Islam, Power and Empire, to 677 CE

Muhammad the Prophet wins Militarily..

While the Sassanid and Byzantine empires were weakening each other, a new religious organization and political force was rising on the Arabian peninsula: Islam. There, towns were few. Arabia had been divided mainly among warlike nomadic tribes with camels and flocks of cattle and sheep. An individual's survival depended on subordinating himself to his tribe. And tribes sometimes compensated for periods of extreme dryness by raiding neighboring tribes or a passing caravan.

The town of Mecca was a link in trade between Constantinople and India. The Quraysh tribe controlled the town. Members of the tribe were skilled merchants and traders and involved in the overland spice trade.

Like other tribal peoples, people of the Arabian desert had been polytheistic. These were people who believed in spirits that were neutral to them, spirits that were hostile and spirits to which they could appeal. They believed that through ritual they could bind their tribe to a spirit. And they saw spirits in various objects and places. They saw spirit in the moon and stars, in the rocks which marked their way through the desert, in springs and water wells, in caves, in the few trees in the region and on mountain tops – places they considered holy.

When Arabic tribes came together at markets and fairs they engaged in religious ceremony and held a truce. At these fairs the tribes had acquired a common view of a god they called Allah, a god who was one among the other gods. These contacts among tribes reinforced their common language, which was rich in poetry, and they acquired a common identity as Arabs.

nto this region called Arabia had come cultural influences from elsewhere. There were the descendants of Jewish refugees from centuries before. And, by the year 500, Christian missionaries had arrived in Arabia. The entire Arabian province of Najran had been Christian. Christianity was established superficially in various other centers of trade, and Arabs living on the borders of what was left of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires had contacts with people and ideas from those empires.

A tradesman member of the Quraysh from Mecca named Mohammad was familiar with Christianity. The earliest biography on the Prophet Muhmmad of which scholars are aware dates to 767, 135 years after his death, and this biography is known to scholars through an edition compiled in 833. Muhammad is described as occasionally withdrawing to meditate in a cave outside Mecca, similar to the withdrawal of some Christian ascetics in Syria. In the cave, Muhammad, at around forty years of age, began hearing messages from God via the angel Gabriel. Muhammad decided that the god he knew as Allah was also Jehovah, the god of the Jews and Christians. He claimed to foresee the end of the world, a day of judgment when the dead would be awakened, when all would be judged according to their deeds and sent to either paradise or eternal flames.

Muhammad saw his faith as monotheistic like that of the Hanif, the Christians and Jews. And he saw the world between God and humanity as occupied by spirits not called gods but labelled as angels and demons. He saw the future as in the hands of God, and he felt it was his duty to convert people to what he called "submission to the will of God" and to warn his fellow Meccans of God's Final Judgment.

Muslim scholars were not to describe Muhammad as partaking in another instance of cultural diffusion. Instead, Islam was viewed as an intervention by God – such intervention an ancient and common view. The scholar Reza Aslan writes:

Like so many prophets before him, the Prophet Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. On the contrary, by Muhammad's own admission, his message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples. ^note5

It was not a modest view. The Prophet Muhammad proclaimed that God had chosen him to preach the truth, that he was God's final and foremost messenger, superseding the message proclaimed by Jesus.

His fellow Meccans rejected his religious ideas. But Arabs visiting Mecca viewed that city as having a special spirituality, and they were impressed by Muhammad's preaching and invited him to their town, Yathrib (population roughly 10,000). Muhammad found Yathrib without any stable authority outside its Jewish community, and as a man of God he established himself as someone to come to for judgments.

At Yathrib, Muhammad approached the leaders of a Jewish community and claimed to be a leader of Judaism. The Jews believed Muhammad's grasp of Judaism muddled, and they rejected him. Until then, Muhammad and his followers had been bowing toward Jerusalem. After a year and a half in Yathrib, Muhammad began bowing instead toward Mecca. He abandoned Saturday as the Sabbath and made Friday the special day of the week for Islam.

Muhammad's followers suffered from poverty, and beginning in January 623 some of them resorted to the tradition of raiding the caravans that traveled along the eastern coast of the Red Sea from Mecca to Syria. These were circumstances that worked to Muhammad's favor. Seeing himself as their leader, Muhammad put himself at the head of these raids, excusing them on the grounds of the injustice of poverty and describing the raids as part of a holy war (Jihad) against the rulers of Mecca for their having rejected his teaching. Muhammad and his followers had been developing a contempt for people they called "idolaters," people who worshipped traditional, numerous gods. Energized by religious fervor, a sense of unity and the prospect of booty, his men fought well.

Muhammad's movement had been a fraction of those in the town of Yathrib, perhaps 1,500 strong. But his success in warfare brought new people into his army, and this larger army brought increased success and more converts. In March 624 he had his greatest success so far, at Bedr, where his followers killed from 50 to 70 Meccans who had been accompanying a caravan. Just as Christians attributed divine help in the violence that Constantine conducted against Maxentius, Muhammad of course attributed his success to the will of God.

Muhammad's power grew as he distributed booty and made alliances with tribes neighboring Yathrib. The war between Muhammad and Mecca continued. By Arab standards, Muhammad had become the leader of a great military machine, and Mecca had failed to acquire help from tribes elsewhere in Arabia. In January 630 Muhammad's army of around 10,000 men stood outside Mecca and frightened the city into surrendering. Muhammad exercised diplomatic skills, and bloodshed was avoided. He strengthened his movement by giving Meccan leaders important positions under his rule, neutralizing them as potential enemies, maintaining their leadership vis-à-vis other Meccans and soothing what might otherwise have been wounded pride. It was a traditional move by the wiser of conquerors.

Under Muhammad's authority, Meccans of wealth were obliged to donate to the well-being of Mecca's poor. People saw Muhammad's strength as the power of his god, and they saw the other gods as having become powerless – another common way of looking at the world and more of military success deciding religious devotions. There were many conversions to Islam. And with Mecca under Muhammad's rule, the holy shrine there, the Kaaba, was turned into a place of Islamic worship.

Muhammad added Mecca's army to his own. His victory at Mecca alarmed tribes elsewhere in Arabia. Had they united with Mecca to defeat Muhammad the story might have been different, but unity of purpose had not occurred, and now not one of their armies matched Muhammad's. In February and March, 630, Muhammad’s military fought various skirmishes and the battles of Hunsin, Auras, and Taif. Muhammad was victorious, and his greater dominance was followed by more conversions.

Succession Politics, 622-23

Tribes across the region began sending deputations to Muhammad and agreeing to deliver taxes to his government. From those who did not convert – Christian and Jewish communities – Muhammad demanded taxes, and in exchange he offered them protection, as rulers had for millennia.

Neither an ascetic nor a celibate, Muhammad is said to have lived his last two years without harsh words about life. He continued the custom of polygamy – a practice that had helped compensate for the high death rate among Arabs and for a diminished ability to conceive because of Arabia's hot climate. But perhaps as a move against the rich, he limited the number of wives a man could have at any one time to four, except for himself, allowing himself thirteen.

Muhammad clung to the acceptance of slavery, to his belief in the coming of Armageddon and to polygamy, and there were other influences. The Arab tradition was not that of dynasties by conquering monarchs. Nor was there a tradition of institutionalized democracy. In Arabia there were none of the institutions that made a state as opposed to kinship societies. Arab politics had been tribal. Tribes were brotherhoods, and that is how Muhammad saw Islam, as a brotherhood, and brotherhoods were not supposed to need formal political mechanisms for maintaining authority.

Muhammad is not known to have left any directives about succession other than there be no successor to him as a prophet of God. Muslim scholars describe a political constitution created by Muhammad, known as the Constitution of Medina. There is no surviving original document. Historians have numerous descriptions from early Muslim sources which offer various interpretative versions of the constitution, but none contain a description of specific mechanisms for leadership to be influenced by popular opinion. As the scholar Bernard Lewis claims, the Constitution was not a treaty in the modern sense, or a contract between the ruler and the ruled. It was a unilateral proclamation.

Modern constitutions were to offer what would become the political stability of mature democracies, but this is not what happened among Muhammad's followers. A group of Muhammad's old companions at Yathrib felt that they should be the ones to select Muhammad's successor. Those from Mecca, who were members of the same tribe as Muhammad, the Quraysh, argued that Arabs would recognize the authority of Muhammad's successor only if he were a Quraysh. And Muhammad's only surviving daughter, Fatimah, believed that her husband, Ali (Muhammad's stepbrother as well as son-in-law) should be the successor, an argument for dynasticism.

Muhammad's old companions met, quarreled bitterly and rejected Ali. The Quraysh group selected one of their own, Muhammad's father-in-law and companion, the fifty-nine year-old Abu Bakr. This group attacked and murdered the favorite of the Yathrib group, Sa'd ibn-Ubada. Sa'd ibn-Ubada was said to have been killed by Allah, and Bakr was declared the successor, the "Commander of the Faithful," the khalifa – anglicized to caliph

The city of Yathrib, meanwhile, had become known as Al Madinah, "the city of the Prophet," which has been shortened to Medina. Bakr ruled from Medina, his powers not well defined. He claimed no religious authority and continued to live frugally and simply in a modest household with his wife, receiving no stipend. He conducted government business in the courtyard of what had been the Prophet's mosque.

Across Arabia, people believed that with the death of Muhammad they were no longer bound to authority from Medina. Those who had only superficially or reluctantly converted to Islam failed to recognize Bakr's authority. So too did some others, on the grounds that they had not participated in choosing Bakr as Muhammad's successor. And some persons claimed that they had received messages from God and they were the new prophets and successors to Muhammad.

Any one of the new prophets would need sufficient military strength to win the recognition that Muhammad had received, and a few tried to organize a military following. But Bakr and his supporters gathered together a military force – Islamic warrior – who fought across Arabia for several months. In 633 they defeated the Hanifa tribe in central Arabia, which had supported a new prophet called Musailima, who lost his life in the fighting and in defeat was described as a false prophet. Oman was pacified in the winter of 632-33. And Yemen was pacified in the spring of 633

Arabs Conquer Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine

The Muslim empire in the late 600s

The momentum generated by victories against dissidents and breakaway regions left Islamic warriors restless and aggressive. Moreover, Arabia was depressed economically, trade having come to a standstill with ten years of war. Some of Islam's warriors were hungry for booty. They began making raids into Mesopotamia – an alternative to raiding "the faithful" in Arabia. It was three years since Constantinople and the Persians had ended their war. Anarchy reigned and for a while not much was left of Sassanid power. Muslim raiders into Mesopotamia found little resistance, and success encouraged more and bigger raids. The caliph, Abu Bakr, went along with it. Finding the warriors joyous in their victories, he declared a holy war on their behalf.

In 634, Bakr sent troops northwest into Palestine, nominally under Byzantine rule. Around twenty miles west of Jerusalem they met an army sent by Constantinople. There, at what is known as the Battle of Ajnadayn. Constantinople's force was made up of local troops, whose morale didn't match the high moral of the Muslims. The Muslims also had superior mobility. Constantinople's force broke and scattered, and the Muslim cavalry chased down the survivors and annihilated them.

Bakr died without learning of the great victory in Palestine. A successor he had chosen, Umar ibn-al-Khattab, became caliph. He had had been an early convert to Islam and one of Muhammad's closest companions.

Like Bakr, Umar lived frugally. It is said that he owned only one shirt and slept on a bed of palm leaves. His rule began with the siege ofDamascus – the Muslim warriors still combating Constantinople's imperial forces. Six months later, in September 635, Damascus capitulated, and the conquering Muslims promised the people of Damascus protection in exchange for taxes.

Against the Muslim force in southern Mesopotamia, the Sassanid Empire was struggling with exhausted and demoralized troops. It managed to send an army that included elephants, and that army defeated the Muslims. But in subsequent battles Islamic warriors overcame their fear of Persia's elephants. With their swift horses and camels they moved beyond fortresses and defeated Sassanid armies. After their victory at the Battle of Qadisiya in 637, the Muslim army was able to move across the whole of Mesopotamia. In 638 they captured the Sassanid capital,Ctesiphon, by the Tigris River in Mesopotamia. Also in 638 they overran Jerusalem, then Caesarea fifty miles to the north. In only three years, the Arabs had conquered Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia.

In Palestine and Syria, Umar's army had created the impression that they were warring against the Byzantine empire rather than against local people: Christians who looked upon the emperor at Constantinople as an enemy. These were Monophysite Christians, abused by the Trinity-believing emperors at Constantinople.

Generally the Islamic forces had been disciplined. But they had often been fighting on empty stomachs and depending upon plunder for their meals. The conquerors had taken over the land and houses that had been abandoned by those fleeing to Constantinople. The conquerors had plundered the wealthy while in general the common people (who had little to plunder) found them well-behaved.

The conquering Muslims had not been accompanied by missionaries attempting to interfere with the religious beliefs and practices of local people. People could worship as they pleased, but they were given the choice of converting to Islam or paying taxes. If they both refused to pay taxes and refused to convert to Islam they were subject to the penalty of death.

Muslim Conquests in Egypt and Iran

In the year 638 a general named Amr asked Umar for permission to invade Egypt – which was still nominally a part of Constantinople's empire. Amr described Egypt as rich and defenseless. Umar reluctantly approved, and in late 639 Amr made a swift raid into Egypt's Delta region to test the strength of Constantinople's defenses there. At the city of Heliopolis he routed Constantinople's forces. Then he overran open country. But without heavy siege weapons he was unable to take the city of Alexandria, and his army set up at a fortified camp six or seven miles northeast from Heliopolis, a spot that would eventually grow into the city of Cairo.

In Egypt, Constantinople's Catholic authorities had persecuted, flogged, tortured and executed Monophysite Christians, and the Monophysites saw the Arabs as liberators. So too did Egypt's peasants, who had felt oppressed by tyrannical, mostly Greek

andlords.

In 642 Alexandria finally fell to the forces under Amr, with Constantinople's troops and officials there fleeing Egypt, as did many merchants and landowners, who took with them what gold coins they could. Amr welcomed the return from hiding of Benjamin, the patriarch of the local Monophysite Christians, and he assured Benjamin that in the future his people would enjoy religious liberty.

Conquests were a source of wealth for the Arabs, and motivated by gain in wealth the Arabs invaded Armenia andPersia. They conquered Armenia in 642, making the people there subjects of Umar, but in name only as the Armenians, protected by their mountainous terrain, remained virtually self-governing and zealously Christian.

In 645, Constantinople tried to regain control over Egypt, transporting an army across the Mediterranean Sea. But Constantinople's army, weakened by several decades of warfare, was easily defeated, with the native Monophysite Christians fighting alongside the Muslims.

By 646 the Muslims conquered all of Egypt, turning Egypt into a colony. The Muslims mitigated friction between themselves and local people by putting local administration and tax collecting into local hands and leaving the Egyptians with control over their agricultural lands.

Persia

For the Arabs, conquering Persia (Iran) was harder than previous conquests. Persians saw the Arabs as barbarians and enemies rather than as liberators. They saw themselves as a superior people, and they were willing to fight to defend their homeland. Arab warriors ran into resistance led by local Persian leaders. It would take decades to subdue all of the quasi independent principalities that had been a part of the Sassanian empire.

In resisting the Arabs, the last of the Sassanid kings, Yazdegerd III, raised an army of 150,000 men. But with victory in Egypt, the Muslims were able to send reinforcements at a critical moment. At the Battle ofNihawand, 30,000 Muslims routed Yezdegerd's army, the Arabs catching and massacring the Persians in narrow gorges. Arabia's Muslim warriors saw this as their greatest victory, and it was decided that all of Persia should be subdued. Yazdegerd III, the last Sassanid king, fled eastward, and in 652, near Merv, he was murdered by local thieves for his jewelry. But it would be many years before Islam would be able to subdue Persia as far as its eastern border.

In Persia, Zoroastrianism was doomed as a great religion. In response to conquest by Islam's armies, the Zoroastrians would foment rebellions, and the conquering Muslims responded. In many provinces they forced Zoroastrians to convert to Islam, with many Zoroastrians adopting Nestorian Christianity instead. Here and there in Persia, Zoroastrians were to remain, but they were to be a small minority.

Succession Conflict Creates the Sunni-Shia Divide

From conquests came booty – much of it from Persia. Eighty percent of this wealth went to the warriors – the traditional incentive for fighting – and the remaining twenty percent went to the state and to others with influence or connections.

Although Muhammad had proclaimed Islam to be one brotherhood, tribal identity and clan rivalry remained. Islam was too big to have the kind of togetherness that small hunter-gatherer societies had enjoyed. The caliphs belonged to the Umayyad clan, a branch of the Quraysh tribe, and this clan had been growing in wealth more rapidly than other clans. Some among the Umayyads scorned the puritanism and asceticism of those devoted to Islamic principals. Opportunistic members of the Umayyad clan had flocked to Medina to benefit from their relationship with the caliph. And, seeking people he could trust, the caliph, Umar, had chosen members of his clam as governors and administrators. Benefiting from the new wealth, some of the Umayyad clan built impressive homes. Umar viewed the increased appetite for luxury with sadness, while many who were not of the Umayyad clan resented Umayyad wealth and opportunism.

In 644, while the conquest of Egypt and Persia were in progress, a captive Persian Christian, who had been made a slave and taken to Medina, managed to assassinate Umar while he was leading prayers at Medina's mosque. It was the duty of six men whom Umar had selected as a council called the Eminent Companions to choose his successor. Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali, now about forty-four, again sought the position, but the Eminent Companions rejected his offer after he refused to promise that he would follow the policies of the previous caliphs, Bakr and Umar. The Council turned instead to someone they thought would: Affan ibn Uthman. Uthman was an Umayyad, a former merchant and an early convert to Islam who had married two of Muhammad's daughters.

Unlike Umar, Uthman lived in luxury, but similar to Umar he appointed his relatives as governors to the provinces and to other administrative positions. In the first half of his eleven-year reign he was popular enough, but paying for continuing wars against resistance in Persia and Armenia while receiving no compensation in the form of booty or increased taxation drained his government's treasury. Building a navy with which to protect Islam's rule in Syria and Egypt was also costly, as were naval operations against Cyprus and delivering defeats to Constantinople's navy.

While annoying some with his nepotism, Uthman annoyed more of his countrymen by his move to collect Muhammad's messages into a standard work – the Koran. Uthman appointed a committee, which collected what they could of Muhammad’s teachings. Uthman ordered the destruction of rival collections that differed in any way from his committee’s work, and this brought upon him the wrath of various people and communities across Arabia who had become wedded to rival interpretations. Many argued that Uthman did not have the authority to establish an official version of Muhammad's teachings, and one of Muhammad's oldest companions charged that the version produced by Uthman’s committee was false and incomplete.

Dissatisfaction with Uthman grew as he pushed for an increase in central government authority – in areas of decision making that traditionally belonged to a tribe or clan. And adding to the dissatisfaction was a rise in prices, resulting from more money in circulation chasing no increase in goods and services.

In 656, an army of five hundred Arab warriors from the garrison town of Kufa in Mesopotamia arrived in Medina. They claimed to be following God's instructions to war against an enemy within. That enemy was Uthman. They claimed that Ali was Muhammad's only legitimate successor, that Uthman had usurped power. And they claimed that Muhammad would return to life.

The rebels surrounded Uthman's residence and demanded that he resign. Uthman had no army or guard to protect him at his residence. From Damascus, Uthman's cousin, Mu'awiyah, the governor of Syria, headed toward Medina with an army to rescue Uthman, but they failed to arrive in time. The rebels assassinated Uthman and cut off the fingers of his wife, and frightened relatives of Uthman fled the city.

The leaders of the sect that assassinated Uthman proclaimed Ali as caliph. Ali accepted, and across much of the empire people gave Ali their support, satisfying those who had argued that rule should come from within Muhammad's family, the Hashimites, rather than from the Umayyads. Ali, now short, fat and in his late fifties, won recognition as the new caliph, but not in Syria. He appointed new governors everywhere but in Syria, where Uthman's cousin Mu'awiyah refused to resign and where it was claimed that assassination was not a legitimate means of attaining power. Mu'awiyah, who was now the head of the Umayyad clan, was obliged by Arab custom to avenge the murder of his kinsman, Uthman. To arouse anger against Ali's regime, Mu'awiyah displayed in Damascus the bloodied shirt of Uthman and the severed fingers of his wife, which had been smuggled out of Medina.

Ali did not disassociate himself from Uthman's assassins, and rather than pursue a policy of accommodation he created enemies by dismissing all those who had been officials under Uthman. A couple of Ali's highly respected and influential supporters, Talha and Zubair, quarreled with him and returned to Mecca. There they joined forces with Muhammad's widow, Aisha, now forty-five and a bitter foe of Ali's from years before when he had questioned her chastity. In December, 656, Ali fought a battle against forces led by Talha, Zubair and Aisha. Ten thousand are said to have died. Ali won the battle. Many mourned the death of Talha and Zubair, and they were inclined to blame Ali for the bloodshed.

Many in Islam's cities had begun to fear Ali's alliance with rural Bedouin tribesmen. Support for Ali was waning, while in Damascus Mu'awiyah waited, making no claim to be caliph, merely asserting his right to avenge the death of his kinsman. Syria, where Mu'awiyah governed, was a stable province, and Christians there enjoyed full freedom of worship and equal treatment. Mu'awiyah freed his Syrian military forces for his struggle within Islam. He established a truce regarding Islam's longstanding war with Constantinople, and he moved his army into Mesopotamia.

Ali responded by leading his followers in a battle against Mu'awiyah's army. In the fighting, Mu'awiyah's forces fared worse. But according to reports, Amr, the conqueror of Egypt, who had allied himself with Mu'awiyah, had his troops fix pages of the Koran to the tips of their lances and cry "the law of God, the law of God! Let that decide between us!" In both armies were a number of reciters of the Koran who wished to adhere to the principle of Muslim not killing Muslim. And, rather than continue fighting, both sides agreed to arbitration. There followed much searching through the Koran, searching for the answer to why God had allowed Muhammad's followers to make war against each other. Some argued against arbiters, claiming that the decision belonged to God alone, a judgment they thought could be expressed by referendum by the entire Muslim nation. And to some, Ali looked foolish for having accepted arbitration while claiming wisdom and authority in all matters affecting Islam.

The official arbiters became a group of as many as four hundred, and months passed as they felt no sense of urgency to come to a decision. During these months Ali's coalition began to collapse. Leaders of his coalition took their troops and returned to their home areas, determined to pursue their own interests. Ali and warriors that remained with him went after these deserters and convinced some of them to return, while against others he engaged in combat and the spilling of blood.

Some of those who turned against Ali were those who had come to believe that the caliph should be elected by the people. Some others rejected all government, believing that they should follow God's laws only, and some of them denounced the worldliness and the luxury of the well-to-do. One group that believed in a theocratic republic became known as the Seceders. They fought Ali, and many of them died.

Ali returned to his base, the city of Kufa, to reorganize his support and await the decision of the arbiters, who were not to meet for another year. Amr returned to Egypt, was received as a hero, and he led Egypt in support of Mu'awiyah. Then in 660 Jerusalem also proclaimed Mu'awiyah as caliph.

Finally, the arbiters decided that Ali was the usurper of power. But arbitration no longer mattered. Ali had lost too much support. The defeated sect called the Seceders had turned to terrorism and had decided to rid Islam of Ali, Mu'awiyah and Amr. They killed Amr's deputy instead of Amr, only slightly wounded Mu'awiyah as he prayed in the mosque at Damascus, but they gravely wounded Ali as he was entering the mosque at Kufa, and in January, 661, Ali died of his injuries.

A few poets had ridiculed Ali for having been fat and unwieldy in figure, but many Muslims remembered him for his eloquence as an orator, his bravery and his morality, including his opposition to the growing luxury and corruption of his time. Ali left behind many admirers and followers. Believing in dynastic rule by the Hashimite family, Ali's supporters recognized Ali's son as his successor, and they became that branch of Islam known as Shia.

The Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus, to 677 CE

Mu'awiyah or someone of his clan bribed Ali's son to give up his claim as caliph. This for the time being ended the challenge for the caliphate from the Hashimites. Mu'awiyah shifted the caliphate's city from Medina in Arabia to Damascus in Syria, ending Arabia's primacy over Islam. But Arabs were free to move into areas that their armies had conquered.

In Damascus, Mu'awiyah presented himself as a champion of Islam, but unlike Ali he claimed no religious authority. His rule in Damascus rested on the loyalty of Christians and on Syrian Arabs, most of whom had lived in Syria for centuries and were accustomed to state authority – unlike Arab tribesmen. Mu'awiyah's influential financial counselor was a Christian, and his favorite wife was both a Christian and an Arab. Mu'awiyah was ruling over an integrated Syria, where Christians and Muslims sometimes worshiped together.

Mu'awiyah tried to rule the empire with concern for agreement of an old sheik (chieftain). He met with members of the nobility regularly at his palace. He received delegations from the provinces in order to accept complaints and smooth over differences between tribes. He displayed mild composure and self-control. He used persuasion and compromise, managing the empire through capable governors and maintaining personal relations with local leaders.

Mu'awiyah's fellow Umayyad clan members bribed and cultivated the friendship of various sheiks, whom they made responsible for the behavior of their people. Criticized for the gifts he distributed, Mu'awiyah replied that civil war would cost more. He gave Arabs participation in rule by creating a council of sheiks as a consultative body with local executive powers, and he created another consultative body representing tribes. He wanted to replace kinship ties with identity to the broader Islamic community. He also surrounded himself with splendor and ceremony in an effort to increase the prestige of his office, taking as his model Constantinople's emperors.

Mu'awiyah re-established the tax-system of provinces sending money to the central treasury, and he saw to it that taxes were collected regularly. In the area around Medina and Mecca he supported projects that improved methods of agriculture. He reorganized his army, abandoning tribal units and modeled his army on Constantinople's armies. At his army's core were Christians, Muslims, Syrian Arabs and Yemenites. And he began building a new navy

Expansion under Mu'awiyah

The end of civil war within Islam made further expansion of Islam possible, and the Umayyads began to extend their empire, beginning with raids from Egypt westward across the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Constantinople's emperor sent a force across the Mediterranean to defend what he thought was still his territory, and, in 664, the Muslims defeated them in a limited engagement. Constantinople's army withdrew, but in places Constantinople's officialdom and navy remained in North Africa – the navy stationed atTunis. There, Latin speaking people remained from Roman times.

Pursuing his war against Constantinople, in 668 Mu'awiyah sent his navy north to Constantinople, and in the spring of 669 he began a siege there. In 670 the Muslims built a military colony at Kairawan, near Tunis – the first attempt at colonizing rather than merely raiding west of Egypt. Berbers there were hostile to the colony, and, in response to Berber attacks, Muslim warriors from Kairawan began making assaults against them.

In 671 Mu'awiyah resettled fifty thousand families in the east of Persia: Khurasan. There were families from the old garrison towns of Kufa and Basra in Mesopotamia, where support for Ali had been strong. From Khurasan, Arab men were obliged to join annual expeditions across the Oxus River into the Turkish east, from which they returned only during winter months. These expeditions brought booty to the Arabs and extended Umayyad rule in Transoxiana, where principalities became Arab protectorates.

In 672 the Muslims took control of the island of Rhodes, which they used as an base of operations in their continuing war against Constantinople. In 674 they took the island of Crete.

In control of Syria and the Levant (eastern Mediterranean), the Arabs sent frequent raiding parties deep into Asia Minor, and from 674 to 678 Caliph Mu'awiyah laid siege to Constantinople. His navy failed him. Constantinople was using "Greek fire" for the first time. It was a mixture of naphtha, quickline, sulpher and pitch fired from arrows or put on board small boats and set against enemy ships. Also, Constantinople's fortifications were too strong. In 677 Mu'awiyah abandoned the project and again made peace with Constantinople – a thirty years' truce.

The historian John Julius Norwich was to write in 1989 that had the Muslims captured Constantinople in the late 600s instead of 1453 "all Europe – and America – might be Muslim today." ^note7 This is an opinion made perhaps without appreciation of the political weakness that accompanies great expansions. Islam, with its coming conquests in North Africa and Spain, was on a road to fragmentation

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Tuesday, June 7, 2016

2 Islam, Power and Empire, to 677 CE