Chapter 3: Shadow of the Sword: Patterns of Islamic Conquest
In the first years of the Muslim expansion Islam was most concentrated among nomads or urban dwellers. The new religion lagged in its spread and appeal to sedentary agricultural communities. Nomads in the form of the Bedouin armies of the Prophet and his early successors were, of course, the initial carriers of the Islamic meme. The Arab leaders settled their army of occupation in large garrison towns which soon developed into cities. These pastoral conquerors quickly adapted themselves to urban environments. In addition, the conquerors attracted masses of camp followers from among the native population; these provided the Arabs with needed economic and administrative skills. These urban dwellers, in intimate contact with their Arab overlords were more susceptible to conversion than were the sedentary peasant masses.
The second great wave of Islamic conquerors, the Turks followed a broadly similar pattern. While military conquest was the most important means for the expansion of Islam, there were minor additional factors. Historian Ira Lapidus sketches the different ways in which Islam expanded:
The expansion of Islam involved different forces. In North Africa, Anatolia, the Balkans, and India, it was carried by nomadic Arab or Turkish conquerors. In the Indian Ocean and West Africa it spread by peaceful contacts among merchants or through the preaching of missionaries. In some cases the diffusion of Islam depended upon its adoption by local ruling families; in others, it appealed to urban classes of the population or tribal communities.[1]
Even in areas where Islam spread by trade or conversion newly converted rulers, elites and clerics, invariably resorted to jihad to expand their territory or extend their new religion, at the expense of unconverted neighbors.
The following table summarizes the various Islamic expansions which are described in further detail below.
Major Territories of Islamic Expansion
Wave ---------- National / Ethnic --- Mode of Initial ----- Territory/---- Approx. ---- Approx.
----------------- Spearhead(s) --------- Islamization ------- Province ----- Start Year - End Year
Initial Arab ------ Arabs ---------------Conquest ----------Greater Syria -------633 -------- 640
Expansions -------Arabs ---------------Conquest ----------Iraq -------------------634 -------- 641
----------------------Arabs ---------------Conquest ----------Egypt -----------------640 -------- 646
----------------------Arabs ---------------Conquest ----------Persia -----------------640 -------- 651
Secondary Arab - Arabs --------------- Conquest ----------Maghreb -----------643 -----------709
Expansions ------ Arabs, Persians --- Conquest ---------Transoxiana/ ------699 -----------930
------------------------------------------------------------------Afghanistan
--------------------- Arabs, Persians ---Conquest --------Western India/Sind 710 -----------870
-
Moorish -----------Arabs, Berbers -----Conquest ----------Spain ---------------711 -----------732
Invasion ----------Arabs, Berbers -----Conquest ----------Sicily ---------------827 -----------902
Nilotic ------------ Arabs ---------------- Conquest ---------Sudan ---------------651 ----------1500
Infiltration
Initial Turkish -- Seljuk Turks -------- Conquest ---------Eastern/ ----------- 1071 ----------1240
Expansion -----------------------------------------------------Central Anatolia
Ottoman ---------- Ottoman Turks ------Conquest -------- Western Anatolia -- 1301 ---------1461
Expansions -------Ottoman Turks ------ Conquest --------Balkans -------------- 1353 --------1526
East Turk/ --------Turks, Moguls ------- Conquest ---------India ----------------- 1001 ---------1700
Mongol ------------Golden Horde ---------Conquest ---------Crimea, So. Russia --1313 --------1341
Expansions
Sub Saharan ------Berbers --------------Conquest/Trade --West Africa ---------1061 ---------1893
Infiltration
East African -------Arabs ---------------Trade --------------East African Coast --850 ---------1885
Colonies
E. Turkestan/ ------Arabs, Persians, --Trade --------------China, Sinkiang -----750 ---------1513
China Expeditions --Turks
Southeast Asia -----Arabs, Indian ------Trade -------------Malaya ---------------1292 ---------1800
Expeditions ----------Muslims
------------------------Arabs, Indian ------Trade -------------Indonesia ------------1292 ---------1800
-------------------------Muslims
World Distribution of IslamThe astounding success of Islam is evident in a cursory examination of population geography. A map of the world distribution of Muslim population in the middle of the last century[2] shows Muslims predominating in a broad swath from the northwest bulge of Africa through Egypt and Sudan through the entire Middle East and Asia Minor into Pakistan and deep into Central Asia and Sinkiang. There are noncontiguous Muslim majorities from the horn of Africa extending down the east African coast; in Bangladesh and the Malay Peninsula extending through Indonesia into Mindanao; in the Balkans with pockets in European Turkey, Albania and Bosnia. In addition there are significant Muslim minorities in Sub Saharan west and east Africa, south Africa, the Caucasus and Central Asian fringes of Russia, north central and southern China and scattered throughout the Indian Republic.
The distribution of the Muslim population shows a striking correlation with a map of world climate.[3] The broad expanse of land extending from Northwest Africa into Central and South Asia, and the horn of Africa contains the majority of the desert and semiarid steppe lands of the African-Eurasiatic landmass. This dry mass is only interrupted by large river valleys: the Nile, Mesopotamia, Oxus and Indus. A smaller portion of this area consists of dry-summer Mediterranean climates along the coastal fringes and extending along the fringes of the Caucasus Mountains into northern and western Iran; these make up a great part of the world’s Mediterranean climates. In addition, most of the European territory once held by Muslims, the central and southern Iberian peninsula, Sicily, Cyprus and the southern Balkans also have dry Mediterranean climates. Noncontiguous areas with Muslim majorities or large minorities may, however, have radically different varieties of climates: rainforest, tropical savanna, subtropical or high mountain. There is an obvious advantage for Muslim armies, which consisted primarily of pastoral nomads, in maneuvering over dry treeless plains and subsisting in arid deserts and steppes.
Causes of the Initial Arab Expansion
The unification of the Arab tribes and the end of their incessant inter-tribal raiding left the new Islamic rulers with the problem of containing or re-directing their warlike energies. The words of Muhammad were a useful, as well as profitable, instrument in channeling these energies. Now, it may be that these verses from the Koran were applicable only during the time of the Prophet and referred only to the wars against his Arab enemies; but they were certainly not interpreted as such by both his immediate and future political successors. Some of the calls to arms in the Koran are:[4]
Fight against such of those who have been given the scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day … until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.
Surah 9:29
And wage war on all the idolaters as they are waging war on all of you.
Surah 9:36
Go forth, light-armed and heavy-armed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah!
Surah 9:41
Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free.
Surah 9:5
There was an economic, as well as a social, imperative to the re-directing of the natural aggressiveness of the Bedouin:
There was an important material aspect to this militant doctrine. By forbidding fighting and raiding within the umma, Muhammad deprived the Arabian tribes of a traditional source of livelihood and drove them inexorably toward imperial expansion.[5]
The motives of material advantage and providing the rambunctious Arab tribes with new outlets for their aggression were both nicely satisfied with raids outside of Arabia proper; raids that quickly and opportunistically became campaigns of conquest. As historian of the Arabs Philip Hitti notes:
Far from being entirely the result of deliberate and cool calculation, the campaigns seem to have started as raids to provide outlets for the warring spirit of the tribes now forbidden to engage in fratricidal combats, the objective in most cases being booty and not the gaining of a permanent foothold. But the machine so built soon got beyond the control of those who built it. … It was then that the systematic campaigns began.[6]
Some scholars, thus, emphasize the accidental nature of the first Arab conquests. Hitti sees it as a movement that “acquired momentum as the warriors passed from victory to victory” and views its creation as “due less to early design than to the logic of immediate circumstances.”[7] Noss, emphasizing the economic motive, agrees with that assessment:
It may be doubted whether the spread of Islam, at least in its early stages, was the result of calculation. … Both religion and greed may be granted to have played their part as motivating impulses; but it would be closer to the mark to say that Muhammad unified the bedouins … and thus made it possible for them … to yoke together their economic need and their religious faith…. [8]
Other authorities contend that the religious imperative toward ever more expansion was present from the very beginning:
We know that before the end of his life Muhammad was in conflict with Christian populations in the north of Arabia, and even within the confines of the Roman [Byzantine] Empire. What would have happened if he had lived we do not know. But probably the policy which Abu Bakr carried on was the policy of Muhammad himself. There could have been no real compromise. He regarded himself as vicegerent of God upon earth. The true religion could only be Islam as he laid it down, and acceptance of it meant acceptance of his divinely inspired authority…[9]
They believe that Muhammad envisioned jihad
…not as a limited defensive action to establish his religious community … he saw it continuing far beyond his lifetime. ‘Jihad will be performed continuously since the day Allah sent me as a prophet until the day the last member of my community will fight with the Dajjal (Antichrist).’[10]
And even though
…it is unlikely that Muhammad had imagined the full scope of Islam’s future expansion, let alone planned it in detail, ‘his was the far-seeing mind which directed the Arabs’ attention to the strategic importance of Syria for the new Islamic state.[11]
However, the most likely event is that the “Arab conquests … were in part the outcome of deliberate state policy and in part accidental.”[12]In the final analysis it might not make much difference; as Karsh observes:
Whether the conquests were an opportunistic magnified offshoot of small raiding parties or a product of a preconceived expansionist plan is immaterial. Empires are born of chance as well as design. What counts is that the Arab conquerors acted in a typically imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.[13]
There can be no doubt that Arab appetites for further raids and even conquest were whetted once they were made aware of the immense and easily obtained booty available in the neighboring territories. And as it was that “in Arabia the result of victory had been booty, so at least for the tribes the Islamic conquests were great expeditions for riches.”[14]Indeed, as Goldziher points out:
It was precisely the prospect of tangible gain that made it possible to attract and hold the greater part of the Arab masses that joined him. … A share in the spoils of war must have been among the preeminent inducements that enabled Islam to draw people to its banners. … When one reads the ancient narratives … one is truly astonished at the reports of magnificent distributions of plunder …[15]
The greed of the ruling aristocracy for plunder was almost insatiable. “Uthman ibn Affan … the third caliph exploited expansion for unabashed self-enrichment. … This fortune paled in comparison with the fabulous wealth amassed by some of Muhammad’s closest companions.” Zubair ibn Awam, Talha ibn Ubaidallah and the conqueror of Egypt, Amr ibn-al-As expropriated vast estates, villas and prodigious amounts of booty from the conquered peoples.[16] The warrior elite, in general, also shared in the plunder:
One cannot fail to be astonished when one reads lists, from as early as the third Islamic decade, of the great riches gathered by the pious warriors and men of prayer, of the vast pieces of land they called their own, of the well appointed houses they furnished at home and in the conquered territories, of the luxury with which they surrounded themselves.[17]
The ideology contrived by Muhammad and his immediate successors, whether deliberately or by a fortuitous random evolution of doctrine was, certainly, an ingenious combination of worldly advantage with ascetic religious zeal. Hitti observes that the “passion to go to heaven in the next life may have been operative with some, but the desire for the comforts and luxuries of the civilized regions … was just as strong in the case of many.”[18] And, as will be elaborated on in a subsequent chapter, in addition to material advantages there were immense sexual opportunities.
An additional factor underlying the Arab conquests was an increase in the population of the Arabian Peninsula relative to that of the adjacent areas:
Demographic details give an approximate idea of the dimensions of the shift, and of the human resources which lay at the basis of Arab expansion … while the populations of Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan stood at a mere 58 per cent of their AD 200 level in AD 600, that of Arabia and the Gulf states had nearly doubled. The clash of the giants, Byzantium and Persia, had favored a peripheral ‘marcher’ area.[19]
The Arab conquests were, in fact, greatly facilitated by the exhausting wars between the Byzantines and the Persians. Only after the exhaustion of the Byzantine and Persian states was apparent “did calculated efforts to extend the spread of Islam make their appearance.”[20] Nor was it only the long rivalry between the empires that enabled the Arab armies to achieve quick victories; both Byzantium and Persia were rent by religious conflict and social unrest:
When the Arabs finally spilled out of the Arabian peninsula they found the Byzantines not yet recovered from the Persian struggle and suffering from the internal convulsions of religious discord. The Persians, defeated by the Byzantines, had in addition suffered from a fossilized social structure that resulted in the jacquerie and communism of the Mazdakites.[21]
For many years the Eastern Roman Empire had to cope with religious, social and ethnic conflict, corruption and inefficiency. According to the historian of Byzantium Vasiliev, “…the list of primary causes for Arabian success includes religious conditions in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, the racial kinship of the population of the first two countries to the people of Arabia, the inadequacy of military forces, inefficient military organization and poor civil administration, and class relations in Egypt.”[22]
Similar conditions prevailed in the domains of the Persians. However, in the case of Persia, there was not only conflict between an established orthodoxy and heretical sects; there was also an inter-religious conflict pitting the Christian population of a major province, Mesopotamia, against the empire:
The welcome on the part of the Aramaean peasants was no less cordial than that rendered by the Syrian peasants and for much the same reasons. The Semitic Iraqis looked upon the Iranian masters as aliens and felt closer kinship with the newcomers. As Christians they had not been especially favoured by the followers of Zoroaster.[23]
Social conflict, maladministration and heresy afflicted Persians as well as Byzantines. Bernard Lewis notes that
…the Persian Empire at the end of the sixth century had just emerged from a revolutionary convulsion, in the course of which the old feudal structure was broken and replaced by a military despotism with a mercenary army. But the new order was far from secure and the many discontents of the population produced a series of dangerous religious heresies that threatened the religious and consequently the political unity of the Empire.[24]
-
The weaknesses of the two rival empires made them exceedingly vulnerable to the tactical advantages naturally enjoyed, in all ages, by rugged and highly mobile nomad armies united under competent leadership:
The first instrument of victory was the exclusive use of horsemanship by a pastoral people genetically adapted and culturally trained for fighting. In this they were like all pastoral people. But they surpassed their predecessors in the rapidity of their movements carried out in a vast desert under conditions of appalling rigour. … The Muslim expansion was led by commanders of the Koreish tribe … whose commanding position at Mecca, at the centre of the great Arabian caravan industry, guaranteed that they would be supremely accomplished in controlling the force of 30,000 Bedouin and bandits whom they mobilized for their first attack. … It was a success that was to be repeated from a Central Asiatic base by the Turks, the Tatars, the Mongols and the Moguls.[25]
Hitti also observes how the Arab’s “seemingly miraculous success was due to the application of a military technique adapted to the open steppes of Western Asia and North Africa – the use of cavalry and camelry.”[26] He cites one particular example of these blitzkrieg like campaigns conducted by the Arabs:
Ordered to go to the relief of Arab troops … Khalid, ‘the sword of Allah,’ struck by forced camel marches from lower Iraq straight across the trackless desert with a body of veteran fighters and appeared with dramatic suddenness in the neighborhood of Damascus … Water for the troops was carried in bags, but for the horses the paunches of the old camels, which were slaughtered for food served as reservoirs.[27]
The difference in geography between the territories of the two empires may have resulted in the swift overthrow of Persia as opposed to the centuries of dogged resistance on the part of the Byzantines. Arab nomad armies, no doubt, found it easier to maneuver quickly over the arid plateau of Persia. And while the Arabs were able, subsequently, to overrun central Anatolia, the more heavily populated hilly and forested coastal areas slowed down their advance, enabling the Byzantine armies to regroup, to buttress the defenses of their formidable capital city and ultimately to drive the invaders out. The Muslim conquest of a debilitated Byzantium was only completed seven centuries later by another group of predatory nomads, the Turks.
-
In any event, in those very early days of Islamic expansion, the conquering Arabs were less than eager to share their religious insights with the conquered masses; it was only in subsequent centuries that the Muslims fully embraced the proselytizing implicit in the Prophet’s universal message. To be accepted as converts it was necessary for non-Arabs to become “clients”, second class citizens, of particular Arab tribes since “at first Islam was held to be a religion for the Arabs alone, or also for their clients.”[28]
Hitti emphasizes the ethnic exclusiveness of the early Arab conquests asserting that the “Arabians burst forth upon the unsuspecting world as members of a national theocracy. It was Arabianism and not Muhammadanism that triumphed first.”[29] Historian Richard Bulliet echoes that viewpoint:
The conquests of Islam are just as properly viewed as the conquests of the Arabs. Being an Arab and being a Muslim were so much the same thing that people in the conquered territories were sometimes unaware of the specific religious character of the invaders.[30]
He also contends that the Arab conquerors at that time in history were not interested in creating a polity that would entice the conquered populations to abandon their own cultures and traditions.[31] On the contrary, the early Arab leadership was exclusively concerned with reinforcing the new faith among the Arabs and establishing them as a permanent ruling class. For example, the Caliph “Umar’s policy was to organize the Arabians, now all Moslems, into a complete religio-military commonwealth with the members keeping themselves pure and unmixed – a sort of martial aristocracy – and denying the privilege of citizenship to all non-Arabians.”[32] In pursuit of this goal and in violation of various treaties he expelled all Jews and Christians from Arabia proper.
However, this policy was doomed to failure; a fact that became increasingly obvious within a few decades of the conquest. For one thing, the universalism of the Prophet’s message could not be permanently denied. A more important factor, which will be explored below in Culture of the Harem, was the system of polygamy and sexual slavery, which was one of the main tenets underlying the whole Muslim expansion. The combination of a numerous hybrid population combined with increasing numbers of converts made the goal of exclusion untenable; a development fraught with consequences for the future spread of the Islamic meme.
An additional factor assumed increasing importance over time in extending the initial territory seized by the Arabs, particularly against their Christian rivals in Byzantium and Europe. The Arabs, themselves an Oriental people, increasingly assumed the role as upholders of the east against the culture of Hellenism and the political ideology of Rome. The rapid Arab absorption of the territories of the eastern Mediterranean and Iran turned what was initially an Arab Islamic conquest into one more chapter of the centuries old clash between East and West.
The clash can be traced back over a thousand years. During the first millennium BC, in an arc stretching from the west coast of the Levant through Anatolia, Greece and Italy a new consciousness, a dynamic individualism, arose in stark contrast to the static group psychology of the older river valley civilizations. Greece was the center and it was here that the critical breakthrough to a new mode of thought; a new conception of human destiny, a new civilization occurred.
From the beginning there was conflict between East and West as Greek civilization and its descendants clashed with the heirs of the ancient river valley civilizations. A series of armed conflicts began when in 490 BC, the Persians invaded mainland Greece. A century and a half later in his war of “revenge”, Alexander conquered the Persian Empire. A century afterward, the Parthians revived the Persian Empire and struggled, first against the Greek kingdoms and later against Greece’s Roman successors.
Religious conflict between the orthodox Christianity of the Hellenized Byzantine elite and the various heretical and schismatic movements in Egypt and Syria was one expression of this clash; an expression internal to the Byzantine Empire. Externally, the Sasanids were the standard bearers of Oriental culture. Then, early in the 7th century the Arabs imbued with a militant new faith, erupted from their desert home, overthrew the Persians, and Islam was to ultimately inherit and reinvigorate Oriental civilization. Philip Hitti observes that “the Moslem conquests may be looked upon as the recovery by the ancient Near East of its early domain. Under the stimulus of Islam the East now awoke and asserted itself after a millennium of Western domination.”[33] In fact, the Arabs at first and other Muslims later, assumed the role of defending Oriental civilization from the vanquished Sasanids. This became obvious when with the advent of the Abbasids “Arabianism fell, but Islam continued, and under the guise of international Islam Iranianism marched triumphantly on.”[34]
Pragmatism of the Islamic conquerors
The pragmatism of the Arab conquerors was one of the most important factors in consolidating the initial conquests and paving the way for future expansion. Though they fought with a fanatical intensity fueled by faith or by greed, once victory was achieved the early Arab conquerors, generally, exploited their new subjects with cunning practicality making a good show of tolerance or even benevolence. The Prophet himself was a model pragmatic political opportunist:
Yet being the astute politician and statesman that he was, Muhammad was prepared to content himself initially with a merely verbal profession of faith and a payment of tribute. He knew full well that paganism, as a social and political phenomenon, was virtually a spent force … he could afford to wait and allow the socio-economic dynamics, which now favored Islam, to run their natural course.[35]
Muhammad’s successors were fortunate that the regulations devised by the Prophet provided for tolerating cooperative tribute payers in the conquered territories. Driving out of non-Muslims was an option “hardly available in the vast territories conquered by the Arabs, both because the populations involved were far too large to make their expulsion practicable and because their tribute was indispensable in enabling the Arabs to enjoy fully their privileges as conquerors.”[36] As Hitti, very succinctly, puts it “where the sword of Islam was not long enough to reach all the necks involved, technicality gave way to expediency.”[37] In those very early days, even spreading the faith took second place to considerations of expediency. As we have seen, the economic exploitation of the conquered territories was the primary concern of the Arabs and as “mass conversion would have threatened them with certain economic loss, they did not encourage conversion.”[38] Indeed, at times under the Umayyads converts were turned away since “they would attain the benefits of being a Muslim, which included a remission of paying the head or poll tax, or even in some instances the land tax.”[39]
Thus, Arab pragmatism even reached the point of discouraging conversions to maintain tax revenues. Another example of a practical concession made by the Arabs was allowing the continuing use of native bureaucrats and languages for a half century or more following the Arab conquests:
Although armed power was in new hands, the financial administration continued as before, with secretaries drawn from the groups which had served previous rulers, using Greek in the west and Pahlavi in the east. From the 690s the language of administration was altered to Arabic…[40]
Pragmatic considerations prevailed in later waves of Islamic conquests. The Seljuk and Ottoman Turks tolerated the dhimmi populations for purposes of economic exploitation and even military recruitment; and continued the practice of employing native Greek officials for many years, at least until the time that Turkish speakers were able to assume these positions. However, by the time of the Turkish conquests the attitude of Muslims toward accepting converts had long since changed:
There is no indication that the Muslim rulers attempted to halt the conversions of Christians in Anatolia, and so it may be that satisfaction of a missionizing zeal may have outweighed losses from the head tax. Indeed, the conquests, commerce, and spoils of an entire empire may have served to soften the loss of such a considerable source of revenue as the djizye.[41]
The Ottoman Sultan Murad even considered the forcible conversion of Christian populations. However, he “lacked the spare military resources to keep it [the Christian population of the Balkans] in subjection by police control. This ruled out a general policy of forcible conversion to Islam, which would in any case have served only to provoke and further to intensify any threat from the Christians.”[42]
The extension of Dhimmi status to Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and other “people of the book” was provided for in early Islamic law. More problematic was the extension of such tolerated status to various pagan groups. However, after considerable struggle, pragmatic considerations led to granting such status even to the “idolaters” of India:
Recognizing that a newly conquered land is bound to have a substantial non-Muslim population, the Sharia provides for laws to govern them. They essentially become dhimmis. At first, it was meant only for ‘People of the Book’— or Jews and Christians, soon including Zoroastrians because Iran was rapidly conquered by the Arabs. Somewhat later, when Islamic rule came to parts of India, Hindus were given grudging recognition as dhimmis though, as idolaters, they were not entitled to it. But the expediencies of politics and governance forced Islamic rulers of India to bend the rules of the Sharia against the blandishments of the clergy.[43]
In fact, the first Muslim general to penetrate Indian territory, the conqueror of Sind, al-Qasim “offered, in return for a peaceful surrender, to spare lives and guarantee the safety of temples … Hindu and Buddhist establishments were respected … The jizya … was imposed; yet brahmins and Buddhist monks were allowed to collect alms, and temples to receive donations.”[44] However, the policies initiated by the far-sighted Governor were quickly repealed inaugurating a long and bloody period of persecution. In the early centuries of Muslim penetration “the Hindus were initially subject to mass execution and mass enslavement. Some of those enslaved converted. Others did not wait to be enslaved, but converted after witnessing the realities of life under Muslim rule.”[45] Eventually, grudgingly perhaps, the rulers of various far-flung Muslim territories had to come to a modus vivendi with their numerous Hindu subjects. In 14th century India “Muslim rulers, mostly far removed from the Islamic world, often at war with the sultan of Delhi or other co-religionists, and always dependent on the loyalty of a largely non-Muslim population, had perforce to compromise.”[46] In the end pragmatism led the final and greatest Muslim dynasty, the Moguls to formally extend the dhimmi contract to the Hindus.
But the Mughal rulers realized that if the only possible choices open to Hindus -- as non-People of the Book (ahl al-kitab), they were not permitted to live and practice openly their religion -- were death or conversion, then there would ultimately be no non-Muslims left to be exploited economically for the purposes of the Muslim state. This could end the fabled Mughal luxury, the famed Mughal magnificence ... So the Hindus were accorded "honorary" status as dhimmis, not because of Muslim mercy, but because by so doing, the ruling Muslims could economically exploit them through the jizyah …[47]
Finally, it should be noted that the pragmatism which prevailed for much of Islamic history, once the subject populations meekly submitted to Muslim rule, gives an illusion of Muslim tolerance. Furthermore, in an analogy to the ‘anthropic principle’ of modern cosmology[48], one can say that if the conquerors had not shown at least a minimal amount of tolerance toward the conquered, Islam would not now exist in any significant form. They would have provoked the various factions of non Muslims into reconciling their differences and uniting in a desperate resistance. Moreover, there would have been no dhimmi population on which to parasitize both economically and culturally. The economic base of the conquered territories which provided Muslim rulers with resources for expansion would have been destroyed. Consequently, the Muslim polities in most areas of the world would have been stillborn. Thus, today Islam, instead of being a powerful history shaping force, would be a relic; perhaps existing only in Arabia and a few scattered communities outside of the Peninsula. The system of dhimmitude and exploitation may not have been designed by any one man, but its cumulative effect over the years may be viewed as an ingenious social invention that facilitated Islamic expansion. Evidence bearing on this point is provided by Islam’s ultimate failure in India. This failure is a likely consequence of particular ill treatment meted out to the “idolaters not of the book.” The bitterness created, one that exceeds even the resentment felt by the conquered “peoples of the book” poisoned Islam’s reception by the majority of Hindus.
The Arab Empire in the Context of Ancient Imperialism
The Arabs were, certainly, not unique as empire-builders. They were both preceded and followed by a number of large empires in Eurasia and the Mediterranean. And although the Arabs had high motivation derived from a powerful ideological imperative; it was an advantage they shared with many other imperial nations:
Throughout history all imperial powers and aspirants have professed some kind of universal ideology as both a justification of expansion and a means of ensuring the subservience of the conquered peoples: in the case of the Greeks and Romans it was that of ‘civilization’ vs. ‘barbarity,’ in the case of the Mongols it was the conviction in their predestination to inherit the earth. For the seventh-century Arabs it was Islam’s universal vision of conquest as epitomized in the Prophet’s summons to fight the unbelievers wherever they might be found.[49]
The Arab conquests, in their speed and extent were comparable to the conquests of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. However the Arabs had several unique advantages that made their empire more durable. Arab culture and Islamic religion developed deep roots in the conquered territories due, to a large extent, to their breeding system. Alexander also sought to encourage the spread of a fused Hellenic and Persian civilization through intermarriage. But the Arab breeding system, with a permanent system of concubinage and sexual slavery was more comprehensive and on-going than the Macedonian. Arab culture therefore penetrated deeply in the conquered territories while Hellenistic culture was never more than a thin surface on top of the oriental culture of the subject masses.
The lightning conquests of the Mongols are comparable to those of the Arabs, and the territory overrun was even more extensive. In addition, the Mongol warrior elite, like the Arabs practiced polygamy and concubinage. Indeed, recent genetic research points to Genghis Khan as having an enormous number of male descendants in Asia. However, the Mongols had nothing comparable to the strong religious motivation of the Arabs. In addition, they lacked the imperative to spread the ideology of Mongolianism; the Mongol chieftains were interested in power and in loot, they had no evangelical pretensions. Thus the Mongols, instead of absorbing, were absorbed by the culture of those they subjugated. The eastern Mongols were eventually assimilated by Chinese and Buddhist culture; the western Mongols became Muslims.
Rome had an empire comparable in extent to that of the Arabs. And like the Arab, Roman culture was deeply rooted and long-lasting. But, unlike the Arab empire, the Roman Empire was the result of a gradual slow accretion occurring over many centuries.
Islam’s Nomadic SpearheadsThe expansion of Islam’s borders by conquest was spearheaded by a series of barbarian nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples. Following the Arabs, it was primarily Berbers, Turks and Mongols that spread the sword of Islam into new territory. In contrast the more civilized Persians adopted a strategy of acceding to Islam and then infiltrating it from within, ultimately using it as a tool of vengeance against their longtime rival, the Greco-Roman civilization of the West. The ultimate triumph of Shi’ism as the state religion of Persia in the 16th century was another consequence of the Persian strategy of preserving their national identity. The Persians were instrumental in consolidating and administering the far flung Islamic possessions; even to the point of establishing their own dynasties which held sway over Persia, Transoxiana and a nominally Abbasid Iraq. But they formed only a subordinate legion in extending Muslim conquests west into Anatolia and east into India. The conquest of new territory was left mostly to the nomadic Turks and Mongols. It was the Turks who, falling under the sway of Persian civilization as well as that of the religion of Islam, administered the final blow to the Persians longtime rivals in Byzantium.
Of all the nomadic spearheads it was the Turks who became the most important champions of Islam. They along with their other central Asian cousins, the Mongols, eventually superseded even the Arabs:
A new race from Central Asia was now pouring its blood into the struggle of Islam for world supremacy. The story of these barbarian infidels setting their feet on the necks of the followers of the Prophet and at the same time accepting the religion of the conquered and becoming its ardent champions, was not a unique instance… the Mongols of the thirteenth century, as well as their other kinsmen, the Ottoman Turks of the early fourteenth century repeated the same process.[50]
The Turks were the dominant Islamic Central Asian contingent. The Mongols entered the scene as avowed enemies of the Muslims, devastating large areas of Muslim territory and even sacking Baghdad. As Lewis observes regarding these people of the Asian steppes:
Unlike the Persians, the Greeks, and the ancient peoples of the Middle East, the Turks and Mongols were never conquered by Islam. On the contrary, they entered the Islamic world as conquerors, some of them freely converted in their homelands, some of them, the Mongols, arriving as pagan aliens and imposing a pagan domination over the Muslims.[51]
Of course the Mongols eventually converted to Islam, and becoming indistinguishable from the Turks in language and culture, proceeded to spread their new faith further into both the steppe lands and India. These new converts from central Asia soon became even more “Muslim” than the Arabs. As Lewis notes:
Partly because of the simple intensity of the faith as they encountered it on the frontiers of Islam and heathendom, partly because their conversion to Islam at once involved them in Holy War against their own heathen kinsmen, the converted Turks sank their national identity in Islam as the Arabs and Persians had never done.[52]
However, not all of these Turks came as conquerors. The first contingent entered the Arab world as recruits or even as slaves of the Caliph al-Mamun. In the far west another primitive tribal people, the Berbers, after a fierce but brief resistance, cast their lot with the Arabs and were instrumental in conquering Spain and spreading Islam to large areas of West Africa.
With every extension of Islamic territory the nomad vanguard was accompanied by Muslims of other ethnic groups. Some of these joined the original nomadic invaders in fighting the infidel, others simply followed in their wake as settlers or colonists. Thus, the Seljuk Turks were accompanied or followed by Persians, Kurds and Arabs in Anatolia. The Ottoman conquerors of Anatolia and the Balkans were joined by other Muslim cohorts and by both converts and opportunistic mercenaries from many ethnicities. The Berbers joined with the Arabs in the invasion of Spain. In India the “Ghorid forces included Afghans, Persians and Arabs, but the most numerous and effective contingents were of Turkic stock.”[53]
Moreover, each of Islam’s nomadic vanguards was usually followed at a later time by additional nomads from the same, or a closely related, ethnic group who were often extremely destructive to the newly pacified conquered territories and to the fragile social orders recently established by their preceding kin. Often, these unwelcome relatives would be diverted by the local Muslim authorities to attack rival Muslim rulers or to invade the territory of yet unconquered infidels. These secondary invasions were as important in expanding or consolidating Islamic territory as were the first invasions.
Following the conquest of the Maghreb and of Spain the still independent Berber tribes proved troublesome to the settled Muslim communities of Arabs and Berbers. While these tribes were often channeled into the continuing struggle against infidels in Spain or elsewhere in Africa, they also formed an opposition to established Muslim states which “took the form of schismatic and heretical Moslem sectarianism.”[54] In addition to this secondary Muslim Berber encroachment, the Maghreb in the eleventh century was ravaged by the “troublesome Arab tribes of the banu-Hilal and Sulaym”. The Fatimid caliph of Egypt, to rid himself of their bothersome presence, persuaded them “to move westward where for years they ravaged Tripoli and Tunisia.”[55] While these rapacious newcomers helped to bring about the Arabisation of many Muslim Berbers, they were, as the historian of Dhimmitude Bat Yeor, points out, even more devastating to the surviving non Muslim groups. “In the Maghreb, tribal wars which also decimated the Muslim populations were even crueler on the dhimmis living as they did under the protection of a monarch, whose assassination could cause their destruction.”[56] In fact, many Jewish merchants from the once thriving province of Ifriqiya “transferred to Egypt in the wake of the devastating Bedouin invasions that overwhelmed Ifriqiya between 1050 and 1057.”[57]
Another territory bordering Egypt, the Sudan, was also ravaged by Bedouin tribes, driven out or re-directed by the Egyptian Muslim authorities. The infiltration of these pastoralists was instrumental in the long process of Islamization of the Sudan. This infiltration gathered force “during the early disturbed decades of the third century of Islam” when “it seems that nomadic Arabs began to enter the Sudan in small parties”.[58]
While the Arab Bedouins were mostly directed toward the west and south (Sudan), there were continuing Bedouin incursions into the eastern Muslim domains, where they also wreaked damage on settled Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In Iran, although the destructive effects of nomadism occurred primarily as a result of the later Turkish and Mongol incursions “certain Arabs … in the center and east, were pure Bedouins and frequently insufferable to the inhabitants of the agricultural fringes”.[59] And few areas were as continually ravaged as Palestine, no doubt due to the close proximity of the large reservoir of Bedouin tribes in the neighboring Arabian Desert. In Palestine, furthermore, “in the early Middle Ages … the ravages which followed Arab tribal battles, resumed with the arrival of the Turkomans in 1071.”[60] In addition, the nomad traditions of feuding and raiding continued to plague settled populations, particularly non-Muslims, up to the twentieth century. According to Bat Yeor:
Apart from the enslavement of rebels, there were episodic abductions of Christian and Jewish women and children by nomads in rural regions of Kurdistan, Mesopotamia, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the Maghreb. Although totally illegal according to Islamic law, this continued to be a regular practice during razzias and uprisings until the twentieth century.[61]
The initial penetration of the Turkish Islamic vanguard was followed by subsequent migrations of closely related Turkish groups, usually known as Turkmen, and by, their more distant kin, the Mongols. The disruptions caused by these secondary Turkish invasions to existing Muslim polities and to the hapless dhimmis, were as, or even more, severe than were the disruptions accompanying the secondary migrations of the Bedouin tribes. Both Bedouin and Turkmen nomads were a plague on settled Muslim populations and their rulers, as well as on Christians, but the latter as infidels had much the harder time.
Turkmen impact in Anatolia has been well documented by historians, particularly in the writings of Speros Vryonis. He notes that the conquest of the Byzantine borderlands in western Anatolia “was a long and destructive process that lasted for a century. … The prolonged hostile relations of Byzantines and Turks in this part of Anatolia resulted in the destruction of Byzantine society and in the nomadization of large areas.”[62] As the later Bedouin migration altered the ethnic and linguistic balance in North Africa, so it was with the secondary Turkmen incursion into Anatolia:
The invasions, settlements, and raids of the Turkmens played a crucial role in the fate of the Anatolian peninsula. The impact of this nomadic-pastoral-warrior society, which was at the height of its heroic age, upon the stability of the highly developed sedentary society of the Byzantine Christians was one of the principal factors in the cultural transformation of Asia Minor.[63]
-
As the troublesome Bedouin were encouraged by local Arab dynasties to migrate out of their territories, so were the Turkmen directed to the borders by the Seljuk authorities:
The appearance of the nomads on the borders is also connected with the fact that the sultans sent them there to carry on the djihad with the Christians. … The report of the twelfth-century Arab traveler al-Harawi also bears out the ghazi character of these nomadic groups. … It was also convenient for the sultans to send these tribes to the frontiers, for they were thus removed from the central regions of the Seljuk domains.[64]
The displacement of the native Christians on the Byzantine frontier “along with the arrival of new Turkic and Mongol groups in Anatolia, resulted in an important demographic and ethnic alteration of the Anatolian population.”[65] The continuing disruption due to nomadic incursion along with the Islamic religion was instrumental in the Turkification of Anatolia; otherwise in the absence of continuing nomad migrations, the dense sedentary population might have absorbed them. Such had been the case, a few centuries before, when the Turkic Bulgarian ruling class was absorbed by the Slavic settlers in the province of Moesia. Vryonis specifies some of the many problems these additional nomads presented to an already burdened sedentary Christian population. After Emperor Manuel, ca 1175, drove the Turkmen out of the region of Dorylaeum the
…undeterred nomads … reassembled with their flocks in the same area. This is quite characteristic of the struggle that the emperors had to wage against the Turkmens in western Asia Minor … The incident of the rebuilding of Dorylaeum is one of the clearest chapters in the long struggle between nomadism and sedentary society in Anatolia.[66]
As Vryonis points out:
The very intrusion and physical presence of the tribesmen, their families and livestock in Anatolia, their status as pastoral military conquerors, and their continuing raids and banditry constituted a very serious disturbance to the sedentary, and especially to the Christian, groups.[67]
-
These depredations compare with the original Seljuk invasions several centuries before. This second, late thirteenth century conquest according to Vryonis “was in many ways similar to the earlier conquest at the end of the eleventh century. That is to say, it was often accompanied by violent displacement of rural and urban populations, enslavement, and destruction.”[68]
These particularly primitive Muslim tribesmen were even less constrained by practical considerations or by Muslim law. Even dhimmi populations under the protection of settled Muslim rulers were subjected to enslavement, sexual slavery, and forced conversion. In Georgia “priests were immolated, virgins violated, young men forcibly circumcised, and children enslaved” by the Turkmen.[69] Indeed, after the collapse of the once powerful Konya sultanate the Turkmen nomads resumed their depredations on the settled population, Muslim and Christian alike. The end of the relatively enlightened Konya sultanate was the final blow to Greek culture and language in the major part of Anatolia:
As they settled in the countryside, their language predominated in those areas where Greeks and Armenians had withdrawn, and even in those regions where the Christian groups remained, Turkish eventually prevailed as the language of the conquerors. … when in 1276-78 the Turkmens of the Karamanids rebelled and entered the city of Konya one of their acts was to banish Persian and to proclaim the exclusive use of Turkish in the government and administration. … When the Turks settled in towns and villages and intermarried with the converted Greeks and Armenians, their position as rulers and the official use of Turkish produced a gradual retreat of Greek and Armenian to isolated areas of non Turkish settlement, or to a few areas in which Christians remained compact…[70]
Thus, there was considerable hybridization with the native population even of these nomads, as had been the case of the preceding Seljuks owing to intermarriage. Other factors adding to this hybridization were widespread concubinage and sexual slavery.
Even the states established by these nomads as successors to the Seljuks were disrupted by still additional nomadic invaders. Turkmen raiders were still active in the following century and were frequently reported attacking Byzantine territory and enslaving Christian children.[71] Moreover, the hatred of both sedentary and town dwelling Greeks and Muslims for these barbaric nomads “left indelible traces in contemporary literature and historical deed ”.[72] The descendants of one of these latter nomadic ghazi cohorts, the greatly hybridized Ottoman Turks, eventually established a stable state which absorbed the territories of all of the Seljuk successors. These new rulers faced the same problems with the Turkmen as had their predecessors. But they were ultimately strong enough to deal effectively with these raiders. The continuing depredations of the Turkmen nomads were such as to force “the Ottoman sultans to adopt a policy of partial extermination.”[73]
Islamic history is not unique with respect to the decisive effects of such secondary invasions on cultural change. The pattern exemplified by Muslim nomadic incursions is an example of a more general historical phenomenon whereby a particular group opens up a territory for conquest and is then followed by additional closely related invaders who war against the states established by the first cohort. One case cited by the historian of ancient Britain, John Morris, relates to the effect on the native British culture and the Welsh language of continuing invasions from northern Europe and Scandinavia after the initial Saxon conquest had settled down into a form of social stability. He notes that in “Britain, both the Norse invasions and the Norman conquest were upheavals severe enough to kill what remained of peasant Welsh in many parts of Britain.”[74]
India was also afflicted by successive waves of nomads starting in the eleventh century. One group of Turkic invaders after another entered the country, including the Moguls whose dynasty was Mongol in origin, but who had been Turkified over the centuries. And as was the case farther west, the Turks were joined by Muslims of other ethnic origins. Many of these migrants fled from the wrath of the Mongols. In fact, “it seems probable that far more Muslims entered India as refugees from the Mongol invasions than as warriors in the Ghaznavid and Ghorid armies combined.”[75] Also as for the western Turks, the more settled Muslims who followed in their footsteps imparted their higher level of culture to the newly conquered Indian territories. For example, in 14th century India, “Gujarat acquired a large community of African Muslims. Meanwhile the influx of Persians and Afghans into the Deccan would give to the Bahmanid sultanate … a strongly Persian and Shi’ite flavour.”[76]
The effects of successive waves of ghazi nomads on recently conquered Muslim lands were devastating. Dhimmi populations, in particular, suffered acutely. The attrition to their numbers was due to continued slaughter, enslavement, forced conversion and plunder; in many cases these were in direct violation of the contract of protection under which they had lived for years. Many dhimmis “voluntarily” converted in order to preserve what little wealth and dignity remained to them. Established Muslim rulers usually attempted to protect their dhimmis. But as Bat Yeor observes, this was often ineffective:
The dynastic conflicts and tribal revolts brought the destruction of villages. … The authorities strove to protect the dhimmis by dispatching troops, if only to preserve the state’s source of finance. Dhimmis were exploited and despoiled by all parties. They were used as economic tools in political struggles which did not concern them.[77]
In a process paralleling the experience of Jews in both Muslim lands and in Europe those dhimmi populations that managed to survive these pressures into modern times were often selected for cunning and intelligence. This is, undoubtedly one of the reasons for the comparative success and accomplishment exhibited by the Armenians, Assyrians, Copts, Parsees and other non-Muslim groups.
Finally, even the conquered Muslim populations in these areas were frequently singled out for oppression and discrimination. The military aristocracies arising from successive nomadic waves were quite happy to use the Muslim ideology as a means of conquest and control. However, they often held the preceding Muslim inhabitants, as well as the dhimmi populations, in contempt. For example, Stillman points out that:
Under the Mamluks, the sumptuary laws were taken more seriously than in earlier periods. After all, as the Mamluks did not allow the native Arabs to dress like Mamluks or ride horses as they did, they were not going to permit nonbelievers to dress like Believers.[78]
Also it was observed that beginning with the 17th century in the Ottoman Empire the “ruling Turkish minority treated the average Arab Muslim almost as contemptuously as they did the dhimmis.”[79]
The Islamic Conquests: A Survey
The following is a brief survey of the conditions leading to the conquest and Islamization of the territories that became subject to Muslim rule. It is not meant as a detailed history of the Muslim conquests; such histories are widely available. The dates are, of course, approximate. There were often incursions into a territory some time preceding the beginning of permanent occupation. Also, continued resistance in certain lands makes it difficult to affix an exact date to the completion of the conquest. In many areas, Islamization was a slow process of infiltration or of trade without any definite starting or ending points.
The following should, however, dispel any notion that Islam spread by peaceful means; it should also dispel the myth that the wars of Islam were “defensive.” All the territories that Islam first appeared in, and most of the later Islamic territories were subdued by force of arms. Although, as we have seen, Islam was, at first, viewed by the conquerors as an Arab exclusive religion, ultimately it assumed the role of one of the world’s great proselytizing faiths. Once the reluctance on the part of the Arab rulers to convert non-Arabs ended, the unceasing pressure on the conquered populations eventually caused the large majority in most areas to become Muslim. By the time other ethnic groups became the carriers of the Islamic meme, conversion of the conquered peoples was eagerly pursued. Moreover, even in those areas where Islam was initially established by trade or through a slow migration of Muslims, local Muslim rulers used the martial virtues of Islam as a means of expanding their states through jihad.
It should also be noted that, while Islam had many attractions for nomadic tribes and other primitive peoples, the settled conquered population did not enthusiastically embrace the faith. In most instances Islam required as much time to become firmly rooted as had Christianity. The latter required about three centuries to emerge from a despised and persecuted faith to the official religion of the Roman Empire. In almost all of the conquered territories Islam required as much, and or even more time, to convert a majority of the natives. Given the obvious coercive advantages that a violent conquering faith has over a persecuted one, this observation is quite revealing of the fact that Islam did not have the same allure for more civilized and educated populations as had its chief competitor in the west, Christianity.
Syria
Greater Syria including Palestine and Lebanon was quickly and easily subdued during the first Arab conquests. Arab armies entered Syria in 633 and the final Syrian fortresses were reduced in 640. Hitti provides some reasons for this rapid conquest:
This easy conquest of the land [Syria] had its own special causes. The Hellenistic culture imposed on the land … was only skin-deep and limited to the urban population. The rural people remained ever conscious of cultural and racial differences between themselves and their masters. This racial antipathy between the Semitic population of Syria and the Greek rulers was augmented by sectarian differences.[80]
However, it was only during the Abbasid caliphate, ca 800, that the conversion of the population passed the tipping point.[81]
Iraq
Iraq was conquered beginning in the year 634 and ending in 641with the fall of Mosul. As was the case for Syria, the conquest was facilitated owing to the religious and ethnic differences between the population and the rulers:
The welcome on the part of the Aramaean peasants was no less cordial than that tendered by the Syrian peasants, and for much the same reasons. The Semitic Iraqis looked upon the Iranian masters as aliens and felt closer kinship with the newcomers. As Christians they had not been especially favored by the followers of Zoroaster. … As in the case of Syria … an influx of fresh Arabian tribes, attracted by the new economic advantages, took place into the newly conquered territory.[82]
Conversions also proceeded slowly. The population of northern Iraq “early in the tenth century was still … ‘Moslem in name but Christian in character’.”[83]
Egypt
Arab armies first attacked Egypt at the beginning of the year 640. The second capture of Alexandria in 646 marked the effective completion of the conquest. Once again dissident religious factions among the native population were an important factor easing the way of the Arab conquerors:
The native Copts … were instructed from the very beginning by their bishop in Alexandria to offer no resistance to the invaders. This is not surprising in view of the religious persecution to which they as Monophysites had been subjected by the official Melkite (royal) church.[84]
In Egypt the cities adapted easily to Muslim rule, however, the adjustment of the rural Coptic population, possibly because of their more pronounced ethnic differences with the Semitic Arabs, proved more problematic. Anthropologists Oliver Roland and Brian Fagan note this dichotomy between the cities and the country:
During the eighth century it [Arabic] finally superseded Greek, and before long it was impinging on Coptic. … As a result, the cultural transition for those who converted to Islam was greatly eased. The successful Egyptian of the early Islamic centuries was first an Arabic-speaker and only later a Muslim. The movement began in towns and spread slowly to the countryside, where Arabic displaced Coptic … only during the later Middle Ages.[85]
Furthermore, the rural Copts proved willing to engage in violent insurrections “several times against their Moslem overlords before they finally succumbed in the days of … al-Ma’mun (813-33)”[86]
The Egyptian population, particularly the Christians, was hard pressed during Islam’s early dynastic struggle. Bat Yeor notes that:
…the removal of the Umayyads … created anarchy … Marwan, the last Umayyad caliph … operated a scorched earth policy when he fled from Abbasid troops. Towns, villages, and harvest were set alight and large numbers perished in the general exodus. The Coptic patriarch Michael … was tortured daily … to extort money from him.[87]
The settled population of Egypt was also afflicted by later Bedouin incursions and without doubt these predations had a differential adverse effect on the remaining Coptic population. In the 15th century “marauding Bedouins in the Delta and the desert to the east repeatedly fell on the settled fallahin of the narrow agricultural valley and ravaged the land.”[88] The final blow to the rural Copts occurred in the Mamluk period. During this time conversions “to Islam, always a steady trickle, now became a flood, and even in regions like Upper Egypt, which adjoined the Christian region of Nubia and had long been a Coptic stronghold, became majority Muslim.”[89]
North Africa
The conquest of the Maghreb began with the conquest of Libya in 643. After several decades halt to the Arab advance Carthage was permanently acquired about the year 698. Berber resistance in western Algeria and Morocco came to an end by 709.
A characteristic of this region was the extreme weakness of Byzantine civilization among the Berber masses. Unlike Byzantium’s eastern provinces, there was a considerable interregnum with respect to Roman rule. These western regions had been under barbarian control before being re-annexed by the Eastern Roman Empire. Nevertheless, the Byzantine authorities made strong, though not entirely successful efforts to integrate the barbarian Berber tribes into the Christian Roman system. Byzantine historian A. A. Vasiliev quotes Charles Diehl in L’Afrique byzantine:
For two centuries the Byzantine Empire had conserved in these districts the difficult heritage of Rome; for two centuries the empire made the great and steady progress of these provinces possible by the strong defence of their fortresses; for two centuries it upheld in this part of North Africa the traditions of classical civilization and converted the Berbers to a higher culture by means of religious propaganda. In fifty years the Arabian invasion undid all these achievements.[90]
This penetration of Byzantine Christianity and civilization was only strong among the town dwellers and settled Berbers of the coast. According to Hitti:
At the time of the Moslem conquest most of the Berbers on the strip of fertile land bordering on the sea had become Christians. … Otherwise the population was not deeply touched by Roman civilization, for the Romans and Byzantines lived mainly in towns on the coast and represented a culture that was quite alien to the mentality of these nomadic and semi- nomadic North Africans. On the other hand Islam had a special attraction for people in such a cultural stage as that of the Berbers.[91]
It is also possible that the remnants of Carthaginian culture remained in remote areas, facilitating the Muslim conquest:
Punic survived in country places until shortly before the Moslem conquest. This explains the seemingly inexplicable miracle of Islam in Arabicizing the language and Islamizing the religion of these semi-barbarous hordes and using them as fresh relays in the race toward further conquests.[92]
Historian of the Maghreb, John Cooley also notes that the “Berbers were not the sophisticated bourgeois of the Syrian cities. Neither Latin nor Byzantine culture took root among them. This probably accounts for the total disappearance of Christianity.”[93] An additional factor in the extinction of Byzantine civilization and Christianity in the Maghreb was undoubtedly the intensity of the struggle for a region that was far from the central territories of Islam. The devastation of the towns and the mass enslavement inflicted on the inhabitants of the coastal cities by the invading Arabs and later on by Muslim Berbers would have exceeded that which took place in the more rapidly conquered eastern provinces. In fact, in “the dead cities of Tunis, which are today in most cases in the same condition in which they were left by the Arabian invasion, one still finds at every turn some traces of these formidable raids.”[94]
The conversion of the Berbers was an important part of the Arab strategy for consolidating their far flung African possessions. The reluctance of the Arabs under the first caliphs to proselytize non-Muslim populations was lessening at this time. And in any event the usefulness of adding a new group of large and warlike primitives to buttress their overextended ranks must have appealed to the early Arabs notable pragmatism. Thus, the “conversion of the Berbers … was carried out in the following century [after 700] according to a new plan of enlisting the Berbers in the Moslem army and thus winning them over by the new prospects of booty.”[95]
Despite “the rapid spread of Islam among the Berbers, however, Christianity still continued to exist among them, and even in the fourteenth century we hear of ‘some small Christian islands’ in North Africa.”[96] Hitti gives an example of one small group of Christian Berber holdouts as late as the beginning of the 16th century:
Here the final triumph of Islam was not achieved until the twelfth century, though certain Kabyls … of Algeria had the Andalusian Moors driven out after the fall of Granada in 1492, to thank for their conversion.[97]
In the final analysis, however, the Maghreb, unlike Arab territories to the east saw the complete destruction of Christianity. There appear to be a number of converging factors which made this disappearance inevitable. As noted above, the primitive level of culture among the Berber tribes, the dominant sector of the population was much more conducive to Islam. In addition their Christianity was superficial at best. While in the east, the national aspirations of the native populations, for several centuries at least, found an expression in Christianity, the Berbers quickly asserted their opposition to the Arab order through various Muslim schisms and heresies. Another factor was the greater destruction wreaked on the cities which were the strongholds of Christianity and Roman culture. During the time of the Aghlabid dynasty (800-909) the transformation of North Africa was “perhaps more complete than in any other region thus far reduced by Moslem arms.”[98]
Continuing tribal warfare and a lack of strong central governments for most of the first five centuries of Muslim rule in the Maghreb decimated the Christian population. Those centuries witnessed frequent uprisings and raids by schismatic Berber sectarians. Also of great importance was the migration of the destructive banu-Hilal Bedouins who, in addition to Arabizing the eastern regions of the Maghreb, caused the flight of both Jewish and Christian dhimmis.
The rise to power of fanatical Berber dynasties with the consequent abrogation of the contract of dhimmitude further decimated the remaining urban Christian communities. In 1159 the Almohad Abd al-Mumin destroyed the episcopate of Carthage and forced the native Christians who remained to convert.[99] Final devastating blows occurred “with the beginnings of the Christian reconquest in Spain and Sicily and the Balearic Islands, and with the crusade led by King Louis IX”. It was then “that the Muslim rulers of North Africa faced their few remaining Christian subjects with the choice of conversion or death.”[100] It is instructive to observe that this preceded by a few centuries, and perhaps even inspired, the much better known Spanish expelling of its Jewish and Muslim populations.
Also of interest is the relative lack of intellectual activity in that part of North Africa as compared to periods of intense activity in the eastern provinces and in Muslim Spain. The continuing depredations of both Berber and Bedouin nomads and the deeper process of Islamization were, without doubt, important causes of the lower level of high culture in the Maghreb.
Sub Saharan West Africa
In the large and heterogeneous territory of sub-Saharan West Africa, stretching from the western border of the modern nation of the Sudan to the Atlantic, Islam was introduced at widely varying times in different areas. A convenient start year is 1061 which marks the organization of the Maghreb Almoravid state by Ibn Tashfin. The Almoravids proceeded with an active program of spreading Islam to their non-Muslim or nominal Muslim trading partners in Ghana. The active period of Muslim expansion lasted many centuries only coming to an end, insofar as it can be said to have ended at all, with the termination of the West African jihads by the French in 1893.
While there had been a slow penetration of Islamic ideas south of the desert through the activities of Muslim traders, it was the zealous new Muslim sect of Almoravids (Murabits) who initiated a more violent and rapid spread of their militant faith. Hitti observes that:
Starting with about a thousand warrior ‘monks’, the Murabits forced one tribe after another, including some negro tribes, to accept Islam and in a few years established themselves as masters of all north-western Africa and finally of Spain. Their story serves as yet another illustration in Islam of what can be produced by the marriage of the sword to religion.[101]
In 1076 the Soninke kingdom of Ghana suffered a defeat at the hands of the Almoravids resulting in the formal acceptance of Islam and payment of tribute. Oliver and Fagan contend that:
Probably the Almoravids … merely helped the internal minority of Soninke Muslims to seize the positions of power. At all events, the written sources of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are at one in claiming that Ghana was now a Muslim state, and that it was still the major power of the Mande-speaking region.[102]
However, a violent invasion by Muslims external to the region was not generally the case in West Africa. As historian of Islam, Ira Lapidus notes, in “most of Africa, Islam was established by processes more closely resembling those of Southeast Asia than the Middle East and India.”[103] In West Africa he notes
…kings often turned to … Islam, to acquire autonomous legitimization and to undermine the authority of competitors. In other cases kingship was not an indigenous institution, but grew out of the dominance of a foreign trading community. In the towns of Kano and Katsina monarchical rule was established by colonies of Muslim traders who either directly seized the state or converted a local ruler.[104]
By 1260 the kingdom of Mali had been penetrated by Islam. The king at that time, “Mansa Uli was a pious Muslim, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca … Mansa Uli was a conqueror … during his reign … Mali expanded its influence to the east … subjecting the ancient kingdom of Songhay …” and gained control of the northern routes through the desert.[105] But along with “peaceful Muslim colonization there was a parallel tradition of militant determination to turn small colonies into Muslim states by defeating corrupt Muslim rulers, conquering the pagan populations, converting them to Islam, and ruling them according to Muslim law.”[106] In Mauritania jihad began with the resistance of Berbers to religiously lax Arab rulers. A later jihad in Senegambia, like other Muslim jihads in the 17th and the 18th centuries “had their origins in the efforts of small Muslim communities to overthrow local rulers and to establish states of their own.” The “Futa Jallon jihad was the work of the settled Muslim communities allied with Fulani pastoralists.”[107] As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such jihads were numerous in West Africa and the central Sudan.[108]
Islam’s appeal to nomadic tribes is illustrated by the West African history of jihad. In addition, the experience of Muslim penetration into West Africa illustrates the danger of allowing the establishment of large immigrant Muslim communities and makes for an instructive lesson even today.
There were two more factors behind Islam’s penetration into sub-Saharan Africa. One is the massive and lucrative slave trade which, along with other valuable commodities, attracted numerous Muslim merchants to establish outposts and initiate friendly relations with local rulers. The other factor was the understandable defensive reaction of local kings who through conversion could hope to deflect Muslim attack:
Accepting Islam would also give the king legal immunity from attack by other Muslims. Since raids by desert nomads upon the settled farmers were very frequent anyway, and raids by Muslims upon unbelievers was encouraged by religion, according to the common belief of Muslims, a Sûdân king would have strong motivation to become a Muslim as a pre-emptory defence against attack.[109]
Eastern Africa
Muslim rule in the coastal regions of East Africa was also a slow process of infiltration by settlers and merchants. A convenient start year is 850 by which time Muslim presence was well established on the Somali coast. However, Muslim forces had captured the Dahlak Islands in the Red Sea at the beginning of the eighth century, while Muslim merchants displaced the Greeks who for centuries held the trade of the city of Axum. The attractions Islam held for nomads was once again evident with its adoption by the pastoral camel herders of the coast. At the same time, the settled Christian populations of the nearby Ethiopian highlands, who have successfully resisted Muslim conquest, retain their religion to the present day.[110] Muslim expansion along the East African coast continued under the aegis of various local rulers until the late 19th century ending with the establishment of European rule in the 1880s.
Between the ninth and thirteenth century most of the people in Somalia and the horn of Africa, under the influence of Muslim traders embraced Islam. “We have an illuminating glimpse of the situation around Berbera from Ibn Said in the early thirteenth century, who says that the people had mostly embraced Islam and were therefore no longer sold as slaves in the neighbouring Muslim countries.”[111] By the year 1200 a Muslim dynasty was ruling the East African islands of Mafia and Kilwa, some hundred miles south of Zanzibar. This was the “greatest and most civilized of all the East African settlements”.[112] In parts of East Africa, as elsewhere, local rulers converted to Islam for its military advantages:
In this region Arab and Swahili traders supplied local chieftains with firearms in exchange for slaves, and thus intensified the local struggle for power. Local adventurers, often supported by uprooted young men turned warriors, took advantage of the situation to conquer small kingdoms. Tippu Tip, a Swahili trader and warrior, set up a small Muslim state. In Buganda, King Mutesa I Islamized his regime…[113]
Sudan
Like Anatolia, the Sudan valiantly resisted repeated Muslim onslaughts for centuries, and remained predominantly Christian until the latter half of the 14th century. The beginning of Arab penetration into the Sudan can be conveniently dated to the same year, 651, that marked the conquest of Persia. In that year the Arabs besieged the city of Dunqula forcing the Nubian king to sue for peace and assent to the annual payment of tribute. Hitti notes, nevertheless, that for “centuries to come the Christian kingdom of Nubia … stood as a barrier against the farther southward onrush of Islam.”[114] According to Oliver and Fagan:
What really happened in the seventh century was that the Arabs saw that the conquest of Nubia would not repay the effort involved. And during the six centuries that followed they saw no reason to revise that decision. As a result, the Sudan enjoyed during those centuries one of the most flourishing and vigorous periods in its long history.[115]
The fall of Alwa, the last Christian kingdom in the Sudan at the end of the 15th century marks the effective end of the Muslim conquest of the Sudan. However, recent events make it apparent that the conquest was not complete in all of what constitutes modern Sudan. The process of Islamization continues in, a particularly vicious and racist form, in the southern Sudan.
The Islamization of the Sudan was, generally, one of slow invasion through migration rather than one of sudden conquest. Similar circumstances may well be occurring today in modern Europe. It was only in the “early disturbed decades of the third century of Islam” that small groups of Arab nomads migrated to the Sudan. This movement was apparently prompted by the policy initiated by the caliph al-Mu’tasim to replace his Arab army with one of Turkish slaves.[116] An immediate consequence of this infiltration was the subjection of the Beja people living on the east coast of the Sudan to Arab rule. Here, in contrast to neighboring “Nubia, there was nothing to stop them from coming through the eastern desert into the Sudan.”[117] Sudanese historian Yusuf Hasan notes the importance of the slave trade in opening up the Sudan to Arab conquest:
The slave trade had influenced the penetration of the Arabs into the Sudan in two ways. In the first place … [slaves] obtained from Nubia and Alwa deprived those countries of their young elements and might in the long run have lessened their chances of standing in the way of the Arab tribes which were soon to submerge the Sudan. Secondly, the penetration of Muslim traders had increased the Arab knowledge of that country… Therefore, while in pursuit of trade they carried the frontier of Islam deep into the heart of the country …[118]
The honesty of this modern Arab scholar, when compared to the denial and dissembling of many western historians is striking. The final phase of the Islamic conquest of the Sudan, had to wait some five centuries and was brought about by the Mamluk dynasty of Egypt whose intervention overcame the last Nubian resistance and
…let loose a migration of nomadic bedouin Arabs from upper Egypt into the Sudan. … Immigrants poured south – first the Rabi’a and Juhayna Arabs of the cataracts … dispossessing and enslaving the Nubian owners; and then the camel nomads from the deserts of upper Egypt, who spread through the Nubian deserts…[119]
As Hasan observes:
The Mamluk policy … aimed at the conversion of Nubia into a vassal kingdom. This design hastened the process of Islamization. The Arabs who entered in large numbers with the Mamluk armies intermarried with the royal family and assumed power. Finally by the middle of the fourteenth century the Nubian kingdom was not so much overthrown as turned inside out – the royal family became both Islamized and Arabized. The collapse of Alwa was mainly due to the gradual ascendancy of the Arab tribesmen…[120]
The end of Christian Nubia occurred on May 29, 1317 when a Muslim convert member of the royal family was raised to the throne by the Mamluks.[121] Thus, in an interesting historical curiosity the ancient Christian kingdom of Nubia fell to the Muslims on the exact date that ancient Christian Byzantium was to fall one hundred and thirty six years later. Though Christianity lingered on for a few years, in the end “it could not withstand the impact of a vigorous Islam, sustained by the influx of marauding Arab tribesmen.”[122] The smaller Christian kingdom of Alwa continued in an enfeebled state of quasi independence for another century and a half; its extinction marked the end of Christian power in the Sudan.
Persia
Shortly after the occupation of Persian ruled Mesopotamia, the Arab invasion of Persia proper began. It was, essentially complete a decade later with the death of the Sasanid emperor in 651; however certain districts of the far-flung territory were to stubbornly resist Arab rule and the Islamic religion for a number of years afterward. For example, the revolt of Sunbad the Magian in 755 was based on the assertion of national feeling along with Zoroastrian religious sentiments.[123] As was the case in Iraq and Syria, most Persians remained unconverted for several centuries.
In the neighboring provinces of Central Asia and Afghanistan, for centuries under Persian influence and often under Persian rule, the progress of the Muslim conquests and of Islamic religion was exceedingly slow. The ultimate victory of Islam in these regions was only achieved some centuries later under dynasties of Persian governors owing only nominal allegiance to the Caliph in Baghdad. The ninth century Persian Saffarids consolidated and extended Muslim rule in Afghanistan:
One of the most important aspects of early Saffarid policy, of significance for the spread of Islam in Afghanistan and on the borders of India long after their empire had collapsed, was that of expansion into eastern Afghanistan. The early Arab governors … had at times penetrated as far as Ghazna and Kabul, but these had been little more than slave and plunder raids.[124]
In the year 900 Muslim power in Afghanistan was still weak enough to allow two Indian princes to re-take Ghazna. “Yet though the power of the local rulers in eastern Afghanistan was not entirely broken, Islam did achieve a break-through … it is probable that the Islamization of the region proceeded apace.”[125]
-
The Samanid dynasty, which eventually superseded the Saffarids, completed the Muslim conquest of the neighboring provinces of Tabaristan and Transoxiana. In 893 the Samanid Isma’il captured Taraz and converted its Nestorian church into a mosque. His conquest “enabled Muslim missionaries to propagate Islam into the steppes.”[126]
Central Asia and the Steppes
A convenient year to date the beginning of the conquest of that part Central Asia beyond the fringes of the Sasanid domains was 699 when an Arab army was sent against the ruler of the city of Kabul who refused the payment of tribute. Within a few years, the Arab armies crossed the Oxus River establishing themselves in the fabled cities of Balkh, Bukhara and Samarkand. The end of the first phase of the conquest of Central Asia occurred in the early tenth century when the Samanids subjected all of Transoxiana to Muslim rule. Islam slowly attained its full extent in Central Asia, East Turkestan and the Steppes. A convenient end date can be marked by the year 1513 when the peoples living in the Tarim Basin in Sinkiang accepted Islam.
During the 8th century direct Arab rule in western Transoxiana was confined to the cities where the Arab garrisons were located. “The Arab agents … were merely military overseers and tax-collectors functioning side by side with the native rulers, who retained the civil administration.”[127] Ironically, the lack of a strong Arab central administration produced conditions that were to lead to the rapid Islamization of the population. However, these conversions were accompanied by the triumph, not of Arabic, but of the standard Persian language.
In Central Asia where the majority of the people were probably local Zoroastrians … there was no strong religious community to hold their people together in the face of Islamic conversion. The much greater amount of fighting in Central Asia, as compared with Iran, also destroyed the links holding people together so that … recovery of ancient traditions and culture was difficult. In addition, the vast number of slaves brought to the Near East from Central Asia in the conquests served to dilute the hold of local culture and tradition…[128]
The end result was the vanishing of the “Bactrian, Khwarazmian and Sogdian languages … together with their literatures, so that an all-Iranian culture and the Persian language dominated”.[129] The circumstances of internecine conflict and the isolation of local religious cultural institutions leading to rapid mass conversion, is strikingly similar to the later Turkish conquest of Anatolia.
While Islam in a Persian form made rapid progress in western Transoxiana, it was only in 893 that the Samanid ruler, Ismail, crossed the Syr Darya and established Islam in eastern Transoxiana. Islam was brought into contact with numerous nomadic peoples who were to be crucial to the future of the religion:
Western Central Asia, having recently accommodated itself … to expanding Arab power, was about to enter into another period of … contact with the Turkic societies to its north and northeast. … it would serve as the transmission zone for the cultural fruits of one nomadic society to another. … the Islamic culture which entered the steppe zone had been influenced and reworked by the Eastern Iranians.[130]
-
Under the Karakhanid rulers the mass conversion of the nomadic Turks began. By 960 Islam had been accepted by some “200,000 tents of the Turks.”[131] This conversion was far from easy; it followed years of conflict between the Muslims and the Turkish tribes beyond the frontiers. When the conversion was finally effected, immense new energy was available for the subsequent Islamic expansions:
The raids of the pagan Turks into the Samanid domains … brought ghazis from all over the eastern Islamic world to fight in Transoxiana against the infidels. With the conversion of the Turks, however, the services of fighters for Islam were no longer needed in Central Asia, but still in Anatolia and the Caucasus regions. … in 966 a host of 20,000 of them came from Khurasan and asked permission … to go west and fight against the Byzantines. Among these freebooter warriors were … many Turks, forerunners of the great movement of Turks to Anatolia in later centuries.[132]
Islam made slow but steady progress in the lands toward the east. It was only at the end of the middle ages that the Uighur stronghold of Turfan became Muslim.[133] By the 14th century
…eastern Turkestan came into the domain of Turkish-Islamic culture. This was the result of a long, slow, and little-documented process in which Mongol peoples were converted to Islam and won over to the use of Turkish languages. Muslim rulers tried to use Islam as legitimization for warfare against non-Muslim peoples. … in 1513, Sunni Islam was widely accepted in the Tarim basin … Mosques appeared along the trade routes between Inner Asia and China. Muslim expansion, however, was checked by the Oirats (Mongols), who accepted Buddhism at the end of the sixteenth century. By then, however, much of the populace of Inner Asia outside Mongolia and Tibet was Muslim or under Muslim suzerainty.[134]
In the northern steppes the progress of Islam was equally slow. The conquering Mongols merged with the Turkic speaking inhabitants and “evolved over time into the Turkic-speaking ‘Tatar’ population, and were eventually converted to Islam.”[135] The first Muslim ruler dates from 1257, but it was not until Uzbek Khan (1313-40) that all of the following the rulers were Muslim.
In remote steppe and mountain areas, the process of Islamic conversion required even more centuries. At about the same time as Islam was completing its South East Asian conversions, it also completed its conversions of the remote nomad tribes of the steppes north of Transoxiana. The first Kazakh converts were made in the 15th and 16th centuries; however conversion “made little headway until the eighteenth century”. [136] In the remote mountains of neighboring Afghanistan, pockets of infidels were still present at the end of the 19th century. As late as 1896,” the rulers of Afghanistan launched a jihad for the conquest of the mountainous region … known as Kafiristan, the land of the unbelievers.”[137] After the conquest the province was quickly Islamized.
Sind
Sind, the western boundary of India in the vicinity of the Indus River, marked the easternmost extent of the Arab conquests. At almost the same time as the Arabs entered the western limit of their conquests, Spain, the Arab general Ibn Qasim invaded Sind and captured the major cities of the province. Finally, in 713 the famous Buddhist center of Multan fell “where the invaders found a large crowd of pilgrims, whom they took captive.”[138] Sind set the pattern for the future Muslim experience in India. Slaughter, on a massive scale so characteristic of the behavior of Muslim armies in India began with that first invasion. After the defeat and death of King Dahar according to al-Biladuri “the idolaters fled and the Mussulmans glutted themselves with massacre.”[139] Another pattern was that of .Indian resistance to Islam with feigned conversions followed by apostasy and rebellion as soon as central Muslim control was relaxed. Muslim law did not provide a contract of protection for “idolaters”; the only legal alternatives were conversion, enslavement or death. Accommodation by Hindus and Buddhists to the new religion was also quite difficult. Unlike the adherents of the monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, even Zoroastrianism, the Indians found the Muslim creed totally alien. As the historian of South Asia, John Keay asserts:
If conquest had been difficult, conversion was proving even more so. Yet the obstinacy of the idolaters … always afforded an excellent justification for pillage and plunder. So it was in Sind and so it would be in Hind (i.e., India).[140]
Furthermore there was continued resistance for well over a century in Sind. “Baghdad’s control of the entire province remained a rare phenomenon” until the year 870.[141]
Despite the slaughter and oppression undergone by their fellow countrymen in Sind, most Indians remained blissfully unaware of the magnitude of the threat posed by these strangers. Invaders had entered the subcontinent for centuries, but as was the case with the Macedonians, when the battle ended some form of understanding and compromise was always possible. The very same naiveté that characterized certain Christian leaders regarding early Islam also characterized the Hindus in the first few centuries of the Muslim incursions. “There is no evidence of an Indian appreciation of the global threat which they represented; and the peculiar nature of their mission – to impose a new monotheist orthodoxy by military conquest and political dominion – was so alien to Indian tradition that it went uncomprehended.”[142]
Indeed, the first native ruler to confront the invaders, King Dahar of Sind “never understood the nature of the war, never understood that more than his throne was at stake. There was for him, in war, an element of chivalry.”[143] For it had always been the case that warfare in India was constrained and chivalric. Keay quotes the ninth century Muslim traveler Suleiman: “When a king subdues a neighboring state, he places over it a man belonging to the family of the fallen prince who carries on the government in the name of the conqueror.” Moreover, civilians were traditionally held to be immune from attack. “Although the ploughmen may have had a stake in the outcome of the battle … they were not expected to get involved. Warriors fought with warriors.”[144] Even the outsider, Alexander the Great, felt compelled to follow these rules in his conquest of India. The Indians were clearly unprepared to face the ruthless and implacable Muslim conquerors.
India
For two centuries following the conquest of Sind, the rest of the subcontinent was spared the attention of the Muslims. The Arab empire, in addition to its overextended lines of supply and communication and enormous unassimilated conquered populations, fell into a period of civil strife beginning with the conflict between the Umayyads and Abbasids. It was left to a new race of Muslims from Central Asia to resume the invasion of India. The Turks, both free nomads and military slaves assumed the mantle of Islam in the East as well as in the West. It was still the case that “Muslim invaders were well aware of India’s immensity, and mightily excited by its resources. … The devout Muslim, although ostensibly bent on converting the infidel, would find his zeal handsomely rewarded.”[145] It was a Turkish former slave, Sabuktigin the Ghaznavid who swooped on the “luckless and … undefended people of Lughman. In a taste of things to come, the Muslim forces butchered the idolaters, fired their temples and plundered their shrines; such was the booty, it was said, that hands risked frostbite counting it.”[146] Furthermore, the “Shahi forces had been routed and those not dead on the field of battle were being butchered in the forest or drowned in a river. No mercy was to be shown: God had ordained that infidels be killed ‘and the order of God is not changed’.”[147]
Although Sabuktigin wreaked much slaughter and accumulated much plunder, his invasion was little more than a glorified raid. It was left to his son Mahmud of Ghazna to begin the permanent occupation of additional territory. He continued “the God-given duty of every Muslim to root out idolatry” and needing to “maintain and reward his large standing army” he instituted “a pattern of yearly incursions.” He crossed into India “on what would be the first of perhaps sixteen blood-and-plunder raids, some time during … the year 1000.”[148] Mahmud with his taste for booty and glory did not even spare his co-religionists. In 1005 “he determined to attack Multan, whose amir, though a Muslim, was now a heretical Ismaili Shi’ah.” The Hindu King Anandapala refused Mahmud safe passage through his domains and duly felt “the hand of slaughter, imprisonment, pillage, depopulation and fire” once again. Then Multan fell, and after “heresy, rebellion and enmity were suppressed” Mahmud’s fame reached “as far away as Egypt.”[149]
Mahmud’s raids continued for many years. It would appear that the Sultan’s “appetite for dead Indians, desirable slaves and portable wealth was whetted, but not satisfied.” When the city of Thanesar fell, and “‘the Sultan returned home with plunder that it is impossible to recount’. ‘Praise be to God, the protector of the world for the honour he bestows upon Islam and Musulmans,’” wrote Mahmud’s secretary al-Utbi. Mahmud looted and destroyed many Hindu temples including Mathura “whose colossally intricate stone structure, impressed even Mahmud.”[150]
Mahmud might have been impressed with the Mathura temple, though apparently not enough to keep from burning it. The “reputation of the uncompromising Ghaznavid and his blood thirsty zealots now preceded them” stirring up “Indian consternation at this new form of total warfare.” At Somnath Mahmud slaughtered over 50,000. “Such was the resultant carnage that even the Muslim chroniclers betray a hint of unease.”[151] Mahmud, perhaps, recognizing that he lacked the means to garrison such extensive territory and control such a large population endeavored to reduce the local princes to a condition of vassalage. These “attempts to employ as feudatories Indian princes who had supposedly adopted Islam often proved as short-lived as their conversions.”[152]
It is no surprise that Mahmud’s bloody career achieved so little in the way of permanent results. However, the devastation he wrought did pave the way for more permanent Muslim conquests. Frye sums up the results of Ghaznavid rule:
Islam made little progress in India during the Ghaznavid period; the succeeding periods of the Ghurids and the Slave Kings were more important for this. His main aim was to make the Indian princes his tributaries and to use them as milch-cows; the temples were despoiled primarily because of their great wealth. The sultan knew well that if he had tried to impose Islam on the princes as a condition of peace, they would have apostasized as soon as his troops left.[153]
It was left to Muhammad of Ghor to resume the Islamic conquest. His 1192 victory over the Rajputs reversed the decline of Muslim power in India and began a new extension of Muslim territory. As in Anatolia after Manzikert, this victory enabled the Muslims to overrun large territories. “Kanauj, Asni and Varanasi … had been overrun … the Gujarati capital of Anhilwara … had been sacked. The thirteenth century opened with even more sensational conquests as Muslim forces pushed further east into Bihar, Bengal and Assam”. At Varanasi Muhammad was said to have returned with “fourteen hundred camel loads” of treasure.[154] Another bloody-minded Muslim dynasty was the Khaljis. They pushed the Muslim conquests into Bihar and Bengal pausing only to put to death all of the inhabitants of the “famous Buddhist monastery-cum-university of Odantapuri.”[155] In general, the establishment of the various sultanates outside of Delhi appears to be a result of the diffusion of a Muslim warrior elite in a manner analogous to the founding of Norman states in western and southern Europe.
It was the Mogul dynasty which, finally, achieved almost total Muslim dominion over India. This dynasty was noteworthy for its generally less fanatical, or at least somewhat more pragmatic rulers, notably the eccentric but tolerant Akbar, who was the one bright spot in an otherwise dreary succession of Muslim despots. However, it was one of their more fanatical rulers, Aurangzeb, who by extending Mughal dominion over much of southern India attained the greatest extent of Muslim power on the subcontinent. As Keay notes, this ruler was motivated by his piety to complete the conquest. “Twenty years of Mughal suzerainty over the sultanates had brought only disturbance and defiance. Additionally, their large Shi’ite communities and Hinduized ceremonial were deeply unacceptable to an orthodox Sunni as devout as Aurangzeb. Annexation rather than overlordship was the only solution”.[156] It was toward the end of his long reign that Muslim power in India peaked with a costly victory in 1700 over the Maratha rebels.
The great historian Will Durant succinctly describes the thousand years of Muslim warfare in India. “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.”[157] The slaughter and pillage committed by the invaders in an attempt to impose Islam on India’s immense numbers backfired. One Hindu historian “writes of ‘ceaseless resistance offered with relentless heroism’ as warriors, ‘boys in their teens’, ‘men with one foot in the grave’ and ‘women in thousands’ fought and died ‘to break the volume and momentum of the onrushing tide of invasion’”.[158] As the Hindu historian Rajaram puts it:
This brings up an interesting issue: the idolatrous Hindus whose choice under Sharia was limited to ‘Islam or death,’ were much more successful in resisting the onslaught of Islam than the ‘protected’ Jews and Christians. Even the Zoroastrians of Persia, then a great empire ruled by the Sassanids, had to migrate to Hindu India to keep their faith alive. Hindus and Hinduism proved much more resilient than these ‘Religions of the Book’ and their adherents.
The Hindus never stopped fighting the imposition of Islam and finally defeated it though at great cost in terms of both land and people. It is a battle that still rages. It accounts also for the extraordinary hatred of Hindu India borne by Muslim ‘leaders’ in India and Pakistan— for it is a living reminder of Islam’s failure. This suggests that one is better off having Islam as enemy than ‘protector’. The protector inevitably turns predator and eventually consumes its protected flock.[159]
Eventually, however, the resistance offered by the large Hindu population induced later Muslim rulers to adopt the more pragmatic policy of fully extending the dhimma contract to the Hindus. “Not all temples were destroyed, although many were. The jizya tax on non-Muslims was not levied on brahmans until … 1351 … and may never have been very effectively collected. Idolatry was condemned yet Hindus were not prevented from practising their religion.”[160]
The conquest of India exceeded all others in its relentless cruelty. The immense wealth of the country in riches and its large reservoir of potential slaves attracted wave after wave of Muslim tribes, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, Persians and Moguls. This was compounded by the religions of the inhabitants who lacked even the slight protection afforded to the peoples of the book. While the majority religion, Hinduism, proved more tenacious, Buddhism, unfortunately, was almost totally extirpated in India following the Muslim conquest. “The multitude of images used in Medieval Buddhist worship always inflamed the fanaticism of Muslim warriors to such fury that no quarter was given to the idolaters.” The Muslim “invasions were fatal to the existence of Buddhism as an organized religion in northern India.”[161]
Southeast Asia
Islam was brought to Indonesia and Malaya by Muslim traders. The exact date of the first permanent Muslim communities is not known, but Muslims in Sumatra were reported by Marco Polo in 1292 and there are records attesting to the existence of a Muslim ruler from the 1290s. There were, however, reports of Muslim traders in the East Indies as early as the twelfth century. These traders were from Indian trading centers in the province of Gujarat.[162]
In any event, by the fifteenth century Islam made great strides in the islands prompted by the rise of the sultans of Malacca. The Dutch Indonesian scholar Bernard Vlekke notes that
The Malaccan ruler who visited China in 1419 bore the name of Muhammad Iskandar Shah which shows that the ruling family of Malacca either had gone over to Islam, or had been replaced by a new Moslem dynasty. … Muhammad Iskandar Shah died in 1424. Islam had by that time spread along the northeast coast of Sumatra …[163]
He also notes Islam’s connection to the burgeoning spice trade. Even so Islam’s “expansion was slow and did not gain momentum until the middle of the sixteenth century.”[164]
A question that naturally arises is why Islam was accepted in a territory beyond the reach of Muslim arms. Indonesia, like West Africa was characterized by many small rival states remote from the greater centers of civilization. In these areas where Islamic armies did not directly penetrate, certain local rulers found it advantageous vis-à-vis their rivals to adopt the militarist Muslim faith. It was analogous to a modern arms race. Those accepting Islam began to reap the benefits of its martial fanaticism and could expect aid from their co-religionists in waging jihad. In those countries, on the other hand, which directly confronted Islamic armies, the local aristocracy did not, generally, enjoy that option. The entry of a new military caste meant a loss of status and wealth by the local aristocrats, even with their conversion to Islam. One such area whose rulers found the new faith of great advantage was Atjeh on the island of Sumatra:
Islam had come early to that part of the archipelago. The principality of Samudra, situated somewhat to the east of Atjeh, had already become Islamic in the thirteenth century. Atjeh had gone over to the new religion in the second half of the fifteenth century, and in the beginning of the sixteenth, its rulers started a series of ‘holy wars’ which gave them control over the pepper growing areas on Sumatra’s northwest coast. Thus, they spread Islam while at the same time securing a firm control on the pepper trade. By the middle of the sixteenth century they had occupied the coast of … Manangkabau and converted its princes and its people to the new faith.[165]
In the early 1500s, another such ruler, the prince of Brunei converted “and was busily engaged in spreading his new religion and the extent of his rule in a northeasterly direction. He subdued the northern coast of Borneo and the Sulu islands, thus paving the way for the Islamization of the island of Mindanao.”[166]
The superiority of Islam with respect to other religions in providing military advantages was obvious to ambitious rulers. For the Javanese princes when confronted with a choice between Christianity and Islam were concerned with “which of the two religions would be more useful to them. From their point of view, Islam held a far greater appeal than Christianity.” However, despite that, Christianity did succeed in gaining a foothold on some islands of the Moluccas.[167]
Some of these rulers, in time became devout Muslims, while others remained simply nominal Muslims. The political situation in the Moluccas illustrates these two contrasting views of Islam by newly converted dynasties.
The villages of all those islands were grouped into two political alliances, one under the leadership of Ternate, the other under that of Tidore. On both islands Islam had become the official religion, but Ternate had been the first to accept the new faith and its kings were more fanatic. Ternate would not accept non-Islamic tribes or villages into its political group, while Tidore made no discrimination…[168]
While some Muslim rulers were fanatical, for many “the acceptance of Islam was only a means to an end, and for a long time, many of them remained reluctant to recognize Islam in the way it ought to be recognized, that is, as being exclusive of all other beliefs.”[169]
Islam, with its long and triumphant history of conquest was bound to have a definite appeal for the primitive mind, in both Southeast Asia and Africa. As Vlekke bluntly states:
For many centuries, the Javanese princes had been accustomed to conceive of religious practices as a means of increasing their inner strength or magic force. Understandably they saw Islam in the same light. The growing influence of the new religion throughout Southeast Asia proved its powerful significance. Why should not the Javanese rulers accept Islam too? Why not add this new source of magic force to the ones they already knew? This would serve a double purpose: it would make them spiritually the equals of possible Moslem opponents and it might well secure the help of these same Moslems against their non-Moslem enemies. … It would be unwise … to exclude … genuine conversions … but Islam definitely did not cause a clear break with the past in Java.[170]
However, as Vlekke also notes:
This does not mean that many of the Indonesian rulers who had outwardly accepted Islam did not become convinced Moslems in course of time. Once the more accessible parts of the archipelago were known to have turned Moslem, there began a continual influx of Moslem scholars from Arabia and India’s west coast, who were readily given hospitality by the Indonesian princes in exchange for their advice in religious matters.[171]
Religious factors were, inevitably, intertwined with external alliances and rivalries. A Hindu Javanese state, Sunda Kalapa, sought an alliance with the Portuguese against its Muslim neighbor. However, before assistance could be rendered, “it had been brought under the power of the Moslem king of Bantam.”[172] In the 17th century to counter the growing Dutch power some of the Indonesian princes sought closer relations with the Ottoman sultan and with the Muslims of Persia and India. This led them to “bring the administration of justice into conformity with Islamic rules.” But this “reform did not fully succeed.”[173] At this later time in history, when the European powers began their great expansions, Islam, in addition to its usefulness as a military motivating force in helping native rulers retain power, also served as an expression of local patriotism. “The struggle against the Portuguese and Dutch made Islam desirable as a bond of solidarity in resistance to the efforts of the Christian powers”.[174]
The Islamization of Indonesia, Malaya and other areas of Southeast Asia was a long drawn out process that continued even after European powers established dominance. In addition to proselytizing the remaining infidels, Islamic teachers devoted much energy to replacing the lax syncretistic religion that characterized much of the region with more orthodox forms. However, by the beginning of the 19th century the current pattern of Muslim dominance had substantially taken shape.
Spain
The Muslim conquest of Spain, like that of the eastern Arab conquests was quick. The conquest beginning in 711 attained its full extent within twenty years. The Arab and Berber invaders of Spain, as was the case further east, took full advantage of internal political and religious strife in the camp of their opponents. Hitti notes that the “natives included a considerable class of serfs and slaves … which contributed to the success of the invasion and cooperated with the invaders … Then there was the Jewish element in the population which was estranged … through active persecution by the Gothic royalty.”[175]
However, Spain was never completely subdued. Continuing resistance by Christian states in the north was facilitated by ethnic squabbling between the two conquering ethnicities. For it was the case that the “Berbers never forgave their Arab superiors for appropriating to themselves the lion’s share of the conquered land.”[176] Furthermore, dynastic rivalries served to weaken Muslim power in the Peninsula. Under the Umayyad prince Abd-al-Rahman, Spain was the first of the conquered provinces to split off from centralized Arab rule.
Unconverted Arabic speaking Christians known as Mozarabs drew inspiration from their independent co-religionists. The suspicion of the Muslim authorities inevitably fell upon the Christians, as well as upon Jews. Persecutions and expulsions, which were emulated by Christian rulers commencing in 1492, were the result. Both series of expulsions shared the same excuse – to prevent future treachery on behalf of external infidel rulers:
On a fatwa … from his theologians, Yusuf in 1099 ordered a beautiful church … possessed by the Mozarabs of Granada, to be leveled … These same Granadans in 1126 were put to the sword or banished to Morocco because they had entered into communication with a Christian sovereign of the north. Eleven years later a second expulsion of Mozarabs left few of them in Spain.[177]
These efforts on the part of the Muslim authorities, however, could not halt the Christian advance that gathered force in the thirteenth century. Hitti notes that many Moslems “were now forgetting their Arabic … and becoming more or less assimilated to the Christians.” He also observes how, even in the western Mediterranean, Islam had assumed the role as protector of Oriental civilization vis-à-vis the West:
After the middle of the thirteenth century two major processes were in operation: the Christianizing of Spain and its unification. … The only part of the peninsula where Islam had struck root was that where the earlier Semitic, Carthaginian civilization had once flourished. The same was true of Sicily. In general the line of cleavage between Islam and Christianity coincided with the ancient line between the Punic and Occidental civilizations.” [178]
Anatolia
The Muslim conquest of Anatolia began in 1071 with the victory of the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert. The conquest was to last four centuries when the last Byzantine remnant, Trebizond fell to the Ottomans in 1461. Vryonis notes the longevity of the Turkish conquest which “subjected Byzantine society to repeated shocks and dislocations.”[179]In an all too depressing echo of almost every Muslim conquest from Spain to India, a long period of civic disorder paved the way for the invaders. “In the eleventh century the strife of the Byzantine bureaucratic class with the magnate-military aristocrats of … Anatolia was the critical development. Not only did it paralyze Byzantine political life with its endless intrigues and rebellions but it destroyed the Anatolian armies and brought in the Turkmens as mercenary troops.” Furthermore “the religious and political animosity of Greeks, Armenians and Syrians in the districts of eastern Asia Minor completed the disorganization of the Byzantine regions”.[180]
The crafty policy of Muslim rulers in deflecting the hostility of their primitive co-religionists was an important factor in advancing the Turkish occupation. As the Muslim rulers of Egypt diverted the Hilali Bedouin into North Africa and other Arab nomads into the Sudan so “the great Seljuk sultans of Persia made strenuous efforts to shunt the Turkmen tribes into Anatolia in order to spare their own domains from their ravages. Also it was the Turkmen element, an element devoted to raiding and plundering, which effected a great portion of the conquests and occupations.”[181]
Vryonis remarks on how the long extended period of warfare was fatal to Byzantine Christian civilization:
With the exception of the felicitous period during which the Nicean empire and the Seljuk sultanate revived Anatolian society, the Turkish conquests and settlements … fatally dislocated Byzantine society in Asia Minor. Inasmuch as the state apparatus was Muslim, the Christian community could not at any given time recoup its previous losses. … Thus in spite of the stability and prosperity that characterized Anatolia in the first half of the thirteenth century, the Christians could do little about recovering all the ground that had been lost consequent to the decimating events of the late eleventh and the early twelfth century. Similarly, the Ottoman unification … brought greater security and uniformity of conditions for the Christians, but it was of no avail in restoring the Christian communities to that position they had occupied in the thirteenth century.[182]
However, Greek culture managed to survive in a new form for many years owing to extensive conversion and hybridization:
…the children of mixed marriages, as well as converts to Islam were very frequently Greek speaking or bilingual. Thus large numbers of mixovarvaroi in the Seljuk armies … were both Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking. … The Seljuks, Ottomans, and house of Aydin, who ruled over large numbers of Greeks and had to deal with Greek states, all had Greek chanceries in their administration. John Cantacuzene remarks that the Ottomans themselves were familiar with the Greek language.[183]
Eventually, the relentless pressure of the new virile religion and culture won the day. Kinross notes that in Ottoman times “through voluntary conversion to Islam, the Christian became automatically an Osmanli, with his origins soon forgotten, enjoying freedom from taxation, the right to hold land, opportunities for advancement, and a share in the benefits of the Moslem ruling elite.”[184]
Balkans
The conquest of the Balkans can be dated to 1353 with the establishment of the first permanent Ottoman garrison in the Gallipoli peninsula. One century later, after defeating the Serbs and other rivals in the Balkans, the Ottomans achieved the long time Muslim dream of taking Constantinople. The empire which had held the Muslims at bay during eight centuries of unrelenting warfare came to an end. The high water mark of the Ottoman domains in the Balkans occurred in 1526 with the first siege of Vienna, following which the tide slowly receded.
In a number of respects the circumstances facing the Muslim conquerors in the Balkans were similar to those facing the invaders of India. Both areas were the home to large settled populations. In both India and the Balkans, the conquest was never unchallenged, large areas were frequently quasi-independent or even in open rebellion. Even at the height of Muslim power in India, unconquered territory continued to exist in the South as well as along the eastern and northern fringe. Similarly, in the Balkans the Ottomans were faced with independent and militarily powerful neighbors just across the frontiers in Russia, Austria and Poland, in addition to the always annoying naval power of Venice.
Kinross describes the occupied Balkan territories as follows:
The Ottoman conquerors were relatively few in number. Now here confronting them in Europe were populations far in excess of any of the conquered lands of Asia, moreover far more various and complex in their racial, religious and political character.[185]
Lapidus describes the demographic situation and the progress of Islamization in the Balkans:
A census of 1520-30 showed that about 19 percent of the Balkan population was Muslim … The Muslim population of Bosnia, one of the highest was 45 percent. In general, Muslims were concentrated in towns. … The Muslim element was most numerous in Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Silistria. A new wave of Islamization occurred between 1666 and 1690 in the Rhodope. Islam came to northern Albania and Montenegro in the seventeenth century. Greeks in southwestern Macedonia and Crete converted in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[186]
Despite the brave resistance of the native peoples of both the Balkans and India, had Muslim rule continued uninterrupted in both regions, the slow process of conversion might, eventually, have produced Muslim majorities as it did elsewhere. But both the Mogul and Ottoman empires entered a period of decline and came under increasing pressure from technologically advanced Europeans. The Austrians, Venetians, Poles and Russians disrupted Ottoman rule and protected Christians in the Balkans; the British in India overthrew Mogul rule and, inadvertently perhaps, helped the Hindu majority revive their beleaguered culture.
Other Islamic Expansions
There were, in addition to the major territories discussed above, a number of lesser Muslim invasions and settlements. Various islands in the Mediterranean and in the Aegean were seized by Arab Muslims, often more than once. These include the islands of Crete and of Rhodes which experienced periods of Arab rule prior to their final conquest by the Turks. Malta, Sardinia and the Balearic islands were also held at various times by Arabs or by Moors. Cyprus also passed back and forth a number of times between Muslim and Christian rule. Sicily was invaded by Arabs and Berbers from North Africa and Spain starting in 827. After a long drawn-out period of war, the conquest was finally completed in 902 by the Aghlabid ruler Ibrahim II. The Aghlabids also briefly seized a number of forts on the southern Italian mainland, an achievement repeated under the Ottomans. The Ottomans at the height of empire, in an extension of their Balkan conquests, established their rule over Hungary, Transylvania and Moldavia.
The westernmost extension of the Mongols, the Golden Horde, having converted to Islam, migrated from the northern steppes west into southern Russia and the Ukraine where they ultimately established the Khanate of the Crimea. The first Khan converted to Islam in 1257; however it was only from 1313 on that all subsequent rulers were Muslim. The Crimean Khans ultimately became vassals of the Ottoman Sultans; the razzias of these Ottoman subordinates supplied the harems of the Ottoman world with many desirable European concubines.
Finally, in China proper, there were settlements of Muslim traders at various times. Their descendants, known as Hui, continue to exist in large numbers in parts of western and southwestern China. Being a small minority within the large Chinese population, they have led a comparatively peaceful existence.
The Muslims were the world’s most successful imperialists. However, all empire-building eventually came to a halt, including those of the carriers of the Islamic meme. The following chapter describes the circumstances by which the various Muslim expansions were stopped.
[1] Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 198.
[2] See Hitti, The Arabs, A Short History, p. 3.
[3] See Joseph E. Van Riper, Man’s Physical World, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1962, endpiece.
[4] All quotes from the Koran are from the translation by Pickthall: Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, New York, Signet Mentor Books.
[5] Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 19.
[6] Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs, UK, Macmillan, 1990, p. 145.
[7] Hitti, The Arabs, A Short History, p. 60.
[8] Noss, Man’s Religions, p. 740.
[9] Richard Bell quoted in Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad in Palestine.
[10] Robert Spencer, Onward Muslim Soldiers, Washington, D.C., Regnery, 2003, p.150.
[11] Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, p. 20.
[12] Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, p. 31.
[13] Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, p. 23.
[14] Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia, Princeton, Markus Wiener, 1996, p. 202.
[15] Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, p. 116.
[16] Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, pp. 23-4.
[17] Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, p. 117.
[18] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 144.
[19] J. K. J. Thomson, Decline in History, Malden MA, Polity Press, 1998, p. 89.
[20] Noss, Man’s Religions, p. 741.
[21] Speros Vryonis, Byzantium and Europe, UK, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970, p. 63.
[22] Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, p. 210.
[23] Hitti, History of the Arabs, pp. 155-56.
[24] Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History, New York, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 50.
[25] C. D. Darlington, The Evolution of Man and Society, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1969, p. 341.
[26] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 143.
[27] Hitti, The Arabs, A Short History, p. 65.
[28] Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia, pp. 201-202.
[29] Hitti, The Arabs, A Short History, p. 61.
[30] Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: an essay in quantitative history, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 41.
[31] Ibid, p. 38.
[32] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 169.
[33] Ibid, p. 143.
[34] Ibid, p. 287.
[35] Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, p. 16.
[36] Ibid, p. 25.
[37] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 233.
[38] Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971, p. 356.
[39] Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia, p. 202.
[40] Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, New York, Warner Books, 1992, pp. 26-27.
[41] Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, p. 357.
[42] Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, p. 47.
[43] N.S. Rajaram, Jihad, Terrorism and Dhimmitude (Internet), June 15, 2005.
[44] John Keay, India, A History, New York, Grove Press, 2000, p. 185.
[45] Hugh Fitzgerald, Why don’t Muslims integrate into Western societies?, Jihad Watch (Internet), August 4, 2005.
[46] Keay, India, A History, p. 279.
[47] Fitzgerald, Why don’t Muslims integrate into Western societies?
[48] The anthropic principle was developed in response to the observation that the physical constants which underlie the existence of a universe favorable to life are extremely fine-tuned. Even the slightest variation in any of these constants would lead to a “dead” universe. The fact that we are here shows that these constants must be as they are.
[49] Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, p. 22.
[50] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 475.
[51] Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 7.
[52] Lewis, The Middle East, p. 88.
[53] Keay, India, A History, p. 235.
[54] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 452.
[55] Ibid, pp. 621-22.
[56] Bat Yeor, Islam and Dhimmitude, Teaneck, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003, p. 63.
[57] Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979, p. 44.
[58] Yusuf Fadl Hasan, The Arabs and the Sudan, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1967, p. 37.
[59] R.N. Frye, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran Volume 4, Cambridge, 1975, p. 310.
[60] Yeor, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 64.
[61] Ibid.
[62] Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, p. 192.
[63] Ibid, p. 194.
[64] Ibid, p. 193.
[65] Ibid, p. 258.
[66] Ibid, p. 188.
[67] Ibid, p. 281.
[68] Ibid, p. 250.
[69] Ibid, p. 284.
[70] Ibid, pp. 281-82.
[71] Ibid, p. 241.
[72] Ibid, p. 283.
[73] Ibid, p. 274.
[74] John Morris, The Age of Arthur, New York, Scribners, 1973, p. 315.
[75] Keay, India, A History, p. 243
[76] Ibid, pp. 277-78.
[77] Yeor, Islam and Dhimmitude, pp. 63-4.
[78] Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, p. 68.
[79] Ibid, p. 93.
[80] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 153.
[81] Ibid, p. 360.
[82] Ibid, p. 156.
[83] Ibid, p. 360.
[84] Ibid, p. 165.
[85] Roland Oliver and Brian M. Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 122.
[86] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 234.
[87] Yeor, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 63.
[88] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 696.
[89] Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad in Palestine.
[90] Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, p. 218.
[91] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 214.
[92] Ibid
[93] John K. Cooley, Baal, Christ and Mohammed, London, Murray, 1967, p. 78.
[94] Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, p. 217.
[95] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 361.
[96] Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, p. 218.
[97] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 361.
[98] Ibid, p. 452.
[99] Cooley, Baal, Christ and Mohammed, p. 76.
[100] Oliver and Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age, pp. 146-47.
[101] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 541.
[102] Oliver and Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age, p. 166.
[103] Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, p. 204.
[104] Ibid, p.406.
[105] Oliver and Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age, p. 171.
[106] Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, p. 416.
[107] Ibid, p. 418.
[108] Ibid, pp. 419-26.
[109] THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN NIGERIA A HISTORICAL SURVEY Paper given at Conference on Sharî`a in Nigeria, Spiritan Institute of Theology, Enugu, 22-24 March 2001 (Internet).
[110] Oliver and Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age, p. 132.
[111] Ibid, p. 140.
[112] Ibid, p. 196.
[113] Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, p. 435.
[114] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 168.
[115] Oliver and Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age, p. 124.
[116] Hasan, The Arabs and the Sudan, p. 37.
[117] Ibid, p. 40.
[118] Ibid, pp. 49-50.
[119] Oliver and Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age, p. 130.
[120] Hasan, The Arabs and the Sudan, p. 90.
[121] Ibid, p. 125.
[122] Ibid, p. 127.
[123] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 291.
[124] Frye, The Cambridge History of Iran, pp. 110-11.
[125] Ibid, p. 112.
[126] Ibid, p. 138.
[127] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 210.
[128] Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia, p. 216.
[129] Ibid, p. 215.
[130] Peter B. Golden, The Karakhanids and early Islam in the Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, Cambridge, 1990, p. 343.
[131] Ibid, p. 357.
[132] Frye, The Cambridge History of Iran, p. 155.
[133] Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 78.
[134] Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, p. 351.
[135] Ibid, p. 339.
[136] Ibid, p. 342.
[137] Lewis, The Middle East, p. 237.
[138] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 212.
[139] Keay, India, A History, p. 185.
[140] Ibid, p. 187.
[141] Ibid
[142] Ibid, p. 188.
[143] V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982, p. 139.
[144] Keay, India, A History, p. 190.
[145] Ibid, p. 188.
[146] Ibid, p. 205.
[147] Ibid, p. 206.
[148] Ibid, p. 207.
[149] Ibid, pp. 207-8.
[150] Ibid, p. 208.
[151] Ibid, pp. 208-9.
[152] Ibid, p. 211.
[153] Frye, The Cambridge History of Iran, p. 180.
[154] Keay, India, A History, pp. 239-41.
[155] Ibid, p. 244.
[156] Ibid, p. 338.
[157] Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1954, p. 459.
[158] Keay, India, A History, p. 242.
[159] Rajaram, Jihad, Terrorism and Dhimmitude.
[160] Keay, India, A History, p. 242.
[161] Vincent Smith, The Oxford History of India, Oxford, 1928, p. 221.
[162] Bernard H. M. Vlekke, Nusantara: A History of Indonesia, The Hague, W. Van Hoeve, 1965, p. 52.
[163] Ibid, pp. 82-3.
[164] Ibid, pp. 83-4.
[165] Ibid, p. 93.
[166] Ibid, p. 94.
[167] Ibid, pp. 97-8.
[168] Ibid, p. 95.
[169] Ibid, p. 97.
[170] Ibid, pp. 86-7.
[171] Ibid, p. 98.
[172] Ibid, p. 97.
[173] Ibid, p. 150.
[174] Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, p. 203.
[175] Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 498.
[176] Ibid, p. 507.
[177] Ibid, p. 544.
[178] Ibid, p. 551.
[179] Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, p. 143.
[180] Ibid, p. 403.
[181] Ibid, p. 171.
[182] Ibid, pp. 285-86.
[183] Ibid, pp. 461-62.
[184] Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, p. 33.
[185] Ibid, p. 47.
[186] Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, pp. 252-53.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire