The line between People of the Book and People of the Pact is hard to discern. The first “pact” was supposedly between the defeated Jews of Medina and Muhammad, but it’s unclear whether such a pact existed or whether it was an invention of later theologians. Over the centuries, the legal distinctions between People of the Book and People of the Pact were the subject of countless treatises and debates. Muslim jurists, like jurists everywhere, parsed every conceivable angle, and probed every hypothetical issue they could imagine. By the middle to late seventh century, however, the idea of
dhimmis
(the term for someone who is entitled
to the protections guaranteed to the People of the Pact) was ensconced in the Arab-Muslim empire.
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The People of the Book who lived under Muslim rule were
dhimmis.
They were set apart, favorably, by their possession of holy scripture inspired by revelations from God (Allah). That entitled them to a modicum of respect by Muslims. But to earn favored status, the People of the Book had to acknowledge the authority of their Muslim rulers, and they had to pay a poll tax. In return, they were allowed to govern themselves. They could worship freely in churches or synagogues or fire temples. They could eat pork and drink alcohol. They picked their own local leaders who had wide latitude over most aspects of daily life, from marriage to inheritance and estates, from petty crimes to crimes of passion. The People of the Book had no armies; they did not control any city or province; but most of the time, they were left alone.
This didn’t mean that they were treated well, only that they were not treated as badly as conquered peoples usually were. Later traditions suggest that both Muhammad and Umar, for instance, were not willing to extend this tolerance to those Jews and Christians living in Arabia itself, and Umar is said to have carried out the last major expulsion of the Jews of Arabia when he removed the Jewish tribes from the Khaybar oasis. Outside the Arabian Peninsula, however, the treatment was more benign.
The Arab-Muslim invasions were significantly less violent and disruptive than the Persian-Byzantine wars that immediately preceded them, or than many of the previous wars of conquest undertaken by the likes of Alexander the Great and the Roman legions. Though there were a fair number of pitched battles, many cities fell without bloodshed. Damascus in the seventh century was a key part of the Byzantine Empire, but its inhabitants were disenchanted with the emperor and with the church leaders in Constantinople. The key issue was a long-simmering doctrinal dispute over the nature of Christ, and the bishops in Constantinople had little patience with the intransigence of churches in Damascus and throughout the Near East. As a result, when faced with an Arab army near its walls, Damascus put up only token resistance.
Besieged by five thousand horsemen commanded by Khalid ibn al-Walid, the citizens of Damascus were faced with a quandary: they had little enthusiasm for laying down their lives to defend the empire, but they did not want to surrender the city only to face slaughter. The bishops
of the city’s various sects entered into talks with Khalid to discuss a peaceful surrender. To assuage their concerns, Khalid wrote out a promise on a piece of parchment, stating,
In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful. This is what Khalid would grant the inhabitants of Damascus, if he enters therein: he promises to give them security for their lives, property and churches. Their city-wall shall not be demolished; neither shall any Muslim be quartered in their houses. Thereunto we give them the pact of Allah and the protection of his Prophet, the caliphs, and the Believers. So long as they pay the poll-tax, nothing but good shall befall them.
Having secured these promises from Khalid, the bishops unlocked the gates, let the Muslims enter the city, and doomed the Byzantine garrison to defeat.
Similar scenes were repeated throughout the Near East. The Christian inhabitants of the city of Hims, north of Damascus, were so infuriated with Heraclius that they chose to join the Arabs in order to fight against the Byzantines. The Arab commanders promised the people of Hims that they would be protected if they surrendered. Instead, they volunteered to help. “We like your rule and justice far better than the state of oppression and tyranny in which we were. The army of Heraclius we shall indeed repulse from the city.” The Jews also joined the cause. “We swear by the Torah,” they told the Muslim commanders, “no governor of Heraclius shall enter the city of Hims unless we are first vanquished and exhausted.”
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In a similar vein, the Arab general who led the invasion of Egypt, Amr ibn al-As, went out of his way to assuage the fears of Egyptian Christians. Legend has it that before he became a Muslim, Amr had saved the life of a Christian deacon from Alexandria. In gratitude, the deacon purchased Amr’s entire stock of goods, and Amr then began to do regular business in Egypt. The Nile Delta was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean, and Alexandria was a commercial hub. It was Amr ibn al-As who purportedly convinced the caliph Umar to authorize an invasion, and one of the reasons he gave was that the Christian population, like the Christians of Syria, was disaffected with the rule of Constantinople.
The rift between the Egyptian church and Constantinople had been
growing for decades, and it was based on both politics and theology. The Coptic Church of Egypt adhered to the doctrine of Monophysitism, which stated that Christ had one nature, and that nature was divine. (Hence the term “Monophysite,” from the Greek meaning “one nature.”) This was in direct contradiction to the creed that had been established by the Council of Chalcedon almost two hundred years before, which held that Christ had both a human nature and a divine nature. Though these debates hardly seem worth fighting and dying for, in the early centuries of Christianity the exact nature of Christ was the most divisive issue. Wars were waged over whether Christ was equally divine and human, more human than divine, or more divine than human. The division between Egypt and Constantinople also had a political dimension. The bishop who had been sent by the emperor to keep the Copts in line succeeded only in intimidating the Egyptians with pogroms and inquisitions. By the time of the Arab conquests, the alienated populace was deeply resentful of Byzantine rule.
Amr ibn al-As took advantage of these strains in order to gain the allegiance of the Egyptians, and that may explain why Egypt fell so quickly to an army of less than five thousand soldiers. Later Arab chroniclers even claimed that the Coptic Church actively aided the Arabs and helped them defeat the Byzantine garrisons in the Delta, having been promised by Amr that their churches would be undisturbed and their tax burden manageable. For the Copts and their bishops, it was a tolerable trade-off. They knew they had to pay taxes to someone, and at least the Muslims would allow them to practice their faith the way they wished, free from the repressive, arrogant authority of Constantinople.
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In many respects, the conquests were swift and largely bloodless. Instead of the usual scenes of wanton death and destruction, the cities and towns occupied by the Arabs were treated almost gently, and seem to have welcomed the exchange of rulers. Given the disarray of both the Persian and the Byzantine armies in the region, and the absence of strong organized resistance, that makes sense. There was, in essence, no need for substantial violence. Yet that has not prevented other conquerors at other times from committing nauseating atrocities. Why, then, were the Muslim conquerors relatively benign? The paucity of sources makes it difficult to answer that question, but one thing is undeniable: the Quran instructed Muslims to respect the People of the Book, and that is precisely what they did. The early history of Islam, therefore,
unfolded against the backdrop of toleration for the religions of the conquered.
There were also pragmatic reasons. Compared to the number of people spread across thousands of miles of territory, the percentage of Arabs and Muslims was tiny. The early caliphs grasped that there was no way for them to rule without the active cooperation of the conquered. In fact, unless the local administrative systems were left intact, the caliph would not be able to gather taxes; without the local officials, who would physically collect them? And while there was pressure on the caliph to allow his commanders to raid and pillage the occupied cities, that would have created further complications. Once that was done, what then? Many of the tribal leaders who led these armies also wanted the caliph to allow their troops to take land and replace the Byzantine or Persian administrators. But then the armies would have disbanded, leaving the newly acquired regions in a vulnerable and potentially chaotic state.
The solution was to create garrison cities, at Basra and Kufa in what is now southern Iraq, and to leave only a minimal number of troops in the older, established urban centers. The garrison settlements in southern Iraq, and later one at Fustat (Cairo), on the Nile, were a way to keep the armies intact, but that in turn meant that there were precious few soldiers to maintain control of formerly Byzantine cities such as Damascus, Jerusalem, and Antioch, or of Persian centers like Rayy and Merv. That made it imperative for the Muslims to do as little as possible to disrupt the status quo in the newly acquired lands. They removed the top layer of Byzantine and Persian administration, but initially they left the other layers untouched. In that sense, religious toleration was a pragmatic component of an overall strategy of staying separate from the conquered peoples.
Later accounts portray Muslim armies sweeping across the region. But while they did inflict crushing defeats on the legions of two different empires, and then occupied a large number of cities, many people in the lands now controlled by the Arabs were only vaguely aware of what had happened. In fact, for years, many had only sketchy details about the conquests. They knew that the Byzantine rule had evaporated, and that people dressing and speaking differently had appeared demanding tax payments. They learned that these were Arabs calling themselves Muslims, and slowly, they gleaned the basic precepts of Islam. But as late as 680, a Christian named John from the city of Fenek in the region of
Mosul wrote an account that was remarkably uninformed about Islam and about the Muslim conquests, although he praised the Arabs for respecting both ordinary Christians and Christian monks. Other Christians from different regions were similarly confused. This was partly a function of the isolation of most people and the time it took for news to spread from the metropolises to the provinces. But it was also the result of the particular nature of the conquests. As one scholar has noted, the Muslims left such a light footprint on the parts of the world they occupied that it took more than a century before many of the people under their rule began to adjust their lives significantly and figure out what had taken place between 630 and 640.
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The simple fact is that if you weren’t in Damascus or central parts of Iraq, if you weren’t in the Nile Delta or the old centers of Sasanian power, your life didn’t change dramatically after the conquests. Once every year or so, a group of soldiers and a local governor might appear to demand payment, but that had also been the case under the prior regime. In time, a few soldiers settled in your town, and they might have been Muslim. Gradually, local governors appointed by the caliph set up their own commercial and cultural networks, which were tied to the larger world of Islam, but this happened so slowly that it would have been almost imperceptible to any one person living during these years.
Much of this is contrary to the imagined history of Arab warriors carrying the Quran in one hand and a scimitar in the other. Yes, they were driven by religion, and yes, they were magnificent fighters, mobile, unconventional, and fearless. They combined a pre-Islamic tradition of raiding with the solidarity and certainty of true believers. But they were also tribal, and tribes rarely admit converts. The message of Islam had been given to Muhammad in Arabic for an Arab audience, and while Arabs believed that the message was universally true, they did not go out of their way to convince non-Arabs. They sought to rule and to tax the peoples of the Near East and beyond, but they did not try to save their souls or show them the true light. If non-Arabs wanted to hear the message, it was there to be heard, but they were not embraced if they did. Non-Arab converts were initially treated not much better than the People of the Book, and in some circumstances they may have been treated worse. There were reports, shaded by later animosity no doubt, that the governor of Iraq in the late seventh century, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, known as a brutal but effective administrator, rounded up all the non-Arab converts
from Basra and Kufa, tattooed their foreheads, and sent them back to their villages and towns.
Eventually, the shabby treatment of converts would lead to a revolution, but for the first hundred years after the conquests, the empire was ruled by an Arab elite that only gradually became absorbed into the societies that they had conquered. While in Egypt and the Tigris-Euphrates region garrison cities were created, even in the far-flung corners of the empire, in Andalus to the west or in the remote corners of what is now northeast Iran and Afghanistan, the Arabs stood apart and separate, secure in their faith, uninterested in missionary work.
Scholars have long since disposed of the image of Islam being spread by the sword, but that has not altered popular imagination. The belief that the Arab conquests were wars of conversion has been stubbornly immune to the facts. Forced conversion would have been directly at odds with the Quran, which states in one of its least ambiguous verses, “No compulsion is there in religion” (2:256). This clear scriptural injunction was obeyed by the early conquerors.
In only one tenuous respect is the image of Islam as welded to the sword legitimate. Eventually, the vast lands that came under Muslim domination did become Muslim societies. The process of conversion took centuries, and happened peacefully and organically. But conversion did happen, and only because of those initial military victories followed by strong Muslim dynasties that managed, with some difficulty, to retain control. That was no small accomplishment. History is littered with victories that did not lead to new empires. Insofar as the sword and the Quran together removed Christianity as the dominant religion in North Africa, Egypt, the Near East, and, much later, Turkey, they did go hand in hand. But only by conflating centuries can it be said that Islam was spread by force, and it simply cannot be said that the initial conquests imposed Islam on the conquered.
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