In Our Time - The Arab Conquests

Episode Date: June 26, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Arab conquests - an extraordinary period in the 7th and 8th centuries when the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula conquered the Middle East, Persia, North Africa and Southern Europe and spread the ideas of the Islamic religion. In 632 the prophet Muhammad died and left behind the nascent religion of Islam among a few tribes in the Arabian Desert. They were relatively small in number, they were divided among themselves and they were surrounded by vast and powerful empires. Yet within 100 years Arab armies controlled territory from Northern Spain to Southern Iran and Islamic ideas had begun to profoundly refashion the societies they touched. It is one of the most extraordinary and significant events in world history that began the slow and profound transformation of Greek and Persian societies into Islamic ones. But how did the Arab armies achieve such extensive victories, how did they govern the people they conquered and what was the relationship between the achievements of the Arabs and the religious beliefs they carried with them?With Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Amira Bennison, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge and Robert Hoyland, Professor in Arabic and Middle East Studies at the University of St Andrews

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For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 632, the Prophet Muhammad died and left behind the nascent religion of Islam among a few tribes in the Arabian desert. They were relatively small in number, they were divided among themselves,

and they were surrounded by vast and powerful empires. Yet within a few decades, Arab armies controlled territory from northern Spain to southern Iran and out of the Caucasus, and Islamic ideas had begun to refashion profoundly the societies they touched. It's one of the most extraordinary and significant events in world history. But how did the Arab armies achieve such extensive victories? How did they govern the people they conquered? And what was the relationship between the achievements of the Arabs and the religious beliefs they carried with them? With me to discuss the Arab conquest, Sir Hugh Kennedy,

Professor of Arabic in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Amira Beniston, Senior Lecturer in Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Robert Hoyland, Professor in Arabic and Middle East Studies at the University of St Andrews. Hugh Kennedy, when we talk about the Arabs of the Arab conquests, who in that time in the 7th century are we talking about? We're talking basically about the people who spoke Arabic. That's the only meaningful definition, I think, of an Arab, somebody whose mother tongue is Arabic. and the Arabs lived in largely nomadic tribal life in the Arabian Peninsula,

what is now Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and also in the desert margins of Syria and Iraq. But there were no Arabs in Egypt, there were no Arabs in North Africa, none of these were Arab countries, Arab countries in any sense, nor was Syria and most of Iraq Arab countries and Arab country. So the Arabs were confined to this central core area. Can you give us some idea of their size and power at the time of the death of Muhammad in 632?

The Prophet Muhammad in the last stages of his life had attracted the allegiance of tribes from all over Arabia. But it was by no means clear that on his death that any of this unity would survive. And at the time that he died, many of the Arab tribes and tribal leaders were thinking that that was that, that was over, and they would go back to fighting each other, basically. But a small group of leaders, the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, in the hijazz, that's in Mecca and particularly in Medina, which was then the capital, decided that things were going to be different.

They decided that they would use the idea of Islam to bring the Arab tribes together and to direct them against outside enemies, because they realized if they weren't fighting outsiders, they'd be fighting each other. And so in the years immediately after the Prophet died, they began an incredibly bold series of campaigns into Syria and Iraq and beyond. Before that, I'd just like to fill in for the listeners and for my own sake.

Are we talking about basically tribal, nomadic peoples with one or two cities, small by any modern standards? Are we talking about people on the move, wholly agricultural? Just give us an idea of what's going on there in the early 7th century. It's probable that most of the people lived a Bedouin, lifestyle, and that gave them all sorts of military and quasi-military skills in wielding arms, in travelling long distances, in surviving great hardships. There were also a lot of people who lived in villages and cultivated the land, particularly in Yemen,

in South Arabia. And there were one or two important trading cities of which Mecca was the most celebrated at the time of the Prophet's death. And you say that after the death, we know that after the death of Muhammad, the man who succeeded him, the Caliph, Caliph means successor. Caliph was a good deal of controversy about exactly how the term comes to be in existence. It either means can be interpreted as successor to Muhammad or as God's deputy on earth.

And perhaps the term is even deliberately ambiguous, but there's a lot of discussion about how it is. And this is a great friend of Mohammed's Abu Bakr, is that how he answered. Abu Bakr. And he decided that he would not be pacific in this way, just drawing people by the man. magnetism that the Prophet Muhammad had, but he would go out and fight those.

Arabs who refused to stay inside some grouping. Yes, exactly. Abu Bakr was part of a group. The sources portrayed him as a rather benign old man, but there were others around him who were certainly much more aggressive and militant. But he went on two-year rampage of war, didn't he really? Yes, he and his associates, yes. And they were determined from the beginning,

that all the Arabs who lived in the Arabian Peninsula should acknowledge the leadership of the Muslim community, should accept the leadership of the Muslim community. And convert as well? Yes. And so he did that in two years? Yes. That's quite something, isn't it?

That's the start of it. Amir Abinison surrounded the Arabian Peninsula, there are two empires, the Sasanian, the Persian and the Byzantines. They were old and powerful. What sort of state were they in? Again, like so many issues surrounding this era, there's a certain amount of controversy about whether one can consider them as sort of old, strong, well-established empires or whether they were actually at this particular point in time slightly weakened.

Some of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires have been engaged in a series of wars against each other. The Byzantines had only fairly recently regained control of the provinces of Syria. about the late sixth century? The late sixth, early seventh century. So there was in fact a lot of people in the region who had witnessed a great deal of warfare. It has been argued that both the armies of both sides were in fact exhausted by war, that the population of the fertile crescent Syria threw into Iraq was disgruntled by the constant movement of armies backwards and forwards, changes in political leadership and so on and so forth. From what you've said, it seems to me that there's a, you're sort of, there's an implied

questioning of the sources because one way so, well, these two great empires were weak. We're going to see that the Arabs overthrew both of them in the same year in 636 their armies. So you said, well, they've got to be weak because these chaps come out in the desert, couldn't overthrow the armies of these two great empires. What sources are you working from here? I mean, there are a number of different sources. The Arabic sources themselves talk very much in terms of kind of the effete, war-exhausted, servile armies of the Sasanians and the Byzantines

and contrast them with the Bedouin, who, as Hugh has said, were sort of hardy, able to withstand hardship and also inspired by a new religion, a new ideology, that of Islam. But I think the problem with that is the sources don't really give us enough detail to really ascertain exactly what happened in any particular engagement. So there's always quite a high level of interpretation going on. And if you like, there are two sides to it. On the one hand, people who wish to sort of minimize the Arab success like to portray the Byzantine and Sasanian empires as being particularly weakened at this moment in time. But

I think one also has to acknowledge the achievements of the Arabs under the banner of Islam. It's a remarkable achievement. These were very large, very well-established, long-standing empires, which they managed to conquer relatively quickly. Can you tell us about those conquests in one year, in 636, that's just four years after the death of Muhammad. They took on the great armies of the two great empires and beat both of them. Now, the Caliphuma is in charge now. So can you describe those in a bit more detail? Were these surprising victories, where these must have been astonishing?

Yes. Even during the caliphate of Abu Bakr, a thrust into Syria had become. It had been one of the aspirations of the Prophet to conquer Jerusalem, which is a holy city for Islam as well as for Christianity and Judaism. And when Omar Eben al-Hatab succeeded to the caliphate in 634 after Abu Bakr's day, he very much pushed that forward and sent armies into the field in a sort of two different directions, directly north if you like, into Syria and then slightly further east towards Iraq. Omar seems to have been a sort of commander-in-chief par excellence. He seemed, although he didn't lead armies himself necessarily,

he does seem to have had some sort of understanding of military strategy and kept very much of a breast of affairs and wanted regular information back and directed the armies up towards the great battle of Yarmouk in Syria. Yarmuk was against the Byzantines. Was against the Byzantines, that's right. Robert Hoyland, can we develop this a bit more? What did the Arab armies,

which had begun as raiding parties, that they knew technologies, which usually often accounts for victories of this nature, rapid and unexpected. What was the, we've been told that he was an outstanding general, let's call him. What else, what reasons, military reasons might have been for their success? Militarily, we don't know that they have any enhanced form of technology. There are a couple of background factors that I'd like to stress.

One is, although it's difficult to document the exhaustion of the great powers, In the early 7th century, the Persian Emperor Hosra II totally changed the game. For three or four hundred years, the Byzantines, the Christian, late Roman Empire, and the Iranians under the Sassanid dynasty, had made a kind of cold war sort of status. There were occasional flare-ups along the border.

But this was new. He decided to go for full takeover of the Byzantine Empire, launched full-scale assaults on, as far as Egypt, all about Syria, all the way right trying to take Constantinople. and this totally demolished kind of the existing order. Their defeat finally caused also the dissolution really of the aristocracy of the Iranian Empire and effectively they had a form of civil war. So there really was large scale collapse of the existing system at the beginning of the Arab conquests.

Secondly, the environment is crucial. All the way from modern Morocco to Central Asia, you have a continuous lines or swathes of either desert or steppe, which are superb, act as superb conduits, kind of highways, if you like, for pastoralist tribes that are used to movement in that sort of territory, i.e. the Arabs. So this gives them a wonderful launch pads for,

their conquest. And that's initially, the first phase of the conquest are almost wholly done that, using the Syrian desert heading into the desert ends of Palestine, Syria and Iraq. So that's immensely important. What's very different is usually these are large-scale rays. They're very successful. They always are. They're so mobile. It's their terrain. And so they generally do very well. It's basically bows and arrows on horses with swords. Yeah. Yeah. And, but they don't normally last the race. So what tends to make things different is what the elite, which is normally settled actually, not normally Bedouin themselves, what their objectives are, usually political and economic, so for example Zanobia, Queen of Parmira self-styled. In the third century,

she has very clear political and economic ambitions to maintain economic independence, Palmyra, have a stab at the actual imperial office herself. She mobilises pastoralist tribes and is very effective. for the coming to the case of the Arab conquests, the settled elite from the settled areas of Western Arabia, they, it appears, have a kind of ideology called Islam, which involves spreading their God's word, at least in some form, to the rest of the Arab peninsula. That there is some sort of new ideology,

is clear actually from contemporary documents, which we have papyrii, from Egypt right through the actual process of the conquests. They're normally headed with the Bismala in the name of God. The era is new starting from zero, so they've actually re-adjusted time to the beginning. July 6.2, a new calendar begins at the death of Prophet Muhammad, yeah. And there's a new name for the people, Mahajirun, emigrants,

people who leave their homeland to go and settle in the newly conquered provinces. So that ideological element is new. I think in bringing at least a cohesiveness, whether it's a purpose, it's difference, but it gives a cohesiveness to the pastoralist tribes, which they didn't normally have. And that's normally, their success is militarily been taken for granted, given them ability, but it's the ability to stay together that isn't normally there.

Would those fighting, those Arabs fighting, consider themselves engaged in a jihad, a holy war? It would seem so. I mean, the term recurs frequently in the Quran. It actually has diverse meanings. It's always some form of exertion. It can be more spiritual exertion, in the way of God, but it certainly includes military exertion in the way of God and fighting.

And the initial UMA that's set up in Medina, for which we have the Foundation document, makes it clear that playing your part and contributing money also to the process of war against the Imphidels and Mecca is part and parcel of being a Muslim. Hugh Kennedy, by the 640s, the Arabam is controlled territory from Iran to the east, to the cusp of Egypt and the west, from Turkey in the north to the foot of the Arabian Peninsula. How were they received in their new dominions? They've been raiding parties before, but now they were taking it over. How were they received?

Well, they defeated, as has been described, they defeated the armies of the great empires. But their relationships with the people over whom they came to rule were complex. And in many cases, I think in the point that Robert is making, the local people felt that the Arabs were here this year and gone next year. They didn't realize that this was going to be a fundamental change, which was going to change the whole language and culture of the area for right down to the present day.

So a lot of people. And the Arabs also, the Arab armies and commanders offered comparatively easy terms to the people they conquered. They didn't demand total submission. They didn't demand that people were driven out of their homes. And above all, they didn't demand that people converted to Islam. What they demanded was that people accepted the sovereignty of the Arab rulers and they paid taxes. And as long as you

didn't resist and you paid taxes, then you were left to get on with your life as you always had before. To till your fields, to go to church or to go to the fire temples in Iran like you always had done. And this meant that for many people submitting to the Arabs

was the easiest option. Much better do that than to resist and have your women and children taken into slavery and your menfolk killed, which was the alternative. And so it would be wrong, I think, to imagine that lots of people welcomed the coming of the Arabs, and clearly in certain cases it was accompanied by violence and disruption. On the other hand, it was much easier, or it was

an attractive proposition to just to pay the money, hope these people would go away and accept their demands. Robert, what about the religious situation? Most of the conquered people were Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. It's already been mentioned by Hugh that they weren't forced to convert. Are we sure about this? Is this our Do your sources bear this out, that there was an easiness? So this is partly because Mohammed so himself so firmly in the tradition of prophets from Moses through Jesus, who's all of the prophets in Islam, to himself. What's quite interesting in the Quran, I suppose,

we actually have an early papyrus that demonstrate, is that there is a specific position given legal position given to Jews, Christians, and actually anyone who possesses a scripture, which actually came to include Zoroastrians and Hindus, presumably for, in a sense, for practical reasons in the early stages. But therefore it's a legal status. God recognises it. This is partly because of the way Islam sees itself more as the religion,

the original religion, if you like going back to the beginning. The message has always been the same, whether the Jews and Christians and others might have slightly corrupted it, but it's all God's message. So their status is respected legally. They were expected simply to govern themselves and get on with their own lives and maintain the liturgy. They pay the taxes, as Hugh said,

but especially for the whole of the Amayy period, which is up to 7.50, they are left on their own. And they're not really... It was almost unexpected to the Arabs that these people would convert any of them. Anya? Yes, and I think this is a very important point. I mean, just a little time ago you mentioned jihad and holy war. I think it's very important for people to understand

that from the early Muslim point of view, this was quite different to a Christian form of holy war and what the Arabs were trying to do was really not to go out and convert people. This was absolutely not their objective. The objective was very much more to submit the world to the political dominion of Islam, which to some extent explains this approach to people

to allow practitioners of other faiths to continue practicing their faith. And I think the early Arabs very much saw themselves as an elite with their own religion which had taken control of it. the world, but they weren't in the first instance concerned to impose that on other people at all. They set up garrison towns in the major cities. What was the purpose of that? Slightly outside the city, sorry, yes. I think this sort of reflects the same kind of exigencies,

and this was partly due to the Caliph Umar whom we mentioned before. He did seem to feel that it was better for the armies to remain separate from the people that they were conquering. And garrison towns were set up in many places. The most famous are Kufa and Basra in Iraq, Fustat in Egypt, and then Kairawan in Tunisia, but there were, of course, others. And even when they didn't establish a sort of a new garrison town, they did tend to establish garrisons adjacent to existing cities, say, in Syria, which, um, kept them to some extent separate from the local populations, which had the dual advantage that they were able to retain a certain amount of their cohesion,

their sense of identity as a group, as well as allowing subject peoples to continue living their lives very much as they had. I think it's important to remember what a small minority the Arab Muslims were at the outset. And actually one could argue that the kind of the way they required practitioners of other faiths to continue living their lives and to continue wearing the clothes they had always worn, for instance, was one way to try and keep themselves separate and distinct and retain their sense of identity. Just building on Amira's point, because this is immensely important,

Arab conquests were impressive in themselves, of course, but mostly the conquests of pastoralist tribes, think of the vandals, the goths and so on, they come in, and then soon they're wearing togas speaking Latin and reclining on their couches and so on. and you don't really notice the changes. But this is the huge factor of the Arab Congress. They led to a new civilization. And the key reason for that is that the Arabs both felt different to some extent and found ways deliberately or not of maintaining that difference.

The garrison cities are one. The other decision attributed to Omar is that the first caliph, 634 to 44, is that people shouldn't settle in the countryside, It didn't have land themselves. The land was to be preserved for the future Muslims as a sort of revenue. So you stayed in the Garrison City. You were given money. You were given monthly rations and you were in kind,

and then you were given an annual salary. So you didn't need to gain estates as would normally happen, where you might, of course, then be exposed to the assimilating pressures of just mixing in with the local population. So this continued for at least in 120 years after Mohammed. But the Egyptian papari make it clear that it's only about the 740s. So it's 110 years up to Muhammad's death that we start to see Muslims actually in the countryside. They're not there at all or in the small towns.

Can we develop this idea here, Ken here? In setting up a new civilization, I mean, when the Brits went to Rome and so on, they became Romans. And QS. Roman, saw everybody who was conquered by the Romans was a Roman and wanted to, as Robert said. Wyrotoga and Lion, and so forth, fighting the armies. This was a big distinction, as Robert said. Yes, exactly. And the distinction, the contrast between what, the Germanic invaders of the Western Roman Empire,

the way they assimilated. No, the Arab Muslims have this extraordinary cultural self-confidence that they bring to their rule. They believed that God had spoken to them and in Arabic and was working through them to spread, to spread belief in Allah throughout the world, or at least the rule of those who believed in Allah throughout the world. So the old dispensation was of no value to them,

and what the Byzantines had done and so on had been made out of date by this new revelation, and what the Sasanians believed was in the same way out of date. And Arabic was the language that God had spoken in. Nobody believed in the Western world that God had spoken in German. but we were relieved that everyone knew that God had spoken in Arabic and this gave the language an extraordinary potency. There was never any question about Arabic being the language of government

and the language of the elite. They didn't feel any need to. At a lower level of administration, to be sure, people continue to write in Greek and in Aramaic and various other local dialects for collecting taxes from villages and that sort of thing. But the level of court, at the level of the royal court, the court of the caliphs,

in terms of the literature, in terms of the poetry, in terms of any sort of religious discussion, Arabic was the language of God. They were, just talking about these settlements they made, they seemed to be an extremely intelligent about tax. And one of the reasons why, perhaps it says, a cynical Western view, that they didn't rush to convert people,

is that if you were not converted, you paid more tax. If you were a Muslim, you paid less tax. So they got more revenue from people who are not Muslims. That's undoubtedly true. and there are various records, in fact, from the first century of Islam about how the authorities actually discouraged conversion to Islam. They didn't want everyone to become Muslims

because then, as you say, they paid less tax and it undermined the resource base of the state. Amir Abinerson, in 646, the Arab armies moved into Egypt and eventually they took the city of Alexandria. How significant a conquest was that? Well, very significant conquest. The reason for going into Egypt was, of course, because it was also part of the Byzantine Empire.

And the Arabs were quite keen to continue pushing the Byzantines out of the various areas which they'd held. There was one battle near the Roman fort of Babylon, not to be confused with Babylon in Iraq, of course, which took place at site where they established a garrison town of Fustat. And that then became the headquarters of the Arabs in Egypt. It was, however, the reduction of Alexandria a few years later,

which was more crucial, perhaps, in terms of removing Byzantine control from Egypt, because as long as the Byzantines held seaports like Alexandria, then later Carthage in Tunisia, they were able to sort of keep a foothold on the territory and continue resisting. But once the seaports were gone, the Arabs were very much in control. And this, of course, has a sort of geopolitical significance and it begins to reorient these countries to a certain extent away from Mediterranean capitals to inland capitals. Obviously for start is the forerunner of Cairo, which right up to today is the capital of Egypt. Ron. Sorry, I thought you wanted to come in on that.

Oh, no, sorry. They're still, can you describe what these armies were like, Hugh Kennedy? I've read that they were, when they came into the city, people were surprised by how poor they were, how rugged they were, how they looked anyway. They were certainly rugged when they went into war. Yes, the first point is that they were armies. They weren't migrations of tribes with their sheep and their camels

and their womenfolk and their families and so on. These were organised armies with a clear command structure. And actually, in most cases, a very effective command structure. The second point is that, yes, that people thought they were very poorly equipped. And there's a lot of Arabic literature about the self-image of these people, the contrast between their poverty, their hardiness, and the fact that all their clothes are ragged, but their swords are sharp as flames and so on.

And the whole self-image is generated of these tough, hardy, poorly equipped people. And lots of comments are put into the mouths of the people, Concord, saying, how is it that these ragged, illiquet people have done this when we're so magnificent and we all have all our wonderful, particularly Persian kings, saying we have all these wonderful fabrics and all this gorgeous jewels and all this wonderful golden armour and so on. How come that these people have managed to do this? It's a point to stress, we're now moving on to the realm of perception, of course, rather than in reality.

One, from the Muslim side, there's a number of different literary talks. point, if you like, that come across in the later sources. One is, of course, yes, how could we, so, you know, when we were only in just poor shepherds and so on, do all this. But there's also the religious one that the Byzantines and Iranians lost because they got too involved in the luxuries of this world, their beautiful silk gowns and their lovely reclining couches. Whereas we, you know, we followed God's word and we despised all these luxuries of this world.

particular Omar the first, the caliph, when sometimes his helpers will say to him, you know, why are you still sitting on the ground like this, on a rush mat when you can see the leaders of the world in these fantastic thrones and so on. Omar is never, you know, willing to accept that and this kind of tough man comes across. The other is the, on the Christian side, is the biblical image of Ishmael. The Arabs are seen as they're located in the biblical genealogy as Ishmaelites, son of Jacob. God's, Ishmael is the wild man whose hand is against all. He is the shepherd. So there's this kind of image as well, which is used to explain the place of the Arabs and also their actions. The hand of all is against him and his hand is against them all. He is portrayed like that in the Bible. And so that's used to explain the conquests. Amira.

Yes, no, I just, it's a slightly different point, but I think it's important to point out that, of course, by this time, once you're moving into Egypt, there are non-Arabs who are beginning to get incorporated into the Muslim armies. We've talked up until now about Arabs. But two points. I mean, as he was saying, this is an army. People are not coming with their families. So very quickly they start to cohabit with local women, which immediately begins to change the complexion of the ruling elite.

Because Arab genealogies tend to be traced through the male line unless a woman is particularly prestigious. Within a couple of years, you start to have children who are described as Arabs, but actually the sons of local women across the empire. And also, as the armies move into North Africa, particularly beyond Egypt, into what's now Libya, they begin to fight tribes.

The same thing occurs actually, once they get past Iran, towards Central Asia. And because tribes resist a lot more strongly... The Berber tribes in North Africa. The Berber tribes in North Africa, yes. And because they resist a lot more strongly, the wars there are... in some cases much more bitter

and there are a lot more prisoners taken. A lot of these prisoners then become incorporated in the Arab armies as clients and do convert to Islam. So we begin to see the complexion of the armies changing at this stage as the conquest continues. Sorry, Hugh. Yes, I think

it's a very important point and when we see exactly the conquest of North Africa, for example, or the conquest of Spain, it seems as if the vast majority of the Indian Vertical was Arabs who who conquered Spain were in fact Berbers. And we know that the chief of the Arab army, the man called Musa of Nusayr,

his father had been a prisoner of war, probably from Iraq who'd converted to Islam, and such as the possibilities of social mobility and so on at this time, that the son of this prisoner of war can actually rise through the ranks, end up as governor of North Africa, and commander of Muslim forces in Spain. So there's an extraordinary way in which the Arab Muslim armies

incorporate the people they conquered and make use of their talents and initiatives. One thing they failed to do is to capture the great Constantinople, which would have been a huge jewel in their crown if they at that stage wanted jewels in the crown. Can you tell us why they didn't manage to do that here? Well... They had two goes, didn't they? Yes, they had two ghosts.

And interestingly, the Arab Muslims mastered the arts of naval warfare very early on. and within a generation there are Arab fleets which are competing effectively and defeating Byzantine fleets. But they could do that in the Eastern Mediterranean, but the Sea of Marmara outside Constantinople, a very different environment. It was very stormy, they were unfamiliar with it, and Constantinople could be and was supplied by sea.

And the Arabs were never able, even though they attacked overland through Turkey and they attacked by sea. They were never able to breach the great walls of the city. They were never able to sustain the pressure, I think that was it. They could have a summer campaign on by sea, but they couldn't keep the fleet mobilised through the winter and so on. And in the end, the storms and the attrition got to them.

So they've been roaring on, Robert, but we come into the middle of the century. We're still in the 650s. We're still just 30, 20 old years on from Prophet Mohammed's. death. And I'd just like to bring back into the conversation the thought that was offered, I think, by Hugh at the near the beginning of the programme, that people around the place had been quite used to Arab raids in and out for loot, and the loot mattered quite a bit to them, partly because they were so poor. But the civil war broke out in the 650s among the inner Muslim world, let's call it. Can you describe that and how threatening that was to their advance?

It's a very difficult question because it becomes of enormous significance given that it's seen as the beginnings of the split between Sunni and Shi Muslims. The Sunnis accepting Abu Bakra as the legitimate caliph successor to Muhammad and then Omar and then Othman, whereas the Shiites feeling that Ali who had married the daughter of Muhammad and therefore was of the house, of the family, Muhammad. He should have been the one to rule. They were cheated of this and at each point it should have been him

really. And then after when Othman is killed, this was Ali's chance. Surely he was then going to become a caliph. But Othman's relative, Ma'awiya, who's been governor of Syria for 20 years almost by this time, based in Damascus. He puts himself forward as the defender of Othman, the one seeking revenge

for the family of of Othman and challenges Ali. He's got a superb base that he's built up having been governor of Syria for 20 years, and so he's fairly easily able to defeat Ali. But in the sources, this takes up thousands of pages you can find

on it, and there's so emotive, so many speeches, so much ringing of hands and crying and weeping, and just is very difficult to be sure what exactly were the issues. A lot of it seems to be over how booty is distributed. Who gets it? Because it

wasn't given equally the stipends that I mentioned, the annual stipends that are paid to all soldiers, which is all Muslims at this stage, are on a descending scale depending when you converted and when you started participating in the war. And also the control of wealth goes to Uthman's family at the time, as the caliph with Ma'awe. And many feel this is wrong that the wealth, the power of the state is all being concentrated in one family's hands and there's a constant fight against this the first civil war is the first manifestation of it

but it came how long it didn't seem to last very long and they were back in the saddle as it were weren't they Amira quite soon yeah I think one of the remarkable things about this era is there is a lot of political turmoil at the top there are a lot of tensions as Robert says related to the distribution of booty

and participation in in the prophets of empire. But at the same time, on the fringes of the empire, the sort of the motor of conquest continues, and it has a sort of almost a rhythm of its own. It's quite independent. I mean, there are fluctuations, certainly, in the conquest of North Africa, which begins to occur.

And at this time and in the succeeding decades, but nonetheless, the need for booty, if you like, also drives the troops on the frontiers onwards under their localized commanders and that sort of drives the, I mean, the early Islamic Empire has been described as a conquest state, that it's utterly dependent on the booty. And to keep the armies together, they have to be sent out in the field. They have to keep on fighting.

They have to keep on acquiring wealth to prevent it all falling apart. Hugh, in 685, Abd al-Malik came to thrown and established Islam as the official religion, as I understand it, of the Muslim-ruled lands. What effect did that happen? It wasn't so much he established Islam as an official religion that he established Arabic as the language of administration. Before Arabic had certainly been the language of religion and it had been the language that the conquerors talked.

What Abdul Malik did was to convert the administration from using Greek and Syriac and Aramaic to using Arabic. And this had a profound implications for the conquered population because now anyone who wanted a job in the administration, however humble had to know how to read and write Arabic. And it meant that Greek disappeared as a spoken language. Greek had been spoken in the Levant, in the Eastern Mediterranean, since the time of Alexander the Great.

For almost a thousand years, Greek had been the normal language of administration and polite conversation. Within a generation, spoken Greek disappears because there are no jobs in Greek anymore. And the same happens to Aramaic and Syria. Interestingly, though, the one place that this linguistic transformation doesn't occur is in Iran, where the people become Muslims, overwhelmingly, certainly by the year of thousand, the overwhelming majority of the population of Muslims,

but a new Persian language develops, which is written in the Arabic script, incorporates a lot of Arabic loan words, but it recognizably not Arabic. Robert. I agree with you, but except for the point about religion, before Abdul Malik Muhammad is never mentioned on any official documents whatsoever nor any form of religious pronouncement beyond the in the name of God, Bismala.

But with Abdul Malik, suddenly Muhammad and very long religious declarations are everywhere. They're on all inscriptions, all papyr, all protocols, all coins, all seals. And you're going to a mosque building too, doesn't you? Yes, and there's a huge programme of moss building. So Islam is gone, if you like, from the cult, the private religious cult of the conquerors to suddenly being the religion of state. Abdul Malik is in a sense, if you like, the Muslim St. Paul.

He really puts Islamic civilization on a firm footing. The army changes. It goes from being a conscript army, where everyone in, every Muslim is a soldier and fighting, to a professionalise army. And many Muslims start becoming civilians now. It starts to be an empire, where the Muslims are participating in many forms, as scholars, as tradesmen and so on,

and there is a professional army. It starts to look like an empire. Yes. Yes, it's their own coins as opposed to beforehand. They'd simply been imitating the coins of the Byzantines and Iranians. So it starts to look much more like an Islamic empire. The conquests, if you like, have started to become systematized and established. Amira?

Yes, no, I would agree with that. I mean, Abdullar al-Mirik's reign does seem to be very much a turning point. I mean, he's one of the Amayers. This is the Umayyad Caliphate now that we're talking about. And they do acquire a much more imperial. mode of operation and you do see that with Abdel Merlick and his son Al-Walid who builds the great mosque of Damascus and rather interestingly

there's a later historian geographer sort of asks the question of his own uncle in fact why did Al-Walid spend all that money on mosques when he could have built roads they'd have been much more useful and the uncle replies no no no you don't understand this was absolutely the best thing Al-Waleed could have done he had looked around Syria he saw the Christians had all these fantastic churches and that he understood to create an empire, he

needed to construct mosques which would make Muslims proud of their own monuments. Robert, briefly. Well, there's two very quick points I wanted to make Arrow Conquest generally just because of the ways they're perceived generally in the secondary literature. One is that they're not the very quick event that they're seen to be often only in the 630s.

But this is a programme that went on for a very long time. Spain, we haven't yet reached, but that was 740s. Central Asia, really, is only in the 9th and 10th centuries. And the other Although it, in a sense, retrospect became a turning point, at the time it's less so. And it fits very well into the world of late antiquity. It's got the late antique kind of universalist vision. It has its idea of the sacred where saints, amulets, the world of magic is all part of Islam.

And so the much less of a rupture there than we perceive it retrospectively. But with the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and then up to Poitia and then back, from Pachia. Then the Abbasid Caliphs came in in the middle of the 8th century. Had they got the base, was the basis established then for what became?

We look back on this, this great period of Arabic civilization, scholarship and so of the UK. Yes, certainly. And it's very striking that with the exception of the Iberian Peninsula, all the areas that were conquered

during this period have remained Muslim and in large cases Arabic speaking ever since. So the conquest were very dramatic. turning point in that sense. But it's important, I think, finally, to make the distinction between conquest and conversion.

It's probable that by the year 1,000 or 400 years after the prophet died, four centuries after he died, that most of the majority of the population had become Muslims. But the conquests happen very quickly. Conversion happens much more slowly, and it happens by attraction, it happens almost entirely peacefully

and voluntarily over a much long period of time. And we're seeing finally, briefly, Amari, we're seeing the implanting of what became a new civilization, not a graft of an older one. Yes, I think it is a new civilization because it does have this striking Arabic imprint. But I think the underlying point that we're all making here is that, as is always the case with history, this is a story of continuity and change. And there are many continuities, but there's this larger sort of overarching change, the introduction of a new language, Arabic, and a new religion, Islam.

Well, thank you very much. Mary Bendison, Hugh Kennedy and Robert Hoyland. And next week I'll be talking about the metaphysical poet, John Don and Andrew Marvel, among others. Thank you very much for listening.