Arabian Fights: The Rise of Islam and the Resilience of the Church

ABSTRACT: The world’s political and religious map was radically redrawn in the seventh century AD. Islam’s birth, growth, and rapid conquest of much of the world was due to factors that range broadly, from the traditional activities of Arabian tribes to the oppressive tax policies of the Roman/Byzantium empire. Despite the Muslim conquests, Christianity was never fully stamped out, not because of stout military resistance but because of the spiritual nature of new birth.

If one compares a religious map of the eastern hemisphere as it looked in the year AD 635 with such a map for the year AD 751, the differences are dumbfounding. The map for 635 shows Christianity as the world’s only truly expansive faith. It filled southern Europe, the forests north of the Alps, and the British Isles. It dominated today’s Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya and was present all the way up the Nile and Blue Nile in today’s Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. In Asia, Christianity extended as far north as Georgia and Armenia. It filled Persia, was present in parts of Arabia and India, and extended across the Silk Road throughout Central Asia (today’s Uzbekistan and surrounding countries). And in the year 635, Persian Christian missionaries were favorably received by the T’ang Dynasty in the Chinese capital of Xi’an.

In contrast, the religious map for the year 751 (the year the Arab conquests were completed) shows Islam dominant in all the African and Asian regions that had previously been primarily Christian. In northwestern Africa (once the home of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine — the giants of early western Christian thought), Christianity had disappeared almost without a trace. It had been reduced to minority status in Egypt and Nubia (today’s Sudan). In Asia, Christianity had disappeared from Arabia and almost vanished from the Silk Road regions, and it was reduced to minority status in Syria and Persia. The entire center of the Christian world had seemingly been hollowed out, and only on the edges — most of Europe, the mountains of Ethiopia, southern India, and China — could the church continue to develop unhindered by the Crescent.

All this change came in less than 120 years. What happened? The rise of Islam and the Arab military conquests remade the world, giving rise to a map we still recognize today, with a mostly Christian Europe and a mostly Muslim northern Africa and western Asia. But the question of what happened leads to the even bigger question of how it happened. How and why did so many professing Christians across so many regions of the eastern hemisphere turn to Islam? And what happened to the ones who didn’t convert? Questions like these warrant a look at the rise of Islam, the Arab conquests, and their effect on the Christian church.¹

Muhammad and the Rise of Islam

The sixth-century Arabian tribal economy revolved around trade in livestock and other goods, and such trade was constantly threatened by opportunistic bandits. As a result, tribes that were adept at war could maintain a lucrative business offering military protection to trading tribes. One such military tribe was the Quraysh from Mecca (western Arabia, at the intersection of two major trade routes). Muhammad was born into this tribe about the year 570, and as a young man he became an able trader/businessman and warrior.² In about the year 610, during the month of Ramadan (the first month of the Arab calendar), Muhammad began to receive what he claimed were revelations from the angel Gabriel, revelations that (according to the story) he dutifully wrote down over the remaining 22 years of his life. After Muhammad’s death, through a process that was obscure and contentious, these revelations were collected and standardized as the Qur’an.³

Initially the qur’anic revelations centered around the supremacy and sovereignty of the one God, Allah, around the call to serve and obey him, and around the certainty of coming resurrection and judgment on the last day. Over time, the revelations began to stress Muhammad’s prophethood and equated obedience to him with obedience to Allah. Muhammad’s thought also seems to have developed from a vague view of one high God early in his career, to a monotheism in which Allah was the same as the God of Jews and Christians, to a more exclusive monotheism late in his life in which Allah was different from the God of Jews and Christians.⁴

Muhammad quickly gained a large following in Mecca. In 622 (which would later be designated year one in the Muslim calendar), he and his growing throng of supporters moved from Mecca to Medina (located about two hundred miles north of Mecca). In the year 630, he led a triumphant military campaign back to Mecca to bring it into the orbit of Islam, and by the time of his death in 632, most of the Arabian tribes were Muslim. According to an eighth-century source, Muhammad’s last words were, “Let there not be two religions in Arabia.”⁵

The Arab Conquests

Two important factors paved the way for the Arab conquests. The first of these was that, in order to unite the Muslim community (called the umma), Muhammad had forbidden his followers to raid other tribes that were also Muslim. But raiding was a staple of Arab economic life. So, once all the Arabian tribes were subjugated to Islam, it was necessary to move farther afield to find tribes to raid. As a result, Muhammad’s successor Abu Bakr⁶ began to send raiding parties beyond the peninsula. The Arabs were great warriors — at least when they could fight in open spaces while mounted on horseback or camelback. They also turned out to be geniuses at leveraging the spoils of military conquest to fund further expansion and empire building. The second major factor was that the great powers of western Asia — Rome (Byzantium) and Persia — had been fighting each other for half a millennium; in the early seventh century, they were again locked in bitter conflict and were exhausting their resources. Neither empire was watching the barren Arabian desert to the south, from which no large-scale invader had ever emerged.

The Arab raiders caught both Rome and Persia completely by surprise.⁷ Intense fighting in Roman Syria led to the fall of Damascus in 636, and the Arabs forced the Roman/Byzantine emperor Heraclius and his armies back into Anatolia (western Turkey today). Jerusalem was besieged for two years before finally surrendering in 638 to avoid starvation. The Arab caliph ‘Umar personally promised to be lenient to the holy city and not to turn any churches into mosques. Another detachment of Arabs confronted the Persian forces on the Euphrates River and annihilated almost the entire army in 636. The next year, the Persian capital Seleucia-Ctesiphon (near modern Baghdad at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates) fell, and Shah Yazdegerd III and his armies retreated over the Zagros mountains, where they suffered another defeat in eastern Persia in 642. Yet another contingent of Arabs crossed the Red Sea into Roman-controlled Egypt, quickly defeating Heliopolis and (Egyptian) Babylon before laying siege to Alexandria on the Mediterranean, which fell in 641. Thus, within a decade of Muhammad’s death, the Arabs under Abu Bakr and ‘Umar had vanquished the Persian Empire completely and controlled most of the eastern regions of the Roman/Byzantine Empire. To celebrate, in 661 they made Damascus — much more centrally located than any town in Arabia — the seat of the Muslim caliphate and thus the de facto capital of the Muslim umma.

But the Arabs were not finished. After a mid-seventh-century internal revolt was settled, they turned their attention to northwestern Africa. The Berbers, led by the great warrior queen Kahina, gave spirited resistance in today’s Algeria and Tunisia but were ultimately defeated, and Carthage fell in 698. Unlike Christians in regions farther east, who generally stayed in conquered territory, almost all the believers in this region fled to Spain. But the Arabs themselves crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 711, defeating Spanish forces the following year and turning Spain into a Muslim province. In the 720s, they crossed the Pyrenees to conduct raids in Gaul (today’s France), where they were defeated at the Battle of Tours in 732 by Charles Martel (Charlemagne’s grandfather). Charles skillfully hid his army in the forests so they could ambush the horse-riding Arabs, who were used to fighting on open deserts and plains, not among trees. The Arabs retreated to Spain, partly because of the defeat at Tours but mostly because they did not regard cold, heavily forested northern lands to be of any value. They were desert people, after all!

If the Arabs were not really interested in northern Europe, the one European prize they dearly coveted was Constantinople (the European side of today’s Istanbul), the crown jewel of the world at the time because of its strategic position at the intersection of both land and sea trade routes. In the 670s, the Arabs laid siege to the city by sea but were repulsed as the Romans used “Greek Fire” (a petroleum-based explosive that could be launched from devices akin to flamethrowers and whose fires could not be extinguished with water) to sink their ships. After this defeat, the Arabs spent a generation fighting their way from Syria across Anatolia so as to be able to besiege the city by land and sea together. The grand siege of Constantinople took place in 717 and 718, but again the Romans were able to use Greek Fire to neutralize the Arab navy, and the Arab army suffered immeasurably in the bitterly cold winter that year. (Again, they were desert people, resilient in the heat but not adept at coping with cold.) The siege was finally lifted in August of 718. The Arabs’ inability to take Constantinople, coupled with their general lack of interest in northern lands like Gaul, meant that Europe (except for Spain) would be spared significant Muslim invasion until the fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Turks would successfully take Constantinople and dominate southeastern Europe.

Back in eastern Persia, the Arabs used their base at Merv (in today’s Turkmenistan) as a launching point for assaults on Bukhara and Samarqand (both in today’s Uzbekistan) from 709 to 712. The Arabs were drawn into constant conflict in the 730s and 740s with the regional superpowers, the Turks (originally from Uzbekistan, not today’s Turkey) and the Tibetan Chinese. Another Arab army crossed the Khyber Pass (between today’s Afghanistan and Pakistan) and controlled the northwestern portion of the Indian subcontinent (most of which is now in Pakistan) by 715. The climax of these central Asian conflicts came in 751, when Muslim forces decisively defeated the Chinese army on the high steppes beneath the Pamir Mountains (the extension of the Himalayas) at Talas (in today’s Tajikistan). This defeat sent China into isolation and made the Arab Muslims the undisputed masters of Asia.

Once again, the Arabs celebrated by building a new capital in 762. This one was Baghdad, on the Tigris River near the old Persian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. To this new city flowed the wealth, goods, knowledge, and skill of the worlds they had conquered. Baghdad would soon become the largest and richest city in the world and would remain so until the Mongols (led by a grandson of Genghis Khan) arrived in 1258.

Why Did So Many Christians ‘Convert’ to Islam?

The intensely military nature of the Arab conquests naturally leads to the assumption that the conversion of Christians to Islam came at the point of the sword, and Christians have made this claim for over a millennium. But somewhat surprisingly, there do not seem to have been many forced conversions during the initial century of Arab conquests. Instead, many Christians (and also some Jews) seem to have welcomed the Arab conquerors. Some converted willingly while others retained their faith in the new situation. There are several reasons for this surprisingly warm welcome.

First, few Christians in Africa or Asia enjoyed the rule of the Romans/Byzantines. Rome had long ruled with a heavy hand, a punitive tax burden, and significant oppression of conquered peoples, and this harsh rule did not change very much after the Roman Empire became Christian in the fourth century. In city after city throughout Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, many people — including Christians — were willing to accept the new conquerors, thinking that they were unlikely to be more oppressive than their old rulers.

Second, and closely related, at first the Arabs offered conquered Christian (or Jewish) cities very favorable terms. The conquering Muslims were adamant that all Arabs become Muslim, but they were relatively unconcerned about the conversion of other peoples to Islam, as long as they abstained from idolatry. Conquered pagans (who were idolatrous in the eyes of Islam) were genuinely forced into Islamic monotheism, but the Christians and Jews (who were not idolatrous) were allowed to continue to worship as they did as long as they consented to extra taxation. Since the Christians already had a high tax burden under the Romans, the Arabs’ tax regulations may not have seemed like an undue burden to them.

Third, for many people, the difference between Islam and Christianity was not obvious in the seventh century. The Qur’an was not yet available, and among less well-educated Christians and Muslims, the two religions may have seemed to be more united than they were. Only around the year 700 — after the initial Arab conquest of Christian regions had been completed — did the gulf between the two religions become more widely recognized and their separation more rigid. In fact, as late as the middle of the eighth century, a famous Arab Christian (Yanah ibn-Mansur ibn-Sarjun, known to the West as John of Damascus) called Islam a Christian heresy rather than a different faith altogether.⁸

As a result, the religious situation in the newly conquered regions was probably rather fluid. Among those who were Christian only in name, giving the new captors a try might mean trying out their religion as well, especially since it was monotheistic and superficially appeared consistent with Christianity. Nominally converting to Islam would give these nominal Christians social advantages and a lower tax burden, and many jumped at the chance for a more favorable status in the new society. Those who were committed Christians generally kept the faith and paid the extra taxes. They too were able to carve out tolerable niches for themselves in Muslim society. The Arabs were great warriors, horsemen, and merchants, but they had little scientific or technical skill. They needed clerks, teachers, and scholars, and Christians with such skills could thrive in the new world they found themselves in, whether they converted to Islam or not.

Thus, the “conversion” of these Christian realms to Islam was far less complete than it might seem. Only in northwestern Africa (Tunisia and Algeria today) did Christianity die out, and that was because most Christians fled, not because they converted. Almost all the Christians in this region were Latin-speaking foreigners of Roman descent; Christianity had not penetrated deeply into the Berber and Punic majority, and the Bible had not been translated into the local languages. Farther east, in Egypt, Syria, and Persia, the Christians stayed; some converted, but a great many did not. In these regions, the presence of Bible translation into the local languages had led to much deeper allegiance of the people to Christ. Over time, there was more attrition from the Christian faith as younger generations assimilated to the Arab majority, but pockets of Christians remained for centuries, even up to the present day.

The Rise of Christianity vs. the Rise of Islam

The rise of Islam presents a striking contrast to the rise of Christianity. Christianity’s earlier spread through much of the eastern hemisphere had involved almost no military conquest. Apostles, missionaries, and even business people and traders all had a hand in spreading the Christian message, and the church received major boosts when rulers adopted the Christian faith, as happened with King Abgar in Osrhoene (eastern Turkey today) in the late second century, as well as King Tiridates in Armenia, King Mirian in Georgia, King Ezana in Aksum (northern Ethiopia today), and Emperor Constantine in the Roman Empire, all four in the early fourth century. But in each of these cases, the ruler converted because he was convinced of the truth of Christianity, not because his kingdom was taken over by a Christian one. Later in history, there would be instances of conversion to Christianity through conquest by a Christian nation, but the initial spread of the church was surprisingly free of such examples. In sharp contrast, even once we recognize that conversions to Islam were not normally at the point of the sword, we cannot fail to see that military conquest, rather than changed hearts and minds, was the vehicle for conversion.

This contrast relates to a deep difference between the two religions. Christianity is profoundly concerned about the transformation of the human heart. It does have significant political and social dimensions, and Christians look forward to the reign of Christ from the new Jerusalem in the new heavens and new earth. But as we wait for and anticipate that fundamental societal change, most of us see our primary concern as the transformation of hearts and minds. It is of vital importance to us that people who profess Christian faith mean it, that their conversions be genuine. Islam had (and to some degree, still has) relatively little such concern. A Muslim was/is one who submits outwardly to the reign of Allah. Whether he “means it” or not was of little interest to Muhammad, and so it is to most Muslim leaders today. They are concerned about the extension of the Muslim umma, the community of people who submit to Allah and whose life is structured according to Islamic principles and law. Islam is fundamentally a political movement, not one that focuses on the transformation of human hearts and minds one by one.

The emergence of Islam as the world’s second-largest religion did indeed redraw the religious map of the world, but it did not alter that map as radically as we sometimes think. It was not only on the “edges” of the church — like Europe — that Christianity survived. Instead, many Christians remained in Muslim-dominated lands. For nearly a millennium and a half now, those believers have sought to be faithful to Christ in challenging social and political environments. Their presence and their witness are a part of the global Christian story, a part that is well worth our attention in this age when the civilizations birthed by Christianity and Islam stand in such obvious contrast and tense conflict.