About book The Great Arab Conquests: How The Spread Of Islam Changed The World We Live In (2007)
This wonderful account clarifies a period that has fascinated me from a position of ignorance for many years now. Written with style and with sympathy for its subjects, it performs neither hagiography nor demonisation of its Muslim subjects, engagingly investigating the enigma of this remarkable wave of transformation without claiming to know more than the obscure and partial records justify. For a lay audience it could not be better presented - exciting while measured and perfectly readable, one is carried along.The expansion of Islam so soon after its inception is the greatest of puzzles when one stops to consider. Not quite as fast as a horse could cross the country, but within the lifetimes of Companions of the Prophet himself, Islam had not only been proselytised, but had actually started to govern, from the Oasis in the West (Atlantic Ocean) to the borders of China. Moreover, it seems to have achieved this with rather little overt violence.The solution to this riddle is multifactorial, and the search for it confounded by the paucity of records. Kennedy works with Arab and other contemporary or more often near-contemporary sources which paint more a picture of how the Muslims later viewed the conquerors than a primary source of historical information. Primary sources are fairly thin on the ground, and one of the most telling metrics of the impact of Islam is the absence of one in its wake: African Red Slip. This characteristic pottery, traded across the Mediterranean, suddenly disappears from the historical record coincident with the conquest of North Africa. This confirms Henri Pirenne's thesis that the rise of Islam ushered in a period of economic stagnation in Europe, triggering a Dark Age. (See Mohammed and Charlemagne)A few things can be said with some certainty, one of which is that the suddenness of Islam's explosive expansion is not a historical illusion. It really did happen in mere decades. In fact, the only place it seems to have stagnated and actually provoked a mutiny among a Muslim army - and there's a bitter irony here for latter-day Knights of the Cross - is in what are now Iran and Afghanistan. The Byzantian and Sassanid Empires, we can safely say, were an open door. Having fought themselves to exhaustion with mutual invasions a few short years previously, Islam rose at exactly the time for them to collapse in the face of its advance. The religiously tolerant Sassanids had no internal theological dissent for the Muslims to exploit, but they often left local governance in place with a mere gesture to Islamic rule in the first generation or two, and the tax load may even have decreased. There was no reason to resist, as the early Muslims were not even particularly censorious of the monotheistic Zoroastrianism.In Byzantium, the Empire sought to resist but there was most definitely internal dissent. Coptic Christians and other Docetic and other heretical groups actually dominated the population in much of North Africa, and were subject to vicious persecution which rapidly ended under Islam. In fact, the Levant and Egypt had only just been recovered from the Sassanids. The African province had been comprehensively demolished by Vandals and only one significant military engagement even occurred, by all accounts. Jews may still have formed a quarter of Alexandria's population and faced a similar calculation. The Empire was not wanted, and it was a couple of generations before any downside in terms of discrimination came to outweigh this. Even then, a symbolic conversion to Islam secured one rather equal treatment. It is no surprise that the door was probably held open with a sneaky Coptic foot or two.Perhaps more interesting, then, are the reasons for Islam's expansion coming to an end. At Kashgar, the Muslims had probably their only engagement with Chinese forces. After being nearly thwarted in Afghanistan a pretext of piracy was found - more ironies for our day! - for an invasion of Sind, where Buddhist-Hindu tension allowed them some ingress. In France the battle of Poitiers, of disputed significance, is said to have stopped their advance. Why were these all different? The door does not seem to have been open. Chinese and Indian cultures were entrenched, already ancient, rich and polytheistic. The contrast with Islam and potential for religious discrimination must have made it unpalatable. In France and Northern Spain the Muslims may simply have made the catastrophic miscalculation of finding it not worth conquering.At any rate, Kennedy paints a sympathetic picture of generous victors who regarded the Byzantine adversary Heraclius as a fine but tragic figure, flawed only by the fatal flaw of not being Muslim. The record is coloured by the fact that most of the sources are Muslim self-assessment, but Kennedy does a fine job of finding the nuggets of fact that allow us to make some safe inferences. He also delivers a thumping good read.
First off, it must be said that I cannot review this work with any great deal of experience in early Islamic history. My focus is Byzantium, and although I have read studied the opening decades of the conflict between the Byzantines and the Arabs extensively, I am not qualified to comment on anything beyond that. I read this book as an utter novice to early Islamic history.Hugh Kennedy, who has quite an impressive bibliography of books alone on the early centuries of Islam has written a major readable and fascinating history of the Arab conquests. The book is short enough to be able to tell the story quite well - he crams about a very eventful century and a half into a little under 400 pages. This means that the narrative is (necessarily) fast-paced, but it makes for a very engaging read and perhaps helps convey some sense of the rapidity of the conquests which spread from the Pyrenees to deep into central Asia. Rather than recite the stories in the sources and turn this book into a slog of names and dates, Kennedy does an admirable job of reminding the readers of the problems with the sources and discusses topics beyond the marches and the battles. Settlement, assimilation, and association with local customs all receive attention here and the book benefits as a result. By reading it, I now have some sense of how the conquests developed, the context of Arabian culture and how that affected the expansion, how the Muslims at the time viewed their own past, and how they managed to administer the regions they took. Kennedy paints a picture of a fairly light-handed conquest on the conquered people, although he does not neglect some of the nastier aspects. The book has an excellent and useful set of maps, which I found myself referring to frequently when reading about the conquests beyond what is now modern Iran. The maps are clear and more than sufficient for the content in the book. The plates include a nice selection of artefacts and Kennedy's own photographs, many of them on sites referred to in the book. Perhaps my lone complaint with the book is with Kennedy's confusing balance between using the attitudes in the sources for later Islamic history or whether they actually preserve conquest attitudes. He only touched on the point briefly and it is clear that he has a lot more to say, so I was a little disappointed that he did not give such an important point a little more space, although it is understandable given that too much historiography in a book priced for a popular audience is unlikely to inspire most readers. I would also have liked Kennedy to have given a little more attention to his "1000m contour line", particularly in the Arab conflict in the Caucasus and how it related to other high places. Nonetheless, these are just minor points that hardly detract from a magnificently readable and informative book.
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آفة الرأي الهوي ... عندما يتم تلخيص سبب الفتوح الاسلاميه فى الصدفه والحظ فقط فهو التعصب والتحيز .. فنجاح المسلمين فى دخول مصر سببه الانقسام الطائفي بين الطبقه الحاكمه من قبل البيزنطيين والشعب المصري وسبب فتحهم الشام وباء اصاب اراض الشام فأخلى الاراضي من المدافعين .. وسبب فتح العراق وايران الحقد واتساع الفجوه بين الفلاحين وطبقه الامراء... لادور هنا لبساله وشجاعة وتكتيك المسلمين ... الغريب ان الكاتب يشكك فى الاخبار اذا جائت من كاتب عربي او مسلم .. ويقبلها برحابة صدر اذا اتت من مصدر غير عربي ... الكتاب فى بعض صفحاته قدي يكون جيد ولكن التعصب يفيض من بين دفتيه
—Haitham fahmy
Good reading for (way) backstory on current events. Author has advantage over previous writers by reading original contemporary Persian records, as well as Byzantine sources in greek, which counterpoint and augment traditional Arab texts. Interesting outline of different Arab tribes who took over the different middle eastern areas at different times, and the politics of Mecca vs Medina. A good deal is about the people they took over administering; eg; Copts, Nestorians, people of the book, and some pretty weird pagans. Fascinating.
—Ross
This is a wonderfully written time for those with any sort of interest in the early Arab world. Kennedy writes superbly and helps explain ideas and concepts that would normally be alien to any non-scholar. While the work may not be directed at scholars per se, Professor Kennedy writes with scholastic undertones and often includes many helpful footnotes and stresses the importance of primary sources. His careful analysis of sources shows how careful and diligent a historian he is. The work itself is not one of political history as much as of military and even social history. It describes how military conquests occurred and hints at the changes that came with these conquests. Kennedy's themes are clear as well as his arguments, which are nicely summed up in the conclusion. Overall, this is a book that one must read even if one has only a passing interest in Arab or Islamic history.
—Vikram Kumar
