School of War - Ep 181: Michael Cook on the Islamic Conquests

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Michael Cook, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and author of A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity, joins the show to discuss the sudden, explosive Arab expansion of the 7th century.  ▪️ Times      •     01:46 Introduction     •     03:05 Sources     •     04:42 War and politics        •     07:32 Grass and sand       •     09:30 Self-defense         •     12:21 Ibn Khaldun      •     16:11 An Arab identity       •     18:45 Knock on effects        •     26:40 Two targets      •     28:32 The Arab way of war       •     34:50 Coming out of the desert        •     38:48 Civil war      •     42:27 Jihad Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

One thing that's predictable in history is that it's unpredictable. Events simply don't proceed in straight lines, at least for as long as people assume that they will. At the start of the 7th century AD, two great empires, the Byzantines and the Persians, stood astride Western Asia, engaged in one of their intermittent and indecisive wars. A hundred years later, the Persian Empire was swept away entirely, and the power of the Byzantines radically reduced by an entirely new civilization that had erupted from an impoverished desert wasteland in a series of spectacular military campaigns. One of the world's great scholars of these things, Michael Cook, joins us today to discuss the rise

of Islam. Let's get into it. It is a perspective for war with Iraqi invasion of late. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain. We shall fight on the beaches, we should fight on the landing grounds, we shall bike in the fields and in the streets,

we shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. To welcome to the show today, Professor Michael Cook, the class of 1943, University Professor of Near Eastern Studies and former Cleveland E. Dodgers.

Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. He's the author of many books, most recently, The Magnificent, A History of the Muslim World, from its origins to the dawn of modernity. Thank you so much for joining the show, Michael. My pleasure. Thank you, Erin. I want to, your book covers a much broader scope, much, much broader indeed that we could possibly even scratch the surface of in 45 minutes. So I'm going to keep us focused on the early period or the formative period of Islam and the early Islamic conquests. And I want to open with a question for you about and about how we can know anything about the early or mid-seventh century in this part of the world. And I'll pair the question with a confession, which is that I'm an

enormous fan of yours and have been since graduate school when I was not studying Islamic history, but I sort of worked down the hall from a number of people who did. And instead of doing the research I was supposed to be doing in the library, I would do things like pick interesting books on other semi-related subjects off the shelves. And a book, this is only, like, I'd be impressed of 10 listeners will get these references. But one of the first books I read in the beginning of my graduate career was Haggerism by you and Patricia Crona.

And setting aside the substance of its argument, what sticks with me is the swash-buckling, source-critical kind of adventure of it. And I've remained a fan of that style of thinking, again, setting aside, I have no idea how you feel about the conclusions today, but just the style of thinking was exciting to me then and remains exciting to me today. So that's my confession. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. Okay, right.

I think I would have to say that I'm a bit older and maybe wiser now than when you were reading that book. So the sources, I mean, yeah, the problem of sources has not gone away. Though it certainly doesn't look quite the same. I mean, on the one hand, you have very rich Arabic sources. There's a lot there. Some of it is very colourful, but in the form in which we have them, they were written many, many, many years after the events.

And on the other hand, we have some archaeological scraps, nothing's like coins, inscriptions, but they don't tell us a whole lot. We have some non-Muslim sources. They don't tell us a whole lot either. So what you're doing is matching them up. Sometimes they match up. Sometimes they don't match up conspicuously.

And where you end up is there's a lot that's reliable in the Muslim sources and a lot that's unreliable. And to tell which is which is not easy. So then what based on the work of a lifetime, tell us a bit about what you have learned about the pre-Islamic world of, the Arabs and how war and politics differed perhaps from, say, the way that war and politics were thought about and conducted in places like the Byzantine Empire or the Persian Empire, both major going concerns of the same period. Right. I'm just picking up from what you just said. I guess one thing about warfare in

those days is it's low tech by our standards. The only thing that's at all high tech, is, well, naval warfare is a bit different than less stick to land warfare. And the point of what I'm saying is that the Arabs can fight just as well as anyone else. Nobody has weapons that are that much better than anybody else's. Where here I'm going to the Arabs before Islam. And I think the crucial thing there is that Arabia is an area very poor in resources. And that means that what you get is very bad for state formation, and in compensation, what you get is tribalism. So you have a society in which there are no really strong political structures.

There's just these tribes and their feuds, and just about any adult male knows how to has weapons and knows how to use them. So that, you know, you've got the big professional armies of the two empires, the Byzantine and the Persian Empire, and you've got these Arabs. And they've been like this as long as anyone can remember. And, you know, they're a nuisance to the empires because they raid. But they're not an existential threat because they're just not organized enough. Now, their military activity is small scale. And, you know, as of, say, the year 600, it would be virtually impossible to imagine the arrows becoming an existential threat to the empires. Yeah, we took bets, right? Virtually no one. Virtually no one would be able to predict how the world that 700 would look like, right, if we were asked.

Exactly. Yes. Now, let me ask you another comparative question. We had Thomas Barfield on the show recently. to talk about his new book on forms of empire. And there's sort of interesting overlap between his work in New Earth, and you're interested in some of the same things. You talk about the step tribes to the north. So Barfield and I didn't really get into the Arabs, but we did talk a bit about the step. And you, of course, they're an important part of your story

at various stages. If we stay in the early 7th century, how much to the Arabs soon-to-be becoming Muslims have in common with the step tribes of the day? what are the differences? Are they sort of similar worlds except one polity is on a grassland and the other polity is in a desert or are there differences? Just help me understand that. Right. I think, I mean, there is a real similarity there. These are both societies in which nomads are very prominent. And they live from pastoralism, much less from agriculture. There is some, but it's not that big a deal.

But I think what you just mentioned, the fact that the steppe society is based on grass and the Arabs are sitting on rock and sand, that means that the resource basis for these step peoples is significantly greater. I mean, they're not real rich, like people sitting in China with all that agricultural land, but there are a whole lot better off than the Arabs. And that means much better chances for state formation. So that those people tend to be much more organized or organized on a larger scale than the Arabs in their desert. And now that means that every now and again they pose a real threat to the empires.

And the empires know that this can be a real threat. And that's happening in the early 7th century. So my sense of it is that, if you're the emperor of one of those empires, you get very worried about the step peoples, but you don't pay much attention to the Arabs until suddenly something happens. Let's say a bit more about just the structure of Arab society. And you speak to this with some sort of interesting literary anecdotes early in the book. How does the Arab society based on segmentary lineage and tribes and so forth, how does it solve the problems that normally you would look to a state to solve? How does it secure people from predation, for example, to the extent it does? How does it actually work?

Yeah. And I think, I mean, the bottom line is self-defense. If you are not armed and if you don't have fellow tribesmen who are also armed, who are also armed, armed so that you can really stand up to an aggressor, you're going to be a victim. Now, what of course is not the case is that this is a society that can only resolve problems by violence. Violence is often the bottom line, but there are other things you can do. Like, say you've gotten into a feud with some other tribal group and you've killed some of then they've killed some of you. Well, somebody may feel that it's about time they stopped.

And then you have a negotiation. And maybe we taught up how many people on our side have been killed, how many people on your side. And now we take the difference and determine the amount of blood money to be paid and that then resolves it. So that's your procedure. They're also kind of building blocks. in this society. Kinship is very important, but also you can form bombs outside kinship. One obvious way is through alliances or getting someone to be your patron. Another one that is completely sort of exotic to us is milk kinship. That's to say, if you have two babies, or if I have a baby and I give that baby to be suckled

by a woman outside my immediate family, that will then establish a relationship that can be politically important with that other family. So we have this world where it's defining features are poverty, lack of higher order organization that you can find just a few hundred miles away. You can find very elaborate states close by, pagan religion. You know, it's as you put it a few minutes ago, it's not it's not the society that you would necessarily place bets on to become a dominant society regionally or indeed at a Eurasian scale in the decades and centuries to come. And yet that's what happens by the middle of the 7th century. This society is on the march.

It has a state. It has centralized leadership. It has monotheistic religion. Let's talk about the pivot and perhaps the figure. of Muhammad, the character of the revolution that occurs? In broad terms, how do we get from 600 to 650? The best thinking that's been done about this really is even Khaldun way back in the Middle Ages. And he basically says, look, these Arabs, they are totally incapable of forming a strong

state under a king. They're just too important. subordinate. You can't get them to fall into line. But he says, if somebody comes along with a religious message, if somebody comes along who can claim not to be a king but to be a profit, then that changes the game. They can submit to a profit in a way in which they can't submit to a king. And I don't know exactly how that works, but he does seem to be right. And something that makes him seem to be right is that, you know, what the Prophet Muhammad did in 7th century Arabia is something that religious leaders in the Muslim world in tribal environments in Arabia and the Sahara have done again and again. So there seems to be some kind of trick of religious state formation. and Muhammad somehow got to that trick, maybe stumbled on it with dramatic results.

Well, let's stay on this then. So, you know, monotheism is not Muhammad's invention. There's Judaism, of course, and there are Jews in the Arabian Peninsula at the time of which we're speaking. And then there's Christianity. Let me ask maybe what seems like a silly question. Why is Muhammad not a Christian problem? or a Jewish prophet. Why is he a new kind of prophet? Yeah, I don't think it's in the least the silly question.

I mean, if you just go comparatively, late antiquity is a period in which everybody all over the place, bar the Persians, I mean, in the western half of Eurasia, everybody is converting to Christianity. And I think the rational expectation would be the sooner or later the Arabs will do that too. You know, they may lag behind everybody else, but they'll do it. So, I mean, there is something very surprising, black swan, as you would say, about Mohammed, instead of calling people to some existing confession, developing this new confession. The one thing I can say that helps to make sense of it, I think, is that, I mean, Arabia in this period, And you've got paganism.

There's a lot of argument about how much, but you certainly have it. You've got Christianity. You've got Judaism. But you don't have heavy-duty states. And that means that the kind of religious coercion that goes on in the empires doesn't go on in Arabia. If you're going to establish a new religion, Arabia is a good place to do it. And so at some point here, in this. the 620s or so, give or take, there's this consolidation or coalescence of statehood,

new religious sentiment. And then I guess my next question for you is somehow a sense of nation that is related to these other things, but at least we would, in the 21st century, would think of as almost a kind of distinct category. Help us understand how you go from being groups of cousins kind of facing off against other groups of cousins and maybe some vague awareness that altogether these cousins are a thing because there's, you know, shared language and so forth. But it's pretty, it's not the most important thing in your life for sure to a much more distinct sense of nationhood.

Right. One thing I would say there, I mean, this has become a very controversial question recently. There's a book that takes the line that there was no such thing as an Arab identity until after the rise of Islam. Personally, I think that's wrong. I mean, the evidence isn't great because the evidence in general is not great. But it looks, and for a variety of reasons, it looks to me like Arabs before Islam knew they were Arabs. And, I mean, they shared things like, you know,

I mean, you look at the personal names of Arabs back in the pre-Islamic period. I mean, what you find is that, you know, there are a certain name. the name Al-Haris, for example, you find it all over the Arabian Peninsula. So there's what you might call pompously a shared onomastic culture. The same way there's a shared poetic culture. All these Arab tribes are virtually all of them are known to have had poets. The poets operate in rather similar ways. And you don't have points like that and beyond the borders of Arab territory.

And so in my hunch, there's a few other little bits of evidence one could throw in, is that the Arabs knew they were Arabs. Of course, being Arabs then acquires a very different kind of aura once you get into Islam and the conquest. But I think there was an ethnic identity there that Muhammad could appeal to. Well, so let's then talk about how this polity becomes expansionist, pretty pretty pretty quickly, pretty early in its history. You know, I confess my mental image of the period of the conquests owes a lot to David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia, which is this wonderful depiction, this is a wonderful

cinematic depiction of World War I, but it's the Bedouin tribes of World War I fighting the Turks. Yes. So in my mind's eye, I mean, maybe this, maybe I'll just put the question to you this way, you know, listeners can go out and check out Lawrence of Arabia anytime they want. how different how differently should we picture the conquests and the way in which I guess here's my real question the way in which this new state entity these new ideas gather old Arab ways of raiding and smaller scare warfare into a much larger and more ambitious gambit to seize you know

two empires right so I mean first we have the prophet establishing some kind of a state in Medina. And I mean, that story has told in the sources is not a matter of any prior design. It's a matter of one thing leading to another. He has a

his followers of being persecuted in Mecca, so he's got a problem. A partial solution is to send them off to Abyssinia, but that's too far away. What he needs is a protector. Like Martin Luther got himself a protector. but who's that going to be and he casts around, he tries this, he tries that.

And in the end, he accepts this rather lousy deal that he's offered by those guys in Medina in Yathrib, who are basically saying, you know, come to us, we'll give you some help, but basically, you've got to make it work. And he goes there, and surprisingly, it does work. So we get the establishment of this kind of nucleus of the state. And now that starts in 622. The Prophet dies in 632. In between, he's managed to get quite a good grip on the region around Medina, the hijazz. And he's got some kind of, how can I put it, hegemony over the rest of Arabia.

Now, that to me looks a very unstable situation. And indeed, no sooner has the Prophet died than a lot of those Arabs out there are rebelling against the Islamic State. And now the Prophet's successors, they succeed in beating back that rebellion. But in my bet is that if they'd continued trying to balance their budget within Arabia, that state would have fallen apart pretty soon. The essential thing was to get hold of rich agricultural resources outside Arabia and then levy taxes and use that to hold the state together. So the way I see there's a kind of window of opportunity on the Arab side.

You've got this state, but its chances of long-term survivors are not great unless it can conquer. And you've also, of course, got a window of opportunity on the imperial side in that, you know, you have these two empires, not one empire, but two. And where you have two empires right, squeeze close together, they're going to fight. And they do that repeatedly. But, you know, there's this fairly stable pattern in previous centuries that the empires fight a bit, and then they make peace. and maybe the frontier shifts a bit this way or that way, but basically it's a stable situation. And that changes in the early 7th century.

You have this war that lasts a whole generation, and in the course of which the empires more or less shred each other. So this is a, I mean, if the Arabs hadn't come along, then who knows, the empires might have fully recovered. I mean, might have had another few centuries of those two empires. But I mean, that is the window of opportunity for the Arabs where the empires are unusually weak to move in and see if they can take over. Well, to use some terms from Barfield for exogenous empires like the Arabs in these early stages, they don't, well, they don't stay exogenous for long, do they? So that's sort of the point or my question, which is there's another grand strategy available and very, I think more commonly used by states in the condition of.

of the early Arabs, which is to raid and pillage and take tribute. But, you know, who really wants the trouble of ruling? It seems like a lot of work. There's a different lifestyle. It's a bit dishonorable to, you know, live in luxury like that, you know, much, much easier to kind of stick to what you know and hold these people at gunpoint every season or every few years or whatever and live like that. But that's, I'm curious the extent to which that was considered and rejected or is it just,

it's sort of the opportunity that was there. I mean, maybe in a different period. of imperial strength, that would have been the option available. As it happens, they walk up and the thing starts to fall apart. I should say that as a statement, but it's a question for you. Yeah, right. And there, of course, we're up against these sources in that. I mean, not only is it difficult to pick and choose between what's good and what's not good in the sources, but also the sources are not. They tell us surprisingly little about strategic thinking. I mean, every now and again, you get a sort of flash in the pan.

I mean, say, you get it more with the Prophet himself. You know, like, you know, there's the Battle of Ohod, which is his big defeat. And you get an account of the consultation that went on before that battle. You know, they're being threatened by an invading army, an army coming from Mecca. It's a serious army. they've got to think what to do and there's two options. One is go out there and fight a pitch battle with them

and the other is stay home in Medina, let them come in and get kind of fragmented by all the palm trees and the houses and whatnot and we can take care of them down there in here in Medina. And that is, at least the way it's presented, that's the sensible chance.

choice. But this consultation is full of young hotheads who want to go out and fight a pitch battle. And against his better judgment, the prophet goes along with them. And then it's a disaster. So I mean, that's a scene of strategic consultation. But you get precious little of that when we go into the conquest after the prophet's death. And the main thing I can think of there is, we hear that the caliph, particularly the second caliph, second successor of the prophet Umar, he's very worried about the Arab army getting water between itself and home. He doesn't want them to cross the Nile, he doesn't want them to cross the sea. So there you have a very clear strategic consideration.

And that maybe slows down the conquest that would involve that. But, I mean, you know, the question I asked myself, that I would ask myself if I was in their position when the conquest are starting, is are we going to take on both these empires, even though they're weak? Or are we going to ally with one against the other? And I would have gone for ally with one against the other. You know, I'm kind of a cautious guy. But they don't.

They go for both of them. Now, there must have been some kind of strategic discussion there, but as far as I know, we don't get a hint of it. Well, not to be too far out on a limb here, but the kind of realist strategy that such a discussion would involve would require setting aside ideological considerations. Yes. If you're going to partner with, you know, Zoroastrians against Christians or Christians against Zoroastrians, if we are to take the sources at some degree of face value, neither

option seems particularly palatable to Muslim state conceptions of itself at the time or the idea of jihad or anything like this. To what extent should we take those things at face value and consider the possibility that maybe it wasn't much discussed? Right. Okay. If I had been there, I would have made an argument on the basis that we're closer to the Christians than we are to the Zoroastrians. Why would I make that argument? Because we've already got a hint of that in the Quran and we have traditions that talk that way, that when the Muslims heard that the Byzantines had defeated the Persians, they thought, this is great. They were rooting for the Byzantines and not for the Persians. Then again, there's the fact that these people can,

can be very pragmatic. And I would say that, you know what I mentioned before of them, the Caliph Holmer saying, I don't want you guys crossing water. And that's a purely pragmatic consideration. You could say, you know, in terms of religious zeal, go conquer the whole world. But, you know, this is something that overrides religious zeal. Now, chill it. Yeah. And so what, the 630s were we're into both the Levant and Mesopotamia, sort of in terms of the decade, all at once, which is just extraordinarily ambitious undertaking. Yes. And then, you know, again, just to take it down a notch from the strategic to the,

to the operational level, if you will, back to my jockey question about how much does this look like Lawrence of Arabia, you know, are these essentially tribally organized fighting formations? Are there new things under the sun here in terms of how the Islamic army? the Muslim armies fight. How is the Arab way of war just to employ a crude phrase evolving in this period to the extent we can tell? Yes, sir. Very good question. And let me start by confessing that I have a tremendous sense of puzzlement about some of this. And let me make this very specific. There's a guy called

Saadib Nabi Waktos. He's one of the prophet's early companions. He's a very good guy, and in about 624, the prophet sends him out on an expedition, a military expedition. According to one account, they're supposed to whey a caravan, a Mexican caravan, and pillage it. Maybe that's the case, maybe it's not. But the point I want to make is, we're told the number of men this guy is sent out with. Others are different accounts as usual. Some say it was eight men, some say it was 20, maybe even 21 men. So this guy in 624 is leading a force of between eight and 21 men.

Now, then we go to the mid-630s. This same guy is the general who wins the Battle of Qadisia, which is essential to the conquest of Iraq, the major battle in the Congress. of Iraq. How many men did he have there? Well, we don't really know. I mean, I think I saw the figure of 12,000 somewhere, or as a minimum or something like that. There's no question that they're fighting a big, a major Persian army. So there must be a very substantial force. Now, how did this guy go between 624 and 635 or whatever, you know, in the space of, you know, something like a dozen years?

from knowing how to do a small scale of Arabian-style raid to knowing how to fight a pitched battle with a large army. And you think of all the logistics that go into that and having that many soldiers together in one place. And I mean, to me, there's a real mystery there. Maybe if I was a professional military historian, I would understand it, but I don't. Well, it's a military, I mean, I think if you are puzzled,

then that's probably a good sign that the situation is inherently puzzling. But I suppose my mind immediately goes not to military history, but to, you know, how just sort of paradigms of how things scale rapidly in any context. So, you know, how does Mark Zuckerberg go from working in his dorm room, you know, with something on a project meant basically to flirt with girls to, what, 10 years later? So a similar time frame running a major multinational corporation and, you know, story after story like that in Silicon Valley, people in their girls. people in their garages, all of a sudden becoming internationally significant or managers and owners of internationally significant enterprises, which has to involve the same sort of challenges. And you sort of stumble on, you know, there's a combination of individual talent and insight and work ethic that then intersects with luck and sudden access to resources, sudden access to

resources that you didn't have before. And I suppose there's also, you know, we have looking on anything historically, though you could make the same point about looking at Silicon Valley, we have a bias towards the things that worked because that's what we know about. We know about Facebook. I mean, how many stillborn Facebook-like things were there? How many stillborn nomadic surges were there that amounted to nothing or profits that nobody listened to or whatever? But we see the one that works. And it is mysterious, isn't it? Why that one and not the other thing? Right. Yes, certainly. And there's no question, remarkable things are happening, and maybe Sadd is a very quick learner.

The other thing here, I think, is in the initial stage of the conquest outside Arabia, there's no way these guys could be paying their troops stipends. They don't have that kind of resources. So, I mean, the troops are, so to speak, they're on credit. The crucial thing is they capture territory, and that the state then takes place. possession of that territory raises taxes and pays the troops. And that's how you get a stable situation rather than the kind of raiding strategy that you referred to earlier. So I think there is, I'm coming back to strategic decisions, there is a really major decision.

And it's certainly at least half a military decision. on the part of the state that when we grab territory, we're not going to divide it up among the tribesmen. We're not going to let them help themselves. We're going to put them in one big camp. We're going to tax the territory, and we're going to pay them stipends. And that's why they'll have to do what we tell them. And that's a really crucial decision,

which I think does a lot for the long. life of the state. And also it makes a radical contrast with what happens in, say, Western Europe, where these Germanic armies that move in, essentially what they do is take over bits of land and support themselves on the land, which makes them, I think, much less easy for a state to rein in or control. There's a really major strategic decision about the shape of the conquest of settlement. This goes a bit back to the question of sources, but if we turn the map around and look at things from either the Byzantine or the Persian perspective, how do they understand what's happening to them?

How do they think about these Arabs, which presumably begins as irritants and then very quickly emergency? But how do they understand the nature of the monotheism that they're dealing with? What do they see coming out of the desert at them? Right. I think they know very well that these people coming out of the desert have some kind of of religious message that is related to their own religious message, but is also very significantly different. and that this is linked, if you like, to their militarism.

But really, there's nothing I could say about the Persian response because, and the Persian Empire was conquered the whole of it. And we get virtually nothing from the period that tells us what it was like for them. I mean, it must have been a tremendous oops moment and set the same across the priorities of Byzantines. And there we know it, you know, we actually have the sources. And sure, yes, I mean, they're pivoting and suddenly confronting a major threat they never expected. Well, and then coming back to the Arabs themselves, you know, a fairly common trajectory here is for a nomadic people to seize a sedentary state complex.

then give it a few generations and they end up looking a lot like the people that they conquered in terms of language, in terms of cultural practice, religion. They adopt the practices that they conquer. This happens in East Asia a lot. It can happen in Europe, as you point out. I guess on some level it happens here in the sense that there's no Arab tradition of large-scale state management. So I think state management practices are sort of adopted from the conquered, right?

But in other regards, something about this Islamic cultural complex is sticky and transforms what it touches rather than the other way around. How does that work? Right. Yeah. I mean, what is absolutely crucial is that these guys come with a religious cause. They're very strongly identified with. And that plus their ethnic identity, I think that also certainly helps to give them a sense of being something different from the population they're conquering. But it's nevertheless, I think, very striking that we have a meeting of languages. in Iraq, it's speakers of Aramaic and Persian, meeting speakers of Arabic. And if we had to bet on which language would win out,

I'm not sure what bet we would have made at the beginning, but no question, Arabic wins out. Equally, of course, as we know now, Islam wins out. You could easily imagine, you know, you take the Visigoths in Spain, There they are with this area and heresy from the point of view of the native population of Spain, who are kind of Catholic Christians. And, you know, the gods keep this up for a while quite a long time. And then they decide, now, this is worth maintaining. Let's dump this heresy of ours and become good Catholics like everybody else.

You could imagine something like that happening in the act. Arab case in the Muslim case, but it certainly doesn't. Let's talk about the sort of regime change within the Arab or Islamic polity around the time that we're discussing, right, where the initial run of successors to Muhammad run into some trouble, there's a civil war, and that the character of the character of the Islamic empire as it's coming into, it's the form that will last suddenly shifts dramatically. Tell us a bit about this civil war, which produces splits, of course, that are still with us. today.

Yes, right. So this civil war, I'm the one that starts in 656, but also the next one, at least two, even three civil wars that are going to come over the next couple of centuries. I mean, they're all in the first instance about the succession. You have more than one person who wants to be caliph. Right, so that first civil war, you know, we start off. in Medina, which is still the capital city of the empire, and we have a succession conflict in Medina. The rival parties essentially want to raise troops to support their cause. There are

not too many, there's a scarcity of troops by now anywhere around Medina. So some of them go off to Iraq. Several of them go off to Iraq. And there's also the governor of Syria, who who has dugging in Syria and has a lot of troops there because he's sitting on a province that's right next to what's left of the Byzantine Empire. So you get a war that is fought out in the conquered territories over a period of five years. And what I find really telling, maybe instructive about that civil war, or one thing about it, is, I mean, you fight a civil war, you are inviting your neighbour to invade you. That's what happened in Spain, you know, when the Muslims conquered it, a civil war among the Visigoths and the Muslims coming nominally on one side and take over. Now, the Muslims were able to fight four civil wars without any of the neighboring states

invading. And that, I think, is a remarkable fact. And what it tells us is, that this is an empire which has achieved a remarkable degree of strategic security, its geopolitical situation, is unusually benign. So that these Arabs, they can fight a civil war every few decades, and they still don't lose their empire. Right. It takes what? A couple hundred years, right, before the Turks really start to pose major problems. Am I, right. It's going to be in the kind of middle decades of the ninth century that they started importing large numbers of Turkish slave soldiers.

And then it's not going to be till the 11th century that Turkish tribes actually move in as tribes. Yeah. Well, even there then to your point today, they sort of bring the early manifestations of the problem on themselves through military policy. Well, here's my final question to you. And it is a bit of an unfair last question because we could do hours more conversation just in this question. I think a decade ago or so you wrote a book about this.

But, you know, sitting here in the 21st century, the role of Islam in war in politics is alive and well. Maybe less front of mind for everyone here in 2025 than it was in 2005. But nevertheless, there, I'll do this in the form of a deceptively simple question. Why? Right. And I would certainly say that there is a heritage from the early Islamic period that goes well with warfare and goes well with concerns to inject a lot of religion into politics or keep a lot of religion in politics. I mean, this is a pretty good heritage if you want to do those things. And of course, and what we have at the present day is the result of a kind of distillation

of what was going on in the very early Islamic period. You know, it's now something accessible in books by religious scholars. But I think what we have still is kind of the residue of something much more intense. that existed in that early period. I mean, let me... Yeah, I think, you know, from various bits and pieces of evidence, I have the sense that, well, certainly, the polity, after the conquest, the policy starts off.

We've got an in-group who are the Muhajirun, the people who've done the hijra, higra to Medina or higra to the conquered territories. They've left Arabia and come out there. That's the in-group. There's two out-groups, one is the Christians that they've conquered, all Zoroastrians, and the other is the Bedouin who stayed back in Arabia. Right.

So I think there is a desire back in that early period to keep things that way. In other words, that we have, that Muslims exist to engage in terms. jihad. That's what they should be doing. So that you have, for example, accounts that later look quite bizarre of, again, it's the Kali Forman, who is always doing things. He is actually ordering the burning of crops on farms owned by Muslims. Muslims should not be owning farms. They should be engaged in jihad. And, yeah, you then get, there's a, an eschatological tradition about the Mahdi, now the Redeemer, who is to come near the end of time. This is a Syrian tradition and it says that the Mahdi is going to, he will return every inch of land in Syria to the Christians

and make every Muslim engage in jihad. Again, this idea, Muslims have no business getting into the economy. Their business is jihad. So I think we had a conquest of science. with that very pronounced shape. And, of course, it couldn't be sustained, and it wasn't sustained. And the kind of militant thread in Islam today is a residue of that early situation. Professor Michael Cook, author most recently of a history of the Muslim world, it is a real pleasure and an honor to have you on the show. I'll say for listeners, you know, you've written many books,

some for specialists in these sorts of things. Early Muslim dogma is one that I read as a student, But also books that I think anyone would enjoy, if you have an interest in this sort of subject, a brief history of the human race, is another favorite of mine. You did one of those, I don't know if it's still in print, but you did a great, very short introduction to Muhammad that's very exact. That was a long time ago, yes. You know, well, I was, even when I was, it's longer ago than me, but even when I was young,

I had affection for older books. Anyway, thank you so, so much for coming on today. Thank you very much, and that was great to hear. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcast. Podcasts.