Making War In The Name Of God. Christopher Catherwood
with the sword.
Debates rage among the politically correct on the one hand and the overtly incorrect on the other, as to how the early Muslim soldiers behaved. Were there massacres, with the innocent slain, or was it a more civilized affair, with casualties limited to those on the field of battle?
The problem is that by now, with so little written down at the time, it is impossible to tell. Furthermore, contemporary accounts would all be partisan one way or the other, with independent corroboration hard to achieve.
But what we do know is that the heartlands of Christianity were conquered within decades of the launch of the invasions, many of them taking place in the reign of the second caliph, Omar (634–644),
Under his rule, the Byzantine Empire suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Yarmuk in 636. By 638, Jerusalem itself was taken, and, by 641, Egypt also soon found itself under Islamic rule.
It is only the plight in twenty-first-century Iraq of the hundreds of thousands of Assyrian Orthodox and Chaldean Catholic Christians, now being harassed for their faith by extremists, that we remember at all that in the seventh century the vast bulk of the inhabitants of the Middle East were once Christian, not Muslim.
Some of the local inhabitants were glad to see the Islamic conquerors. When, in 381, Christianity became the official religion of the East Roman—or Byzantine—Empire, theologically heterodox forms of the faith were regarded as politically as well as spiritually rebellious. Such forms of dissent were thus suppressed or otherwise discouraged, in a way that was to continue in Christianity until the seventeenth century, when the results from the split caused in Western Christian faith by the Reformation led some of its adherents to return to the nonstate origins of Christianity’s founders. As a result, several small Christian groups, in the seventh century, realized that Islam did not distinguish doctrinally between one form of Christianity and another, so that believers in what the Byzantines deemed to be heresies would no longer be persecuted for their beliefs. Now the Byzantine folly would haunt the Orthodox Church, since many territories formerly under its sway would be lost to Islam for good.
Rather than try to hold onto the entire Middle East, the Byzantines decided to protect their own territorial heartland—their lands in Anatolia, and their possessions in Europe and other parts of the Mediterranean. Crucially, as relates to the later Crusades, this entailed not attempting to reconquer areas such as Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Consequently these were to enter what Muslims before or since call the Dar al-Islam, or Realm of Islam, territory that, theologically speaking, once Muslim is always Muslim, for all time.
(Those of us outside Islam live in the Dar al-Harb, or Realm of War. Some Muslims, historically, have allowed for a Dar al-Sulh, or Realm of Truce, where non-Islamic rulers live peacefully with their Muslim neighbors, so long as that is agreeable to the Islamic side. Today, peace activists within Islam also want to create a Dar al-Salaam, which we have seen means a Realm of Peace.)
To the east, the great Iranian Empire, that of the Sassanid Persians, was also swiftly conquered. At the end of the 650s that, too, was under Muslim rule. The ancient, pre-Christian Zoroastrian faith was all but wiped out (that religion barely exists today, observed by a comparatively small number of Parsis in India, and some other scattered adherents.)
After not very long, major differences arose within the Islamic community of the faithful, the umma.
According to such scholars as Michael Cook (author of The Koran: A Very Short Introduction, and Patricia Crone, it is hard at this distance to work out who exactly believed what, when, and why. It is possible that Islamic doctrine was not fixed as early as Muslim scholarship would have us believe, though, as I have argued in other books that I have written on this area, there is no intrinsic reason to doubt the official version of the development of Islam in these early decades, so long as one does not examine it all through rose-tinted spectacles that deny the downside as well as the achievements.
Whichever side is true, the new faith found itself at war almost immediately, in armed conflict over what Muslims now call ridda (apostasy, the renunciation of an old faith). Only Abu Bakr, of the four Rashidun, or Rightly Guided Caliphs (632–61) died peacefully in his bed—all the others met violent ends in one form or another.
Much of the bloodshed involved who should legitimately succeed Muhammad as the leader of the faithful, the umma. Muhammad, as the founding Prophet, was deemed to be God’s final revelation, and was, in that respect, irreplaceable. But he was also a political and military leader, since Islam then and since does not make the separation of the spiritual and the secular that early Christianity made, and that we in the West rediscovered in the seventeenth century and after.
On three occasions, Ali, who was both Muhammad’s cousin and also the husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, was passed over as caliph. In view of his somewhat lackluster performance when he was finally chosen, this is perhaps not surprising. No daughter could succeed Muhammad. But Ali and Fatima had sons, and these were male descendants of the founder. A strong minority thus saw Ali as having all the right hereditary and spiritual credentials. Ali’s supporters were the party of Ali, the Shia’t Ali, and it is from them that Shia Islam and its Shiite followers—today about 15 percent of Muslims worldwide—gain their name.
Since politics and military rule were all interwined, the issue was solved by war, one group of Muslims against another. By 657 Ali had entered a truce called by Muawiya, Othman’s nephew, and also governor of Damascus. Like his uncle Muawiya was a member of the Ummayad clan, the aristocratic Meccan group that had initially rejected Muhammad.
This truce was not acceptable to a group of hard-line Muslims, now called the Kharajites (literally “those who withdraw”). Although they were not influential in mainstream Islam, the Kharajites, with their purist view of how the Muslim world should be run, nevertheless continued to be highly thought of by a steady minority of extreme Muslims over the centuries. Although it might be pushing a point, one can see in them the future germ of al Qaeda and that group’s equally purist view of an ideal Islamic caliphate. It was a Kharijite that murdered Ali in 661—this in itself shows the degree of internal violence that was endemic in the Islamic world at this time.
War in the Muslim world continued; upon Ali’s assassination, this time the Ummayads left nothing to chance: Muawiya proclaimed himself caliph, making his capital Damascus.
Needless to say, this assumption of power by one of the Meccan aristocracy was not acceptable to all, and fighting continued among different factions all eager to assume power of what was now an increasingly large empire, stretching from what is now Iran in the east to even further stretches of North Africa in the west.
Ali’s first son by Fatima, Hassan, was not a natural warrior, and allowed the new regime to take power. But Hassan’s brother Hussein was made of sterner material. When Yazid, Muawiya’s son, took over as caliph in 680, many regarded what was now an hereditary monarchy in all but name as contrary to custom, as the Ummayads were not of the Prophet’s family. Hussein therefore made a bid for power and was completely crushed at the Battle of Karbala that year, his head sent to the new caliph in Damascus.
Most Muslims continued to support the victorious Ummayads, and mainstream Sunni Islam does so today. But Hussein’s death was seen as martyrdom by his loyal band of followers, and that remains the case with modern-day Shiite Muslims. The annual festival of Ashura, when Shiite Muslim men scourge themselves with chains, is still the major celebration of Shiite Islam in our own time. Not only that but the sense of being martyrs, of being a minority within Islam, arguably gives Shiism a very different outlook and self-image than that of the Sunni majority.
While Muslims were killing each other back in the beginning of the eighth century, they were also spreading the Dar al-Islam ever wider. By now the borders of the Indus were being reached in the east, and, by 711, most of North Africa was also in their hands.
At this stage it is important to say that most of the peoples they conquered were not forcibly converted to Islam. Arabs remained small minorities in the new domains, often restricting themselves to new garrison towns, from which they could control their territories.
Some subject peoples did convert but, under the Ummayads, who held onto