In God's Path: the Arab Conquests and The

In God’s Path Ancient Warfare and Civilization series editors richard alston robin waterfield In this series, leading historians offer compelling new narratives of the armed conflicts that shaped and reshaped the classical world, from the wars of Archaic Greece to the fall of the Roman Empire and the Arab conquests. Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great’s Empire Robin Waterfield By the Spear: Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire Ian Worthington Taken at the Flood: The Roman Conquest of Greece Robin Waterfield In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire Robert G. Hoyland In God’s Path The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire Robert G. Hoyland 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoyland, Robert G., 1966- In God’s path : the Arab conquests and the creation of an Islamic empire / Robert Hoyland. pages cm. — (Ancient warfare and civilization) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–19–991636–8 — ISBN 978–0–19–991637–5 1. Islamic Empire—History—622–661. 2. Islamic Empire—History—661–750. I. Title. DS38.1.H688 2014 909’.09767—dc23 2013043047e 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ‘To the great despair of historians men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs’ —(Marc Bloch, , trans. Peter Putman, The Historian’s Craft Manchester 1954, 28). Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 The Setting Chapter One 8 The First Battles (630–640) Chapter Two 31 Eastward and Westward (640–652) Chapter Three 66 The Push for Constantinople Chapter Four (652–685) 103 The Great Leap Forward (685–715) Chapter Five 138 Retrenchment and Revolt (715–750) Chapter Six 170 The Making of Islamic Chapter Seven Civilization 207 Appendix: Sources and Source Critical Remarks 231 Timeline 241 Dramatis Personae 245 viii Contents Genealogical Tables of Quraysh and the Umayyads 249 Notes 253 Select Bibliography 279 Index 287 Acknowledgments I am indebted to two particular sources for the writing of this book. The first is the many students to whom I have taught Islamic history and who have helped me think about the shortcomings of the traditional narrative. The Oxford graduate intake of 2010–11 were particularly influential, for I was then fully engaged in writing this book and we discussed some of its aspects in our seminars, so thank you Anna, Benedict, Charlie, Hasnain, Josh, and Ryan. The second is my undergraduate teacher and doctoral supervisor, Patricia Crone, who first introduced me to Islamic history and encouraged me to think critically about its origins and formation. In addition, there are the many colleagues with whom I have had interesting discussions that have helped shaped some of the ideas presented in this book. Although there are too many to name them all here, I would particularly like to thank Aziz al-Azmeh, Amikam Elad, James Howard-Johnston, Hugh Kennedy, Marie Legendre, Milka Levy-Rubin, Andrew Marsham, Fergus Millar, Harry Munt, Arietta Papaconstantinou, Richard Payne, Gabriel Reynolds, Christian Robin, Sarah Savant, Petra Sijpesteijn, Adam Silverstein, Jack Tannous, David Taylor, Luke Treadwell, and Kevin van Bladel. Of course, none are responsible for how I have used the wisdom that they imparted to me. My editor Stefan Vranka and reader Robin Wakefield put in a lot of work to improve this book’s X Acknowledgments coherence and readability, and Michael Athanson gave freely of his time and expertise to help make the regional maps. Finally I am eternally grateful to Peter Waidler for his astute and thoughtful proofreading and to Sarah for her love and support. Byron’s Muse, October 10, 2013 MAP 1 The World on the Eve of the Arab Conquests. MAP 2 The Arab Empire in AD 685 (with approximate dates of major campaigns). MAP 3 The Arab Empire in AD 750 (with approximate dates of major campaigns). Introduction here is an old Middle East legend that tells of a band of Christian youths fleeing the persecution of a pagan Roman T emperor in the mid-third century ad. They leave their native city behind and seek refuge in a cave, where they soon fall asleep. When they go out on what they assume to be the following day they are astonished to hear church bells ringing out across the streets below and to see crosses on all the high buildings. Unbeknown to them, God had spared them from witnessing the cruel ravages of heathenism by putting them to sleep for two centuries, and so the youths passed overnight from a pagan world to a Christian one.1 One experiences much the same feeling when one studies the seventh-century Middle East. Histories of the region up until ad 630 present an image of a largely Christian land, where Christ’s word is fast gaining ground even in the deserts of Africa, the Persian Empire, and as far away as China. But when one turns to Muslim accounts to read about the post-630 world, then it appears that the prophet Muhammad’s preaching was carried at breakneck speed from its birthplace in west Arabia across the whole Middle East by Arab soldiers, who then established unified rule over all the lands of the former Persian Empire and in all the southern and eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire in only a few short years. The 2 IN God’S Path Arabs are everywhere victorious; non-Arabs everywhere submit, convert, or are killed; and Islamic government is everywhere imposed—or at least this is the picture that ninth-century Muslim historians painted and it is one that has been widely accepted ever since. The problem with this narrative is not so much that it is wrong, but that, like all histories told from the standpoint of the victors, it is idealiz- ing and one-sided: the role of God and Islam is played up and the role of non-Muslims is mostly ignored. It is the aim of this book to try to give a more rounded account of this undeniably world-changing phenomenon. The main strategy for achieving this is a simple one: I will give precedence to seventh- and eighth-century texts and documents over later ones. Our earliest extant Muslim sources date from the ninth century, and even though their authors were using earlier materials, they inevitably shaped them in the light of their own world. This is of course always so, but the problem is magnified in this case because the political and religious landscape of the ninth-century Middle East was so dramatically different from that of the seventh century. It may seem very odd to an outsider to this field why this strategy of privileging earlier sources over later ones would not have been used before—is it not just stan- dard practice for modern historians? The problem is that the early sources are overwhelmingly of Christian provenance and in languages other than Arabic, and so they fall outside the usual purview of Islamic historians—and it is also assumed that they will be either prejudiced or ill-informed. Christian authors inevitably had their own preconceptions and biases, but the Arab conquests did affect them concretely and directly, and so there is very good reason to refer to their works to write about this subject. Moreover, those living in the decades shortly after the conquests still understood the late antique world in which these events had occurred and so can help us to understand what these events meant in their own time as opposed to what they meant to the inhabitants of the ninth-century Islamic world. But I do not want simply to champion non-Muslim sources over Muslim sources; indeed, it is my argument that the division is a false one. Muslims and non-Muslims inhabited the same world, interacted with one another, and even read one another’s writings. In this book, the distinction I make is simply between earlier and later sources, Introduction 3 and I favor the former over the latter irrespective of the religious affiliation of their authors. This strategy allows me to put back a number of elements missing from the traditional narrative. The first is process. The word most associated with the Arab conquests by Western scholars is “speed.” “The speed of the Arab expansion is staggering,” says one; another speaks of its “near-miraculous speed,” like “a human tsunami speeding outwards.” This reflects the assump- tion that the Arab conquests were over and done with in a few short years.

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