The spread of Islam

The story

After Muhammad

When Muhammad died, in AD 632, his community faced a big problem: who was to lead it? The Muslims chose successors, called “caliphs”, a word meaning the successor of Muhammad at the head of the community. The first was Abu Bakr, the faithful companion who had accompanied Muhammad on the Hijra. With him and with the caliphs who came after, in less than a hundred years, the Arabs built a territory that stretched from the Atlantic to Central Asia. It is one of the fastest expansions in history, and to understand it we have to follow it year by year.

Syria, Persia, Egypt

Between 633 and 640 the Arabs took Syria and Palestine from the Byzantines. Jerusalem was occupied in 638. In 637 they conquered Ctesiphon, the capital of the Persian empire; by about 651 that empire, which for centuries had been Byzantium's great rival, was wiped out. Between 639 and 646 they conquered Egypt, and in 642 Alexandria fell, the great city on the sea.

The Arabs did not stop. In 649 they attacked the island of Cyprus; in 655, in the naval battle of Lycia, they defeated the Byzantines at sea too. They were years of success, but not without difficulties inside: between 656 and 661 the community split in a crisis that marked the separation between Sunnis and Shiites, the two great branches of Islam that still exist today, and also gave rise to a third group, the Kharijites.

The Umayyad dynasty

In 661 Muawiya came to power, the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty. He moved the capital to Damascus, in Syria. From there the caliphs governed an ever-larger territory. To the west, in 670, the city of Kairouan was founded, in what is now Tunisia, which served as a base for the advance into North Africa. By 705 Morocco too was in Arab hands.

The next step was Spain. In 711 a commander named Tariq ibn Ziyad landed on the Spanish coast and defeated the Visigoths of King Roderic. The Visigothic kingdom, which had lasted more than two centuries, collapsed: in 713 Toledo fell too. The Arabs crossed the Pyrenees and reached France: Narbonne in 719; in 721 they besieged Toulouse but were defeated by Duke Odo of Aquitaine; in 725 they took Nîmes and Carcassonne. In 717 they also tried to take Constantinople with a long siege, but were driven back thanks to the famous “Greek fire”, an incendiary weapon of the Byzantines.

In 720 the principality of Asturias was born in northern Spain, the first core of Christian resistance. Around 732 (some sources say 733) the battle of Poitiers was fought, in France. Tradition remembers it as the moment when the Arab advance in Europe stopped. Today many historians play down its importance: it was an important clash, but it did not on its own decide the history of Europe.

In 750 the Umayyad dynasty fell. Soon afterwards, in 751, near the river Talas, in Central Asia, the Arabs met the Chinese army of the Tang dynasty. The clash marked the division of the area between the Arabs and Tang China. The conquest of Sicily began later, in 827, and was completed in 902.

How were the conquered territories governed?

The Arabs had to govern very different peoples. Christians and Jews, in general, could keep their religion: they were called dhimmis, that is, “protected”, and in exchange paid a special tax (the jizya) and a tribute on land (the kharaj). Those who converted to Islam obtained full civil rights, but in the first Islamic century political rights were often denied to many non-Arab converts. The language of administration and of the Quran was Arabic, which little by little became established as the language of government and study over vast territories.

Why was it so fast?

Nobody can explain it with a single reason. But historians agree on one fact: Byzantines and Persians were exhausted by a long war against each other. The local populations, moreover, were tired of Byzantine rule, and the Arab tribute was often lighter than the imperial taxes. The Arabs found, therefore, exhausted empires and peoples who were not very willing to defend them.