The Great Arab Conquests (2 page)
Read The Great Arab Conquests Online
Authors: Hugh Kennedy
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe many debts of gratitude to people who have helped me and supported me in the writing of this book. The book owes its whole existence to Georgina Capel of Capel & Land who first suggested that I should tackle the vast topic of the early Muslim conquests, and my thanks go to her. I am extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a research fellowship which enabled me to prepare this work. I am grateful, too, to my colleagues in the School of History in St Andrews who have, over the years, provided such a supportive intellectual environment and so much good friendship. I would also like to thank Penny Gardiner, my editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This is the third book we have worked on together and I owe much to her skill and enthusiasm, and also to Tom Graves for his work on the illustrations. Above all I must acknowledge the contribution of those friends and family who have sustained me in the self-absorbing and sometimes obsessive work. I am very grateful to them all for their patience and understanding.
PREFACE
I
n the 680s a monk called John Bar Penkāyē was working on a summary of world history in his remote monastery by the swift-flowing River Tigris, in the mountains of what is now south-east Turkey. When he came to write about the history of his own times, he fell to musing about the Arab conquest of the Middle East, still within living memory. As he contemplated these dramatic events he was puzzled: ‘How’, he asked, ‘could naked men, riding without armour or shield, have been able to win . . . and bring low the proud spirit of the Persians?’ He was further struck that ‘only a short period passed before the entire world was handed over to the Arabs; they subdued all fortified cities, taking control from sea to sea, and from east to west - Egypt, and from Crete to Cappadocia, from Yemen to the Gates of Alan [in the Caucasus], Armenians, Syrians, Persians, Byzantines and Egyptians and all the areas in between: “their hand was upon everyone” as the prophet says’.
1
n the 680s a monk called John Bar Penkāyē was working on a summary of world history in his remote monastery by the swift-flowing River Tigris, in the mountains of what is now south-east Turkey. When he came to write about the history of his own times, he fell to musing about the Arab conquest of the Middle East, still within living memory. As he contemplated these dramatic events he was puzzled: ‘How’, he asked, ‘could naked men, riding without armour or shield, have been able to win . . . and bring low the proud spirit of the Persians?’ He was further struck that ‘only a short period passed before the entire world was handed over to the Arabs; they subdued all fortified cities, taking control from sea to sea, and from east to west - Egypt, and from Crete to Cappadocia, from Yemen to the Gates of Alan [in the Caucasus], Armenians, Syrians, Persians, Byzantines and Egyptians and all the areas in between: “their hand was upon everyone” as the prophet says’.
1
For John Bar Penkāyē, pious monk that he was, the answer was clear: this was God’s will. Nothing else could account for this wholly extraordinary revolution in the affairs of men. Now, thirteen centuries later, in a world where divine intervention is, for many people, not an entirely satisfactory explanation of major historical changes, this book is an attempt to suggest different sorts of answers to John’s question.
This work concerns three major themes. The first is the story of the events of the Muslim conquests in so far as we can reconstruct them. The form of the book is unashamedly narrative. It is a tale of how a small number (it is unlikely that any of the Arab Muslim armies consisted of more than 20,000 men and many were much smaller) of determined and highly motivated men were able to cover vast distances, through rugged and inhospitable lands, to conquer major empires and kingdoms and to rule their lands. It is a tale of bravery and daring, but it is also a tale of cruelty and destruction. I hope that this work will, while being true to the evidence, give some impression of these stirring events.
The second theme is that of the settlement of the Arabs after the conquest, where they lived and how they exploited the enormous resources that had fallen into their hands. This, in turn, raises the issue of how the Arabs were able to maintain their own identity and culture in a sea of strange and often hostile people, and at the same time provide an environment that encouraged many of the conquered people to convert to Islam and, in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and North Africa, to adopt Arabic as their native tongue. This process is essential to understanding the creation and preservation of an Arab Muslim identity that still dominates many of the lands conquered in this period.
Finally, this is also a book about memory and the creation of memories. We have almost no perfectly contemporary records or descriptions of the Muslim conquests. All the accounts passed down to us have gone through several stages of editing and revision, and the addition of new and sometimes spurious information. Other historians have tended to dismiss much of this material because it is not an accurate record of ‘what actually happened’. In reality, it is extremely interesting as an expression of social memory, of how the early Muslims reconstructed their past and explained the coming of Islam to the areas in which they now lived. The investigation of the foundation myths of the early Islamic community can tell us much about the world-view of the Muslims in the first century of Islam.
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