The results of the meeting of an expansionist Arab state and the old civilizations of southwest Asia became clear by around 700: Large parts of southwest Asia and North Africa were permanently under Arab political control, and Islam was the region’s religion. But how those results were achieved in the fifty or so years between the death of Muhammad and the accession of the caliph (successor to the Prophet) Marwan in 684 is not at all clear. The sources for early Islamic history are somewhat problematic: Almost all of the Islamic sources date from after 685 and reflect political positions relevant to that later period. Non-Islamic sources are scarce and short. Specific events, including the key battles that led to the Arab conquests, are either not narrated or are narrated in multiple, conflicting, versions. Even the specific tenets of Islam during this period are hard to recover. We can see the general shape of what happened, but not all the details.
The nature of the Arab conquests is grounded in pre- Islamic Arabia, which can best be compared to the steppes of Central Asia (see Chapter 6). A fringe of settled, agricultural land and trade-oriented cities along the western and southern edges of the peninsula bordered a vast desert, too poor to support horse herding as in Central Asia and so dominated by camel-herding Bedouins (nomads). The poverty of the land had two consequences. First, unlike the steppe nomads, the Arabs could not generate the resources for building hierarchical chiefdoms and states themselves—in fact, they could barely do so with outside infusions of wealth. Such infusions were, in turn, less likely because the Arabs were neither as numerous nor, usually, as threatening as the steppe nomads. And the Arab border with civilization was at the opposite end of the peninsula from the economic center of gravity of the Arab world, further complicating potential state building. Second, the lack of competition for poor land meant that, again unlike the steppes and its constant churning of peoples and ethnic identities, Arab tribal culture and identities were extremely stable and deeply rooted, and so potentially more resistant to assimilation by the cultures of surrounding civilizations. Deep tribal divisions also contributed to the difficulties faced by would-be state builders, however.
But the half-century of intense East Roman- Sassanid Persian rivalry up to 630 created some new potential, politically and culturally. Economic resources came in, religious rivalries heated up, and Muhammad turned out to be the right leader at the right time to harness that potential. Whatever the details of his new faith and his role in it, he clearly managed to create a state centered at Medina. In competition with other Arab political groups, Muhammad’s Medina benefited from the ideological lure of a religion that drew on Arab notions of ethnic identity through their claimed descent from Abraham via Ishmael, that therefore incorporated the Christian and (even more important) Jewish traditions already in the area, that also managed to absorb the Arab pagan tradition, and that justified Arab unity and external conquest in the name of a universal god. Muhammad died in 632 having built Arab unity and (probably—the sources are unclear) initiated attacks into Roman Syria. His successors built rapidly on his foundation.
The Arab armies that accomplished the early conquests were efficient but unremarkable in many ways. They drew first on a selection of the adult males of the Arab population of Arabia and later on recruits from conquered areas, especially among Arab populations already in Syria and Mesopotamia but also among some non-Arabs. They served for a share of the booty to be gathered from conquered lands, which rapidly took the form of a share of the taxes the conquerors began to collect using local administrative mechanisms soon after their conquests began. Thus, the army of the conquests was not exactly a militia. And it was paid but not exactly professional, as the right to a share of tax income was taken by many in the army to be their heritable right in return for service already rendered, rather than pay in expectation of continued service as the caliphs (mostly) wished to see it. The total number of soldiers theoretically available to the Caliphate grew to perhaps 200,000 by 700, but individual field armies were normally around 20,000-30,000 and rarely much over 50,000-60,000 due to logistical constraints.
Figure 8.2 Arab Conquests
If recruiting and pay arrangements were slightly odd, equipment and tactics were not. Probably only a minority of soldiers had body armor of some sort, either scale armor or mail; iron helmets were more widespread. The vast majority served as infantry, most of whom carried spears that they used in defensive formations against cavalry charges and attacks by other infantry, with the first rank often kneeling to ground their spears more firmly. They also carried swords, which were their primary offensive weapon. Some were archers. The cavalry, limited in numbers by the expense of horses, also carried swords and often dismounted in battle, especially on the defensive. They shared a high level of religiously inspired morale with their chief opponents, but probably gained at the small-unit level from the cohesion of tribal groupings that fought under their own banners. The degree of discipline and determination demonstrated by early Arab armies, as well as perhaps the Roman legacy of the Syrian population they conquered, shows up in their frequent use of the khandaq, or field fortification, which could range from an improvised battlefield ditch to a full, Roman-style fortified camp constructed at the end of each day’s march. These same qualities and engineering skills gave them success in siege warfare: Improvising, and often using siege equipment captured from enemies or acquired from defectors, they consistently ground down defenders, especially those isolated by Arab battlefield successes.
Tactical tenacity and defensive prowess combined their other great strength at the strategic level: a significant level of strategic mobility. Horses and especially camels often transported troops to battle, though they played no role tactically; and even pure Arab infantry marched light and fast, partly a result of being paid in coin and thus being expected to buy their own provisions at markets along the march rather than relying on baggage trains. Arab commanders could therefore seize the strategic initiative and choose their place of battle while being able to opt for the advantages of the tactical defensive. This combination probably accounts for a good deal of the success of armies that had no real advantage in equipment or even morale over their main foes, though both East Rome and Persia may have suffered from war weariness and harder-than-normal recruiting in their early encounters with the Arabs. In addition, it took some time for the Arabs to appreciate the importance of sea power (see Chapter 10).
Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt fell to the Arab armies between 632 and 642, with the decisive battles occurring at Yarmuk in Syria in 636 against the Romans and at Qadisiya in 637 against the Persians. Consolidating the conquests took longer—Egypt had fallen by 642 but a Byzantine fleet nearly retook Alexandria in 645, and the highlands of Persia were not secure until 650 or so. Further expansion came more slowly (Figure 8.2), partly because of the distances involved and partly because the success of the conquests created tensions among the conquerors that involved not just practical problems of administration but ideological questions about the succession to the Caliphate, Arab identity, and the very nature of Islam. Three civil wars and significant transformations of the Islamic state between 650 and 750 resulted without solving some of the deepest problems.
Wishing neither to lose their Arab identity in the cultures they conquered nor necessarily to share their religion at first, the Arab armies of conquest settled in garrison cities largely isolated from the surrounding populations. Within the garrisons of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, settlement reproduced the tribal divisions and rivalries of the homeland. Syria became the effective core of the Caliphate, with Medina retaining symbolic primacy. The separation of military from society that this created was initially a separation between Muslims and non- Muslims, but subject peoples began to convert. Whether converts had rights to military tax income became one point of dispute in the Muslim community; the division between Muslims who had done military service and those who had not became another, especially as the garrisons of Mesopotamia in particular lost their military effectiveness in the later 600s. Finally, the ideological attachment to tribal Arabia that motivated isolated garrison settlement implied hostility to the monarchical, bureaucratic rule of the Romans and Persians. Yet effective administration of the empire demanded something approximating monarchy and bureaucracy, producing another source of tension.
Conversion and settlement inevitably also weakened tribal affiliations as an alternate source of organization. As the garrisons lost their military significance, they became home to a class of urban scholars with strong mercantile connections. This development, which bypassed local aristocracies, not only separated the leadership of Muslim Arab society from landholding as a source of prestige but also separated landholding from service to the state—a strange development by traditional standards. Meanwhile, the rural peasantry escaped to the cities when they could, converting to Islam and becoming clients of the Arabs to escape taxation, as the local aristocracies could no longer protect them. This had the triple effect of undermining the old aristocracies and the imperial traditions they might have supported, spreading the values of the Arabs who controlled their clients throughout society, and thus steadily diluting the exclusively Arab tribal ties of Muslim society.
The first civil war, in 657-661, over succession to the Caliphate, resulted in the split between Shi’a and Sunni Islam and established the aristocratic Umayyad family in the Caliphate. The second, in 680-684, established the primacy of Syria, whose professional army took over garrisoning the entire Caliphate after what amounted to a new round of conquests (see the Highlights box “The Battle of Ra’s al-Ayn, 685”). Both results, in fact, damaged the legitimacy of caliphal government in the eyes of many Muslims, though both the caliphs, on the one hand, and the emerging ulema, the scholars who interpreted Islamic law, on the other, contributed to the defining of Islam in the process of arguing with each other. Those arguments, combined with the problems of maintaining military forces that developed from the professionalization of the Syrian army, had deep consequences for Islamic political structure and resulted in a third civil war, in 747-750, discussed further below.