294. Gaza & The Islamic Conquest (Part 4)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrenpoort. And we are joined again, I'm very happy to say, by the Professor of Late Antique, Medieval and Byzantine Studies at the University of Cambridge, Peter Saris. Welcome, Peter. In the last episode, we talked about Christianity and the impact of Christianity and these sort of wild monks who really changed the fabric of what Gaza looks like. Sort of this boom time with monasteries and churches springing up in the Holy Land. In this episode, we're going to talk about the great conquests of Islam because William left us on a cliffhanger at the last episode in the 7th century.

1:09And how ideas about this period have, by modern study, been completely overturned in some way. So let's start at the very, very basic level. We're talking about a rapid expansion of Islam at this time. We're talking sort of 630s, aren't we? So just tell us what's going on and what is happening here. Over the course of the 6th and early 7th centuries, cultural, economic, military, religious conditions in the Arabian Peninsula had been revolutionised and transformed by the growing involvement in Arabia of the two great powers of the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanian Persia. Partly as a result of this growing superpower involvement, you've seen new religious ideas come into circulation in Arabia, new forms of identity emerging.

2:00And in the context of these swirling ideas and new identities, in the early 7th century, a prophet has emerged in the settlement of Mecca, a significant trading centre known to posterity as Muhammad. Muhammad has preached the imminence of divine judgement, a very strong theme in contemporary Christianity and Judaism as well in the early 7th century. He's advocating the worship of the god of the Old Testament, who has previously revealed himself to the Christians and Jews, but whose worship of that true god Muhammad believes would become corrupted. Through a series of political, religious and military struggles, Muhammad has been able to unite many of the tribes of Arabia under the aegis of his new religion.

2:47As Will mentioned at the end of the last episode, Muhammad is believed to have died around the year 632. But the leadership of the community of believers, the Ummah that he has established, would then pass to some of his earliest companions, who would reunite the Arabian Peninsula after some of the peoples who have joined the Ummah tried to break away, and who then, from the year 633-4, would begin to lead forces into the empires of the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia to the north, thus initiating the dramatic expansion of Islam over much of the known world, which will then proceed from the 630s down to the 650s in a series of lightning military campaigns.

3:30And right at the end of the last episode, William was talking about this sort of flashpoint that takes place in Gaza, where a unit called Serios is meant to be paying Arabs who have been protecting that frontier for the emperor. And he says, you know what, we hardly pay our soldiers, we're not going to pay the dogs. It is such an insult. It leads to something that the people of Gaza could not have foreseen. Tell us what happens next. Well, I think that episode is a later dramatisation and sort of almost semi-mythologised retelling. I wouldn't shame, it's a good story. I think the fine detail of it should be treated with some caution, but it's telling us something that's fundamentally true.

4:12I think, take a step back for a moment. During the course of the Roman-Persian warfare of the preceding century, the Romans have built up their own Arabian or Arab clients along the frontier zone, dominantly Christian Arabs or Arabians, the Gassanids or the Jaffanids, and the Persians have built up their own clientage network as well. Now, at the height of the Roman-Persian struggle, when the Persians think that they've got the Roman Empire beaten just before the Emperor Heraclius reverses the Persian games, the Persians seem to have dismantled these clientage arrangements along the frontier zones of southern Iraq and southern Syria and southern Palestine.

4:52They're probably planning to put something else back in their place, but never get round to it. So when the Emperor Heraclius suddenly defeats the Persians at the end of the 620s and nominally restores Roman control to Syria, Palestine, Egypt, you've got a power vacuum along those desert fringes. You've got former client peoples of these empires not receiving the pay that they're expecting. And as it were, the emergent forces of Islam and the emergent forces of the Ummah are filling that power vacuum. The Ummah being the Muslim community. The Muslim community. And the first time the Romans spot this is when two Arab forces turn up near Gaza.

5:31We have some later Arabic accounts of this, which don't mention Sergius. We have a later Byzantine account drawing on a now lost source that does mention him. We have a very, very contemporary account written in Syriac, which is the Christian version of the Aramaic language of the region around Gaza, which not only gives us a fragmentary, but quite chilling, because it's brutal account of the military conflict that ensues, but is also one of our earliest sources to survive from anywhere that mentions Muhammad by name. Really? We have a Syriac source written around the year 640 that describes how a battle occurs about 12 miles to the east of Gaza, as a result of which the Romans flee, leaving behind their general who is killed.

6:22They sew the general up in a camel or something. It's a horrible story. According to the later sources, but the contemporary Syriac source describes is then the Arabs, as it were, raiding local villages and killing villagers in order to take control of the countryside and ravaging the whole region. But the Syriac source describes these as the Arabs of Muhammad, as one of our very earliest mentions of him. So it's a crucial historical document, not just in terms of the military history of Gaza, but for the history of world religion. Goodness. And the leader, we're always told, is Amr ibn al-As, famous for later conquering Egypt.

6:56Absolutely, yes. And there's the mosque he established which you go and see in Cairo. These Arabian Arab soldiers and warriors are not unknown to the populations of Gaza and southern Syria and southern Palestine because the empires have become dependent on such armed Arabs or Arabians for their region's defence for a long time. And they've been bringing in frankincense and stuff. And they've been bringing traitor. Muhammad's family have been merchants. There are some suggestions, for example, that Amr ibn al-As's family may have had estates or lands on the fringes of Roman territory as well. So initially quite hard, I think, for the Romans to work out what's going on here, not least because the Emperor Heraclius has defeated the Persians in the foothills of the Caucasus with armies made up of Armenians and what have you.

7:40The Roman military present on the ground in Syria, Palestine, Egypt in the year 63 to 4 is going to be pretty nominal. A lot of the so-called Roman troops are really going to be local levies, local recruits who don't really want to be serving for being press ganged or armed peasants or other Arab tribesmen who are being paid to defend it. And it's quite easy, then, as it were, for the Arabs being employed by the Romans or the Arabs being employed by the Persians to then defect to these new Arabs emerging from inner Arabia. And clearly, lots of that is happening as well. Well, I mean, you can't imagine Heraclius, who has only had five minutes, not literally, but just a little bit of time to sort of bathe in his own success of taking back the one true cross, which we talked about in the last episode.

8:24He's seeing all of this. What is his reaction? Is he sort of dispatching armies all over the place to try and quell these little fires everywhere? What seems to happen after the fall of southern Palestine, the Arab armies will advance very rapidly. I think we'll come to this shortly, the whole of Palestine will be under Arab control. And a series of engagements will then take place along the banks of the Jordan, in which the emperor's own brother, leading a Roman force, is defeated by the Arabs. And that, in a sense, breaks the backbone of such Roman resistance as there is. But I think it's partly because there aren't really that many Roman troops there on the ground to start off with.

9:02It's interesting with Heraclius that Heraclius, who has restored the true cross, will be very well regarded in the Islamic historical imagination and memory. And as I say, the religious milieu out of which Islam is emerging and the Arabs that are joining the Ummah are emerging is one that is actually in many ways more pro-Roman than pro-Persian. So there's a verse in the Quran, the verse on the Romans, that seems to be alluding to a battle between the Romans and the Persians that had taken place in southern Syria, in which the Romans have been defeated, but in which the faithful are reassured that, God willing, the Romans will be victorious.

9:40Peter, so this culminates, this Islamic advance culminates in the battle of the Yarmouk. Tell us about that. Yes. So here we have a great difficulty in that we have a series of much later Arabic sources, which are in very fine detail. We have some later Byzantine sources and a bit more fragmentary, and then we have some more contemporary, very fragmentary sources in Syriac. How we piece these together to make sense of the Arab advance is slightly complicated. Just to take a step back to see how we get to Yarmouk. 633-4, they have taken control of southern Palestine. By the end of that year, most of Palestine seems to be under their control.

10:23By Christmas of 634, the Arabs have got control of Bethlehem. We have a letter from the head of the church in Jerusalem, complaining, for example, that the Christian clergy can't make their usual pilgrimage to Bethlehem in the Christmas of 634 because of the Arabs. And for those that don't know the geography, Bethlehem is just, you know, five miles to the south of modern Jerusalem. Yeah. Now, in the later Arabic sources, Jerusalem doesn't fall till 639, but that's actually quite unlikely. There's a good case to be made that Jerusalem probably falls by the end of 635. And then with Jerusalem having fallen by the end of 635, the battle line then advances to the west bank of the Jordan, with the Arabs then advancing into Rome and Syria.

11:10And a series of engagements then take place along the northern fringe of the volcanic Haram plain near the river Yarmouk. And these series of engagements then get, I think, tidied up by the later Arabic historical tradition into one big engagement we call the Battle of Yarmouk. But it's probably a series of struggles taking place as the Arab armies are advancing out from Jerusalem onwards into Syria. So Peter, quite soon after the Battle of Yarmouk, or that series of engagements that you described, you get the establishment of a centralised Umayyad caliphate. Tell us quickly about that. After the rapid expansion of Islam from the 630s into the 650s, the Islamic world is suddenly rent by a bitter civil war over the succession to authority and leadership within the community.

12:04It's out of this civil war that the subsequent division between Shia and Sunni Muslims will emerge. We needn't go into that, but the crucial point is that the first major civil war is brought to a conclusion around the year 661 with the rise to power of a dynasty that draws its support primarily from the armies of the Ummah that are operating in Syria, a dynasty we know as the Umayyads, who will dominate the Islamic empire and establish a more centralised califal system ruling from Damascus, which will rule over this world from the 660s until the mid 8th century. This is a vast empire, isn't it?

12:43It's what, from the Indus to Gibraltar or right into Spain? Yes, by 711 Spain has been conquered. So this is now an empire by the early 8th century stretching from the Atlantic, eating into Central Asia. And Peter, one of my all-time favourite historical passages is my great idol. I'm not sure what you think of Sir Stephen Rutzman. And he He opens his famous history of the Crusades in the first volume with this description of the patriarch Sophronius taking the caliph into Jerusalem. The caliph arrives on a white camel. Tell us all that scene. Is that true or is that now not thought to be? I think a white camel may have been, Stephen, being a bit euphemistic.

13:20By this point, the leadership of the Umar has passed this character Umar, known as Umar al-Farouq, the Redeemer, who makes the formal entry into Jerusalem when it's conquered. Early Islam is a very apocalyptic movement and this entry into Jerusalem has enormous cosmological significance for the Muslims but also for the Christians. Our Byzantine account describes how the patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, negotiated a treaty for the securing of all Palestine. So here he's negotiating Roman surrender. Umar entered the holy city clad in filthy camel hair garments. He's probably wearing something like a monk's robes, but it's being depicted negatively by the Byzantines.

14:01He's adopting a humble demeanour, conveying an ascetic appearance. Peter, when this is sometimes presented, the Islamic conquest of Palestine, it's sometimes made to look as if this is an apocalyptic event. The old world is wiped out, that a bunch of Arabs from the Hejaz come and replace the population. The beginning of Arab history in Palestine begins at this point. But historians today have a very different understanding, don't they? They say that the conquest actually is almost invisible. You can't see it archaeologically, that there's just a new ruling class turning up, but that the administration continues for a while in Greek, that the same sort of Christian families are running the bureaucracies.

14:40I mean, I've got a book on my shelf here called The Invisible Conquest, which describes this as something that happens very gradually and is not one of the kind of great juncture points of history. The conquest of Jerusalem is apocalyptic in one absolutely crucial sense, in that I think it has great apocalyptic symbolism within early Islam itself. What we will see over the course of the 7th century, particularly in the so-called era of the Umayyad Caliphs in the second half of the 7th century, is a very major investment in Jerusalem, the building of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mound. There's a very interesting argument made that Jerusalem is being prepared for God to come and sit in judgment.

15:23The intensity of apocalyptic expectation in early Islam is very important, I think, to how the early Muslim elite are viewing what they're doing in Jerusalem. Now, you're right that beyond that, partly by virtue of the rapidity of conquest and the way in which the conquerors initially concentrate on taking control of the countryside and then negotiating with civic elites, offering those civic elites continuity of property ownership and rights to worship, if they agree to pay tribute to the Arab conquerors, you see very little disruption on the ground. Although what is going on is a fundamentally military process.

16:02So that's why archaeologically you don't see much by way of destruction. The Arabs aren't turning up and doing what Mongols do of sort of raising cities to the ground. Controlling the countryside is the first military priority and that tends to leave very little by way of archaeological evidence behind. But it's also true, and it's also crucial, that their primary goal is to establish control over a region and extract tribute from the local population with the Arabs or Arabians establishing themselves as a separately cantoned, almost warrior caste initially, living off the tributes collected from the local population.

16:39And they build a new city camp, don't they, at Ramli, which is just inland from Gaza. And that's a very common phenomenon we will see throughout the areas conquered by the Arabs. And this allows for an enormous amount of economic, administrative, and cultural continuity on the ground. So in fact, the area of greatest continuity of literary culture from the ancient into the early medieval world in terms of writing in Greek, for example, is Palestine as it passes into Arab rule, because both the Persians and the Arabs have conquered Palestine rapidly and have been very happy to leave the existing infrastructure in intent.

17:18In Palestine, as in Egypt, as in Syria, what you largely have are the same elites administering and dominating the same regions, collecting essentially the same taxes, but then handing those taxes over to Arab masters instead of sending them off to the Roman authorities in Constantinople or the Sussanian authorities in Sattisifon. They're doing so until the end of the 7th century in the same languages. It's only at the end of the 7th century that the Caliph Abd al-Malik, who's one of the great caliphs of early Islamic history and who consolidates an imperial system, introduces Arabic as an imperial language and a language of administration.

17:56It's at that point that local elites throughout this nascent caliphal world, whether they're adopting Islam or not, whether they're Christians or not, or Muslims or not, have to start learning Arabic in order to maintain their positions in local society. So the linguistic Arabisation of communities in the Near East shouldn't be read to indicate that old populations have been swept away and replaced by huge numbers of settlers, as it were, coming in from inner Arabia. And in terms of religion, again, we think of Islam as a completely different religion to Christianity or Judaism, albeit that they have Abrahamic roots.

18:36But it's not at all clear to the people on the ground that this is not just another Christian heresy, is it? Islam looks quite like the sort of prayer that they're used to. And the way that Muslims pray, prostrating themselves, is what the Greek Orthodox monks did at the time. This is further complicated by the fact that it is quite clear, and this comes across from a close reading of both the Arabic and non-Arabic sources, that the armies of conquest, although the leadership is made up of Arabians or Arabs who have been called to monotheism in what we might call a sort of proto-Quranic or proto-Islamic form, that there are also individuals and groups fighting in those armies of conquest who are still thinking of themselves as Christians, or thinking of themselves as Jews.

19:23They're also Jews taking part in the conquest. And indeed we're told that when Sergius, or whoever the Roman commander is, is killed by the Arabs, we're told by another 7th century source that the Jewish community near Gaza celebrates, because they regard the Romans as persecutors and these Arabs as liberating them from Roman control. To some Roman onlookers, they say, well, what are these people preaching? They're preaching the worship of the God of the Old Testament, but they seem to deny the divinity of Christ. They sound like Jews. So some people are assuming they're Jews. Made more complicated, I think, there are clearly Jews in the armies of conquest and the first governor of Jerusalem appointed by the authorities is Jewish.

20:05Others look at the same claims and say, these are claims made by Christian heretical groups. They must be Christian heretics. And Islam itself is acquiring greater definition and form over the course of the 7th century, in the same way that Christianity adopted greater definition and form over the course of the 4th century, as each of these religions had become imperial religion. Islam acquires greater theological definition that people come to understand it as a separate and rival religion rather than something derivative of one of the existing religions. Peter, when I was writing my book From the Holy Mountain and reading about this period and hanging around Jerusalem talking to archaeologists, I met this Franciscan called Michele Piccirillo, who dug up a lot of the churches from this period.

20:50And his view was that there was a great wave of church building after the conquest, particularly around the Jordan and in the desert. And that far from being a period when Christianity goes into decline, that the new conquerors have lighter taxes, less money is being sent off to Constantinople, and that many of the, particularly the non-Orthodox Christian groups, are actually flourishing at this point? I think the level of taxation issue is more complicated. But the point is that the taxes are being collected still by Christian elites. And as is always the case, the people collecting the taxes take a cut.

21:23So it's a good time for Christian elites. And they're investing a lot of that in church building, a magnificent wave of church building, particularly in what is now Jordan, particularly for those Christian communities who had been regarded as heterodox or non-conformist by the increasingly persecutory imperial authorities in Constantinople, the period of Arab rule is something of a golden age. And change is the way we think about this, particularly because early Islam isn't terribly interested in conversion. If we're looking at the Mediterranean world in the Near East around the year 700 AD, the majority of Christians are subjects of the Caliph of Damascus.

22:02Well, look, let's take a break there. And after the break, we're going to introduce you to an unexpected, perhaps, figure from this period of history. He's a saint. He's St. John of Damascus, who lives just a few miles away from Gaza. Join us then.

22:23Welcome back. Peter, just tell us, St. John of Damascus, first of all, where does he stand in the pantheon of saints in Christian belief and who was he? He's regarded as one of the greatest theologians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and is a fascinating figure who really embodies and epitomises how, despite the Arab conquest, the establishment of califal rule, the Christian communities of the Near East still remain part of a broader Christian universe and cosmos and world that still embraces Syria, Palestine, and Constantinople. John belongs to a family of Syrian Christians who have probably been serving as a bureaucratic class, who probably for centuries were serving as bureaucrats under Roman emperors in Syria, and who then simply continue their bureaucratic lifestyle under Arab rule, operating as bureaucrats ultimately at the court of the Umayyad caliphs, ruling over this new empire from Damascus.

23:32He then retires, as many civil servants did in this period, Christian civil servants did in this period, to a monastic cell. He becomes a monk and theologian. At Masaba, the monastery is still there, isn't it? Exactly, it's still there, and is particularly important for two aspects of his thought. First of all, I say by this point at the end of the 7th century, it's now become apparent to Christians and others that Islam is a rival religion. It is acquiring much greater definition at the court of the Umayyads at Damascus, where the Caliphs are presiding over formal disputations between Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars over theological issues, which is making it clearer what the differences between these religions are, what they have in common, but crucially, where they stand apart.

24:17And John writes one of our first detailed critiques of Islam from a Christian perspective, from an Orthodox perspective, where he emphasises what it has in common with earlier Christian heresies. But he is treating it as a separate religion. He clearly knows Islam's religion in detail, up close. He is referring to verses of the Quran, including, interestingly, some verses that seem to have been lost since then, which is an interesting historical feature. But John's critique of Islam is particularly important because Because it's so close to events, and he knows Islam so intimately up close, that actually his critique then provides a sort of intellectual scaffold around which subsequent generations of Muslim scholars will then compose and draft their own justifications of Islam.

25:08So in that sense, he makes a very important contribution to the emergence of Muslim theology. At the same time, at the end of the 7th century, one of the major points of division that emerges between Muslims and Christians, and particularly Christians of the Roman Empire, is the place of religious images in worship. Images or icons, such as those that survived from St. Catherine's in Sinai, our best preserved 6th century icons of Mary and the saints, have come to play a central role in Christian worship. At the end of the 7th century, the Caliph Abd al-Malik denounces the Christian use of images as idolatrous and affirms that Islamic opposition to the veneration of images is a cornerstone of the Islamic faith.

25:52This will then spark off a nervous reaction in the Byzantine empire, which finds itself on a back foot militarily. And in the 730s and 740s, the Byzantine authorities will themselves crack down on the use of images in Christian worship. And John of Damascus, writing in Syria and in Palestine, having probably engaged in this dispute with the Arabs earlier, writes our most detailed and influential justification of the veneration of icons in the place of Orthodox worship. Again, he's ready for this debate because he's already probably engaged in it with the Arabs. And just again to clarify this, John of Damascus in his youth, there was a story in one of those Runciman books that he was a drinking companion of the future Caliph Ali Aziz.

26:38He's right there in the court. Yeah, absolutely. He knows this world intimately. But if you've got John of Damascus or John Damascene, as he's sometimes known, who's saying, you know what, this religion, Islam, it's heretical, let's say that, but it doesn't feel so different. One would assume then that it would be easy and, you know, just a smooth transition to convert. But conversions don't happen in great numbers, do they, Peter? Why not? Islam isn't interested in conversion at this formative phase. What it's interesting doing really is extracting tribute from the subjugated populations, which can then be shared out amongst the Muslims.

27:15If anything, that then provides the Islamic leadership, the califal leadership, with a disincentive to see widespread conversion, because widespread conversion would lead to a diminution in your tax revenues. Right. So when you do start getting large-scale conversion, it actually causes political crisis, The Christian communities of Palestine, Syria, Egypt will remain probably in a majority in each of those areas down to the period of the First Crusade and beyond. Really? So majority Christian till the 11th, 12th century? That's the position I would take, yes. That's so different from conventional views.