
13 Abu Faraj al-I~bahani, Kitiib al-Aghiinf. Biilaq, 1284-1285, rep. Beirut, 1390/1970, VI, pp.
94-5. It is clear that the aim of the tradition is to prove that Mu~ammad's Prophethood was
foretold by the Christians and recognised by no less than the Emperor Heraclius hirnself, who
symbolises, in this type oftradition, Christendom as weIl as Christianity.
14 See BaladhurT, Futül; al-Büldan, ed. M.l. Oe Goeje, Leiden, pp. 125.,-6-. cf. G. Le Strange,
Palestine under the Moslems, London, 1890, p. 231.
15 Ya'qubi, op. cit. ll, p. 261.
16 I. Goldziher, op. cit. pp. 44-5 and n.l in p. 45; S.O. Goitein, "The historical background ofthe
erection ofthe Dome ofthe Rock", Journal ofthe American Oriental Society, LXX, 1950, pp.
234
104- 8; and the extensive study ofO. Grabar "The Umayyad Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem",
Ars Orientalis, 111, 1959, pp. 33ff.
17 The long inscription above the arches of the inner arcade (on both sides) is supplemented by
two inscriptions on copper plates on the northern and eastern gates of the Dome (removed in
1973 and never returned to their places). Published by M. Van Berchem, Materiaux pour un
Corpus Inscriplionum Arabicarum, Jerusalem, ljaram (Il B2), Le Caire,1927, nos. 215, 216,
217, pp. 228-55; E. Combe, J . Sauvaget and G. Wiet, Repertoire Chronologique d'Epigraphie
arahe, Cairo 1931 ... nos. 9- 11)_
18 The verses Qur'an, 3: 18-19 were carefully, and entirely, quoted at the end ofthe inner face of
the inseription.
19 CL Grabar, op. eit., p. 44a.
20 Qur'an, 9:33.
21 See Yaqüt, Mu'jam al-Buldän, (ed. Wuestenfeld) Leipzig, 1866-1873, s.V. "Fus~a~": Ibn
Duqmaq, Kilah al-intf~är, I, pp. 62f.; Maqrizi, Khi{a{, Ii, pp. 246-7,249; IBn_Taghri BJrdi
An-Nujum az-Zähirah, Cairo, 1936, pp. 66-7; S. Basheer, Muqaddimah ji at-Ta'rikh
Al-A-khar, Jerusalem, 1984, p. 60. See also Kindi, Wulät, p. 13, where it is stated that 'Amr's
qiblah faced Ya~müm, a mountain range to the east of Fus!a!. The mosque of 'Amr b. al-'Ä~
in Cairo was not turned directly to the east but towards the winter sun rising point in the
northern hemisphere, namely in 117°. See G. Hawkins and D. King, in J.H.A ., XlII, (1982),
pp. 102-9; D. King, Muqarnas, 2, (1984) pp. 73-84. Thanks are due to Dr A. Elad and U.
Avner from the Hebrew University for drawing my attention to many of these referenees.
22 B. Rothenberg, Timna, Valley oJ/he Biblical Copper Mines, London, 1972, p. 221 and Figure
71. For Beno Rothenberg who was the first to describe the structure near Be'er Orah, the
mosque was an enigma. The archaeologist Uzzi Avner, who drew my attention to the mosque,
reported large quantities of Umayyad pottery in the place. The structure is far more complete
than what appears in Rothenberg's d.!:awing.
23 See. Mu~'ab b. 'Abdallah az-Zubayri, Nasab Quraysh, ed. E. Levi-Provan"al, Cairo, 1953, pp.
237-9, Baladhuri, Ansäb al-Ashräf, IVB, ed. M. Schoessinger, Jerusalem, 1938, pp. 17 (I. 6),
19 ( I. 15), 21( I. 21: where 'Abdallah b. Zubayr reportedly says: "I am only a dove among the
doves of this sanctuary'), 25 (l. 11), 27 (I. 9), 29 (I. 4), 52 (I. 21), 54 (I. 8); V, ed. S.D. Goitein,
Jerusalem, 1936, p. 363 (I. 12). 'Abdallah b. az-Zubayr's supporters were referred to as ahl
al-masjid (Dinawari, al-Akhbär a{- [twäl, ed. 'Abd al-Mun'im 'Ämir and Jamäl ad-Din
ash-Shayyal, Cairo, 1960, pp. 266 (I. 1), 314 (1.9).
24 See Baladhuri, Ansäb al-AshriiJ XI, = Anonyme arahische Chronik, ed. W. Ahlwardt,
Griefswald, 1883, p. l77f. Aghänf. IV, p. 52. One tradition in the Aghänfleaves no doubt as to
the importance of the year 73/693. This is not only "the year of unity" but also the year in
which the Caliphate of'Abd al-Malik only begins: "when 'Abd al-Malik assumed his functions
ascaliph in t~e Yearofthe Unity."lbid. p. 102.
25 See AI-Wasiti, Facjä'il al-Bayt al-Muqaddas, ed. I. l:'asson, J erusalem, 1979. English transla-
tion of some of the most relevant traditions for our discussion in I. Hasson, "Muslim literature
in praise of Jerusalem", The Jerusalem Cathedre, Jerusalem, 1981, pp. 177-83.
235
16
I~FAHAN-NIHAwAND. A SOURCE-CRITICAL STUDY
OF EARLY ISLAMIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
Albrecht Noth
There are two accounts of the Muslims' fight for the Persian city of I~fahan in
Tabarl's Tärikh al-rusül wa-l-mulük, accounts which, although they stand side
by side, differ considerably.1 It is the second of these accounts that shall be
the subject of the present detailed study, not because it is a particularly good
source for the conquest of this Persian city, but because it enables us to make
several important observations on the subject of early Islamic historiography.
The account is also transmitted, with unimportant variations or more or
less abridged, by Abu YUSUf,2 Baladhurj} Mas'udl,4 Abu Nu'aym 5 and Ibn
al-Athlr,6 and it consequently received wide dissemination. It is possible to
determine the time of its origin fairly exactly. As it is already found in Abu
Yusuf (d. 182/798), it most definitely belongs in the second half of the eighth
century. Its isnad allows us to delimit the date even more closely. The first
common link in the various versions of the isnad 7 is the Ba~ran traditionist
I:Iammad b. Salama (d. 167/784).8 It is most probably this I:Iammad - and
definitely not the eye witness of events standing at the end of the isnad 9 -
whom [275] we have to claim as the originator or disseminator of the I~fahan
1 The first account: al-Tabarl, Ta'rikh al-rusul wa l-muluk ed, de Goeje (Leiden,
1879-1901), I/2637, 14-2640, 12 (henceforth cited as 'Tab'); the second account: Tab. I/2641,
17-2645,4 (under A.H. 21).
2 Kitäb al-kharäj, ed. Bulak (1302 AH) p.18f.
3 FutuQ, al-buldän, ed. de Goeje (Leiden 1866) p.303f.
4 Muruj al-dhahab, ed. Barbier de Meynard (Paris 1865) IV, 230ff.
5 Dhikr akhbär I?bahän, ed. S. Dedering (Leiden 1931 ff.) I, 21ff.

6 Al-Kämilji l-ta'rikh, ed. Tornberg (Leiden 1866 ff.) III, 14.
7 Complete isnäds in Tabarl, Balädhurl and Abu Nu'aym.
8 Despite the extensive biographical information about hirn (cf. Flügel, Fihrist II (Leipzig
1872) p.95 and 99 (= notes on I, p.219, 10 and 227, 4) and Ziriqll, Al-a'läm. Qämiis taräjim
li-ashhar al-rijäl wa-l-nisä' ... (2nd ed. Cairo 1954ff.) II, p. 302b and n.l), he, like many ofhis
contemporaries, remains a completely shadowy character.
9 Ma'qil b. Yasär. Concerning the lack of reliability of similarly 'beautiful' eyewitness
isnäds (the corresponding isnäd in ]:ladlth and law would be one with the Prophet as the last
link) cf. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford 1950), p.163ff. and
passim.
2 Albrecht Noth
tradition. IO The account in its present form would consequently have been
created around 750, more than a hundred years after the actual events.
Let us now turn to the content of this account of a conquest. It starts with
the Caliph 'Umar asking the former Persian general Hurmuzan,ll who was
then in Medina, whether Fars, Adharbayjan or I~fahan would recommend
itself as the target with the greatest priority for the conquering Muslim armies.
The Persian couches his answer in an image: Fars and Adharbayjan are the
two wings of the Persian Empire, I~fahan its head. If one of the wings were
removed, the 'Persian bird' could still keep itself alive, but ifthe head were cut
off, the wings would be useless as weIl: I~fahan, the head, would be the obvious
choice as the target. 'Umar then goes to the mosque where he finds al-Nu'man
b. Muqarrin (al-Muzanl) in prayer, and when he has finished, 'Um ar teIls hirn
he intends to appoint hirn 'ämil. Nu'man's reaction is, 'With a tax collector's
duties (jäbiyan)? Never, only with the powers of a warrior (ghäziyan)!'
Whereupon 'Umar sends hirn as general to I~fahan, ordering the Kufans to
join hirn as auxiliaries. When he reaches his destination, Nu'man sends
Mughlra b. Shu'ba as his messenger to the commander in chief of the Persian
army (whose title is Dhil-l-1;Läjibayn). On the advice of his entourage, the
Persian presents hirnself to the Muslim decked out in all the splendour at his
disposal. The Muslim, however, is not at all impressed and, in order to teach
the Persians amazement (li yatatayyaril), proceeds to belabour their precious
rugs with his spear. In the following conversation between the Arab and the
Persian, the latter indicates to his interlocutor that the Arabs only left their
country because of unbearable famine, and that he would be only too happy
to help them out with food, if they withdraw again. Mughira freely admits
the miserable conditions of the ma'äshir al-'arab; he makes them sound even
more terrible. However, he continues, the Arabs' misery has ended with the
Prophet's mission, for he has promised the Arabs victory over the Persians
and acquisition of their wealth, and now they have co me [276] to get what
he has promised them. Then he once again tries to amaze the Persians by
suddenly sitting down next to the general on the latter's throne. After they
have removed hirn none too gently he points out to the Persians that this is
hardly the accepted way of treating an emissary; certainly not among the
Arabs. In conclusion the Persian general asks Mughlra whether the Muslims
10 Concerning the importance of the first common link in different vers ions of an isnad in
dating traditions, see Schacht, Origins (cf. n.9), p.17lff. - Concerning I:Iammad as the
probable author of the ac count cf. also Baladhurl, Futul)" p. 305, 9f., where the account is
called 'I),adith Ifammad b. Salama', although I:Iammad is neither the first nor the last link in
the chain of transmitters.
11 Cf. EI II co1.359a, s.v.
Ifjfahan-Nihawand 3
would cross over to them or whether they should cross over to the Muslims
(for the battle), and Mughira announces that the Muslims will cross over to the
Persians. Now they prepare for battle. The Persians, chained together in tens,
fives, or threes (to prevent them from fleeing), begin the attack. Nu'man is
still hesitating, and when Mughira tries to press hirn to attack, he reminds
the latter of the Prophet's custom to begin an attack only after sunset, when
the evening breeze springs up. He gives so me tactical orders in a speech to the
army: he would shake his standard (liwii') three times, and du ring the first and
second times the warriors must prepare themselves and at the third time,
attack. He then asks God to grant hirn martyrdom (shahiida), and the Muslims,
victory. After his speech the battle starts, as intended at the third shaking
of the standard, and Nu'man is the first to fall. However, the Muslims are
victorious after the Persian general dies as weIl; falling off his mule he slashes
his body. After the battle, Ma'qil b. Yasar (he now talks in the first person, as
the isnad introduced hirn as the eye witness and narrator of events) takes
care of the dying Nu'man, who asks who won the battle. Ma'qil teIls hirn of
the Muslim victory, and Nu'man asks hirn to write to 'Umar of the victory.
Now that Nu'man is no longer the Muslim general, the warriors rally round
al-Ash'ath b. Qays; some famous ones among them are named. The conclusion
ofthe account is the narrative ofhow they approached Nu'man's umm walad
(the mother ofhis son) asking whether her husband had not left her anything,
whereupon she produces a casket containing a letter. In it Nu'man has
ordered his succession: if he should die in battle, someone (juliin) should
replace hirn, and if this someone should die, another one.
Two things are very noticeable even after only cursory reading of this
account: firstly, that it is composed of several images, or narrative motifs: the
breaks in the transitions from one scene to the next are tangibleY Secondly,
that this text does not really [277] contain anything that could be seen as
typical of the battle for I~fahan. If I~fahan had not been mentioned in the
discussion between 'Umar and Hurmuzan,13 the account could be referring to
any battle the Muslims fought in Persia, or indeed anywhere else. 14
12 Here some examples: p.2642, 5 (the transition between Hurmuzan's advice to
appointing Nu'man), p.2642, 10 (arrival in I:;;fahan and dispatching the messenger), p.2643,
10 (Mughlra's speech and decision to sit on the Persian's throne), p.2643, 14 (Mughlra's
complaint of the bad [277] treatment he is receiving from the Persians and the Persian's
inquiry who should move against whom), p. 2645, 2 (the Muslims rallying under al-Ash'ath
b. Qays and the inquiring from Nu'man's widow as to his estate).
13 Three variants ofthe account (A. Yusuf, BaladhurI and Tabar!), mention a place name a
second time; however, in a different passage in each of the variants, so it is probable that
this was a later explanatory addition
14 There is nothing in the account to indicate that the enemy is Persian.
4 Albrecht Noth
Let us look into this second observation more deeply. Even in the earliest
Islamic historiography a consequence of the vagueness of this account was
that it could be daimed for two military events of the first wave of conquests,
for I~fahan and for Nihawand. While Tabari: and Abu Nu'aym relate it to
I~fahan, Abu Yusuf, Baladhuri: and Mas'udi: consider it to be a description of
the events that took place in Nihawand. 15
This immediately gives rise to the question for which of the two military
events the account was originally conceived. The transmission points towards
its having been linked to Nihawand, as the older transmitters, Abu Yusuf and
Baladhuri, refer it to Nihawand, whereas only the younger transmitters,
Tabari and Abu Nu'aym, refer it to I~fahan. It is of particular importance
here that Abu Yusuf (d. 798) lived very dose in time to the creation of this
account (ca. 750) and might, in fact, have heard it first hand. Another weighty
argument in favour af the original connection of this accaunt with Nihawand
is what we learn about its hero, AI-Nu'man b. Muqarrin. In all the possible
sources - with the exception ofthis I~fahan tradition - Nu'man appears as the
general and martyr of Nihawand;16 according to Muslim tradition, there is
consequently no doubt that he belongs here and not to I~fahan,17 If our
account had indeed been written with reference to I~fahan in the first place,
the author must have been either so ignorant or so brazen that he simply
daimed the hero of the famaus [278] battle far Nihawand for the battle far
I~fahan, which, it must be said, is really unlikely.
Thus it can be regarded as fairly certain that the account was originally
a tradition referring to Nihawand, and it is now necessary to darify why it
was later linked to I~fahan. If we do not want to believe it to be a deliberate
forgery, which remains always possible, a plausible explanation can be found
in the narrative motif of Hurmuzan's bird parable, which introduces our
tradition. The objective ofthe later military expedition is mentioned only here
with certainty.18 There are several versions of this parable, which is obviously
15In the sources quoted not es 1-5.

16I would like to refer to the registers in the relevant historieal works s. v. 'Al-Nu'man b.
Muqarrin'. Cf. also al-I::;bahani, Kitäb al-Aghäni, vo1.14, p.28, 2, where Nu'man is said to be
buried ne ar Nihawand.
17 It is irrelevant whether this is also valid for the historical Nu'man. - It is not possible for
hirn to have taken part in the battles for both I::;fahan and Nihawand, as the battle for
I::;fahan was later than that for Nihawand, where he fell.
18 The seeond referenee to a loeation in three vers ions of the aeeount is probably a later
addition (cf. n. 13).

Ifjfahan-Nihawand 5
an independent narrative motif,18a one of which refers to Nihäwand. 19 In

all prob ability this was found at the beginning of the account and was
later confused or exchanged with the I!?fahän version which either existed
independently or in a different context. After this exchange it became possible,
if not necessary, to link the account of the battle to I!?fahän as weIl. This
explanation finds some support in the fact that even Abu Yusuf, Balädhurl
and Mas'udi, although they know the account as a Nihäwand tradition,20
mention the location I!?fahän in their versions of Hurmuzän's bird parable.
This discrepancy is convincingly explained if we assume an exchange of the
two versions ofthe parable. In any case it makes quite clear that Hurmuzän's
bird parable, was in so me way a decisive factor in the mistaken attribution of
the whole account to the battle for I!?fahän.
However, even if our explanation - that the presence of more than one
version of Hurmuzän's bird parable can be held responsible for the double
use of the account of the battle - is correct, this would have been only the
superficial cause. The deeper reason is to be found in the vagueness of the
account. Just because it was narrated in such vague terms it could be applied
to more [279] than one military expedition, just as a documentary form can be
used for more than one legal trans action. After all, even if the two accounts
had been confused once, this would not have led to transferring one account
onto another military event if it had otherwise contained facts which tied it
unmistakeably to a definite situation during the first wars of conquest; indeed,
an exchange of two versions might not have been possible at all in that case.
Thus as the first result of our study we can set down: the I!?fahän-Nihäwand
tradition, which was probably conceived at first with reference to Nihäwand
and then transferred onto I!?fahän, is an example of early Islamic conquest
traditions that could be applied, like a form, to more than one event because
of their vagueness. This kind of multiple application can be proved for our
account. As there are indications that this was no isolated occurrence, it
will be worth our while to search for similar cases. We will certainly have
to expect - and more frequently than might appear at first - formulaic and
stereotypedjutüQ, traditions. We will be able to gain insight into the workshop
183 In purely formal terms, there is probably a connection between this motif and the folk
motif ofthe 'carving ofthe chicken' found in Oriental folk tales (cf. O. Spies, Orientalische
Stoffe in den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, Beiträge zur Sprach- und
Kulturgeschichte des Orients, Vo1.6 (1952), p.40f.) as well as in European folk tales (cf.
Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde 6, p.59).
19 1'abarl I/2600, 17-2601, 5.
20 In Abu Yusufthis becomes clear from the traditions surrounding our account; similarly
in BaladhurI; Mas'udl ends his version of our account with the words 'wa-hiidhihi waq'at
Nihiiwand'. Sources are at notes. 2-4.
6 Albrecht Noth
of early Islamic traditionists if we now turn our attention to the individual

narrative motifs of our account.
We have already pointed out that the I~fahan-Nihawand tradition is made
up out of a sequence of scenes or narrative motifs which can be separated
easily as they have beenjoined together by no means seamlessly. Let us first of
all list them in order:
1. 'Umar's query and Hurmuzan's advice (the bird parable);21

2. 'Umar and Nu'man in the mosque; Nu'man would rat her be a warrior than
a tax collector; 'Um ar appoints hirn his general;22
3. 'Umar writes to the Kufans to ask them to support Nu'man; Nu'man's
order at the end of the account, to write to the Caliph about the Muslims'
victory is really the second part of this motif;23
4. Mighlra b. Shu'ba as the Muslims' messenger to the Persian general, and
their conversation;24 [280]
5. The question ofwhich party should cross over towards the other (to start
the fighting);25
6. The Persians are chained together in small groups;26
7. Nu'man intends to attack not before nightfall, as is said to have been the
Prophet's custom;27
8. Three shakes of the standard as the signal for the attack;28
9. NU'man's death;29
10. Names offamous warriors in the battle;30
2'Tab. I/2642, 2-6; A. Ylisuf, p.1S, 1Sf.; Balädhurl, p.303, 5-7; Mas'lidl, p.230, 5-9; A.
Nu'aym, p. 21, 6-10.
22 Tab. 2642, 6-9; A. Ylisuf, p.1S, 19-21; Balädhurl, p.303, S-10; Mas'lidl, p.230, 9-231, 2; A.
Nu'aym, p. 21, 10-12.

23 Tab. 2642, 9 and p.2644, 1S; A. Ylisuf, p.1S, 21f. and p.19, 19; Balädhurl, p.303, 10 and
p.304, 4; Mas'lidl, p.231, 3 and p. 235, 5; A. Nu'aym, p. 21,12 (the end is missing).
24 Tab. 2642, 10-2643, 14; A. Ylisuf, p.1S, 23-19, 5; Balädhurl, p.303, 11-13 (much
abbreviated); Mas'lidl , p.231, 4-233, 5; A. Nu'aym, p. 21, 14-22,4.

25 Tab. 2643, 14f.; A. Ylisuf, p.19, 6f.; Mas'lidl , p.233, 5f; A. Nu'aym, p.22, 4f; not in
Balädhurl.
26 Tab. 2644, 1; A. Ylisuf, p.19, 7; Balädhurl, p.303, 13f.; Mas'lidl , p.233, 6f.; A. Nu'aym,
p.22,5f.
27 Tab. 2644,1-5; A. Ylisuf, p.19, 7-11; Balädhurl, p.303, 14-17; Mas'lidl, p.233, 7-234,1; not
inA.Nu'aym.
28 Tab. 2644, 6-S; A. Ylisuf, p.19, 11f. and 15; Balädhurl, p.303, 17-20; Mas'lidl , p.234, 1-4
and 7; not in A. Nu'aym.

29 Tab. 2644, 13-2645, 1; A. Ylisuf, p.19, 15-20; Balädhurl, p.303, 20-304, 4; Mas'lidl, p.234,
7-235,6; A. Nu'aym, p.22, Sf.

30 Tab. 2645, H.; A. Ylisuf, p.1S, 22f. (in a different position within the narrative); A.
Nu'aym, p.21, 12-14; not in Balädhurl and Mas'lidl.

Ifjfahan-Nihawand 7
11. Nu'män' orders his succession. 31
These constituent parts - easily recognisable as such - which make up our

account are not unique to it. Nearly all of them can be found in different
combinations in other Nihäwand stories. In the following we shall list
evidence of the parallel instances:
Adescription of events in Nihäwand which can be traced back to Ibn Isl:täq
and is transmitted in TabarI:l2 contains the following motifs from our account:
a) Nu'män prefers fighting the infidels to being a tax collector (2).33 In this
instance Nu'män is not, however, in Medina but in Kaskar, and the initiative is
his own: he approaches 'Umar with the request to relieve hirn of his position
as tax collector and assign hirn a military task. With the mediation of Sa'd b.
AbI Waqqä~ 'Um ar then sends hirn a written order to betake hirnself to
Nihäwand. b) A list of seven wujüh a?~iib al-nabiy who took part in the fighting
together with Nu'män (10).34 c) Nu'män ordering his succession, giving the
names of three persons (11).35 d) Nu'män wants to attack in the evening, as
recommended by the Prophet (7).36 In this instance this motif is related to the
[281] previous one as Mughira b. Shu'ba, angry at having been overlooked by
Nu'män when ordering his succession, advocates an early morning attack.
e) A tripie signal for the attack, here a tripie takbir (8),37 f) The Persians are
chained together (6).38
AI-RabI' b. Sulaymän is Tabarl's source for another Nihäwand story, which
is alleged to have originated with an eye witness,39 in which we can recognise
the following constituents of our I~fahän-Nihäwand tradition: a) Hurmuzän's
advice (1);40 here Nihäwand is the bird's headY In addition, this version ofthe
story has a second point, aimed at bringing Hurmuzän into discredit: the
Persian advises the Caliph to start his offensive against the bird's wings, but
'U mar is not fooled and draws the correct consequences from the parable and
begins with the 'head' Nihäwand. b) Famous Prophet's Companions are
31 Tab. p.2645, 2-4; Mas'üdi p.235, 7-9; not in the other versions.
32 Tarikh I/2596, 9-2598, 12 (under A.R. 21).
33 Ibid. 2596, 10-15.
34 Ibid. 2597, 5-9.
35 Ibid. 2597, 17-19.
36 Ibid. 2597, 19-2598,4.
37 Ibid. 2598, 4-8.
38 Ibid. 2598, 8.
39 Tarikh I/2600, 16-2605, 11 (under A.R. 21).
40 Ibid. 2600, 17-2601, 5.
41 Cf. 5f above.
8 Albrecht Noth
taking part in the enterprise, three are mentioned by name (10).42 c) Mughira
as the Muslims' messenger to the Persian general;43 more detailed but
substantially the same. d) The question of who will cross over to whom (5).44
e) The Persians chained together (6),45 who are furt her impeded from fleeing
by iron thorns (b,asak aHtadid). f) Following the Prophet's custom, Nu'man
intends to attack in the evening (7).46 As in Ibn IsQ.aq's tradition, this leads
to a disagreement between Nu'man and Mughira, but there is no further
explanation given in this instance. g) Three shakes of the standard as sign
to attack (8).47 h) Nu'man ordering his succession (11).48 He is said to have
designated seven possible successors, three ofwhom are mentioned by name.
i) A written message of victory is sent to 'Umar (3).49
Another tradition, reporting of Nu'man only, is said to have originated
with Abu Wa'il, and Tabari heard it from MuQ.ammad b. 'Ubayd Allah b.
~afwan al-Thaqafi. 50 This also contains the motifthat Nu'man [282] preferred a
fighting assignment to an administrative one (2);51 as in the account by Ibn
IsQ.aq, Nu'man is in Kaskar and asks 'Umar in writing to employ hirn as a
warnor.
Another Nihawand tradition transmitted by Tabari originates with Sayfb.
'Umar,52 is very long and detailed and contains three of the narrative motifs
found in our I;;fahan-Nihawand account: a) Nu'man ordering his succession
(11),53 although in this instance it is 'Umar rather than Nu'man who designates
possible successors; b) Nu'man intends to attack not before evening (7),54 and
in this instance he faces not only Mughira's opposition but that of the whole
army; c) a tripie signal for the attack (8);55 as in Ibn IsQ.aq, this is a tripie takbir.
The same three motifs we find in Sayfb. 'Umar's account are also present
in the Nihawand account in Dinawari,56 which is transmitted without an isnad.
They are the order of the succession (11), as in Sayf's version determined by
42 Op. cit. 2601, 7-10.

43 Ibid. 2601, 12-2603, 3.
44 Ibid. 2603, 3-5.
45 Ibid. 2603, 5-8.
46 Ibid. 2603, 8-15.
47 Ibid. 2603, 18-2604, 1.

4H Ibid. 2604, 6-8.
49 Ibid. 2605, 4f.
50 Tärikh I/2615, 1-11 (und er A.R. 21).
51 Ibid. 2615, 4-7.
52 Tärfkh I/2605, 11-2611, 12 and (continued) 2615, 13-2631,7.
53 Ibid. 2615, 17-19.
54 Ibid. 2622, 3-13.
55 Ibid. 2624, 6-9.
56 Kitäb al-akhbär al-tiwäl, ed. 1. Kratchkovsky (Leiden 1912), p.141, 7-146, 14.
Ifjfahan-Nihawand 9
'Umar,57 Nu'man's resolution not to attack before evening (7)58 and the tripIe
shaking of the standard as the sign for the attack (8).59 Lastly, a tradition
about Nihawand recorded by Abu Nu'aym 60 contains the motif of Nu'man's
succession (decided by 'Umar) (11)61 and that of the tripIe shaking of the
standard as the sign for the attack (8).62
The main aim of this detailed evidence of the parallel instances of the
individual passages of our I:;;fahan-Nihawand account in other Nihawand
traditions is not to show that the motifs can be found elsewhere, but to clarify
how they are presented in the other instances. It is possible to state that,
firstly, the individual motifs do not always appear all together in the various
accounts, secondly, they do not always appear in the same order and, thirdly,
they do not always appear in the same combinations. These findings lead
us to assume that the individual motifs were originally independent and
transmitted on their own; an assumption which is further supported by the
observation that the different narrative motifs can still be recognised as
individual units within the longer accounts. [283] However, we cannot rule out
the possibility that the various motifs were originally extracted from one or
more longer traditions and then, in their isolated form, reused in different
passages. Even ifthis were the case, however, it would not change the fact that
at the stage with which we are concerned the individual motifs have their
own individual existence and can be used in different combinations as the
components for more detailed accounts.
As the second result of our study we can thus set down that the material we
can expect in the traditions of early Islamic historiography is not exclusively
made up out of large, self-contained complexes of historical information.
Historiographers and transmitters also used individual narrative motifs
which they combined in different ways, like the pieces of a mosaic, to create
longer accounts.
As the individual components of our account have paralleIs in other
Nihawand histories, one might be inclined to assume that they were part of
a store of traditions which originated with the famous battle of Nihawand,
i.e. that they reflected actual events of that battle - in whatever form. This,
however, is not the case, surprising as it may seem. The larger part of them
is also found in reports - usually futü1;t traditions - which have no factual
57Ibid. 143,2-6.
58Ibid. 144, 7-9.
59Ibid. 144,9-12.
60 Dhikr akhbär I$bahän, edition quoted, p.19, 5-20, 24.
61 Ibid. p.20, 10.
62 Ibid. p.20, 19-21.

10 Albrecht Noth
connection with Nihäwand at all. To begin with we will list parallel instances
of this kind, albeit without any claim to completeness, arranged according to
the order in which the narrative motifs from the I:;;fahän-Nihäwand account
appear.
1. Hurmuzän's bird parable
We have already mentioned that there are two versions of this parable, one
for I:;;fahän and one for Nihäwand. 63 It would be difficult to determine which
of them is the original. There is, however, a third version of the parable,
transmitted by Bukhärl in his $a~{tL64 It is much more general than the other
two and, as it also mentions the bird's feet, probably of later origin. This
does not, however, mean that its principal content is necessarily younger
than that of the other versions. In BukhärI's version Hurmuzän has the bird's
head represent the Persian King (Kisrä) and its two wings the Byzantine [284]
Emperor (Qaisar) and Persia (Färis), respectively; he advises to attack the
Persian King. 65
2. Nu'män's appointment as general

I have not so far found a parallel to Nu'män's attitude that fighting is better
than collecting taxes. The tendency behind this - hardly true - story will be
discussed below. 66
3. Correspondence between 'Umar and the warriors at Nihäwand

The motif that the Caliph was in uninterrupted correspondence with the
conquering Muslim armies is found so frequently in the literature about the
conquests that it is really superfluous to adduce individual instances. Let it
suffice to quote a few paralleIs for the motif that a written message was sent to
the Caliph immediately after a Muslim victory.67
4. Mughira as the messenger to the Persian general
The Muslim messenger in the enemy camp and champion of the cause of
Islam is a most popular and much varied motif in the futu~ literature. There
P.5 above.
63
L. Krehl and T. Juynboll eds, II, (Leiden 1864)jizya 1, 3 p.292f.

64
65 The bird's feet, although mentioned specifically, are not given any further explanation.
66 See p.17 below.
67 Tabari, Tiirikh 1/2386, 10; 2392, 16; 2541, 11f.; 2655, 4f.; 2661, 16f.; 2666, 7f.; 2684, 5f.; 2690,
12; 2701, 9f; 2707, 9f.; it would be easy to find many more.
I$fahan-Nihawand 11
are two clearly distinct types in the varied presentation of this motif: a) the
messenger suggests that the enemy should convert to Islam (da'wa); b) the
messenger expresses his disdain for the enemy and his confidence of
Muslim victory and invincibility.68 The story ofthe messenger in our I~fahan
Nihawand account is obviously the second type. Besides the parallel in
the Nihawand account transmitted by TabarI from al-RabI' b. Sulayman
mentioned above,69 there are others, in particular in traditions in connection
with the battle of QadisIya. The messenger mentioned most frequently is
MughIra b. Shu'ba, who appears to have been the Muslim emissary per se for a
number of transmitters. 70 Some others are also named; the paralleis in
question are here. 71
[285] 5. 'Crossing over' towards the other Cabara, qata'a)

The negotiations between the Muslims and the enemy concerning who will
'cross over' towards whom in order to begin the fighting, which at first appear
relevant to this particular instance, have paralleis in other conquest
traditions. N egotiations like these are mentioned in accounts of the 'battle of
the bridge' (waq'at al-jisr),72 the battle ofBuwayb,73 the battle ofQiidisiya74 and
the victory over Hurmuzan in Ahwaz. 75
6. Persians chained together

One of Khalid b. al-WaIId's first victories in 'Iraq was one which received the
name yawm dhiit al-saliisil (day of the chains) in the tradition, as the Persian
enemies were chained together on that occasion. 76 Another parallel is found in
a tradition on the battle ofQadislya. 77
68 There are some instances in which these two types appear combined, but it seems that
originally they existed independently.

69 See p. 9 above.
70 Cf. also Caetani, Annali dell'Islam (Milan 1905ff.) IV, under AH. 21, para.42, n.2, p.484.
71 1'abarI, Tarikh I (4) under AH. 14, p.2236, 17ff. (Mughlra as the messenger); p.2235,
20-2236, 10 [285J and continued 2238,7-2244,6 (a number of envoys); I (5) under AH. 14,
p.2267, 6-2285, 15 (several parallel traditions with a number of envoys, among them
Mughlra); p.2351, 12-2353, 11 (Mughlra).
72 1'abarI, Tarikh I (4) under A.H. 13, p.2175, 3ff. (cf. the paralleis 2177, 3ff. and 2177, 15ff.).
73 Ibid. 2185, 2ff. (cf. the parallel 2190, 7ff.).
74 Ibid. under A.H. 14,2237, 8ff.; I (5) under A.H. 14, p2285, 10ff.
75 Ibid. under A.H. 17, p.2541, 5ff.
76 Ibid. I (4) under A.H. 12, p.2023ff.
77 Ibid. 1/2294, 13.

12 Albrecht Noth
7. Attack not before the evening,following the Prophet's custom

This motif is not so much part of the realm of history as of the realm of 1;Ladith.
Consequently it is not, as far as I can see, found in other accounts of conquests,
but in the collections of traditions by Bukhäri78 and Abu Da'ud. 79 The former
mentions it in a larger context, the latter only isolated. It is more probable that
this 1;Ladith was first transmitted by itself and then added into our account,
than that it was extracted from the account and then transmitted on its own;
consequently we can assume that we are seeing he re the use of a 1;Ladith as the
base for the depiction of historical events.
8. Triple signalfor the attack

The tripie signal, with the first two phases ordering the warriors to prepare for
battle and the third announcing the attack, is a tripie shaking of the standard
in our account. It seems that in the eyes of the transmitters [286] this was
interchangeable with the tripie takbir, as can be seen from the fact that so me
of the Nihäwand accounts which contain one or more paralleis to our account
have a tripie takbir instead of shaking the standard. 80 There are, once again,
several parallel instances in reports of other battles, which mention the tri pIe
takbir. 81
9. Nu'man's death
We would hardly be likely to find paralleis for this motif. However, it might be
useful to find out whether there is so me episode narrated in connection with
this that might contain a similar description of the death of another Muslim
hero.
10. Names offamous men who took part in the battle

Lists of names of well-known Companions of the Prophet (a$1;Lab and also
muhajirün and ansar) are so frequent in the accounts of early Muslim
conquests that detailed documentation is superfluous. One instance will be
sufficient. 82
78 $al},il}" (ed. Krehl and Juynboll), II, 293 (jizya 1,3).

79 $al},il}, Sunan al-Mu?taja, (ed. Cairo) I, 414 (jihad 102).
80 See pp.9 and 10 above.
81 Tabari, Tal'ikh 1/2191 (end); 1/2295 in three places; p.2388, Hf.
82 Ibid. 1 under A.R. 23, 2798, 12f. The context is one ofMu'awiya's ghazwas.
Ifjfahan-Nihawand 13
11. Nu'man ordering his succession

I know of at least one parallel to Nu'man's appointing successors who should
replace hirn as general in the case of his death; it is found in a tradition
concerning the 'battle of the bridge'. In this instance it is Abu 'Ubayd who, like
Nu'man, feels compelled to take this step because he can see a martyr's death
(shahada) coming his way.83
Now that we have furnished proofthat the major part ofthe narrative motifs
in the I~fahan-Nihawand account has paralleis not only in other Nihawand
stories but also throughout the conquest literature, it should have become
clear enough that our account is nothing but a conglomerate of commonplaces
from thefutuQ, historiography and tradition,84 which results in a large number
of consequences for the source criticism of this kind of historiography.
However, before we address these conclusions, we must inquire into the
origin and the tendency of the individual narrative motifs [287] we have
discovered to have been commonplaces. In source criticism it is not only
important to simply recognise the topoi present, but also to classify them
correctly - i.e. discover the position they occupied originally - and to track
down the tendencies that might be behind them. While it is unlikely that we
will arrive at definitive answers to the question of origin and tendency ofthese
commonplaces, we still ought to discuss the possible answers.
Of Hurmuzan's bird parable we can say with certainty that it is part of the
group of traditions created around the first Muslim conquests in Persia, and
not in other countries, because the former Sassanid general Hurmuzan is a
fixed component of this narrative motif. It is not certain, however, whether the
parable was originally (as in our example) linked to the account of a battle; it
mightjust as weIl have been intended to elucidate the second Caliph's military
plans and ambitions in greater detail. It is furthermore uncertain whether
originally I~fahan, Nihawand or Kisra was the point of the parable, as it is
impossible to determine which of the three versions was the earliest. It is also
possible that there were further versions of the parable which also might have
been the original. The tendency of the parable, which does certainly not
belong in the time in which the transmitters put it, is in all probability to invest
one particular event during the early conquests in Persia with particular
83 1bid. 1/2178 top.

84 Caetani, Annali V under A.H. 23, para.22, p.15f., already recognised this in part.
14 Albrecht Noth
importance after the event; because of the reasons mentioned above it is,
however, impossible to say which particular event this was. 85
The historical basis of this narrative motif might have been the fact that
from time to time Hurmuzan served 'Umar as advisor. In the Nihawand
version, Hurmuzan gives the Caliph false advice, to start with the wings,
whereupon he is rebuked by 'Umar and receives the epithet 'enemy of God'
('aduw Allah); this, however, is a later addition aiming - for whatever reason-
to show the Persians in a bad light.
The basis for the passage about 'Umar appointing Nu'man general is the
view that military activity is preferable to administrative employment. 86 [288]
Appointing Nu'man is in fact only an external framework for proclaiming this
maxim; as the hero and martyr of Nihawand, Nu'man was most suitable to
invest it with significance. Two conditions were necessary for the maxim that
military service is better than administrative service to take shape. Firstly,
there had to be a clear separation between these two fields of activity - which
was not at all the case in the early years; and secondly there had to have been
doubts concerning the superiority of military service over administrative
service. The maxim is clearly apologetic; it only begins to make sense if it is
understood as a defence of the superiority of military service.
The correspondence between 'Umar and the Muslim armies is part of the
greater context of the later systematic arrangement of events from the early
years of Islam, an arrangement which is clearly perceptible in the stage of
tradition we now see. 87 The Caliph in Medina is shown as the ruling spirit of
the conquests, who holds all the threads in his hands. Just as he gives written
orders managing every smallest detail, so the Muslim generals believe it is
their duty to keep hirn informed of everything in writing. It is possible that the
purpose of this representation was to show early Islam as a particularly
orderly and exemplary state; but it may be that the later transmitters, more or
less deliberately, transferred the idea of the state prevalent in their own time
onto the earlier time - or maybe both played a part. In any case, we must not
rely too much on reports of correspondence between the Caliph and the army,
not even ifthe various letters are quoted verbatim. 88
85 Cf. also Caetani, Annali IV under A.H. 21, para.42, n.1, p.484, who calls the parable a
'predizione ab eventu' ('prediction after the event'); but without giving a reason he believes
the Nihäwand version to have been the original one.
86 This applies to both extant vers ions ofthis story (cf. pp.8 and 10 above). The version in
whieh N u'män himselftakes the initiative contains this maxim in even more pointed form.
87 Cf. espeeially J. Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur altesten Geschichte des Islam, in Skizzen
und Vorarbeiten VI (Berlin 1899), pp.ll, 19, 79, lOH.

88 Cf. Wellhausen, op. eit., p.50, and D. S. Margoliouth, Lectures on Arabic Historians
(Caleutta 1930), p.122f.

It is, of course, possible that the true historical basis for the story of
the Muslim messenger's visit to the enemies' camp is that during the early
conquests the Muslims occasionally negotiated with their enemies before the
battle. However, the various forms in which it appears in the historiography
are undoubtedly later fiction. 89 One characteristic of the messenger story is
clear before all others: it is the external frame for expositions on state politics
and on character and aims of Islam. In order to be able to put into relief the
essential features of the theory [289] contained within the type of messenger
story under discussion here,90 it will be necessary to bring to mind once more
its main characteristics. 91 The Muslim messenger, who as a rule appears
as the representative of all the Muslims, is received by his opponent, the
representative of the heathens,92 with the greatest possible display of pomp.
The messenger's own attire and demeanour is simple, and he is not at all
impressed by the display; on the contrary, his manner shows clearly that he
does not think much of pomp and majestic behaviour. The leader of the
heathens begins the dialogue by asking the messenger why he and his
companions have come to this place at all, then stating that he remembers
their weakness and neediness 93 from the old days,94 and suggesting that they
had better leave again. 95 While the messenger does admit freely that the 'arab
used to be indeed feeble and needy, he points out that this state of things
changed completely after the Prophet's mission 96 the consequence of which
was that his followers can now claim the property of the heathens as theirs,
and count on success in military enterprises. In some instances the messenger
adds the call to convert to Islam (da'wa) to his mention of the Prophet's
mission; after this the negotiations are cut short97 and the battle begins.
Here the useless and despicable pomp of the heathens is contrasted with
the ideal ofthe simplicity ofthe followers ofIslam. In addition to this, however,
it is made clear that the power of the heathens and their wealth is useless
89 Cf. also Wellhausen, op. cit., p.76 and n.2, and Margoliouth, op. cit., p.122f.
90 Concerning the two types of messenger stories cf. p.13 above.
91 Cf. the parallel passages quoted at n.n on p.14 above.
92 Admittedly, Persian heathens; the isnäds ofthe messenger stories also point to Iraq, in
particular to KUfa.
93 In some instances their moral inferiority is mentioned as weil.
94 This is the place where he sometimes also points out that those who are now Muslims
used to be the receivers of charity from his people.

95 In some instances he adds he re that if they do leave, he would be willing to support
them with food (cf. n.94).

96 A parallel instance can be found in BayhaqI (Ibrahlm b. MuJ:tammad), Kitab al-ma(l,asin
wa-l-masawi, ed. Fr. Schwally (Gie:;;sen 1902), p.299.

97 There is also a version in which the infidels (or some ofthem) are most impressed with
the messenger's manner. The negotiations are broken off all the same.
16 Albrecht Noth
especially because the necessary consequence of the Prophet's mission is

that those who accept hirn, no matter how poor and powerless they are, will
overcome the heathens and take possession oftheir wealth. Briefly, the theory
expounded he re is that Islam implies that the infidels will be dispossessed
and consequently powerless, a theory which we also find elsewhere in Islamic
writings (especially [290] in the lJadith)98 and which, with this degree of rigor,
must have been developed as a consequence of the first great conquests and
by no means was their ideological basis.
It is even possible that the messenger story contains not only a theoretical
definition of the relationship between Islam and heathenism, but that it
presents an opinion concerning an internal Muslim problem. It is remarkable
how sharply all the activities of the pre-Islamic Arabs are condemned in the
story. It is the heathen general who first utters this condemnation, but the
messenger admits to its being justified and indeed emphasises it even more
strongly. His only argument against the infidel is that everything changed
after the rise of Islam. He thus admits that the power and superiority of
the Muslim community is by no means based on any national, i.e. Arab,
superiority: the Arabs are now superior to the infidels because they are
Muslims, not because the Arab people possess such remarkable qualities. It
is likely that this emphasis on Arab inferiority and on the fact that only the
religion of Islam is responsible for the power and invincibility of the Muslim
community was especially in the interest of the non-Arab Muslims, the
mawiili, who converted later. 99 Consequently the messenger story might
contain a polemic by the mawiili against the Arab warrior dass who initially
ruled the Islamic state. lOO
We have already mentioned that there are other versions of this story in
which the messenger may invite the infidels to embrace Islam at the end of
their conversation. It is not necessary to consider this da'wa any further here;
it only needs to be pointed out that it most probably does not belong with
the type of messenger story under discussion but is a later addition. This is
supported primarily by the way in which it is transmitted. There are, on the
98 Some examples can be found in A. N oth, Heiliger Krieg und Heiliger Kampf in Islam und
Christentum. Beiträge zur Vorgeschichte und Geschichte der Kreuzzuge, in "Bonner

Historische Forschungen", ed. M. Braubach, vol. 28 (Bonn 1966) p.19f.
99 Cf. R. Hartmann, Islam und Nationalismus, Abhandlung der Deutschen Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1945/6, philosophisch-historische Klasse No. 5 (Berlin 1948),

p.9f.
100 It must be remembered that in one version of the messenger story (rabart, Tarikh
1/2269, 12ff.) the behaviour of the messenger in the in fidel camp is described as being
boorish rather than disdainful of pomp. Similarly the Persians are said to have 'sensible
ideas and good manners' (lahum ara' wa-adab).
one hand, messenger stories in the tradition which contain nothing beyond
the invitation oft he Muslim messenger to the infidels to convert to Islam (or to
pay jizya, [291] or to take their chance and fight).101 On the other hand there
are stories in which the messenger presents victory over the infidels as a result
exclusively ofthe Prophet's mission, without offering them the opportunity of
embracing Islam. 102 And it is really much more probable that the hybrid form
was a result of a later combination of the two types of story, than that the
two types should have emerged from a messenger story which originally
contained both those elements. In addition, the concepts of the objectives the
Muslim conquerors pursue with their war on the infidels, upon which the two
types of stories are based, are radically different. In the da'wa type of the story
the intentions on which the Muslim conquests are based are - at least partly -
missionary, while their object in the other type of story is purely to conquer
the infidels and expand the power of the Islamic state. It is exceedingly
improbable that two so contrary opinions should originally have stood side by
side in one and the same story.
Finally, it is usually Mughlra b. Shu'ba who is the Muslims' messenger,
as in the type of messenger story under discussion here. 103 This may well
be reminiscent of the historical fact that Mughlra did indeed playanot
unimportant role in the Prophet's missions to the tribes of the Arabian
peninsula; he appears frequently as either writer or witness 104 in the relevant
mission documents of the Prophet, which are probably authentie, at least in
their basic content. 105
Similarly the topos of 'crossing over' towards the enemy may well be based
on a true historical event. However, it will be difficult to determine the original
place, i.e. the event during which this information had not yet become a topos.
We might consider the 'battle of the bridge', because in that case the 'crossing'
a river (the Euphrates) was indeed a determining factor in the battle action,
but [292] this attribution is uncertain. There is still another possible
explanation of this topos. There is an account of a single combat between a
101 Such as e.g. 'fabarl, Tarikh 1/2019, 12ff; 2020, 2ff.; 2022, 8ff.; 2039, 15ff.; 2040, 14ff.; 2053,
15ff.; 2097, 16ff.; I (5), p.2435, 10ff.; 2441, 3ff.; 2585, 7ff.; Sa'ld b. Bitrlq (Eutychios of
Alexandria), Na;pn al-jawhar, ed. L. Cheikho CSCO Scriptores Arabici Series III, Vol.VII
(Beirut-Paris 1909), part 2, p.l0, IHf.; 25, 6ff. We could easily find more examples.
102 Ain, e.g., our I:;;fahän-Nihäwand account and in 'fabarI, Tarikh 1/2236, 17ff.
103 Cf. p.13 above, and notes 70 and 71.
104 Ibn Sa'd, Kitab al-tabaqat al-kabir (ed. 1905ff.), I, 2, p.21, 22 (three times), 23 (twice), 24,
36, 85. [The content of this note and note 105 were reversed in the German original. -
TransI.]
105 Cf. M. V. Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford 1956), p.336 and 345; A. J. Wensinck, The
Muslim Creed (London 1932), p.8f.

18 Albrecht Noth
Muslim and an infidel before the battle - which was a frequent occurrence in
early Islamic times l06 - which states that the two combatants agreed before
their fight who should attack firsU 07 The wording of this agreement is very
nearly exactly the same as the negotiation concerning the 'crossing over' (cf.
qäla: immä an taly,mila 'alayya wa-immä an ab,mila 'alayka; fa-qäla: ab,milu
'alayka ('he said: either I shall attack you, or you shall attack me: and he said, I
shall attack you') (be fore the single combat) and qäla: immä an ta'bur'Ü ilaynä
wa-immä an na'bura ilaykum; fa-qäla Abu 'Ubayd: bal na'buru ilaykum ('either
you cross over towards us, or we cross over towards you, and Abu 'Ubayd said:
indeed, we shall cross over towards you') (in aversion of the battle of the
bridge) ).108 If we presume that before a single co mb at an agreement of the kind
was generally the custom, we might say that our topos evolved out of the
transference of a single combat formality onto the military engagement of two
armies. 109 However, this assumption will have to remain a hypothesis as well.
The same arguments valid in the case of 'crossing over' also apply to the
motifs ofthe enemies chained together, the triple signal for the attack, and the
order of succession. They most likely do have areal historical basis, but so far
it has not been possible to determine this exactly. A Muslim army may weH
have seen warriors among the enemies who were chained together;110 a triple
signal may weH have been used - whether three shakes of the standard or, in a
more religious version, triple takbir; and possibly a general appointed one or
more successors in case of his death, all these are occurrences one would not
simply fabricate. Where and when these events really took place, however,
must remain uncertain. We would not even be able to say with any certainty
that these events took place at the time of the first conquests, as claimed by the
tradition; they might just as well be of a much more recent date and were
backdated to the early time - for whatever reason. We must not, however,
be led to conclude under any circumstances that the repeated [293] mention
made of the chains, the triple signal and the order of succession is proof that
these were common practices or events. The fact that they are used in our
account, which has been recognised to be fictitious and free from any
authenticity, should be sufficient proof that they were used, if not exclusively,
lOG Cf. e.g. N. Fries, Das Heerwesen der Araber zur Zeit der Omaiyaden nach rabari
(Tubingen 1921), p.80.

107 Tabari, Tarikh 112639, 5f. (the passage concerning the other version of the battle for
I;;fahan; Abu Nu'aym, I$bahan (quoted edition), p.25, 11f. (the same tradition).
108 For the reference and parallels see p.14 above, nn.72-75.
109 If the agreement was not part of the formalities surrounding single combat, it would, of
course, also be possible for the dependence to be the other way around.
110 Apparently among the Persians, to whom this custom is ascribed in Muslim sources;
but it is impossible to control the information, as there are no Sassanid sources.

Il}fahan-Nihawand 19
as topoi. Repeated use of a topos does not, however, mean that the events
reported did in fact take place repeatedly.l11
There are two possible explanations for the Dadlth which has the Prophet
recommending an evening attack. It might contain a grain of truth in that
MUDammad may indeed have recommended an evening attack once, but of
course it is out ofthe question that he ever suggested it should be a rule. Or it
could have been fabricated, probably with the intention of justifying
retrospectively either a single event or a practice of the kind.
Finally, the list of famous participants. It is most uncertain whether this
topos in its different variants can be traced back to any historical events at all.
Their tendency, however, is quite clearly visible. The authors intended to
invest military events of the early days with a certain solemnity by having
famous people taking part in them. 112 There are no authentie reports to be
found, because during the time of the first conquests people were not
interested to know which of the Prophet's Companions took part in which
battles. The question only acquired importance later, when the a?l),ab had
become 'saints' of Islam, a quality not attributed to them, as a rule, during the
first decades after the Prophet's death.
Having analysed the I~fahän-Nihäwand account we can draw several
conclusions for the source criticism, into which we must now look in
conclusion.
[294] It goes without saying that our account is completely worthless as a
source for the battle for the city of I~fahän, and its value as a source for the
battle for Nihäwand is, of course, the same. However, the other Nihäwand
traditions which contain one or more of the narrative motifs of our account,
should also be used only with great caution as sources for this event. For
if some individual commonplaces can be found in them it is not really
far-fetched to assume that they might contain others, even though those may
not be recognisable as such at first sight. The most important factor for their
value as sources is to which extent their content is determined by the provable
topoi. The same applies to the other futül), traditions in which elements from
our account can be found. The reliability of quite a large number of traditions
is thus called into doubt by the analysis of our I~fahän-Nihäwand account.
111 This is a fact that is not taken into consideration sufficiently by any means in modern
historiography on the subject of early Islamic times; which has led to a number of
erroneous conclusions. Two examples are the 'collections' by Fries, Das Heerwesen der
Araber... (see p.22 above, n.106), and L. H Beckmann, Die muslimischen Heere der
Eroberungszeit. Das Instrument der Ausbreitung des Islam, sein Aufbau, seine Gliederung,
weine Fuhrung und sein Einsatz (622-51). Diss. phi!. Hamburg (typed) 1951.
112 Another example is to be found in Wellhausen, Prolegomena (see p.18 above, n.87) p.63.
20 Albrecht Noth
Furthermore, our examination of this account has established several

leads for studying the methods of some transmitters, which are not without
importance for the source critical study. We have already established that
the I~fahan-Nihawand account is a good example of how traditions were
composed by selecting a number of more or less independent narrative motifs
from the store of futulJ traditions and then putting them together to form a
larger whole. 113 This method - and we can be certain that there are more
instances in early Islamic historiography - is not so much falsification of
history based on certain tendencies, of whatever kind, but rather falsification
based on editorial manipulation; i.e. it must not be ascribed to the politically
biased reworking of authentie news, but to the assembling of heterogeneous
pieces of tradition, rather like a photomontage. The conclusion we can draw
from this, with reference to the understanding of history of some Muslim
transmitters whose specialist field was the early time, is that they were less
concerned about transmitting authentie information and more with drawing
attractive and memorable images. These images could also, as can be seen
clearly from our I~fahan-Nihawand account, be used in a formulaic way to
illustrate several events. 114 A tradition transmitted by Bukhari shows clearly
where historiography could end if based on this kind of perception of
history.115 It is composed of three narrative motifs of our account: Hurmuzan's
advice, the messenger story (after a briefmention [295] that the army was sent
out) and the l).adlth about attacking in the evening. This tradition does not
refer to any particular event, it is only a military expedition of the time of the
Caliph 'Umar; historiography has lost all reference to facts and is only a
universally valid example.
So far the conclusions we have drawn from the analysis of our account
have been mostly negative, unless proving that something cannot possibly
have happened as it is described in the sources can be counted as a positive
for source criticism. Still, we can make a few genuinely positive statements,
with reference to the study of the sources or - so to speak - the 'methodology'
of assessing the sourees. After all, we may glean from the present study that
the analysis of individual traditions can ac hieve results. This path has so far
been taken very infrequently;116 the usual approach in source criticism has
been to take the first great compilations by Tabari, Baladhuri and others,
or by their predecessors Sayf b. 'Umar, Abü Mikhnaf and others, in their
113 See p.12 above.

114 See p.4ff. above.
115 Quoted edition, II p.292f.
1160ne example from recent time is E. L. Petersen, 'Ali and Mu'awiya in Early Arabic
Tradition (Copenhagen 1964).
entirety and aspire to a comprehensive assessment of a greater body of source

material. ll7 This approach is surely legitimate, especially if the compilers
have already arranged the material at their disposal systematically and
pragmatically. However, the study of individual traditions is advisable as weIl.
Firstly, the compilations, which are after all not simply fiction, contain various
kinds of traditions, good as well as bad. Secondly, there are larger groups of
traditions which form a thematic unit inasmuch as they correspond regarding
their subject, the idea of history on which they are based, or the style of
presentation. However, seeing as these traditions are not found in one
compilation only but will be met in the most varied places, it is only possible to
detect them by taking individual traditions as the basis for a study. The groups
of traditions referred to in turn could do with, indeed require a comprehensive
assessment. Thus it is possible to say that by beginning with the compilations
scholars attempt a comprehensive assessment of the most varied traditions,
whereas by beginning with individual traditions scholars may achieve a
comprehensive assessment of traditions that belong together.
It is a good principle for a historian, and one that cannot be challenged
on principle, that he, if he wishes to discover more about an event, should
compare [296] the different extant accounts concerning this event, and
then draw his conclusions as to wh at really happened by finding the
correspondences between accounts. Based on the analysis of our account this
principle will have to be qualified in the case of the historian of the early
Muslim conquests, for it is now obvious that there was a nu mb er ofnarrative
motifs in the early futü1;l, literature which were used again and again.
Consequently if all we have are correspondences in different accounts, they
will not justify any conclusions. Only the knowledge of the entire conquest
literature will allow the scholar to decide whether in one particular case the
correspondences between accounts are a sign of the authenticity of wh at is
reported, or whether they are just a shared commonplace.
Having proved a number of topoi and tendencies in our account has
another, purely practical result for source criticism. In thefutü1;l, literature and
in other traditions about the time of the first four Caliphs, these and similar
topoi and tendencies are certainly found in large numbers. 118 In my opinion it
would be worthwhile to inquire further into these phenomena and compose
a catalogue of the provable commonplaces and tendencies, thus furnishing
at least one useful starting point for the assessment of the sources. A list of
117Such as in particular Wellhausen, Prolegomena (see p.18 above, n.87) p.4 and passim.
118This is merely an assertion at present. The author, who is currently engaged upon a
more comprehensive study on the subjed o[ early Islamic history (the first [our Caliphs),
will have to prove it in due course.
22 Albrecht Noth
topoi would, firstly, allow us to see in whieh subject areas oftradition eommon-
plaees are found most frequently; seeondly, serve to reeognise a substantial
number of non-authentie traditions 119 and reject them. A eompilation of
politieal tendeneies might furthermore lead to better reeognition of authentie
information, as the faet that a tradition eontradicts the eurrent politieally
biased opinion may well be a sign of its eredibility.120
This article has been the eritieal study of only one tradition. If this study
were extended to eomprise the entirety of the sourees about early Islamie
history, the result would probably be that we would know mueh less about this
time, but that little may perhaps be closer to the truth.
119 Non-authentie with referenee to what they report. They are eertainly valuable as
sourees [or the eireumstanees under whieh they were eomposed. This, however, will have
to be set aside for the time being.
120 Whether this is indeed the ease will have to be verified [or the individual examples.
17
CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY AND MILITARY
AUTONOMY IN THE EARLY ISLAMIC CONQUESTS
Fred McGraw Donner
I Introduction: Some Thoughts on Centralization

THE HISTORICAL works of the Islamic tradition portray the early Islamic
conquests as the self-conscious and centrally managed expansion of a new state
in the name of the new faith of Islam. According to this view, commitment to
Islam provided the motive force underlying the conquests, and the leadership
of the early Islamic community, headed by the Caliphs in Medina, coordinated
virtually all aspects of the expansion, from the initial recruitment of troops to
the placement of garrisons of Muslims following the successful conquest of a
province.
This vision of the Islamic conquests embraces what we shall call, in
more general terms, the "centralization thesis." The main components of this
• Iam indebted to the participanlS in the thied Late Antiquity and Early Islam workshop, whose
fertile suggestions strengthened this paper immensely, and whose criticisms of an earlier
version spurred me to address some of its main weaknesses. Unfortunately, they are too
numerous for me to single out for individual mention here. I am also grateful to Paul M. Cobb
and Walter E. Kaegi for taking the time to read earlier drafts and for many helpfu1 suggestions.
This paper was first written in 1992, then revised in early 1993 and, slightly, in early 1994. In
making revisions, however, I have not inc1uded literature appearing since 1992, with the sole
. exception of references to the revised edition of Albrecht Noth's Quellenkritische Studien, cited
here as "Noth-Conrad" (see n. 22, below).
338 Fred McGraw Donner
thesis can be identified as (1) the existence of some central concepts or mission
motivating the conquerors; (2) the existence of a ruling elite dedicated to the.
principles of these central concepts; and (3) the existence of some plan of
expansion in the name of the central concepts; and (4) the capacity of the
ruling elite to realize the plan of expansion through direct and indirect
commands.
The centralization thesis has been accepted in the main by many modern
scholars, but it has also been challenged, sometimes fundamentally, by a
variety of revisionist interpretations put forth over the past century or so . The
objective of this essay is to consider the cogency of the various interpretations
of the conquests that have been advanced by modern scholars, with particular
reference to whether the conquests are viewed as "centralized" or
"decentralized." Before doing so, however, it will be useful to make some
general observations about the notion of "centralization" that must be kept in
mind when attempting to interpret the evidence for the early Islamic
conquests.
Centralization means control of some process from "the centre" - in the
traditional view of the Islamic conquests, control of the conquest movement by
the Caliphs in Medina. In dealing with historically complex phenomena such
as the Islamic conquest, however, the notion of centralization cannot be
envisioned as half of a simple binary polarity, with complete
"decentralization" as its opposite pole. Rather, it must be seen as a continuum.
That is, we may be able to envision the Islamic conquests as falling in general
somewhere along a broad spectrum of degrees of centralization. Indeed, we
will probably need to draw a complex judgment on the issue of centralization,
and to speak of certain aspects of the conquests as being relatively centralized,
while other aspects are quite decentralized.
Moreover, we must recognize the existence of a hierarchy of levels or
aspects of centralization - what, for simplicity, I shall term the eoneeptual, the
strategie, and the tactical aspects. These can perhaps best be described by
formulating them as questions: (1) Were the conquests the product of some
centralized or unitary impulse or ideology? Did they have some central
source of authority and some broad, overarching goal to which its participants
feIt themselves bound, even if the latter was perhaps vague or elastic?l If so,
1 Meaning, here, by "broad", that it transcended the narrow interests of particular individuals.
Centralized Authority 339
we can speak of the conquests as having displayed conceptual central~zatiolt .

If, on the other hand, the various events usually included under the rubric of
the Islarnic eonquest were in fact motivated by different and unrelated causes
and were not part of some larger eoneeption, then we ean eonsider the
conquests to have been eoneeptually deeentralized. (2) Did there exist some
general military objeetives and some general strategy for attaining these
military objeetives? Or (to put it another way), did the eentral authorities
co ordinate in some measure the activities of different war parties on various
fronts? If so, we ean speak of the conquests as having displayed strategie (or
operational) eentralization (we shall use either "strategie" or "operational"
depending on whether the partieular context of which we are speaking focuses
primarilyon planning or on implementation). H, on the other hand, the events
of the Islamie conquest represent primarily the fruits of the individual
initiative of various war-leaders who acted on their own authority without any
direction from the "centre" , then we must speak of the conquests as having
been strategically decentralized. (3) Did there exist a elose centralized contro}
or implementation of tacties and logistics (of supply, communications, etc.) on
various fronts or in speeific encounters with the enemy? If so, we can speak
of the conquests as having displayed tactical centralization.
Certain implieations follow apriori from these logical distinctions
among different degrees or aspects of centralization. One is that absence of
centralization on one level does not necessarily imply an absence of
centralization on the levels above it; rather, each level must be examined in its
own right. In particular, we must avoid the pitfall of drawing conclusions
about strategie or coneeptual centralization on the basis of evidence that
pertains to taetieal matters. It is, for example, all too easy to ridicule the idea
that the Caliphs in Medina eould have eontrolled every detail of the conquests
unfolding in distant provinces; but lack of Caliphal oversight over details of
tactical disposition does not necessarily mean that the Caliphs had no strategie
or operational oversight. Nor can it be used as evidence to conclude that the
conquests lacked any unifying conceptual base, that they were not a
"movement," but were merely a collection of unrelated incidents that were
only retrospectively conceived of as parts of a larger whole.
Conversely - but, perhaps, somewhat less obviously - we can propose
that any firm evidence for the existence of a given level of centralized control
inescapably implies the existence of centralized control on all higher levels as
340 Fred MeGraw Donner
weIl. Coordination by a centralized authority of the activities of separate

commanders (operational centralization in realizing a strategie plan), for
example, requires that the central authority be motivated by some guiding
concepts; for it is self-evident that there can be no coordination of activities
without a purpose or goal in the pursuit of which things are to be coordinated.
From these considerations it becomes clear that there are only four
logically valid types of interpretation for any conquest movement. In order of
increasing degrees of centralization, they are:
I. No eentralization is found on the eoneeptual, strategie, or taetical
levels. That is, the character of the conquest as a eoordinated movement is
denied.
/I. Coneeptual eentralization is present, but neither strategie or tactical
eentralization is found. In other words, there is a general commitment to some
common idea or doctrine, but there is either no unified leaders hip to
implement it, or no effective mechanisms of implementation available to the
leadership. Implementation is, in other words, totally haphazard, and under
the free control of independent loeal eommanders acting in the name of a set
of eommon eoneepts, but without any eoordination among them and as eaeh
interpreted the dietates of those coneepts on his own.
IIl. Coneeptual eentralization and strategie centralization are present,
but not tactieal eentralization. Aeeording to this scheme, the leadership of the
movement is able to mobilize subordinate forees and shape general strategie
poliey in the name of the unifying eoncepts.
IV. Centralization is found on all levels - eonceptual, strategie, and
tactieal. Virtually every aspeet of the eonquest is eontrolled and managed from
the eentre by the ruling elite.
Let us now review some salient interpretations of the early Islamic
conquests to see where they stand in relation to this logieal typology.
11. Divergent Interpretations: a Typology

A signifieant number of modern interpreters of the early Islarnic eonquests
have aceepted the main outlines of the traditional Islarnic "centralizing thesis," .
holding to the general notion of a set of central motivating concepts and a
centralized execution dir~cted, 100sely at least, from the centre in Medina.2

These interpretations correspond to type m in the typology sketched above.
Modern versions of the centralizing thesis, when compared to their
analog in the traditional Islamic sourees, can usually be seen to involve
adjustments or shifts of emphasis that modify it in ways that are minor, from
the point of view of our analysis, however revolutionary they may be in other
respects. For example, the notion that the movement was sparked by some
motivating concept or mission may be adopted, but in some cases the nature
(but not the existence) of that mission is called into question: where the Islamic
tradition sees the motivating factor as the pure early Islam, others may adduce
political or other motivations instead.3 These interpretations, then, emphasize
the importance of conceptual centralization, and usually follow the Islamic
sources also in seeing a large measure of strategie (operational) centralization.
The issue of tactieal centralization is usually not raised explicitly, or is not
dealt with in depth, and as far as I know no modern interpretation has
proposed that the Islamic conquests displayed complete Caliphal control on
both the strategie and tactical levels (type IV), although the Islamic tradition
itself routinely suggests this. 4
Already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however,
some western authors were raising objections to certain aspects of the
centralizing thesis of the type Irr variety. Building on the work of Hugo
Winkler, for example, Leone Caetani advanced the view that the expansion of
Arab rule was largely the result of ecological factors - particularly c1imatic
2 See, for example, Carl Brockelmann, History ofthe Islamic Peoples (New York, 1960),
49-62 [Germ an original 1939]; Laura Veccia-Vaglieri, "The Patriarchal and Umayyad
Caliphates," in The Cambridge History of Islam I (Cambridge, 1970), 58-60; Marshali G. S.
Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago, 1974), I, 200-211; Fred M. Donner, The Early
Islamic Conquests (Princeton, 1981); Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the
Caliphates (London, 1986),59; John Walter Jandora, The Marchfrom Medina: aRevisionist
Study of the Arab Conquests (CHfton, N.J., 1990).
3 Among the most striking cases of this is Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism
(Cambridge, 1977). Radical as the religious implications of the book are, however, it
nonetheless sees the conquests as the result of implementing a central mission.
4 Jandora, The March jrom Medina, pays more attention than most works to matters of military
tactics and organization. A few general comments are offered by Mul).ammad 'Abd al-ijallm
Abü Ghazzäla, AI-In.ti~ärät al- 'arab/ya al- 'u~mä fi ~adr al-isläm: diräsä 'an fann al-harb al-
'arab! (Cairo, 1403/1983), 33-47 (on weaponry) and 48-52 (on military organization), but
despite its subtitle this work offers virtually na analysis of military arganization or its
development
change and population increase - which resulted in economic distress and

consequent emigration. 5 This "ecological thesis", as we may term it, proved
very popular, and was embraced by many later writers. A typical expression
of it is the following passage by a leading scholar from a book intended for a
general audience: "Initially the great conquests were an expansion not of Islam
but of the Arab nation, driven by the pressure of overpopulation in its native
peninsula to seek an outlet in the neighboring countries. It is one of the series
of migrations which carried the Sernites time and again into the Fertile
Crescent and beyond."6 According to the ecological thesis, the early Caliphs
were merely riding the tiger of the expansion of the Arab peoples, over which
they had little real control, at least at the outset. It is for this reason that
proponents of the ecological thesis often prefer to speak of the "Arab
conquests", rather than the "Islamic conquests." The view that the conquests
were essentially more "Arab" than "Islamic" was partly rooted in the
observation of an undeniable fact, that the conquests were not carried out
primarily to secure the religious conversion to Islam of the conquered
populations, at least beyond the Arabian peninsula. For, as is weIl known, the
conquerors were content to collect tribute from non-Muslim religious
communities outside Arabia that tendered their submission, and to leave them
free to continue in their former faiths.
Many - indeed, almost all - of the scholars who adopted the ecological
thesis to explain the Islamic conquests continued to adhere to aspects of the
centralization thesis; for example, they often continued to describe how the
Caliphs dispatched forces, coordinated strategy, and mobilized resources for
the conquests, while positing ecological factors as the underlying cause of the
conquests. That is, they seem to have introduced the ecological thesis as a kind
of modification of the centralization thesis, rather than as a total repudiation
of it, perhaps feeling that it provided a way to explain the origins of the
5 Leone Caetani, Studi di Storia Orientale I (Milan, 1911), 133-38,369-71; restated with, if
anything, greater force by Henri Lammens, Le berceau de l'Islam (Rome, 1914), 117-21 and
174-77. A variant of the ecological thesis is developed in M. A. Shaban, Islamic History A.D.
600-750 (A.H. 132): a New Interpretation (Cambridge, 1971). He argues that Mubammad's
activities created an economic recession that forced the Arabs to raid neighbouring territories,
resulting in their "unintentionally acquiring an empire" (p. 14). For further discussion of these
theories, see Donner, Early Islamic Conquests, 3-7.
6 Bemard Lewis, The Arabs in History (rev. ed., New York, 1960),55-56.
conquest movement that was, in their view, more "scientific."7 On the other
hand, seeing the conquests primarily as an Arab conquest neatly glosses over
the fact that the conquests began with the forcible subjugation of many
Arabian tribes by the Medinese leadership.
There is a also a deeper problem inherent in such "hybrid"
interpretations. Stripped to its essentials, the ecological thesis is nothing less
than the denial that a mission or central set of concepts played any causative
röle in the Islamic conquests - it asserts, after all, that the conquests were
"really" generated by population pressure and other historical and econornic
forces rather than by conceptual factors. That is, the ecological thesis belongs
to type I in our typology of interpretations. The co ordination of strategy,
dispatch of commanders, and other operational features, on the other hand,
belong to what we have termed strategie eentralization, whieh is found only in
interpretations of type III or IV. Yet, we have shown in the preceding seetion
that the existence of strategie and operational centralization logically requires
the existenee of eonceptual centralization. Hybrid interpretations that combine
an ecologieal thesis with some elements of the centralization thesis seem to me,
in other words, to embrace a fatal contradiction, for the two theses are
logically ineompatible. The hybrid "eeological-eentralizing" interpretation, in
short, does not eonform to any of the four logieally valid typologie al variants,
and must be rejected. This does not mean that ecological faetors played no
part in the events of the eonquest era, but in dealing with them we must either
embrace the eeologieal thesis whole-heartedly and dispense entirely with any
talk of eentralized control by the Caliphs over what is usually called the Arab
or Islamic eonquests, or reduce ecological factors to the role of supporting
elements abetting the process of Arab migrations onee the conquests had
already begun. 8
7 For example, Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs (8th ed., London, 1964), or Lewis, The
Arabs in History, 55, who speaks of the conquest both as amigration of the Arab nation and as
something in which the Arab leadership employed conscious strategy and provided
reinforcements and supplies for their troops. See also Francesco Gabrieli, MuhamInnd and the
Conquests of Islam (New York, 1968); Shaban, Islamic History; Edmond Rabbath, La
conquete arabe sous les quatre premiers califes (11/632-40/661) (Beirut, 1985), I, 13-26, who
sees ecological factors in combination with the new faith of Islam as decisive.
8 I have offered more detailed objections to some of the specific assumptions of the ecological
thesis in The Early Islamic Conquests, 3-8.
Very few scholars have chosen the first option and attempted to discard
the centralization thesis in all its aspects; as we have seen, many attempted to
reconcile aspects of the centralizing view with the ecological thesis. Recently,
however, there has appeared a radically revisionist view of the Islamic
conquests that we can call the accidental thesis. It clearIy belongs among type I
interpretations. Its proponents not onIy deny that the events of the conquest
(as reiated in the traditional sources) were coordinated by the Caliphs as part
of a coherent movement; they also deny the existence of any centralizing
concepts or mission and doubt that many of the major events of the conquest,
as related in the traditional sources, took place at all. This position is clearIy
staked out in arecent article, whose authors, on the basis of seventh-century
Syriac, Greek, and Armenian sources, "conc1ude that the Iocal sources written
before the early eighth century provide no evidence for a planned invasion of
Arabs from the Peninsula, nor for great battles which crushed the Byzantine
army; nor do they mention any Caliph before Mu'äwiyah .... The picture the
contemporary literary sources provide is rather of raids of the familiar type;
the raiders stayed because they found no military opposition .... [W]hat took
place was aseries of raids and minor engagements, which gave rise to stories
among the Arab newcomers of How We Beat the Romans; these were later
selected and embelIished in Iate Umayyad and earIy 'Abbäsid times to form an
Official History of the Conquest."9 According to this more radically
revisionist view, the very notion of a conquest movement is an
9 1. Koren and Y. Nevo, "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies," Der Islam 68

(1991),87-101, at 100. See also Moshe Sharon, "The Birth of Islam in the Holy Land," in
Sharon (ed.), Pillars of Smoke and Fire: the Holy Land in History and Thought
(Johannesburg, 1986), 225-35, esp. 226-27, who argues that "Islam" had no unified
beginning, and may have had several prophets, and suggests that local communities of
mu 'minün (believers) simply seized power when the Byzantine and Sasanian empires
collapsed. Even in some of the oider literature, however, we fmd suggestions that the first
steps in the conquest may have been, essentially, accidental; Carl Heinrich Becker' s magisterial
essay "Die Ausbreitung der Araber," in his Islamstudien, I (Leipzig, 1924),70, expresses this
idea, as does Hitti, History ofthe Arabs, 8th ed., 144-45, although Hitti introduces Islam as a
conceptual factor, contending that it forced Arab tribes to stop raiding one another, and so
helped redirect their raids outward. Walter E. Kaegi, Jr. has pointed out to me that - pace
Koren and Nevo - some "local" sources written, at the latest, at the very beginning of the
eighth century C.E. (end first century A.H.) do make reference to major battles of the conquest
era, notably Anastasius the Sinaite, Sermo adversus Monotheletas (ed. Karl-Heinz Uthemann,
Tumhout, 1985), 60 (paras. 3.1.86c88); on the date of this work, see John Haldon, "The
Works of Anastasius of Sinai," in Averil Cameron and Lawrence I. Conrad, eds., The
Bvzantine and Early Islamic Near Hast I: Problems in the Literary Source Material (princeton,
NJ., 1992), 107-47, at 113 (personal communication, Walter E. Kaegi, Jr.).
historiographie al myth, ereated during the first few Islamie eenturies, that was
projected baek onto a set of historical events that were much more haphazard,
unplanned, and aecidental than the conquest traditions would have us
believe. lO One is reminded here of the recent revisionist interpretation of the
. Dorian invasions in Greece that views them not as the immigration and
eonquest by a new group, but as a retrospective historiographical myth ereated
to explain the emergenee to prominence in various parts of Greeee of once-
lowly peoples. 11
The question of what mission or eoneepts, if any, mobilized the
eonquests is a vitally important one, but is properly beyond the scope of this
volume, whieh foeuses on the problem of states and their material
infrastrueture in the transition from late antiquity to early Islam. Tactical
centralization, on the other hand, given the prevailing eonditions of the
conquest era, is neither expeeted nor likely to have eharacterized the
eonquests. This only leaves the question of strategie and operational
eentralization, whieh is eentral to the present volume's foeus, so we shall
restrict our remaining eomments to the problem of strategie eentralization in
the early Islamic conquests, taking it for granted for the moment that there
was some kind of coneeptuaI basis underlying the conquest movement, even if
we are not yet sure exaetly how we wish to characterize it. Our foeus here on
strategie eentralization is justified, moreover, beeause most of die interpreters
of the conquests to date have assumed the existenee of motivating eoneepts, but
disagreed sharply on the degree of strategie and operation al centralization.
Just how mueh operational eontrol did the Caliphs have over the events of the
eonquests unfolding throughout the Near East? In what measure were the
10 The most detailed analysis of the historiographical problems of the conquest literature are the
works of Albrecht Noth cited in n. 22, below. Noth is not as skeptical about the basic events
of the conquest as, say, Koren and Nevo are; but Noth has made the clearest statement of the
salvation-historical character of the conquest tradition. It may be, however, that Koren and
Nevo pursue some implications of Noth's ideas, even beyond the point intended by Noth:
Noth's general reconstruction of the events (as opposed to the historiography) of earIy Islamic
history can be found in his chapter "Früher Islam," in Ulrich Haarmann, ed., Geschichte der
arabischen Welt (München: C. H. Beck, 1987), 11-100. On the other hand, even a scholar as
generally traditional in his orientation as Hitti (Histary althe Arabs, 145) pointed out paralieis
between the conquest accounts and Biblical "salvation history."
11 A convenient summary of the various interpretations in this debate, with recent
bibliography, is provided in Jean-Nicolas Corvisier, Aux origines du miracle grec.
Peuplement et population en Grece du Nord (Paris, 1991), 7-16. The dosest parallel is
perhaps the interpretation advanced by Sharon, "The Birth of Islam in the Holy Land."
conquests of various provinees the result of eonscious strategie policies

implemented by the ruling elite, and in what measure were they the
serendipitous eonsequenees of uneontrolled tribaI raiding parties or the aetion
of forees eontrolled by essentially autonomous war leaders, aeting on their
own initiative and for their own purposes, and not for those of the Caliphs and
the naseent Islamie state? It is to a eonsideration of these issues that we must
now turn.
111. Problems of Strategie and Organizational Centralization

The notion that the eonquests displayed a signifieant measure of strategie and
operational eentratization is, as we have seen, erucial to the traditional
interpretations of the conquests. Three different objections have been raised
to this notion. They are the difficulty of eommunications, the ease of 'Amr
ibn al- ' Ä~ and his role in the conquest of Egypt, and - by far the most
eomplex - a general historiographical critique of the eonquest narratives. Let
us look at each in turn.
A. Communications during the Conquests.

The difficulty (real or assumed) of communications in the early
medieval period is sometimes taken as a reason why the conquests eould not
have been, in operational terms, a centralized movement, since strategie and
operational centralization would require the Caliphs to be able to eommunicate
with their commanders with some efficiency. NOth' for example, has argued
that the early Muslims lacked this capacity, stating that it would take 20 days
for messengers to cover the 1000 km separating Medina from the fronts in
Syria and Iraq, so that a single exchange of letters would require forty days'
time and a complex negotiation many months.1 2
It is, however, hardly unreasonable to assume that a fast messenger
eould cover the distanee of 1000 km in less than twenty days. Musil relates
instances in which riders were able to cover 300 km in roughly sixteen hours,
and even more rapid communications can be imagined if we assurne that the
early Muslims maintained a few eourier posts, with fresh riders and fresh, fast
12 Noth, Quellenkritische Studien, 72-80, esp. 72-73; Noth-Conrad, 78-80.

mounts, between Medina and the armies in Iraq or Syria. 13 Such rates would
make it possible for couriers from Syria to reach Medina and bring a reply in
a week or even less, certainly quickly enough to take care of general
operational coordination. Obviously, tight Caliphal control of all details on all
fronts would be out of the question, but broader strategie planning and
operational oversight is not thereby mIed out.
In any case, the communications time-lag faced by the earIy Islamie
state eertainly compares favorably with later colonial ventures such as the
Portuguese or British expansions in the Indian Ocean. Both were carried out
by forces operating on the basis of general orders in an environment where
communieations and news required months to reach horne base in Europe, but
there can be no doubt that the Portuguese colonies in Asia and the British
occupation of India were, in at least strategie terms, sanctioned and in some
measure coordinated from Lisbon and London; they were not, at a~y rate,
"accidental" occupations undertaken by free-wheeling commanders completely
unbeknownst to higher authorities in Europe, however loose the laUer' s day-
to-day knowledge of and control over operations must have been.
Communications limitations demanded that Muslim eommanders in the field
handle many situations that arose as they saw fit, and we may, with Noth, wish
to take a sceptical view of reports of lengthy negotiations between
commanders in the field and Caliphs in Medina arising out of specific loeal
situations during the conquest. But operational coordination of a broadly
conceived strategy for the Islamic conquests by the Caliphs in Medina
certainly seems to have been feasible given the prevailing communieations of
the day.
B. 'Amr ibn al- 'Ä$ and the Conquest 0/ Egypt.

A few of the accounts about the invasion of Egypt by 'Amr ibn al-' Ä~ describe
hirn as having acted entirely on bis own authority, and sorne scholars have
taken these accounts to be vestiges of an archaie Iayer of tradition refIecting
13 Alois Musil, Northern Negd (New York, 1928), 145. Williarn Lancaster of the British
Institute at Amman recounted reports, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, of a
fast camel travelling from Darnascus to al-Jawf in 24 hours - a distance of 600 km. (comment
during Workshop discussions.)
lack of centralized Caliphal coordination of the conquests.l 4 This

interpretation rests on the observation that later Islamic tradition had a
tendency to exaggerate the degree of centralized control enjoyed by the
Caliphs - what we can call the "centralizing bias."15 Given the existence of
this centralizing bias, it is argued, any surviving accounts that show a
commander - in this case, 'Amr ibn al-' Ä~ - acting independently must be
older than the appearance of this centralizing bias, and hence must reflect
more closely the original conditions prevailing in the conquest era.
A closer look at these accounts suggests, however, that they provide
only dubious or ambiguous evidence for a lack of strategie centralization.
The assumption that accounts relating 'Amr's independence of action antedate
the centralizing bias ignores the fact that there were some bistoriographical
circles in late Umayyad times that were glad to paint 'Amr as a villain, 16 and
once the centralizing bias was current, accounts portraying 'Amr as acting on
his own and in defiance of Caliphal authority would be just right for such
vilification. For this reason, the "centralized" versions of the invasion of
Egypt - in which 'Amr invades on 'Umar' s orders, rather than on bis own
authority - may weIl be just as old as, or even older than, the accounts in
wbich he invades Egypt on his own. 17 It is therefore very risky to claim that
these accounts about 'Amr's independence reflect an old tradition based on an
bistorical reality of decentralization.
In any case, even if 'Amr did invade Egypt on bis own, we must still ask
whether 'Amr's presumed independence of action can be taken to reflect a
general lack of strategie or operational centralization. Might it not have been
a partieular case of disobedience, and if so, is it reasonable to take it as
characteristic of the whole conquest movement? Is it not misleading to
generalize from this one example of military autonomy - assuming that it is an
exampIe? For, we find reports of such independence or defiance of Caliphal
authority for no other commander of the early conquest period on any other
front - and there were many of them. The onIy apparent parallel we might
14 The most detailed analysis is again found in Noth, Quellenkritische Studien, 162-64; Noth-
Conrad, 182-84.
15 See below.
16 Erling Ladewig Petersen, 'Ali and Mu'äwiya in Early Arabic Tradition (Odense, 1974 [orig.
1964]), especially 33-34, 45, 48-49, 53-54.
17 I plan to provide a more detailed analysis of the 'Arnr traditions in aseparate study.
point to, the independent raiding of the Iraqi countryside by al-Muthannä ibn
IJäritha and tribesmen of Shaybän, is really quite different from the case of
'Arnr ibn al-'Ä~. For one thing, it is not elear that al-Muthannä, when he
embarked on bis raiding, had any formal relationsbip with the Islamic state; he
appears in many accounts merely to be a local tribai cbieftain who was raiding
an area adjacent to bis traditional tribai territory,18 In this he stands in marked
contrast to 'Arnr, who according to every account had been appointed by the
Caliph to lead an army composed of men drawn from many tribes into
territories far from their own homelands (and certainly distant from 'Amr's
native town, Mecca). Whereas' Arnr may have been an insubordinate agent of
the state, in other words, al-Muthannä was an outsider - albeit one whose
raiding activity, in elose proximity to the campaigns of Khälid ibn al-WalId
into Iraq, was soon co-opted by the Islamic state. 19
An episode from 'Arnr' s later his tory in Egypt also raises doubts about
the cogency of the argument that his invasion of the country reflects his
unbridled autonomy as a military commander. Had 'Arnr in fact acted entirely
on bis own, with no Caliphal approval or control, one might expect that it
would be impossible to dislodge hirn thereafter from the province that was,
after all, in some sense his private conquest. 'Arnr' s dominant röle in ruling
Egypt after its conquest is well-known, of course; yet the Caliph 'Uthmän did
relieve him of his post as governor of Egypt (replacing hirn with his own
foster-brother, 'Abdalläh ibn Sa'd ibn Abi Sarl)). Moreover, 'Uthmän was
apparently able to do so without'undue difficulty - certainly no military force
was needed to make 'Arnr relinquish his position. The fact that 'Arnr
obviously resented the measure, and complained openly about it, makes all the
more significant the fact that the Caliph could replace hirn as viceroy over
Egypt. 20 Indeed, if we wish to find an example of an individual and his
descendants thoroughly entrenched in a province during and immediately
18 On al-Muthannä and bis raiding see EI2, s.v. "al-Muthannä b. Bäritha" (F. M. Donner);
Donner, Early Islamic Conquests, 181; idem, "The Bakr b. Wä'il Tribes and Politics in
Northeastem Arabia on the Eve of Islam," Studia Islamica 51 (1980),30,34-35.
19 There do exist accounts in which al-Muthannä is said to have come to Medina before
engaging in any raiding in order to seek the caliph's permission to do so. In this case,
however, I suspect that such accounts may be later creations reflecting the topos of
centralization.
20 A convenient overview of the events is provided in EI2, s.v. "'Amr b. al-'Ä~" CA J.
Wensinck).
following the Islamic conquests, the best example is probably that of Syria -
conquered, according to traditional sourees, by several armies, one of whieh
was led by the Umayyad YazId ibn AbI Sufyän, who beeame its first governor;
and governed, after YazId's death, by his younger brother Mu'äwiya.
However, the implieations of the Umayyads' long tenure of this governorship
for the question of eentral authority and loeal autonomy are clouded by the
fact that the Caliph 'Uthmän (r. 644-56 C.E.) was also an Umayyad, and henee
not inclined to challenge Mu'äwiya'grip on Syria as he had challenged 'Amr's
control of Egypt, since he relied so heavily on his kinsman 's support.
C. The General Historiographical Critique.

Another challenge to the centralization thesis rests predominantly on
historiographical arguments and analysis. It has long been argued that the
traditional Islamic sources present avision of early Islamic history, including
the early conquests, that is idealized and shaped to fit later dogmatie needs. 2l
The conquest narratives in partieular have been made the subject of detailed
analysis by Albrecht Noth.2 2 Noth has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt
that many narrative sourees for ear]y Islamic history are imbued with a
marked tendency to present events - especia11y the events of the conquest - as
centrally planned and regulated. 23 Even a eursory review of the traditional
accounts about the Islamic conquests provides one with examples that eonfirm
21 This view goes at least as far back as Ignaz Goldziher; see his Muhammedanische Studien 2
(Halle, 1890),5 [= Muslim Studies, 2 (transl. by S. M. Stern, London, 1971), 19].
22 Especially his monograph Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen, und Tendenzen
frühislamischen Geschichtsüberliejerung. Teil I: Themen und Formen. (Bonn, 1973) (=The
Early Arabic Historical Tradition: a Source-Critical Study. Second edition in collaboration with
Lawrence I. Conrad. Translated by Michael Bonner, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam
2, Princeton, 1994) (cited as "Noth-Conrad"). See also Noth's articles "Der Charakter der
ersten großen Sammlungen von Nachrichten," Der Islam 47 (1971), 168-199; "Isfahän-
Nihäwand. Eine quellenkritische Studie zur flÜhislamischen Historiographie," ZDMG 118
(1968),274-96; ''Zum Verhältnis von Kalifater Zentralgewalt und Provinzen in Umayyadischer
Zeit. Die "Sullf'- '''Anwa''-Traditionen für Ägypten und den Irl!.q," Die Welt des Islams 14
(1973), 150-62; "Die literarisch überlieferten Verträge der Eroberungszeit als historische
Quellen für die Behandlung der unterworfenen Nicht-Muslims durch ihre neuen muslimischen
Oberherrn," in Tilman Nagel et al., Studien zum Minderheitenproblem im Islam I (Bonn,
1973), 282-314.
23 The most explicit formulation is in Noth, "Der Charakter der ersten großen Sammlungen
von Nachrichten." His Quellenkritische Studienis based on the assumption that the traditional
sources exaggerate the degree of centralization. Cf. Noth, Quellenkritische Studien, 53-54, 57,
75-76, 174-181; Noth-Conrad 56-57, 61, 81-82,196-204.
the existence of this centralizing bias. Let us seleet one example at random by
way of illustration - a relatively lengthy account coming via Ibn Isl;täq (d. 151
A.H.), allegedly on the ultimate authority of an eyewitness to the early Islarnic
campaigns in Egypt under the eommand of 'Amr ibn al- 'Ä~.24 This account
relates how 'Amr's forees eonquered villages surrounding Alexandria and
describes 'Amr' s negotiations with the "master" of Alexandria25 to establish
the terms aeeording to which the eity was brought under Muslim rule. It
contains, however, many Wnts that it is a composition of relatively late date
and of Egyptian origin. For example, the "master" of Alexandria addresses
the Muslims using terms that refleet a sharp conceptual opposition between
Muslims and Christians, and between Arabs on the one hand and Byzantines
and Persians on the other: "I used to pay the jizya to parties who were more
odious to me than you are, oh company of Arabs - to Persia and Byzantium."
Such sharp distinctions along these lines seem more likely to hail from the
eontext of second-eentury A.H. Islamic juristie usage, however, rather than
from the mouth of a non-Muslim figure of the early seventh eentury. The
same ean be said of the account's systematic understanding of jizya to mean a
head tax, which accords with later juristic usage but not with what
documentary sources reveal about the first Islamic century.2 6 This is
reinforced by the account's depiction of Egyptian captives being given their
free choice to embrace Islam or to remain Christi an and pay jizya - thus
justifying colleetion of jizya by the state not on grounds of mere conquest, but
on grounds of the personal choice of those subjected to the tax. Likewise, the
aecount's pronouneed emphasis on establishing the tax status of the conquered
districts via what has come to be known as "$ullJ- 'anwa" traditions is certainly
24 The account is in al-rabari, Ta'rikh al-rusul wa-l-mulük, ed. M. 1. de Goeje et al. (Leiden,
1879-1901) I, 2581-84 (isnäd: Ibn lJumayd - Salama - Ibn Isl).äq - al-Qäsim ibn Quzmän, a
man ofEgypt- Ziyäd ibn Jaz' al-ZubaydI).
25 $äbib al-Iskandariya. It is not clear who this "master" was; perhaps the Coptic bishop of
Alexandria, or the Byzantine official known as the praefectus augustalis, the effective civil ruler
of Byzantine Egypt?
26 On theconfused tax practices in early Islamic Egypt, see Daniel C. Dennett, Jr., Conversion
and the Poil Tax in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA, 1950), 65-115; J0rgen Brek Simonsen',
Studies in the Genesis and Early Developmentofthe Caliphal Taxation System (Copenhagen,
1988), 79-131; Kosei Morimoto, The Fiscal Administration 0/ Egypt in the Early Islamic
Period (Kyoto, 1981).
the product of later juristic thought. 27 Finally, the account presents all
decisions, even relatively minor ones, as having been referred back to the
Caliph. As' Amr is made to say when the "master" of Alexandria contacts hirn
with an offer to pay jizya if 'Amr returns captives already taken from
Alexandria's territory, "Behind me is a cornmander [amfr] without whose
perrnission I cannot do anything." So the "master" of Alexandria and 'Amr
agree to a cease-fire until a messenger can be sent to the Caliph and his
response received. The Caliph's reply, when it comes, betrays too many later
legal concems of the kind mentioned above, and too much awareness of the
later history of the Muslim community, to be plausible as an authentic
document of the conquest period.
We would have to be credulous indeed to take at face value this account,
which appears to be not, in fact, an eyewitness report dating from the conquest
period but a working-through of later fiscal and religious concems within the
Islamic juristic tradition, fitted into the context of some very general
understandings or cornmonly accepted notions of what had happened during
the conquest period. In other words, some widely known fact, such as that
'Amr ibn al-' Äl) had led the Muslim conquerors into Egypt, was utilized to
provide a plausible framework on which to hang material that ground the late
first and early second-century jurists' axes. Accounts of this kind, which
abound in the narrative literature about the conquests, do seem to me to be
best explained as products of later legal thought, and they fit very weIl into
Noth's picture of the workings of an historiographical "topos of
centralization."
While accepting the existence of a centralizing bias, however, we should
not allow ourselves unwittingly to adopt an "all-or-nothing" attitude about
centralization. That is, the existence of the later centralizing bias does not
necessarily mean that the conquests themselves displayed no centralization; to
argue thus is to fall into the trap of seeing centralization as a simple binary
polarity. Rather, we should consider the possibility that what the centralizing
bias does is to exaggerate the degree of centralization during the conquests,
and to exaggerate it perhaps in specific arenas only and not in others. It seems
27 On $ull)- 'anwa traditions, see Werner Schmucker, Untersuchungen zu einigen wichtigen

Bodenrechtlichen Konsequenzen der islamischen Eroberungsbewegung (Bonn, 1972); Noth,
art. cit., n. 22.
clear, for example, that the centralizing bias is very prominent in the arena of
tax arrangements, where, as we have seen from the example just given, the
first Caliphs and their commanders are portrayed as imposing systematic
taxation regimes on conquered areas in a way that is belied by surviving
documentation. Whether the accounts about other aspects of the conquests are
so thoroughly affected by the centralizing bias, however, remains to be
considered. In the remainder of this section, therefore, we shall examine
briefly a number of different kinds of accounts that, like accounts about
taxation, have a bearing on the question of strategie centralization and the
range of validity of this centralizing bias.
One obvious indicator of a measure of centralized operational control of
the conquests is coordination by the Caliphs of activities on different fronts.
The traditional sources provide us with many examples of such coordination:
Khälid ibn al-WalId's march from Iraq to Syria, the veterans of Yarmük
joining the Muslim forces at al-Qädislya in Iraq, the troops of southern Iraq
marching north to join their fellows at al-Qädislya,28 or the veterans of Syria
being sent to northern Syria and the Jazlra. 29 Related to these are many
ac counts that portray the Caliphs sending reinforcements or supplies to
various commanders or fronts. For example, some ac counts say that the
Caliph 'Umar reinforced 'Amr shortly after he entered Egypt by dispatching a
supporting force under al-Zubayr ibn al-' Awwäm. 30 Others describe the
Caliph 'Uthmlin arranging for reinforcements to go to Armenia from both
Syria and Iraq in responsevto arequest from the military commander in
Armenia, Uablb ibn Maslama al-FihrI. 31 Similarly, the Caliph 'Umar is said
to have sent sheep and camels from the Uijäz to provision the Muslims at al-
28 On these, see respectively Donner, Early lslamic Conquests, 119-27, 207 and nn. 193 and
194 to chapter 4 (with many references), and 339 and n. 195 to chapter 4.
29 Recently noted in Walter E. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early lslamic Conquests (Cambridge,
1992), 149, with references to the main sourees.
30 Al-Tabm, I, 2084 (isnäd: Sayf - Abü 'Uthmän Yazld ibn Asld al-GhassänI - Khälid ibn
Ma 'dän and 'Ubäda ibn Nusayy); Ibn 'Asäkir, Ta 'rfkh madfnat Dimashq, photographie
reproduction of ZähirIya library manuscripts (' Ammlül, ca. 1988), xm, 514, lines 9ff. (isnäd:
KhalIfa - al-Walid ibn Hishäm al-'Ajrami - his father - his grandfather, and 'Abdalläh ibn al-
Mughlra - his father and others).
31 On this episode see Najda Khammäsh, Al-Shämji $adr al-isllim (Damascus, 1987), 197-
98.
Qädislya in Iraq.3 2 Careful study of these and many other similar traditions is
needed to decide whether they represent a tendency to exaggerate the degree
of coordination analogous to the centralizing bias, and intended precisely to
convey the false impression that there was some co ordination among different
fronts, or whether they reflect, in some degree, the actual conditions of the
conquest period.3 3 If Caliphal coordination and reinforcement can be
demonstrated, it would certainly support the notion of strategie and
operational centralization of the conquests.
Another phenomenon bearing on the question of centralization is the
degree to which the Caliphs were able to remove military commanders from
their posts and to replace them with new candidates of their own choice. The
traditional sources for the conquest period describe how the Caliphs changed
commander or govemor in a province with, sometimes, marked frequency.
Related to this is the replacement of commanders lost in battle (as in the ca se
of Abü 'Ubayd al-Thaqafi at the Battle of the Bridge in Iraq) or lost to
disease (as in the case of the 'Amwäs plague»)4 Frequent or regular disnrlssal
of established commanders must be considered an indication of a significant
measure of centralized administrative control; at any rate, it argues against
commanders and govemors being so entrenched that they could effectively
resist dismissal. Moreover, we have no record of any govemor or commander
before the outbreak of the first civil war in 656 C.E. who resisted dismissal
and rebelled against the Caliphs in Medina. There are accounts of Khälid ibn
al-WalId grumbling about bis dismissal by 'Umar, and similarly 'Arnr ibn al-
'Ä~ about bis dismissal by 'Uthmän, but their opposition seems to have been
verbal only.3 5
32 Al-Balädhun, FutülJ al-buldän, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1866),255 (isnäd: al-WäqidI).

Huge quantities of camel bones were discovered in archaeological strata datable to the conquest
period at al-Rabadha in Saudi Arabia, presumably the result of large-scale slaughtering (Dr.
Geoffrey King, personal communication). It is tempting to take this as evidence of a staging-
point or supply-base for the early Islamic armies, but confirmation of this interpretation must
await full publication of this material.
33 Noth, Quellenkritische Studien, 114-15; Noth-Conrad 123-29, considers such accounts
briefly, but is inconclusive regarding their significance.
34 On AM 'Ubayd and his successors, see Donner, Early Islamic Conquests, 195-96 and 202.
On the 'Amwäs plague and the replacement of YazId ibn AbI Sufyän by his brother Mu 'äwiya,
see al-BalMhun, FutülJ, 139-41.
35 On'Khalid, see al-Taban, Ta'rzkh, 1,2147-48 (Sayf); 2148-49 (Ibn Isl)äq); 2149-50 (Ibn
Isl)äq). Like many of al-TabarI's accounts about Khälid, these have something of the character
of moralizing tales. On 'Amr, see above, n. 20.
Similarly, there exist aeeounts that deseribe the Caliphs exercising some
measure of restraint on the ambitions of govemors, commanders, and their
troops. Mu'äwiya, or example, as govemor or Syria, petitioned 'Umar to let
him make raids by sea, but the Caliph resisted this suggestion for some time
and refused to permit naval raids against, among other targets, Cyprus.3 6
'Umar is said to have ordered Sa'd ibn AbI Waqqä~ move his camp back to a
site west of the Euphrates, rather than where he had stationed himself near the
old Sasanian eapital of al-Madä'in in the Iraqi alluvium, whieh might have
been a more natural administrative Ioeation.3 7 Numerous aeeounts tell of the
Caliphs instrueting tribai groups moving to the front not to settle in one place
but rather to head for another about whieh they were less enthusiastie.38
Many ae counts deseribe how the eommanders of the earIy eonquest
armies forwarded a fifth of the booty to the Caliph in Medina, but these
aeeounts may, in fact, belong to the eomplex of aecounts relating to taxation
growing out of the eentralizing bias. However, only an extensive
historiographical analysis of these numerous aceounts ean help us to
understand their real date and provenanee, and henee give us some idea of
their reliability as evidenee for the eonquest period.3 9
On the other hand, G.-R. Puin has examined aeeounts describing the
ereation by the Caliph 'Umar of various dfwän or pay-register,40 which
distributed the booty among various eategories of recipients, including
especially the soldiers on aetive duty. The existenee of this institution suggests
some measure of administrat1ve eentralization and regulation closely tied to
the military activities of the eonquerors. It seems unreasonable to suppose that
the same authorities who established a regular pay-system for troops in their
armies would simultaneously be unconeemed with where those armies went or
what they did in the field.
We mayaiso find some evidenee for operational centralization in the
way the military institutions of the first Muslims are said, by the traditional
36 E.g., al-Balädhun, Futü/:l, 152-53; Khammäsh, Al-Shäm, 201-202.

31 See several accounts in al-Tabm, Ta 'rfkh, I, 2482-85.
38 E.g., ibid., I, 2183 (Sayf) and 2185-87 (Sayf and al-Sha'bi), on BajIla being sent to lraq
ratherthan to Syria; 2187-88 (Sayf), similarly with Azd and Kinana
39 Such an analysis would be sufficient for a book and is far beyond the scope of !his paper.
40 Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, Der Dfwän von 'Umar ibn al-Ifa.lJäb. Ein Beitrag zur frühislamischtm
Verwaltungsgeschichte (Diss. Bonn, 1970); see also Kennedy's paper in this volume.
sources, to have evolved. Various organizational and technical features would

suggest that the early conquest campaigns were, in fact, parts of a centrally
coordinated conquest movement, rather than isolated raids carried out by
unrelated parties. These inc1ude (1) evidence that the campaigns of conquest
were much larger in scale and duration than usual tribaI raiding; (2) evidence
that, unlike tribaI raids, the conquest campaigns were not limited to c1early
defined military objectives, but rather had an open-ended quality; (3) evidence
that the military techniques employed by the forces were more elaborate, or
required a greater level of skill or training, than the usual tribaI raiding
displayed; and (4) evidence that the forces involved were not simply tribai
war-parties led by a tribaI chiefs, but were to some extent organized in ways
that transcended tribaI ties. The first two items are clearly depicted in the
traditional sources and need not detain us further here; the third, on the other
hand, while potentially important, is difficult to examine adequately because
our evidence for military technology and field organization of the early
Islamic armies is sparse and often quite problematic. 41 This leaves for us to
examine evidence for the organization of the early Muslim armies in ways that
were independent of, or that transcended, tribaI affiliation.
Many of the Prophet's military campaigns do not seem to have been
organizationally more sophisticated than the small tribai raiding parties of
pre-Islamic Arabia. 42 By the time the Muslims embarked on the invasion of
Syria and Iraq, on the other hand, we are - if we can believe the traditional
narrative sources at all - no longer dealing with the usual tribaI raids, but with
much targer and more elaborate undertakings. It is, of course, possible to
argue that these large armies 43 were simply agglomerations of large tribaI
41 The valiant effort to refine our understanding of conquest-era military phenomena made by
Jandora in The Marchfrom Medina is noteworthy, but it seems to me that at many turns his
presentation relies more on extrapolation of what he feels "should" or "must" have been the
case, based on later Arabian or other military paralleis, than it does on deduction from solid
historical evidence.
42 On this see Ella Landau-Tasseron, "Features of the Pre-Conquest Muslim Armies," chapter
6 above.
43 Large relative to what was familiar in the Arabian context, at least; as I have noted
elsewhere, the armies were actually quite modest in size, the largest apparently being that at the
Yarmük in Syria (20,000-40,000 men); the army at al-Qlidisiya in Iraq probably numbered
only between 6,000 and 12,000 men. See Donner, Early lslamic Conquests, 133, 135, 140,
142 (different figures for the Yarmük); 205-209 (Qädislya); 221. Cf. Jandora's estimates of
36,000 and 10,000 respectively, although he does not detail how he reaches these figures from
the conflicting numbers given in the sourees; Jandora, March from Medina, 68 and 62.
units ted by their own tribaI chiefs, who simpty served under the overall
command of the Muslim general staff; we read frequently, for example, of
large groups from one particular tribe or other fighting in various battles,
apparently as tribaI contingents,44 and the reports about the settlement of the
garrison-town of al-Küfa in Iraq tell of tribaI groups being assigned particular
quarters or streets, where they resided together. 45 But there is also some
evidence of military arrangements that cut across tribaI lines, or measures that
harnessed the solidarity of tribaI groups in ways that benefited the state. Some
military arrangements that may have cut across tri bai lines were the
organization of troops into ranks ($ufüj) by weaponry Carchers, lancers, etc.)
and references to (still obseure) organizational or tactical units such as the
"tens" Ca 'shiir), karädfs, katä'ib, etc. 46 Moreover, the Islamic state seems to
have tumed to its own advantage the authority of tribai chiefs over their
kinsmen by securing the loyalty of such chiefs through special payments,
grants of lands, and the like.47 The Caliphs could also channel various
administrative arrangements through the tribes, such as relying on a figure
known as the 'arTf in each tribe to dis tribute payments ('a,tä') to the solmers
belonging to that tribe. 48
As we saw at the beginning of this sec ti on, the centralizing tendency of
the Islamic narrative sources is very palpable in many reports about tax
arrangements supposedly made during the conquests. It is not nearly so dear,
however, that in the many other arenas just surveyed the narrative material is
exaggerated by, or even influ~nced by, the centralizing bias. Decisive
definition of the exact range of applicability of the centralizing bias must await
44 See the evidence for this compiled in Donner, Early Islamic Conquests, 223 , and
Khammiish, Al-Shäm, 264-65, 356-57.
45 Donner, Early Islamic Conquests, 228-29 and 234-36. The basic references are al-Taban,
Ta'rikh, 1,2488-90 and 2495 (both related by Sayf ibn 'Umar); on this slender base of
evidenee rest the various reconstructions of early al-Küfa, including the book of Hichem Djai't.
Al-Kufa: naissance de la viUe islamique (Paris. 1986). .
46 On these arrangements and units see Donner. Early Islamic Conquests. 223-26; Jandora.
MarchjromMedina, 113-16; Khamm~sh. Al-Shäm, 359-61.
47 On the use of such blandishments by the Islamic state of the conquest era, sec Donner, Early
Islamic Conquests, 255-63. Note also al-Tabm, Ta 'rikh, I, 2187-88 (Sayf). in which the Ujbal
leader of Azd has to persuade bis tribesmen to go to Iraq, as the caliph requested, rather than 10
Syria, where they wished to go; clearly the tribal chiefs' stature among their followers was an
important resouree used by the caliphs to maintain control of the tribesmen.
48 On the 'iräja (office of the 'ari!> and registration of troops by tribe see Donner, Earl)' l.rlamic
Conquests. 237-39; Khammäsh, AI-Shäm. 264-65, 356-58.
a much fuller historiographical analysis of the accounts in each of these

arenas, a massive undertaking that is far beyond the scope of this essay.
Nevertheless, the various lines of evidence summarized above tentatively
suggest that even allowing for some exaggeration due to centralizing bias, the
strategie centralization of the early Islamic conquests is not merely an
historiographical will-o' -the-wisp. It is true that reports of Caliphal control
of all tactieal details and accounts of systematie tax arrangements are
exaggerated in the Islamic sourees, but it nonetheless remains plausible to me
to assume that the Caliphs enjoyed a good measure of influence and control
over the conquests, both in setting general policy and in ensuring that it was
implemented along lines agreeable to them.
There remains one final , general point about strategie and operation al
centralization to be made here. Strategie and operational centralization is
essentia11y a question of relations between the central authorities an~ the first
order of subordinates - generals in the field, in a military situation such as the
conquests, or governors after the absorption of newly conquered territories
into the state's domains. We can propose, as a general organizational principle,
that the degree to which commanders in the field can be entrusted by the
central authorities with implementing broad policy objectives is directIy
proportional to the degree to which the rulers and their subordinates
constituted a coherent and homogeneous group. In thinking about the early
Islarnic conquests, it is important to remember that the elite of the new Islamic
state was bound together by common values and expectations. According to
the traditional Islarnic sourees, at least, the early Islarnic ruling elite, whose
members all hailed from the main towns of western Arabia - Mecca, Medina,
and al-Tä'if - was a small group of men, almost a11 personally we11-known to
one another. All had embraced Islam and had shared certain formative
experiences (notably, helping the prophet Mubammad create the nascent
Islamic state in Medina, and spreading its hegemony during the Prophet' s last
years and during the wars of the ridda).They were not all from the same tribe
(though many were blood relatives or became linked by marriage), so we are
not dealing mainly with a long-distance network of kinship ties; but all were,
to a significant degree, shaped by their sirnilar origins, common history, and
common comrnitrnents. This is not to say that they a11 had exactly the same
objectives as individuals, but at leastthe commanders in the field would have
known what measures and behaviour would be acceptable to the Caliphs in
Medina. The implication of this is that the Caliphs might weIl have been able
to content themselves with giving their commanders only general poliey
guidelines and objectives, secure in the knowledge that they would implement
them on their respective fronts in a manner acceptable to the whole ruling
group eolleetively. The existenee of this kind of group cohesion and
homogeneity both increased the reality of general strategie coordination, and
reduced the need for elose surveillanee of subordinates by the Caliphs (and for
the administrative instruments needed to carry out such surveillance).49
IV. Conclusions
%ile we must acknowledge that the Islamie historiographical tradition
has presented the eonquest era in an overly eentralized manner in some areas,
such as taxation, I betieve that the traditional view that the conquests displayed
both eonceptual and strategic-operational centralization or unity retains an
explanatory power superior to revisionist alternatives - partieularly 'what I
have termed the accidental thesis. The accidental thesis - aecording to which
the Arabs "found" themselves in possession of vast domains that, as an
afterthought, they stitehed together into an empire - leave too manY important
questions unanswered. How and why did they get there? Why was the military
opposition of the established empires so ineffeetual? How did the invaders
manage to penetrate not only the Iraqi and Syrian fringes of the Arabian
desert, but also deep into Iran, Egypt, and even across the sea? Why was the
liijäz, of all plaees, chosen as"the ideological centre for these people who,
aeeording to the revisionists, had no particular conceptual focus and who,
when they first emerge indisputably into the light of historical documentation,
are ruUng from Syria? Why, if the empire was later pieced together from
smaller pieces originally eonquered by different, unrelated groups, is there
tittle or no record of the fighting among these different groups that must have
attended the unification?50 If we assurne, with some proponents of the
49 This point is made for the Roman republic by Arthur M. Eckstein, Senate and General.
Individual Decision Making and Roman Foreign Relations, 264-194 RC (Berkeley, 1987),
322-324. The main thrust of Eckstein's book, however, is that the actions of Roman generals
played a significant - but not unlimited - röle in shaping Roman policy, tempering the theory
advanced by others (esp. Mommsen) that during the Republic the Senate tightly controlled
foreign policy.
50 Consider by way of comparison, for example, the history of the same region under the
successors of Alexander, who though bound to one another by the shared experience 01' long
accidental thesis, that the conquests were "really" at the outset a hodge-podge
of local, uncoordinated raids by a variety of warlike "Arab tribesmen" with
no connection to one another, how do we explain the fact that when the dust
setdes most govemors, commanders, and rulers hailed from the llijazI towns
of Mecca, Medina and al-Ta'if, which were not among the Arabian groups
most renowned for their martial valour? These are the kinds of questions that
the revisionist interpretations do not address, much less answer, but for which
the tradition al interpretation, even when subjected to much-needed
modifications, offers perfectly plausible explanations.
campaigning, 8elVice with the conquering hero, and powerful cultural chauvinism, immediately
began fighting one another upon Alexander!s death and spent the next few 'centuries fighting
each other. Yet the proponents of the accidental thesis ask us to believe that most of the Arab
chieftains who had somehow established themselves in the NearEast in the early seventh
century quietly put aside their own ambitions and rallied mund the Umayyads.
18
THE CONQUEST OF KHUZISTÄN:
A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REASSESSMENT
Chase F. Robinson
In 1889 Ignazio Guidi edited an East Syrian chronicle that covers the late
Sasanian and very early Islamic period. 1 Four years later Theodor Nöldeke
translated the text into German, dated it to the late seventh century, and
argued that its provenance was southern, rather than northern Iraq.2 Nöldeke's
arguments were accepted, and the text came to be ca lied the Khüzistiin
Chronicle, which now seems to be the preferred designation in the secondary
literature. 3 Litde more was said about the text until 1982, 4 when Pierre Nautin
argued more vigorously for an idea floating around since Nöldeke's day, viz.
that the text consisted of two unequal parts, the second of which was made
up ofwhat Nöldeke called 'notes' (Aujzeichnungen).5 More specifically, Nautin
proposed that at least two hands fashioned the work: first a chronicler, who
he suggested was Elias of Merv (tL 7th century);6 and second, at least one (and
perhaps more) redactorjcopyist(s), who added a grab-bag collection of material
onto the chronic\e, wh ich had already lost its beginning; this coIIection Nautin
caIIed an 'appendix'. 7 Now whether Elias is to be credited with the first,
• Versions of this paper were delivered at the Washington meeting of the Middle East Studies
Association in December 1995, and at the Near and Middle Eastem History Seminar at the
School of Oriental and African Studies in February 1996. 1 am indebted to those who listened
and responded. 1 am also grateful to Sebastian Brock, Lawrence I. Conrad, and Patricia Crone,
who read and criticized drafts. For several years this articie has been described as 'forthcoming'
in L. L Conrad, History and historiography in early Islamic limes, from which it was reluctantly
withdrawn. The author regrets any confusion that may resul~. Abbreviations for periodical and
other titles are given as fallows: AIEO: Annales de /'Institut d'Etudes Orientales; BF: Byzantinische
Forschungen; BGA: Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum; BMGS: Byzantine {//ld Modern Greek
Studies; CSCO: Corpus Scriptorwll Christianorum Orientalium; JJS: Journal 0/ Jewish Studies;
JSS: Journal 0/ Semitic Studies; OCP: OrientaUa Christü//la Periodica; PdO: Parole de /'Orient;
PEQ: Palestine Exploration Quarterly; RHR: Revue de l'histoire des religions; WI: Die Welt
des Islams.
1 'Un nuovo testo siriaco sulla storia degli ultimi Sassanidi', Actes du huitii!1ne Congres
intenUltional des Orientalistes (Leiden: E. J, BrilI, 1891), Semitics Section, Part B, 1-36. All
citations here are to Guidi's post-Nöldeke edition, Chrollicon allonymum, in Chronica }Jinora
(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1903; CSCO 1-2, Scr. syri 1-2), I, 15-39 (Syriac text); II, 15-32
(Latin trans.).
2Theodor Nöldeke, 'Die von Guidi herausgegebene syrische Chronik übersetzt und
commentiert', Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Classe,
128 (1893), 1-48,
3 It is also occasionally referred to as the 'Anonymous Nestorian Chronic1e'; see
Sebastian p, Brock, 'Syriac historieal writing: a survey of the main sourees' , Journal o/Ihe Iraqi
Academy (Syriac Corporation) 5 (1979-80), 25/302; idem, 'Syriac sources for seventh-century
history', BMGS 2 (1976), 23-4; Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: the making 0/ the
Islamic world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), index of sourees, s,v. 'Khuzistan"i
Chronicle'; Ignatius Ortiz de Urbina, Patrologia syriaca (Rome: Pont. Instituturn Orientalium
Studiorum, 1965), 206-07; J.-B. Chabot, Litterature syriaque (Paris: Librairie Bloud et Gay,
1934), 103; Anton Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur, 2nd ed, (Bonn: A. Marcus und
E, Webers, 1922), 207; Michael Morony, lraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 563, The Haddad edition (noted by Brock, 'Syriac historical writing',
25/302) is unavailable to me, but none of the Ms. variants listed by Brock elsewhere ('Notes on
some texts in the Mingana Collection', JSS 14 [1969],221) improves on Guidi's (and Nöldeke's)
readings,
4 With perhaps one exception: Fiey's tentative suggestion that either DlIniel bar Mariam or
Mikha ofBet Garme wl!s 'la source ecc1esiastique'. See Jean Maurice Fiey, 'ISö'yaw le Grand: vie
du catholicos nestarien BÖ'yaw III d'Adiabene (580-659)" OCP 36 (1970), 46 n. 3.
'Nö1deke, 'Chronik', 2. He also speaks of'der wenigstens zwei Generationen später schreibende
Redactor' (ibid., 20 n. 3).
6 On Elias, see Baumstark, Literatur, 208; Chabot, Litterature, 102. ,
7 Pierre Nautin, 'L'auteur de la "Chronique Anonyme de Guidi": Elie de Merw', RHR 199
(1982),303-14.
THE CONQUEST Of KHÜZISTAN 15
chronicle, section of the work is not at all clear, but Nautin was certainly
correct to emphasize the eontrast between this part and what folIows; if any-
thing pulls the heterogcneous material together here, it is no longer chronology,
but rather an enthusiasm for geography.8
For the date of the composition of the chronicle, Nautin argued for a
terminus unte (juem of 657 or 658, the date of Ishö'yab III's death;9 he did not
date the 'appendix', but much of the evidence cited by Nöldeke to date what
he called a 'letzten Verfassers' would now apply, apparent allusions to the
conquest of Africa and the failed siege of Constantinople taking us to c. 680. 10
Nöldeke's argument naturally turns on his understanding of these allusions,
and in fact there are grounds for arguing that Nautin's 'appendix' was com-
piled even earlier, perhaps very soon after the completion of the chronicle. For
there are no unambiguous references to events in the 660s and 670s: thus, what
Nöldeke took to be an allusion to the famous siege of Constantinople of the
late 670s ('Over Constantinople He has not yet given them contro!') may
rather allude to obseure events in the 650sY But for OUf purposes it matters
little if Nautin's 'appendix' had been eompiled by 660, 670, or 680, and I
shall stick with Nöldeke's more conservative dating. 12 The material may have
been compiled earlier; there is no reason to think that it was compiled later.
In terms of form and provenance, the 'appendix' is eomposed of aseries
of discrete aecounts, already written in character,13 and perhaps even more
clearly than the ehronicle, it rellects local knowledge. It is true that similarities
to material that appears in Monophysite sources suggest that at least some of
our text's information about Syria came from a Syrian-Byzantine milieu;14
but there is precious little of this, and what does eome from the West is vague
in the extreme: there is no doubt that Syria and Egypt were distant places.
Here it is particularly important to note that unlike much of the later Christian
tradition that betrays the influence of recognizably Islamic historiographical
eoncerns,15 the 'appendix'-here Iike the chronicle-shows no reliance on the
Islamic historieal tradition. Entirely absent are features such as Arabic loan
words (e.g. rasülä,fetnä),16 hijrT dating, 17 and interests that reflect a specifically
Islamic Sitz im Leben (e.g. Arabian genealogy).18 Meanwhile, the names of
8 It indudes, inter ,,!ia, an account of one of Elias' mirades, the foundation of several cities
(see Nautin, 'L'auteur', 307-08), the conquest reports discussed here, Heraclius' death, and some
Arabian topography. _
9 Nautin, 'L'auteur', 311; Fiey ('Isö'yaw le Grand') puts his death in the year 659.
10 'Chronik', 2-3.
11 As argued by Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as orhers S(/IV it: a study of the use of non-
Muslim sourees for early I slamic hislOry (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1996), 185 n. 41.
12 The text's silence may suggest a date earlier than Nöldeke's: it mayaiso reflect the compiler's
project, since he makes no attempt to be thorough or comprehensive, and is apparently concerned
to cobble together the stray piece of information that appeals to his interest in geography.
13 See Nöldeke, 'Chronik', 2.
14 See below, n. 205.
15 See, for example, Lawrence I. Conrad, 'Theophanes and the Arabic historical tradition:
some indications of intercultural transmission', BF 15 (1990), 1-44.
16 See the examples adduced in Andrew Palmer, The seventh century in the West-Syrian
cltronicles (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993),49 n. 162,56 n. 173 (rasül); and see also
the ZlIqnin Chronicle, IV, ed. and trans. J.-B. ,Chabot under the erroneous title of Cltronique de
Den!,s de Tell Ma(tre, qllatrieme partie (Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1895), AG 967 (fetna).
7 Such as that in the (West Syrian) Chronicle of 1234: see Jean Maurice Fiey's introduction
to the French translation of the second volume, Anonymi auctoris ehronicon ad annum Christi
1234 pertinens, II (Louvain: Secn!tariat du CorpusSCO, 1974: CSCO 354, Sero syri 154), x; also
in the East Syrian Opus ehronologicum by Elijah of Nisibis (wr. 410/1019), ed. E. W. Brooks
(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1910), 134, where Abü Müsä al-Ash'an (whose name is given in full)
is said to have conquered Bet Huzäye in All 22.
18 Such as we have in Theophanes Cd. 818): noted by Fred M. Donner, The Early [slam!c
conquests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 144. The matter is discussed fUlly in
Conrad, 'Theophanes', 11-16.
16 CHASE F. ROBINSON
Abu Musa [al-Ash'arT], Khalid [ibn al-Wand], and Sa'd ibn [AbT] Waqqä~
appear in fragmentary form, the Persian general Hormizdän is called 'the
Mede', and such details as do exist-particularly the names and offices oflocal
church notables-are as hard to reconcile with Islamic historiographical
concerns as they are natural in a local Nestorian Christian milieu.
It is in the midst of the broadly heterogeneous material in the 'appendix'
that the reader comes across the subject of this article: a vivid and detailed
account of the conquest of Bet Huzäye (Ar. Khuzistän/al-Ahwäz). Although
the Khüzistän Chronicle has been read several times with an eye towards
discerning a Christian reaction to early Islam in general,19 it has not yet been
brought to bear systematically on any of the vexing historical and historio-
graphical problems that plague students of the conquests. Of course, Nöldeke
did address some of these problems in his translation, but his marginalia are
spotty and now show their age;20 in any case, he apparently sought only to
elucidate the recently available Syriac text. The source has also been put to
use in a summary of the campaigns of Khälid ibn al-WalId, 21 but there its
significance lay in its silence ab out Khälid's presence in Iraq, rather than in
what it does say about the Muslim presence in Khiizistän. As far as the
conquest is concerned, Islamicists from Wellhausen to Caetani to Donner have
relied instead on the Arabic sources, and these being generally so intractable,
and Islamicists generally so conservative, scholarship has hardly moved at
all. 22 In fact, inasmuch as it has moved, our knowledge has contracted; and it
is impossible to find fault with Donner's sensible view that we now must be
content with 'a sequence of events and with the general understanding that
the conquest of southern Iraq took place between AD 635 and 642. To seek
greater chronological precision is to demand more of the sources than they
can reasonably be expected to provide'. 23
To break the logjam we must leave the Islamic tradition. In what follows
I shall do so, putting the long-neglected Syriac text to work by translating and
commenting on its description of how several cities in Khiizistän fell to the
Arabs. 24 My interests are primarily historiographieal, and thoroughly con-
ventional at that: I am concerned with the old-fashioned-if still unresolved-
question of how faithfully our Islamic sources record conquest history. Of
course it is impossible to know if the events described by our anonymous
Syriac author actually took place as he describes them. We cannot pretend
that literary representation, particularly ofthis variety, is a disinterested witness
to events past,25 and early sources are not necessarily more accurate than later
,0 See, for example, Claude Cahen, 'Note sur l'accueil des chretiens d'Orient a l'Islam', RHR
166 (1964), 51-3; Harold Suermann, 'Orientalische Christen und der Islam: christliche Texte
aus der Zeit von 632-750', Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft 67
(1983), 130-31; Hoyland, Seeing Islam as others saw it, 182-9. The work is curiously absent from
M. Benedicte Landron, 'Les relations originelles entre chnitiens de l'Est (nestoriens) et musulmans',
PdO 10 (1981-82), 191-222.
20 For example, the material on the conquest of Khüzistän attributed to Sayf ibn 'Umar
(d. 180/796), and preserved in al-TabarI (wr. 303/915), was not yet available to Nöldeke.
2' See Patricia Crone, art. 'Khälid b. al-WalId' in EI 2 , IV (Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1978), 961a.
22 Julius Wellhausen, 'Prolegomena zur ältesten Geschichte des Islams', in his Skizzen und
Vorarbeiten, VI (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1899), 95-6; Leone Caetani, Annali deinsiam (Milan:
Ulrico Hoepli, 1905-26), III, 906-16; IV, 3,454-74; Donner, Conquests, 212-17.
23 Donner, Conquests, 217.
24 The 'appendix' also has something to say about matters in Syria and Egypt, which I have
translated in a brief appendix of my own; it follows below.
25 The point hardly needs demonstration, but cf. John Wansbrough, The sectarian milieu:
eOlllent and compositioll of lslamic salvation history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 119:
' .. .it ought to be c1ear that there can be no question of a neutral or "objective" source. Each
witness, regardless of its confessional alignment, exhibits a similar, if not altogether identical,
concern to understand the theodicy'.
THE CONQUEST OF KHÜZlSTÄN 17
ones. 26 But if we shall never know exactly what happened in Khüzistän in the
640s and 650s, our Syriac source preserves a very early understanding of what
happened, and in so doing it provides an invaluable control for the later
Islamic tradition. Early, naive, and historiographically independent of Islamic
sources, it allows us to identify·and occasionally disentangle strands of tradition
that are manifestly late and polemically conditioned from other, older, strands
that preserve authentically early views of conquest history.
The Syriac account

The relevant account may be translated as follows. 27 I have broken the text
into paragraphs for the sake of c\arity.
At the time of which we have been speaking (beh den b-hanä zabnii domen
tel emarnan), when the Arabs (fayyiiye) conquered all the lands of the
Persians and Byzantines,28 they also entered and conquered all the fortified
towns, that is, Bet Lapät (Ar. Jundaysabür),29 Karka d-Ledän,30 and
Shüshan, the citade1. 31 There remained only Shüsh (Ar. al-Süs) and
Shüshtra (Ar. Tustar), which were very strong, while of all the Persians
none remained to resist the Arabs except king Yazdgard 32 and one of his
commanders ((wd men rabbay haylawiiteh), whose name was Hormlzdän
the Mede,33 who gathered traops and held Shüsh and Shüshträ. This
Shüshträ is very extensive and strang, because of the mighty rivers and
canals that surraund it on every side like moats. One of these was ca lied
Ardashlragän, after Ardashlr who dug it; another, which crossed it, was
called Shamlräm, after the queen; and another, Däräyagän, after Darius.
The largest of an of them was a mighty tOffent, which flowed down from
the northern mountains. 34
26 It is regrettable that this point is usually made apologetically, in defence of late evidence;
see K. Lawson Younger, Ancient conquest accounts: a study in {meient Near Eastem {md hihlical
history II'ritillg (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990),249-53.
27 The passage begins on 35:20/29:30 and ends at 37: 14/31 :2.
28 As Nöldeke remarked ('Chronik', 41 n. 4) this passage seems to allude to an earlier one,
which begins on 30:23/26:13: 'Then God brought the sons of Ismail against them, [innumerab1e]
like sand on the sea shore. MuJ:!ammad was their leader (mdabbränii). Neither walls, gates, armor,
or shields withstood them, and they took control over all of the land of the Persians. Yazdgard
sent countless armies against them, but the Arabs (tayyüye) defeated them all; they even killed
Rustam. Yazdgard shut hirnself up inside the walls of MaJ:!öze (i.e. Seleucia-Ctesiphon), but
eventually escaped by fleeing. He came to the lands of the Hüzäye and of the Marönaye. There
he ended his life. The Arabs took control of MaJ:!oze and aU of its lands. They also came to the
Byzanline lands, and they plundered and ravaged all of the lands of Syria. Heraclius, the king of
the Byzantines, sent armies against them, but th~ Arabs killed more than 100,000 ofthem'.
29 On Bet Lapä!, see Jean Maurice Fiey, 'L'Elam, la premiere des metropoles ecclesiastiques
syriennes orientales', Melto 5 (1969), 227-67; reprinted in idem, COJ/lntunaulI!s syriaques en Iran
et Irak des origines a 1552 (London: V~riorum, 1979), Chapter Ul.
30 On Karka d-Ledän, see Fiey, 'L'Elam, la premiere des metropoles ecclesiastiques syriennes
orientales (suite)" PdO 1 (1970), 123-30; reprinted in his Communautes, Chapter IIIb.
31 As Nöldeke comments ('Chronik', 42 n. 2), the phrase is biblical, but the author cIearly
does not have in mind Shfish (Susa, al-Sus), which presently folIows.
32 i.e. Yazdagird III (r. 632-51).
33 On the name, see Ferdinand Justi, Iranisches Namenhuch (Marburg: N. G. Elwert'sche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1895), 10. The Arabic form preferred is generaUy al-Hurmuzan, with the
important exception of Ibn A'tham (wr. 204/819-20), whose reading (H-r-m-z-d-ä-n) comes cIosest
to the Syriac. On the date and transmission history of Ibn A'tham's history, several recensions of
which have survived-at least in part-to modem limes, see Lawrence l. Conrad, Ibn A'tham and
his history (Winona Lake, IN: American Oriental Society, forthcoming).
34 For a convenient discussion of the region's geography, see W. Barthold, An historical
geography 0/ Iran, trans. Svat Soucek, ed. C. E. Bosworth (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984), Chapter 11.
Then (hayden) an Arab commander known as 35 Abü Müsa attacked

HormIzdan the Mede. He (Abü Müsa) had built al-Ba~ra as a settlement
(l-mawtäbhän) for the Arabs, where the Tigris flows into the great ocean,
between the cultivated land and the desert, just as Sa'd bar Waqqä~ had
built the city of 'Aqüla as another settlement for the Arabs, which was
named Kufa, after the bend of the Euphrates. But when Abu Müsa went
to attack HormIzdan, this HormIzdan devised stratagems in order to pre-
vent them (the Arabs) from engaging him, until he gathered an army. He
wrote to Abü Müsa that he (Abu Musa) should stop taking captives and
making war, and that he (Hormlzdan) would send him whatever tribute
(madattä) they imposed on him. Thus it remained for two years.
Trusting his walls, Hormlzdan then broke the truce (shaynii) between them,
and killed the men who had been ambassadors between them, one of whom
was George, the bi shop of Ulay.36 He [also] imprisoned Abraham, the
metropolitan of Furat. 37 He [then] sent many armies against the Arabs,
but they defeated them all. The Arabs rushed [forward], lay siege to Shüsh,
took it after a few days, and killed all of the nobles (pr/sM) in it. They
seized the house that is called the 'House of Mär Daniel', and took the
treasure there enclosed, which had been kept there on the kings' orders
since the days of Darius and Cyrus. They also broke open and made off
with a silver coffin, in which a mummified corpse was laid; many said it
was Daniel's, but others [claimed] that it was Darius.
They also lay siege to Shushtra, and fought for two years to take it. Then
a man from Qatar38 who was living there befriended a man who had a
house on the walls, and the two of them conspired together. They went
out to the Arabs and told them: 'If you give us a third of the spoil of the
city, we will let you into it'. They came to an agreement, dug tunnels under
the walls, and let in the Arabs, who [thus] captured Shüshträ. They shed
blood there as if it were water. They killed the exegete of the city and the
bi shop of Hormlzdardashir (Ar. Süq al-Ahwäz),39 along with the students,40
priests, and deacons, whose blood they shed in the holy sanctuary. They
took Hormlzdän alive.
The passage translated appears to be a' discrete unit. With a sure command
of detail, and paced by aseries of adverbs and adverbial phrases that link the
episodes tempo rally and logically, the account generates a sense of movement
that is almost entirely lacking in other parts of the 'appendix'. Elsewhere
information is imparted: here a coherent story is told. Since our compiler
generally shows little if any historical method,41 we can assume that the account
came to him in this form; he copied it, just as he copied the chronicle before
it. Hs appeal presumably lay in the quality of its narrative, which vividly
3; Metkne, usually merely 'nicknamed', but here it precisely expresses the Arabic kunya.
36 Apparently located south of aI-I;IIra; see Morony, lraq, 152; Donner, Conquests, 329 n. 66.
37 That is, Furät d-Maysän, which was apparently located opposite the medieval site of
al- Ba~ra; see Morony, lraq, 159.
38 Nöldeke ('Chronik', 25, n. 2) points out that this was understood broadly: 'Qalar umfasst
aber bei diesen Syrern alle Länder der nordöstlichen Arabiens, wo damals viele nestorianische
Christen wohnten'. The point, as I argue, below, is Nestorian church politics.
39 On HormIzdardashIr, see Fiey, 'L·Elam ... (suite)', 130-34.
40 Eskiilaye; for the term, and a sense of schoollife, see The statutes oi the School oi Nisibis,
ed. and trans. Arthur Vööbus (Stockholm: Papers of the Estonian Theological Society in Exile.
1962}, esp. 79; J. B. Segal, Edessa, 'The Blessed City' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 149-51.
4 It is particularly worth noting that no effort has been made to relate Khälid's march to
Syria, as portrayed in the 'appendix', to the chronicler's earlier allusion to al-Yarmük (on which
see below).
THE CONQUEST OF KHUZISTAN 19
describes the terrible fate of a Nestorian heartland; it mayaiso have appealed

to the copyist's (or copyists') interest in geography and topography. Whatever
its ultimate provenance, it is more detailed than anything available to Elias
of Merv,42 or, for that matter, anything else to be written in either West or
East Syriac.
What the Syriac aeeount canno! tell us

In what follows I shall argue that the 'appendix' to the Khüzistiin Chronicle
can provide enough corroboration for accounts in the Islamic tradition that
we must posit the continuous transmission of historical material within the
latter. In this case, some early material c1early did survive the hazardous
passage from witness to tradent to historian, a passage of approximately
150-200 years. The degree to which those who initialIy transmitted and com-
piled the material were concerned with what we would consider historio-
graphical issues-particularly problems of sequence and time-is considerably
harder to discern, and although we shaU meet these problems throughout, it
is best if we address two at the start.
First, since our source begins with the entrance of Abu Musa al-Ash'arT,
it sheds no light on the events that the Islamic tradition describes as having
taken place before his appearance in Khuzistan: of cities that are said to have
entered into treaties, which they would soon break, and of 'Utba ibn Ghazwan
and al-Mughlra ibn Shu'ba, the two commanders who are said to have preceded
Abu Müsa on the front, we hear nothing. 43 What our source does say, however,
is that all but four of the 'fortified towns' had been taken hefore Abu Musa
arrived on the scene; and thus there is probably something to the Islamic
accounts that attribute so me role to 'Utba and al-Mughlra. 44 Of course,
whether Abu Musa 's victories can be considered the last phase of a continuous
series of campaigns that began with 'Utba is altogether a different question,
and one that the source does not answer: the world of Medinan state building
and caliphal politics is unknown to our Syriac source. Our Syriac compiler
was apparently concerned only to record the outlines of the Sasanian defeat,
rather than a detailed history of the Muslim victory; and even assuming that
he had heard of such earlier battles as there were, we can hardly expect hirn
to have connected them to those led by Abu Musa. He records what the
Islamic tradition generatly considers the final phase of the conquest of
Khüzistan, probably for the simple reason that Abu Musa's campaigns were
indeed decisive.
Although Syriac accounts can occasionally provide invaluable help in
solving dating problems,45 this one cannot; he re we arrive at the second
principal limitation of our source. An assortment of topicS,46 the 'appendix'
can only yield a relative dating, and one that happens to be particularly weak
to boot. The beginning of the passage suggests that the start of the conquest
42 Be that in the chronicle part of the work, foUowing Nautin, or in the Christian Arabic
Chronicle 01 Seert, following L. Sako, 'Les sources de 1a chronique de ~eert', PdO 14 (1987), 159.
On the disputed authorship of this work, see Jean Maurice Fiey, 'Ishö'dna~ et La chronique
de Seert', PdO 6-7 (1975-76), 447-59; and Nautin's riposte in 'L'auteur', 313-14.
43 For summaries of these events, see the works cited above, n. 22.
44 Here it is tempting to infer from the presence of the bishop of Hormtzdardashtr in Tustar
that his city had already fallen.
45 Particularly for events in Syria and Palestine, where the Christian testimony is most dense;
the earliest example is Theodor Nöldeke, 'Zur Geschichte der Araber im I. Jahrhundert d.H. aus
syrischen Quellen'. ZDMG 29 (1875), 76-98,
46 In Nautin's words ('L'auteur', 304), 'un appendice fait de rnorceaux decousus·.
of Khüzistän was roughly contemporaneous with, or perhaps even folIowed,

that of Iraq and Syria: 'At the time of wh ich we have been speaking, when
the Arabs conquered alI the lands of the Persians and Byzantines, they also
entered and conquered aU the fortified towns .. .'. But after recording Abü
Müsa's campaigns, it then turns to Khalid ibn al-WalId's conquest of Syria,
which it says/ollowed those of Abü Müsä: 'Afterwards (bätarken) a man from
the Arabs named KaIed came and went to the West, and took the lands and
towns as far as 'Arab'.47 Now the problem can be solved by preferring the
second of these two passages, which has the virtue of more c\early asserting a
sequence of events; and since the remarks that follow seem to aUude to the
battle of al-Yarmük,48 we can actually generate a terminus ante quem of late
August of 636/Rajab of AH 15 for the end of Abü Müsä's campaigns.49 That
this dating is at severe variance with the consensus of the Islamic sources might
cause so me concern,50 particularly because it would force a redating of the
founding of al-Ba~ra; but it is far from fatal, the Islamic tradition containing
some aberrant dating schemes of its own. Areport in the Kitäb al-kharäj of
Abü Yüsuf (d. 182/798), for example, can be handled in such a way so as to
produce the dating of c. AH 15 or 16 for the fall of Tustar. 51
But there are too many problems to overcome. For one thing the sequence
of conquests would run afoul of another, earlier, non-Islamic source. S2 For
another, it is not at alI c\ear that the author of the passages translated above
can also be credited with the passage translated below; and since the final
redactor/editor manifests so little interest in chronology, we cannot use the
latter to date material in the former without establishing single authorship.
Moreover, even if we could establish a single author, his acquaintance with
events in Syria pales in comparison with his knowledge of his (apparently)
native Bet Hüzäye; and it would be nothing if not reckless to use his vague
and secondhand material concerning the West to date his detailed account of
local events. Finally, it may be that the crucial adverb (bätarken}-the hinge
upon which the proposed dating would swing-has tittle temporal significance,
and instead marks nothing more than a narrative transition. S3
For the whole passage, see the Appendix below.

47
Cf. Nöldeke, 'Geschichte', 79; Palmer, Sel'el1lh cel1ll1ry, 3.
48
According to the conventional interpretations of M. J. de Goeje, Memoires slir la l'onqllete
49
de la Syrie, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1900), 108-24; Donner, COllqllesls, 128-44; Palmer,
Sel'enth cel1ll1ry, 4.
50 The earliest date for operations in Khüzistän seems to be the consensus report (qiilü, 'they
said') that begins al-Balädhurl's section on al-Ahwäz; but here it is al-MughIra ibn Shu'ba who
raids Suq al-Ahwäz in late 15 or early 16/636 or 637; see al-Balädhurl (d. 279/892), FlItÜ!1
al-bllldiin, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1866), 376. KhalIfa ibn Khayyä~ (d. 240/854),
Ta'rTkh, ed. Suhayl Zakkar (Damascus: Wizärat al-thaqäfa wa-l-siyäJ:!a wa-I-irshäd al-qawrnI,
1967), I, 105, puts this raid in All 16. The latest date is in the severely telescoped account in
al-Ya'qübi (d. 284/897), Historiae, ed. M. T. Houtsma (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1883), H, 180, where
Abü Müsä 's conquest of al-Ahwäz and I~~akhr is put in AH 23.
51 The report states that Abü Musä conquered Tustar, I~fahän, Mihrajänqadhaq, and
Nihäwand (1) while Sa'd ibn AbI Waqqä~ was laying siege to al-Madä'in; see Abü Yüsuf, Kitiib
al-kharü} (Cairo: al-Ma!ba'a al-salaITya, All 1352), 60. The date for the final capitulation of
al-Madä'in is usually given as 16/637; see al-Tabarl, Ta'rlkh al-ruslil wa-I-mlllük, ed. M. J. de Goeje
et al. (Leiden: E. 1. BrilI, 1879-1901), I, 2431-32. But its siege may have been very protracted;
al-DInawarI (d. 282/891), Al-Akhbiir al-!iwül, ed. Vladimir Guirgass and Ignatius Kratchkovsky
(Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1888-1912), 133, puts it at 28 months. See also al-Balädhurl, Flitü/.l, 262-64;
Yäqüt (d. 626/1229), Mu'jam al-buldün, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus,
1866-73), I, 768, which draws on al-BalädhurI, as weil as on a chronology that dates the conquest
tOMI 15.
52 See ps.-Sebeos (wr. c. 660-70), Histoire d'Heraclius, trans. Frederic Mader (Paris: Ernest
Leroux, 1904),97-101.
53 For paralleis in the Arab-Islamic tradition, see Albrecht Noth, The early Arabie historical
tradition: a source-critical study, 2nd ed. in collaboration with Lawrence I. Conrad, trans. Michael
Bonner (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994; hereafter cited as Noth/Conrad), 173-77.
THE CONQUEST OF KHÜZISTÄN 21
In sum, nothing in the 'appendix' can yie\d a precise date for 'the conquest
of the south. Of course this can also be restated in more positive terms: nothing
in the 'appendix' can throw serious doubt on a reconstruction that is based on
a reading of the Islamic tradition, and that dates the fall of Khüzistän after
that of al-Madä'in, perhaps in AH 22 or 23. 54
What the Syriac account can tell us

If the text cannot answer all of our questions, it can shed a direct and bright
light on several others. It is to these questions that I shall now turn.
The conquest of Jundaysäbür

The first problem concerns the fall of Jundaysabür. The sources familiar to
al-TabarI (wr. 303/915) and al-Baiadhurl (d. 279/892) held that the definitive
conquest of Jundaysäbür followed that ofTustar and al-Süs; this is the sequence
that Donner describes. 55 But there were differing views: a tradition preserved
by Khallfa ibn Khayyat (d. 240/854), for example, holds that Jundaysäbür fell
before Tustar, 56 and this is c\early what our Syriac authority has in mind as
weIl. Considering that the conquest of Jundaysäbür does not seem to have
been a principal concern for most of our Muslim authorities, and considering
too that our Syriac source is not only local, but also that Jundaysäbür was
the metropolitan centre of Nestorian Bet Hüzäye,57 one might side with
KhalIfa. In this case, as in others, consensus is apparently no guarantee of
accuracy. Meanwhile, what the Syriac source has to say about the canal-
dominated topography of Tustar is very much in line with how the city is
described in many conquest accounts in the Islamic tradition. 58
The point to be emphasized here is a broader agreement between the
Islamic tradition and our Syriac SOUlTe: al-Süs and Tustar were among the
last cities to hold out in Khüzistan, falling definitively only after AM Müsa
appeared on the scene, and al-Hurmuzän, sent by Yazdagird, played a crucial
role in the Sasanian defence.
AI-Ba~ra, al-Küfa, and the problem of conquest participation

Our Syriac testimony on the founding of al-Ba~ra and al-Küfa is one of the
earliest datable accounts we possess. It is both familiar (the two are established
as 'settlements' for the Arabs) and unfamiliar (Abü Müsä al-Ash'arI, rather
than 'Utba ibn Ghazwän, being given credit for founding al-Ba~ra).59 Another,
54 Cf. Donner, Conquests, 217.

55 AI-Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2567; al-BalädhurJ, FUtU(l, 382; Donner, Conquests, 216.
56 Khallfa ibn Khayyät, Ta'rlkh, I, 138. .
57 For a detailed discussion, see Fiey, 'L'Elam', 227-67.
5. See, for example, al-Qummi (d. 805/1402), Tärrklz-i QUlllm, ed. JalTI al-Dln Tihräni (Tehran:
Matba'at-i Majlis, 1934), 297-this work is a Persian translation of an otherwise lost late tenth-
century Arabic original; see A. K. S. Lambton, 'An account of the Tiirrklzi QUl1lm', BSOAS 12
(1947-48), 586-96. AI·Qummj credits his material to Ibn Isl,läq (d. 151/761) and Abu 'Ubayda
(d. 211/826), citing for the latter a Futii(l aM al-Isläm, which seems otherwise unknown; the
material may be familiar to Ibn al-Nadim (wr. 377/987) under the tille Futii(t al-Ahwiiz. See
Ibn al·NadIm, Fihrist, ed. Gustav FlUgel (Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1871-72), 54; Ibn Khallikän
(d. 681/1282), Wafayiit al-a'yän, ed. I1,lsän 'Abbäs (Beirut: Där al-thaqäfa, 1968-72), V, 239.
Whether this was an independent monograph, or rather a section in a larger work, is at present
hard to say-Michael Lecker thinks the former; see his 'Biographical notes on Abü 'Ubayda
Ma'mar b. al-Muthannä', Studia lslamica 81 (\995),76.
59 On al-Ba~ra, see Charles Pellat, art. 'al-Ba~ra' in EI , I (Leiden: E, J. Brill, 1960), 1085a
2
(which puts the conquest in AH 17); ~älil,l Al,lmad al-'AlI, Al-Tan;fl1liit al-ijtimii'fya wa-I-iqtieiidrya
jl l-Ba~ra jf I-garn al-awwal al-hijrl (Baghdad: Ma~ba'at al-ma'ärif, 1953), 25-6 (perhaps as early
as AH 14 or 16).
and admittedly much later, Christian source also credits AM Musä with
al-Ba~ra,6o but the evidence is more enticing than c1inching.
As far as the conquest is concerned, the Islamic tradition generally has
Abu Musä al-Ash'arI play a dual role. First, he is said to effect the definitive
conquest of cities, such as Sug al-Ahwäz, that had reneged on earlier treaties;
and second, he is given a prominent role in the two victories of al-Sus and
Tustar, which broke the back of the Sasanian defence. As we have already
seen, on the first of these our Syriac source can offer only silence, which is
particularly frustrating since so many cities are said to have reneged on earlier
agreements. In the case of Tustar we have another instance of this, but because
our Syriac source does have something to say here, our conc1usions perhaps
have more force there. 61 On the se co nd problem-Abu Musä's role in the
Muslim armies-our Syriac source can suggest that credit for the conquest of
al-Sus and Tustar indeed does belong to Abu Musä, rather than to other
candidates favoured by OUf Muslim authorities, particularly Abu Sabra, whom
Sayf ibn 'Vmar (d. 180/796) gives pride of place in the army that besieged
Tustar. 62
It is not just the silence of our Syriae souree that makes Abu Sabra's role
at Tustar a problem. He is also curiously absent in the very battle scene that
Sayf himself describes: it is at Abu Musä's feet, rather than Abu Sabra's, that
the arrow shot from a traitor's bow dramatically lands, thus turning the tide
of the battle. 63 It is true that his absence on the field could be argued away
on the grounds that the conguest tradition occasionally distinguishes between
a commander who has nominal authority over a campaign, and a sub-
eommander, sometimes called the amlr al-qitill, or 'battle commander', who
leads the army into combat, and who has authority to enter into agreements
on his superior's behalf. 64 But no such distinction is made at Tustar, and other
sources are as consistent in ignoring Abu Sabra as they are on insisting on the
command of Abu Musä. 65
They ignore Abu Sabra's role in Tustar for the simple reason that they
ignore hirn otherwise: Sayf is apparently alone in having hirn briefly hold the
governorship of al-Ba~ra after 'Utba ibn Ghazwän and before al-Mughlra ibn
Shu'ba. 66 These then are the terms in wh ich we can understand Abu Sabra's
cameo appearance in Sayfs account, and the seeond reason why we should
reject it. For it apparently comes not from an authentie memory of the events
in question, but rather was generated by a view widely held by conquest
authorities that the governorship of al-Ba~ra and the leadership of the
Khuzistän campaigns were one and the same. 67 In the case of Abu Musä,
60 Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286), Ta'rTkh muk/llasar al-dult'al, ed. Antoine ~all).ani (Beirut: Imprimerie
catholique, 1890), 174, knows 'Utba and al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba only as military commanders;
the laying out of the khira!, the building of ma/lidl and the congregational mosque, Arab
settlement-all these are credited to Abü Müsä. AI-Ya'qübi (Historiae, H, 163) explicitly credits
'Utba with the ikhtitat of the site.
61 See below. ..
:~ AI-Tabarl, Ta'rrklr, I, 2553-6.
lbid, I, 2554.
64 Thus Suhayl ibn 'Adi in ibid., I, 2506-7.
65 Thus tribesmen boast that they fought alongside Abü Müsä; see Ibn AbI Shayba (d. 235/849),
AI-M~'tIIlnaJ, ed. Sa'Id al-Lal).l:täm (Beirut: Dar al-fikr, 1989), VIII, 17; on p. 32 Abü Müsä is
explicitly identified as the amfr al-jaysh). AI-Qummi (Tärfkh-i QUl1lm, 295) puts Abü 'Ubayda's
and Ibn Isl).äq's reports under the rubric dhikr-iJat!l-i Abu Musli Ash'arl.
66 AI-TabarI, Ta'rfkh, I, 2498, 2550-51.
67 Note that al-Balädhuri's first report (Futii!l, 376: qiilii), which outlines the overall sequence
of events, conspicuously and explicitly connects the conquest of al-Ahwäz with the administration
of al-Ba~ra: 'They reported: al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba raided Süq al-Ahwäz during his govemorship
when 'Utba ibn Ghazwän was removed from al-Ba~ra at the end of the year 15 or the beginning
of the year 16 ... then Abü Müsä raided it when 'Umar appointed hirn govemor of al-Ba~ra after
al-Mughlra'.
THE CONQUEST OF KHÜZISTAN 23

where we have a broad Islamic consensus that is corroborated by our Syriac
source, there is good reason to think that the view is correct: Abu Mus<!
founded al-Ba~ra and did playastarrlng role in the conquest 01' Khuzistän.
In the case 01' Abu Sabra we have only Sayf.
Abü Sabra's obscurity may have had narrative advantages for Sayf, who
has hirn oversee what is presented as two separate armies, one Ba~ran and one
Küfan. 68 These armies pose problems 01' their own. Now because our Syriac
source implies that AbU MUsä came to Khuzistän from al-Ba~ra, we can put
some stock in the Islamic accounts that speak 01' Ba~ran armies as well. 69
Küfan participation in the conquest ofthe south is altogether harder to confirm,
however. As Donner has noted,70 the introduction of reinforcements into the
Khüzistän campaign-of wh ich the Küfans under al-Nu'män ibn al-Muqarrin
or 'Ammär ibn Yäsir figure very prominently-was a matter of some
controversy. In what follows I shall offer some suggestions why.
The conquest of KhUzistän

At issue was the region's revenues, since it was by claiming conquest experience
that one argued one's share; in other words, the conquest record was influenced
by post-conquest politics. 71 Sayf preserves an account that has al-Al.maf ibn
Qays voicing Ba~ran grievances vis-a-vis the Küfans soon after the conquest
of Süq al-Ahwäz, and to judge by 'Umar's response, his argument was convin-
cing: in addition to doling out to the Ba~rans former Sasanian crown land,
'Umar is said to have increased the number of Ba~rans receiving 2,000 dirhams
by including among them all those who had fought at (SUq) al-Ahwäz. 72 The
Ba~rans and Küfans disputed about Tustar in particular. The categorical
assertion that Tustar belongs to the Ba~rans is warning enough that adminis-
trative geography was controversial,73 and echoes of the controversy can be
heard even as late as Yäqut's time, when some apparently claimed that Tustar
belonged to al-Ahwäz, while others held that it belonged to al-Ba~ra: Yäqüt
also teils of a heated exchange between the two parties that took place before
'Umar, each claiming Tustar as their own. 74 Ibn A'tham al-Kufi has a much
longer version of this, or a similar, scene.
The Ba~rans and Küfans came to argue, the Ba~rans saying: 'The conquest
is ours!' and the Küfans saying: 'No, the conquest is ours!' So they argued
about it to the point that something truly disagreeable alm ost happened
between them. 75
68 AI-Tabari, Ta'rfklz, I, 2553: wa-'alü I-farfqayn j{{/lIf'an Abii Sabra. Cf. al-BalädhurI, Futfilz,
380: hamila ahl al-Basra !Va-aM al-Küfa. cr. the much later case of al-Muhallab and 'Attäb ibn
Warq'ä', where the position of amfr al-jamü'a (= amfr al-qital) is determined by conquest claims
by Ba~rans and Küfans; see al-Mubarrad (d. 285/898), Al-Kilmilft l-luglza wa-l-adab, ed. William
Wri,llht (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1874-92), 675.
9 AI-TabarI, Ta'rfkh, I, 2552-54; Ibn A'tham, Kitab al-futü~, ed. Mul,1ammad 'Abd
al-Mu'id Khän et al. (Hyderabad: Dä'irat al-ma'ärif al-'uthmanIya, 1388-95/1968-75), II, 5;
al-Balädhuri, Futülz, 372-3.
70 See Donner,'Conquests, 342 n. 229.
71 Cf. Robert Brunschvig, 'Ibn 'Abdall,1akam et la conqu~te de I' Afrique du Nord par les
arabes: etude critique', AIEO 6 (1942-47), 110-55. Cf. the case of the Jazira in C. F. Robinson,
Empire emd elites after the Muslim conquest: the transformation of northern Mesopotamia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6ff.
7Z AI-TabarI, Ta'rfkh, I, 2539-40; cf. I, 2672-3.
73 Cf. Ibn Abi Shayba, Mu~amwf, VIII, 35: Il'a-Tustar min ar(i al-Ba~ra.
74 Yäqüt, Mu'jam al-huldan, I, 849 (both accounts).
75 Ibn A'tham. FIIlÜ?I, II, 27. Cf. the dispute between a Küfan and a Syrian, where the former
crows about his townsmen's victories: 'We were the victors at the battIe of al-QadisIya and the
battle of such-and-such' (na!lIlli a~Jlüb yaw/II al-Qüdisfya lVa-yawlII kadhä lI'a-küdhä ... ), and the
latter about his townsmen's victories (including al-Yarmük), in Ibn AbI Shayba, Mu~annqj',
VIII, 17.
The solution that 'Umar is here given to provide holds that although the
conquest is indeed to be credited to the Ba~rans, its benefits accrue to Ba~rans
and Küfans alike. 76
'Umar's view that conquest revenues were to be distributed to the Ba~rans
and Küfans is more fully described by Ibn A'tham. Here Abu Musä al-Ash'arT
writes to the caliph, requesting reinforcements for the upcoming battle at
Tustar; the caliph responds by dispatching a Küfan commander. 'Ammär ibn
Yäsir. As in other reports,77 the operative terms (istamadda, amadda) are
topological, in this case probably employed not only to emphasize the role of
the caliph in conquest decision making,78 but also to bring Kufan troops into
a picture that had been dominated by Ba~rans. 'Ammar ibn Yäsir is then given
to describe the contents of the letter from 'Umar: 'He (the caliph) is ordering
me to march to Abu Müsa al-Ash'arT to co me to the aid of our believing
brethren from al-Ba~ra' (li-nu~Tat ikhwanina al-mu'minfn min ahl al-Ba~Ta).79
Then, after the battle, 'Umar passes judgement on the ensuing controversy:80
Tustar is [to be considered) among the conquests (maghiizl) of the Ba~rans
even though they were aided by their brethren from among the Kufans
(innamä nu~irü hi-ikhwanihim min ahl al-Küfa). The same thing goes for the
Küfans: if they make raids in their marches (thughür), and the Ba~rans
come to their aid, there is no harm [done to their elaim) (tam yakun
hi-dhälika ba's). For according to the book of God, victory belongs to [all)
the believers; God has made [all) the believers brethren. 81 The conquest is
the Ba~rans', but the Küfans are their equals in the rewards and spoils
(shurakä'uhum fi I-ajr wa-I-ghanfma). Beware the discords inspired by
Satan!82
A post-conquest opinion on the division of spoils-i.e. that merely by assisting
(nu~ra) the Ba~rans, the Kufans had earned a fuH share-is thus detectable in
a tradition that purports to describe the conquest itself. That precisely this
issue was controversial is made elear elsewhere, in a work that is explicitly
legal in character. 83 The late and polemical character of the account explains
'Umar's eirenic tone: all the rivalry that we might expect of campaigning
armies, and of which we have elear echoes in the post-conquest disputes,84 is
stifled by a unitary and providential view of conquest history.
Post-conquest disputes influenced the historical record in other ways as
well. If some attrihuted to 'Umar the view that the Basrans and Küfans were
to share equally in the spoils, others thought differently: Thus Yiiqüt preserves
an echo of another view, which held that 'Umar gran ted the revenues ofTustar
to the Ba~rans rather than to the Küfans, on the grounds that it was eloser to
al-Ba~ra than it was to Küfa. 85 In one of the titles attributed to al-Madä'inT
76 Ibn A 'tham, Futü!" II, 27.

77 AI-TabarI, Ta'rTklz, 1,2534.
7S See Noth/Conrad, Early AmMe Izistorical tradition, 123-6. But cf. C. F. Robinson, 'The
stud~ of Islamic historiography: a progress report', JRAS 3, 7, 9 (1997), 218 Ir.
:0 Ibn A'tham, Futil!" H, 10.
lbid, II, 27.
B' Cf. Sürat al-Anfäl (8), v. 74; Sürat al-Rüm (30), v. 47; Sürat al-.I;:Iujurät (49), v. 10.
B2 The vocabulary remains quranic: see, in particular, Sürat al-Nisä' (4), v. 12; Sürat Yüsuf
(12) v. 100; Surat al-Rum (30), v. 28.
83 See al-Taban, IklztiläJ al-Juqalzii', ed. Joseph Schacht (Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1933),68-71.
84 One can only wonder about the contents of the Fakhr at.l al-KüJa 'alä l-Ba$ra by al-Wäqidl
(d. 207/823), and the Mufoklzarat alzl (/l-B(/~ra l1'a-alzl al-Kiifa by al-Madä'inI (d. 228/842); on
which see Ibn al-NadIm, Filzrist, 100, 104. Cf. also al-Ya'qübI, Kitäb al-buldt'in, ed. M. J. de Goeje
(Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1885; BGA 7),167-73 .
• 5 Yaqüt, Mu'jam al-buldiln, I, 849: Ja-jll'alalzä 'Ulllar ibn al-Kila!!üb min arrj al-BaFa
Ii-qurbilzä mil!/zä.
(d. 228/842), the Khahar al-Ba~ra wa-futü(lihii lVa-futü(1 ma yuqarihuha min

Dahistän wa-l-Ahwaz wa-Masabdhan wa-ghayr dhalika,86 we may have a
reeonstruetion of eonquest history aeeording to this principle.
Rinds has shown how Ba~ran participation in the initial conquest of Färs
could be exaggerated by our sources. 87 Given the problems surrounding the
Küfans in Khüzistän, those determined to reconstruct history could do worse
than to rethink the Küfans' role here.
The question of treaties

Things are perhaps only slightly less thorny when it comes to what our Syriac
souree calls a 'truce' (shaynii). That the campaigns in Khüzistän were inter-
rupted by a short-lived peace is clear enough; the problem is that the one
promising account we have in the Islamic tradition, which is Sayf's, identifies
al-Hurmuzan and 'Utba ibn Ghazwan, rather than al-Hurmuzan and Abü
Müsa al-Ash'arl, as the parties concerned. 88
In fact, Sayf knew of two such agreements. AI-Hurmuzan is first said to
have reached a ~'ul~ agreement with 'Vtba at Süq al-Ahwaz, after he had heard
of the losses of Manadhir and Nahr T1ra to Muslim forces:
When the [Muslim] fighting force (al-qawm) moved against al-Hurmuzan
and encamped near hirn in al-Ahwaz, he saw that he lacked the force to
do battle. So he requested a ~ul~. They (the Muslims) then wrote to 'Utba
about the matter, requesting his instructions. AI-Hurmuzän wrote to hirn,
and 'Utba agreed to the offer on the following terms: [al-Hurmuzän would
retain] all of al-Ahwaz and Mihrajanqadhaq, except Nahr T1ra, Manadhir,
and that part of Süq al-Ahwaz that they (the Muslims) had overrun. What
we have liberated will not be returned to them.
A dispute is then said to have arisen concerning the borders between
al-Hurmuzän's territory and that ofthe Muslims; in the aftermath, al-Hurmuzan
'reneged (kafara), withhe1d what he had accepted,89 enrolled Kurds (in this
army), and so his army grew strong'.90 He then took to the field, was defeated
at Süq al-Ahwaz, and eventuaUy fted to Ramhurmuz. There he reaehed a
second ~ul~, and onee again 'Vmar is given to impose conditions: "Umar
ordered hirn ('Utba) to accept [al-Hurmuzan's offer], on the following terms:
that the land not conquered, i.e. Tustar, al-Süs, Jundaysabür, al-Bunyan, and
Mihrajanqadhaq [would come under Muslim authority)'. AI-Hurmuzan agreed
to the terms, whieh are now described in more detail:
The commanders of the Ahwaz campaign took responsibility for what was
assigned to them, and al-Hurmuzän for his ~ul~, [the laUer] levying taxes
for them, and [the former] protecting him. 91 If the Kurds of Fars raided
hirn, they would come to his aid and defend him. 92
86 See Yaqut, Irslzäd al-arfb ilä ma'rifat al-adrb, ed. D. S. Margoliouth, 2nd ed. (Leiden:
E. J. BrilI, and London: Luzac, 1923-31), V, 315; Ursula Sezgin, AbU Miljmif. Ein Beitmg zur
Historiogmplzie der wll,liyadischen Zeit (Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1971),44.
87 Martin Hinds, 'The first Arab conquests of Fars', Iran 22 (1984), 39-53; reprinted in his
Studies in early Islamic his tory, ed. Jere Bacharaeh, Lawrence 1. Conrad and Patricia Crone
(Princeton: Darwin Press, 1996), 197-229.
88 AI-TabarI, Ta'rfkh, 1,2538-42.
89 i.e. what he had agreed to yield in tribute? The Arabic text is \Va-Illalla'a mit qabilahu.
90 AI-TabarI, Ta'rfkh, I, 2540.
91 y,mll1{(ÜI!ahu; one might also read yu'üwilluhum, 'and he (al-Hunnuzan) offering aid to them'.
92 AI-Tabari, Ta'rfkh, I, 2543.
This sulh fared no better than the first: after two Muslim torces were sent into
al-Ahwäz, one of which was led by Abu Musa, al-Hurmuzan engaged
al-Nu'män ibn al-Muqarrin, was defeated, and fied to Tustar. 93
Once again, one can be cheered by the common ground: al-Hurmuzän
seems to have entered into some kind of agreement with the Muslims, which
perhaps stipulated an exchange of tribute tor recognition of local authority,
and during which al-Hurmuzan reinforced his armies. Although its exact timing
escapes us, it must have been reached during, or soon after, the fall of al-Ahwäz.
But it is difficult to say much more. The elose similarities between Sayfs two
agreements might be taken to suggest either that the 'appendix' contlated the
two, or that Sayf (or his sources) had so heavily elaborated a single truce
account that out of its precipitate emerged two separate accounts. A tentative
argument might be made in favour of Sayfs second treaty. For whereas the
first says nothing explicit about tribute, the second elearly stipulates that
al-Hurmuzän collect taxes for the Muslims. Moreover, it is only at this point
that Abu Musä enters the scene, and it is here too that Tustar emerges as a
stronghold for al-Hurmuzän: to Tustar he withdraws after his defeat, and to
Tustar comes help from the people of Färs. Finally, a later passage that
mentions 'the rebellion (intiqä~) of al-Hurmuzän' clearly alludes to the breaking
of the second treaty.94
Al-Süs: leadership, Asäwira, and Daniel

Since our Syriac source places Hormizdän at both Shüsh and Shüshträ, and
describes his capture in the latter, we are to infer that it fell after Shüsh.
Donner argues the opposite, putting al-Süs after Tustar. 95 On tbis sequence
no authority is cited, but it is implicit in Sayf in al-TabarI,96 and explicit in
al-DInawarI (d. 282/891).97 Tbere appears to have been some disagreement on
the matter, however. Al-Tabali freely volunteers that there was no consensus
about the conquest of al-Süs,98 al-BaladhurI discusses Tustar after al-Süs,99
and Ibn al-A'tham, as weil as Abü 'Ubayda (d. 211/826) and Ibn Isi).aq
(d. 151/761, as preserved by al-Qumml, d. 805/1402), clearly put the fall of
al-Süs before that of Tustar. lOO This was Caetani's view, 101 and it is vindicated
by our Syriac source.
In the precise course of the conquest of al-Sus the Islamic sources evince
little interest. A failed ruse attempted by al-Sus's (anonymous) marzbän is
featured in one of al-BaladhurI's accounts, according to which an amän was
granted, and where there is no suggestion that tbe city was penetrated; the
point is that Abu Musa saw througb the marzbiin's trick, executing hirn and
80 fighters (muqätila) as a result. I02 Aversion of the same story is then related
by a participant in the battle; here we read of an anonymous dihqän. 103 Ibn
93ibid, 1,2552-3.
94ibid., I, 2614.
95Donner, COl1quests, 216.
96 AI-Tabarl, Ta'rlkh, I, 2551-6.
97 AI-Dlnawarl, Aklthiir, 140.
98 AI-Tabarl, Ta'roch, I, 2561: ikhtalaJa ahf af-siyar jT amrilzii. Sayfs account of the conquest
ofTustar (ibid., 1,2542-5) may be out ofplace.
99 AI-Baladhurl, Futiih, 378-81.
100 Ibn A'tham, Futii!i, 1I, 9: thwnma sära Abii Müsä i1ü Tustar ba'dJariighihi mil1 amr al-Siis;
al-<iummI, Tärlklt-i Qwmn, 295 (al-Süs follows Manädhir).
O'Caetani, Anl1ali delns!am, IV, 454.
102 AI-Balädhurl, Futiih, 378.
103 ibid., 378-9; see also Ibn AbI Shayba, MlI~anl1aJ; VIII, 32; al-Qumml, Tärfkh-i Qumm, 295.
THE CONQUEST OF KHUZISTÄN 27
A'tham has aversion of the same story, but now both the marzhän (Säbür ibn
Ädharmähän) and a lieutenant are given names. 104 Meanwhile, Sayf seems to
be at pains to demonstrate the clemency of the victorious Muslims: the city is
stormed after a siege, the conquered pathetically beg for mercy, and a ~ul~ is
granted by the Muslims, who are apparently led by Abü Sabra, although Abü
Müsä is also present. Behind the tradition-and perhaps the trickery account
as well-there are signs of some disagreement: the granting of a ~ul~ after the
Muslims' violent entrance (ba't1 mil dakhaliihii 'anwatan), and the division of
spoils that is said to have taken place before the ~ul~ (wa 'qtasamii mii a~iibii
qahla l-~·ul~) suggest that this is a reconciling account,105 intended to accom-
modate conflicting ~ul~ and 'anwa traditions. 106 The failed ruse may perform
a similar function for Ibn A'tham: spoils were taken after an amiin because of
the trickery.107 Certainly our Syriac account, which details the killing of
Christians in the city, does not inspire much confidence in reports such as
these. In none of these Islamic accounts does al-Hurmuzän appear.
In Sayfs report al-Hurmuzän is again absent in the Sasanian defence, but
we may have an echo of his presence: al-Shahriyär, said to be al-Hurmuzän's
brother, leads the Muslims in battle. It is here that we get a glimpse at what
really concerned the authorities: the rate of the asilwira, the elite cavalry of
the Sasanian army. The asiiwira, like so much in early Islamic history, are only
now beginning to receive their due, and although the conquest accounts have
generally been enough to persuade historians that they converted in this
period,l08 there is some evidence to suggest that their conversion is a product
of the Umayyad period. 109 For early Muslim traditionists it was probably not
so much their conversion that was at issue as the top stipends that they were
awarded; that al-Balädhurt devoted an entire section to amr al-asäwira wa-l-zutt
at least suggests that the issue retained some interest as late as his day.1l0 On
the one hand, there was a view that the asiiwira remained loyal to the Sasanians
through Tustar. Thus Ibn A'tham, whose sequence follows that of our
Syriac source, has no problem in putting not only mariiziba, but also asiiwira
in al-Hurmuzän's forces that resisted the Muslims at Tustar;1l1 Ibn Sa'd
(d. 230/844) also preserves a reconstruction of events that has al-Hurmuzän
commanding a group of asäwira at TustarY2 On the other hand, al-Madä'int
seems to reftect a widely held view that Siyäh al-Uswarl was sent by Yazdagird
to defend al-Süs, while al-Hurmuzän was sent to Tustar; and when, according
to al-BalädhurI's sources, Siyäh learned of the capitulation of al-Süs, or,
according to al-Madä'ini, came to realize more generally that the Muslims
104 Ibn A'tham, FUliih, II, 6-7.

105 Cf. the case of Siiq al-Ahwäz, about which Khalifa ibn Khayyä! (Ta'fileh, 1. 106) reports
that it was conquered sulhan {/IV ·anwaran.
106 AI-Taban, Ta·rfkh; I, 2565. Cf. Albrecht Noth, 'Zum Verhältnis vo~ Kalifer Zentralgewalt
und Provinzen in umayyadischer Zeit. Die '$u1I:t-'Anwa' Traditionen rür Agypten und den Iraq',
WI 14 (1973), 150-62.
101 Ibn A'tham, FU/iih, II, 7.
108 Bertold Spuler, Iran imfrnhislamischer Zeit (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1952),254; Morony,
lraq , 198. On the asawira in early Islam in general, Mohsen Zakeri, Siisiinid soldiers and
early Muslim sociely: Ihe origins of 'Ayyärün and Futuwwa (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995),
index. s.v.
10 Patricia Crone, Slaves 0/. horses: Ihe evolution of Ihe Islamic polity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), 237 n. 362.
110 AI-Balädhun, Fldiih , 372- 3. Among the titles attributed to al-Madii'inl is a Kitiib al-asawirl/;
see Ri<:lä Tajaddud's edition of the Fihrist (Tehran: Ma!ba'at-i Danishgäh, 1971), 115; Bayard
Dodge, Tize Hilri;-t of al-Nadim: a tenth-century survey of Muslim culture (New York and London:
Columbia University Press, 1970), I, 225 (Flügel, Filzrisl, 103, reads Kitäb l/l-islziira).
111 Ibn A'tham, FlIliih, 11, 13.
112 Ibn Sa'd, Kitüb al-!abaqiil al-kabir, ed. Eduard Sachau el al. (Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1904-40),
V, 64.
were overwhelming the Sasanians, he and the asiiwira enrolled in the Muslim
armies instead. ll3 This opens the door-perhaps only narrowly-for the
participation of the asiiwira at Tustar, which was reluctantly conceded. 1l4
Indeed, it is only by presuming that they converted before Tustar that we
can understand Sayfs version of events. For Sayf has it that 'Umar ordered
Abu Musä to assign them the highest stipend, equal to that granted to any
Arab tribesman, even though Abu Musä had nothing but disdain for their
feeble effort at Tustar. A few lines of poetry that follow give voice to consequent
Arab resentment:
When 'Umar (al-foruq) saw the excellence of their valor
And came to see what might come of the matter,115
He assigned to them a stipend of two thousand,
Having seen fit to give the 'Akk and l:Iimyar a stipend of three hundredY6
Reports that identify SInah/SIneh as the traitor who betrayed Tustar to the
Muslims presumably reflect the same anti-asiiwira sentiments that produced
these lines. ll7
We are on firmer ground concerning Daniel. The legendary connection
between Daniel and al-Sus is not an Islamic invention. 118 1t had been made
before Islam,119 and by the seventh century Cif not earlier) it appears to
have gained wide currency. Thus, the Armenian history attributed to Sebeos
(wr. c. 660-70) relates that the Byzantine emperor Maurice (r. 582-602)
made an unsuccessful attempt to remove Daniel's body from al-Sus to
Constantinople; as in our Syriac account, here too various claims were made
about the identity of the deceased. 120 It is in the light of this material that we
should read our Syriac account: 'they [the Arabs] seized the house that is
called the "House of Mär Daniel", and took the treasure there enclosed,
which had been kept there on the kings' orders since the days of Darius and
Cyrus'. lt is in the same light that we should also read the Arabic accounts of
how Daniel's body was discovered in al-Sus; these are positive1y ubiquitous in
the conquest tradition. 121
As late antique monotheists, the conquering Muslims might be expected to
have taken an interest in Daniel, in this period considered a prophet not only
by Christians, but also by some Jews. 122 He does not appear in the Quran,
but remembering that this inventory was not complete,123 and assuming as
113 AI-Tabarl, Ta'rJkh, I, 2562-4; al-Balädhurl, FutU!I, 372-3, on the authority of 'a group of
learned men' (jamä'a min ahl al-'ilm). .
114 AI-Balädhurl, FutilJ.l, 382: yuqäl...wa-Alläh a'lam, 'it is said ... but God knows best', al-Tabarl,
Ta'rfkh, I, 2563, 2564: wa-qmvm yaqülilna, 'there are some who say'.
"'i.e. he recognized their potential, as weil as the hazards of putting them off.
116 AI-Tabarl, Ta'rlkh, I, 2563-4.
117 On the betrayal of Tustar, below.
118 Which seems to be implied by William Brinner in his translation, The history of a!-Tabarf,
II: Prophets (md patriarchs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 48 n. 129; and
Geor~es Vajda, art. 'Däniyäl' in EI', II (Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1965), 1l2b.
II See the evidence gathered by Louis Ginzberg in his The legends of the lews (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1928), VI, 437 n. 20.
/20 Histoire d'Heraclius, 29-30. Cf. al-Balädhurl, FutilJ.l, 378: qfla innafthi}ulhthat Däniyal.
121 AI-Tabarl, Ta'rfkh, I, 2566-7; al-Balädhurl, FUtül,l, 378; Ibn A'tham, FutülJ, II, 6-9; Ibn
Abi Shayba, Mu~{//maf, VIII, 31; al-QummI, Tärfkh-i QUIllIll, 296-7; Ibn Zanjawayh (d. 251/865),
Kitfih a!-allllVäl, ed. Shäkir DhTh Fayyä<j (Riyadh: Markaz al-Malik Fay~alli-I-bul:liith wa-I-dirasat,
1986), 1I, 748; Ibn AbI 'Adasa (fl. 9th/15th c.), Qi~a~ a!-anbiyii', KhälidI Library (Jerusalern), Ms.
Ar. 86, foi. 114r. See also M. Kevran and S. Renimel, 'Suse islamique: remarques preliminaires
et perspectives', Studia hanica 3 (1974), 256.
122 See John Barton, Oracles of God: perceplions of prophecy in Israel after the exile (London:
Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), 36-7, 99; Geza Vermes, 'Josephus' treatment of the Book of
Daniel', IIS, 42 (1991), 158 with n. 14.
123 See Sürat Ghatir (40), v. 78: wa-la-qad arsalnii rusulan lIIin qllblika minhulII man qa~a~llii
'a!llyka wa-minhwn marI lam IUlq~~ 'alaykll, 'We sent Messengers before thee; of some We have

weH that this inventory gradually created, rather than reflected, a consensus,
one might speculate that the conquering Muslims had open mindsY4
In contrast to the attitudes of the conquering Muslims, the concerns of the
later traditionists are fairly clear. First, Daniel's prophecies enjoyed some
popularity in the early period, and this almost certainly reflects the broad
appeal of apocalyptic texts among Christians 125 and Muslims alike. 126 In fact,
Sayf (or one of his sources) betrays an Islamic triumphalism that is only fully
intelligible in the light of Christian millenarian anxieties that tied the conquest
of al-Süs to the eschaton. Sayf reports that the monks and priests (al-ruhhän
wa-l-qasslsün) mocked the besieging Muslims from the top of the walls of the
city: '0 host of Arabs, among the things taught us by our learned men and
ancestors is that only the Antichrist, or an almy led by the Antichrist (qawm
fihim al-dajjäl), will conquer al-Süs. If the Antichrist is leading you, you will
take it (al-Süs); if he is not, don't bother besieging us'.127 Of course in the
eyes of Muslim informants the conquests were the work not of the Antichrist,
but of God Himself; and far from marking the beginning of the End, they
came to mark an altogether new beginning. The successful siege of al-Süs thus
makes a mockery of the Christians and their misplaced trust, turning what
must have been a familiar topos on its head. 128
The Daniel tradition seems to have been informed by iconoclastic concerns
as well. 129 Here it may be significant that the Syriac does not corroborate
the Islamic accounts that describe the Arabs' relocation of Daniel's body.
Although the story is recounted in several different ways,130 aH are drawn
together by a shared concern to make the site inaccessible to those determined
to locate-and perhaps translate-relics. 131
related to thee, and some We have not related to thee' (Arberry). Cf. the relatively early discussion
in 'Abd al-Malik ibn J:Iabib (d. 238/852), Kitüh al-ta'rfkh, ed. Jorge Aguade (Madrid: Consejo
superior de investigaciones cientificas, 1991),26-7.
124 In fact, occasional passages in the Islamic sources eeho the Rabbis' rejection ofhis prophetie
status, and sound like special pleading. Note, for instance, the words attributed to Abu Sabra
(al-Taban, Ta'rfkh, I, 2566). but particularly those of 'All, who answered a query by stating: balä
hüdhü Düniyül al-(/(/kfl1l It'a-hult'a ghayr lIIursal (Ibn A'tham, FUlii!/, H, 8); er. Ibn Abi Shayba,
Mu,wmnctj; VIII, 31:la-ü1I7ahu nc/bf(but not, it appears, a rasiil). For a particularly rieh diseussion
of rasül and nabf, see Geo Widengren, MU!/(/lIlll/ad, the Apostle 01 God, and his Ascension (King
and Saviour V) (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1955), chapters 1-4.
125 For the use of the Danielie paradigm in apocalypses and histories, see G. J. Reinink.
'Ps.-Methodius: a concept of history in response to the rise of Islam', in Averil Cameron and
Lawrence I. Conrad, eds, The Byzanline cmd early Islamic Near East, I: problems in Ihe literary
souree material (princeton: Darwin Press, 1992), 161-6; and (in the same volume), H. J. W. Drijvers,
The Gospel of the Twelve ApostIes: a Syriae apoealypse from the early Islamie period', 201-08.
126 See al-Khatib al-BaghdädI (d. 463/1071), Taqyfd al-'Um, ed. Yusuf al-'Ushsh (Damaseus:
Där il).yä' al-sunna al-nabawIya, 1949),51,56-7 (a scribe from al-Süs eopies the Book of Daniel
and is scolded for doing so; first noted by Crone, Staves, 18). On the popularity of Daniel among
early Sasanian Jews, see Jacob Neusner, Ahistory 01 the Jews in Babylonia, 11: The early Sasanian
period (Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1966),236-7.
127 AI-Taban, Ta'rfkh, I, 2564-5.
128 The' presence of the Antichrist in a besieging army has a long tradition in Christian writing;
for a fourth-century example, see Norman Cohn, The pursuit 01 the millennium, revised ed.
(London: Pimlico, 1993), 27-8.
129 A strong aversion to relies and icons is attested in an early eighth-century source from
southem Iraq; for a brief summary of the unpublished Syriae disputation between a monk of Bet
J:Iäle and an Arab, see G. J. Reinink, trans., Die syrische Apokalypse des pseudo-Methodius
(Louvain: Peeters, 1993; CSCO 541, Ser. syri 221), xlviii. See also Hoyland, Seeing Islam as others
saw it, 465-72; for some tentative archaeological evidence for Islamic ieonoclasm, see Robert
Schick, The Christian cOl1ll7lunities 01 Palestine /rom Byzantine to Islamic rule: a historieal and
archeologieal study (Prineeton: Darwin Press, 1995),207-09.
130 AI-Balädhun, Futii!/, 378; al-Taban, Ta'rfkh, I, 2567: Ibn-A'tham, Futil!/, H, 8-9.
131 The reason is made explicit by Ibn A'tham (Futüh, II, 8), who has 'All recommend that the
body be reburied 'in a place where the people of al-Sus would not be able to find bis grave', cf.
Ibn AbI Shayba, Mu~allluif, VIII, 31-2, on a Tustar eorpse discussed below: 'a plaee known only
to you two'. According to al-QummI (Tiirfkh-i QWIlIn, 297), only some Qummis who just happened
to be in al-Süs were told of its loeation.
Tustar I: traitors and treaties

If the historiography of the conquest of Khüzistän has generally moved little
from Wellhausen's day, an exception is the siege of TustarYz The historicity
of this siege was accepted by Wellhausen and Caetani,133 and continues to be
accepted elsewhere; in some quarters this also includes an act of treachery on
the part of a TustarI local, which delivered the city into the Muslims' hands. 134
But with Noth we finally have a dissident voice. Pointing to the multiplicity
of siege accounts in the Islamic conquest traditions in general, and adducing
the Tustar account in particular, he argues that they must be interpreted as a
feature of historical discourse: they represent 'not the reporting of history, but
rather the deployment of literary stereotypes' .135
In general terms, Noth is certainly correct: siegefbetrayal accounts can
funetion stereotypically,136 'drifting' from one event to the next. 137 It may be
that the appearance of the topos in the futfi?l literature is in some way re1ated
to the treacherous Jew of the sfra. 138 Since the repertoire of pre-Islamic Syriac
historical writing includes siege aecounts of great drama,139 one might also
suggest that it was popular enough to circulate widely in the Near East of late
antiquity.140 In any case, just as a specific takbfr account can be corroborated
by an early Syriac source, 141 so too, it appears, ean the oecasional siege. In this
particular case, accounts that relate a siege and betrayal quite clearly refleet
an early-and authentie-memory of events. For there is Syriac corroboration
not only for the betrayal of the city, but also for the length of the siege (two
years),142 as weil as for the Muslims' penetration of the city through water
tunnels under its walls. 143
132 The siege is very weIl attested in the Islamic sources; see KhalIfa ibn Khayyät. Ta'rikh, I,
133, 138-42; Ibn Abi Shayba, Mu~annaf, VIII, 28-32; al-Tabari, Ta'rfklz, I, 2552-6; al-Balädhun,
Futü!.l, 380; al-Dlnawarl, Akhbär, 137-8; Ibn A'tham, Futü!.l, II, 12-15, 18-23; Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqät,
V, 64j al-Qummi, rarfkh-i QlIl1lm, 297-8. See also Bar Hebraeus, Ta'rfkh, 174.
13 WeUhausen, 'Prolegomena', 96; Caetani, Annali dell'Jslam, IV, 457-8.
134 D. R. Hili, for example, considers: 'That the entry was effected through the treachery of a
citizen is quite probable, the Muslims at this time being ineffectual in siege warfare'. See his Tize
termination of hostilities in the early Arab conqllests. A.D. 634-65 (London: Luzac, 1971), 134;
'Abd al-I:fusayn Zarrlnküb, 'The Arab conquest of Iran and its aftermath', in Cambridge !zistory
of Iran, IV, ed. R. N. Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 15: 'The siege of
Shustar was protracted, but in the end an Iranian's treachery-his name was Siyä-enabled the
Arabs to enter the city'.
135 Noth/Conrad, Early AmMe historical tradition, 19.
136 The traitor topos is also noted by Lawrence I. Conrad, 'The conquest of Arwäd: a source-
critical study in the historiography of the early medieval Near East' , in Cameron and Conrad,
eds, Tize Byzantine aM Early Islamie Near East, I, 363.
137 On 'drift', see Noth/Conrad, Early AraMe historical tradition, 109.
138 Conrad, 'Arwäd', 363, citing Wansbrough, Sectarian milieu, 18-21, 109 (on the motif of
the treacherous lew in the s'ira tradition).
139 Of the many exarnples that could be cited, see ps.-Zacharias Rhetor (wr. e. 550), Historia
.ecclesiastica Zilchariae Rhetori vulgo 'ldscripta, ed. and trans. E. W. Brooks (Paris: L. Durbecq,
1919-21; CSCO 83-84, Scr. syri 38-39), VII.iii-iv (25-28/16-19), lX.xvii (132-33/90-91).
Similarly, The Chronicle of JoshIla the Stylite (written c. 518), ed. and trans. William Wright
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882),50/42 (guards fall asleep): 'Whether then through
this rernissness, as we think, or by an act of treachery, as people said, or as a chastisement from
God .. .' (Wright's translation); and 68/59 ('deserter' helps Byzantines against Persians). Also,
compare the final section of translated Syriac above (a Qarari coUudes with someone who has a
house on the city walls) with ps.-loshua, 69/59-60 (defenders have built temporary houses on the
wall~ are we to understand that the co-conspirator was part of the force defending the city?
1 It almost goes without saying that stories such as these have a very long tradition. Cf.
Joshua 2, which describes how Rahab, a harlot in lericho, admits, shelters, and cuts a deal with
Israelite spies that guarantees the safety of her family; for a discussion and bibliography, see
J. Alberto Soggin, Joshua: a commentary (Landon: SCM Press, 1972),34-43.
141 Crone, Slaves, 12.
142 Thus Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat, V, 64 (a variant also proposes eighteen months); KhalIfa ibn
Khayyät. Ta'rTkh, I, 139 (around a year), 141 (two years or eighteen months); Ibn Abi Shayba,
Musannaj; VIII, 28 (around a year).
143 Thus Ibn Abi Shayba, M~annaf, VIII, 28:fa-adkhalahu min madkhal al-ma'; Khalifa ibn
Khayyät, Ta'rfklt, I, 139:fa-adkltalahlllllin Illadkhal al-mii' Illadkhalan; Ibn A'tham, FutÜ!I, II, 20:
Of course this is ·not to say that we should accept the Tustar traditions in
their entirety. For sieges produce tales: tales of courage, piety, steadfastness,
of elemency, arrogance, and hubris, As Näldeke remarked,144 the particularly
long seige of Tustar produced its share of stories, and these probably explain
why the conquest was invoked in apparently stereotypical fashion,145 We may
even have a very brief glimpse of the Sitz im Leben of some of the storytelling,
Asked by 'Umar to speak on the conquest of Tustar, 'Ziyäd (ibn AbThi) arose
and spoke with such ski 11 that the people were astonished by his e1oquence,
proelaiming: Ibn 'Ubayd is a kha{ib!>146 Needless to say, a performance such
as this one earned praise not for its dogged fidelity to what happened, but by
moving people; what matte red was not a elose correspondence to historical
truth, but rather the speaker's impressive command of a rhetoric that told a
great story, Since the process by which memory was elouded by tale-telling
!Vas already weil under way when we get our first look at our traditions, there
is no question of finding an Islamic account that has survived unaffected:
legendary material crowds our early accounts (Ibn Sa'd, Ibn AbI Shayba, and
KhalIfa ibn Khayya!),147 as it crowds our later sources,
Now some of this material, such as the legendary awil'il, we can safely argue
away, not only because they are usually so transparent, but also because they
are often expendable: no serious interpretation of the conquest of Tustar turns
on 'the first to light the fire at the gate of Tustar' ,148 The point I would emphasize
here is the difficulty of distinguishing between the baby and the bath, Without
our Syriac text, for example, we would not know that it was apparently only
the identity of the traitor that was conditioned by polemics, In most of the early
accounts the traitor remains stubbornly anonymous,149 but exceptions are
al-DinawarI and Abü 'Ubaydajlbn Is1).äq (as preserved in al-QummI); in both
cases the figure starts out anonymously (rajul min ashräf ahl al-madTna, dihqiinT
az jumleh-i buzurgiin-i Tustar), but is then identified as a certain SinajSineh
(wa'smuhu STna, näm-i ü STneh),150 As we have already seen, his appearance
here should probably be explained in the light of asiiwira polemics; we mayaIso
have yet another example of the 'onomatomania' of the Islamic tradition,1S1
nahr Tustar. The 'appendix' thus clinches Gautier Juynboll's argument that something authentie
lay behind Sayfs material (al- TabarT, Ta'rfklz, I, 2554-5: maklrraj al-ma '); see the seeond
appendix to his TabarT translation, Tlze Iristory ofal- Tabarf, XIII: the conquest of lraq, soutlllvestern
Persia and Egypt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989),227-9. For arehabilitation
(on very different grounds) of the view that Jerusalem fell to the 'Israelites' because the latter
penetrated the city's defences through an aqueduct, see Z. Abells and A. Arbit, 'Some new
thou.ßhts on Jerusalem's ancient water system', PEQ 127 (1995), 2.
I Nöldeke, 'Chronik', 44 n. I.
14' Tribesmen crowed about their presence at the battle, one boasting that he had participated
in the battles of al-QädisIya, Jalülä', Tustar, Nihäwand, and al-Yarmük; see al-Fasawt (277/890),
Kitab al-ma'rifa wa-l-ta'r7klz, ed. Akram Piyä' al-'UmarI (Beirut: Mu'assasat al-risäla, 1981), I,
233. Cf. Ibn Qutayba (d, 276/889), 'Uyün ul-akhbiir, ed. Al.lmad ZakT al-'Adawl (Cairo: Där
al-kutub, 1343-48/1925-30), III, 245 (I~fahän, Tustar, Mihrajän, kuwar ul-Ahwaz, Färs).
146 Fa-qama Ziyiid fa-takallamll Ja-ablagha fa-'ajiba al-nas ",in bayallihi wa-qiilü inna Ibn
'Ubayd la-kha.tfb; see al-Zubayn (d, 236/851), Nasab Quraysh, ed, E, Levi-Proven<;al (Cairo: Där
al-ma'ärif, 1953), 244-5, The locus c1ussicus for Ziyäd's eloquenee is his famous khu!ba batra'
delivered to the Ba~rans; on his reputation for eloquence, see,Henri Lammens, 'Ziäd ibn AbThi,
vice-roi de l'Iraq, lieutenant de Mo'äwiya', reprinted in his Etudes sur le siecle des Omayyades
(Beirut: Imprimerie catholique, 1930), 60,
147 Ibn AbI Shayba, M~an1laf, VIII, 31-2; KhalTfa ibn Khayyät, Ta'rfkh, I, 138-42. Cf, also
Ibn A'tham, Futil", Ii, 18-25 (for heroes),
148 Ibn AbT Sh'ayba, Ml~annaf, VIII, 31.
149 ibid., VIII, 34: dihqan Tustar; al-Taban, Ta 'rfkh, I, 2554: rajul; KhalIfa ibn Khayyät,
Ta'rfkh, I, 139: rajul min aM Tustar; al-BalädhurT, Futil!l, 380: rajulan min al-u'iijim,
150 AI-Dlnawan, Aklzbar, 138; al-Qumml, rarfklr-i Qumll1, 297-8, cr Ibn A'tham, FutiiJ.z, 11,
20, where 'NasIbeh' must be a variant of this name; also Ibn AbI Shayba, Mu,wnniif, VIII, 28,
where the traitor is identified as the brother of a victim of al-Hurmuzän,
15' See Noth/Conrad, Early Amhie Izistorieal tradition, 126; also Crone, Slaves, 16,
Of the traitor's actual identity we shall probably never know the details, 152
for the Nestorian authorities naturally had their own axes to grind; here, Iike
in the Arabic, the identity of the traitor was polemically conditioned. The
provenance of the Tustar traitor is suspiciously the same as that of a certain
Peter, also a native of Bet Qaträye, who is said to have betrayed Alexandria
to the Persians in an early part of the chronicle. 153 In neither Alexandria nor
in Tustar can we corroborate the identities of these men, and to explain why
Bet Qaträye is given to provide figures such as these we should probably look
to the Nestorian ecclesiastical controversies that took place when our work
was being assembled. For it was in the middle of the seventh century that
the bishops of Färs, and soon after, Bet Qatraye, refused to acknowledge the
authority of lshö'yab III, who served as catholicos of the Nestorian church
from 649 to 659. 154 Several of the letters written by lshö'yab III address the
problem of the recalcitrant bishops of Bet Qaträye,155 and one, which can be
dated to the period between 649 and 659, states that George, the bishop of
Shüshtra, was among those enrolled to argue the catholicos' view. 156 Just as
in the case of the Islamic tradition, history was apparently pressed into service
to express views abo~t the present: the Qatarenes' threat to the unity of the
Nestorian church in Ishö'yab's day gave rise to the tradition of a Qatarene's
betrayal of the Nestorians to the Muslims in Tustar.
Our Syriac source cannot shed any direct light on areport that describes
a ~ul~ in Tustar, on which the Tustaris reneged (kafara); the city is then said
to have been reconquered by muhiijirün. 157 In its earliest datable form the
tradition is credited by 'Abd al-Razzaq al-$an'äni (d. 211/826),158 as by
al-BaladhurI after hirn, to Ibn Jurayj (d. 150/767), on the authority of 'AW
al-Khuräsäni (d. 133/750).159 The tradition being impossible to confirm/ 60 we
might explain it in the light of post-conquest polemics. Considering that the
issue addressed by 'Atä' is a taxation anomaly-why 'Umar exempted the
issue of conquest unions between the muhäjirün and Tustan women-one is
tempted to think that the tradition is primarily aetiological. Similarly, if the
purported participation of the muhäjirün might have functioned to endow
Tustar with high-status settlers,161 so too might accounts that posit a city's
152 There is no mention of a traitor in the account available to Ibn Sa'd CTabaqiit, V, 64), but
here Ibn Sa'd is interested only in the events that follow al-Hurmuzan's surrender.
153 See 25/22. On Bet Qa~räye, see leaD Mauriee Fiey, 'Dioeeses syriens orientaux du Golfe
Persique', in Mbnoria/ Mgr Gabriel Khouri-Sarkis (Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste, (969),
209-12 (reprinted in CO/ll/llunautes, Chapter II). _
154 For an overview of the controversy, see Fiey, 'Bö'yaw le Grand'.
155 See lSö'yaflh Patriarchae III Liber epistu!arum, ed. and trans. Rubens Duval (Paris:
L. Durbecq, 1.'104-1905; CSCO 11-12, Ser. syri 11-12), nos. 17-20 in the third cyc1e of letters,
written while Ishö'yab was catholicos.
156 Liber epistularum, 259/187.
157 AI-Baladhurl, Futi1(I, 382; Ibn Zanjawayh, Amwiil. H, 439.
15. 'Abd al-Razzäq al-~an'anl, Mu~annaf, ed. HabTh al-Ra\:lman al-A'~ml (Beimt: AI-Majlis,
al-'ilml, 1390-1407/1970-87), V, 293 (first cited by Patricia Crone, 'The first-century concept of
Higra', Arabica 41 [1994],358).
159 On Ibn Jurayj and this 'AW (who is not to be confused with 'AW ibn Abi Raba\:l), see
Harald Motzki, Die Anfänge der islamischen Jurispmdenz (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 199\), 183-218.
160 To expect our Syriac source to concede that Tustar's Nestorian authorities reneged on an
earlier agreement-unless, of course, it was to be portrayed as heroie resistance-is perhaps as
unreasonable as it is to expect the Islamic tradition to record the apparently wanton killing of
local Christians (on which see below). Hill (Termination, 134) is sceptical of this kufr tradition,
sug~esting that it refers to another (unnamed) city.
61 See Noth/Conrad, Early Ambic historical tradition, 98, 2 \0; and cf. Tarif Khalidi, Ambic
historical thaI/gilt in the c1assical period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (994), 46
(explaining the chronological and geographical organization of the !abaqiit): 'What may have
been at issue is a kind of apostolic tmth theory whereby the Prophet's companions and their
descendants act as guarantors of the tme faith in the cities where they settled'. (It alm ost goes
without saying that the authors disagree about the reliability of the early source material.) Cf.
C. F. Robinson, Islamic historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 138 ff.
kufr reconcile conflicting accounts of its conquest history. For while the con-
quest tradition concedes the ~'ul~ ba'd fat~ arrangement,162 it was too awkward
to argue for afat!l ba'd ~UNl, since this would east dishonour on the eonquering
Muslims: hence kufr accounts, which shift responsibility for renewing hostilities
back to the conquered.
If there is a kerne! of truth in all of this, it is probably that the conquest
was violent. That the Islamic tradition says nothing of the killing of local
Christians is to be explained not only by its relative indifference to (and absence
of solid information about) the fate of the conquered,163 but also by the political
circumstances in which it stabilized. C1early defined legal rights and peaceful
co-existence, the latter commonly articulated in the Prophetie prohibition of
killing monks,164 are deve!opments of the post-conquest period. Of course a
similar thing can once again be said about the Christian tradition: had our
Syriac source been written a eentury later, when the Christian elites had be gun
to work out a modus vivendi with the Muslims, the killing might have been
conveniently forgotten as weil.
Finally, an account that posits the discovery of an uncorrupted corpse of
another (now unidentified) prophet in Tustar is almost certainly boguS. 165 It
was probably invoked to support claims made in the course of the 'a~abfyät
that flared up between the TustarTs and SüsTs about Daniel's täbüt. 166 As a
source of local pride, as weil as a draw for pilgrims, sites such as these were
obviously of some value. 167
Tustar 11: the organization oftraditions

For the purposes of historical reconstruction, we can say with some confidence
that reports of a siege Jed by Abü Müsa al-Ash'arT, which was then followed
by a betrayal from within, reflect early and authentie memo ries of the events
in question. How was this memory transmitted? The question is a notoriously
difficult one, but in Tustar we have enough evidence to tease out some
provisional answers.
We can start with the collections in which the Tustar accounts were
included. The conquest traditions of Khüzistan seem to have been compiled
into province-based eollections (e.g. al-Mada'inT'sI68 and Abü 'Ubayda's169
Futü~ al-Ahwäz), as weH as into Ba~ran-based collections (e.g. al-Mada'ini's
Khabar al-Ba~ra wa-jutWlihä).170 Detailed descriptions of the first of these seem
to be lacking in the literature, but we are fortunate to have a glimpse at the
contents of the second. According to Ibn al-NadTm, it began as folIows:
'Dastumaysan, the governorship of al-MughTra ibn Shu'ba, the governorship
162 AI-Taban Ta'rfkh, I, 2565; cf. al-Balädhurl, FutÜ(I, 378.

163 For other examples of conquest kilIing, see Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 33.
164 Thus Abu Yusuf, Kharäj, 195: a~(läb al-~·awämi'.
165 Ibn AbI Shayba, MU~(JJlnaf, VIII, 31-2.
166 These are attested for a Iater period; see al-MuqaddasI (wr. c. 375/985), Ab.mn al-taqäsfm
fi IIla'ri/at al-aqülfm, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1906; BGA 3), 417; also noted by
C:;:laude Cahen, 'Mouvements populaires et autonisme urbain dans I' Asie musulmane du Moyen
Age', Arabica 6 (1959), 28. The lews of al-Süs in Benjamin of Tudela's time are said to have
argued about the tomb as weIl; see Benjamin ofTudela (fi. mid-12th c.), Itinerary, ed. and trans.
Marcus Nathan Adler (New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1907),52-3,
161 In the thirteenth century Tustar could claim the tomb of the sixth Imäm of the ShI'a,
la'far al-~ädiq (d. 148/765); see al-Harawl (d. 611/1215), AI-Ishüra ilä nU/'ri/at al-ziyära, trans.
lanine Sourdel-Thomine as Guide des lieux de piderinage (Damascus: Institut Fran~ais de Damas,
1957) 222-3,
168 Ibn al-NadIm, Füzrist, 103; Yäqüt, Irshäd, V, 316.
169 See above, n. 58.
110 Ibn al-NadIm, Filzrist, 103,
34 CHASE F. ROBTNSON
of Abü Müsa, the matter (khahar) of al-Ahwaz, of al-Manadhir, of Nahr TIra,

of al-Süs, of Tustar, 171 of the citadel (a/-(jara), of al-Hurmuzan, of I;:>abba ibn
MiJ:t~an, 172 of Jundaysabür'. Why the material was assembled into this form,
in addition to the more conventional Futiib al-Ahwaz form, can be explained
at least in part by the administrative controversy that pitted Ba~rans against
Küfans; for what we really have is a set of traditions recounting the victorious
march of Ba~ran armies against the remnants of the Sasanian state.
There are, in addition, two very striking features in Ibn al-Nadlm's survey
of al-Madä'inl's work. The first is that the order of titles-here representing
'section headings'-clearly reflects the sequence of events and battles as they
are known to us from (most of) the surviving sources: Abü Müsä follows
al-Mughjra ibn Shu'ba, and his appointment is followed by the conquests
of al-Manädhir, Nahr TIra, al-Süs, and Tustar (Jundaysäbür being misplaced
after Tustar).173 Given the dearth of second- and early third-century material,
it is useful to know that the hard work of establishing a more or less correct
sequence was apparently finished by this time. 174
The second striking feature is the detail concerning the conquest of Tustar,
particularly al-Hurmuzan's role in it. 175 Now in his attention to al-Hurmuzän,
al-Madä'inI is c1early reflecting broader trends: thus Ibn AbI Shayba has a
long section on 'What was related concerning Tustar' (mä dhukira fi Tustar),
which is dominated by al-Hurmuzän, and the otherwise laconic KhalIfa ibn
Khayyät, drawing on sources that include al-Madä'inI, pauses for four pages
of material on waq'at Tustar; here too al-Hurmuzan plays the starring role. 176
What makes Ibn al-Nadlm's description of al-Madä'inI's, work especially
interesting is his organization of this material into three discrete sections, i.e.
kllabar Tustar, khabar al-qal'a, and khabar al-Hurmuzän. The kllabar al-qal'a
must refer to a set of traditions concerning the siege of the city in general and
al-Hurmuzän's sheltering inside the citadel (qara, qa~aba) in particular; this is
usually, but not always, described as the result of the Muslims' penetration of
the city walls. The khabar al-Hurmuzan, it folIows, would have been a collection
of reports relating his surrender and meeting with 'Vmar in Medina; a favourite
account is a ruse by wh ich al-Hurmuzän secured safe passage. l77 The concerns
here are fairly easy to discern: to contrast the pious austerity of 'Vmar with the
imperious ostentatiousness of al-Hurmuzän-that is, to give vivid illustration
to the Arabian God's victory over the poly theist Sasanians. 178 The dominant
metaphor seems to be al-Hurmuzän's fine c1othing, which is contrasted
with 'Vmar's spare garb; that the scene is a topos is almost certain. 179 This
171 Flügel (Filzrist, 103) here read Dastawä, which makes enough sense (see Yaqüt, Mu'jam, H,
574); but I follow Dodge (The Fihrist, I, 225) and Tajaddud (Fihrist, 115).
172 See Ihn A'tham, Futii/.l, II, 28-30; al-Tabari, Ta'rfkh, 1,2710-13.
173 The early and indecisive campaigns that go almost entirely unnoticed by our Syriac source
were presumably embedded in the section on the govemorship of al-MughIra ibn Shu'ba.
17 KhalIfa ibn Khayya!, who had access to al-Madä'inI's work on al-Ahwäz (Ta'rfkh, I, 140:
qäla AM I-lfasan), may have had the good judgement to ignore his sequenee when it eame to
Jundaysäbür.
t7S Caetani (Annali dell'Islam, III, 908-09) may have been the first to note the crucial
role played by al-Hurmuzän in the eonquest aecounts. The adviee given by al-Hurmuzän to
' Umar about the conquest of I~fahän is discussed by Albrecht Noth, 'I~fahän-Nihäwand. Eine
queIlenkritisehe Studie zur frühislamische Historiographie', ZDMO 118 (\968), 283-4.
176 Note as weIl that Sayfs account as preserved by al-Tabari revealingly begins with
bio/fraphical material on al-Hurmuzän; see al-Tabari, Ttc'rfkh, I, 2534.
77 Khalffa ibn Khayyä!, Ta'/'fkh, I, 142; al-Balädhuri, Futü(l, 381.
178 Thus al-Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2557-8; Ibn Sa'd, Tahaqät, V, 64-5: al-lU/md li'Iläh alladitr
adlwl/a hildhä wa-shfatahu bi-l-Isläm, ete.
2
179 See, for example, al-Ya'qübI. Historiae, H, 163. In her artic1e 'al-Hurmuzän' in E1 , III
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), 586b, Laura Veccia Vaglieri concedes that al-Hurmuzafi's 'arrival in
Medina is deseribed with a number of details that seem to bear a romantic stamp'.
leaves us with the problematic reading of khabar Tustar; if it is correct, it

probably refers to the campaigning that led up to the siege.
Of course, that al-Madä'inI organized a mass of TustarI traditions in this
fashion in no way means that they were always so carefully distinguished. This
is made plain by a contemporary, Ibn AbI Shayba, a muhaddith who does us
the favour of citing relatively full isnlids, and who also eschews the akhhärls'
practice of breaking up and rearranging akhhlir. His first account of the
battIe of Tustar and its aftermath was transmitted from Quräd Abu NU1:l
('Abd al-Ra1:lmän ibn Ghazwän, d. 207/822),180 and is uItimately credited to
'Abd al-Ral)nüin ibn AbI Bakra (d. c. 100/718).181 The account seems to reflect
a fairly naive stage of tradition building. It takes the reader through the siege,
surrender, and al-Hurmuzän's meeting with 'Vmar; and for all that it presents
an edifying story, organized primarily around the dialogue, it is disarmingly
vague: we have but a handful of characters, and no attempt to locate the
events chronologically. It may reasonably be taken to represent one late first-
or early second-century Ba~ran tale of the conquest. KhalIfa ibn Khayyät had
access to the same account, which he too credits to Quräd Abu NU\:!, now via
an intermediary, 'All ibn 'Abd Alläh. 182 Whereas Ibn AbI Shayba probably
preserved this account in extenso, KhalIfa ibn Khayyä!, here wearing an
akhhlirl's hat, gives us a highly abbreviated version. It too enjoys pride of
pI ace in KhalIfa's presentation, but now the account is stripped of all but its
essentials, and breaks off when al-Hormuzän takes refuge in his citadel. The
tradition has apparently begun to fragment, in this case according to the
categories reflected in al-Madä 'inTs work. 183
Conclusion
One can only agree with Conrad that 'work that securely vindicates, rather than
repudiates, the historicity of early Arabic accounts is extremely difficult' .184
As I have tried to show, our Syriac passage can be handled in such a way
so as to vindicate and repudiate. Since much of the preceding has also been
fairly rough going, I shall conclude by restating more concisely, and briefly
elaborating upon, my principal conclusions.
1. A local seventh-century Syriac source, which is historiographically independent

of the Islamic tradition, can offer impressive corroboration for accounts pre-
served in a range of Arabic-Islamic sourees, which generally date from the
ninth and tenth centuries. Since the corroboration is occasionally detailed and
precise, in this case there can be no doubt that the nascent historical tradition
180 Ibn Sa'd, TClbaqät, VI1.2, 77; Ibn l:Iajar (d. 852/1449), Tahdhfh ClI-tClhdhfb (Hyderabad:
Dä'irat al-ma'ärif al-ni?ämIya, AH 1325-27), VI, 247-9; al-DhahabI (d. 748/1348), SiYClr Cl'läm
Cll-nubalä', ed. Shu'ayb al-Ama'üt et al. (Beirut: Mu'assasat al-risäla, 1401-04/1981-84), IX,
518-19; aI-~afadT (d. 764/1362), AI-Wl'tft hi-I-wafayät, ed. Helmut Ritter, Sven Dedering et al.
(Istanbul and Wiesbaden: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1931-proceeding), XVIII, 217.
181 See al-Balädhuri, FlItii~, 347; Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqät, VII.!, 138; Ibn Qutayba, Kitäb al-ma'iir!/,
ed. Tharwat 'Ukkasha (Cairo: Wizärat al-thaqiifa, 1960), 289; Ibn Khallikan, Wafayiit, VI, 366;
Ibn l:Iajar, Tahdhfh, VI, 148-9: al-~afadI, Wiijf, XVIII, 128; al-Dhahabi, Siyar a'läm al-nubalii',
IV, 319-20; Ibn al-'Imäd (d. 1089/1679), Shadhariit al-dhahab, ed. 'Abd al-Qädir al-l:Iusni
al-Jaza'iri (Cairo: Maktabat al-qudsi, AH 1350), I, 122. AI-WaqidT also drew on 'Abd al-RaJ:!män
for information about al-Ba~ra; see al-Tabari, Ta'rrkh, I, 2530.
182 KhalIfa ibn Khayyät, Ta'rfkh, I, 139-40.
183 Note the narrative interruption (qiila) that may mark the division between khabar al-qal'a
and klwbar al-Hurmu=iin material in Ibn AbI Shayba, M/l~annaf, VIII, 29:-4.
184 Conrad, 'Arwäd', 399 n. 213.
was in some measure continuous. The results here thus contrast sharply with
another recent comparison of Arabic and Syriac sources, where it was shown
that the former retain only the vaguest outlines of the conquest of Arwad, a
small island off the coast of Syria. Here radical discontinuity was the lesson
learned. 185
Part of the explanation for the contrast may lie in the relative strengths of
the Syrian and lraqi historical traditions. For although Syria did produce more
historiography than has gene rally been assumed, it cannot compare with that
of Iraq; and what was produced in Syria was frequently slighted by later Iraqi
authorities in favour of Iraqi traditions. 186 But since the invention of tradition
was apparently not limited to Syria,187 and furthermore, since the survival of
some authentie material from Syria was occasionally possible as well,188 this
explanation cannot take us terribly far. It is thus probably more fruitful to
draw a slightly different contrast. Left in the hands of the Iraqis, for whom
the fate of the Mediterranean island of Arwäd could hardly have constituted
a serious concern, such conquest tradition as there was disintegrated almost
entirely.189 By contrast, we have seen that the conquest of Khüzistän in general,
and Tustar in particular, mattered a great deal to the neighbouring Ba~rans
and Küfans/ 90 indeed, were it not for the Küfan/Ba~ran debates, much more
material might have been lost. It may seem trite to point out that history that
matters is more readily transmitted than history that does not; but in this case
it bears repeating. If we assume that the tradition remained oral beyond the
Iifetime of the participants, as we must,191 the continuing interests of the
Ba~rans and Küfans in the conquest fate of cities to the south provide the best
explanation for the survival of material in oral form. There is no general life
expectancy for oral traditions. In
18' ibid., particularly 388: '". the fact remains that it can be demonstrated in every case that
the Arab-Islamic material for the conquest of Arwäd does not and cannot consist of aeeounts
passed on from one generation to the next in a continuous tradition beginning with the generation
of the Arab eonquerors. Instead, the beginnings of the extant tradition for this event must be
sought among Umayyad storytellers piecing together narratives with only the barest shreds of
genuinely historical information to guide or restrain the process of reeonstruetion'.
186 See Fred M. Donner, 'The problem of early Arabie historiography in Syria', in Mul)ammad
'Adnän al-Bakhft, ed., Proceedings of the second symposium on the Izistory of Biläd al-Shiim during
the early Islamic period up 1040 A.H.j640 A.D. (Amman: University of Jordan, 1987), I, 1-27.
On a Damascene tradition, see Gerhard Conrad, Abü'/-lfusain al-Riizf (-347/958) und seine
Schriften. Untersuchungen zur frühen Dal11aszener Geschichtsschreibung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 1991). See now J. Lindsay. ed., Ibn 'Asiikir and early Islamie hislOry (Princeton: Darwin
Press), 2001.
187 See Noth, 'I~fahän-Nihäwand'; Donner, Conquests, 198-9 (on Buwayb); and now
N oth,Conrad, Early Arabie historical tradition.
18 See Donner, Conquests, 144 (al-Wäqidl apparently eorroborated by the Syriac tradition;
there is no evidenee that the latter depended on the Islamic).
189 Note that it is the Syriac tradition, in the person of Theophilus of Edessa (d. 785), that
quite naturally transmits a more believable version of events.
190 Cf. Lecker's comments apropos of Abü 'Ubayda ('Biographical notes', 17): ' ... the
conquests of the Sawiid and the neighboring Ahwäz were a kind of loeal history for the
Basran A.'U.'.
'191 The case that the early tradition was written down earlier is occasionally asserted (see,
most recently, Khalidi, Ambie historicczl thought, 14, 26-7), but it has not been demonstrated.
M ueh as one would Iike to see early Islamie scripturalism function as a catalyst for historical
writing (cf. the role of Christianity in the shift from roll to codex), we lack the evidence to see
this at work. For two recent views on the problem of the origins of Islamic historiography, see
F. M. Donner, Narratives of Islal11ic origins: Ihe beginnings of Islamie historicalwriting (Princeton:
Darwin Press, 1998) and Robinson, Islamie historiography.
192 On the sodal function of oral history, see John Kenyon Davies, 'The reliability of oral
tradition', in L. Foxhall and J. K. Davies, eds, The Trojan War: its historicity and context
(Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1984), 90; O. Murray, 'Herodotus and oral history', in Heleen
Saneisi-Weerdenburg and Amelie Kuhrt, eds, Achaemenid history, II: the Greek sources (Leiden:
Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1987),99.
310 - - - THE EXPANSION OF THE EARLY ISLAMIC STATE
Of course, if the transmission of historicaI memory was not completely

discontinuous, it was anything but disinterested. It is abundantly cIear that
much of the material was conditioned, and in some cases generated, by post-
conquest polemies about spoils and administration. Even a tradition that at
first gIance suggests only simple storytelling of the awä'il variety, e.g. 'the first
to light the fire at the gate of Tustar,/93 is adduced by Abü Yüsuf in his
discussion of the division of spoils. 194 One can disagree with Dennett's
qualifications of Becker, or Noth's qualifications of Dennett. but there is no
denying the insight that draws together all their work, and which Calder has
emphasized: conquest accounts 'should be recognized as bearers of ideological
and juristic messages'. 195 To take only one example: if one's share of the booty
was determined in part by whether one was walking rather than riding,
and if the latter, on what kind of mount,196 how are we to describe how
such-and-such a city was taken?
What our Syriac source shows, however-and this needs to be
emphasized-is that the Khiizistan tradition is more than the accumulation 01'
details arbitrarily added by story tellers, more than topoi and schemata, and
finally more than back-projected legal precedents or assertions of state and
provincial power. All ofthese do appear, crowding, and no doubt occasionally
crowding out, authentie material. But some authentie material did survive, and
since some of this at first appears to be manifestly stereotypical, the task of
distinguishing between authentie and unauthentic is no simple matter. The
conquest of Tustar shows many of the signs that usually betray literary effect,
e.g. statements describing the enemy's strength,197 a great siege, tribaI boasting,
and eschatological allusions, but for all these it cannot be dismissed as merely
topological.
2. The survival of authentie material is most striking at the level of individual

scenes (e.g. the siegejbetrayal at Tustar; Daniel's tomb at al-Süs), although it
is certainly true that legendary elements can arise here too (e.g. the traitor's
name at Tustar). The results thus support Noth's view that the conquest
traditions as we have them are generally composite reconstructions, assembled
out of discrete units, rather than pieces of a now-Iost coherent whole. 198
This said, our Syriac source can also corroborate the Islamic tradition on
matters that are not 'scene-specific', but rather represent a more synthetic
understanding 01' events, e.g. the principal role played by Abü Müsa al-Ash'ari:
in the protracted campaigns, and matters of sequence as weil, particularly the
secondary capitulations of al-Siis and Tustar. This, in turn, suggests that at
least some accounts concerning Tustar and al-Süs were integrated early on
into a fairly broad view of the Khüzistän campaign, that the collectors and
systematizers of the second and third centuries had the historiographical
resources and sophistication to overcome the limitations of source material
that did not, or some combination of both. It is the nature of our evidence-
and the state of research-that we cannot say much more than this. One can
193See above, n. 148.

194Abü Yüsuf, Kharlij, 198.
195 Norman Calder, Studies in early Muslimjurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 151.
196 AI-TabarI, Ta'rrkh, I, 2556; Abii Yüsuf, Kharlij, 18; 'Abd al-Razzäq, Mu~allnaf, V, 183-7;
Qudama ibn Ja'far (d. c. 310/922), Kitlib a/-khariij, ed. l:Iusayn Mu'nis (Cairo: Där al-shurüq,
1987J 59.
1 7 See, for example, al-Balädhurl, FutÜ/I, 380: wa-biha s/u/lvkat al-'adüw wa-!/{/dduhum
198 Noth/Conrad, Early Arabic historical tradition, 5. On akhblir more generally, see Stefan
Leder, 'The literary use of the khabar: a basic form of historical writing', in Cameron and
Conrad, eds, The Byzalltine anti early Islamic Near East, I, 277-315.
speculate that the memory of Abü Müsä was kept alive by descendants in
al-Ba~ra and al-Küfa;199 and we have also seen that the correet sequence of
battles was already in plaee by the early third century. But these are just two
pieees of a mueh larger puzzle.
3. The ease of Khüzistän offers yet another illustration of how the 'schools
theory' of the early tradition fails us. 200 If Ibn A'tham more frequently seems
to have got things right, no single authority either resisted the fOl'ces of
distortion completely, or monopolized early material entirely. In some cases
the consensus of the Islamie tradition was vindicated; in others (e.g. the
conquest of Jundaysäbür), minority views were corroborated. Sayf ibn 'Vmar
seems to have been mi staken about the role of Abü Sabra at Tustar;201 on the
other hand, he seems to have been the only authority who had reasonably
good material on the truee(s) between al-Hurmuzän and the eampaigning
Muslims. Indeed Sayfs aecount, whieh deseribes the tribute arrangements
between al-Hurmuzän and the Muslims in an impressive\y imprecise way,
passes Noth's standards for authenticity with flying colourS. 202 The absence
of detailed tribute accounts is an altogether striking charaeteristic of the
KhüzistänI conquest aceounts in general, and this too seems to be the case for
all of our traditionists, regardless of their provenance.
4. As far as the reconstruction of conquest history is concemed, we can have

some eonfidence that Abü Müsä al-Ash'arI, then based in al-Ba~ra, led a
Muslim force that followed up earlier battles in Khüzistän; the capitulations
of al-Süs and Tustar, which we can actually describe in some detail, marked
the turning point in his campaign. That the Sasanian defence and Muslim
advance concentrated on tllese cities can be explained by their administrative
significance in the late Sasanian period. 203 At least one truce was brokered,
and as others preserved in very early sources, 204 it was apparently negotiated
by commanders on the scene; it stipulated the payment oftribute and described
a fron tier. Our source cannot corroborate the Islamic tradition in dating
matters, but it gives no reason to doubt that Tustar had fallen by 22 or 23 AH.
199 See Ibn I:Iazm (d. 456/1064), ]amharat ansäb al-'arab, ed. 'Abd al-Saläm Mu\:lammad
HärOn (Cairo: Där al-ma'ärif, 1977),397-8; Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqiit, VI, 9. The significance of family
and clan traditions is emphasized by Michael Lecker, The death of the Prophet Mul:Iammad's
father: did Wäqidi invent some of the evidence?', ZDMG 145 (1995),11. On family traditions in
a different oral tradition, see Rosalind Thomas, Oral tradition and written record in Cfassical
Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter 2.
200 The argument for distinct historiographical schools was undercut by Albrecht Noth long
ago; see his 'Der Charakter der ersten grossen Sammlungen von Nachrichten zur frühen
Kalifenzeit', Der Islam 47 (1971), 168-99.
201 Cf. the case of Abü 'Ubayda ibn al-Jarra\:l (Albrecht Noth, 'Futu!l-history and FutU~
historiography', Al-Qan!ara 10 [1989],459), who seems to appear in Damascus conquest accounts
onl~ to function within the manifestly late ~ul~/,anwa paradigm.
02 'Je weniger eine Abgabe Steuercharakter hat, umso eher kann sie als authentisch angesehen
werden; je mehr sie einer Steuer ähnelt, umso mehr ist ihre Authentizität zu bezweifeln.' See
Albrecht Noth, 'Die literarisch überlieferten Verträge der Eroberungszeit als historische Quellen
für die Behandlung der unterworfenen Nicht-Muslime durch ihre neuen muslimischen
Oberherren', in Tilman Nagel et al., eds, Studien zwn Minderheitenproblem im Islam, I (Bonn:
Selbstverlag des Orientalischen Seminars der Universität Bonn, 1973),300. For a balanced view
of Sayf, see Ella Landau-Tasseron, 'Sayf ibn 'Umar in medieval and modem scholarship', Der
Is/am 67 (1990), 1-26.
203 See Rika Gyselen, La geographie administrative de J'empire sassanide: fes tbnoignages
sigillographiques (Paris: Groupe pour I'etude de la ciyilisation, du Moyen-Orient, 1989), passim;
J. Markwart, A cata/ogue 0/ the provincia/ capitals 0/ Eriinslzahr (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico,
1931} 19.
24 See ps.-Sebeos, Histoire d'Heraclius, 147, 164.
THE CONQUEST OF KHUZlSTÄN 39
Appendix
Immediately following upon the passages I have translated above is an account
alluding to the conquest of Syria and Egypt, and for the benefit of those
interested, the following is a translation. 20s
Afterwards (hätarken) a man from the Arabs named Käled came and went
to the West, and took the lands and towns as far as 'Arab. 206 Herac\ius,
the king of the Byzantines, heard [this] and sent a large army against them,
whose leader was called S_q_y_l_r_ä. 207 The Arabs defeated them, annihilating
more than 100,000 Byzantines, whose commander they [also] killed. They
also kiJled Ishö'däd. the bi shop of Iffrtä, who was there with 'Abdmas11.t;20B
this [Ishö'däd] was undertaking an embassy between the Arabs and
Byzantines. The Arabs [thus] took control 01' aIl the lands of Syria and
Palestine: They wanted to enter the Egyptian [lands] as weil, but they were
unable, because the border (t(Jömä) was guarded by the Patriarch of
Alexandria with a strong and large army. For he had blocked the marches
01' the land,209 and had built walls along the banks of the Nile in all the
land. Only with difficulty, because 01' their (i.e. the walls') height,210 were
the Arabs able to enter and take the land of Egypt, Thebaid, and Africa.
If only because of a possible allusion to the enigmatic al-Muqawqis, this
passage deserves some attention. 211
205 The passage begins on 37: 15/31: 3 and ends on 38: 3/31: 20.
2060ften glossed as western northern Mesopotamia under Byzantine rule; see Nöldeke,
'Chronik', 14 n. 4; SYllodicoll orielllale, ou receuil de sYllodes Ilestoriens, ed. and trans. J.-B. Chabot
(Paris: Academie des lnscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1902; Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la
Bibliotheque Nationale, 37), 617.
207 37: 19, whieh is to be eompared with Nöldeke's and Broek's reconstruction of S[ac[ella]arius]
in what is called the 'record dated to AD 637' in Palmer, Sevellth celltury, 3; and Theophanes,
Clzrollograplzia, ed. Karl de Boor (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1883-85), AM 6125: sakellarios; trans.
e. Mango and R. Seott, The ChrrJllicle of Theoplzalles confessor (Oxford, 1997), 468f. For
discussion see Donner, Conquests, 145-6; Walter Kaegi, Byzalllium emd the early Islamic conquests
(Cambridge: Cambridge_University Press, 1992),99-100.
208 The pres~nce of lshö'däd in Syria is curious, and it may be that this sentence is out of
place; Fiey ('L'Elam ... (suitel,' 137), seems to put this episode of killing in Tustar. In 'Abdmasi\:!
we almost certainly have 'Abd al-MasTh ibn 'Amrj'Amr ibn 'Abd al-Masi\:!, an AzdI native of
al-Hlra, who is weil attested in the Islamic tradition: see al-BalädhurI, Futilh, 243; and Donner,
CO/i~uests, 183,331 n. 83, for more literature. .
2 9 Literally: 'the entrances and exits'.
210 Cf. the accounts beginning at 30: 25/26: 15. Walls were gene rally seen as an effective defence
against Arabs (in contrast to seige-Iaying imperial armies); see Proeopius (wr. 550), The history
of the wars, ed. and trans. H. B. Dewing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961
reprint), Il.xiv.12; and 'Joshua the Stylite', Tize Chrollicle of loshua the Stylite, 63/54.
211 The testimony of the K"il~istiill clzrollicle is noted in the revised edition of Butler
(Alfred J. Butler, The Arab conqllest of Egypt, ed. P. M. Fraser, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Glarendon
Press, 1978], ix), but it did not make it into the text proper. On al-Muqawqis, see K. Ohrnberg,
art. 'al-MuI!:aw~is' in EI 2 , VII (Leiden: E. J. BrilI, 1993), 511a-513a; and Butler, Conquest,
Appendix C; on the Great Wall of Egypt, see Butler, Conquest, 197-8; and on the walls and
fortifications in general, Wladislaw Kubiak, AI-Fllstat: its !<nmdation and early urban developmellt
(Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1987),50-57.
19
SYRIAC VIEWS OF EMERGENT ISLAM
S.P.Brock
It requires a strenuous effort of the imagination in

order to counteract the advantage Qf hindsight that
we enjoy in looking at the events of the seventh
century. How did contemporaries view them? When did
the people of Syria and Mesopotamia begin to realize
that the Arabs were there for good? How did they
reconcile this realization, once attained, with their
total world view? How aware were they of the re-
ligious background of the conquests?
It is questions such as these that the Syriac
sources ,I sometimes contemporary wi th the events them-
selves, can help to answer. Here we have the
expression of an articulate and often highly sophis-
ticated section of that part of society which
provided the continuum, as it were, in the shifting
sands of the seventh century.
On 24 December 633, at a monastery outside
Damascus, ~ sumptuous Gospel manuscript was
completed, miraculously to survive the turbulent
events of the.next few years, to give us same hint of
the lack of awareness of the storm clouds over the
horizon.
On Christmas day, a year later, the Patriarch
Sophronios preached in Jerusalem, and saw in the Arab
occupation of Bethlehem a punishment for sin that
could be easily remedied: "We have only to repent,
and we shall blunten the Ishmaelite sword . . . and
break the Hagarene bow, and see Bethlehem again."3
It was not lang before things began to take on a
different look: in a letter dated between 634 and
640 Maximos the Confessor speaks of a "barbaric
nation from the desert" as having overrun a land not
their own, and hints that the appearance of Anti-
Christ is at hand. 4 The Doctrina Jacobi nuper
baptizati, of much the same date, fits contemporary
events into the apocalyptic scheme of the four beasts
of Daniel chapter 7, but Rome is still the fourth
beast, simply humiliated by the succession of horns. 5
It is not until the end of the century, with the
10 Syriac views
Armenian Sebeos, that we find a radical reinterpret-

ation of the beasts, wi th the Ishmaeli tes replacing
Rome as the fourth beast. 6
II
In assessing the Christian reactions to the conquests

of the seventh century, it is essential to take into
account the ecclesiastical allegiance of the various
sources, since each of the three main communities,
Chalcedonian, Monophysite and Nestorian, came to
provide their own particular interpretation of these
events. Since I shall be concentrating on Syriac
sources, this means that the viewpoints that we shall
be given are mainly Monophysite and Nestorian; here
and there, however, we can cast a glance at the more
scanty Chalcedonian texts (both monothelete and
dyothelete) on the topic, mostly in Greek.
Two main types of evidence will be employed, the
world chronicles and the apocalyptic literature. As
we shall see the division between these twogenres is
not always as clear-cut as one might have expected.
The three world chronicles which have most to say
about the seventh century all happen to.be products
of the Syriac "renaissance" of the.twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries, namely the chronicles of the
patriarch Michael, the anonymaus writer ad annum
1234, and Bar Hebraeus. 7 Thanks, however, to the
fact that these works relied very heavily on much
earlier sources, two in particular, Jacob of Edessa
(who died in 708) and Dionysios of TellmaQre (who
died in 845),8 we can recapture from them something
of the attitudes of two great scholars and thoughtful
men who lived much closer to the events themselves,
and who were both active in the general area of Syria
and western Mesopotamia.
Before looking in greater detail at these chron-
icles, however, it is worth stressing that the early
decades of the seventh century had already been
exceedingly turbulent for the populace of Syria-
Mesopotamia; the area had served as ·the fulchrum of
Persian-Byzantine hostilities, and the Byzantine
reconquest under Heraklios had brought with it
vicious persecution of the dominant Monophysite com-
munity by tne Byzantine (Chalcedonian) authorities.
In view of this background, the sense of relief at
the change of rule, from Byzantine to Arab, that we
find in these Monophysite chronicles is hardly
surprising. The Arab invasions are seen primarily as
a punishment for Byzantine ecclesiastical policy. In
a famous passage we find the following analysis:
11
Heraklios did not allow the orthodox (i.e,

Syrian Orthodox, or Monophysites, as I shall
eall them to avoid eonfusion) to present them-
selves be fore him, and he refused to hear
their eomplaints ab out aets of vandalism eom-
mitted on their ehurehes ·(i.e. by Chalcedonians).
This is why the God of vengeanee, who has power
over the kingdom of men on earth, giving it to
whom he wants and raising upto it the lowliest
ofmen,9 seeing the overflowing measure of the
wickedness of the Romans--how they used every
means to destroy our people and our ~hurch, so
that our (religious) eommunity was almost
annihilated--(this is why) he roused up and
brought the Ishmaelites from the land of the
South--the most despised and insignificant of
the peoples of the earth--to effeet through
them our deliveranee. In this we gained no
small advantage, in that we were saved from the
tyrannical rule of the Romans . . . . 10
This sort of sectarian theological interpretation
would appear to have been the standard one in Mono-
physite eircles, and John of Nikiu applies it equally
to the Egyptian situation. ll Mutatis mutandis we
find interpretations based on eeelesiastical lines
among the Nestorians and Chalcedonians as well. Thus
the Chalcedonian Anastasios1 2 sees the Arab successes
as a punishment for Constans II's pro-monothelete
policy and his treatment of Pope Martin. 13 The re-
vival of dyothelete theology under Constantine IV, on
the other hand, effects peace between the two
empires, and civil war among the Arabs. The mono-
thelete author of a Syriac life of Maximos,14 in
contrast, saw the Arab successes in Africa as a sign
of God's wrath, bringing punishment on every place
that had accepted Maximos' error (i.e. dyothelete
theology). To the Nestorian John of Phenek, to whom
we shall come back later, the Arabs were sent by God
as a punishment for heresy (i.e. Chalcedonian and
Monophysite) .
III
Syriac writers are generally mueh better informed on

the religious teachings of Islam than are Byzantine
writers, and one of the interesting things that the
chronicles have to say coneerns the links between
Mu~ammad and the Jews.
On Mu~ammad's early career it is only a few late
chronicles that provide any details, and these are of
no special interest to us here. 1S Much more
12 Syriac views
important is a section in our Monophysite chronicles,

deriving from Dionysios of Tellma~re, which describes
Mu~ammad's contacts with Jews in Palestine. 16 Im-
pressed by their monotheism and the excellence of the
land of Palestine "that had been given to them (i.e.
the Jews) as a result of their belief in a single
God," Mu~ammad returned home and promised to those
who accepted his new religious teaching that "God
would give them a fine land flowing with milk and
honey.,,17
In this section we are also given abrief outline
of the Prophet's teaching, where it is specifically
stated that he accepted the Torah and the Gospels,
apart from the crucifixion narrative. 1B Muslim
acceptance of the Torah is also a point made in a
mid seventh century docQ~ent, the colloquium between
the Monophysite patriarch John and an unnamed emir. 19
Further hints of Jewish ideology lying behind the
early conquests are perhaps to be found in the anony-
mous chronicler's account of Abü Bakr's address to
the four generals on their departure for Syria, where
the phraseology is reminiscent of Deuteronomy 20:
10 ff, recording Moses' instructions to the
Israelites. 20 Likewise 'Umar's alleged building of
the Dome of the Rock on the site of the temple of
Solomon is specifically described in one chronicle as
the rebuilding of the temple. 2l The anonymous
chronicler agai~ reflects Deuteronorny (this time
17: 16 ff) in the section on 'Uthmän and his "per-
version of the law and modest manner of the kings who
preceded him."22 (Incidentally this chronicler,
alone of the Syriac writers, knows of 'Uthmän as the
collector cum editor of the Qur'än.)23
IV
Although the chronicles generally present rather dry

and bare lists of events, we do find an occasional
anecdote included that is intended to illustrate some
aspect of the change of regime. In that these prob-
ably represent popular attitudes, they should be
judged worthy of our attention.
Bar Hebraeus retails the story that, in the face
of Arab successes, Heraklios gathered some bishops
and clergy and enquired how they viewed the situation.
After they had all made their own observations, the
emperor hirnself volunteered astatement: "As far as
their way of life, manners and beliefs are concerned,
he said, I see this people as the faint glimmer of
first dawn--when it is no longer completely dark, but
at the same time it is not yet completely light."
13
Asked to elucidate further, he went on: "Yes, they

have indeed left darkness far behind, in that they
have rejected the worship of idols and worship the
One God, but at the same time they are deprived of
the perfect light, in that they still fall short of
complete illumination in the light of our Christian
~aith and orthodox confession."24
The story itself is no doubt apocryphal: this is
obvious, if for no other reason, from the fact that
the judgment pronounced has a theological rather than
political concern behind it. The positive attitude
to Islam is interesting,25 and it finds a close par-
allel in the writings of Timothy I, the Nestorian
patriarch. 26 The story probably rep~esents a reflec-
tion later in date than the seventh century, since
sources best anchored in the seventh century suggest
that there was greater awareness that a new empire
(malkutal had arisen, than that a new religion had
been born. One Chalcedonian (monotheletel source
from the end of the century C.:l:1 still openly speak of
"paganism. ,,27
Another anecdote concerns precisely this transfer
of power, from the Persians to the Arabs; it also
says something of the attitudes of Christian Arabs.
As we shall see it has a surprising ancestry. In the
course of Yezdegerd's final struggle with the Arabs,
the Persian army was encamped on the Euphrates near
Küfa, and a spy, a man from ~irta d-Nafman, was sent,
to the Arab encampment. When the spy arrived he saw
a Mafadd tribesman outside the encampment, who urin-
ated, sat down to eat and then proceeded to remove
the fleas from his clothing. They got talking and,
asked what he was doing, the tribesman replied: "As
you see, I am introducing something new, and getting
rid of something old; and at the same time I am
killing enemies." The spy, having puzzl~d over the
matter, eventually came to the conclusion that this
signified that "a new people was coming in, and an
old one departing and that the Persians would be
killed. ,,28
The interesting thing about this story is the way
it portrays the dawning of an awareness, on the part
of the Christian Arabs, that the invaders were there
to stay, and that their present masters, the
Sasanids, were already doomed. Actually we have
here, adapted to a totally new setting, a slightly
modified version of an anecdote about an encounter
between Homer and some Arcadian fishermen who, when
questioned by the poet as to what they were doing,
made a very similar reply.29 Horner, unfortunately,
was not as quick-witted as the spy from ~irta, and he
14 Syriac Views
died of frustration at not being able to solve the

riddle.
v
We should now turn briefly to the terminology used in
the Syriac texts dealing with the seventh century.
If we can identify the conceptual framework into
which Syriac-speaking Christians tried to' fi t the new
situation of their times, we can perhaps learn some-
thing of the way· in which they regarded their new
overlords.
All the Syriac writers of this period, including
those active in the middle of the century, would
appear to be writing with sufficient hindsight for
them to be aware that Byz1ntine and Persian rule was
at an end, and that the A:abs were there to stay,
representing a new empire, or "kingdom." The caliphs,
and MUQammad himself, are regularly described as
"kings," and the malkuta, kingdom of the Arabs, is
seen as the direct heir of the "kingdomsOl of Byzan-
tium and Persia. No doubt behind this terminology
lies the influence of the book of Daniel, with its
picture of successive world empires. We have already
seen how, from a very early date, this book played an
important role in the process of fitting the new
state of affairs into an already accepted conceptual
framework.
For MUQammad the title "prophet" is not very
common, "apostle" even less so.30 Normally he is
simply described asthe first of the Arab kings,3l
and it would be generally true to say that the Syriac
sources of this period see the conquests primarily as
Arab, and not Muslim. There is, however, -ane
interesting term used of MUQammad that turns up in
both Monophysite and Nestorian sourees, namely
mhaddyana, "guide,,,32 a term that has no obvious
ancestry, although the related haddaya is a
Christological title in early Syriac literature.
The term caliph occurs only once, in a Syriacized
form, in the texts covering the seventh century~ and
this is in direct speech, addressed to ·Uthmän.~3
.Here, as we have seen, "king" is the normal term
employed, although Isho'yahb, writing in the middle
of·the century, uses the term shallita rabba. 34 For
local governors the Syriac sources either take over
the Arabic term amira,35 or use the colourless words
shallita (Isho'yahb) or risha, neither of which had
served as part of the technical vocabulary for
officials of the Byzantine and Sasanid empires in
earlier Syriac sourees.
15
As is weIl known, the Arabs are generally referred

to in Syriac sources as Tayy. As far as their ident-
ity and origin were concerned, seventh century
writers already had available a tradition going back
to Eusebios, according to which the Arabs had been
classified as the descendants of Ishmael and Hagar.
The term Tayy itself has no religious overtones, and
could imply pagan, Christian or Muslim. Where it was
thought necessary to specify them as Muslim the term
used in early texts is mhaggraye,36 which can also be
used alone. In origin the term would appear to be
connected with muhäjirün, but to most Syriac writers
it probably came to be more or less synoriymous with
bnay Hagar, "sons of Hagar. " This latter term, how-
every, could evidently (to judge by a couple of
passages in Michael the Syrian}37 bear pejorative
overtones, presumably not present in another term,
"sons of Ishmael," also commonly found.38 The pejor-
ative overtones in Michael's Chronicle certainly fit
in with Sozomen's statement that the Sarakenoi dis-
guised their servile origins by calling themselves
Ishmaelites, rather than Hagarenes. 39
VI
Of the east Syrian, or Nestorian, sources John of
Phenek, writing in the 690s, is the most important,
but before turning to him we should first glance at a
few passages in the correspondence of the Catholicos
Isho'yahb 111, who died in 659. 40 As a background to
these two writers two things need to be kept in mind.
First, and most obviously, the Nestorian church,
living under the Sasanid empire, had problems very
different from those that faced the Monophysites
under Byzantine rule. Secondly, the seventh century
saw the expansion of the Monophysite church into
north Mesopotamia at the expense of the Nestorians.
We shall see that both these factors colored our
author's attitudes.
Isho'yahb takes a very positive attitude towards
the events of his time. 4l To him there was no doubt
that God had given dominion (shultana) to the rayy.42
What is more, he describes them as "commenders of our
faith," who honor the clergy, the churches and the
monasteries. Writing in the same letter (addressed
to Shem'un, bishop of Rev Ardashir) about the whole-
sale apostasy of the Christian Community in Mazon, or
Oman, he says that there was no question of pressure
to convert being exerted, only of temporal financial
disadvantage, and he upbraids his correspondent for
the laxity of his clergy in the whole shameful
affair. 43
16 Syriac Views
Others of Isho'yahb's correspondents had also

tried to use the Arab invasions as an excuse for
their own failures. Thus the clergy of Nineveh
(Mosul) evidently attributed the Nestorian losses to
the Monophysites in north Mesopotamia to the fact
that the new rulers favored the Monophysites. Utter
nonsense, says Isho'yahb, it is quite untrue that the
tayyaye mhaggraye helped the Theopaschites (i.e.
Monophysitesl, the losses are entirely your own
fault.1!4
Some of his correspondents evidently looked back
to Sasanid rule with a certain degree of nostalgia t
which we are also to find later in John of Phenek,4~
but this only brings a sharp rebuke from the
Catholicos. 4b
Isho'yahb was evidentlyon excellent terms with
the Arab authorities, and they supported his case
when some of his clergy in Kerman revolted against
his authority and appealed unsuccessfully to the
"chief shallita, chief of the officials of the
time.~47 Isho'yahb's attitude is found spelt out
even more explicitly in the writings of one of his
most famous successors on the patriarchal throne,
Timothy I (died 823). Timothy writes that "the Arabs
are today held in great honor and esteem by God and
men because they forsook idolatry and polytheism, and
worshipped and honored the One God." "God honored
MUQammad greatly, and subdued be fore his feet two
powerful kingdoms, of the Persians and of the Romans;
in the case of the Persians God effected this because
they worshipped creatures instead of the Creator, in
that of the Romans, because they had propagated the
theopaschite doctrine."48
John of Phenek, writing some decades later than
Isho'yahb, is no less convinced that the "sons of
Hagar" were divinely called:
We should not think of their advent as some-
thing ordinary, but as due to divine working.
Before calling them, God had prepared them
beforehand to hold Christians in honor; thus
they also had a special commandment from God
concerning our monastic station, that they
should hold it in honor. 49 . . . How other-
wise, apart from God's he+p, could naked men,
riding without armor or shield, have been able
to win: 50 God called them from the ends of
t-he earth in order to destroy, through them, a
sinful kingdom (Amos 9:8), and to humiliate,
through them, the proud spirit of the Persians. 5l
As proof texts of the divine calling of the Arabs,
John adduces Zechar~ah 3:2, Deuteronomy 32:30 and
17
Genesis 16:12.
John also sees the advent of the Arabs as a pun-
ishment for Christian laxity, apparently chiefly in
matters of doctrine (i.e. failure to oppose Mono-
physites and Chalcedonians sufficiently vigorously) .
Because of the bloodshed of the conquests John sees
the Arabs as themselves punished by a divided rule.
In contrast to Honophysite writers, who tend to view
the rule of Abü Bakr and 'Umar in idealistic terms,
John sees only division until the reign of Mu'äwiya,
in whose time there was unprecedented peac~2 "such
as our forefathers had never experienced."~
John specifically states that all the 'new rulers
required was payment of taxes, and that otherwise
there was complete religious freedom. ~1oreover he
definitely sees the new rulers in ethnic and not
religious terms: "among the Arabs are not a few
Christians, some belonging to the heretics (i.e.
I10nophysites), and some to us (i .e. Nestoriansl. ,,53
The peace brought by ~u'äwiya, however, only led
to further laxity--in particular allowing the Mono-
physites to spread eastwards. It is in punishment
for this that there followed the troubled times
under Mu'äwiya's successors. Yazdin (i.e. Yazid) is
castigated for his immorality, which is contras ted
with (Ibn) Zubayr's zeal against the "sinful
westerners." (Ibn) Zubayr's death John regards
effectively as the collapse of the Arab "kingdom":
"from that time on the king~om of the Tayy was no
longer firmly established."~4
To top the political turmoil comes the plague of
A.H.67 (A.D.686 j 7), and it is at this ~oint in his
narrative that John begins to strike an apocalyptic
n o te: "the end of the world has a rrived." The only
thing lacking so far is the advent of the Deceiver
(i.e. Antichrist);55 we are in fact experiencing the
beginnings of the eschatological birthpangs. John
s~ecifically sees the successes of the "captives"
liberated by Mukhtär as a sign of the coming destruc-
tion of the Ishmaelites and the end of Tayy rule. 56
John of Phenek was not alone in seeing the tur-
moils of the last decades of the seventh century as
the beginnings of the end, and his work serves as an
excellent bridge to the last work we should consider,
the Apocalypse attributed to Methodios, dated to the
seco nd half o f the seventh century. This work was
written in Syriac, but was soon translated into Greek .
and thence into both Slavonic and Latin, the last
being a language in which it won its greatest
popularity. I shall base myself in what follows on
the original Syriac, surviving complete in a single,
18 Syr i ac vi ews
as yet unpublished, manuscript,57 since the Greek and

Latin vers ions have both been considerably reworked
in places.
The Apocalypse attributed to Methodios was evi-
dently written in the region of Sinjar,58 abou~
A.D.690, in any case (as we shall see) before 692.
After a highly individual ac count of the pre-
Christian empires, the author makes ·it quite clear
that, in contrast to the kingdom of the Persians,
already uprooted, that of the Greeks, being Chris-
tian, will never be completely dominated by any
other. God has brought the "barbaric" Ishmaelites
into the kingdom of the Christians, not out of any
love he had for them, but because of the sins of the
inhabitants (especially in the matter of sexual
licence). The oppressive rule of the "tyrants" will
last ten apocalyptic "weeks" (i.e. seventy years) ,
after which the Greek king will suddenly rise up and
destroy the unsuspecting Ishmaelites: he hirnself
will attack the desert of Yathrib from the Red Sea,
while his sons will finish off those Ishmaelites who
are left in the "land of promise."59
There follows aperiod of the "last peace," in
which apostates will receive their reward, and
priests no longer be subject to taxation. Next, the
nations enclosed by Alexander in the gates of the
north will burst out, only to pe destroyed by an
archangel in the plain of Joppa, after wreaking havoc
for one "week." Thereupon the king of the Greeks
will enter Jerusalem for 1\ "weeks" (here also
specified as 10~ years), after which the "false
Christ" will appear. The Greek king will then go to
Golgotha, place his crown on the cross, and commit
the kingdom to God. Both crown and cross are raised
to heaven, thus fulfilling Psalm 68:31. 60
This psalm actually speaks of Kush as "stretching
out her hands to God," and i t is clear that some of
the author's contemporaries understood this to mean
that a savior would appear from Kush. Our author,
however, is at pains to refute this, and he does so
by providing an elaborate genealogy for the Greek
kingdom, going back to Alexander'sKushite mother. 6l
In this way he is able to claim that it is really the
Greek kings who are meant by Kush here. 62
The author regards the tyranny of the Arabs as
coming to an end at the conclusion of the tenth
"week·," in other words after seventy years, which
would be 692. 63 He hirnself is quite clearly living
in the final "week," thus between 685 and 692--
precisely the period that John of Phenek was describ-
ing as the "last days." John specifically mentions
19
the "plague" of A.H.67 (A.D.686/71 as adding to the

miseries; "plague" is among the ills mentioned by
Pseudo-.Methodios, but wha t he finds really oppressi ve
is the tax system: 64 "even orphans, widows and holy
men will have to pay poIl tax," he writes. And in
this statement we have, I believe, the key to the
precise dating of the Apocalypse: it must belong to
the period immediately be fore (ar possibly duringl
the census of <Abd al-Malik, on the basis of which
the tax system in Mesopotamia was reformed. The
Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysios gives A.G.1003 as the
year of this reform, i.e. A.D.69l/2. 65 I would
suggest that the Apocalypse of Methodios should be
dated to 690 or 691, at a time when rumors about the
new tax laws were rife: in antiquity, as today, a
census always gave rise to strong feelings. 690-1
was significantly also a time when ho?es of a
Byzantine recovery could be nurtured without too
great a degree of improbability: .678 had seen a
major Byzantine victory, and ten years later, in 688,
<Abd al-Malik had renegotiated humiliating peace
terms with Justinian 11. The tension between these
two factors--rumors of vastly increased taxes, and
Byzantine military recovery--thus provided an ideal
hotbed for eschatological ideas. As products of
this ferment we have, not only John of Phenek and
Pseudo-Methodios, but also another, shorter, Syriac
apocalypse that goes under the name of the Apocalypse
of John the Less. 66
Eschatological speculations seem indeed to have
been rife in the late seventh and early eighth cen-
turies, focusing on the recapture of Jerusalem among
Christians, and on the destruction of Constantinople
among .Muslims and Jews,67 and it is against this
wider background that these Syriac texts need to be
viewed. John of Phenek and the Apocalypse of John
the Less show no interest in the revival of Byzantine
power, and this makes Pseudo-Methodios stand out all
the more sharply in contrast, for here is an appar-
ently Monophysite writer looking to the re-establish-
ment of Byzantine power--in complete opposition to
what was evidently the standard Monophysite attitude
that we saw in Michael the Syrian. Pseudo-Methodios
is in fact much more in line with what seems to have
been the Chalcedonian attitude in Syria, where in the
early eighth century John of Damascus was writing
hymns which pray for deliverance, at the hands of the
Byzantine emperor, from the enemies of Christ, the
Ishmaelites. 68 One wonders whether Pseudo-Methodios
may not in reality have been a Chalcedonian, whose
work (unobjectionable Christologically to the
20 Syriac Views
Monophysites) happens to have been transmitted in

Syriac by Monophysite scribesi the fact that the
work is also quoted by Nestorian writers perhaps
lends support to this suggestion. Such a hypothesis
would also explain how the work came to be translated
into Greek--an honor achieved by no other Syriac text
in this period, as [ar as I know. 69
With this piece of speculation, perhaps we could
try to draw together the various strands. One thing
is quite clear: after only a short period, perhaps
just a decade, of uncertainty, people became aware
that a new, Arab, empire (malkuta) had arrived on the
scene, replacing the Sasanid entirely, and half the
Byzantine. In such times the Christian population.
resorted to the book of Daniel to find divine backing
for these major upheavals, and it is this that would
seem to be the reason why the seventh century texts
use the terms malka, malkuta, of Arab rule, and not
because the new rulers corresponded in any obvioUS-
way to either the.Sasanid or the Byzantine emperors.
This explanation of the choice of termin610gy would
be supported by the fact that the Syriac writers were
clearly at a loss to describe other figures in the
new power structure: since they did not correspond
obviously to anything with which they were already
familiar, these writers resorted either to colorless
terms, such as risha, head, or to the Arabic ones,
duly Syriacized, such as amira.
To writers of every ecclesiastical body there was,
without any doubt, some theological reason to be
sought for the demise of the two former world empires
and the concomitant ills suffered by Christians as a
result of the Arab invasions. To the Nestorian and
Monophysite communities there was a ready-made
answer, based on inter-church relationships: for the
Monophysites, the Byzantine defeat was simply a pun-
ishment for Chalcedonian arrogance and the per-
secution under Heraklios, while the Nestorians saw in
the hardships they endured divine punishment for the
Monophysite successes in northern Mesopotamia, or,
alternatively moving to a wider viewpoint, the Arab
conquest of the Sasanids was understood as a punish-
ment for Zoroastrianism. The Chalcedonians, on the
other hand, were faced with a problem: 70 as long as
the Arab presence seemed only temporary, the general
laxity and sins of the Christian community could be
blamed, but this was a bit drastic when the Byzantine
armies bade Syria their final "farewell"j and the'
monothelete/dyothelete controversy could not continue
to be the scapegoat for very long.
It is thus probably the Chalcedonian
21
community's dilemma, as weil as in the worsening con-

ditions for Christians during the second civil war,
and fears aroused by the census, that led to the rise
of the apocalyptic literature, around 690, which
found a ready audience in all three religious
communities.
It was perhaps only with Dionysios of Tellmaore
(died 845) that we really get a full awareness of
Isl a m as a new religion. Earlier observers had not
always been able to distinguish the religion of the
Arabs from paganism, although Christi ans who came
into direct contact with the new rulers, such as the
patriarchs John and Isho'yahb, certainly knew better,
and perhaps it is the story about Heraklios and the
first dawn that would best reflect the viewpoint of
the majority of Christians under Arab rule--that is,
of those who bothered to think about the matter at
all.
From Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society,

Ed. G.H.A. Juynboll. Copyright @ 1982 by the Board of
Trustees, Southernl11inois University. Reprinted by
permission cf the Scuthern Illinois University Press.
NQTES
1. For a bib1iographica1 survey, see my "Syriac

soure es for seventh-century history ," Byzantine and .
ModernGreekStudies 2 (1976): 17-36. In the present
artic1e I use the fo11owing abbreviations for fre-
quent1y cited sources: BH = P. Bedjan, Gregorii
Barhebraei Chronicon Syriacum (Paris: 1890) (English
translation in E.A.W. Budge, The Chronography of
Barhebraeus (Oxford: 1932) i pp. 89-105 of vol. 1
covers the seventh century); Chr. 1234 = J.B. Chabot,
Chronicon ad annum 1234 pertinens 1 (c.s.c.O.~ Scr.
Syri 36: 1920) (Latin translation in C.S.C.O., Scr.
Syri 56: 1937); MS = J.B. Chabot, Chronique de
Michelle Syrien, 4 (Paris: 1899-1924; reprint
1963) (French translation in vol. 2); PsD = J.B.
Chabot, Incerti auctoris chronicon pseudo-Diony~ianum
vulgo dictum 2 (C.S.C.O., Scr. Syri 53: 1933) (French
translation by Chabo"t, Chronique de Denys de Tell-
Mahre, quatrieme partie (Paris: 1895); pp. 4-11
cover the seventh century) •
2. J. Assfalg, Verzeichnis der orientalischen
Handschriften in Deutschland, V: Syrische Hand-
schriften (wiesbaden: 1963), no. 5.
3. Ed. H. Usener, in Rheinisches Museum, n.F. 41
(1886), p. 508 (compare p. 515, for hope of recovery).
4. ~. 14 (Patrologia Graeca 91, col. 540).
5. Ed. N. Bonwetsch, Doctrina Jacobi nuper
baptizati (Abhandlungen der Gesellschaft der Wissen-
schaften zu G6ttingen, phil.-hist.K1. n.F.12, 3:
1910), p. 63.
6. F. Mac1er, Histoire d'Heraclius par l'eveque
Sebeos (Paris: 1904), pp. 104-5 (section 32, cf. 34);
cf. W.E. Kaegi, "Initial Byzantine reactions to the
Arab Con~uest," Church History 38 (1969): 139-49.
7 . See note l.
8. Cf. R. Abramowski, Dionysius von 're11mahre
(Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 25.2:
1940), pp. 14 ff.
9. Daniel 5:19
10. Chr. 1234, pp. 236-7; MS 2: 412-3 = 4: 410.
They go on to add that the change of ru1e was
200
advantageous even though they did not regain control

of their churches confiscated under Heraklios, seeing
that the Arabs simply maintained the status quo in
this matter.
11. R.H. Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop
of Nikiu (London: 1916), 121.2: "all said . . the
victory of the Muslims was due to the wickedness of
the emperor Heraklios and his persecution of the
orthodox through the patriarch Kyros."
12. Patrologia Graeca 89, col. 1156.
13. Kaegi, "Initial Byzantine Reactions . ,
p. 142 wrongly tries to identify the Bib!ical name
"Amalek" as a corruption of 'Amr b. al-'A~ or
'Abd al-Malik.
14. Ed. S.P. Brock in Analecta Bollandiana 91
t(1973): 299-346 (section 23) .
15. BH, p. 97; Elias of Nisibis, Opus Chrono-
logicum (ed. E.W. Brooks, C.S.C.O., Scr. Syri 21),
Part I, pp. 126-30.
16. MS 2: 403 = 4: 405; Chr. 1234, pp. 227-8.
17. Cf. BH, p. 97: rejection of idolatry would
lead to God giving the Arabs "that land of promise";
compare also Sebeos (see Note 6) section 20, and
Vardan (J. Muyldermans, La domination arabe en
Armenie (Louvain and Paris: 1927), p. 41 (text)
p. 74 (translations)).
18. MS 2: 404 = 4: 406 (MS wrongly has "Lawand
prophets"); Chr. 1234, p. 229. In BH several anach-
ronistic statements have crept in; e.g. (p. 98) the
attribution to the Prophet of the institution of
Ramadan (contrast Elias of Nisibis (ed. Brooks,
p. 131), who credits it to 'Umar, under the year
A.H. 14).
19. Ed. F. Nau, "Un colloque du patriarche Jean
avec l'emir des Agareens," Journal asiatique 11 sero
5 (1915): 225-79 (sections 2, 4). Nau dated the
conversation to 639, but 644 i8 preferred by Lammens
(Journal asiatique 11 sero 13 (1919): 97-110).
20. Chr. 1234, p. 240: "When you enter that
land, kill neither old man, nor child nor woman; do
not force the stylites to come down from their col-
umns, do not harm the solitaries, because they have
set their lives apart to worship God. Do not cut
down any tree or lay waste cultivated land, and do
not hamstring any domesticated animals, whether
cattle or sheep. Establish a covenant with every
city and people who receives you, give them assuran-
ces and let them live according to their laws and the
practices they had before our time. Let them pay
tribute in accordance with the sum fixed between you,
and let them practise their own religion where
201
they live. Those, however, who do not reeeive you,

you are to fight, conducting yourselves earefully in
aeeordanee with the ordinanees and upright laws
transmitted to you from Sod, at the hands of our
prophet, so that you do not anger God."
21. MS 2: 431 = 4: 421; cf. Chr. 1234, p. 260;
Sebeos seetion 31.
22. Chr. 1234, p. 261.
23. Chr. 1234, p. 26l.
24. BH, pp. 96-7.
25. Also found in the anonymous Nestorian ehron-
iele eomposed between 670 and 680, ed. I. Guidi,
Chroniea Minora I (C.S.C.O., Sero Syri 1), p. 38:
"The victory of the sons of Ishmael, who overpowered
two strong empires, came from God." Cf. C. Cahen,
"Note s~r l'accueil des chr~tiens d'Orient ~ l'Islam,"
Revue de l'histoire des religions 166 (1964): 51-8.
26. See below, p. 16.
27. Syriac life of Maximos (see note 14), 18;
the term probably means little more than non-
Christian here, and should not be taken as implying
the hostile attitude that beeomes prevalent in later
Byzantine writers (on whom see S. Vryonis, "Byzantine
attitudes towards Islam during the late Middle Ages,"
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 12 (1971):
263-86) .
28. MS 2: 421-2 = 4: 416-17; Chr. 1234, pp.
246-7; BH, p. 101.
29. Scholia on Gregory Nazianzen's Inveetive 1,
no. 33 (attributed to Nonnus), in Patrologia Graeca
36, eol. 1004 (English translation of the Syriae
version in S.P. Brock, The Syriac Version of the
Pseudo-Nonnus Mythological Scholia (Cambridge: 1971),
pp. 97-8).
30. "Prophet": PsD, p. 149; Chr. 1234, pp.
240, 254, 275; Apocalypse of John the Less (see
note 66), p. 18; Elias of Nisibis (see note 15),
p.126. "Apostle": Ps!), p. 149; Chr. 1234, p. 227.
31. E.g. List of Arab "kings," ed. J.P.N. Land,
Anecdota Syriaca 2 (Leiden: 1868), p. 11 of addenda;
French translation by F. Nau in Journal asiatique 11
sero 5 (1915): 226 note l .
32. Iohannan b. Penkaye (ed. A. Mingana, Sources
Syriaques 1 (Leipzig: 1907), p. 146*; Chr. 1234,
pp. 227, 238. In a late sixth century text it is
used of the initiator of a heresy: S.E. and J.S.
Assemani, Bibliothecae Apost. Vaticanae
Catalogus, 3: 65. In the Harklean New Testament
(616) haddi translates hodegein.
33. Chr. 1234, p. 277: tahlupa da-nbiyeh d-alaha;
'Uthmän is also addressed as amira da-mhaymne.
202
34. Ed. R. Duval, Isho'yahb Patriarchae 111 Liber

Epistularum (C.S.C.O., Scr. Syri 11 (translation:
12», p. 226; the anonymous Nestorian Chronicle (ed.
Guidi, see note 25), pp. 30, 31-2) uses mdabbrana,
nieader," of both Mutammad and his successors.
35. E.g. in the conversation between the pat-
riarch John and the unnamed emir (see note 19).
36. E.g. ISho'yahb, Liber Epist., p. 97; Chr.
1234, p. 238; colophon of BM Add. 14666, dated
A.H. 63; Patriarch Athanasius apud A. Vööbus,
Syrische Kanonessammlungen 1 (C.S.C.O., Subsidia 35;
1, p. 200).
37. MS 2: 418, 423 = 4: 414, 416.
38. E.g. co1ophon of BM Add. 14666 (A.H. 63).
39. Eccl. Hist. 6: 38.
40. For the date, see J.M. Fiey, "Isho'yaw le
grand," Orienta1ia Christiana Periodica 36 (1970): 7.
41. Cf. Fiey, pp. 30-33, 43; also ~.G. Young,
Patriarch, Shah and Ca1iph (Rawalpindi: 1974), pp.
85-99.
42. Liber Epist., p. 251; compare note 25.
43. Liber Epist., pp. 248 ff.
44. Liber Epist., p. 97.
45. Ed. Mingana (see note 32), p. 144*.
48. A. Mingana, "Timothy's Apo1ogy for Christi-
anity," in Ivoodbrooke Studies 2 (Cambridge: 1928),
pp. 59, 62.
49. Compare Chr. 1234, p. 240.
50. Compare the story in MS 2: 422 = 4: 417.
51. Ed. Mingana (see note 32), p. 141*.
52. Ed. Mingana, p. 147*.
55.' Ed. Mingana, pp. 165 ff; Isho'yahb (Liber
Epist., p. 249) already wonders whether the mass--
apostasies in Mazon (Oman) did not portray the arriv-
al of the "man of sin." Compare even earlier Maximos,
in Patro1ogia Graeca 91, col. 540. According to
Sebeos section 35 the Ishmaelite "chief" is the
"grand ally of Antichrist~"
56.Ed. Mingana, p. 167*; see also p. 157* for
the "captives."
57. Vat. syr. 58, ff. 118 b -137 a , of 1584. For
other Syriac extracts see my "Syriac sources . "
(note 1), p. 34. On the background, see the liter-
ature cited by I. Shahid, in Le Museon 89 (1976):
174-6.
58. Thus in the title, f. 118 b .
59. Ff. 126 a -133 b .
203
.60. Ff. 134 a -136 a .

61. Ff. 123 b -126 a .
62. F.136 a .
63. The starting point will be the Hijra, and not
the conquest of Iraq, as most scholars have supposedj
The Hijra dating is already used for the Nestorian
synod of 676 (J.B. Chabot, Synodicon Orientale
(Paris: 1902), p. 216 (text) = p. 482 (translation»;
likewise John of Phenek (ed. Mingana, p. 160*):
A.H. 67.
64. F.129 a - b .
65. PsD, p. 154 (on this muddled passage, see
D.C. Dennett, Conversion and PoIl Tax in Islam
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1950), pp. 45-6).
66. Ed. J.R. Harris, The Gospel of the Twelve
Apostles (Cambridge: 1900), pp. 34-9 (translation),
15*-21* (text).
67. CL A. Vasi1iev, "Medieval ideas of the end
of the world: west and east," Byzantion 16 (1942/3):
473 f.
68. Cf. J. Meyendorff, "Byzantine views of Islam,"
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 118; on John of
Damascus, see in general D.J. Sahas, John of Damascus
on Islam (Leiden: 1972).
69. Isaac of Nineveh was translated into Greek in
the ninth century.
70. Cf. Kaegi, "Initial Byzantine reactions . . . "
(note 6), p. 149.
INDEX
Note: The Prefix 'al-' is ignored in the alphabetical ordering of entries.
Abbasids Abü Wä'il 248

and administration 108 Abü YüsufYa'qüb b. Ibrählm al-Ani?ärl
defeat ofUmayyads 52,151,152-4 al-Küfi 193, 197 n.20, 201-2, 241, 243
and dhimmi 129, 130 n.13,244-5,293, 310
and J ewish apocalyptic 133, 158 administration
size of forces 69 centralization 263-86
and trade with Europe 102 early Islamic xxii-xxiii, 32, 46-7, 48-9,
'Abd Alläh b. $älii). 194-5 107-8
'Abd Alläh b. Zubayr see Ibn al-Zubayr, MongoI47-50, 52,60
'AbdAlläh in provinces 177-88,306
'Abd al-'Azlz b. Marwän 154, 220, 221-2 Aghlabids, and conquest of Sicily 65
'Abd al-Malik xvii, 77, 78, 150, 152, 154,323 agriculture
and Arabic 47 development 109
and coinage 109-10 and sulb,an-'anwatan traditions 180-1,
in Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam 219-20 185
and J erusalem 232-3, 236 ahl al-dhimma 192, 196 n.18, 198, 199
and Mecca 236-7 ahl al-$ulb, 194-7
'Abd al-Rai).män b. AbI Bakra 308 al-Al:maf b. Qays 296
'Abd al-Rai).män b. 'Awf 192 Ain Jalut, battle (1260) 55
'Abd al-Razzäq b. Hammäm al-$an'änI305 Ajnädayn, battle xv, 12, 68
Abü 'l-'Arab Mui).ammad al-TamlmI205-6, 'All b. 'Abd Alläh 308
215,220,223 'All b. AbI Tallb xvi, 151, 185,210, 217, 230,
Abü Bakr al-$iddlq 40, 217, 221, 316 302 nn.124,131
and promise ofbooty 67-8 Albert of Aix 161
and ridda wars xv, 67, 94 Aigeria, and conquests of'Uqba 214
Abü Da'üd 252 Alptakin 134, 156, 160
Abü Ghazzäla, Mui).ammad 'Abd al-I;Iallm Alroy, David (pseudo-Messiah) 161
267 n.4 amfr al-mu'minfn (commander ofthe
Abü Hämld al-GharnätI 89 Believers) xv, xviii, xxiv, 230-2
Abü I;Ianifa 196-7, 201-2, 205 am$är (garrison towns) xv-xvii, 59, 70,263,
Abü Hurayra 28, 210 293
Abü 'Isä of Ispahan 154 'Ammär b. Yäsir 296, 297
Abü Ismä'll al-Bai?rI173 n.19 'Amr b. 'Ai? 63, 69-72, 74, 77
Abü Mikhnaf 260 conquest of Cyrenaica 190-1, 193-4,
Abü Müsä al-Ash'arl 289,291, 292-301, 306, 197-9
310-11 conquest ofEgypt 63, 69-70,170,181-2,
Abü Muslim 152-4 279
Abü Nu'aym al-li?fahäni 241, 244, 249 Fustät mosque 234
Abü Sabra 295-6,300,302 n.124, 311 and operational centralization 272-6,
Abü Sufyän b. I;Iarb b. Umayya 231, 237 277-80
Abü 'Ubayd al-Qäsim b. Salläm 192,253, and Rama<;län fast 209-10
258 Anastasius the Sinaite 116-17, 121-2,270
Kitäb al-Amwäl193-7, 199,204-6 n.9,315
Abü 'Ubayd al-Thaqafi 280 Anatolia, and early Islamic expansion
Abü 'Ubayda b. al-Jarräi). 71, 170,210,294 XVI
n.58, 295 n.65, 299, 304, 305 al-Andalus, Muslim settlers xvii
332 INDEX
'anwatan organization 70-1, 282-3

meaning 178-9 payment 96
see also sulltan-'anwatan tradition pre-Islamic 1-7
Apocalypse of J ohn the Less 323 size 11-13, 68-9, 282
apocalyptic supplies 71
Byzantine 115-16, 117-20 tactics 71-2
and Daniel 302 weapons and armour 41, 69-70
Jewish xxvii, 131-61 see also discipline
Muslim 131 armies, Byzantine 1,5-6,11-13,33
Persian 129 discipline 72
Syriac 313-14, 321-5 size 41, 68
Arabia weakness xxi-xxii, 92
central and peripheral 93-4 armies, Mongoi 58
dessication 16-18, 28, 39, 92 armies, Persian 5-6,12-13,68,317
and early Islamic expansion xv, xvii, 26, cavalry 300
268 command structure 74
pre-Islamic religion 8-9, 93 discipline 72
and Semitic migrations xix, xxiii, 16-17, tactics 1
67 weakness xxi, 92
tri baI confederations 2-4 Arnold, Thomas, and nationalist
Arabic 24 interpretation xix, 15-16
as divine language 57, 59, 61, 84-5 Asad b. al-Furät 77
ofjutült literat ure 171-2 al-Ash'äth b. Qays 243
as literary language xxv, 57 al-Ash'arI see Abu Musä al-Ash'arI
as officiallanguage 47, 53 Ashhab 210
spread 59 Ashtor, Elie 102-5, 108
Arabs 'Atä' b. AbI Rabäi). 210
aristocracies 93-4 'Mä' al-Khurä~ani 305
Christian 317, 321 'atä' system 107-8
conversion 40 autonomy, military 263-86
fiscal benefits 107 Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 206-7
and Islamic civilization 24, 87 al-Awzä'i, Abu 'Amr 'Abd al-Rai).män
and military art 1-7, 32-3, 41 and distribution of booty 202, 205
military organization 71, 72 and interrupted prayer 211
nomads and sedentaries xxiv, 37-8, 60-1, and status of conquered peoples 192,
93-5 194, 195-6
pre-Islamic 1-7,24,93
as raiders 39, 59 Babyion (Egypt) xv, 64, 68, 72, 122
and religious fervour 7-11, 25, 31, 40 Baer, Fritz 133, 152, 154-5, 159, 161
and single combat 6 Bahnasä (Egypt), conquest 166, 167
in Syriac sources 319-21 al-Bakri, Abu 'Ubayd 219
as Tayy 319, 321 Bakr b. Wä'il tribe 74
tribai rivalries 24 al-Balädhuri, Ai).mad b. Yahya 67-8,70,
see also armies; nomads; tribes 191,193,195,196-7,222 n.88
architecture, development 109 and battle for I~fahän 241, 243 n.13,
aristocracy 244-5,260
Persian 129 and conquest ofKhuzistän 294, 295 n.67,
triba193-4 299-300,305
Armenia Futült al-buldän 38 n.1, 164,215,217
infutült literature 167 nn.70,71
and Islamic expansion xvi, xvii, 73, 279 Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Syriacum 295
armies, Arab 1, 5-6, 41, 63-80 n.60, 314, 316-17
command structure 96 Barthold, V.V. (W. Barthold) 48 n.22, 58-9
and military autonomy 263-86 Bashear, Suliman xxvii
INDEX 333
al-Ba~ra (Iraq) 59, 291, 293 internal weakness xxix, 33, 40, 73-4
founding xvi, 70, 108, 294-6 and Jewish apocalypticism 155-60
Battle ofthe Bridge 251, 252, 257-8, 280 and North Africa 74-5,78-9,88, 198,
Battle of the Masts 64, 78 221-2
Bayhaqi, Ibrähim b. Mui).ammad 254 n.96 Orthodox and Monophysite Christi ans
Becker, Carl Heinrich xx, xxiii, 16, 39, 270 xxii,41,51, 74, 116, 122-3,314
n.9,310 reactions to Arab conquest xxv, 113-23
Bedouin see Arabs; tribes tactics 1
Be'er Orah mosque 234-6, 235 and taxation 107-8
Ben Cheneb, Mohammed 203 and Umayyads xvii, 66-7, 231-2
Berbers wars against Persia 41, 51, 73, 160,314
in Arab army 39, 58, 72
and Byzantine empire 75, 76, 78 Caetani, Leone 25, 27 nn. 8,9, 28
and conquest of Spain 39, 69, 224 and conquest of Khuzistän 289, 299, 303
conversion to Islam 41, 64, 215, 220, 224 and economic interpretation xix-xx, 10,
in Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam 215, 224 39
andjizya 190-1 andfutült literature 12, 165, 173
Lawäta 190-1, 193, 195-7, 199 and nationalist interpretation xix, 1-13,
Bethlehem, Arab conquest 113-14 16-19,267-8
Blruni, Abu 'l-Rayi).än Mui).ammad 147 Cahen, Claude 102-3, 111
Bloch, Marc 89 n.5 Calder, Norman 310
booty Caliphate
distribution 200-8,297,310 and centralization of control 263-86
as incentive for conquest 7, 26-7, 66-9, and qismat al-arcuJ,in traditions 184-6
92-3,96 Canard, Marius, and factors in military
land as 184-6 success xxii, 63-80
nafal202-6 capitation payments 197-8
and pillage 207-8, 224 Carcassone, Islamic control xvii
setting aside of a fifth 201, 203-6, 208, Carmathians 155-9
281 Carthage, Arab conquest (698) 64, 75
and Umayyads 220 Casanova,Paul229-30
Bossuet, J acques Benigne 35 n.28 cavalry 70, 92
Bousquet, G.H. centralization of authority 263-86
and factors in military success xxii, centralizing bias 274, 275-85
15-21,32-5 conceptualaspect264-6,267,269-71
and religious interpretation xx, xxi, 23, historiographical critique 276-85
25-32,41-2 n.4 strategic/operational aspect 265-6, 267,
Brinner, William 301 269,271-85
Brock, Sebastian xxxi tactical aspects 265-6, 267, 271
Brockelmann, Carl 173 Chalcedonian Christianity see Orthodox
Browne, Laurence E. xxiv n.22 Christianity
Brunschvig, Robert, and Ibn al-I;Iakam chance, role 33-5, 76, 80, 92, 93, 270-2,
xxviii, 189-228 285-6
Buddhism, and Mongol empire 43, 47, 53, Charles Martel 64, 75-6, 82
55-6,61 China
Bukhäri, Abu Abdullah Mui).ammad 250, and Arab raids 82
252,260 and Mongol control 42-3, 48, 50-3, 56, 61
Bulliet, Richard W. xxiv-xxv Chingis Khan 38,47-8,51,57,59
Buttenwieser, Moses 133 and bilik 44
Buwayb, battle 251 and religion 42-3, 54-5
Byzantine empire and Yasa 43-5, 57
and Arab conquest xv-xvii, xxi-xxii, 5, 8, Christianity
11,24,63,84 and conquest as punishment for sin
armies 5-6, 11-13, 33, 92 113-23
334 INDEX
and converts to Islam 32, 118-19, 126, demographic xxiii, 106-9

167,319 economic xxiii-xxiv, 101-11
in Egypt 15, 63 on non-Muslim populations xxvi, 113-23,
in Iran xxvi, 125-30 125-30
and Islam 29, 317-25 political xxii-xxiii, 110-11,296
in Mongol empire 54-5 and social and ideological change xxvi,
in Syria 16, 232-6, 313-25 107
and toleration 47 Constans II, emperor 116-17, 315
see also Monophysite Christianity; Constantine IV, emperor 117, 121-2,315
Nestorian Christianity; Orthodox Constantinople
Christianity and early Islamic expansion xvi
Chronicle of Guidi 127, 328 n.25, 329 n.34 siege (717) xvii, 66, 82
Chronicon ad annum 1234 314-16 sieges xvii, 66, 82, 288
civil wars xvi, xvii, 24, 230, 280, 315, 325 conversion xix, xx, xxiv-xxv, 15-16
Clausewitz, Carl von 98 ofBerbers 215, 220, 224
coinage, Islamic 95, 109-10 of Christians 29 n.13, 32,118-19,126,
communications, problems in 272-3 167,319
community, integration xiv, 93-5, 107 forced xix, 65-6, 82
Companions ofthe Prophet 9-10 of Jews 135
conquest, Islamic xiii-xiv, xviii as motivation for expansion 29-32,
Arab forces see armies 39-40,65,268
Byzantine reactions to 113-23 of Zoroastrians 129
and centralization thesis 263-7 Cook, Michael xxx, 229, 267 n.3
and chance 33-5, 76, 80, 92, 93, 270-2, Copts 41, 74, 182, 191, 193
285-6 Cordier, J. 34 n.25
Christian reactions 313-25 Crete, Arab conquest 65, 79
and communication problems 272-3 Crone, Patricia xxx, 229, 267 n.3
compared with Mongol conquest 37-61 Crusades
as divinely ordained 113-22, 126-8, 130, and conversion 31
313,315,320-1,324 and Jewish apocalyptic 133-4, 145-7,
and land distribution 184-6 154-5, 158-61
motivations 25, 26-30 and Mongols 55
and Mu\:lammad xiv, 26 and Pseudo-Wäqidlliterature xxvii, 173
and multiple causation 18-21, 26-7, 91-3 culture, Islamic 35, 83-9
nature and causes 23-35 Cyrenaica, conquest 190-200, 221-2
outline xiv-xviii, 63-5
phases 18 Damascus
and Pi renne thesis xiii, xxiii-xxiv, 88-9, as capital xvii
101-11 Carmathian capture 158
reasons for success xxi-xxii, 11-13, 15-21 Fätimid capture 158-60
and ridda wars xiv-xv, 28, 40 Muslims and Christians in 232
scholarly interpretations xviii-xxviii, siege 70
15-21 Daniel apocalypse 158
speed xiii, xviii, 15, 24, 91 De Goeje, M.J. 12, 16 n.4, 28 n.12, 164-5, 172
and state-formation xiv decentralization of authority
as symbol or source of legitimation conceptual aspect 264-5
xxvii-xxviii strategic/operational aspect 265
and Umayyads xvii, 18,26 Decobert, Christian xxii, 91-9
see also consequences; historiography; Dennett, Daniel C. xxiv-xxv n.22, 102-4,
theories 310
Conrad, Lawrence I., and sources xxx, 308 dhimmi, Christi ans as 129, 130
consequences of expansion xxii-xxvi Dlnawari, Abu Hanifah AQ.mad b. Da'ud
Arabization xxv 248-9,293 n.51, 299, 304
cultural xxiv-xxv Dionysios ofTellma\:lre 314, 316, 325
INDEX 335
discipline, military 4-5, 41, 70-3, 93, 96 fasting 208-12

Diwan 71, 281 Fezzan,conquest199-200,213
Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati 113, 115-16, Fiey, Jean Maurice 287 n.4
121,313 fiqh (religious law) xx, 21, 24
Döllinger, Johann Joseph von 9 and distribution of booty 200-8
Dome ofthe Rock (Jerusalem) 233, 236-7, and fasting 208-10
316 and Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam 225-8
Donner, Fred M. 93, 94-5, 97-8 and prayer 210-11
and centralization of authority 263-86 and status of conquered peoples 191-9,
and conquest of Khüzistän 289, 294, 296, 278
299 First Civil War xvi, 280
fitna (civil war) xvi, 24, 230
Eckstein, Arthur M. 285 France, invasion xvii, 18, 39, 63, 64-5, 75-6
Egypt Fraxinet, battle (942) 77
and Arab conquest xv-xvi, xxii, 6, 18, 33, Fries, N. 71
64,113 Fustät 59, 155
and 'Amr b. 'A"} 63,69-70, 170, 181-2, foundation xvi, 108
272-6,279 and Mecca 236
armies 68, 72, 79 mosque of'Amr b. al-'A"} 234
centralization of contro1273-6, 277, 279 Futuly, Ijriqiya 163, 167
injutuly, literature 166-8, 170 Futuly, al-'Iraq 163
and Khälid b. al-Walid 167 jutuly, literature xviii, xxviii-xxxi, 163-75,
sully,an-'anwatan traditions 179, 180, 294 n.58, 303
181-2,187,226,277-8 and battle for I"}fahän 245-6, 249-53,
Byzantine army 74 259-62
Christianity in 15, 63 content 169-71
coastal towns 103, 105, 108 date 172-3
Fätimid conquest 155 as epic poetry 172, 174-5
and Mongois 55 isnäds 167-9, 171, 174
Ehrenkreutz, Andrew S. xxiii-xxiv, 101-11 and land distribution 184
Elias ofMerv 127 n.8, 287-8, 292 language 171-2
Elias of Nisibis 327 n.18 Futuly, Mi$r 163, 168, 189-90, 193
elites Futuly, al-Sham 163, 166
and centralization 264, 272 aim and intention 169-70
new xxii, xxiv authorship 172-3
eschatology, and Islamic expansion xxvii,
115-16, 117-20 Gabrieli, Francesco 75
Eudes of Aquitaine 64, 76 garrison towns see am$ar
Europe, and Pirenne thesis xiii, xxiii-xxiv, Gateau, Albert 189-90, 194, 197,202-3,208,
88-9, 101-4 209,212,218 n.76, 223, 226 n.98
Evagrius 123 Gaul see France
Ewald, Heinrich 165 Gerö, Stephen xxvi, 125-30
expansion, Islamic see conquest, Arab; Ghassänids 46,231
consequences of expansion; theories ghulUl (concealment ofbooty) 208
of expansion Goiten, S.D. 233
Golden Horde 51, 61
Fätimids Goldziher, Ignaz 15 n.2, 65-6, 233
army 72 and sources xxviii, xxix, 230, 276 n.21
and Umayyads 155-6, 158-9, 161 Graetz, Heinrich 132-4, 148 n.7, 150, 152
Fagnan, E. 216 n.68 Greece, Greeks see Byzantine empire
fanaticism Guidi, Ignazio 287
and death for Islam 9-10
and success of Arab conquests 15-16, 25, I;Iabib b. Maslama al-FihrI205, 279
27-9,66 Iy,adith 189-90, 191-228,237-8 n.2
336 INDEX
Hai Gaon of Babyion 156 and pillage 207-8

I;Iajjäj b. Yusuf 186-7 and prayer 210-11, 226
Hamaker, H.A. 165, 168, 172 and treaty with Cyrenaica 190-9
I;Iammäd b. Salama 241 on 'Uqba b. Näfi 212-17
I;Ianafites 226 Ibn Abi Shayba 302 n.131, 304, 306, 307, 308
andjizya 192, 196 Ibn Abi Zayd, Risäla 216
Haneberg, D.B. 165-6, 172 Ibn 'Asäkir 164
Härun al-Rashid 52, 78, 173 Ibn A'tham al-Kufi 290 n.33, 296-7,
harams, role in Muslim community 93, 299-300,302 n.131, 311
95-6 Ibn al-Athir 156 n.1, 241
I;Iasan b. al-Nu'män 64, 69,77,78,198,220 Ibn Diyäs 191, 194, 198
I;Iasan al-Ba~ri187 Ibn Duqmäq, Särim al-Dln al-Mi~ri234
Hawting, G.R. xxix Ibn Fadlän 89
hegemony, religious xiv, xix, xxi Ibn I;Iawqal 72
Heraclius, emperor 41, 71, 73, 171, 231, 312, Ibn I;Iudayj see Mu'äwiya b. I;Iudayj
314-15,316-17 Ibn IsQ.äq 181, 247, 248, 277, 294 n.58, 295
I;Iim~ (Syria), as military centre xvi n.65, 299, 304
Hinds, Martin 298 Ibn al-JarräQ. 156
I;Iira xvi, 126, 183 Ibn Jurayj al-Makki 305
Hishäm b. 'Abd al-Malik 150 Ibn Khaldun, 'Abd al-RaQ.män 61, 76, 77-8
historiography Ibn Lahi'a, 'Abd Alläh 210, 223-4, 226-7
and apocalyptic xxvii Ibn Näji' 69
centralization thesis 276-85 Ibn al-Nadim 294 n.58, 306-7
andfiqh 189-228 Ibn al-Na~räni, Ibrähim 198-9, 221
andfutült literature xxviii, xxx, 163-75, Ibn al-Qalänisi156 n.1
245-6,249-53,259-62 Ibn Sa'd, Abu 'Abd Alläh 69, 201, 210-11,
Nestorian 287-312 218,221,223,275,304
$ulltan-'anwatan traditions xxvii-xxviii, Ibn Salläm see Abu 'Ubayd al-Qäsim b.
177-88,277-8 Salläm
and tradition 229-37,308-11 Ibn Sayyid al-Näs 164
Hitti, Philip K. 269 n.7, 270 n.9, 271 n.10 Ibn Shihäb al-Zuhri191, 194
Holy Land see Palestine; Syria Ibn SikkH 179
horses, in battle 70 Ibn al-Zubayr, 'Abd Alläh 64, 217, 220, 221,
Horvitz, H.M. 132 230-1,237,321
Hubayb b. Mughfil al-Ghifäri 209, 210 Ibrähim b. al-Aghlab 226
I;Iunayn, battle 4, 164 Ibrähim al-Nakha'i186-7, 207
Hurmuzän/Hormizdän identity, Muslim 86-8
and conquest ofI~fahän 242, 244-7, 250, Ifriqiya
253-4,260 conquest xvii, 64, 198, 200-28
and conquest ofKhuzistän 289,290-1, size of Arab forces 69
294,298-300,306-8,311 Il-Khans 50, 53, 55
I;Iusain b.Ai)mad b. Bahräm 158 imperialism
Arab xiv, 66-7, 91, 97, 237
Iberian peninsula see Spain nomadic 37-61
Ibn 'Abbäs, 'Abd Alläh 210 India, Arab conquests 82, 86
and Arab tribes 222-5 Iqshidids 155, 158
and Caliphs 217-22 Iran
Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam xxviii, 69,70 Christi ans in xxvi, 125-30
and conquest of Fezzän 199-200 and early Islamic expansion xv-xvii, 5,
and distribution of booty 200-7 60
and fasting 208-10 see also I~fahän
andfiqh 225-6 Iraq xv-xvi, xxiii, 40, 167
Futült Mi$r 168, 189-228 and Arabic xxv
and Mälikism 225-8 army 72
INDEX 337
raids on 275 Joseph Hazzäyä 129 n.22

sul1.wn-'anwatan traditions 179, 180-1, Judaism
182-8 and apocalyptic xxx, 131-61
see also Sasanian empire and Islam 32, 47
I:;;fahän, conquest 241-62 Jundaysäbur, conquest 294, 311
Islam Justinian 11 323
and Christianity 317-25 Juwaini, Abu al-Ma'ali 'Abd al-Malik 38,50
and Judaism 316
in Mongoi empire 43, 54, 56, 61 Kähina (Berber Queen) 64, 75, 224
and political power 9, 83-4, 86 ka'bah 236-7
and religious fervour 7-11, 27-9, 63 Kaegi, Walter E. xxvi, 113-23,270 n.9
and state xiii-xiv Kairouan, founding 59, 64, 72, 75, 213,
Sunni-Shi'ite divisions 51 214-17
unification 231-6 Kaufman, J. 133, 136 n.4, 139 n.1, 146, 149
and universalism xix, 29, 87 n.1, 152, 155, 158-9, 161
as urban faith 40, 46 Khälid b. al-Walid 32, 71, 275, 289, 293
Ismä'il b.'Ubayd Alläh 220-1 armies 67-70, 251
isnäds and centralization of control275, 279,
for battle for I:;;fahän 241, 243 280
ofjutü/:t, literature 167-9, 171, 174 injutü/:t, literature 167, 170
of /:t,adiths 189, 226 military tactics 5-6, 71, 72
ISo'yahb 11, Nestorian patriarch 127-8 and siege of Damascus 70
ISo'yahb 111, Nestorian patriarch 126, 127, Khalidi, Tarif 309 n.191
288, 305, 318, 319-20, 329 n.55 Khallfa b. Khayyät 180, 293 n.50, 294, 300
Italy, Arab conquests in 64,65,76-7,79 n.105, 304, 306, 308
kharäj (property tax) 65-6, 183, 198
Jabala b. 'Amr al-An:;;ärl 203, 205 al-KhatIb al-BaghdädI164
Jacob ofEdessa 314 Khawärij 230
Jalulä, capture 201, 206, 219 Khosrau 11 ofPersia 127,130
Jandal b.$akhr 221-2 Khuzistän, conquest xvi, xxxi, 287-312
Jandora, John W. xxii n.14, 267 n.4, 282 Khüzistän Chronicle 287-8
nn.41,43 appendix 290-4, 312
and factors in military success xxii n.14, authorship 287-8, 292
267 n.4 and conquest ofTustar 303-8, 310
Jazira see Mesopotamia date 288
Jellinek, Adolf 132, 134, 135 n.2, 138 n.1, and fall of Jundaysäbur 294, 311
139 n.4, 140 nn.2-4, 154-5, 157 n.1, 160 and founding of al-Ba:;;ra and al-Kufa
Jerusalem 294-6
Dome ofthe Rock 233,236-7,316 and al-Sus 299-302, 311
as holy city 232-3 and treaties 298-9
Jews al-Kindi, Abu YusufYa'qub 234
and Mul).ammad 315-16 Koren, J. and Nevo, Y. 270, 271 n.10
in Spain 76 Krader, L. 48-9 n.22
in Syria xxx, 232 Krauss,152
jihad (holy war) xviii, 65-8 Kubilai Khan 50-3, 55-6
jizya (poll tax) 65, 183,257 Küfa (Iraq) 59, 284, 291
and conquest ofEgypt 277-9 churches 126
and conquest ofNorth Africa 191-2, founding xvi, 70, 108, 294-6
197-8, 199 Kusayla (Berber chief) 78, 221, 224
John ofDamascus 113, 122, 323
John ofNikiu 122,123,315 Labourt, Joseph 125
John ofPhenek 315,319,320-1,322-3 Lambton, Ann K.S. 56 n.35
John Tzimisces, emperor 134, 156-9 Lammens, Henri xx n.6, 16 n.5, 151,327
Jones, Marsden 163 n.19
338 INDEX
Lancaster, William 273 n.13 Marwän II b. Mu\:lammad 82, 151-2

land distribution 184-6, 296 Mas'udI, Abu 'l-l;Iasan 153, 241, 244-5
Lawäta Berbers 190-1, 193, 195-7, 199 Masts, Battle of (655) 64, 78
law seefiqh Maurice, Byzantine Emperor 301
al-Layth b. Sa'd 191, 194, 195-6,208 n.50, Maurout, Duke of Marseilles 64
210,215-16,226-7 al-MäwardI, Abu 'l-l;Iasan 'A11196 n.18, 197
Lecker, Michael 294 n.58, 309 n.190 n.20
Lees, W. Nassau 165, 168 Maximus the Confessor 116, 313, 315, 317
Leon VI, emperor 67 Mecca
LE~vi, Israel 150 as haram 93, 95
Lewis, Archibald R. 78 ka'bah 236-7
Lewis, Bernard Medina 230-1
and Jewish apocalpyptic xxvii and centralleadership 264-5, 267, 269,
and nationalist interpretation xix n.5, 272-3
269 n.7 as city-state 163
Lisän al-'Arab 179 and first conquests xiv-xvii, xxii, 9, 70
Lombard, Maurice 109-10 as haram 94, 95, 97
and killing of snakes 215-16
al-Madä'inI, Abu 'l-l;Iasan 297-8, 300, 306-8 and Ridda wars 40
maghäzi literat ure 163-72 Mediterranean, and Pirenne thesis xiii,
Maghreb, conquest xvii, 64 xxiii-xxiv, 88-9, 102-5, 111
Mähän 186, 187 Mesopotamia xvi, 313-14
Mahdi 131, 154 infutü~ literature 167
Majus 191-7 and Monophysite Christianity 319-20,
Mälik b. Anas 225, 227 324
and distribution ofbooty 201-2, 204, 207 and sul~an-'anwatan traditions 178-9,
and interrupted prayer 211 180
Mudawwana 199-200, 201, 209-10, 227 see also Iran; Iraq; Sasanian empire
Muwatta' 192, 193, 196, 199, 201, 208, 215, messianism, Jewish xxx, 131-3, 135-43,
227 146, 152-61
and pillage 208 Methodius see Pseudo-Methodius
and Rama<;län fast 209-10 Michael, N estorian patriarch, world
and status of conquered peoples 192, chronicle 314, 319, 320
193, 196, 199-200 Middle Ages, and Pi renne thesis xiii,
Mälikites 227 101-11
and distribution of booty 206 migrations, from Arabia xix, xxiii, 16-18,
and interrupted prayer 211 91-3,98,107,268
and status ofnon-Muslims 192, 197 Mongke Khan 45, 52, 55
Mamluks Mongoi conquest
and Mongois 45, 55 and administration 47-8,52,60
in Syria 159-60 and collapse 51-4
Ma'mun b. Härun al-Rashld 158 compared with Arab conquest 37-61
Man~ur, Abu Ja'far 'Abd Alläh, and Jewish language and literature 57-8
apocalyptic 133-4, 153-4, 156 and religious motivation 42-6, 54-5, 59,
Ma'qil b. Yasär 241 n.9, 243 61
MaqrlzI, TäqI al-I;>in Abu 'l-'Abbäs 156 n.1, size of army 58
234 sources 38, 54
Mar Emmeh, Nestorian patriarch 127-8 and urban society 48-50,60-1
Marcias, William 69 Monophysite Christianity 126, 127, 130,288
Marj al-Suffär, battle 7 in Mesopotamia 319-21
martyrdom, in battle 10,27-8, 65-8, 243 and Orthodox Christianity 41, 51, 74,
Marv, as garrison town xvii 122-3,314-15
Marwän I b. al-l;Iakam 148 n.4, 150,207, reactions to Arab conquest xxii, 314-19,
219-20,222 322-3
INDEX 339
monotheism Byzantine 78-9, 103, 160

and Christian response to Islam 126 Near East, integration 109-11
and creation of Islamic community xiv, Nehemiah b. l;Iushiel161
95,97-8,230-1 N estorian Christianity
and Judaism 316 and Byzantine empire 123
Mordtmann, A.D. 165 in Iran 59, 125-30
Mu'ädh b. Jaba1210 and Khüzistan Chronicle 287-9
Mu'äwiya b. Abi Sufyän xvi-xvii, 219, 276 in Mongoi empire 43,47,50,54-5,59
as amir al-mu'minin 231-2, 238 n.10 and reactions to conquest 314-15,
and Arab navy 77-8 319-25
and centralization of control 276, 281 and Sasanian empire 319
and Christianity 232 Nevo, Yehuda xxix, see also Koren, J.
and distribution of booty 206 Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople
as governor of Syria 64 123
and J erusalem 232 Nicephorus Phocas 67
in Jewish apocalyptic 150, 151, 154 Niebuhr, B.G. 165
and religious tolerance 129 NihävandlNehavend, battle (640) xvi, 63,
and sul1.wn-'anwatan traditions 186 68,244-60
in Syriac sources 321 Nöldeke, Theodor 218,287,289,290
Mu'äwiya b. l;Iudayj 203, 206-7, 219 nn.28,31, 291 n.38, 304
Mughira b. Shu'ba 242-3,246-8,250-1,257, nomads
292,295 and art ofwar 1-7
Mul;1ammad as empire-builders 37-61
and Arab confederations 3 and Islamic community 94-6
Byzantine reactions to 115-16, 122 and political order 46
and Islamic community 93-5,97-8 and religious motivation xxi, 39-46
and Islamic expansion xiv, 27, 35, 39 North Africa xvi, xvii, 63-4,76
in Jewish apocalyptic 146 and Arab forces 69, 70
and Jews 315-16 and Byzantine empire 74-5, 78-9,88,
and martyrdom in battle 10 198,221-2
and Mecca 237 conquest of Fezzan 199-200
and Medina 163 in Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam 189-228
and military art 3-7 and attitude of Caliphs 217-25
in Syriac sources 318, 320 treaty with Cyrenaica 190-9
andumma 94 Noth, Albrecht xxviii
Mul;1ammad b. 'Abd Alläh b. al-l;Iasan and communication problems 272-3
al-Nafs al-Zakiyya 133, 154 and conquest historiography xxix-xxx,
Mul;1ammad b. Sirin 187 177-88, 271 n.10, 276, 278, 310-11
Mul;1ammad b. 'Ubayd Alläh b. 9afwän and conquest of Tustar 303
al-Thaqafi 248 and I~fahän 241-62
Muir, W. 5 al-Nu'män b. Muqarrin 242-4, 246-50,
Mu'izz li-Dln al-Kurt i 159 252-4,296,299
mu'minün (believers) 230-3
Musä b. Nu~ayr 64,69,75-7,212-13,220 Ockley, Simon 164-5
Musaylimah 238 n.9 Ohsson, Mouradgea d' 15 n.3
Musil, Alois 272-3 Oman, and early Islamic expansion xv
al-Muthannä b. l;Iäritha 275 Orthodox Christianity 116, 317, 324-5
and Monophysites 41, 51, 74, 122-3,
nafal202-6 314-15
Narbonnaise, Arab contro164, 75
Nau, F. 327 n.19 pagans
Nautin, Pierre 287-8, 292 n.46 Majus 191-7
navy Muslims seen as 317
Arab 32,64,77-9,103 in Persia 255-7
340 INDEX
Palestine Sa\:lnun, 'Abd al-Saläm b.Sa'id al-Tanuqi

Arab conquest 63,113,229-37 192,205-6
Fätimid invasion 155-6, 159-61 Sa'id b. al-'As 7
and Jewish messianism 155-61 Sa'id b. Jubayr 186-7
and Mu\:lammad 316 Sa'id b. al-Musayyab 210
see also Syria Saladin (~aläh al-Din) 161
Paret, Rudi xxvii, 163-75 al-~an'äni, l;Ianash b. 'Abd Alläh 220
Pareto, Vilfredo 18 n.11, 28 n.11 Sasanian empire
Pentapolis, conquest 190-1, 193-9 Arab conquest xv-xvi, xxi, 5, 8, 24,
People of the Book see ahl al-dhimma 287-312
Persia see Iran; Sasanian empire armies 1, 5-6, 12-13, 68
Persian language 58, 60 Christians in 125-30
pillage 207, 224 conquest ofI~fahän 241-62
Pirenne, Henri xiii, xxiii-xxiv, 88-9, 101-11 internal weakness xxix, 33, 41, 51, 73-4
poetry, epic 164-6, 172-5 and Islam 63, 167
Poitiers, battle (732/3) xvii, 64, 75-6, 82, 201 Mongoi rule 50-3, 55-6, 60
prayer 210-11, 226 and Nestorian Christianity 319
direction 234-7 and taxation 107-8
prose, rhyming 172 wars against Byzantium 41, 51, 73, 160,
provinces, administration 177-88 314
pseudo-Ibn Qutayba 208 n.50 see also Iran; Persia
Pseudo-Methodius, apocalypse 117-20, Saunders, John J., comparative study xxi,
321-4 37-61
pseudo-Wäqidiliterature xxvii, 163-75 Sawäd see Iraq
Puin, G.-R. 281 Sayf b. 'Umar 173, 183, 248, 260, 295-6,
298-302, 311
al-Qädislya, battle (637) xv, 7, 63, 68, 74, Schacht, Joseph, and sources xxviii, xxix,
251,279,282 n.43 31-2
Qarmatis, see Carmathians Schiller, Friedrich 30 n.15
Qasr al-Sham', siege 68, 70 Schumpeter, Joseph 16-17,25 n.6, 29-30
Qayrawän, as garrison town xvii Sebeos 120-2, 123,301,314,329 n.55
qiblah, east-facing 234-7 Second Civil War xvii, 325
qismat al-ara1,in traditions 184-6, 187 Severus b. al-Muqaffa' 151
al-Qummi 294 n.58, 295 n.65, 299, 302 n.131, Sezgin, Fuat 163, 168
304 Shaban, M.A. 268 n.5
Quräd Abu Nu\:l 308 al-Sha'bi, 'Amir 183-4, 186-7
Qur'än, compilation 28-9, 41, 316 al-Shäfi'i, Mu\:lammad b. Idris 192, 193,
Quraysh tribe 2, 70, 213, 222-3 196-7,202,204-5
Qurrah b. Sharik 234 Shäfi'ism 227
Shahrastäni, Mu\:lammad b. 'Abd al-Karim
al-Rabi' b. Sulaymän 247, 251 154
Rabbath, Edmond 269 n.7 al-Shahriyär 300
Ramac:län, fasting 208-12 Sharon, Moshe xxix, 229-37, 270 n.9
Ramlah, foundation 108 Sicily, Arab conquest 63,64,65,76,77,79,
Rashld al-Din 50,58 88
ridda (apostasy) wars xv, 28, 40, 67, 94 Simon ben Yö\:lay, R.
Robinson, Chase F. xxxi, 287-312 Prayer 131-61
Rothenberg, Benno 239 n.22 Secrets 132-4, 144-53, 156
Rougier, L. 34 n.26 Ten Kings 132-4, 144-53, 156, 159
Russia, and Arab expansion 83, 89 Sind, and Umayyad expansion xvii, 82, 86
Siyäh al-Uswäri 300-1
Sa'd b. Abi Waqqä~ 247,281,289,291,293 slavery, and conquered peoples 191-6
n.51 snakes, killing 215-16
Saffä\:l, Abu 'l-'Abbäs 153 Snouck-Hurgronje, C. 15 n.2, 25 n.6, 229-30
INDEX 341
Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem coastal towns 103, 105, 108

113-15,119,121,313 and conversion of Christians 16
sources see also U mayyads
and centralizing bias 274, 275-85
Islamic xiv, xviii, xxviii-xxx, 31-2, 38, 93, TabarI, Abi Ja'far Mul).ammad b. Jarlr 32,
97,229-30 71, 147, 150, 164
for Mongoi conquest 38 and battle for Ii?fahän 241, 243 n.13, 244,
non-Islamic xxx-xxxi, 113-23, 125-7, 260
287-312,313-25 and battle for Nihäwand 247-8,251
source-criticism 241-62 and conquest of Jundaysäbur 294
see also futuly, literature; Ibn 'Abd and conquest of al-Sus 299
al-I;Iakam; sully,an-anwatan tahäluf (sworn confederations) 3
traditions Täriq b. Ziyäd 69, 76, 212
Sozomen 319 taxation
Spain of'anwatan lands xxviii, 181-2, 183-4
Arab conquest xvii, 51, 63, 64, 75 and centralization 285
and Berbers 39, 69, 224 jizya 65, 191-2, 194-5, 198, 199,257,277-9
in Ibn 'Abd al-I;Iakam 189,207-8 kharaj 67-8,197-8
and size of armies 69 by Mongois 48
and tri baI rivalries 24, 72 ofnon-Muslims xxvii-xxviii, 105-8, 129,
Visigoth control51, 63, 75 321,323
state of tribes 5, 94, 107
and centralization of control 263-86 Tayy Bedouin 156, 161, 319, 321
formation xiv, xx, 26, 97-8 Thäbit b. Sinän 156 n.1
and Islam xiii-xiv Theophanes Confessor 11, 123, 147 n.1
and land ownership 177-88 Theophilus ofEdessa 309 n.189
and revenues 106, 187,296-7 theories of expansion xiii-xxviii
unification 231-2, 233-7 accidental thesis 270-1, 285-6
Steinschneider, 132, 148 n.7, 150-1 centralization thesis 263-86
al-SubkI, Taj al-DIn 227 n.102 comparative xxi, 23 n.1, 24 n.4, 37-61
Sufyän al-Thawri 194, 195-6, 204 conquest as symbolic xxvii
$ully,an-'anwatan traditions xxvii-xxviii, ecological thesis 267-70
177-88,193-8,277-8 economic xxiii, 20, 26-7, 39-40, 93
and agriculturalland 180-1 in Becker xx, 39
and conquest of Khuzistän 298-300, 305 in Caetani xix-xx, 10,39, 267-8
meaning 177-80 in Canard 67-8
Sulaymän b. 'Abd al- Malik xvii, 150, 201, 220 in Decobert 92, 95
Sulaymän b. Yasär 203, 205 in Lammens xx n.6
supplies, military 71, 279-80 and legitimation of state xxvii-xxviii
al-Sus military advantage 68-73, 80, 93
conquest290-1,295,299-302,310-11 nationalist
and Daniel291, 302-3, 320 in Arnold xix, 15-16
Syria in Caetani xix, 1-13, 16-19, 267-8
Arab conquest xii, xv-xvi, xxiii, 33, 63-4, in Winckler xix, 16, 267
68-72,74,113,293 political68, 73-80, 85-7, 94-7, 267, 296
and Bedouin 40 religious xviii, xix, xxvii, 7-11, 15-16, 21
and Christianity 16, 232-6, 313-25 in Bousquet xx, xxi, 23, 25-32, 41-2 n.4
and conversions 16 in Canard 63, 66-8, 79-80
andfutuly, literat ure 164-7 in Decobert 92,93,95-7
and Khälid b. al-Walid 6, 68-70, 71 in Saunders 39-46
and size of Arab forces 12, 68 in Syriac sources 314-24
and Arabic xxv revisionist xxi, xxviii-xxxi, 264, 270-1,
Byzantine reconquest 314-15 285-6
and Carmathians 155-9 sources xiv, xviii, xxviii
342 INDEX
Timothy I, patriarch 327 and sul1:tan-'anwatan traditions 181-2,

al-Tirmidhi, Abü "Isä Mul).ammad 192 184-5,298
Töbhiyah b. Eli'ezer, Midrash Leqa1:t Töbh and Umayyads 231-2
156-7 'Um ar 11 b. 'Abd al-Aziz 104-5, 181-2, 191,
Toledo, Arab capture 64 195-7,199,220
toleration, religious 47, 56, 128-30 Umayyads
Torrey, Charles C. 189, 209 n.53 Abbasid overthrow 52,151-4
Tours, battle (732) xvii and administration 108, 276
towns, development xv-xvii, 70, 103, 105, and Byzantine empire xvii, 66-7, 231-2
108-9,294-6 and Egypt 182
trade and expansion xx, 18, 26, 66, 230
internal109,110-11 and Fätimids 155-6, 158-9, 161
and Pi renne thesis 101-5, 111 and Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam 218-21
tradition, and history 229-37,308-11 and J ewish apocalyptic 133
treaties military organization 71-3
and conquest of Khüzistän 298-300 as mulük and amirs 231-2
and conquest ofNorth Africa 190-200 size of forces 68-9
see also $ul1:tan-'anwatan traditions and sul1:tan-'anwatan traditions 177-88
Trench, Battle of 71-2 and unity of Islam 233-7
tribes, Arab umma 94-8
confederations 2 universalism
in Ibn 'Abd al-l;Iakam 222-4 Islamic xix, 29, 87
and Islam 4-5, 39-40, 86, 114 Mongo143
and military organization 71, 282-3, 286 al-'UqayH,237
and Muslim community 94-5 'Uqba b. 'Amir 214
rebell ions 28, 67, 94 'Uqba b. Näfi' al-Fihri70, 77, 78,212-17,
rivalries 24, 41, 72 221,224-5
and taxation 94, 107 and conquest ofFezzan 199-200, 213
and warfare 1-7,93,282-3 and foundation of Kairouan 64, 213,
see also nomads 214-17
tribute payments 26, 66, 191-8,268 as Qurayshite 222
Tripoli, capture 217 'Urwa b. al-Zubayr 210
Tripolitania, and conquests of 'U q ba 'Utba b. Ghazwän 292, 295, 298
213-17,224-5 'Uthmän b. 'Affän xvi, 64, 78, 126
Tustar, conquest 286-7, 290-1, 293, 295-7, and centralization of control 279
299,300,303-8,309-11 and conquest of Tunisia 217-19
and distribution of booty 207
'Ubayd Alläh b. Abi Ja'far 182 and Egypt 275
'Ubayd Alläh b. l;Iabl).äb 182 and Qur'än 28,40-1,316
Uighurs 47-8,49,54,58 and Syria 276, 318
'Umar I b. al-KhaHäb xv-xvi, 32, 34,77,151 and taxation 191-2, 195, 199
and conquest ofEgypt 181-2, 274 'Uthmän b. 9älil). 193
and conquest of I~afahän 242, 243, 246-9, 'Uthmän dan Fodio 83
254,260
and conquest ofKhüzistän 296-7,298, Van Vloten, Gerlof 26 n.7
301,307-8 Visigoths, conquest 51, 63, 75
and conquest ofNorth Africa 218-19 Vladimirtsov, B.J. 48-9 n.22
and Dome of the Rock 316 von Grunebaum, Gustave von xxii, 81-9
and incentives for war 66-8
andjizya 191 WaHd I b. 'Abd al-Malik xvii, 77,220
and military organization 40, 70,97, Walid 11 b. Yazid 150
279-81 Wansbrough, John, and sources xxix, 289 n.25
and political order 46-7 al-Wäqidi, Abü 'Abd Alläh Mul).ammad
and state revenues 106,296-7 163-5,166-8,172,218,223
INDEX 343
warfare Yarmük, battle (636) xv, 63, 71, 116-17,279,

and Arab tribes 1-13 282 n.43, 293
and central organization 282-3 and religious fanaticism 28
and single combat 6, 204, 257-8 size of armies 12, 68
Wäsit, development 108 and women and children 7
Watt, J. Montgomery 40 n.3, 41-2 n.4 Yazid b. Abi I:Iabib 182, 223, 234
Wellhausen, J. 20 n.16, 26 n.7, 163,230,289, Yazid b. Abi Sufyän 231,232,276
303 Yazid I b. Mu'äwiya 66,151,321
William of Rubruck 38, 49, 54-5, 59, n.46 Yazid II b. 'Abd al-Malik 222-3
Winckler, Hugo, and nationalist Yazdagird III (Yazdkart III ) of Persia 127,
interpretation xix, 16, 267 290,294,300,317
women, in warfare 4,7, 171,212 Yemen, and early Islamic expansion xv, 94
world chronicles 314-18 Yo\:lannän bar Penkäye, chronicle 127-8
Yünus b. 'Abd al-A'lä 169
Yal)ya b. Adam 193 Yüqannä of Aleppo 167, 173
al-Yamäma, and early Islamic expansion
xv,230 Zamakhshari, Abu 'l-Qäsim Ma\:lmüd 28
Ya'qübI, Al)mad b. AbI Ya'qüb 233, 237, 293 Ziyäd b. AbIhi 180, 186, 304
n.50 Ziyädat Alläh I 77
Ya'qüb b. Killis 160 Zoroastrians, conversion xxiv, 129, 192
Yäqüt b. 'Abdulläh al-RümI al-I:IamawI 234, al-Zubayr b. al-'Awwäm 279
296,297 Zuhayr b. Qays al-Balawi 78, 221-2, 223
Index compiled by Meg Davies (Fellow ofthe Society of Indexers)

Donner, Fred - The Expansion of The Early Islamic State

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Donner, Fred - The Expansion of The Early Islamic State

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Donner, Fred - The Expansion of The Early Islamic State

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

TUE FORMATION OF TUE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD

General Editor: Lawrence 1. Conrad

General Editor: Lawrence I. Conrad

1 Byzantium on the Eve of Islam Averil Cameron

General Editor: Lawrence 1. Conrad

Published 2016 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint 0/ the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Published in the series The Formation of the Classical Islamic World

ISBN 9780860787228 (hbk)

British Library CIP Data

US Library of Congress CIP Data

THE FORMATION OF THE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC WORLD-5

General Editor's Preface Xl

2. Some Critical and Sociological Remarks on the Arab Conquest

3. Observations on the Nature and Causes of the Arab Conquest

4. The Nomad as Empire Builder: A Comparison ofthe Arab and

5. The Arab Expansion: The Military Problem

6. The First Expansion of Islam: Factors of Thrust and Containment

8. Another Orientalist's Remarks Concerning the Pirenne Thesis

9. Initial Byzantine Reactions to the Arab Conquest

11. An Apocalyptic Vision of Islamic History

12. The Legendary Futül). Literature

13. On the Relationship in the Caliphate between Central Power and

14. Ibn Abdell).akam and the Conquest of North Africa

15. The Birth of Islam in the Holy Land

16. I:;;fahan-Nihawand. A Source-critical Study of Early Islamic

17. Centralized Authority and Military Autonomy in the Early Islamic

18. The Conquest of Khuzistan: A Historiographical Reassessment

19. Syriac Views of Emergent Islam

CHAPTER 2: G.R. Bousquet, "Quelques remarques critiques et sociologiques sur la

CHAPTER 3: G.R. Bousquet, "Observations sur la nature et les causes de la

CHAPTER 4: John J. Saunders, "The Nomad as Empire Builder: A Comparison of

CHAPTER 5: Marius Canard, ":Cexpansion arabe: le probleme militaire",

CHAPTER 6: Gustave E. von Grunebaum, "The First Expansion of Islam: Factors of

CHAPTER 7: Christian Decobert, Le mendiant et le combattant (Paris, 1991), pp.

CHAPTER 8: Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz, ''Another Orientalist's Remarks Concerning

CHAPTER 9: Walter E. Kaegi, "Initial Byzantine Reactions to the Arab Conquest",

CHAPTER 12: Rudi Paret, "Die Legendäre Futül).-Literature", in La poesia epica e la

CHAPTER 14: Robert Brunschvig, "Ibn Abdell).akam et la conquete de l'Afrique

CHAPTER 16: Albrecht Noth, "I~fahän-Nihäwand. Eine quellenkritische Studie zur

CHAPTER 17: Fred M. Donner, "Centralized Authority and Military Autonomy in

CHAPTER 18: Chase F. Robinson, "The Conquest of Khüzistän: A Historiographical

The First Expansion ofIslam as a Problem ofWorld History

If we are to judge the importance of historical phenomena by the range and

Basic Outlines of the Expansion

Scholarly Interpretations of the First Expansion of Islam

WHAT CAUSED THE CONQUESTS?

2 Hugo Winckler, "Arabisch-Semitisch-Orientalisch", Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-Aegyptische

stated sarcastically that their "religion" could be reduced to the satisfaction of

WHAT FACTORS CONTRIBUTED TO THE CONQUESTS' SUCCESS?

Bousquet's articles had noted the importance of distinguishing between the

WHAT WERE THE MAIN CONSQEUENCES OF THE CONQUESTS?

Surprisingly, fewer scholars have tackled this issue explicitly or comprehensively.

Islam in the Medieval Period, which utilizes an ingenious, if highly speculative,

THE CONQUESTS AS SYMBOL OR SOURCE OF LEGITIMATION

Any comprehensive consideration of the expansion of Islam must take into

32 Suliman Bashear, "Apocalyptic and Other Materials on early Muslim-Byzantine Wars: a

Review", Journal ofthe Royal Asiatic Society (1991),173-207.

Revisionist Views of the Expansion