The first Caliphates (632-800)
Over-awed and defeated by Islam, Christianity melted into paranoid obscurity
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Join the journey!
Next Thursday: The Shock of the Norsemen
BY 750 CE, the forces of Islam were driving the events that shaped the history of North Africa and Europe.
The Arabs and their vassal regimes held most of the known world in their thrall.
Their empire of 13.4 million square kilometres was the largest then attained and the sixth-largest in history, greater than those of Rome and Athens at their peak, and rivalled only by the Tang conquests in China.
Millions of Christians lived in the embrace of the Caliphate, the over-arching Islamic state, the first three of which presided over the Arab conquests and the ‘golden age’ of Islam: the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661 CE); the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 CE) and the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258 CE).
For much of the eighth century the Caliphate was directed from its new capital, Baghdad. This splendid metropolis, built in 762–766 CE by the Abbasid caliphate after their victory over the Umayyads, would be the pulsing heart of the Islamic empire for five centuries, until the Mongol invasion in 1258 overran and annihilated it, a shock from which the Muslims never recovered.
The Christians were not entirely supine before the Arab invasions.
The Byzantine Empire persisted as a potential rival to Islam. The Greeks retained a well-organised state, with a regular army and an emperor who aspired to the glory of the caliphs and who earned their grudging respect.
And while the Muslims believed they were ‘the possessors of the only true religion,’ writes historian Hugh Kennedy, ‘some knew they had much to learn from the culture, philosophy and science of the Greeks.’
As well, the Byzantines possessed the adamantine jewel of Constantinople, the gleaming junction where East met West, and the Christians’ strategic bulwark that would block the Islamic invasions during the Middle Ages.
‘But for Constantinople’s role as the fortress of Europe,’ argued historian Norman Cantor argued, ‘the people of medieval Europe would have been overwhelmed by the religious determination and military superiority of the Moslem armies.’
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That religious determination breathed through the architectural splendour of Islam.
It arose wherever the faith prevailed, reminding the world of the higher motivations of the Arab conquests.
Near the end of the seventh century, the Dome of the Rock graced the contours of Jerusalem, an Islamic shrine and the third oldest monument to Islam, built on the site of the second Jewish temple that the Romans had razed in 70 CE.
Within 50 years, mosques would rise over Damascus, Jerash and Amman (in today’s Jordan), Baalbek (Syria), Fustat (Egypt), Istakhr and possibly in Susa (Iran).
The beauty of the great mosques of Baghdad, a new city built between 762-767 CE, eclipsed them all (until they, too, yielded to the magnificence of the Ottoman Empire, notably the Hagia Sophia, converted to a mosque after Constantinople fell to Islam in 1453).
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It is impossible to conceive of the success of the Arab conquests without the devotional power of the Koran.
By 800 CE the Koran held sway over most of Spain, North Africa and Egypt, on the coasts of the Ethiopian Sea, in Syria and Asia Minor, and in all the countries around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (excepting the kingdom of Astrakhan), in Transoxonia, in all of Persia and a great part of Tartary, as well as over much of the Eastern Mediterranean: Thrace, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Greece.
Whether the surahs, the Koranic verses, were invoked as justifications or pretexts for the Islamic invasions is not the point.
My point is that the surahs animated the Muslim mind at every stage of these conquests, and they were believed.
Without this binding belief, the Muslims would surely have reverted to the booty-chasing banditry of the Age of Ignorance: the fists of the tribe, not the sword of God.
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Listen to Qutayba ibn Muslim, the Arab commander of the invasion of Transoxania (lower central Asia) in the early eighth century. This was, according to Kennedy, ‘the toughest, bloodiest and probably the most destructive of all the campaigns of the great Arab conquests’.
Qutayba believed his men were the tools of the Almighty: ‘God,’ he said, ‘has brought you here so that He may make His religion strong, protect sacred things through you and through you to increase the abundance of wealth and mete out harsh treatment to the enemy.’
In the coming jihad, he declared, Muslim soldiers who fell on the battlefield would not die; they would join Allah as blessed martyrs: ‘Count not those who are slain on God’s path as dead but rather as living with their Lord, by Him provided.’
This was no mere pre-battle pep talk. Qutayba was sincere. The soldiers were listening, and their faith shone in accounts of the battle: a Muslim cavalryman, charging the enemy ranks seven times, killed one of them with every charge, which so impressed the enemy that they cried out, ‘We’ll abandon our idolatry and worship you.’
To which Qutayba scornfully replied that he was fighting to force them to worship Allah, not him.
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The later Muslim conquests of Asia opened with their signature bout of savagery, then tended to settle into a state of peaceful coexistence.
In the Buddhist kingdom of Gandhara, for example, in what is now southern Pakistan, ‘the Muslim conqueror was celebrated’, says Kennedy, ‘not for his zeal in the rigid enforcement of Islamic norms, but for his tolerance and easy-going humour’.
And in parts of India the Muslims reversed their view of the Hindus and Buddhists as mere idolaters who should be slaughtered on sight, and instead granted them the same status as the People of the Book - the Jews and Christians and, by then, the Persian Zoroastrians.
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Raja Dahir, the last Hindu ruler of the Brahmin dynasty of Sindh (679–712 CE), dared to resist the Islamic invasion under Muhammad bin al-Qasim, who applied the usual ruthless mopping up measures to the cities that fell to the Koran: he levelled the stupas, slaughtered the Brahmin leaders and monks, seized booty and slaves, and drove many of the widows to choose suicide over captivity.
‘Our glory has gone and the term of our life has come to its close,’ Dahir’s sister was quoted as saying. ‘As there is no hope of safety and liberty, let us collect firewood and cotton and oil. The best thing for us, I think, is to burn ourselves to ashes and so quickly meet our husbands in the other world.’
The surviving Brahmins, their heads shaved in supplication, later appeared before their Muslim conquerors and asked the new rulers to clarify their status: as usual, they would be required to convert to Islam or pay the jizya (tax).
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Meanwhile, a sense of profound insularity enswathed western Christendom.
In the flood-tide of the Islamic age, the Christian church retreated to the northern darkness, a bitterly divided, inward-looking sideshow, barely recognisable as the once pounding faith of Jesus Christ.
The western Mediterranean had become ‘a Muslim lake’, wrote the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, ‘the west was blockaded and forced to live upon its own resources.’
For the first time in history, ‘the axis of life shifted northward from the Mediterranean.’
The once-indomitable faith of Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Origen and Saint Ambrose had fallen into a self-tormenting loop of paranoid introspection, easy prey to the demons of superstition and imagined heresy.
The prevailing Christian response to the ‘Muslim Apocalypse’, as they saw it, tended to be self-blame: the followers of Christ had brought it on themselves through moral laxity and heresy, as the Nestorian monk John bar Penkaye wrote in the 690s:
‘God was punishing the Church for flirting with the heresy and the Arabs were his instruments of punishment.’
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Fierce disputes over Christian doctrine among the various sects of the church were even thought to be more menacing than the existential threat of Islam.
The real enemies of Christ, many Roman Catholics believed, were not the heathen Arabs, but the Jews and other strands of Christianity – chiefly the hated Chalcedonians and Monophysites of the Byzantine Empire.
So, while the Muslims conquered much of the known world, the Christians sat in their monasteries and northern fastnesses and prayed for a messianic figure to deliver them from their torment.
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The Christians did not anticipate a more terrible oppressor than the Saracen.
And yet, here they came, pouring out of the Northern Lights. After they’d passed through an English or French town, the dazed Christian survivors (if any) wondered who these marauders were: beasts or men?
Soon all of Christendom trembled before the wrath of the Vikings.
Next Thursday, 3rd July 2025: The Shock of the Norsemen
Selected sources and further reading:
Al-Tabari and Yarshater, E. (transl.) (2007) History of Al-Tabari, Albany NY: State University of New York Press.
Cantor, N. (1993) The Civilization of the Middle Ages, New York: HarperCollins.
Fidler, R. (2022) The Book of Road and Kingdoms: From the Wonders of Imperial Baghdad to the Darklands at the End of the Earth, Sydney: ABC Books.
Hussain, K. and Husain, K. (1999) ‘The Tradition of “Jihad” in the Evolution of Anti-Colonial Struggles in Malabar’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 60, pp. 709–14.
Jones, A. (transl.) (2007) The Qur’an, Harrow UK: The E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust.
Kennedy, H. (2008) The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live in, Boston: De Capo Press.
Kufi, A. and Kalichbeg, M. (transl.) (2004) The Chachnamah – An Ancient History of Sind, lulu.com.
Laroui, A. and Manheim, R. (transl.) (1977) The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pirenne, H. (2003) Mohammed and Charlemagne, New York: Dover Publications.
Rippin, A. (ed.) (2006) The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
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Paul
Interesting, thanks. I've been writing posts on how this Islamic Golden Age had quite the impact for us living today. Your book looks great, will order a copy.