The Arab Islamic conquests swept across three continents with startling speed
Evidence
‘Of the Middle East in about AD 600 one thing can be said for certain: its chances of being conquered by Arab tribesmen in the name of a new religion were so remote that nobody had even speculated that it might happen. Islam came upon the world as a totally unexpected development…’ Nevertheless, by 632, the year of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, most of the Arabian peninsula had submitted to Islam. In the next few years, not only Syria was taken from the Byzantines, but the Sasanian Persians had also been defeated and their capital, Ctesiphon, occupied. The Arabs conquered Egypt in 642. Thereafter Arab armies pressed on eastwards through Iran and Khurasan, ultimately reaching the frontiers of China, while other Arab and Berber forces moved westwards across North Africa and crossed into Spain in 711. For a while, it even seemed that areas of the south of France and Switzerland might be included within the frontier of the Arab caliphate. … Though the Muslim Arabs made little attempt to convert their newly conquered subjects, nevertheless there were political, social and, above all, fiscal advantages in converting to Islam. Consequently Christendom was faced with not just a military threat, but an ideological one as well. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 47
Categorization
- CANDY: A compact version of the astonishing pace of Islamic conquest — good dinner-table fact.
Related
- Islam’s rapid conquests seemed miraculous even to Muslim observers themselves (similarity 0.82)
- The Muslim conquests were not a foreign invasion but a unification of long-familiar peoples (similarity 0.80)
- Muslim conquests seemed unremarkable to contemporaries who had seen many (similarity 0.78)
- Islam’s early expansion produced multiple distinct subcivilizations across three continents (similarity 0.78)
- Early Muslim conquests succeeded partly because war-weary peoples welcomed the armies (similarity 0.78)