The Arab Conquests by Justin Marozzi

Author:Justin Marozzi [Marozzi, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838933418
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Sistan, the largely desert region that encompasses eastern Iran and southern Afghanistan. The conquests in these remote lands, which began in the 650s and took almost a century to consolidate, were among the toughest ever fought by the Arabs.

Alexandre Rotenberg / Alamy Stock Photo.

This favourable Christian view of the new Muslim ruler points to an absolutely fundamental aspect of the conquests. They were by no means the purely military, destructive affair that Christian apocalypses portrayed with such anguish. There were powerful elements of live-and-let-live tolerance, cultural elision and assimilation. Alongside the inducements to surrender in the form of promises to respect life, property and freedom of worship, there were also tax exemptions to those living in remote terrain. If the new jizya tax introduced by the Arab warriors was unwelcome, it was probably no more so than the taxes already exacted by Constantinople.

Equally important to remember is that, however foreign and bolt-from-the-blue different Islam might sound to a non-Muslim reader today, for a Middle Eastern and North African population in the seventh and eighth centuries the Islam of these horse-mounted warriors was in fact reassuringly familiar. To begin with there was the one omnipotent God of an Abrahamic faith, together with his coterie of revered prophets, then there were the prayers, scripture, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage to holy sites, holy days and community buildings in which to pray. ‘It was different enough from Christianity and Judaism to make it distinctive, but similar enough to make it palatable.’57 Some contemporaries, such as St John of Damascus, went even further. For John, and many of his coreligionists, Islam was less a new faith than a Christian ‘heresy’. John’s work, The Fount of Knowledge, one of the first Orthodox Christian refutations of Islam, written at the request of the Bishop of Maiuma in Palestine, dismissed Mohammed as a ‘false prophet’, the Quran as a collection of ‘ridiculous compositions’ and Islam as ‘a forerunner of the Antichrist’.58 A clearer sign of Umayyad tolerance would be difficult to imagine.

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With Muawiya’s death in 680, the Islamic Empire lost one of its most brilliant and controversial leaders. Politically astute and militarily precocious, he was admired for his skilful leadership and hilm, his forbearance and self-control, and his use of subtlety and cunning to achieve his objectives. He was also famed for his eloquence, elegance and finesse, virtues that were highly prized in the Arab world. The ninth-century Arab historian Yaqubi described Muawiya’s philosophy of power in a memorable passage:

‘I apply not my lash where my tongue suffices, nor my sword where my whip is enough. And if there be one hair binding me to my fellow men I let it not break. If they pull I loosen, and if they loosen I pull.’59

After Muawiya had died, however, his immediate legacy began to unravel disastrously. His son and heir Yazid I was a louche, unpopular man with a love of hard-drinking, music, dancing girls and, most abominable for conservative Muslims, a pet monkey. When he became caliph, neither lashes nor swords would be able to maintain the bonds between fellow Muslims.

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