'If you kill us, we shall enter paradise'
Driven by this unfalsifiable conviction, the Arabs conquered most of the known world in the name of Allah
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Next Thursday: Islam enters Spain
THE KORAN exhorts Muslims to declare Holy War on the infidels. If they failed to do so, Allah might abandon them:
‘O believers! What is the matter with you that when it is said, “March out in the path of God” you are weighed down . . .? The enjoyment of the life of this world is but little when compared with the life of the Hereafter. If you do not march forth, He will afflict you with a painful punishment, and will substitute another people instead of you.’
The Koranic injunction to destroy all those who refused to accept the supremacy of Islam was not confined to a specific region; it would be applied to the Earth:
‘The expressed purpose of the Koranic wars was universal Muslim hegemony and the total elimination of idolatry,’ wrote Reuven Firestone, an expert on medieval Islam. Destruction of idolatry per se therefore became a primary justification for war.
Accordingly, it was the strict duty of all Muslims to march forth in the name of Allah, for victory or martyrdom.
And so the Arab Wars flowed into the wider world. The Muslim conquests of Persia (632–654 CE) were a series of astonishing military triumphs that hinged on their victory in the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah (636 CE), commemorated as one of Islam’s greatest feats of arms.
Little is known of al-Qadisiyyah, so the fabulists have granted it legendary status.
The battleground was a twenty-day ride from Medina, roasting by day, freezing by night, over hard, flat plains and low hills.
In their pre-battle negotiations, the Muslims explained that they were at war on God’s orders, and swore that if they were killed, they would go to Heaven and enjoy the fruits of Paradise, while their enemies, wretched infidels – the Zoroastrian Persians – were doomed to perdition.
The Persian elite, adorned in jewels and gorgeous robes, peered with astonished condescension on these near-naked wild men and mockingly defied them to entertain the slightest hope of defeating their shah, the Persian king.
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Listen to the pre-battle dialogue between the hardened Persian commander Rostam Farrokhzad, a veteran of the Byzantine and Iranian civil wars, and an Arab delegation.
Rostam opened the talks with a letter to the Arabs:
‘Tell me this, who is your king? What man are you and what is your religion and way of life? Over whom do you seek to triumph, you, naked commander of a naked army? With a loaf of bread you are satisfied yet remain hungry. You have neither elephants nor platforms nor baggage nor gear . . . Send us some man to speak for you, someone of experience, a warrior of understanding, of the kind who may tell us what your religion is and who your guide is upon the royal throne. I shall send a cavalier to the Shah requesting him to grant you what you desire. And now do not attempt to make war on so great a monarch . . .’
The Arabs replied by sending a low-ranking man who threatened the Persians with war unless they renounced their Zoroastrian faith or paid the jizya tax. The Persians contemptuously dismissed him.
The Arabs then sent Al-Mughirah ibn Shu’bah, a warrior chief of rather loose morals (he was reputed to have married and/or divorced as many as 1000 women, though the true figure was closer to eighty), who represented Caliph Umar.
Speaking on behalf of the young shah, King Yazdegerd III (624–651 CE), Rostam scorned the Arabs as a destitute neighbour, of little consequence, whom Persia’s frontier villages had been in the habit of repulsing.
‘[T]here was nobody more destitute than we were,’ agreed Al- Mughirah:
‘We used to eat beetles of various sorts, scorpions, and snakes . . . Our religion was to kill one another and to raid one another . . . But then God sent us [Muhammad] . . . He invited us to embrace his religion . . . He spoke the truth, and we lied . . . Whatever he said to us was the word of God, and whatever he commanded us to do was the commandment of God . . . If you wish, choose to pay the poll tax out of hand and in humiliation. If you wish [to reject this offer], it is the sword, unless you embrace Islam and save your soul.’
Rostam was enraged: ‘Dawn will not break upon you tomorrow before I kill you all,’ he thundered.
‘If you kill us,’ Al-Mughirah answered, ‘we shall enter Paradise; if we kill you, you shall enter the Fire; [so] hand over the poll tax.’ At this, the Persians ‘snorted and shouted’, then declared: ‘There will be no peace between us!’
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The Arabs attacked at twilight, the Prophet’s preferred hour of battle.
The Sassanid and Byzantine soldiers were reportedly chained together during the conflict, to prevent them from deserting. Whether this was true or not, the story reflected the Muslims’ point that religious faith drove them, while their enemies’ forces were coerced.
Touring his 24,000-strong army, pausing to inspire every standard, the Arab commander An-Numan ibn Muqarrin reminded his men that they were fighting not for land or booty; they were fighting for honour and Allah. He promised them ‘one of two good things, everlasting martyrdom and eternal life, or a quick conquest and an easy victory’.
The Muslims drove deep into Persian territory, attacking towns and razing the Zoroastrian fire temples and the icons of the ancient Persian religion. They were victorious: some 40,000 Persians were said to have perished in the massacre that followed the Arab victory, a scale of slaughter unheard of in the region.
Wholesale looting of the temples and the gifts deposited by Zoroastrian pilgrims enriched the Arab commanders: Abu Ubayda was said to have made forty million dirhams sacking the temples.
No doubt hunger for the spoils rivalled or exceeded religious faith in driving many Arabs to war.
After the Muslim victory at al-Qadisiyyah, hundreds of spear thrusts were reportedly found lodged in Rostam’s body. The Persians surrendered. Their princes and nobles accepted the new religion, while retaining the Persian language and culture.
The Persian Empire became firmly Muslim.
The Islamic victory at al-Qadisiyyah marked the beginning of the end of four centuries of Sassanid power in Persia. Indeed, al-Qadisiyyah baptised in blood today’s Islamic Republic of Iran.
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The idea that the Muslim armies felt divinely guided is easily dismissed by the knowing cynicism of our transactional age.
Wasn’t Islam a pious gloss used to justify the seizure of slaves, women and booty?
And their belief in Allah – wasn’t it just a pretext for a universal landgrab that differed only in scale to the crude banditry of the ‘Age of Ignorance’ that preceded Islam?
That would be easy but wrong: without the motivating zeal of Islam, the Arab conquests are impossible to imagine.
All contemporary sources agree that the Arabs’ devotion to Muhammad and Allah incited and spurred their attacks on the non-Muslim world. Their spoils were not an end, but the deserving trophies of jihad.
Religious conviction incited the declaration of Holy War on the non-Muslim world. The Arabs had found a purpose greater than themselves and their old squabbles, as Muhammad had promised: the Prophet had given the Arabs a shared destiny. The Prophet had touched their souls.
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That is not to deny the appeal to Muhammad’s heirs of the by-products of Holy War: treasure, slaves, women, tax revenue.
Many Arab leaders would later do little to convert the infidels to Islam, because they came to depend on the revenue from the jizya to finance their lavish lifestyles.
‘The conquests were less a matter of hearts and minds than of pockets and purses,’ writes the historian Tim Mackintosh-Smith.
That may have been true after the event, and yet without the higher goal of ‘propagating the faith’, the Arab conquests were mere wishful thinking.
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The conquered regions had little choice but to convert to Islam or pay the tax.
This embittered many Persians, and the wounds wouldn’t heal for centuries, inspiring the Persian poet Ferdowsi to write his nostalgic epic, Shahnameh (‘The Book of Kings’), around 1000 CE. A sample:
‘Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate,
That uncivilized Arabs have come to
Make me a Muslim. . . .
Count Iran as a ruin, as the lair
Of lions and leopards.
Look now and despair.’
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The Byzantine Christians were similarly aghast at the Saracen invasions, and their literature consistently portrayed the rise of Islam as the coming of the Antichrist.
A sharp counterpoint to the terrifying spectacle of Muslim conquest was a letter, written by Ishoʿyahb III of Adiabene, patriarch of the Eastern church, which painted the occupying forces of Islam in a softer hue, characterised by their tolerance and admiration of the Christians and Jews:
‘As for the Arabs, to whom God has at this time given rule (shultana) over the world, you know well how they act towards us. Not only do they not oppose Christianity, but they praise our faith, honour the priests and saints of our Lord, and give aid to the churches and monasteries.’
The letter bears out the fact that the Muslims did not force their subjects to convert to Islam. In fact, the Koran recognised the Abrahamic faiths, as we have seen.
The apocalyptic horror of Islam, as portrayed by later Christian literature, misrepresented the early Muslims’ respect for and tolerance of the faiths that fell under Islamic control.
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The Muslims were often less tolerant of one another.
The Arab conquests were fought against violent internal wrangling over the correct interpretation of the Koran, amid simmering disagreements about Muhammad’s lineage and succession.
Treachery and bitter family division dogged any hope for the smooth fulfilment of the unity Muhammad had willed.
The Arab civil wars, of Muslim on Muslim, led to the sundering of the faith.
The Battle of the Camel, of 656 CE, fought near Basra in Iraq, began as little more than another bloody family feud. It was also a war of revenge against the assassins of Uthman, the third Rashidun caliph.
It set Muhammad’s favourite cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph, against his favourite wife, Aisha, the daughter of his best friend.
Aisha entered the melee ‘on a camel in a litter made of wooden boards covered with thick hair cloth and cattle-hides, under which was a layer of felt, the whole covered with chain-mail’.
By the end of the battle, wrote a witness, ‘seventy men’s hands had been severed as they tried to grab the camel’s halter . . . and the litter was so stuck about with darts and arrows that it looked like a porcupine’.
In the end, Ali prevailed. At least 7000 Muslims died at the Battle of the Camel, but it was little more than a skirmish compared to the four-month Battle of Siffin (657 CE), fought on the right bank of the Euphrates, between the victorious Ali and the Syrian forces of Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan (c. 597–680 CE), the future founder and first caliph of the Umayyad caliphate.
An inciting incident was a dispute over the correct interpretation of the Koran by the third caliph, Uthman, who was accused by Ali of deviating from the word of Allah, and of corruption and nepotism.
It appears that Ali had had no hand in Uthman’s assassination (656 CE), but the caliph’s death provoked a revolt by Mu’awiya, Uthman’s cousin, and led him to declare war on Ali (either as a pretext to shore up Mu’awiya’s Syrian power or as a genuine attempt to avenge Uthman’s death).
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Siffin ended with an astonishing 70,000 recorded dead, surely an exaggeration, and three times as many wounded, many of them in a single night of savagery known as ‘the Night of the Shrieking’.
So traumatic were the consequences for Islam that the new faith lost the unity Muhammad had forged, and would be partitioned into two extremely hostile camps, of Shia and Sunni, centred respectively in Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The division continues unabated to this day. ‘The darkness clings there still,’ wrote Mackintosh-Smith in 2019, when he was living in Yemen:
‘[I]t is a millennial theatre of war, from the clashes between Babylonians and Assyrians down to only yesterday, when . . . a Shi’ah-dominated Iraqi state and a hyper-Sunni “Islamic State” were slogging it out on the endless dusty plains and missiles were slamming into al-Raqqah, the “Islamic State’s” capital in Syria.’
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The Arab Civil Wars iterate our theme of belief as the engine of history in two striking ways.
First, they showed that Muslims would kill Muslims in huge numbers, despite the Koran’s injunction that no Muslim should shed the blood of another. That is, sectarian fanaticism overrode the Prophet’s clear exhortation against Muslim-on-Muslim violence.
Second, the Muslim wars revealed the sacred place of the Koran in every soldier’s mind, before and during battle, and the vital place of the sacred book in seeking peace.
When Mu’awiya sensed he was losing at Siffin, for example, he commanded his men to strap copies of the Koran to the ends of their lances and shout, ‘Let the book of God be the judge between us!’
The warriors deferred to Allah: the fighting ceased, and peace talks began.
Next Thursday, 19th June 2025: Islam enters Spain
Selected sources and further reading:
Al-Tabari and Yarshater, E. (transl.) (2007) History of Al-Tabari: The Battle of al-Qadisiyyah and the Conquest of Syria and Palestine (Vol XII), Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Ferdowsi, A. and Davis, D. (transl.) (2006) Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, New York: Viking.
Ferdowsi and Levy, R. (transl.) (2011) The Epic of the Kings (RLE Iran B): Shah-Nama the National Epic of Persia, Abingdon UK: Routledge.
Firestone, R. (Spring 1996) ‘Conceptions of Holy War in Biblical and Qur’ānic Tradition’, The Journal of Religious Ethics, 24(1), pp. 99–123.
Hoyland, R.G. (1998) Seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, Princeton NJ: The Darwin Press.
Jones, A. (transl.) (2007) The Qur’an, Harrow UK: The E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust.
Kennedy, H. (2007) The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live in, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Khaldun, I. and Rosenthal, F. (transl.) (2005) The Muqaddimah, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mackintosh-Smith, T. (2019) Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Penn, M.P. (ed.) (2015) When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam, Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Pourshariati, P. (2017) Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran, London: I.B. Tauris.
Rippin, A. (ed.) (2006) The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.