Back to the Garden by James H. S. McGregor

Author:James H. S. McGregor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Islamic conquests in the seventh to ninth centuries stretched from Spain across North Africa to the Levant and beyond.

Victory in the east was followed by a western campaign against Egypt, which was the granary of the Byzantine Empire as it had once been of Rome. By 643, Byzantine Alexandria, well fortified, heavily garrisoned, and easily resupplied by sea though it was, fell to the attackers. The Muslim army moved farther west along the southern coast of the Mediterranean and took Tripoli the same year, but from then on, difficult terrain and long supply lines, combined with the determined resistance of tribes adept at desert fighting, slowed their advance. The conquest of North Africa was not complete until the eighth century. By then, Spain had been overrun. The drive to expand from Spain across the Pyrenees and into France met decisive resistance from the Frankish general Charles Martel.8

The conquest of so much territory in such a short span of time might logically have led to widespread conversions to the faith of the Muslim victors, but this was not the case. Although Islam bound the conquerors together, their goal was not the spread of their religion but its protection. Muslims considered infidels on their borders a threat to Islam. The religious community campaigned to eliminate this threat, not to capture territory or to win converts. The victors sought to pacify or neutralize captured territories and to gather revenue from them. Under the rule of Muslim conquerors, therefore, subject peoples retained their religions, their language, their forms of agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing, and their customary laws. Islam and the Arab way of life remained the exclusive property of the victors. Being Muslim and being Arab were privileges that the first generations of Muslim conquerors saw no reason to share with the diverse peoples suddenly under their control. The model of the Arab conquerors appears to have been the Constitution of Medina, which created a confederation of believers and nonbelievers in which Muslims held a privileged and protected place in a pacified community and everyone shared responsibility for the general welfare and defense.

In keeping with the policy of religious exclusivity, early Muslim leaders made strenuous efforts to segregate Arab occupiers from civilian populations. In the military enclaves established in conquered lands Arab troops were garrisoned well out of reach of local populations. Before the invaders became soldiers, most of them had been Bedouin shepherds. Their traditional occupation and their ingrained sense of the appropriate use of land had favored pasture over cultivation. The ruling authorities of the first waves of Muslim advance, the successors of Muhammad called caliphs, along with the Arab elites of Medina and Mecca who were their closest advisors, insisted that captured lands under cultivation be preserved in their old forms and not transformed into pasture for horses, sheep, and camels. They also insisted that these lands become common property, not the spoils of war for individual bands of successful raiders. Top administrators in each new area were Arabs, but the functional administration of each conquered land remained in the hands of local powers.

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