The Abbasid Caliphate

The fact that the Umayyads conquered most of Iberia in just four years with a few thousand soldiers indicates that they received support from the local population. Further Conquests Full consolidation of ‘Uqba’s conquests in North Africa had to be completed before further conquests could be undertaken. The caliph ‘Abd al-Malik sent armies to conquer Carthage, the final outpost of Byzantine control in North Africa in 698. With this, the last remnants of Byzantine North Africa disappeared for good, as the former rulers of the land were forced to retreat to Sicily and Greece. Now the Muslim armies were primed for one of the most spectacular and unlikely conquests in history. Legend has it that a former Byzantine official, Julian, appealed to the new Muslim governors of North Africa to punish the Visigothic king of the Iberian Peninsula, Roderic, who had supposedly seduced Julian’s daughter while she was under his care. Julian even promised to ferry a Muslim expeditionary force across the strait to Spain to exact his revenge upon the tyrant king. Whether or not Julian really existed, reports of unrest in Visigothic Spain along with pleas from persecuted Jews and unorthodox Christians must have played a role in the decision to cross the strait and venture into the Iberian Peninsula. Musa ibn Nusayr, the Umayyad governor of the Maghreb sent a force under the command of Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber convert to Islam, who in early 711 landed near a giant monolithic promontory on the south shore of Spain. He established his camp near the mountain, which became known as Jabal Tariq (the Mountain of Tariq), Anglicized as Gibraltar. From this base, Tariq led raiding parties throughout the south of Spain, which proved to be generally successful— especially since Roderic and the main bulk of the Visigothic army was in the north of the peninsula dealing with a Basque rebellion. By the time Roderic was able to march his army south to meet the Muslim forces in the summer of 711, Tariq had managed to bring over an army that numbered around 10,000 soldiers from Muslim North Africa. At the decisive Battle of Guadalete, Tariq’s army crushed the amassed forces of Roderic, who suffered from disloyalty in his army’s ranks along with the effects of an exhaustive march to meet the Muslim invaders. Roderic himself was killed in the battle, and the underlying weakness of the Visigothic kingdom soon became apparent. Central control collapsed throughout the peninsula. Tariq advanced to take Roderic’s old capital city of Toledo within a few months of the battle, and soon afterwards, cities began to fall one by one to the invading Muslims. Tariq’s superior, Musa, also crossed over into Spain to aid in the ongoing conquest. Tariq was the conqueror and Musa was the consolidator. As expeditionary forces under Tariq took cities as far north as the Ebro Valley, Musa’s larger army followed up to fully establish Muslim rule in conquered areas and set up civil government. In the years from 711 to 715, Tariq and Musa managed to bring the vast majority of the peninsula under Umayyad control. The seemingly improbable conquest of such a large territory by relatively small invading armies (no more than ten to twenty thousand soldiers) was reminiscent of the conquest of North Africa just a generation before. Many of the early Indian converts to Islam were Buddhists and members of lower castes, who were attracted to the egalitarian nature of Islam. Further raids to the north into Gaul initially proved to be as successful as the conquest of Spain. The Muslim armies managed to advance into the south of modern France, establishing their rule in Aquitaine and Septimania in the 720s. The climax of the Muslim invasion of Gaul was in 732, when armies under the Muslim governor of al-Andalus, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, were defeated by the Franks under Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, in northern France. The importance of this battle has been thoroughly debated by historians. Some argue that a Muslim victory would have led to the eventual complete conquest of Europe and its subsequent conversion to Islam in the 700s. Others downplay the battle, making the point that al-Ghafiqi’s advance to northern France was nothing more than a summer raid with no aims at conquest. Whether or not the battle really was that important cannot be determined, but one has to wonder at the implications of what Muslim rule in France and beyond could have meant for European history in the Middle Ages. What makes Umayyad expansion in the early part of the eighth century so extraordinary is that it was not confined to North Africa and Spain. Simultaneously, on the opposite side of the Empire, Umayyad armies were marching into an unknown land into which even Alexander’s armies dared not venture. The impetus was a Muslim trade vessel returning from Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) that was attacked by pirates based in the northwest corner of India, Sindh. When the king of Sindh, Raja Dahir refused to return the Muslim captives taken from the ship, Umayyad armies were again spurred to action to push the empire’s borders even further. Under the command of Muhammad bin Qasim, a young man who hailed from the tribe of Thaqif, based in Ta’if (the same city that according to Islamic tradition Prophet Muhammad chose not to destroy). Although he was in his teens, Ibn Qasim proved to be an able leader under the tutelage of Hajjaj bin Yusuf, the governor of Iraq. He was sent with an army of 6,000 Syrian soldiers across Persia and into the Indian subcontinent in 711, the same year as Tariq ibn Ziyad’s foray into Spain. Upon reaching the Indus River, several small communities capitulated to the invading force once given the promise of religious freedom. Aided by Buddhist temple officials, the Muslim army marched from city to city with relatively little resistance. When bin Qasim’s force finally met Dahir in battle along the Indus River, the Muslims, along with locals discontented with Dahir’s rule, managed to inflict a devastating blow on the Sindhi army. Dahir himself was killed in the chaos of the battle, his war elephants being no match for the flaming arrows employed by the Muslims. Like in Spain, the loss of a major battle and the death of the king led to the complete collapse of local government. Muhammad bin Qasim’s forces mopped up the remaining organized opposition within months, and established Muslim rule in Sindh. For the first time, a part of India was under Muslim control, although it would be centuries before Muslims would manage to establish control further into the subcontinent. For the locals living in Sindh, the Muslim conquest did not change their daily lives much. On the advice of his superiors in Iraq, Ibn Qasim extended the same religious freedom to Buddhists and Hindus that was already given to Christians and Jews elsewhere in the Muslim world. Temples and idols destroyed in the fighting were allowed to be rebuilt by the new Muslim governors. Once again, the relaxed terms offered by the conquering Muslims created little discontent with Muslim rule and relative social harmony. By the mid-700s, the Umayyad caliphate stretched from Spain to India, making it the largest empire in the world just 100 years after the Islamic movement began high up on a mountain in Mecca. While expansion and conquest are usually signs of a powerful and capable government, a plot for the end of the Umayyad dynasty was being planned just as Umayyad armies marched into unknown territories. Where other rebellions against the Umayyads failed, this one would succeed as it capitalized on the many different ethnic groups that were now under Muslim control and their discontent with Umayyad social policies. The rapid expansion meant that a huge number of peoples came under Muslim control who were not Muslims themselves. The percent of the population that was Muslim in the early to mid-700s is estimated to be around just 10 per cent, the rest being a blend of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Buddhists and Hindus. According to Islamic law, these groups were granted religious freedom and were exempt from military service in exchange for payment of a poll tax, the jizya. Muslims on the other hand, were only subject to a land tax and the zakat, a mandatory tax meant to be distributed to the poor. Although the jizya was usually lower than the pre-Islamic taxes of the Byzantines or Sassanids, it was still higher than the taxes paid by the Muslims. A natural economic reaction to this system would be for non-Muslims to convert to Islam in order to pay less tax. But this solution posed a problem for the Umayyad government: if all the non-Muslims in the empire converted to Islam, it would lead to a huge fall in tax revenue, making further military expeditions (not to mention luxurious Umayyad palaces) financially unfeasible. Consequently, a safeguard to protect revenue was put into place. Non-Muslims who converted to Islam were required to continue to pay the same jizya tax they had paid before their conversion. In theory, this would protect the Umayyad caliphate from losing a valuable tax base, and ensure that all conversions would be sincere. In practice, it meant institutionalized discrimination based on race. Since the Arabs had almost entirely converted to Islam before the Umayyad caliphate began, the only people who were converting into the religion were non-Arabs such as Copts, Greeks, Berbers, and especially Persians.

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