While there is ample documentation of these facts, not all accounts of the conquests convey an impression of Muslim tolerance, and the gap between what happened and what people think happened is partly the result of Christian chroniclers. At the time of the fall of Jerusalem, the patriarch, Sophronius, led the resistance to the Arabs and negotiated the surrender of the city. He also acted as Umar’s tour guide in 638 when the caliph made a pilgrimage to receive the city personally. Though Jerusalem had been demoted by Muslims in favor of Mecca, it was still
considered a holy site, and Umar understood the significance of its passing into Muslim hands. Entering the walls, he rode his usual white camel and wore his usual unpretentious bedouin garb. Umar was met by the resplendent patriarch, wearing the rich robes of his office, and surrounded by his equally resplendent retinue. The caliph was taken on a tour of the holy sites, after which he promised that he would leave the Anastasis (Holy Sepulchre) untouched. He then ordered that a mosque be built on the Temple Mount, which less than a century later was replaced with Al-Aqsa.
The occupation of Jerusalem was among the least tumultuous that it has ever known, and for a city that has been raided, sacked, and destroyed so many times, that is saying something. Even so, that did not endear the Arabs to the vanquished. The construction of a mosque on the site of Solomon’s Temple was seen by Jews and Christians as a sign of God’s severe displeasure. The patriarch interpreted the victory of the Arabs as a punishment for the sins of Christians. “If we were to live as is dear and pleasing to God,” he told his congregation, “we would rejoice over the fall of the Saracen enemy and observe their near ruin and witness their final demise. For their blood-loving blade will enter their hearts, their bow will be broken and their arrows will be fixed in them.”
Sophronius was a staunch defender of the two-nature creed enshrined by the Council of Chalcedon, and he used the triumph of the Arabs as an excuse to berate dissident sects throughout the Near East, especially the Egyptian Copts, for rejecting that formula. In retribution, God had sent the Arabs to “plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Byzantine armies arrayed against them.” Though acting as an agent of God’s wrath, Muhammad, continued the patriarch, was a “devil,” and his message a blasphemy. But the Christians had only themselves to blame for straying, and that had led to their utter defeat.
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The patriarch viewed the Muslim occupation as a tragedy on a cosmic scale. So did his master, the emperor Heraclius. For both men, the defeat was mortally crushing. Having spent long years wresting control of Jerusalem from the Sasanians, Heraclius had assumed that he had found favor in the eyes of God, and when he replaced the True Cross in the Church of the Anastasis in 630, he must have believed himself blessed. When he heard that a desert chieftain with the strange title of “caliph” had entered the holy city as a conqueror, he was stricken, emotionally
and physically. He had been in Antioch at the time, and as the Arabs advanced, he retreated to the coast of Asia Minor. In Constantinople, adversaries took advantage of the setbacks and began to plot. Ailing and despondent, Heraclius returned to a capital and a family conspiring against him. He died within months.
While the emperor and his patriarch in Jerusalem saw Muslim success as the result of Christian sin, some went even further and claimed that Islam was nothing more than a Christian heresy. So said John of Damascus, one of the last great Christian theologians of the Muslim Near East. Though he grew up in Damascus, he left the city sometime in the late seventh century and spent significant portions of his life penning angry rebuttals of Muslim theology. In contrast to the ecumenical portrait of the early Arab commanders left by medieval Muslim historians, John of Damascus condemned Islam as
a people-deceiving cult of the Ishmaelites, the forerunner of the Antichrist…. It derives from Ishmael, who was born to Abraham of Hagar, wherefore they are called Hagarenes and Ishmaelites. And they call them Saracens, inasmuch as they were sent away empty-handed by Sarah These were idolaters and worshipers of the morning-star… and until the time of Heraclius they were plain idolaters. From that time till now a false prophet appeared among them, surnamed Muhammad, who, having happened upon the Old and the New Testament and apparently having conversed with an Arian monk, put together his own heresy.
According to John, Muhammad then “composed frivolous tales,” which were cobbled together by his followers to form the bare bones of a sect.
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In essence, John treated Islam as no different from the dozens of other heresies that had contaminated early Christianity. While his interpretation was harsh, his denunciation of Islam as Christian heresy is a powerful testament to the close connection between the two faiths. Christian polemicists never described Zoroastrianism as a bastardization of Christianity, nor did later Europeans link Hindus and Buddhists to Christianity. The schisms of the early Christian church represented alternate and opposed interpretations of the scripture. These schisms could last decades or even centuries, but eventually one side lost or was marginalized and was then labeled a “heresy” by the “orthodox.” John of
Damascus, writing during a time when the strength of the church in the Near East was waning, was dismayed and angered by the success of Islam. He believed that Muslims had distorted the true word of God by denying the divinity of Christ, just as earlier heretics had. Unlike those earlier heresies, however, Islam had resisted efforts to quash it and now was a direct challenge to the legitimacy and survival of the Byzantine Church.
THE COMMUNITY DIVIDES
MUSLIM ATTITUDES
toward the People of the Book were hardly the focus in these early years. Instead, the first generation of Muslims were occupied with defining a new political order. The initial wave of conquests paused in the middle of the seventh century because of internal divisions. The succession to Muhammad had been a problem even with the choice of Abu Bakr, but after Umar ibn al-Khattab, the issue became more acute. The third caliph, Uthman, was assassinated, and Ali ibn Abu Talib, who had married Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and was also the Prophet’s cousin, then became the fourth caliph. During Ali’s brief reign, the tenuous unity of the Arab tribes collapsed. The central debate was over who should be the rightful heirs to Muhammad. Different clans of the Quraysh staked their claim. The Meccan aristocracy tried to seize the upper hand and were in turn challenged by the Medinese, who asserted that because they had joined Muhammad first, they should be preeminent. But even amongst the Medinese and Muhammad’s immediate family, there were divisions.
If these political and tribal fissures weren’t sufficient to create chaos, there was an added doctrinal dimension: did the caliph have to be connected to and descended from Muhammad by blood, or was piety the most important factor? In short, the question was whether the caliph would be a hereditary monarch, who would pass on his rule to his children, or a first among equals who would earn his authority through the respect of the community.
Ali was the most controversial of the first four caliphs. His elevation to the caliphate triggered a civil war. He had fiercely loyal followers who believed he had been Muhammad’s favorite and was then unjustly denied the caliphate for more than two decades. At the same time, he
was attacked not only by rival clans and other claimants but by groups who believed that the caliphate should be reserved for the pure of faith regardless of blood ties to Muhammad. The civil war that ended with Ali’s assassination in 661 was a kaleidoscope of warring factions, and the partisan nature of subsequent sources makes it even harder to sort out what happened. Ali seems to have tried to negotiate with his enemies in order to keep the Muslim community intact, but that only alienated some of his followers. The purists who assassinated him felt that he had betrayed them and abdicated his responsibility by not vigorously campaigning against his adversaries. While the specifics are clouded, the outcome is not: the caliphate of Ali opened a religious chasm within the Muslim community. The
shi’a Ali
, or “party of Ali,” became known as the Shi’a, and the rest became known as Sunni, or “traditionalists.” Each of these in turn fragmented into multiple factions and sects, but the Sunni-Shi’a division has lasted to this day.
To subsequent generations of Muslims, Ali’s death marked the end of the “Rightly Guided Caliphate.” The first four caliphs had all been personally connected to Muhammad, by blood, friendship, or marriage. The caliph who replaced Ali, Muawiya, was one of the Quraysh and related to Uthman. He had been a superb general during the initial conquests, and then governor of Syria. But even with formidable backing of the garrison cities and of Cairo, only when Ali’s eldest son, Hasan, agreed not to contest Muawiya’s leadership was his hold on the caliphate secure.
The Umayyad dynasty founded by Muawiya lasted for nearly a century. The Muslim empire shifted from loosely organized, dynamic confederacies of tribes into a more structured state spanning thousands of miles and ruled from Damascus. Initially, the Umayyads tended more to internal affairs than to continuing the wars of expansion, but skirmishes with the Byzantines continued, especially given the proximity of Damascus to the heartland of the Byzantine Empire. The Umayyads built a navy, and seized Crete and Rhodes, but these were minor acquisitions compared with the territory conquered only a few years before. Muawiya’s death and the ineptitude of his son triggered another civil war, which again featured the partisans of Ali and rebellion in Mecca and Medina. After, the victorious Umayyads initiated a new wave of conquests and more substantial attacks on Constantinople.
The Umayyads led the first Muslim empire that directly impacted the Christians of Europe. Advancing from Egypt, Arab armies took
Carthage (Tunis) toward the end of the seventh century, and then proceeded west along the Mediterranean coast. At the beginning of the eighth century, Tariq ibn Ziyad, a freed Berber slave of the Muslim governor of North Africa, invaded Spain with an army that he led across the narrow strait that would be named after him, Jebel Tariq, known in the West as Gibraltar. The Iberian Peninsula at the time was ruled by the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe that had seized the region during the last days of the Roman Empire. As in Egypt, relations between rulers and the ruled were tense and hostile, and the local populace did not go out of their way to halt Tariq’s advance. Cities such as Córdoba and Toledo fell without a fight, and while the Goths did mount some resistance, the entire peninsula, called by the Arabs al-Andalus, was soon under Tariq’s control. Only the Pyrenees stood between him and Europe. He might have continued his advance had he not been recalled by the caliph, who, it would appear, had never actually given his consent to the invasion of Spain and was not clear what value it added to his empire.
The conquest of Spain had an incalculable impact on Europe and on the evolution of Western civilization, but initially, it was a footnote for the Umayyads. More important to the Muslims at the time was that the success of the Umayyads was a defeat for those who believed the community should be ruled not by the most powerful dynasty, but by the most pious and pure.
The relocation of the capital to Damascus cemented the new order, and reduced the influence of Medina and Mecca. The result was that the Umayyad Empire evolved like other empires. Its ruling class, and a small but growing percentage of its subjects, were Muslim, but the state was governed and organized much like the Byzantines, the Persians, or medieval states in Christian Europe were. The caliph retained the title Commander of the Faithful, and he was the ultimate arbiter of religious disputes, but the same was true of the Byzantine emperor. The caliph had supreme authority and a court, governors, and an army, but so too did the Han emperor in China. And in matters of faith, law, and doctrine, the Umayyads began to defer to religious scholars and judges.
For the caliph in Damascus, what mattered was control, order, and income. Control was maintained by placing strong governors in each province and making them responsible for collecting revenue. The garrison settlements evolved into thriving cities, and the armies of the caliph were the ultimate keepers of the peace. But day to day, the
decentralized nature of the empire meant that its inhabitants enjoyed substantial autonomy. The overwhelming majority of those inhabitants were People of the Book, and autonomy meant toleration for their religious beliefs and institutions. While the conquerors were not above inflicting humiliations on the conquered, that was not the predominant experience. For the Copts of Egypt, for the peoples of Andalusia, and for the Christians of the Near East, the reign of the Umayyads was more benign and less intrusive than what had come before the arrival of Arabs and Islam. Communities were left to organize themselves, with minimal intrusion from the state. While the Copts, for instance, were second-class citizens relative to the ruling Arab elite, they had also been second-class citizens relative to the ruling Byzantine elite. At least under the Arabs they did not face religious persecution. They had to pay a poll tax, and were sometimes subjected to restrictions on travel, especially between villages and cities, but it wasn’t as if most Egyptians had enjoyed personal freedoms under the Byzantines that were then denied by the Muslims.
Today, millions of people—especially in the Muslim world—still believe the myth that the caliph ruled the spirit as well as the flesh of his subjects and that the early Muslim empires represented a unique and potent synthesis of faith and power. This has troubling implications for how Islam has been defined in the modern world. Most people living under Muslim rule in the seventh and eighth centuries would not have recognized this picture of their world. Unless they directly and explicitly challenged the authority of the caliph and his deputies, they were allowed an extraordinary degree of latitude. No doubt there were examples to the contrary. People with power usually abuse that power, and governors overstepped. But those abuses were not systematic. Instead, the system was designed to maintain much of the status quo, and that meant a small Muslim ruling class that impinged as little as possible on a large Christian-Jewish populace.