First Muslim Cities of Egypt

Posted on May 8, 2021 by Ruth

The two great modern cities of Egypt are the same ones that became great under Muslim rule. Ancient Egypt had had Thebes, which never got its primary status back, and other cities had come and gone. Alexandria is still great, and the early conquest period saw the establishment of what grew to be Cairo.

The name “Alexandria” was quickly shifted into Arabic as al-Iskandria. Alexandria was smaller by the time Amr rode into the city in triumph, a year after its surrender. Some of Old Alexandria, the city of Alexander the Great, had already been destroyed by an earthquake-driven tsunami in 365 that sent much of the Royal Quarter under water. Egypt will be building an underwater museum to show off some of these wonders.

But Alexandria still had the Pharos Lighthouse, a wonder of the ancient world, and the official Tomb of Alexander, when Amr entered it officially a year after the Patriarch negotiated its surrender. Pharos was an octagonal tower on an island, with a round cap. It had a huge lantern to warn ships away from the island’s environs. The lantern failed in 700, and although they tried to repair the lighthouse, finally two earthquakes in the 12th and 14th centuries finished it off. During the early conquest period, though, the lighthouse was in full splendor and its symbolism, lifting light to the sky, was beloved of Arabic poets.

You may be wondering about the great Library of Alexandria. This institution had the largest collection of books in the ancient world; it probably had a full set of all of the Greek plays and philosophical treatises, as well as many works of mathematics and science. Today we make do with a fraction of the old works, often only surviving in Arabic form translated back into Greek. It’s often said that Amr’s men burned the library, but most scholars believe that it was already gone when the Muslims got there. Barnaby Rogerson, in The Heirs of Muhammad, links the fire to the death of Hypatia around 415.

During the time of the last pagan Roman emperors, Egyptian Christians had been severely persecuted. Now that the Christian religion was official, tables had turned on the pagans. Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, a famous mathematician, and was a leading scholar of pretty much everything. She did not convert to Christianity, but during most of her life, the Patriarch of Alexandria was on friendly terms with her. Then the mood turned dark. A new Patriarch in 412 led the city into urban civil war, Christian factions and Jews battling in the streets, and one outcome was that Hypatia was killed. Did they also burn down the library, or at least remove many pagan books and burn them? It’s certainly as likely as any hypothesis; the civil unrest of 412-6 was brutal.

Would Amr have burned the library? It doesn’t seem likely. The Muslims had a general rule to leave any city undisturbed that surrendered peacefully—and did not rebel. Cities that were destroyed always had some kind of rebellion, treason, or at least breaking of a promise. And although the Arabs were newly literate—Amr might not have been able to read—the fact that the Quran was being written down made them generally respectful of books. As we’ll see, one of Islam’s great contributions to the world was to spend millions of dirhams and dinars on efforts to collect and translate all the books in the world.

But Alexandria was a terrible place for camels. Umar’s ruling had been that Arabs could only put down permanent roots in places that had a good environment for camels. Alexandria—and the whole Delta—was humid and green, with lush grass that was really too rich for camels. Camels and the Arabs’ horses got fungal foot infections in wet climates. So while the Muslims could be proud of the city now in their orbit, they couldn’t live there.

Amr established the permanent Muslim base at Fort Babylon, near ancient Heliopolis, at the base of the Delta rivers branching off. It was a perfect place because it never ran out of water, but it was on the edge of desert. He called it Misr al-Fustat, the City of Tents. “Misr” means both “Egypt” and “city,” so it could also mean the Tent of Egypt. The garrison cities built by the Arabs were generally called “amsar,” that is the plural of “misr.” Kufa and Basra were amsar; so were Damascus, Emesa/Homs, Tiberias, and Ramla.

A misr city had a permanent Muslim Arab population organized around the government palace, a mosque, and a market, exactly like Basra and Kufa. It served as a main army base and tax collecting station. Settlers from around Arabia, many from Yemen, moved to Fustat. Fustat was one of the places where the old Egyptian language, Coptic, died out first. It was truly an Arab city. It also had a large population of Jews, perhaps ones who moved from Arabia. The more it became an ethnic melting pot, the more prominent Arabic became as the common tongue. When the Fatimid dynasty later established Cairo, Fustat was left behind as the old city and became a Jewish stronghold. It was in Fustat that scholars in the 19th century discovered centuries’ worth of letters and wills, including some signed by Maimonides himself.

Amr lived in his new Fustat, sending out deputies to explore and conquer parts of the Sahara. In 644, he preached a celebratory sermon that called Egypt “a white pearl, then golden amber, then a green emerald, then an embroidery of colors.” (Rogerson, 219) But in 645, Caliph Umar called him back to Medina and relieved him of command. Umar just didn’t trust his successful generals who became governors. He was sure they were setting up as aristocrats, and that was one thing he was not going to have.

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Conquest of Egypt, 636-42

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Ruth

We need a wide range of dates to cover the conquest of Egypt because histories conflict so much as to when things happened and in what order.

General Amr ibn al-As, who had led his army to Gaza in the first wave of invasion, survived both the Battle of Yarmouk and the plague. As the others moved into the north, conquering Syria and Lebanon, he moved south to Gaza again, securing it. He really wanted to head south, as his friends were heading north. He moved down the Mediterranean coast to Arish, on the Egyptian border. There he sent word to Umar, asking permission to move on. Umar was understandably concerned that the Muslims were spread too thin. Amr would have no more than 4000 men to invade a place with serious forts and entirely unfamiliar geography.

But Amr gradually moved past Arish, and when Umar’s letter arrived, he found that it said “Don’t go into Egypt. But if you already did, don’t retreat, go forward.” Funny how that works, when you keep creeping forward while waiting for permission.

Egypt, a Roman stronghold since Caesar Augustus conquered the last Greek Pharaoh, Cleopatra, was the richest Roman province outside of Italy. It had been an early adopter of Christianity, and by now it was thickly dotted with churches and monasteries. Due to irrigation around Lake Fayoum, in addition to the regular Nile inundations, Egypt was able to grow enough wheat to essentially feed the Roman army. That’s why Heraclius had reacted so strongly to Persia’s seizure of Egypt, in the closing years of the 6th century. Without Egypt, he really could not feed his army.

But Rome’s defeat in Syria had been profound enough that even a threat to Egypt now could not move them. There were garrisons and officers in Egypt, and one of the best forts of the ancient world was near modern Cairo. But they didn’t have very many men in these garrisons. Egypt itself was underpopulated at this time, because of the multiple visitations of the bubonic plague, starting in 541. Additionally, some city walls and buildings had been ruined during the war between Persia and Rome, and they had not been rebuilt. Roman Egypt was caught up mainly in a sectarian struggle, as Constantinople tried to impose its control on the Egyptian church. They were not at all prepared for a new invasion.

There were some battles for the cities of the Delta. Amr was able to sweep out a few strongholds, but when he faced a difficult, potentially losing, situation at Heliopolis, Umar was able to send reinforcements to meet him. The first serious challenge was the siege of a very well-built fort, Fort Babylon. The name is confusing because the Babylon mentioned in the Bible was in Iraq, but this Babylon was built by Alexander the Great, much more recently. This Babylon was near modern Cairo, at the point where the Nile branches into the smaller rivers of the Delta.

Babylon’s defense was assisted by the annual Nile flooding, which kept the Muslims from coming close. During the waiting period, the Coptic Patriarch Cyrus sent to ask Emperor Heraclius if he could surrender, since no help was on the way. Heraclius demanded that he come in person, and there Cyrus found himself mocked and exiled. But back at Fort Babylon, the water began to recede, while the Romans tried to hold out. The Muslims were able to move a very small force onto a wall, where their archers kept the Romans away. It was only a matter of time until this small force got a gate unlocked. And with that, Fort Babylon surrendered.

The Roman general retreated. When Amr approached another city in the Delta, he retreated again, and then again. After a week of battles around a fort near Alexandria, the Romans retreated again. Morale was very low, since they knew no outside help was coming. The men in Alexandria were not willing to meet the Muslims in the field. They could not sustain serious loss of life, they could only hang on and see if conditions improved their lot.

But during this time, Heraclius died. Constantinople again lived through a rapid turnover of leadership, with competing sons and military coups. They wanted to send an army, but they weren’t able. Patriarch Cyrus was returned to Alexandria to calm the turmoil, but by then the turmoil inside the city amounted to a small civil war. Under such conditions, no city can defend itself well. And yet Alexandria was a city nearly impossible to besiege, since it sat so much on the water and was of vast size, impossible to circle. The Muslims were not able to get any grip on how to assault it.

Amr left a token force at Alexandria and went on to establish control over the other parts of Egypt, including the key regions of Lake Fayoum and the ancient capital of Thebes. There were small battles, but nothing serious like Yarmouk or Qadisiyah. In the stronghold of Babylon, Amr began setting up Egypt’s administrative offices to collect taxes.

The Patriarch Cyrus, exiled by Heraclius then returned by his son, now caught in a civil war in the city, traveled secretly to meet Amr. He offered peace terms that were beyond Amr’s imagining. Egypt would pay a poll tax of two dinars per person and the Roman forces in Egypt would leave unilaterally. And that was that, Alexandria came under Muslim rule without fighting—and without burning its library. Later Roman emperors sent ships to try to retake Alexandria, but the efforts did not succeed. Egypt was lost to Rome forever.

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The New Cities in Iraq: Kufa, Basra and Mosul, 636-40

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Ruth

The Muslim forces were a small population of conquerors in a very large settled agricultural society. Now that they controlled it, they were free to settle or build in it. They could have begun a massive migration from dry Arabia to the Fertile Crescent. If they had blended into the Iraqi population, they would have learned Aramaic and farming, and they might have vanished into the existing demographics as thoroughly as the Goths vanished into Italy. But partly due to concerns about the new climate’s humidity, Caliph Umar ordered the men who stayed in Iraq to do something quite different.

Umar said that they could only settle in a place where camels could thrive, so the humidity of the central Jezirah (“island”) was ruled out. Scouts rode out to find a good place, and the first location they selected was a site on the southern bank of the Euphrates River, where the ground was firm and stony. It was between Ctesiphon and the road to Medina, but it was also centrally situated along the river, so it could easily access other parts of Iraq. Sa’d moved most of his men away from Ctesiphon, where they had camped while tracking down runaway enemies, to the new site that they named Kufa.

Kufa was the first planned Muslim city. They built first a mosque, which was not so much defined by a building, as by an open area. An archer measured out the masjid, the open gathering space, by shooting arrows in all directions. Sa’d laid out the dimensions for a palace, which would chiefly be the government offices, not a lavish house. The treasury had to be in the palace, so they planned the back of this building to face the mosque, where people came at all hours, to make bank robbery less appealing. Around these two central institutions, they laid out markets.

The roads were carefully planned. They radiated out from the city center, and main streets had to be 20 meters wide, while no alley could be narrow than 3 meters. Houses were permitted to be built only outside the bounds of the mosque and market. At first, they built using river reeds, but as the city grew, Umar granted them permission to use clay and stone. The Caliph’s chief concern for this new city was that it should be an ideal Muslim town, not an imitation of Ctesiphon or Damascus. Houses were to be small and egalitarian. Markets were to sell necessities. All gathered in the mosque for prayers on an equal plane, equally bowed before Allah.

To the south near the Persian Gulf, near newly-Muslim Khuzestan, they built a second new town called Basra. The modern city of Basra has moved a bit, just as the modern town of Kufa has merged with nearby Najaf. Basra was created on the same plan as Kufa, and so were other new cities built by the Muslim conquerors. To the north, they also began laying out Mosul, a larger settlement where a small village had been.

Because the Muslim Arabs stayed in these new cities, instead of blending into the existing towns, they maintained their language and culture. There was little resistance to them in the countryside, where the farmers just wanted to live quietly and pay their taxes. Just having these garrison towns full of 20,000 armed Arabs was enough to keep rebellions from starting. Even if some of them married local women, their home language of Arabic was necessary for the market, mosque and government, so the wives had to learn Arabic, and Aramaic didn’t get established in Kufa or Basra.

Just as the fighting units had been raised from clans and tribes, the men who settled in Kufa and Basra built neighborhoods according to their old clans and tribes. It’s who they knew well. This, too, kept the culture preserved. They were forbidden to move into the countryside or take up life as nomads again. The Caliph wanted them to be city-dwellers, no matter what they had been in the old country.

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Caliph Umar’s Administrative Headaches

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Ruth

The Islamic State of Medina had been a relatively simple organization. Tribute came in, it was collected near the mosque, and it was immediately spent on alms or provisions for an expedition. Caliph Abu Bakr kept things simple too, continuing to distribute treasure as soon as it arrived. But as the state grew to be a wide empire that included both Syria and Iraq, things had to change. Under Caliph Umar, the foundation of an administrative state was set up. It is remembered as the Forty-One Laws of Umar, but we’ll look at only some of them.

One simple problem was just where to store all of the stuff that the army was sending home. Even if it were sold (one can imagine how the markets of Arabia boomed with international buyers) and turned into Persian and Roman coins, these still needed a treasury building. They were looking at millions and millions of dirhams (the Persian coin). So the Bayt al-Mal, the House of the Treasury, was set up. The taxes and tribute even just from within Arabia, which now united Bahrain, Yemen, the Red Sea and the interior, was more than any one man could handle. Official treasurers and accountants were appointed, with great emphasis on keeping accurate records so that Islam could remain scrupulously fair and charitable to the poor. Syria and Iraq also needed regional treasuries with record-keepers, so that they could pay locally and remit taxes to Medina in an orderly way. All of these treasuries needed armed guards, too.

Fighters began to need salaries, and in Medina the Companions of Muhammad who were still there needed stipends so they could focus on teaching Islam to the many students who were sent from newly-converted cities. So a system was set up to maintain lists of who got stipends and salaries. These lists went on for a few generations, with greater income for the descendants of veterans of famous battles (like the really old ones, Badr and Uhud, or now like Yarmouk and Qadisiyah). Barnaby Rogerson (221) quotes some stipend amounts, in dirhams:

  • Battle of Badr: 5000
  • Oath of the Tree at Hudaybiya: 4000
  • Ridda Apostasy Wars: 3000
  • Yarmouk or Qadisiyah: 2000
  • ordinary soldiers: range of 200-500

There were many others who received stipends (Rogerson, 222). Cousins and widows of the Prophet had stipends; the widows got 10,000 dirhams a year, but A’isha got 12,000. Umar wanted to support the injured and sick, who were disabled from working, as well as the elderly and orphaned children. With so many military campaigns, there were plenty of injured men and orphans. Umar created the first alms-giving Trust, or Waqf. He bought property for the Waqf to own and manage so that they could pay stipends out of its ongoing income. The Waqf also had a treasury with regular generous payments from the conquest income.

They now needed a vast bureaucracy of governors, tax collectors, and accountants for every treasury and trust. Now Caliph Umar had a dilemma. He was himself a very austere man who wore patched robes, slept on the floor, and lived in the same simple house as before. He was a violent and harsh man, but he was also very disciplined toward himself and his family. When one of his sons misbehaved publicly while drunk, Umar ordered him to be flogged according to the law, even though the flogging led to his son’s death. He did not allow anyone to wear fine robes or live in luxury around him. He was a fanatic about equality and free access of the common man to a leader.

Umar wanted to promote other early converts who had simple lifestyles, who had really internalized the Prophet’s values. But as many of these men as there were, he ran short because he was also sending them to lead armies to east and west. Also, they needed literate men, and literacy among the Arabs was still uncommon. The best source of literate, capable governors and accountants was the old Meccan aristocracy of the Quraysh.

How ironic, with the Qurayshi love of luxury and power enshrined in the Quran as a wicked thing, to need to promote Quraysh members who had resisted Islam to the end. But so it was. And foremost among the Quraysh were the Umayyad clan. Uthman, an early convert and close friend (and son-in-law) of Muhammad, was of the Umayyad clan, and he was already one of Umar’s closest advisers and friends. But there were many more Umayyads: Abu Sufyan’s and Hind’s sons, Yazid and Mu’awiyah, and many cousins and nephews in that branch. They began to climb the ladder of power. Yazid and Mu’awiya went out with the army to Syria, where Mu’awiya became the governor in Damascus. He needed lieutenants he could trust, so of course he promoted his Umayyad cousins.

Umar hated the idea of a ladder of power. He set limits on the wealth his officials were allowed to accrue. He threatened them with dismissal if they started to look like a higher social class from the average man on the street. He stressed that the treasury money was for the public good, for people, not for fancy buildings. Umar’s strict idealism about not showing wealth finally ended the career of Khalid, his most successful general. Khalid paid a poet who had declaimed a poem in celebration of one of his northern Syrian victories. When Umar heard of it, he fired Khalid. To Umar, it sounded like Khalid was doing what a king would do: being the patron to a poet. Khalid could easily become a rebel king in northern Syria, with his family now resettled at their new home. Khalid accepted his firing quietly and went into retirement in Emessa/Homs. He died a few years later.

Umar had a major administrative difference from Muhammad’s original ways. He mistrusted wealth, but he also mistrusted women. Remember his lack of sympathy for his daughter Hafsah when her complaints to Muhammad had contributed to his withdrawal from his wives’ company. As Caliph, he believed women should be kept apart. Muhammad had encouraged women to speak up, come to the mosque, and travel, including on the Hajj. But Umar told women to stay home.

One last Umar note: it was Umar who decided that his government would count time with the move to Medina as Year One. The Latin year 622, then, was AH 1. It might make purer sense to have chosen the year of Muhammad’s first revelations as Year One, but apparently even then there could be arguments about how many years ago that was. After moving to Medina, they had lived with careful record-keeping. They used the pre-Islamic Arabic lunar calendar.

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The Amazing Wealth of Persia, 638-40

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Ruth

Persian luxury was famous; even then, they put carpets on the ground that others would have prized as blankets or wall coverings. In the negotiations before the Battle of Qadisiyah, Arabs had taken pains to ruin any carpets they were invited to stand on as emissaries. They cut holes and slashed them, just to show their disregard for whatever the Persians considered valuable. But when the cities and country manors were thrown open for looting, the valuable things looked different.

Sa’d’s men chased the retreating Persians and sometimes recovered more treasures, including the royal armor and robes. Gems encrusted anything valuable, gems that the Arabs had never seen. They scooped up a lot of armor, not just the royal set, and many weapons. In the tents, there were rich pillows and blankets and clothes made of silk and spun gold. In houses, they found ceramics from China, and camphor, the precious scent of the Persian court. They found furniture that they didn’t know what to do with, like beds and sofas and chairs. Of course, they also found wine and rich food. Some mistakenly cooked the camphor.

There was a massive carpet in the palace, reportedly 30 meters square. The Arabs somehow transported it to Medina on camels, where it was handed to Umar. He ordered it cut into pieces and shared out with the other Muslim leaders, who mostly sold their pieces. There were countless treasures like this, none of which were prized as they would be now. Nobody had a sense of history, nor even of preserving something as massive as a carpet that required a special one-use loom and hundreds of craftsmen.

The people who were left behind from the Emperor’s retreat were rounded up as booty, too. The Muslims had a firm rule about all booty being shared out by a central arbiter, rather than grabbing whatever any man could take, but women were easily handed out as shares. The first Arab-Persian infants were born soon after, founding a generation that would become extremely important in the development of Arab sciences.

The land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers was called in Arabic “the Island,” or the Jezirah. This land was richer than anything the Arabs had ever seen, since it was built of alluvial deposits for thousands of years. It was filled with farms, towns, churches and monasteries, most of which were left alone on the condition that they pay tribute.

A second military wave moved through the southern river region and into the land beyond. Caliph Umar’s concern was that Arab tribesmen were quite capable of raiding and seizing on their own, and he wanted conquests to be in Medina’s name and under central control. There was a growing problem of having way too much booty to keep track of. It was just so much stuff, now liberated from its former buildings. The Arabs scrambled to find literate men who could keep accounting records of all the treasure and coin flowing south.

On the other side of the Tigris River was an Iranian province called Khuzestan. Now Arabs led by a veteran of Qadisiyah moved into this territory. It was the former land of the Elamites, mentioned in the Bible. One vast ziggurat still stood from the Bronze Age. Khuzestan was a rich farming country of hills and valleys, very green with many streams. It was beyond imagining to desert-born eyes. They grew rice and sugar, cotton and linen. There were a number of cities, mostly Christian as in Mesopotamia.

Without imperial military backing, the region had little defense against the new onslaught. There’s a Muslim anecdote about the capitulation of the city of Jundishapur, home of Persia’s greatest doctors. The city was keeping up its defense in a siege as best it could, but then one day the city fathers opened the gates and came out to surrender. It transpired that they thought the Muslims had shot an arrow in with a message, promising mercy if they surrendered. The Muslim commanders knew nothing about it, but they found that an enslaved Persian had sent the message. Perplexed, they sent a rider to ask Caliph Umar what to do. Umar told them to uphold the apparent promise and accept tribute. Again, there was much tribute, much wealth to distribute.

The city of Susa was the ancient Persian capital containing the Tomb of Daniel. It had been sacked and plundered by Alexander the Great, and again by the current Persian dynasty in the 4th century, but its wealth was again great. It resisted for a few days, but the Muslims forced the gates and killed all the Persian nobles.

The Tomb of Daniel was a problem. Daniel had been a prophet, but the Quran did not mention him, so the Muslims at first did not recognize him as anything special. The tomb was broken open; there had been silver and gold stored there since Darius and Cyrus. They found a silver coffin with a mummy, perhaps Daniel’s. Since they did not recognize Daniel as a prophet, they buried the body in the river bed and looted the treasures. Over time, though, the Tomb persisted as an institution, and eventually it was revered by Muslims, too.

The last city of Khuzestan was Tustar (or Shushtar), guarded by a castle and a massive dam built in 260 by Roman prisoners of war (during one of the early Roman vs. Persian wars). The Roman engineers had cut tunnels into the rock, too, for irrigation. The whole installation was one of the engineering wonders of the world, at the time. It was greater than the Marib Dam, the largest previously known to the Arabs. The moats, dams and natural rivers guarded the city of Tustar so that the Persian commander was able to hold the city against the Arabs for two years. Finally, treachery allowed the Arabs to tunnel under the walls; sieges were usually ended by treachery, more often than by brute force.

During this relatively long period when a Muslim army was invested in the siege of Tustar, Persian soldiers defected to the Muslim side. It was very clear that momentum was on the Muslims’ side of the long, wide war, and soon holdouts would be isolated so that even if they won, they could not continue to live independently. Some of the Persian units that defected were elite, well-trained, well-armed cavalry or other special forces. Emperor Yazdgerd still had eastern lands to live in, and cities still under his rule, but nobody could see a real comeback any time soon.

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Conquering the Tigris, 636-7

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Ruth

The Arab general Khalid had moved quickly up the Euphrates River in 634, but he left his gains there and went to Syria. Now, with Damascus and Jerusalem securely held by Muslims and the remaining armies tackling the tougher port cities, Khalid was free to go back. What had been happening while he was gone?

While Khalid was gone, the tribal chief Muthanna ibn Haritha was left in charge of collecting the promised tribute. But over the course of a year, the newest Emperor in Ctesiphon was able to recruit and train a new army to face the new threat in the south. Ctesiphon was the Persian capital in the west, not their home base, but the city from which they governed Iraq.

Muslim authority in southern Iraq grew weaker with Khalid gone, and Muthanna asked the Caliph to send another army. Caliph Umar, newly in power, did not find it easy to round up more volunteers. With armies in Syria, they were stretched. But Umar dipped into a reserve that Caliph Abu Bakr had refused to tap: apostates who had rebelled after the Prophet’s death. So they weren’t the best Muslims, so they might be faking faith just to fit in, they can still help fight, right? Eventually, a new Arab army set out for Hirah. This was the former Lakhmid capital that the Muthanna’s men had been occupying.

The attacking and defending armies met across the Euphrates River, with one bridge between them, so it was called “The Battle of the Bridge.” Muthanna pushed his men to be the ones to cross over, forgetting that bridges act as funnels. The army crossing over comes dribbling out, while the army already on that bank can take them out one by one. Pro tip: if you can, always make the other side cross the bridge.

Moreover, on the other side they (the half that had completed the crossing) found that Bahman, the Persian general, had a unit of Indian elephants in his forces. The Arab horses had never seen elephants. The smell and sound of them terrified the horses so that their cavalry was ineffective. In the melée, their commander was trampled. The Muslim fighters were recently recruited, inexperienced, and lightly trained in this type of fighting. They turned to run, but those who had crossed over the bridge mostly ended up in the water, drowning. Crafty old Muthanna had stayed at the back, probably not yet over the bridge, so he lived to fight another day.

The old-model raiding Arabs would have had enough; they would have left off attacking Persia for at least a decade. The Persians were surprised to see that as Muslims, the Arabs had a stronger sense of mission. They were more willing to take losses and try again.

By autumn of 636, two even larger armies faced each other again about 30 miles east of Hirah, on the plain of Qadisiyyah. The top Persian general, a prince named Rustam, was in charge this time. Hugh Kennedy says that he brought along the Persian royal flag, which was 40 meters long and either was made of or looked like tiger skin. A low estimate of Rustam’s force would be 30,000 men, with some estimates ranging to 80,000. They were heavily armed, with even horses wearing chain mail.

The Arab general, Sa’d, probably had no more than 12,000 men (Crawford estimates between 6000 and 12,000). Some forces were called back to Iraq from Syria, and more Arabian tribes were asked to send recruits.

The Battle of Qadisiyah proved to be as decisive against the Persians as the Battle of Yarmouk had been against the Romans. There were many similarities. Both empires were fielding the best army they could, out of an exhausted treasury and new recruits. In both battles, the sides fought conventionally with infantry assaults and cavalry charges, and they were fairly well matched. Both battles lasted for several days. At the Battle of Qadisiyah, the decisive action was Sa’d’s when he chose to push his men to attack yet again when they had been fighting literally all night. Rustam assumed that with a battle ending at daybreak, nobody would be fighting for half a day. The Muslims pushed ahead and attacked unprepared, resting Persians, and one unit ran straight into the center and killed Rustam himself. Then the cavalry pursued fleeing Persian soldiers and cut them down. “Much like Vahan’s army, the force that Rustam led out from Ctesiphon ceased to exist.” (Crawford, 144)

Rustam’s death and defeat left the Persian heartland wide open. There might be smaller army units here and there, but the crushing imperial mega-army was gone. Within a month, the Muslims were advancing on the capital, Ctesiphon, which was on the Tigris River a bit north of where Baghdad is now. An advance force swept most resistance out of the way, until 10 miles from Ctesiphon, a pre-battle set of single combat duels killed the Persian general.

Ctesiphon was a cluster of cities around the Tigris River, so it could not be fully surrounded, the way Damascus had been. It was heavily defended from attacks from the north, but the south had always been guarded by the rivers. There was no bridge, and all ferry boats could be collected on the far side. The Muslims were stopped for the moment by the Tigris River, and there was a stand-off. The Persians had dug ditches around the city they were defending, and they had catapults. But some of the Arabs had used siege engines at Khaybar, and now they got Persians to make a set for them, too. The Persians fell back to Ctesiphon itself, but the Muslims found a point where the Tigris could be forded. They began landing men on the north-east side.

Ctesiphon was not defensible from the south. Emperor Yazdgerd and his army chose to take the bulk of the money in the treasury and flee into the Iranian interior. Sa’d occupied the palace and set up a mosque under the great royal arch. Fleeing Persians had left behind houses, flocks, businesses and treasures.

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Fall of Jerusalem, 637

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Ruth

The Muslim armies captured remaining towns in Syria in the months following the Battle of Yarmouk. They re-occupied Damascus, temporarily abandoned so as to have maximum forces at Yarmouk. The siege of Emessa/Homs took place in the winter, when the people in the town hoped that snow would force the barefoot Arabs to withdraw. They didn’t, so when spring came, the city negotiated its surrender.

Hugh Kennedy provides details of the surrender provisions, interesting in that they tell us what was considered normal at the time. The city’s residents paid tribute, but not all the same rates, so that would have been negotiated. It was personal, rather than a lump sum, as I would have assumed. This may have been part of why conversion to Islam was individually appealing, since tribute as a whole could be paid, while one man’s contribution was suspended. The city walls, churches, and mills were given special attention in the negotiation, so that none were to be torn down. A portion of one church would become a mosque; the same thing happened in Damascus. During the early years of conquest, archeological records show us various churches that shared space with Muslims, as identified by the qibla, the direction pointer toward Mecca.

Abandoned houses and land in Emesa/Homs would go to Muslim settlers, and up to half of the occupied houses were told to support Muslim guest residents. This was a way of paying Arab commanders with landed property; they sent for their families and flocks, and Syria began to be more heavily Arab from this time. Khalid decided to settle his family in one of the defeated towns that stood in a wide, green, agricultural plain. Although he continued to campaign, this became his home base. Other officers did the same, creating the foundation of the eventual Arab Muslim aristocracy of Syria.

Antioch didn’t attempt to put up a long siege resistance, although as Crusaders were later to learn, it was a city designed to be impregnable. Other towns sometimes welcomed the Muslim army as guests, with drums and cymbals. Gaza and Caesarea on the coast were among the last cities to fall. Amr, who had first approached Gaza before Yarmouk, now came back and conquered it, which positioned him to move into Egypt. Caesarea, another extremely strong port city, was hard to conquer. It may not have fallen to Arab control until 641. Tripoli, too, held out for a long time. These cities would all become major contests when the Christians tried to take them back, nearly 500 years later.

The port of Latakia is said to have been conquered with a ruse; fighting men hid in ditches, out of sight, while the main force appeared to retreat. When the townsmen brought their cattle out to pasture in the morning, the hidden men seized the gate. Hugh Kennedy says that in Latakia, the Muslims chose to build a new mosque, whereas in most of these towns, the existing church was divided. But the northern ports of Tyre, Sidon and Beirut surrendered. When Tripoli finally did fall, it was essentially also a surrender: the men were evacuated by sea, since the city was isolated by then.

The city of Jerusalem was ruled by its Patriarch, Sophronius. The army of Abu Ubaydah set up a siege in the fall of 636, and the city held out for four months. But it was clear that no imperial help was coming, and Sophronius himself had already sent the most important relics away in preparation for defeat. He asked for an unusual condition, though. He would only surrender to the Caliph himself. The Muslims may have tried to pass off someone else as Umar at first, but it became clear that only the real thing would do. So everyone sat by some of the Muslim generals made the journey to where Umar was. Umar may not have been in Medina; he may have been touring Syria’s conquered towns, setting up administrative details. Perhaps that’s why the Patriarch thought to ask for his personal involvement.

Their agreement, later called the Covenant of Umar, recognized Christians as a protected class as long as they paid their tribute/taxes. Jerusalem received special considerations, compared to Emessa/Homs. No churches in Jerusalem were to be divided, and all church property and rites were guaranteed complete safety. They were not to be forcibly converted, and neither were Jews to be placed in their city. Anyone who wished to withdraw and go to live in Byzantine territory was given safe passage. In fact, the terms encouraged them to leave, abandoning city houses and farm estates for Arabs to take over.

The point about Jews is odd, since Jerusalem was the city of the Jews. But when the Romans destroyed it in 70 AD, Jews were expelled, and apparently Roman law had formally never changed. Jews had continued to live in smaller towns and on the outskirts of Jerusalem. I can’t believe that Jerusalem was really “Judenrein,” and by the Crusades’ period, there were certainly Jewish neighborhoods. But apparently it was important to the Patriarch to get this old Roman law upheld. Perhaps Arabia’s reputation as a refuge for Jews made it seem very likely that the Muslims would bring in Jews, just as they were placing Bedouins in other cities. Indeed, later the Muslim governor imported Arabian Jews to populate coastal cities that had been largely abandoned.

Patriarch Sophronius and Caliph Umar toured the city, with the Patriarch making sure all of the necessary renovations were pointed out. Invited to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Umar refused lest the Muslims interpret this as taking it for a mosque. There was apparently nothing built on the Temple Mount; the famous Muslim Dome was not built until sixty years later. One of his top advisers was a converted Arabian Jew, K’ab ibn Adhar. K’ab suggested that the ruins of the Temple be used as the prayer qiblah that day, but Umar said no, they would turn toward Mecca, the only holy site for Muslims. However, apparently they did clear away rubbish that the Romans had been dumping on the site, and they prayed there.

During the ensuing year, as the rest of Palestine and Syria were conquered, the plague infection had its own campaign. Bubonic plague returned as “The Plague of Emmaus/Amwas” in 638. We don’t know how many of the Muslims died, but we know that Yazid and Abu Ubaydah died of plague. Yazid had been made the administrator of Syria, seated in Damascus. After his death, his younger brother Mu’awiyah became governor of Damascus. Yazid and Mu’awiya were both sons of Hind “the liver-eater” and Abu Sufyan, of the most powerful family in Mecca. As we’ll see, Mu’awiya took to power readily and resisted relinquishing any of it.

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Syria: Damascus, 635 and Yarmouk, 636

Posted on April 27, 2021 by Ruth

Caliph Umar confirmed the previous appointments of commanders and pushed for more action. He intended to lead fighters in the field, and probably did sometimes, but I didn’t see much detail about that. The main campaigns during his Caliphate were led by Khalid or Amr; this was so, despite a personal dislike and mistrust he had of these recent converts. He removed Khalid from supreme command, and ordered him back to Medina. There, Khalid was forced to give up all of the wealth he had obtained as booty from his campaigns. But he returned to the field and regained his status through the brilliance of his strategic planning.

We have only a few clear details about the fall of Damascus. The four Muslim armies camped outside its four gates, imposing a siege that lasted until September 635. There’s also record of a major battle, but the timing is unclear. A Roman army sent to relieve the siege was defeated north of the city, and so eventually Damascus’ city leaders decided to open the western gate to Abu Ubaydah, who was nominally the supreme general. Hugh Kennedy notes that the city’s ruling and military elites were Armenian and Roman/Greek, while the populace were Aramaic-speaking Christian Arabs, some with kin in the Muslim army. They must have opposed making the city an example of resistance to the end, just to see themselves ruined, when they weren’t sure they didn’t prefer to be ruled by Arab monotheists.

But during the same few hours, Khalid’s men heard that on the east side, the Roman commander was feasting his men to celebrate his son’s birth. They figured the guard would be weaker, so they mounted an attack. Damascus had a significant moat in this place, and they inflated goat skins as floats to cross. With camel-hair ropes and simple ladders, they quietly got as many men to the top of the wall as they could, then suddenly rushed the few gatekeeping guards and broke in.

Damascus was in Muslim hands, but how should the loot be settled? Khalid’s men believed they had broken in and seized the city, so they should be receiving serious loot. But because the city also opened a gate to Abu Ubaydah, there was room for negotiation.

Damascus was treated as if it had surrendered, which meant much more generous provisions for its citizens, property, and leaders. The city would send tribute—a punitively high tax rate—but not a sum to crush their economy. Roman treasury gold was seized for the Muslim treasury, and some amount of property was shared out for the fighters, since it was their only pay.

Muslim armies then fanned out north of Damascus and took the cities of Emessa (now Homs) and Baalbek. Presumably these provided a bit more income, but surrendering cities were creating a payroll problem that would have to be solved.

In the summer of 636, Emperor Heraclius, commanding from the relative safety of Antioch, summoned the largest army he could put together at that point, made up of Greeks, Armenians, and Ghassanid Arabs. Estimates vary between 20,000 and 100,000; Arab records tend to give their enemies higher numbers than historians think likely. The commander was an Armenian named Vahan. The new forces gathered in the Golan Heights at the Ghassanid summer pasture, al-Jabiya. It was greener than lower-altitude plains, but it was surrounded by rocky mountains and river gorges.

The Muslims came to meet them, camping a few miles away. The flat space where the fighting took place was at the headwaters of the Yarmouk River, so it is known as the Battle of Yarmouk. Peter Crawford notes that the Yarmouk River formed a last-defensive line for the Muslims, keeping their communications with Medina from being cut off. Khalid’s strategic genius chose a site that forced the Romans to fight with a river gorge that had only one bridge at their backs, making retreat unlikely. The Romans could have refused that place, staying at another until the Muslims came to them, but they were suffering internal divisions among their commanders, and they needed to get it over with. The two armies seem to have been well-matched, similar in composition and size, and now the Muslims had experience fighting Roman-style battles. The various wings and blocks were as far as a mile apart, so they probably could not see each other even at the front.

The Battle of Yarmouk was a series of daily battles, skirmishes, and strategic moves that lasted a week. On the first day, the Roman army did things the Arab way, with single combat challenges in the space between the armies. The Muslims won these, since it was for them a strength. The first big Roman infantry offensive was succeeding in pushing its Muslim opponents back toward their camp, until Khalid realized that there was an opportunity for a fast cavalry drive around behind the Romans, attacking the rear and cutting off their retreat. The Roman infantry was typically stronger, so that whenever Vahan was pressing this advantage on some portion of the Muslim army, it fell back. The Romans had shield-locking strategies to prevent the same happening to them. The Muslims had to commit reserve forces each time, just to prevent defeat. But Khalid probably showed more cleverness and fast thinking during these engagements, looking down and spotting opportunities, so the Romans often came out on the losing side at the end of each day.

On the fifth day of such fighting, the Romans asked for a truce. Khalid used this time to gather his remaining cavalry into one massive strike force, not neglecting to send a significant but smaller unit to capture the bridge that the Romans would need for retreat. On the sixth day, with the truce expired, Khalid’s infantry pushed forward as the Romans had done previously. His cavalry strike force swept the Roman cavalry back, leaving the infantry to fight without cover. It was a massive and final defeat for the Romans; with the bridge guarded, anyone who tried to retreat found he had to scale the cliffs of the river gorges. Some Romans did manage the feat and tried to regroup at a fall-back position, but the Muslims had pressed forward to hunt down as many retreating soldiers as they could. Some Romans reportedly sat down, exhausted and dejected, wrapped in their cloaks and waiting for death.

The Roman army’s commanders were all killed in the fighting. The Ghassanid commander defected to the Muslim side, to live to fight another day. Since this defeat at Yarmouk followed on the devastating years of plague and war, it left Constantinople unable to field another army of size for a long time to come. The news of the defeat was carried afar into Europe and Egypt. It pre-demoralized any remaining “Roman” strongholds. Emperor Heraclius withdrew from Antioch by ship, where he is said to have said or written “Farewell to Syria, a long farewell. You will be a beautiful province for the enemy.” Some of Jerusalem’s relics may have been taken away with him, because now it was clear that the entire region was about to fall.

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Caliph Umar, 634

Posted on April 13, 2021 by Ruth

When Abu Bakr died, he was careful not to leave the same type of succession crisis as they had faced at the Prophet’s death. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He named Umar as his successor, therefore Caliph. Umar ruled as Caliph (successor) and added a new title: Commander of the Faithful. He lived for another ten years, sometimes leading the armies himself, and always living simply and according to strict Muslim law. He had his own son publicly whipped for drunken behavior, although the whipping wounded him to death. Ali ibn Abi Talib worked closely with Umar as his second-in-command, filling the power vacuum if Umar left Medina. Most of the news from Umar’s reign is about the intense decade of conquest that began under Abu Bakr but really took off now.

Let’s review Umar’s biography. He had been an early Meccan convert to Islam, but with a twist. When his sister began following the brand-new strange cult, he grew very angry. He assaulted her, then when she shamed him, he set out to kill the Prophet. When he heard the beautiful verses of the early Quran being recited, he was overwhelmed and immediately converted. So he was a very early convert and friend to the Prophet, and clearly was Abu Bakr’s closest companion as well. But Umar was a violent man. Stories about him always include his calling for someone’s head to roll. He was in charge of forcing Ali to submit to Abu Bakr, so either he personally put his shoulder to Ali’s door, injuring Fatimah, or he ordered one of his bodyguards to do it.

Umar had two wives in Mecca, but in Medina he married a local woman to create alliances. He may have married or at least fathered children by several more, the total coming to as many as nine. But the most interesting story is about the wife he married around the time he succeeded Abu Bakr as Caliph.

Atiqah was a child in Mecca when Muhammad’s revelations began, and her guardian was an early convert. She married a much older man who took her to Medina with the other Muslims, but they must have divorced, for next she married Abu Bakr’s son Abdullah. Atiqah was a poet! She was renowned in the community for the poetry she recited; note, she did not need to be literate, since all poetry was memorized like the Quran. Abdullah ibn Abi Bakr doted on his wife, although she bore no children. They say Abu Bakr was angry because Abdullah listened to his wife too much, both in obeying her and in literally hanging around talking to her, when he should have been out leading armies or collecting taxes. He tried to make Abdullah divorce her. But in the end, she remained Abdullah’s wife. Abdullah doted on her so much that he made her promise not to remarry. He willed her a large property, since she had no son to inherit.

When Muhammad died, Atiqah recited an elegy for him. Her Wikipedia entry gives sixteen lines of it, perhaps the whole elegy. Here is how it begins:

His camels have been lonely since evening;
he used to ride them and he was their adornment.
I have been weeping for the Chief since evening,
and tears are flowing in succession…

When her husband died a year after Muhammad, she turned down several marriage offers. But Umar was a suitor not to be denied. He ordered her guardian to marry her to him, then he argued with her personally until she finally gave in. A’isha sent her a bitter message asking for their family property back, since Atiqah broke her vow. But Atiqah finally bore a child to Umar.

The remarrying cross-overs get dizzying. Umar also married a widow of the Battle of Ajnadayn: Umm Hakim, first wife of Ikrimah, a leading Meccan. But Ikrimah himself had married two women who were almost wives of Muhammad. They probably had been intended brides during his last year of life. One arrived just after his death, and they decided not to return her to her father—but the failure of the marriage alliance to the Prophet may have contributed to her clan’s part in the Ridda Wars rebellion. Ikrimah may have been a big shot in Mecca, but the Prophet he wasn’t.

The other girl might have been the bride that A’isha boasted she got rid of, because it’s not clear how this Asma was (or wasn’t) a wife of Muhammad. In that story, A’isha said she told this new bride that it would really turn Muhammad on if she pretended to be afraid and said to her new husband, “I take refuge from Thee in Allah!” The girl (Asma?) didn’t realize this was a formula for divorce until Muhammad left the room. Whatever happened, now married and divorced without consummation, Asma was a logistical problem for the Muslims. She was married to another man first, but ended up with Ikrimah. We don’t know why Umar didn’t choose one of these Ikrimah-widows to marry, and I don’t think we know what happened to them next.

Abu Bakr left a widow, another Asma. She had been married to Ja’far, Ali’s brother. After he died in the first doomed invasion of Syria, Abu Bakr married her. She bore him a son along the road to Mecca, the infant Muhammad. But now, in 634, she was a widow again. This time, Ali married her, so he became stepfather to his brother’s children and also to Abu Bakr’s toddler. As if Muslim names were not confusing enough, eventually the story will feature this Muhammad, son of Abu Bakr and technically A’isha’s half-brother, but emotionally the son of Ali. He didn’t have an easy life; he was a walking divided-allegiance.

There’s one more tangled marriage story, this time for Umar again. After he became the Caliph, he asked to marry Ali’s daughter, who was known as Umm Kulthum. Shi’ites do not believe this marriage happened, and everyone agrees that Ali intended to marry his daughters to their cousins, Ja’far’s sons. Sunni sources say Umar insisted, but one twist was the girl’s age. It hadn’t been many years since her mother Fatimah died and the child was not yet the age of puberty. Sunni sources say Ali agreed to the match on Umar’s promise that he would be the best husband ever, and that Umm Kulthum lived as a queen in Medina, sending a gift of perfume at one time to the Empress in Constantinople. If this marriage did happen, it’s another example of what ridiculous age gaps they were willing to accept, basing a marriage’s value on rank and wealth, not on age suitability. It’s likely that Umar wanted a public sign of Ali’s support to quell possible rebellions.

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The First Muslim Conquest in Syria, 634

Posted on April 13, 2021 by Ruth

The Arabs were much more familiar with Syria than with Mesopotamia. They had interacted a great deal with the Ghassanids, whose capital city was in the Golan Mountains. They stopped often at cities like Bos(t)ra. Some of the men of Mecca had bought land around cities like Damascus and Jerusalem, installing relatives as branch offices of their trading businesses. It was a no-brainer to begin probing the weak defenses of this “Roman” region that they already knew so well.

While Khalid captured southern Mesopotamia, four Arab commanders set out to raid at the borders of Arabia. Two were old-time converts who had known Muhammad well. Shurahbil ibn Hasana and Abu Ubaydah ibn Jarrah were such early converts that they had been part of the Abyssinian migration. Abu Ubaydah had been considered as a possible successor to Muhammad at that crucial all-night meeting in Medina. The other two commanders were more controversial, as they were recent Meccan converts, like Khalid. Amr ibn al-As had converted around when Khalid did, before the Fall of Mecca, and Muhammad had appointed him to collect taxes between Medina and Syria. He went on to lead raids in the region. He may have been a recent convert, but he had made his place in the Muslim command structure already.

But Yazid, the fourth commander, was the son of Abu Sufyan and Hind. That family had only converted when Mecca fell, so their faith was suspect. Were they truly Mu’min, believers? Yazid’s younger brother Mu’awiya came along. He had served as a scribe to Muhammad in the short time between Mecca’s fall and the Prophet’s death. The promotions of Yazid and Mu’awiya were part of the campaign to have Mecca’s old leadership become part of Islam seamlessly. They were raised to rule and to fight, and apparently they were pretty intelligent. Their family owned property around Damascus, so they had personal reasons to see through the conquest of this weakly “Roman” area.

Amr led the smallest army, about 3000, up the caravan road to Aqaba, across the Negev Desert to Gaza. He met only disorganized Roman garrisons and won the Battle of Dathin near Gaza. Abu Ubaydah led a larger army, about 7000, into the Golan Mountains to challenge the Ghassanid capital at al-Jabiyah. He captured the Roman town of Areopolis. Yazid and Shurahbil were sent into the middle zone between Amr’s southern march and Abu Ubaydah’s northern one. Shurahbil’s campaign did not leave much news behind so the records kind of forget about him after this.

Abu Bakr commanded Khalid to leave Mesopotamia and go as quickly as possible to Bosra, where Abu Ubaydah and Yazid were to meet him. Khalid’s forced march to Syria in spring 634 is his most famous exploit because it’s both clever and disgusting. The zone between Iraq and Bosra, Syria was extremely dry. The roads around the arid zone took longer, and everyone assumed Khalid would use these. If the local Romans were gathering themselves to defend cities, and heard Khalid was coming, they’d have calculated a certain number of weeks before he could possibly arrive. But Khalid had seen the advantage of speed in Mesopotamia. He decided to cut straight through the desert, even if he would lose some men and horses on the way.

Khalid realized that they had one tool that the Romans never had. They traveled with a large herd of camels for bearing burdens that always included water. But the camels themselves famously tanked up on water and retained it for long periods. Khalid ordered his men to tank up the camels with as much water as they could drink, then tie their mouths shut so they could not chew their cud. They became walking water tanks. When the other water supplies ran out in the middle of the arid lands, they slaughtered the water-camels carefully so that their stomachs could be emptied. I guess if you are very, very thirsty, you don’t mind drinking water mixed with camel stomach-acid and a bit of blood.

Once Khalid arrived, the Muslims quickly conquered Bosra. Then they fought a pitched battle in the south of modern Israel against a regular Roman army. This army was not large, but it was led by the Emperor’s brother, a professional soldier. Its core was made up of Armenians, and it had been stationed at Emessa, now Homs. This area had many Armenians; we’ll meet them again a few centuries later in the Crusades. And Emperor Heraclius himself was at Emessa to watch from a distance.

The Battle of Ajnadayn went on for two days of fierce fighting, with high casualties. The Roman style of fighting was nothing like the traditional Arab battle style. From this time on, the Arab Muslim armies had to adapt to pitched battles with high losses. But the Roman army lost the Battle of Ajnadayn, with survivors scattering toward Gaza or Jerusalem. Emperor Heraclius himself retreated from Emessa/Homs to Antioch, a walled city that could be defended. They presumed that the Arab raiders would loot and then go home.

The Emperor and his brother quarreled about whose fault was the loss. It was obviously the brother’s, since he had led the army; but he blamed Heraclius for marrying their niece, an incestuous union. (Crawford, 115) This quarrel was not good for the Empire; it led to a coup attempt that failed, but various high officers and aristocrats were mutilated or exiled. The Emperor was weaker than ever.

The Muslim armies could range all over the area now; they held the rural areas and many small fortresses. They had only one major city, so far. But while they were soon to besiege and take Damascus, there was a political interruption. In the summer of 634, Abu Bakr died.

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