The Muslim conquest of Syria initially preserved Byzantine administrative continuity.

Evidence

In the wake of the Muslim conquests, little changed for the average Christian or Jewish resident of ex-Byzantine Syria. In Damascus, for example, the same family that had administered the city under Constantinople now did so for their new Muslim masters. Bureaucratic apparatuses were left in tact, and the language of administration continued to be Greek (or Persian in the former Persian empire). In the two centuries that followed, the Near East, from Egypt to Iran, became the theater of a tremendous though gradual cultural transformation: out of Greek, Persian, Arabic, Syriac, and Indian elements, a new Islamic civilization was forged. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 260

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘The same family that administered Damascus for Constantinople now did so for their new Muslim masters’ is a crisp, surprising image of conquest-as-management-handoff.
• XREF: Strongly recalls the ‘continuity thesis’ in late-antique historiography and the reader’s prior interest in how conquest regimes preserve the local admin they replace. — connects to: Byzantine-Persian exhaustion enabled early Muslim conquests