The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In

Summary

Hugh Kennedy's book narrates the conquests by which Muslim Arab armies, within about a century of the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632, came to rule lands from Spain and Morocco to Central Asia and the Indus valley. It opens with a chapter on the sources, chiefly Arabic histories such as those of al-Baladhuri and al-Tabari, written down some two centuries after the events, and on how to use their mix of genealogy, heroic tale and administrative memory. A second chapter sets out the foundations of conquest: an Arabian society of tribes and warriors, the new religious community at Medina, and two great empires, the Byzantine and the Sasanian Persian, exhausted by their war of 602-628 and by recurrent plague. Regional chapters follow. In Syria and Palestine the Muslims defeat the Byzantines at the Yarmuk in 636 and receive the surrender of cities such as Damascus and Jerusalem by treaty. In Iraq they win at Qadisiyya and take the Persian capital Ctesiphon. Amr ibn al-As conquers Egypt and Alexandria by 642. The conquest of Iran is slower, through the battle of Nihavand and years of local agreements, ending with the death of the last Sasanian king, Yazdgard III, near Merv in 651. Into the Maghreb, Arab armies meet determined Berber resistance under leaders such as Kusayla and the woman known as al-Kahina before North Africa is secured, and in 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad crosses to Spain, where the Visigothic kingdom collapses. Crossing the Oxus, Qutayba ibn Muslim campaigns among the cities of Transoxania, Bukhara and Samarqand, while in the furthest east Muhammad ibn al-Qasim enters Sind. A chapter on the war at sea covers the new Muslim fleets, the Battle of the Masts in 655, and the sieges of Constantinople. The book ends with the voices of the conquered, Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian writers in Syriac, Armenian, Coptic and other languages who recorded how the conquests looked to them. Kennedy argues that relatively small, mobile and well-led armies succeeded because of the weakness of their opponents, their own cohesion and conviction, and the generous terms they often offered: local communities kept their faith, property and leaders in return for tribute. Conversion to Islam was therefore slow, taking centuries, and the conquests created the political frame within which Arabic language and Islamic civilization later spread. The book was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London and Da Capo Press in Philadelphia in 2007.

Top Lessons

• How small armies won wide lands

  Kennedy stresses that the conquering armies were often small. They won because the Byzantine and Persian empires had exhausted each other in a long war and had suffered plague, because the Arabs were mobile and united by faith and leadership, and because many cities and lords preferred negotiated surrender to resistance. Victory came from a combination of causes rather than any single one.

• Conquest and conversion are different things

  The conquests brought lands under Muslim rule, but Kennedy shows that most conquered people did not become Muslims for generations. Treaties let Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians keep their worship in return for tribute, and conversion spread slowly over centuries for many reasons. Distinguishing political rule from religious change is one of the book's central lessons.

• Reading late and partisan sources

  The Arabic accounts were written down long after the events and shaped by tribal pride, legal concerns and storytelling conventions. Kennedy neither discards them nor accepts them uncritically; he compares them with Greek, Syriac, Armenian and Coptic writers and with what can be known of administration and geography. His method models careful use of imperfect evidence.

• Many peoples, many responses

  The conquered did not respond in one way. Some cities opened their gates by treaty, Berber leaders fought for decades, Iranian lords bargained, Sogdian merchants changed sides as their interests required, and Christian chroniclers interpreted events through Scripture. The final chapter gives these voices their own place in the story.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medical matters are marginal. Kennedy counts recurrent plague since the 540s among the conditions that weakened the Byzantine and Persian empires before the conquests, and the plague of Amwas (Emmaus) in Syria in about 639, which killed leading Muslim commanders, is part of the narrative of the Syrian campaign. Wounds and deaths in battle are recorded as in any military history.

• The foundations of conquest

  Plague and the long Roman-Persian war as causes of imperial weakness before the conquests.

• The conquest of Syria and Palestine

  The plague of Amwas among the Muslim armies in Syria.