The Great Arab Conquests (4 page)
Read The Great Arab Conquests Online
Authors: Hugh Kennedy
At the time of the Muslim conquests there were five major churches or sects in the Middle East, each one claiming to be ‘orthodox’. In North Africa and Spain the church was Latin-speaking and looked to Rome rather than Constantinople for leadership and doctrinal authority. There was no schism between this church and the Greek Orthodox, that would come later, but there was a different ecclesiastical culture. Then there was the Melkite (meaning ‘royal’) Greek Orthodox church supported (usually) by the imperial government in Constantinople. This was also known as the Chalcedonian church because it followed the doctrines on the nature of Christ adumbrated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and the Diophysite church, because it believed in the two natures, human and divine, within the person of Christ. Within the eastern Empire the main opposition to this established church came from the Jacobite Monophysite communities in Syria and the Monophysite Copts in Egypt, all of whom believed in the single and indivisible nature of Christ. They were known as Jacobites in Syria after the missionary Jacob Baradaeus (d. 521) who was the effective founder of the separate Monophysite ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Nestorian Church, named after its founder Nestorius (d.
c
. 451) who had been Patriarch of Constantinople before being deposed for heresy, was opposed to both the Monophysites and the Diophysites. Persecution had largely eliminated the Nestorian Church from Byzantine territory but it continued to flourish in the lands of the Persian Empire, especially Iraq, where Nestorians constituted the majority of the population. Finally, there was the Monothelite sect supported by the emperor Heraclius and his government. There is an old Scottish story about the stranger who approaches a small town and asks a local man how many churches there are in it, Scotland having almost as many different sects as the late antique Middle East. The local replies, ‘Well, there used to be two but then we had a union so now there are three’. This is essentially what happened during the reign of Heraclius. In an effort to bridge the damaging gap between the Monophysite and Diophysite churches about the nature of the incarnation, Heraclius and his theological advisers came up with a subtle compromise formula called Monothelitism. Inevitably this pleased neither party, and his attempts to enforce this new doctrine in the Middle East and North Africa simply provoked more discontent.
c
. 451) who had been Patriarch of Constantinople before being deposed for heresy, was opposed to both the Monophysites and the Diophysites. Persecution had largely eliminated the Nestorian Church from Byzantine territory but it continued to flourish in the lands of the Persian Empire, especially Iraq, where Nestorians constituted the majority of the population. Finally, there was the Monothelite sect supported by the emperor Heraclius and his government. There is an old Scottish story about the stranger who approaches a small town and asks a local man how many churches there are in it, Scotland having almost as many different sects as the late antique Middle East. The local replies, ‘Well, there used to be two but then we had a union so now there are three’. This is essentially what happened during the reign of Heraclius. In an effort to bridge the damaging gap between the Monophysite and Diophysite churches about the nature of the incarnation, Heraclius and his theological advisers came up with a subtle compromise formula called Monothelitism. Inevitably this pleased neither party, and his attempts to enforce this new doctrine in the Middle East and North Africa simply provoked more discontent.
I have used endnotes sparingly in this work to avoid over-burdening the text with scholarly apparatus. I have contented myself with noting the main sources used, the origins of direct quotes and the most relevant secondary literature. In the case of the two primary sources I have depended on most, the
History of the Prophets and Kings
by Tabarī and the
Conquests of the Lands
by Balādhurī, I have given references to the original Leiden editions. Readers who wish to consult the English translations will find the references to the editions in the margins of the translated texts.
History of the Prophets and Kings
by Tabarī and the
Conquests of the Lands
by Balādhurī, I have given references to the original Leiden editions. Readers who wish to consult the English translations will find the references to the editions in the margins of the translated texts.
The bibliography is similarly restrained. A full bibliography, including all the literature on late antiquity and early Islam, would run to thousands of titles. My intention has been to confine myself to the works I have made best use of and those that I consider will be most relevant and accessible to the reader who wishes to explore the subject further.
A Note on Transliteration and Names
There are now standard and acceptable ways of transliterating Arabic letters in Latin script. I have not adopted any of these in their entirety. For a non-Arabist, it is not very helpful to be able to distinguish between the two types of
h
or
s
or
t
and readers who do know the language will in any case be aware of these. Arabic has both long and short vowels and these I have indicated in most cases. It does seem to me helpful to know, for example, that the name of the great conqueror of Syria, Khālid b. al-Walīd is pronounced Khaalid b. al-Waleed, rather than, say Khaleed b. al-Waalid. Put simply, ā is pronounced as a long aa, ī as an ee and ū as an oo and the stress falls on these long syllables.
h
or
s
or
t
and readers who do know the language will in any case be aware of these. Arabic has both long and short vowels and these I have indicated in most cases. It does seem to me helpful to know, for example, that the name of the great conqueror of Syria, Khālid b. al-Walīd is pronounced Khaalid b. al-Waleed, rather than, say Khaleed b. al-Waalid. Put simply, ā is pronounced as a long aa, ī as an ee and ū as an oo and the stress falls on these long syllables.
I have also marked the Arabic letter
c
ayn as
c
when it comes in the middle of words. The
c
ayn is a consonant peculiar to Arabic whose pronunciation can only be learned by imitation. It is perhaps most helpful to think of it as a gutteral prolongation of the previous vowel. The symbol ‘ (Arabic
hamza
) is a simple glottal stop.
c
ayn as
c
when it comes in the middle of words. The
c
ayn is a consonant peculiar to Arabic whose pronunciation can only be learned by imitation. It is perhaps most helpful to think of it as a gutteral prolongation of the previous vowel. The symbol ‘ (Arabic
hamza
) is a simple glottal stop.
Arabic names come from a variety of different traditions. Some are biblical in origin: Ibrāhīm is Abraham, Ishāq is Isaac, Yūsuf is Joseph, Mūsā is Moses and Yahyā is John. Some names like Umar, Amr, Uthmān and Alī were purely Arabic without any religious connotations. There were also names describing the holder as a slave (
abd)
of God in any of His names, most commonly Abd Allāh but also others like Abd al-Malik (slave of the King), Abd al-Rahmān (slave of the Merciful).
abd)
of God in any of His names, most commonly Abd Allāh but also others like Abd al-Malik (slave of the King), Abd al-Rahmān (slave of the Merciful).
Men were named after their fathers, thus Ibn (usually abbreviated to ‘b.’) Fulān (Fulān meaning ‘so and so’). We also find men called Ibn Abī Fulān, ‘son of the father of so and so’. Women were known as Bint Fulān, ‘daughter of so and so’ or, more commonly, as Umm Fulān, ‘mother of so and so’. In the early days of Islam, most Arabs would also have had a tribal name or
nisba
such as Tamīmī (from the tribe of Tamīm) or Azdī (from the tribe of Azd).
nisba
such as Tamīmī (from the tribe of Tamīm) or Azdī (from the tribe of Azd).
The spelling of place names presents problems of a different sort. In general I have used conventional English names where they exist, thus Damascus not Dimashq, Aleppo not Halab etc. In the case of names like Azerbaijān, where there is a modern equivalent, I have preferred the forms used by the
Times Atlas of the World
. In the case of older and more obscure Arabic names, Yarmūk or Qādisiya for example, I have transliterated the Arabic, using the spellings given in Yāqūt’s thirteenth-century geographical dictionary, the
Mu
c
jam al-Buldn.
Times Atlas of the World
. In the case of older and more obscure Arabic names, Yarmūk or Qādisiya for example, I have transliterated the Arabic, using the spellings given in Yāqūt’s thirteenth-century geographical dictionary, the
Mu
c
jam al-Buldn.
Coins
The conquest narratives place great emphasis on the dividing up of money and the payment of taxes. At first the Muslims used the coins already in circulation in the areas they conquered, notably the Sasanian silver
drachm
, known in Arabic as the
dirham
. The
dirham
was a thin silver coin slightly over 2 centimetres in diameter and weighing about 3 grams. The Muslims began to mint these, at first with counter-struck Sasanian models, by the 660s. More valuable was the gold
dīnr
, a small coin about a centimetre in diameter based on the Byzantine
nomisma
which began to be minted during the caliphate of Abd al-Malik (685-705). From this time, all Islamic coins were purely epigraphic, with Arabic inscriptions but no images. In both North Africa and Spain, some early Muslim coins carried Muslim formulae translated into Latin.
drachm
, known in Arabic as the
dirham
. The
dirham
was a thin silver coin slightly over 2 centimetres in diameter and weighing about 3 grams. The Muslims began to mint these, at first with counter-struck Sasanian models, by the 660s. More valuable was the gold
dīnr
, a small coin about a centimetre in diameter based on the Byzantine
nomisma
which began to be minted during the caliphate of Abd al-Malik (685-705). From this time, all Islamic coins were purely epigraphic, with Arabic inscriptions but no images. In both North Africa and Spain, some early Muslim coins carried Muslim formulae translated into Latin.
FOREWORD: REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
Our understanding of the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries is based on written and, to an extent, archaeological sources. At first glance these sources look abundant; vast numbers of pages of Arabic chronicles describe these triumphs in loving and admiring detail. The conquered people, particularly the Christian clergy of all denominations, contribute a different view, while the mass of archaeological evidence, especially from the lands of the Levant, gives us yet another. On closer investigation, however, none of these sources is as clear or easily usable as it first appears: all have to be sifted and used with care, and, despite the length of the narratives, there are still many aspects of the conquests about which we have virtually no information at all.
Any historical enquiry is inevitably shaped by the nature of the source material on which it is based. Partly this is a question of reliability, or ‘can we believe what we read?’. At its most simple it is a matter of asking who wrote a text, what they wanted to convey and whether they were biased in favour of one side or another. The ways in which the sources define the enquiry, however, go much further than considerations of reliability and party prejudice. The interests of the authors and compilers of texts determine what questions we can ask. For example, in investigating the Arab conquests we can ask what battles were fought and who participated in them. If we want to look in more detail at the face of battle, however - why one side prevailed and the other was defeated - we come up against a wall of ignorance because the writers on whom we depend were simply not interested in pursuing these questions. The level and area of discussion are defined by the ancient authors, and there are many roads down which we simply cannot go. It is not possible to write a history of the Muslim conquests full of those tidy battle maps beloved of most historians of warfare, in which divisions of foot soldiers are shown clearly in square black boxes while bold arrows show how the cavalry manoeuvred around them. If this book does not discuss many of the questions that are normally dealt with in military history - commissariat and the supply of provisions, for example - it is not because these topics are uninteresting, but rather because we have no information that would enable us to answer them. An understanding of the scope and limitations of the documents is crucial to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of my account of the Arab conquests.
The Arab conquests of the Middle East directly affected the lives of millions of people, many of them literate in a part of the world in which the culture of writing had been developed for millennia. Yet very few of them thought to write down what they had seen and experienced. The number of contemporary accounts of those crucial decades, the 630s and 640s, can be counted on the fingers of one hand; even the ones that we do have are fragmentary and very slight.
The lack of contemporary eyewitness accounts does not mean that we have no historical evidence at all for what went on in these momentous decades. On the contrary, we have a vast number of narratives that purport to tell us what happened. The problem for the historian is that they are mostly episodic, discontinuous and frequently contradict each other - and sometimes themselves. It is often impossible to know what to believe and accept as a reasonably accurate account of events that actually happened. In a way more interesting, however, is what they offer in terms of the attitudes and the memories different groups preserved and cherished about what had gone on.
The Middle East conquered by the Muslims in these early decades was a multicultural society, a world where different languages and religions coexisted and intermingled in the same geographical area. After the success of the conquests, the language of the new elite was Arabic. Even for government, however, the existing administrative languages - Greek in Syria and Egypt, Middle Persian (Pahlavi) in Iraq and Iran, Latin in Spain - continued to be used for the business of government. After a couple of generations, however, this began to change. Around the year 700, sixty or more years after the earliest conquests, the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705) decreed that Arabic and Arabic alone was to be used in the administration. The decree was surprisingly effective. From this time, anyone wanting a position in the expanding bureaucracy of the Islamic state, whether they were Arab or non-Arab by descent and upbringing, needed to be able to read and write in Arabic. The inscriptions on the new style, image-free coins and the roadside milestones were all in Arabic. There was no point for most people in learning Greek or Pahlavi because there were no career opportunities in them. It was around this time, in the early eighth century, that the Arabic traditions of the conquests began to be collected and written down.
The momentous events of the seventh and eighth centuries inspired an extensive Arabic-language literature which claimed to describe what had happened then. But the memories and narratives of the Muslim conquest were more than the records of ‘old forgotten far-off things and battles long ago’. They were the foundation myths of Muslim society in the areas that generated them. They were developed because they helped to explain how Islam had come to the land and to justify the defeat and displacement of the previous elites. These accounts did not deal with ethnogenesis, the birth of peoples, as Latin historians of the early medieval West did, but rather with the birth of the Islamic community. They preserved the names of the heroes who had led the armies of the conquest and were the founding fathers of the Islamic state in their area; the names of the companions of the Prophet, men who had met and heard Muhammad and brought with them a direct connection with his charisma; the names of the caliphs who had turned Islamic armies in their direction.
These narratives do provide information about the course of events, and just as interestingly they show how these events were remembered by later generations, how they saw the beginnings of the community in which they lived. Looked at as a form of social memory, the distortions and legends that can seem at first sight an obstacle to our understanding can be seen instead as reflecting the attitudes and values of this early Muslim society.
In the form in which they have come down to us, these accounts were edited in the ninth and early tenth centuries; that is, between 150 and 250 years after the events. The Arabic narratives are rarely simple accounts written by a single author and telling a straightforward account of events. They are actually multi-layered compositions that have gone through different stages of editing and elaboration for different purposes at different times. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex process, the narratives seem to have gone through three stages of development. The first was oral transmission of traditional stories of heroic deeds in battle. Such traditions were often preserved within tribes and kinship groups or among Muslims who had settled in particular areas. In part they may have preserved these memories as their predecessors had treasured accounts of the battles of the Arab tribes in the years before the coming of Islam. The ancient tradition of recording the triumphs and tragedies of pre-Islamic warfare certainly coloured the way in which the battles of the first Islamic conquests were remembered. Like their ancestors in the
jhiliya
(time of ignorance) before the coming of Islam, they composed and preserved poems and songs to celebrate heroic deeds. As well as these ancient, traditional themes, the Muslims could also remember their victories as clear evidence that God was on their side, the deaths of their enemies and the vast quantities of booty they amassed all being evidence of divine favour: no one could question the essential rightness of what they had done. They also preserved, elaborated and even made up accounts to serve new purposes, to justify claims to stipends or rights to enjoy the proceeds of taxation. Men who could prove that their ancestors had participated in the early conquests felt entitled to salaries from public funds; the inhabitants of cities might hope for lighter taxation because they had surrendered peacefully to the Muslim armies. In short, the stories of the conquests were preserved, not because of interest in producing a clear historical narrative, but because it was felt to be useful. Correspondingly, material that was not useful, the exact chronology of events, for example, was consigned to oblivion.
jhiliya
(time of ignorance) before the coming of Islam, they composed and preserved poems and songs to celebrate heroic deeds. As well as these ancient, traditional themes, the Muslims could also remember their victories as clear evidence that God was on their side, the deaths of their enemies and the vast quantities of booty they amassed all being evidence of divine favour: no one could question the essential rightness of what they had done. They also preserved, elaborated and even made up accounts to serve new purposes, to justify claims to stipends or rights to enjoy the proceeds of taxation. Men who could prove that their ancestors had participated in the early conquests felt entitled to salaries from public funds; the inhabitants of cities might hope for lighter taxation because they had surrendered peacefully to the Muslim armies. In short, the stories of the conquests were preserved, not because of interest in producing a clear historical narrative, but because it was felt to be useful. Correspondingly, material that was not useful, the exact chronology of events, for example, was consigned to oblivion.
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