Read The Great Arab Conquests Online

Authors: Hugh Kennedy

The Great Arab Conquests (6 page)

BOOK: The Great Arab Conquests
2.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 
If the historians show keen interest in some aspects of the conquests, they are much less concerned with others which may seem to our eyes much more important. The account of the battle of Qādisiya in Iraq, that marked the decisive end of Persian power in Iraq in Tabarī’s
History
, takes up some two hundred pages in the English translation, yet the course of the battle remains frustratingly obscure. Admittedly it is very difficult to be certain about the actual progress of the military action even in more recent conflicts, but this vagueness makes it almost impossible to provide convincing answers to the crucial question of why the Byzantine and Sasanian armies which tried to prevent the Arab invasions of their territory performed so badly. We are sometimes told in bald and stark terms that the fighting was hard but eventually the Muslims prevailed. Sometimes too their opponents are driven into rivers or ravines and large numbers are killed in that way. There are a number of reports that both Byzantine and Sasanian troops were chained together to prevent them fleeing from the battlefield; this is not real historical information but a topos to show how the Muslims were inspired by faith while their opponents were coerced by tyranny.
2
This may have been true, but the stories as presented tell us nothing about the real military reasons for defeat.
 
Perhaps even more exasperating for the modern historian is the vagueness about chronology. This is a particular problem of the earliest phases of the conquests. We are given dates ranging over three or four years for the great victories of Yarmūk and Qādisiya. The ninth-and tenth-century editors were quite happy to keep it that way and simply admit that there were these many different opinions. In the absence of corroborative accounts from outside the Arabic tradition, we are often quite uncertain as to the true date of even the most important events in early Muslim history.
 
So what can a modern historian, attempting to reconstruct the course of events and analyse the reasons for the success of Muslim arms, make of all this? Since the nineteenth-century beginnings of scientific research in the field, historians have wrung their hands and lamented the disorganization of the material, the apparently legendary nature of much of it and the endless repetitions and contradictions. Alfred Butler, writing on the conquest of Egypt in 1902, lamented the ‘invincible confusion’ of the sources while some of the material he dismissed simply as ‘fairy stories’.
 
Historians have long been aware of the confused and contradictory nature of much of this material, but in the 1970s and 1980s a much more wide-reaching challenge was mounted to the reliability of any of these traditions. Albrecht Noth in Germany observed how many of the conquest narratives were formulaic set pieces, topoi, which appeared in numerous different accounts and were transferred, as it were, from one battlefield to another. Accounts of how cities fell to the Arabs because of the treachery of some of the inhabitants are found in so many different cases and are expressed in such similar language that they can hardly all be true. At almost the same time, Michael Cook and Patricia Crone in London argued that the sources for the life of Muhammad and early Islam more generally were so riddled with contradictions and inconsistency that we could not be certain of anything; the very existence of Muhammad himself was questioned.
3
 
The result of this critical onslaught was that many historians, even those not convinced by all the revisionist arguments, have been reluctant to take these narratives seriously or to rely on any of the details they contain. I am of a different opinion. There are a number of reasons why we should return to this material and try to use it rather than dismissing it out of hand. The first is that Arabic accounts can sometimes be checked against sources outside the Arabic literary tradition, the Syriac Khuzistān Chronicle, for example, or the Armenian history of Sebeos, both accounts written by Christians within a generation of the events they describe. They are much shorter and less detailed than the Arabic accounts but they tend to support the general outlines of the Arabic history. On occasion they even support the detail. For example, the Arabic sources say that the heavily fortified city of Tustar fell to the Muslims because of the treachery of some of the inhabitants, who showed the Muslims how to enter through water tunnels. Such elements have often been dismissed as formulaic and valueless since we find similar accounts of the conquests of other towns and fortresses. In this case, however, the local Khuzistān Chronicle, a Syriac Christian source quite unconnected with the Muslim tradition, independently tells more or less the same story, suggesting strongly that the city did fall in the way described. This implies that the Arabic sources for the conquest of Tustar, and perhaps by extension for other areas too, are more reliable than has been thought.
 
We can go further with the rehabilitation of the Arabic sources. Many of them can be traced back to compilers in the mid eighth century, men like Sayf b. Umar. Sayf lived in Kūfa in Iraq and died after 786. Beyond that we know nothing of his life, but he is the most important narrative source for the early conquests. Medieval and modern historians have suspected that he fabricated some of his accounts, but the most recent scholarship suggests that he is more reliable than previous authors had imagined. He is certainly responsible for collecting and editing many of the most vivid accounts of the early conquests.
4
Sayf was writing little more than a century after the early conquests and it is possible that some of the participants were still alive when Sayf was a boy. Furthermore, the later conquests in Spain and Central Asia were still under way in his lifetime. Sayf was as close in time to the great Muslim conquests than Gregory of Tours was to the early Merovingians or Bede to the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, both sources on which historians have always relied for the reconstruction of these events.
 
There is a further dimension to these sources, the dimension of social memory. James Fentress and Chris Wickham have pointed out how traditional accounts, which may or may not be factually accurate, bear memories of attitudes and perceptions which tell us a great deal about how societies remember their past and hence about attitudes at the time of their composition.
5
The conquest narratives should be read as just such a social memory. In this way the early Arabic sources are very revealing of the attitudes of Muslims in the two centuries that followed the conquests. If we want to investigate the
mentalités
of early Islamic society, then these sources are of the greatest value. The tendency among some historians has been to denigrate the narratives: if instead we try to go with the narrative flow, to read them for what they are trying to tell us, they can be much more illuminating.
 
One of the key issues that the sources address is the difference between the Arab Muslims and their opponents, their differing habits, attitudes and values. The Arab writers do not analyse these issues in any formal sense but instead explore them in narrative. Let us take, as an example, one narrative among the hundreds that have come down to us from the eighth and ninth centuries. It comes in the
History of the Conquests
, compiled in its present form by Ibn Abd al-Hakam in the mid ninth century.
6
 
The story begins with an account of how the Muslim governor of Egypt, Abd al-Azīz b. Marwān (governor 686-704), came to Alexandria on a visit. While he was there he enquired whether there were any men still alive who remembered the conquest of the city by the Muslims in 641, at least half a century previously. He was told that there was only one aged Byzantine, who had been a young boy at the time. When asked what he recollected from that time, he did not attempt to give a general account of the warfare and the fall of the city but instead told the story of one particular incident in which he had personally been involved. He had been friends with the son of one of the Byzantine patricians (a generic term the Arabic sources use for high-ranking Byzantines). His friend had suggested that they went out ‘to take a look at these Arabs who are fighting us’. Accordingly the patrician’s son got dressed up in a brocade robe, a gold headband and a finely decorated sword. He rode a plump, sleek horse while his friend the narrator had a wiry little pony. They left the fortifications and came to a rise from which they looked down on a Bedouin tent outside which there was a tethered horse and a spear stuck in the ground. They looked at the enemy and were amazed by their ‘weakness’ (meaning their poverty and lack of military equipment) and asked each other how such ‘weak’ men could have achieved what they did. As they stood chatting, a man came out of the tent and saw them. He untied the horse, rubbed it and stroked it and then jumped up on it bareback and, grabbing the spear in his hand, came towards them. The narrator said to his friend that the man was clearly coming to get them so they turned to flee back to the safety of the city walls, but the Arab soon caught up with his friend on the plump horse and speared him to death. He then pursued the narrator, who managed to reach the safety of the gate. Now feeling secure, he went up on the walls and saw the Arab returning to his tent. He had not glanced at the corpse or made any effort to steal the valuable garments or the excellent horse. Instead he went on his way, reciting Arabic, which the narrator reckoned must have been the Koran. The narrator then gives us the moral of the tale: the Arabs had achieved what they had because they were not interested in the goods of this world. When the Arab got back to his tent he dismounted, tied up his horse, planted his spear in the ground and went in, telling nobody about what he had done. When the story was over, the governor asked the man to describe the Arab. He replied that he was short, thin and ugly, like a human swordfish, at which the governor observed that he was a typical Yemeni (south Arabian).
 
At first glance this story is hardly worthy of serious reading, let alone retelling. The Muslim conquest of Alexandria was an event of fundamental importance, marking as it did the end of Byzantine rule in Egypt and the extinction of 900 years of Greek-speaking rule in the city. The historian devotes two or three pages to it. He tells us nothing of the nature of the siege, if there was one, where the armies might have been deployed or any of the military details we would like to know. This trivial anecdote occupies almost all the space he allows for the event. Furthermore there is no real evidence that it is true, in the sense of describing an event that actually occurred, and even if it was, it would not be very interesting: the protagonists are anonymous and the death of one man had no significant effect on more general events. On further consideration, however, this anecdote is quite revealing. For a start the telling of it is put into a historical context. It may not be a true record of what happened in 641 but it does appear to be a genuine artefact of the late seventh century. The Umayyad governor wanted to find out more about the circumstances in which the province he now ruled over became part of the Muslim world. Like the historians and compilers of his generation, he was engaged in recovering and recording these memories before they disappeared for ever. The story itself stresses some familiar themes. The Byzantines are wealthy and complacent, unused to the rigours of warfare. Furthermore the text shows sharp divisions of class and wealth between the son of the patrician and the narrator. The Arab, by contrast, lives a life of privation and austerity in his tent. Unlike the upper-class Byzantine he is an excellent horseman, having a close and affectionate relationship with his mount and being able to leap on to it and ride bareback. He is also, of course, a skilled and hardened spearsman. After the death of the patrician, he shows his religious zeal by reciting the Koran and his lack of concern for material goods by not stopping to strip the corpse of his victim. The governor’s concluding question about the appearance of the man allows the narrator to describe a small, wiry, ill-favoured individual. In a way, this is a surprisingly unflattering portrait, but it too makes a point; the man is described as typically Yemeni. Most of the Arabs who conquered Egypt were of Yemeni or south Arabian origin. The governor, in contrast, came from the tribe of Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet himself, a much more aristocratic lineage. However, the author who is said to have preserved this anecdote was himself a Yemeni, from the ancient tribe of Khawlān. Khawlān were not Bedouin in the traditional sense but inhabited an area of villages in the mountainous heart of Yemen. Their descendants, still called Khawlān, live in the same area today. Khawlānis played an important part in the conquest of Egypt and were prominent among the old established Arab families of Fustāt (Old Cairo) in the two centuries that followed. The author clearly developed the anecdote as a way of emphasizing the important role of his kinsmen, and of Yemenis in general, in the conquest of the country they now lived in.
 
The anecdote is also making a point about the ways in which the Muslims thought of themselves as different from, and more virtuous than, the Christians who surrounded them and who were certainly at this stage much more numerous. It makes a political point too about the role of Yemenis in the conquests and the way in which the governor should respect them for their achievements at this time. The final redactor, Ibn Abd al-Hakam, in whose work we find the story, was writing at a time in the mid ninth century when these old Yemeni families were losing their influence and special status as Turkish troops employed by the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad came to take over military power in Egypt. By pointing out the heroism of this early generation, he is making a point about the rights and status of his own class in his own day. The story has clearly been refashioned along the way, but it preserves a social memory of the hardiness, piety and Yemeni identity of the conquerors. This memory was preserved because it was valuable to those who kept it alive, but it also reflects the reality of the environment, if not the detail, of the conquests themselves.
BOOK: The Great Arab Conquests
2.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Diary of Latoya Hunter by Latoya Hunter
Show Time by Suzanne Trauth
Last Hope by Jesse Quinones
Lush in Lace by A.J. Ridges