Rise of Islam

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I'm currently at Ancients HQ.

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Today's episode we're going back to the 7th century AD and we're exploring the rise of Islam and the early Arab conquests with our guest Dr.

Hodadad Rezakhani.

Hodadad, he's an expert in the late antique and early medieval world, particularly in West Asia, and he currently works at the Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna.

He dialed in from Vienna for this chat.

Really grateful for this time and it was fascinating to hear all about this topic, particularly, at least in my opinion, why Hodadad believes the Arabs were so successful against the Sasanian Persians and the Romans, two great ancient superpowers.

He pushes aside this idea that both these superpowers were weak and in ruin at the time from years of fighting.

It was really interesting, and I really do hope you enjoy.

Let's go.

In the mid-7th century, the the world changed forever.

For centuries, the river Euphrates had marked the boundary between two great superpowers of antiquity, but in a matter of decades, a new empire rose to dominate the entirety of West Asia, presenting itself as the champion of a new faith and ideology.

Islam.

In this episode, we're covering this extraordinary period of change.

We'll explore the early 7th century world in which the Islamic Caliphate emerged, a world where where Sasanian power had reached its peak under King Khosro II, before a temporary Roman reversal of fortune.

We'll delve into the relations between the Arab world, the Romans, and the Sasanians, the forming of an Islamic polity in Arabia, and exploring the narrative of a swift, successful, and significant Arab conquest of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

This is the story of the rise of Islam with our guest, Dr.

Hoddadad Rezahani.

Hodadad, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Thank you very much, likewise.

And it's quite the story going all the way to the 7th century and understanding the nature of the Arab conquests, the rise of Islam in the face of not one but two powerful ancient superpowers in West Asia, the Romans and the Sasanians.

Indeed, and it has always been presented as one of these great questions and mysteries of history.

And when talking about this topic, is it fair to say that we're largely focusing on Islam as a political system at the time?

Well, we should be, I guess, but we sort of do this in a convoluted way where we try to find this political and social and, you know, administrative system, but at the same time recognize Islam as a religion as well.

And I think, as I would argue when we talk, is that these are two different matters.

We have to look at two different things.

But yes, that's essentially what it is.

And what types of sources do you, as an expert and a scholar, do you have available to learn more about this period and the change that happened?

Well, it is a very interesting topic as far as sources go because it's one of the few that we almost

exclusively used to study from the sources from within the empire itself.

So the majority of our sources for both the rise of Islam as a religion and you know the ministry of Muhammad himself and then the rise of the empire the rise of the caliphate the conquest and things of the sort and the establishment of the caliphate were traditionally coming from within the Islamic sources themselves Islamic historians would write that and this is how we interpreted it and then from the middle of the 20th century well earlier really but from beginning of the 20th century we started having these studies of the rise of islam itself and tried to to find other sources, which resulted in very sometimes bewildering works of scholarship that you would wonder where they came from.

So it is primarily

a sort of field of study that we have a main narrative in Islamic histories, and then we try to find information to corroborate and

go against this narrative and things of the sort.

And so are also Sasanian sources, Persian sources, and I guess also East Roman Byzantine sources also helpful for this topic?

Byzantine sources are a matter of discussion because Byzantine sources really are becoming very rare at this time.

And this is one of the reasons this is so interesting that we have very rich evidence and you know Byzantine histories for the sixth century, so the century that precedes the rise of Islam.

We start having very good sources for the eighth and ninth century.

And there is the sort of birth of Byzantine historiography.

Then exactly in the middle of the seventh century, where we are asking this question, Byzantine sources all of a sudden start petering out.

So we have a couple of sources, none of them seem to be comprehensively talking about this.

And then we now have

Syriac and Armenian sources, which we traditionally weren't using.

They weren't getting into the main narrative of these things.

And then the Sasanian sources that you talked about, that is a very interesting thing because contemporaneously we have nothing.

Sasanians, as far as we know, did not develop a historiographical tradition the way we know it from the West.

I believe I have a couple of theories about what their historiography was like, but I haven't been able to prove them yet.

But Sasanian primary sources, the way we are used to sources, something from the middle of the seventh century, is very rare.

They are, in sense, of apocalyptic writings from a few years later.

And of course, what I believe is basically that the Islamic sources that I was talking about are actually originally Sasanian sources getting reflected in Arabic.

And it's because of the nature of thinking about sources that they have to be in the languages that we expect them, that we don't think of Arabic sources as Sasanian.

So that's sort of the range.

But on each one of those, I would be more than willing to sort of comment on exactly what they mean.

I mean, we'll certainly delve into that as we progress through the narrative.

I mean, it feels important to start with the background.

And Hodadad, if you could explain, let's do like the early 7th century West Asia.

What does the world look like in those first decades?

Very good question.

So we know almost stereotypically that the Persians and the Romans have been fighting.

People have this very convoluted idea that they have been fighting since the time of the Greeks, which is nothing, it's not related.

But at least since the first century BC, we have this almost continuous state of belligerence between the two sides whether early on arsasid empire of iran and then the sasanians and then various roman emperors and dynasties and governments we have this going on constantly is going on there are a number of conflicts almost always ends up in a draw as they call it there's a state that two months sometimes in the second century emperor trajan manages to take over southern mesopotamia and then you know for a bit before that Arsasides have made it to the Mediterranean you know but normally this is not how things are normally the Euphrates is the border and things are going on in the sixth century the century preceding this we are entering a new phase of these conflicts now as a couple of scholars have remarked this is now going for the kill this is a total war They want to destroy each other.

They have been fighting, at least since 502, but but particularly since after 530s, they have been fighting to destroy each other.

And surprisingly, Sasanians have been taking the upper hand.

Several times, Sasanians are coming way into the Byzantine territory.

They reach the Mediterranean.

We have the Sasanian Emperor Hosra I

in about 550s, probably taking a dip in the Mediterranean, sort of in my interpretation, saying that this is no more Mare Nostrum, this is no more just a Roman pond, we are here too.

And then in the early seventh century, this all culminates in this grand war, which has been famously called by Professor James Howard Johnston as the last great war of antiquity, in a sort of a jokish way.

And as it challenged this, I have called it the first great war of the Middle Ages.

But it's a great war, which really initially is caused by the assassination of Emperor Morris and the replacement of Phocas on the throne in place of Maurice, and then Maurice's assassination, or, you know, depending on whose historiographical side you take, removal and execution by Heraclius and the instability, obviously, in Byzantium, but also this gathering of energy in the Sasanian Empire, which all of a sudden bursts out and between 610 and 619 essentially conquers all of the Near East.

It comes in, it takes in Syria, Palestine, into Egypt, and from that said reaches the walls of Constantinople.

And for a good while, until 626, for about 16 years, Sasanians are actually in charge of the entire Eastern Mediterranean.

And what I have pointed out in this situation in relation to Islam is that notice that Muhammad's move from Mecca to Medina and the beginning of the Islamic state,

if that, you know, often Hijrah, the Muhammad's migration is considered the beginning of the Islamic state, It's exactly happening in 622 in the middle of these wars, where Sasanis are in control of the entire place.

Early Muslims, then early Muslim state, has no contact with the Byzantines.

They are surrounded by Sasanians.

Their north in Syria is surrounded by Sasanis.

Their northeast, Iraq, was always controlled by Sasanis, but now their north, Syria and Palestine, and their northwest, Egypt is also blocked by Sasanis.

And Sasanians also at this time controlled Yemen in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, and they always controlled Eastern Arabia anyway.

So the Islam, as I put it, the Islamic State is coming to its own in a Sasanian incubator.

They are surrounded by the Sasanians.

And this is a very unprecedented state of affairs.

There was no power

from Mesopotamia, which is what Sasanians really are.

controlling this entire area since the Achaemenids.

There hasn't been anything like this for a thousand years.

Now they are controlling this whole thing.

And what does that mean?

I think that's a lot of explanations of why we have this weird episode in the middle of the seventh century.

It's so interesting to hear how the Sasanians, as you mentioned, have the upper hand against the Romans in the early 7th century with those conquests.

Just a bit more to set the scene, in regards to religion at that time in the Sasanian Empire, what religions are the ones that are dominant in that empire at the time?

That's a very good question.

Unlike the Byzantines, the Sasanians weren't going for a state religion.

They do not seem to have the supersessionist idea idea of religions.

There seem to have been a panathley of religions and faiths all around.

So from the east, you have the Buddhists and, you know, whatever local religions they are.

The majority of the central part of the Sasanian lands, which is Iran, is probably the vast majority of them a version of what we call Zoroastrianism.

Whether it is the Orthodox Zoroastrianism that is reflected in Zoroastrian books is a matter of debate, but it is.

In Mesopotamia, of course, there are Zoroastrians as well, particularly in the capital complex.

But at the same time, majority of the population in Mesopotamia and southern Anatolia, which is part of the Sasanian Empire, seems to be either various denominations of Christians who use Syriac as their ritual language, and in central Mesopotamia, also Jews.

There are a great number of Jews.

Southern Mesopotamia seems to be a hotbed for what I would say say Christian church fathers would call heretics.

These people who are following religions that place somewhere between Judaism and Christianity and local beliefs, most famous of which are the Mendeans, who still exist, who still exist in that area.

Some of your listeners might remember them as marsh Arabs that Saddam decided to destroy and things of the sort, but they still exist in southern Iran and southern Iraq.

So yeah, that's sort of the range of religions we have.

And going back to what you you said earlier, so the Sasanians, they have dominance in West Asia and also in key parts of the Arabian Peninsula.

So you mentioned what is Yemen today, also, Oman.

So those are kind of key trade areas, isn't it, for trade between Persia and India and the Red Sea.

But also, as you mentioned there, so Western Arabia as well, the Hejaz area.

So is it in that context of the Sasanians, as you mentioned, as the clear superpower that you see, well, like the story of Muhammad, that you see like the emergence of Islam Islam at that time in the 620s.

About hijaz, it's interesting to point out that no, nobody seems to have controlled hijaz.

It is that probably at that point, nobody cared.

It wasn't important enough for anybody to want to control hijaz.

And this is the important part.

It's exactly coming as sort of a power vacuum.

I don't think it's as much due to the Sasanian superpower, but rather due to the changing circumstances of the world, right?

The weight that we put on Islam is that it's a power, it's a force, it's an ideology, it's a system that comes out of this peripheral land and changes everything.

It brings a whole new world.

I guess the most famous eration of this is Henri Piren's Muhammad Sha'leman,

where he argues that the whole medieval ages comes out of basically Muslim conquest of the half-the Mediterranean and the reaction that Europeans have to it.

So, I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that this Islamic change has a precedence in what the Sasanians are doing with these grand conquests.

And you very correctly pointed out the trade issue.

Yes, a great thing to do with the changing state of connections across Eurasia, which I think is most quantifiable within the sense of trade.

And it's no surprise that Islam has often been called the religion of merchants.

Muhammad himself is a merchant, right?

So all of these together, I think it's the Sasanian precedence as to Islam.

Do you think there was any resentment towards Sasanian, the imperial power of the Sasanians at that time?

If they have, evidently have relations with different Arab communities, do you get a sense that there was some resentment towards the growth of Sasanian power at that time?

I would say if you don't resent the empire, you don't exist.

Yes, of course.

Of course, early Islamic sources are all talking about resenting the Sasanians from the middle of the sixth century.

The actual primary sources show that a lot of, as you said, a lot of the Arab tribes of particularly southern Mesopotamia and the Syrian desert were on the Sasanian camp.

And my argument actually is that the reason the Sasanians were so successful in their conquest against the Byzantines, particularly in their southern theater of war towards Syria, towards Palestine, towards Egypt, is because these Arabs actually worked with the Sasanians.

They actually aided them.

So there was a lot of cooperation.

But of course, early Islamic sources, partly from a position of boasting, but partly from trying to, I guess, reflect some of the feeling that is there, do talk about a lot of dislike of the Sasanian power.

And of course, it's constantly then

this is reinforced by mention of the Arabs either answering, you know, like an Arab person being forced, an Arab chief being forced, and answering in a very tough way to a Sasanian king to even, you know, we defeated them.

There is a famous battle of Zughar, which is happening probably sometimes in 610, if it is real, which very much gets prominence in the Islamic narratives as the battle that we defeated the Sasanians before we could always do it.

And they are this big, decadent empire that we managed to destroy.

So yes, of course.

So the Sasanis, they dominate West Asia for a few decades in the early 7th century.

But why Hodadadad

is the date 628 AD so big in what happens next?

Can you talk us through this?

628 is important because, well, to give you the end result, I think that's the end of the Sasanian Empire.

That's what happens.

So from this grand gesture of 610 to 626 dominating this entire area, you go in the space of two years to the Sasanian Empire essentially disappearing.

In 627, you have a series of campaigns by Emperor Heraclius, who, until this point, had surprisingly stayed meek, sometimes even in the 616, asking for forgiveness from the Sasanian Emperor, and the Senate of Constantinople asking Khosrow to appoint his own choice of the emperor, and basically sort of advocating on behalf of Heraclius, saying, Well, if you're going to do it, Heraclius has this experience, you should do it.

So, from this state of really humiliating cowering of Byzantium, from about about 625 probably, but probably 626, 627 is more likely, Heraclius has a number of very interesting and brilliant campaigns in northern Anatolia, in Armenia, probably

mostly successful diplomatically because there is really one or two major battles.

There really is one major battle, the Battle of Nineveh, that he ever fights.

And the Sasanian Emperor is not there.

There are no important Sasanian commanders.

It seems to be

more of a political diplomatic thing, which is partly done because probably after 18 years of fighting, the Sasanian nobility is just tired of this.

And they are not controlling anything.

This is the thing.

Sasanians don't ever manage to completely establish an administration in these occupied lands.

We have a few documents.

from Egypt that shows, yes, they were in charge and Middle Persian is used in papyri from southern Egypt.

So from this state of affairs, internal political dissatisfaction, and then Heraclius's successful campaigns in the north, it causes sometimes in February of 628, a coup against the Sasanian Emperor Khosra II, the hero of these wars, the brain behind all the conquests and everything else.

He all of a sudden is removed by the nobility.

His son, who seems to be by all measures, seems to be an incapable and sort of an idiotic and bloodthirsty prince is replaced and Zechosra is actually executed, which I find very interesting.

I've tried to find sort of parallels with Charles I and the execution of Charles I and in Britain for that.

So he's executed.

His execution ends the war.

Things seem to start going back to normal.

But really what it does, it completely destroys the Sasanian dynasty's control.

Sasanian dynasty is gone.

People usually say 641, the battle of Nihawand, when Yazgir III loses the battle to wars.

I think 628 is it.

They are dead.

Then, after that, they are a bunch of princes trying to get some power.

And they never do.

They never really do.

So that's why that year is such an important year.

But it's interesting, though, isn't it?

Because as you mentioned, there, yes, there's that big battle at Nineveh, but it's not like the complete destruction of all of these cities.

And it's a terrifying kind of campaign by Heraclius.

Yes, the dynasty has been affected severely by the killing of this mighty monarch who'd ruled for decades and overseen the zenith of the Sasanian Empire at that time.

But should we push aside this idea that the lands of the Sasanians were weak or they were kind of they were destroyed at this time?

Completely.

I don't think there was anything of the sort.

The usual narratives of the fall of the Sasanians and the coming of Islam is that the Sasanians were very weak and the Byzantines were very weak.

This is the normal narrative of the rise of Islam, that the Sasanians and and Byzantines had exhausted each other, the cities lay in ruins, the soldiers were demoralized, there was no money in the treasury.

So when the Arabs came out, there was nobody to face them.

When you actually look at this, this is not the reality, particularly the money part.

The Sasanian treasury seems to be too full.

That not only are they doing very well economically, internally, they are also getting all this money from these new lands, the taxation and the booty from the new land.

They seem to be completely fine.

One of the items of accusation brought against Khosru II is you keep the treasury too full and you don't give the money to the nobility you should open the nobility and give your sons the princes and the nobility some of the money khosra's answer to that is you fools we are fighting for what war needs money so it seems to be that they are fine economically as i said keraklis really doesn't undertake a campaign of destruction yes there is a famous destruction of the fire temple in Shies.

That's very symbolic.

You're destroying the fire temple.

There is no major destruction of the cities.

I would say in 628, there is nothing to indicate that in about 15 years, you are going to have a completely new world order here.

No indication of it.

All signs seem to point out to things going back to normal, borders returning to Euphrates, Byzantines continuing, Sasanians continuing now in a weakened state, probably rebuilding themselves in a couple of decades.

That seems to be it.

What happens after seems to be a complete shock to everybody.

So, what has been happening in Western Arabia in those years in the meantime, let's say between 622 and around 628?

How powerful has the Muslim community become over that time?

Answering that question in a sure way is almost impossible.

Because what we have from that period is almost all internal evidence of the Muslim sources.

Lately, we have been having a sort of a fluorescence of sources coming out of that area, mostly through the discovery of sundry Arabic inscriptions that seem to pop up everywhere now in what is now Saudi Arabia, Jordan, sometimes Iraq, Syria.

And it seems to be that people were actually very eager to write.

The problem with these sources is putting them in historical context and trying to get anything out of them is really squeezing them to maximum.

And nobody has yet quite come up with a good vision of this.

So this becomes very impossible to judge without relying fully on the Islamic sources.

Islamic sources tell us that this is the period in which Muhammad's ministry really switches on from a purely religious movement that was in Mecca trying to convert people to this cause of a one God and a religion that is mostly based on freedom for slaves, mostly appealing to the people who are being suppressed by the rich people of Mecca.

And, you know, is the beginning of a lot of these Abrahamic religions, right?

You know, this prophet that comes and is charming and charismatic.

This phase is now done.

And now Muhammad moves to Medina and now establishes a state.

The state is still very primitive.

It seems to be relying on local cooperation of the people of Medina with the people who have migrated with Muhammad from Mecca.

So there is a lot of internal politicking going.

It's almost completely relying on Muhammad's personal charisma and the divine word that is supposedly behind him and regulates the state.

And in many senses, it is based on establishing the city-state of Medina as a center of power, raising it to a center of power.

And of course, towards the end of this really results in Muhammad's control of the entirety of that part of hijab.

So, towards the very end of his life, he manages to conquer Mecca, his hometown, which has this religious significance because of the house of Kaaba, and also the city of Ta'if, which is a smaller city towards the southeast, and create a small kingdom.

Of course, he never calls himself a kingdom.

He's always just a prophet, and slowly building up momentum in the sense of now

this state is attracting tribal loyalty.

People from all around seem to be sort of gravitating towards it.

And if we believe the Islamic sources, early on, they start even going towards Yemen a bit.

Muhammad, in the very, very end of his life, like almost a few months before he dies, he has this campaign towards what is now Aqaba region in southern Jordan.

So there is some signs of

wanting to get involved in something bigger, something of the conquest-y type.

When exactly this happens, it seems to be in the last two, three years, exactly.

So, whether it has anything to do with the fact that 628 has come up, Muhammad dies in 632, right?

So, the last three, four years of his life, that's a matter of debate.

But all we know, as I said, from Islamic sources is that this little city-state is now growing to be a little kingdom and does that kingdom does it just continue to grow and grow over the following years you kind of as you have to the north the sasanians and the romans almost expecting things to go back to that status quo that you mentioned earlier but in the shadow down in arabia you see this new kingdom starting to grow in its power over the following years not really it still doesn't come to the radar of the byzantines

another problem was that we don't have really byzantine and sasanian sources, so we don't know if they came to the Areida.

I'm guessing it was still smaller than doing it.

And here, I think, comes in one of the arguments I have made: is that this kingdom is not as peripheral as we think it is.

Not in the sense of it is more powerful, but that it is more involved in the affairs.

I read into things such as Muhammad's campaign in Aqaba, such as the mention of the war of of the Romans and the Persians, and the very clear evidence we have of the familiarity of the populations of Mecca and Medina with the affairs of Mesopotamia, affairs of Iraq and Syria, that they were involved in the wars, that the wars, while they're happening, one of my main theories is that Arab tribesmen of Iraq and Syria were in fact the mercenaries or soldiers or whatever you want to call them, federati, let's use the Latin term, federati of the Sasanians, helping the Sasanians conquer.

So, well, these Arabs, there is all indications that these Arabs are not absolutely divorced from what is further down in Hejaz.

And then we know that during the time of Muhammad, that tribes start gravitating towards the state.

And we have

conversions all around and payment of taxes all around, at least what Muslim sources tell us, whether that is accurate accurate or not.

But anyway, it's, in my opinion, inconceivable the growth of Muhammad's state in Medina is completely done in a separate context than the Sasanian-Byzantine wars.

And I think the fact that

622, 628

is really the time of the formation of the Medinan state.

And then 628, 632, really it's becoming a kingdom.

The time is important.

622, Sasanians are in complete charge of everywhere they have conquered.

There is no new conquest really happening after 619.

Egypt falls in 619.

That's it.

So for the next, from 619 to 628, for the next eight years, Sasanians are just there defending, administering, basically trying to establish themselves as an empire in these regions as well.

It is a period of relative peace.

There is actually no conflicts.

This completely makes sense.

And this is exactly the time that now a small state whose members probably were somehow participants in the conquest are now

forming as a secondary state formation on the periphery of the world of the conquest as their own little kingdom.

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All right, Hodadad.

So what happens then during the 630s, this next big stage in the story?

Yeah.

Well, Muhammad, when he dies in 632, is succeeded by his closest friend, Abu Bakr, as the first caliph.

Caliph means the successor.

And Abu Bakr's entire caliphate is spent in something called the Wars of Reddah.

So people who have, after the death of Muhammad, have said, oh, okay, so the guy is dead.

We gave him our allegiance.

It's done.

And Abu Bakr sends these now war.

the sort of experienced commanders to now go conquer these tribes and bring them back into the fold of Islam.

It's during this process that the entire thing that we recognize now as Arabia seems to come under the control of Medina.

So it's really during the time of Abu Bakr from 632 to 634 that Arabia comes under the control of Medina, of course, except the places that are very firmly under Sasanian hands, like Eastern Arabia, the areas of Kuwait and, you know, Qatar and UAE and other places that are firm.

And Yemen seems to be in between.

Yemen seems to have some sort of a local authority allied with the Sasanians.

It's kind of helping.

Yemen's help is probably one of the biggest boosts that the Medinian state receives.

This seems to be that the Yemeni polity, whatever you want to call it, the Yemeni state, whatever it is, which seems to be dominated by...

pro-Sasanian and even you know native Iranian people but who are not anymore really working on behalf of of the Sultan.

It's their own people.

They're called the Abnah in Islamic sources.

It seems to be the boost that Muslims get for a lot of this push.

And the importance of Yemen and Yemenis in the subsequent history of the Islam probably is a testimony to this.

So during this period, there is this Arabia comes under control.

And then the second caliph, Umar, who is the very famous caliph and rules for 11 years and it's quite important, he's the one that supposedly starts the conquests.

He actually starts organizing campaigns.

He has these two, three grand commanders who are very famous: Khaled ibn Walid, Sadibna Akas, and Da-da-da-da.

And he sends them to do the actual conquests.

And it's interesting that Islamic sources assign the entire conquest to his period.

So he seems to be the conqueror caliph, as far as the Muslim sources are considered.

So, 630, 637, they have gone already towards Palestine.

They are getting into Syria.

Then around the same time, another front comes to southern Iraq.

It takes over southern Iraq, then attacks the capital of the Sasanians.

Attesiphon takes that over.

The Sasanian Emperor is supposedly set to flight.

And they reach basically borders of the Caucasus.

and borders of Anatolia by the end of the 630s.

And yeah, the conquest.

630s is the decade of conquests.

And to highlight what you mentioned earlier, so those cities that they are taking over, you know, these are rich cities as well.

So Syria, Mesopotamia, the lands that they're conquering.

I mean, these are almost like centers of civilization, or they are great, wealthy centers that they're taking over.

You can almost imagine like the amazement behind the riches that they're taking when they're able to like defeat the Sasanians and the Romans at that time.

They are amazed about it themselves.

The Islamic sources are replete with such and such commander taking over the city and the money he takes as you know reparations when they don't reach some sort of agreement they go and take booty they can't believe the money that it's there and this becomes one of the big questions because then they send back to omar and like we have a lot of money we have a lot of things what do we do with these things and then there are set of very you know symbolic things that are in islamic sources oh omar says just cut that piece of very expensive carpet up and give each person a piece.

And you wonder what would the carpet in pieces be like?

You know, it seems very symbolic.

It seems like now it's trying to present Umar as Solomon.

And you have to notice that these sources are written 250 years later.

They are not contemporaneous to the events.

So the image of early Islamic conquest is very idealized.

very much made into a situation where pious men sitting in Medina and getting their inspirations directly from Muhammad and having asked about, because every situation where things become tight and there is something that needs to happen, there is this person who is asked the question and says, Hey, I was talking to Muhammad the other day,

sitting by the mosque, and I asked him about this question.

I said, What happens if this happens?

And he said, Yeah, you should do this if this happens.

So, there's always a hadith that comes up.

So, of course, this is 200 years later, 250 years later.

These things are idealized, made into this wise Solomon-like caliphs who have answers for everything, and they are all pious and divinely guided in their work.

But yeah, the matter of the distribution of booty is basically why Islamic state even comes to existence.

They just don't know how to deal with all of this.

So why do you think that these early Arab conquests are so successful?

This is where we get into what I think my contribution to this is.

The regular narrative, as I said, based on Islamic sources, is the Guais Caliph sitting in Medina, having brilliant loyal commanders like Khalid ibn Nabalid and sending them out and the power and vigor of Muslims and so on and so forth manages to undertake this conquest and it makes them always successful.

The studies that have been done, the majority of studies that have been done, have been also

trying to make sense of this justifying such narrative by saying that well Byzantines were weak well sasanians were weak people were tired the official narrative that a lot of people sympathetic to Islamic narratives is that Zoroastrianism or Christianity whichever one they were oppressive because these powerful rich priests were oppressing the people and you know islam was bringing a message of equality so people allowed it

none of this makes sense none of this actually makes sense this is not how things happened.

There is no powerful Zoroastrian priesthood.

That image of, you know, rich bishops oppressing everybody more belongs to the early modern period and, you know, Martin Luther's narrative of the Catholic priest and what you have actually in Syria at the time going on.

There are no very rich priests, I don't know, in any of these cities.

So it doesn't make sense.

For me, it always was, it just does not make sense.

Why would this happen?

My answer to this was that, well, people who are fighting these wars seem to supposedly seem to have a lot of experience, right?

They are not unfamiliar with the region.

They are going in and they are putting,

they are taking roads and they are conquering things.

and they are negotiating things and they are fighting where they need to they are peaceful where they need to they seem to be using all sorts of tactics to get people to their side.

They're not unfamiliar with this area.

You know, you have to notice people didn't have maps.

Forget about Google maps.

They didn't even have, I don't know, the old-fashioned maps.

It's very strange that you would be from the middle of an Arabian desert and know your way around Syria and Iraq and even up to Caucasus so well.

So is it possible that these people were actually very familiar with this region?

Because they were in touch with it.

That

this region, they are not outsiders, they are part of this world.

This image of Islam as an outside power that comes from the peripheries is very much created in order to give Islam itself a legitimacy.

See, this is a divine religion.

And when God is behind you, you succeed, even if you are from the middle of the Arabian desert, which makes sense a lot of times when Islam says so many bad things about Arabs before Islam.

Like, oh, they killed their daughters, they buried their daughters alive, they killed the daughters, they did this, and they fought each other over nothing, and they had blood libels.

And so, like, why would you say so many negative things?

Because you want to say that Islam was a completely new thing that created this figure.

It's actually surprisingly a Christian narrative.

This is what also happens if you read almost contemporaneous and prior Christian narratives.

It's always that we win wars, not because our emperors are strong, not because our generals are good, but because God wants to.

And we lose wars because we have sinned against God and God decided to punish us.

This is the universal narrative of everybody.

You read all the histories that they have, particularly Syriac histories, that's the theme.

We win because God wants us to.

We lose because God wants to punish us.

And of course, Islamic narratives are exactly from the same tradition.

So my answer to this is because they knew the area, because they are from that area.

And from there, I move on to this.

Isn't it interesting that if you look at the map of the early Islamic conquests, it's almost exactly the map of the Sasanian conquest.

Earliest Islamic conquests are, well, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and southern...

and central Anatolia.

That's exactly what Sasanians conquer.

That is precisely what Sasanians conquer.

So my idea was,

which I think I can now say it in public because I have published on it, is that we have to change our direction of narrative.

The direction of narrative, instead of moving to Mecca and then to Medina and focusing on the formation of the Islamic State and how it conquers the area around it and how it expands to entire Arabia and then becomes the place where things burst out, It needs to stay where the histories themselves focus before Muhammad, mainly in some vague place in Iraq and Syria, where the conquests are happening.

628, Khosra II dies.

What happens to the land that he has conquered?

Largely nothing.

Byzantines do take over at places.

There are some Byzantine control being restored.

Seems to be on the coastal region.

We have a return of the true cross that Khotra II has taken from Jerusalem under Heraclius.

So at least some control of the area of Jerusalem.

But there is very little evidence that Byzantine legions moved down to Bustra and Homs and Damascus.

There is very little evidence of Byzantine presence in Egypt in a serious way, maybe in the Delta region, but like, you know, Anona, the free grain distribution in Constantinople, which had been going on for hundreds of years and the grain was coming from Egypt, stops.

It's never restored.

So Byzantine control is very ephemeral.

There is no real reconquest.

Sasanians also seem to be, they are not quite gone yet.

It seems to be that three years after Khosru's death, there is some sort of a Sasanian troop still in Syria present.

And if we take my suggestion that, well, these Arabs were actually helping the Sasanians, my narrative becomes this.

And we we have evidence for it.

That's interesting, you know.

Well, if you are an Arab warlord working at the Fedorati of the Sasanians and conquering and everything, and you have gone through 18 years of conquest, and all of a sudden your boss is gone, what do you do?

Do you just close the door, go back to your camp originally, and live peacefully with your wife and family?

Or you try to exert local authority.

You say, hey, hey, Khosra is gone.

Who says I can't control this?

I conquered it myself.

I took it over.

It was me and my troops that took it over 15 years ago anyway.

We were paying taxes to Khosra and we were sending him the booty that we got because we are his soldiers.

Now he's gone.

How about I control it?

So there is a warlordism, right?

It screams similarities with the like of Oduaka or Rissima, I guess, in the West, with the Western Roman Empire at the end, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Like, who says, I can't control this?

Because I cannot cannot be the person and these arab warlords basically are all around this place we have evidence of one of them a man called mutanna ibn haritha al-shaybani which even in muslim sources 250 years later this is the version of the events they give him he's there he's from the shaybanu tribe he is from southern iraq he is not from anywhere else he's not from the the Hejaz area, he is from northern area, he is from southern Mesopotamia.

And the man writes a letter back to the Caliph Abu Bakr, that first caliph, and says, These Persians seem to have no defenses.

They seem to not care about anything that is happening in their territory.

We can easily go conquer them.

And I have already done a couple of this.

I have already gone against a couple of villages and things.

Send me help.

And Abu Bakr actually does.

This is the first instances of these grand commanders of the later period, Sakhalid ibn Walid and Sa'd ibn ibn Abiwaq, particularly Khaled himself, appearing in this area as helps to Mutanna's conquest.

That is how it happens.

And interestingly enough, by the way, his tale is great because they keep on sending him help.

The Meccan people keep on sending him help to conquer.

And they keep on telling him, listen to our commander.

And he keeps on ignoring it.

And those commanders, all of them somehow either die or disappear or go back to Mecca.

Somehow, the guy has this longevity and stays there.

And he's the one who's doing the conquest.

And finally, they have to make him the commander.

And he's made the commander.

So he gets the authority from Medina finally.

But he's from there.

So Medina's role,

my answer is that these warlords like Muthana were just there.

They were consolidating their power after the disappearance of Sasanians.

And now...

They get their legitimacy from the Medina government.

And so once they've taken over, I mean, if we focus on the Sasanians, first of all, they've taken over these Sasanian cities in key areas like Mesopotamia.

What happens to Sasanian institutions?

How do we think they ruled?

Well, the Sasanian emperor is gone.

He tries to put up a fight in 642.

He's defeated.

He's gone.

He's out of the picture.

He will fly further east to Central Asia and is killed sometimes in around 651.

So he's out of the picture.

Sasanian institutions are interesting.

It seems that the entire taxation system transfers over without any change.

It seems like that anything from, you know, the Sasanis have had a great tax reform in the sixth century.

That seems to go over completely without change.

Generally, Muslims seem to not touch the local system of taxation.

There is no emperor anymore, but all the government

offices seem to be again intact.

There are several things that Muslims have to establish.

Seems to be one of the biggest conflicts they're having is of the booty that goes to the conquerors.

So the people who are conquering then get put on these roll lists that gets them money for life from certain areas.

So they have to reroute some of the tax that comes in to these conquering forces.

Slowly later they start continuing what the Sasanis had started and that is the use of marginal land for agriculture.

This is probably due to the fact that they don't touch the Sasanian system of small land ownership headed by sort of small gentry landowner called the Dikhkhans.

They don't touch that system.

They leave the Dikhans be, mostly probably because Dekhkhans, very early on, enter negotiations and don't fight.

So they have to come up with land to give to the conquerors, which is the marginal land.

So that's what they established.

The war systems is completely obviously rerooted.

I think the most visible sign of administration and system, which is coinage, is the most interesting part.

It doesn't get touched at all.

They don't touch this coinage so much that they use the exact image of the Sasanian emperor.

And there is a fire altar in the back of the coins of the Muslims.

On the front, it says Bismillah.

But on the back, it's just a fire altar.

So it's the same Zoroastrian imagery for the next half half a century.

And then sometimes in the late 7th century, when you have like, I don't know how many caliphs down the road, we are like 10th caliph already.

Then he creates this Muslim dual coin system, which is completely iconic and, you know, very Islamic and continues for a good thousand years.

But they do the same thing in Byzantine territories.

They keep on producing coins of Heraclius.

What they do in the back coins of Heraclius is there is a cross standing on an altar.

So they take the horizontal bar over, so it becomes a piece of stick standing on an altar instead of a cross.

But they generally continue that.

They very much don't use Arabic on the coins early on, except that word Bismillah sometimes or things of the sort.

It's much more visible and, I guess, iconic in the Sasanian coinage.

And it's called the Arab-Sassanian coinage.

And that is very important.

So So, in general, they don't touch it much.

The empire continues, the imperial system continues.

Very famously, the language continues.

There is a very famous reference of changing the language in the late

7th, early 8th century.

And it shows that until that time, the language of the administration of the Muslims in Mesopotamia had stayed just, you know, the entire Sasanian world.

So, Iran, Iraq, Iran, everywhere, had stayed Middle Persian.

So, it's Persian, and the prominence of Persian as a language, it does endure for quite a long time, does it?

It does, of course.

Middle Persian, and then its later version, New Persian, becomes essentially the second language of Islam.

So Persian really becomes the language with which Islam spreads east to Central Asia, which is, I think, very important.

That people of the East are converted into Islam not via Arabic, but via Persian.

It does hurt the nationalism of a lot of Iranians who like to see Iran and the Persians as the victims of Arabs and Muslims.

And it doesn't sit necessarily very well with them that, well, Persian really spreads as a language because of Islam.

Because Persian is the language of the western part of Iran and at the time Iraq.

It's a native language of that region.

Why do people speak in northern Afghanistan?

Well, it is because of Islam, actually.

Because it actually spreads east.

That is by itself an entire podcast about how a language of a supposedly conquered population becomes the vehicle with which a religion spreads.

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Is it very much also a case?

I'm getting a sense that it's a gradual shift in like Sasanian and also Roman culture institutions continue for some time as the caliphates get more established.

And then after a while, is it very much a case that then

I don't want to say put pressure, but do they start encouraging the conquered peoples to adopt Islam and adopt, you know, their Islamic ideology as they become more established in the area?

Certainly.

You know, it's an ideology.

It sees itself as a winning ideology.

It sees itself as a divine ideology.

And very early on, at least based on sources, they offer terms of peace by saying, pay us reparations and accept Islam.

And if you don't pay us reparations and accept Islam, then you're in a state of war with us.

Then we're going to fight.

And if we win, you know, then we're going to take booty and force you to become Muslims.

Well, actually, they don't ever really force in the sense that they do.

There is no way to force somebody to do it anyway.

But, you know, like we would oblige you to do it.

So, yes, there is that element of from the beginning, there's an ideological part to this.

The thing is, this ideology i think has been overemphasized as the reason these things happen early on we have a lot of evidence of non-muslims participating in these whole things the non-supersessionist nature of the new rulers they don't want to destroy all local religions this is one of the interesting things notice in the territories of the Byzantines and Romans, there are no non-Christians, native non-Christians.

Like, you know, I always wondered in the Lithuanians who got converted to Christianity in the 13th century and 14th century.

So

seven, six, seven hundred years ago.

But there are no Lithuanian pagans remaining.

There's nobody that has the,

when you become Christian, you become Christian, right?

In the worlds of Islam, you do have Zoroastrian, native Zoroastrian, native Christians, native Jews, native Mandaeans, native Buddhists remaining.

What this says about the administration of the Islamic Empire is, I think, very interesting.

That how they are managing this is that they are obviously privileging this new religion.

They are almost completely making its exclusive requirement to access power to have any social role of significance.

Very few exceptions, you know.

a Christian doctor running there, a Jewish astronomer running there, you know, a Zoroastrian literary figure learning there.

But there's not really like you don't get power if you are not Muslim.

But their way of doing converting is really a lot more through

social pressures and change and

through this access to power.

That's why it really happens a couple of hundred years later.

The conversion of Iran seems to be coming in the 9th century.

It seems that in the ninth and 10th century, there is a derive towards conversion to Islam because now this is the law of the land.

I would say it has something to do with the fact that this is in Persian as well, that they don't seem to think of it as an outsider thing for whatever reason.

But yeah, this ideology does become a central tenant of this new power, and it does get established and it does get promoted in every sense of the word.

This has been fascinating.

And I want to kind of wheel back to a point you made earlier and how you say in jest jest how this is at the beginning of the Middle Ages.

But it's, it's clear, isn't it?

By the mid-7th century, I mean, the world as the Romans and the Sasanians, as they knew it in West Asia, and I guess just say the world in general, it's changed.

And it will never go back to that kind of...

two superpower idea, you know, with the Euphrates as the border between.

You know, this world has transformed because of what's happened in those previous decades.

Yes, completely.

Now we have a different world.

There is no Rome anymore.

Yeah, Byzantines are still calling themselves Roman, and there is this heritage of Rome, and there's a lot of it remaining.

But Byzantines are now essentially a small Balkan West Anatolian state.

The whole dominance of,

you know, central church of Christianity, the imperial Christianity of Byzantium has now disappeared.

Now the Pope in Rome.

has his own power.

You see, very shortly after this, all of a sudden, a Roman pope puts a crown on the head of a German king.

Question becomes:

Charlemagne, you know, Charlemagne, yeah, right.

So, Charlemagne, the German Frankish king,

who has conquered all of Western Europe now, comes down to Rome and gets crowned as the Roman Emperor, which is a significant event.

One of the questions to ask is: who gave the Pope the right to crown the Roman king?

It's not like, you know, the popes didn't crown Roman kings 400 years before.

Romulus Augustulus doesn't get crowned by the Pope.

Who gave the Pope to do this at all?

But now you have these pretensions to these things.

But yeah, Western Europe becomes this weird Catholic, Roman-centered, but you know, German-run empire.

Byzantium is this now small state in Eastern Mediterranean.

And this gigantic power based...

for a short while in Damascus, but mostly in Baghdad, now dominates anything from the borders of the southern borders of France to China, which is a completely different world than we have in mind.

And it has huge repercussions.

It has this one of the most important things, I think, is that the border and Euphrates

really

divided the entire Eurasian trade into these arbitrary zones.

It is very interesting if you look at it from a different point of view, I suppose.

You don't see any Roman coins

in Iran and Iraq.

Romans used gold as their main currency.

They used silver as a currency dependent on the conversion to gold.

Sasanians used silver.

And you don't find many Sasanian coins in the Roman Empire.

You don't find many Roman coins in the Sasanian Empire.

So there was a trade stopping at Euphrates.

I think this is one of the impetus for the rise of Islam, the entire artificial border on the Euphrates.

And one of the reasons for the success of Islam is that it removes this border, right?

It's getting rid of that border that's been there for so long.

Exactly.

And now you have a unified currency zone that goes from the borders of China to the borders of France, right?

Now you have this double currency of gold and silver.

going all around.

And this is why in the medieval world, the Islamic world becomes the richest part of Western Asia, Western Western Eurasia, right?

It becomes a place that everybody is coveting because I think this potential is realized that you have this grand economic zone

that is taking the gold from Africa and spending it in India and has Central Asian administrators running things in Algeria.

And, you know, it's like just this huge union of powers and talent that succeeds in creating this world during that period.

So, yes, it's a completely changed world.

Somebody from year 500 standing in Rome would have been amazed about seeing the world that they are seeing.

They couldn't have believed this happening ever, probably.

Hadada, this has been such a fascinating chat, a period of history that I know very little about, so really interesting to hear about it.

I could ask so many more questions, whether it's like the early alliance with the kingdom of Axum,

like a bit more about it,

or Yarmouk and the battles

and so on and so forth.

I feel like you've answered most of this question already, but I'm going to ask it as a kind of a final one if there's any more information you'd like to add.

You are yourself, you're an expert on the late Sasanian world and of course everything we've talked about.

But from your viewpoint, how do you think we should really view the story of the early Arab conquests and the rise of Islam?

I wrote this recently in a funding request.

So I think that I would give you that elevator pitch.

We think of Islam as a perpetual outsider, right?

In our world, in the Western world, in what we imagine is a Western civilization, we view Islam as this unusual force coming out of Arabia and then conquering our world, right?

You know, that whole, that whole Muhammad,

that Piran that I referred to several times, is thinking of the Mediterranean world.

We have been raised with this thinking that Rome was everything.

Rome broke down because of these conquests, and Middle Ages came in.

And, you know, we know all that, all, all that is associated with that, you know, Dark Ages, which is the ideas that have been very much dismissed, but at the same time, it's in the back of all of us, back of the head of all of us.

We all think of Dark Ages still.

And, you know, Renaissance, you know, you go to Italy, you see the Renaissance painting, you can't not think of what preceded it, right?

The Middle Ages and so on and so forth.

And then Islam is this outside power that causes that, that destroys the classical world and stuff like that.

My entire,

I guess, research program is to show that the world of later antiquity is a lot more connected.

I'm glad you brought Aksum.

We should bring India, and certainly my other sort of hat, which is Central Asia, we should bring in Central Asia, and even, you know, I don't have the expertise, but China.

That we are talking about a globalized world

in which certain political settings

had

a kind of dominance for a certain amount of time.

If you look at it, the entire dominance of Rome and Byzantium is five, six hundred years.

The entire dominance of Sassanians is four or five hundred years.

In the greater extent of time and exchanges, it's not that unusual.

Changes like this had happened before.

You know, the rise of Rome itself was a shock.

The rise of Sassanians is a shock.

We should stop thinking of these things as sort of antagonistic and destroying our world, changing our world in this terminology.

We just have to think of these things as

trying to not have blind spots in history, trying not to think of places as outside and inside, but consider connections.

globalization, relations,

and that I always say global history is not the history of the entire globe, but the history of a village within a global context.

You could be working on a village, but just you have to notice that the world doesn't end beyond the walls of the village, right?

It goes on beyond that.

And in the same way, Mecca is a city in the middle of a desert, but it's not just a city in the middle of a desert.

It's in the middle of a world as well.

So, yeah, that would be my, I guess,

selling pitch.

Hodadad, what a pitch that was.

This has been absolutely fascinating.

Are there any books that we can promote that you're releasing or anything like that that I can ask just now, or paper that's come out as well?

The latest thing that relates to this is a volume that I edited earlier this year came out called Brill's Companion to War in Ancient Iranian Empires.

And I have an article there called The First Great War of the Middle Ages.

A lot of the references and things to what I say here are given there.

All right, the team will have to get you on Gold Medieval as well in the future.

Hold a dad, this has been fantastic.

It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

Well, there you go.

There was Dr.

Hoddodad Rezahani talking about the rise of Islam.

I hope you enjoyed the episode.

Thank you for listening.

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