Social and cultural transformations
The Arab conquests are often viewed as a discrete period. The end of the conquests appears to be a convenient dividing line because it coincides with a conventional watershed, the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphs by the ʿAbbāsids. To illustrate their role in broader social and cultural change, however, the military conquests should be included in a period more than twice as long, during which the conquest of the hearts and minds of the majority of the subject population also occurred. Between 634 and 870 Islam was transformed from the badge of a small Arab ruling class to the dominant faith of a vast empire that stretched from the western Mediterranean into Central Asia. As a result of this long and gradual period of conversion, Arab cultures intermingled with the indigenous cultures of the conquered peoples to produce Islam’s fundamental orientations and identities. The Arabic language became a vehicle for the transmission of high culture, even though the Arabs remained a minority; for the first time in the history of the Nile-to-Oxus region, a new language of high culture, carrying a great cultural florescence, replaced all previous languages of high culture. Trade and taxation replaced booty as the fiscal basis of the Muslim state; a nontribal army replaced a tribal one; and a centralized empire became a nominal confederation, with all of the social dislocation and rivalries those changes imply.
Yet despite continuous internal dissension, virtually no Muslim raised the possibility of there being more than one legitimate leader. Furthermore, the impulse toward solidarity, inherited from Muhammad and Abū Bakr, may have actually been encouraged by persisting minority status. While Muslims were a minority, they naturally formed a conception of Islamic dominance as territorial rather than religious, and of unconverted non-Muslim communities as secondary members. In one important respect the Islamic faith differed from all other major religious traditions: the formative period of the faith coincided with its political domination of a rich complex of old cultures. As a result, during the formative period of their civilization, the Muslims could both introduce new elements and reorient old ones in creative ways.
Just as Muhammad fulfilled and redirected ongoing tendencies in Arabia, the builders of early Islamicate civilization carried forth and transformed developments in the Roman and Sāsānian territories in which they first dominated. While Muhammad was emerging as a leader in the Hejaz, the Byzantine and Sāsānian emperors were ruling states that resembled what the Islamicate empire was to become. Byzantine rule stretched from North Africa into Syria and sometimes Iraq; the Sāsānians competed with the Byzantines in Syria and Iraq and extended their sway, at its furthest, across the Oxus River. Among their subjects were speakers and writers of several major languages—various forms of Aramaic, such as Mandaean and Syriac; Greek; Arabic; and Middle Persian. In fact, a significant number of persons were probably bilingual or trilingual. Both the Byzantine and the Sāsānian empire declared an official religion, Christianity and Zoroastrian-Mazdeism, respectively. The Sāsānian empire in the early 7th century was ruled by a religion-backed centralized monarchy with an elaborate bureaucratic structure that was reproduced on a smaller scale at the provincial courts of its appointed governors. Its religious demography was complex, encompassing Christians of many persuasions, miaphysites, Nestorians, Chalcedonians, and others; pagans; gnostics; Jews; Mazdeans. Minority religious communities were becoming more clearly organized and isolated. The population included priests; traders and merchants; landlords (dihqāns), sometimes living not on the land but as absentees in the cities; pastoralists; and large numbers of peasant agriculturalists. In southern Iraq, especially in and around towns like Al-Ḥīrah, it included migratory and settled Arabs as well. Both empires relied on standing armies for their defense and on agriculture, taxation, conquest, and trade for their resources. When the Muslim conquests began, the Byzantines and Sāsānians had been in conflict for a century; in the most recent exchanges, the Sāsānians had established direct rule in al-Ḥīrah, further exposing its many Arabs to their administration. When the Arab conquests began, representatives of Byzantine and Sāsānian rule on Arabia’s northern borders were not strong enough to resist.
ʿUmar I’s succession
The spirit of conquest under ʿUmar I
Abū Bakr’s successor in Medina, ʿUmar I (ruled 634–644), had not so much to stimulate conquest as to organize and channel it. He chose as leaders skillful managers experienced in trade and commerce as well as warfare and imbued with an ideology that provided their activities with a cosmic significance. The total numbers involved in the initial conquests may have been relatively small, perhaps less than 50,000, divided into numerous shifting groups. Yet few actions took place without any sanction from the Medinan government or one of its appointed commanders. The fighters, or muqātilah, could generally accomplish much more with Medina’s support than without. ʿUmar, one of Muhammad’s earliest and staunchest supporters, had quickly developed an administrative system of manifestly superior effectiveness. He defined the ummah as a continually expansive polity managed by a new ruling elite, which included successful military commanders like Khālid ibn al-Walīd. Even after the conquests ended, this sense of expansiveness continued to be expressed in the way Muslims divided the world into their own zone, the Dār al-Islām, and the zone into which they could and should expand, the Dār al-Ḥarb, the abode of war. The norms of ʿUmar’s new elite were supplied by Islam as it was then understood. Taken together, Muhammad’s revelations from God and his Sunnah (precedent-setting example) defined the cultic and personal practices that distinguished Muslims from others: prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, charity, avoidance of pork and intoxicants, membership in one community centred at Mecca, and activism (jihad) on the community’s behalf.
Forging the link of activism with faithfulness
ʿUmar symbolized this conception of the ummah in two ways. He assumed an additional title, amīr al-muʾminīn (“commander of the faithful”), which linked organized activism with faithfulness (īmān), the earliest defining feature of the Muslim. He also adopted a lunar calendar that began with the emigration (Hijrah), the moment at which a group of individual followers of Muhammad had become an active social presence. Because booty was the ummah’s major resource, ʿUmar concentrated on ways to distribute and sustain it. He established a dīwān, or register, to pay all members of the ruling elite and the conquering forces, from Muhammad’s family on down, in order of entry into the ummah. The immovable booty was kept for the state. After the government’s fifth-share of the movable booty was reserved, the rest was distributed according to the dīwān. The muqātilah he stationed as an occupying army in garrisons (amṣār) constructed in locations strategic to further conquest: al-Fusṭāṭ in Egypt, Damascus in Syria, Kūfah and Basra in Iraq. The garrisons attracted indigenous population and initiated significant demographic changes, such as a population shift from northern to southern Iraq. They also inaugurated the rudiments of an “Islamic” daily life; each garrison was commanded by a caliphal appointee, responsible for setting aside an area for prayer, a mosque (masjid), named for the prostrations (sujūd) that had become a characteristic element in the five daily worship sessions (ṣalāts). There the fighters could hear God’s revelations to Muhammad recited by men trained in that emerging art. The most pious might commit the whole to memory. There too, the Friday midday ṣalāt could be performed communally, accompanied by an important educational device, the sermon (khuṭbah), through which the fighters could be instructed in the principles of the faith. The mosque fused the practical and the spiritual in a special way: because the Friday prayer included an expression of loyalty to the ruler, it could also provide an opportunity to declare rebellion.
The series of ongoing conquests that fueled this system had their most extensive phase under ʿUmar and his successor ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (ruled 644–656). Within 25 years Muslim Arab forces created the first empire to permanently link western Asia with the Mediterranean. Within another century Muslim conquerors surpassed the achievement of Alexander the Great, not only in the durability of their accomplishment but in its scope as well, reaching from the Iberian Peninsula to Central Asia. Resistance was generally slight and nondestructive, and conquest through capitulation was preferred to conquest by force. After Sāsānian Al-Ḥīrah fell in 633, a large Byzantine force was defeated in Syria, opening the way to the final conquest of Damascus in 636. The next year further gains were made in Sāsānian territory, especially at the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah, and in the next the focus returned to Syria and the taking of Jerusalem. By 640 Roman control in Syria was over, and by 641 the Sāsānians had lost all their territory west of the Zagros. During the years 642 to 646 Egypt was taken under the leadership of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, who soon began raids into what the Muslims called the Maghrib, the lands west of Egypt. Shortly thereafter, in the east, Persepolis fell; in 651 the defeat and assassination of the last Sāsānian emperor, Yazdegerd III, marked the end of the 400-year-old Sāsānian empire.
