Rashidun Caliphate

The succession nobody had planned

Drafted from Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (1997)formation

Muhammad died at Medina in 632 without a designated successor and without an institution to produce one. What happened next happened in an afternoon, in a roofed enclosure belonging to the Banu Sa'ida, while the burial was still being arranged.

The Medinan Ansar met to choose a leader from among themselves. A small group of Meccan Emigrants arrived, argued that the community would not accept a leader from outside the Prophet's own tribe of Quraysh, and secured the acclamation of Abu Bakr. The argument that carried the room was not scriptural. It was that the Arabs would obey Quraysh and nobody else.

That improvisation set the shape of the office. The successor — khalifa — took no prophetic authority, only the political and military leadership of the community, and he took it by acclamation rather than by descent or appointment. Every later dispute over the succession, including the one that ends this period, is a dispute about which of those two things should have decided the question.

Abu Bakr then spent almost his entire two years fighting Arabs who took the same view of the agreements that he did not — that they had been made with a man, and had ended with him. That war is the next chapter, and it is where the office acquired the thing acclamation had not given it.

The war that made the polity

Drafted from Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (1981)formation

Abu Bakr ruled for a little over two years and spent almost all of it fighting Arabs. The ridda — the turning back — is usually told as the suppression of an apostasy, and the label is worth examining before the events, because the label is the thing that was actually at issue.

Much of Arabia had come to terms with Muhammad in the two years before his death, and a great many of those terms were agreements with him. When he died, tribes across the peninsula stopped remitting the zakat to Medina. Some followed prophets of their own — Musaylima in the Yamama, Tulayha among the Asad, the prophetess Sajah — and some simply declined to keep paying a levy to a town they had contracted with rather than joined. The two are not the same refusal, and the tradition tends to file them together.

Medina's answer collapsed the distinction on purpose. To call the withholding of zakat apostasy was to assert that the agreements had been made with a permanent thing and not with a man, and that the thing had a claim on Arabian tribes that outlived the person who negotiated it. That is a constitutional argument, and it was settled by force. Khalid ibn al-Walid broke Tulayha at Buzakha and then destroyed Musaylima's following in the Yamama, and the eastern and southern risings were put down in turn over roughly a year.

What matters here is not the moral question but the machinery. To fight the ridda, Medina had to raise, direct, supply and pay columns operating hundreds of miles apart, drawn from tribes whose ordinary military behaviour was the raid and whose ordinary political behaviour was the feud. It did so, and it worked, and it demonstrated something that had not been demonstrable in Arabia before: that tribal manpower could be commanded centrally rather than merely allied with.

The armies did not disband afterwards. They were assembled, victorious, unpaid by anything except what the campaign had produced, and pointed at Arabia — where there was nothing left to take. Within months they were pointed north instead. The conquests are not a separate event from the ridda. They are the same instrument used again, on richer ground, and that continuity is why the civil war inside Arabia is better read as the making of the state than as an interruption to it.

What the neighbours wrote down

Drafted from Hoyland, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13 (1997)aside?What aside means

Almost everything written about these thirty years rests on Arabic narrative sources compiled a long time after the events they describe. Ibn Ishaq died in 767 and survives through an editor who died in 833; al-Waqidi died in 822; al-Baladhuri in 892; al-Tabari, whose history is the spine of almost every modern account of these thirty years, in 923. The nearest of them stands a century and a quarter from Saqifa, and the furthest close to three.

That is not a reason to discard them. It is a reason to say out loud what kind of thing they are: material transmitted, arranged and argued over by people with positions in later quarrels, about a period whose outcome those quarrels were still contesting. Both the works these chapters are drafted from spend a great deal of effort on exactly that problem.

There is an independent check. Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians living in the conquered provinces wrote things down at the time, in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic and Ge'ez, and roughly a hundred and twenty such texts survive with something to say about the first century and a half. Thomas the Presbyter, writing in Syriac around 640, records a battle between the Romans and the Arabs of Muhammad east of Gaza and dates it to 634 — a contemporary, non-Muslim, near-dated notice of the conquests beginning. The Greek Doctrina Jacobi, from about the same decade, has a report of a prophet who has appeared among the Saracens. The Armenian history attributed to Sebeos, written in the 660s, gives a narrative of the conquests by someone who was alive for them. John of Nikiu describes the taking of Egypt from inside it.

What they confirm is the frame: the dates roughly, the direction of the campaigns, the speed, the scale of the Byzantine and Sasanian collapse. What they do not do is talk about the conquerors the way the later Arabic tradition does. They call them Hagarenes, Ishmaelites, Saracens, Arabs — hardly ever Muslims — and they are much more interested in what the conquest is doing to them than in who is caliph. A reader who wants a name for the office, an account of Saqifa, or the theology of the dispute at Siffin will not find it here, and that absence is itself information about how visible the internal constitutional argument was from outside.

So the two bodies of evidence do different jobs. The four caliphs, the civil wars and the constitutional argument come from the Arabic tradition and from modern scholars reading it critically. That a state of this size appeared in the 630s and took Syria, Egypt and Iran is attested by people who had no reason to invent it and every reason to notice.

A generation, four directions

Drafted from Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (1981)expansion

Between 633 and 651 Arab armies took Syria from the Byzantines, Iraq and then the whole Iranian plateau from the Sasanians, and Egypt from Byzantine administration. The Sasanian empire ceased to exist. The Byzantine empire lost its richest provinces and never recovered them.

The explanation that survives scrutiny is not religious enthusiasm, and not Byzantine and Sasanian exhaustion after their own long war, though both are real. It is organisational. The Medinan state could direct tribal manpower that had previously been unavailable to anyone — not because it converted it, but because it could pay it, feed it, and give it somewhere to go. The ridda campaigns had already demonstrated that force could be assembled centrally. The conquests were the same capability pointed outward, at states whose frontier defences assumed raids rather than annexation.

Three battles and a decade

The decisive fighting was remarkably brief. At the Yarmuk in 636 the Byzantine field army in Syria was destroyed and Heraclius withdrew behind the Taurus. At al-Qadisiyya, in the same year or close to it, the Sasanian field army broke and Ctesiphon was open, and with it the Sawad — the irrigated alluvium of lower Iraq, the richest tax province either empire had, and the revenue the next twenty years of caliphal politics were conducted over. At Nihawand in 642 the last assembled Sasanian force was beaten.

Two empires lost their armies in about six years and neither raised a replacement in time. That is the whole military history of the conquests at the level of set-piece battle, and the brevity of it is why explanations reaching for enthusiasm or for providence have so little to work with.

What followed was much longer and much less tidy, and it went differently in each direction. Syria was a campaign against a field army and a negotiation with Arabs already in Roman pay. The Iranian plateau was a decade of raiding out of garrison towns, district by district, with agreements repudiated and re-imposed. Egypt was a provincial administration that came apart faster than anyone attacking it expected, in a country whose own people were divided about whether they wanted it defended. Three chapters follow, one for each.

Not a migration

What the conquests were not was a movement of peoples. The armies moved as armies and the countryside was left substantially as it was: existing landholders, existing tax registers, existing officials, and in Syria and Egypt existing Greek-language administration that went on functioning for two more generations. The conquerors took the revenue and left the machinery.

That is true as a description of what the new rulers built, and it is worth holding alongside what the bishop of Nikiu says was done to his own town. Both happened. An administration can be inherited intact by men who sacked the place first.

This is also why the maps mislead. A polity of six million square kilometres in 655 is an accurate figure for the extent of a claim to tribute. It is not a statement about how much of that area anyone in Medina could see.

Peace unto thee, O Syria

Drafted from al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) (1916)expansion

Syria was the first province taken and the one that decided what the caliphate would become, because the man who governed it for twenty years afterwards took the empire with it.

The campaign was not a single march. Khalid ibn al-Walid came up to the Ghuta, the orchard belt outside Damascus, and stood an hour at the pass with the black banner spread; the bishop of Damascus came out to him with gifts and asked for a covenant, and Khalid gave one. Then he left and went south to Busra, which came to terms — lives, property and children safe, and a poll-tax, with one account putting it at a dinar and a measure of wheat for each adult. Ma'ab in the Balqa' surrendered on the same terms as Busra. The pattern was already established before the battles that are remembered: towns treated with, and the terms written down.

The Ghassanids

The Arabs of Syria were already there, and they were on the other side.

Heraclius assembled Greeks, Syrians, Mesopotamians and Armenians, and sent as his vanguard Jabala ibn al-Ayham of Ghassan at the head of the Arabs of Lakhm and Judham and the rest — Arab tribes long settled in Roman Syria and long paid by Rome to hold its desert edge. The conquest of Syria was not Arabs arriving in a country without them. It was one Arab political order displacing another that had been in Roman service for generations.

Jabala's own story is the whole ambiguity in one man. After the fighting he came over, telling the Ansar "ye are our brethren and the sons of our fathers", and professed Islam. Then, when Umar came up to Syria, he struck a man of Muzayna in a dispute and knocked out his eye, and Umar ruled that he should suffer the same. Is his eye like mine? Jabala said. Never, by Allah, shall I abide in a town where I am under authority. He renounced it all and went back to the Greeks with thirty thousand men. Umar sent an expedition after him four years on with instructions to treat him gently and appeal to the blood between them, offering him his own faith and a fixed payment; Jabala refused and stayed. One of Umar's own companions thought the caliph had mishandled it, and said so: had he taken the payment and been friendly, the man would have stayed a Muslim.

A king of Ghassan preferred exile in Constantinople to equality before a Medinan judge. That is a sharper statement of what the new order demanded than any battle provides.

The Yarmuk

The armies met at the Yarmuk, the river the Greeks called the Hieromax, in 636. Baladhuri says twenty-four thousand Muslims fought, that the Greeks and their auxiliaries chained themselves together so that no man could hope in flight, and that some seventy thousand of them died. The figures come to him at third hand and he does not vouch for them; what is not in doubt is that the survivors scattered as far as Palestine, Antioch, Aleppo, Mesopotamia and Armenia, and that no replacement army came south.

Abu Sufyan had travelled up as a volunteer to see his sons and brought his wife; Hind bint Utba, who had led the women of Mecca against Muhammad's army at Uhud, was in the line calling on the men to cut the enemy down. The families that had fought the Prophet longest were now fighting for the state he left, and their sons would inherit it.

Heraclius was at Antioch when the news reached him. He went north to Constantinople, and Baladhuri has him turn at the pass and say goodbye:

Peace unto thee, O Syria, and what an excellent country this is for the enemy!

He never came back. The emperor who had broken the Sasanian war effort a few years before conceded the richest provinces of his empire in a sentence about pasture.

District by district

Drafted from al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan), Part II (1924)expansion

Syria fell in a campaign. Persia fell in a decade of raiding, and the difference is the most misunderstood thing about the conquests.

Two battles broke the Sasanian state's capacity to defend itself: al-Qadisiyya in 636, which opened Ctesiphon and the irrigated Sawad behind it, and Nihawand in 642, where the last army the empire assembled was destroyed. After Nihawand there was no Persian field force and no Persian government. What there was, was a plateau of walled towns, mountain districts and provincial magnates, none of whom had surrendered, and every one of whom had to be dealt with separately.

Baladhuri's eastern volume is a record of that work, and it is repetitive in a way that is itself the point.

Raid and return

The method was not occupation. Uthman ibn Abi al-As was ordered into Fars, made his camp at Tawwaj, and operated out of it — making raids from that point and returning thereto. Abu Musa was told to help him from Basra, and did the same thing from the other direction, returning thereto after each raid. The armies lived in a garrison and went out from it. Territory was not held between raids; it was revisited.

What a raid produced was a settlement, and the settlements are recorded one by one because centuries later the tax status of each district still depended on which kind it had been. Shabir was taken by force after siege and battle. Khurra of Sabur fought first and then capitulated, on condition of paying jizya and kharaj and giving counsel to the Muslims. Kazarun and Nubandajan were subdued. Arrajan and Shiraz capitulated on terms. A single province produced a dozen separate legal outcomes, and Fars was one province of many.

Even the fighting was not always one-sided. At Rishahr the Persian commander Shahrak was unhorsed and killed by Sawwar ibn Hammam, and Shahrak's son immediately killed Sawwar; Baladhuri's informants thought the battle there comparable in violence to Qadisiyya itself. That is a considerable claim about a place almost nobody has heard of, and it suggests how much of the real resistance happened after the decisive battles were over.

The covenants that did not hold

The most revealing pattern is what happened to agreements once made.

When Nihawand was over, most contingents went home to their provinces, but the Kufans stayed with Hudhayfa and raided Adharbayjan, and the province bought peace for eight hundred thousand dirhams. Umar then replaced Hudhayfa with Utba ibn Farqad — and, hearing that Utba had sent him sweetmeats wrapped in cotton cloth from his new province, sent them back with a note: thou eatest sweetmeats not the fruit of thy toil nor of thy father's toil. Utba, for his part, remembered arriving on embassy at Medina to find the caliph eating gristly camel flesh.

Then Uthman became caliph and appointed al-Walid ibn Uqba. And when they broke the covenant, al-Walid raided them in the year 25 — the twenty-fifth year of the hijra, some four years after the peace was bought. He raided Muqan, Babar and Taylasan too, plundering and taking captives, and when the villages of Adharbayjan asked for peace again he granted it — on exactly the terms Hudhayfa had given them the first time.

A province had been conquered, had paid, had repudiated the arrangement, had been reconquered, and had ended on the same terms as before. That happened across the plateau for years, and it is why the Sasanian empire is dated to 651 rather than to 642: the state was beaten in a season and the country was not finished for a decade.

Umar, who could not go and see any of it, wrote to the Kufans wintering up there about the food and the fur clothing, telling them to eat nothing not lawfully slaughtered and wear nothing ceremonially unclean. A caliph in Medina legislating on the garments of soldiers in the Caucasus foothills is a fair picture of how far the thing had already outrun the men running it.

What the bishop of Nikiu saw

Drafted from Nikiu, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu (1916)expansion

Egypt is the one theatre where the conquered side wrote an account that survives, and it does not read like the others.

John was bishop of Nikiu, a town on a Delta island that Amr ibn al-As took on his way to Alexandria. He was writing within living memory of the events, in a country that had just changed hands, for readers who had lost. His chronicle reaches us through an Ethiopic translation of an Arabic translation of a Coptic or Greek original, which is a long chain: the dates are unreliable and the place-names are damaged. What comes through undamaged is the texture.

Collapse, not defeat

There is no great battle in John's Egypt. There is a command structure coming apart.

The Roman general John, sent to hold the Fayyum, is drowned in the river, and Theodore the commander-in-chief drags the body out in a net and sends it up the chain to Heraclius. Guards are posted at the rock of Lahun to watch for the enemy; the Arabs go around through the desert instead, lifting sheep and goats from the high ground without anyone noticing. When a relief officer named Leontius finally arrives, John records that he was obese in person, quite without energy and unacquainted with warlike affairs, and that he took half the available troops back to Babylon almost at once to report.

The Roman command in Egypt spends the war calculating. They want to attack before the Nile rises and the sowing begins, after which nobody can campaign without destroying the crop. They are still waiting when the fortress of Babylon falls.

And at Kebrias the general Domentianus, learning the Arabs were near, boarded a ship and left. His soldiers, seeing their commander gone, cast away their arms and threw themselves into the river in the presence of their enemies, and were killed in the water; one man, John says, got out alive.

The sack

The version of the conquests in which armies changed hands and the countryside went on as before is not what the bishop of Nikiu describes.

At Nikiu itself, finding no soldiers left to resist, the Arabs proceeded to put to the sword all whom they found in the streets and in the churches, men, women, and infants, and they showed mercy to none. Then they went on to other places and did the same. John gives the day — a Sunday in the month of Genbot — and then stops, saying it is impossible to recount what was done there.

This is a partisan telling by a man whose own town was sacked, and it should be read as one. But it is the only contemporary voice from inside, and what it insists on is that the transfer of Egypt was violent in a way the administrative sources do not record, because the administrative sources are interested in what was agreed rather than in what was done.

Why the Romans lost it

John's most striking passage is not about the fighting at all. It is about whose side the Egyptians were on.

Lower Egypt, he writes, split in two: one party held with the Roman general Theodore, and the other wished to join the Moslem. Egypt had spent a decade under Cyrus, the Chalcedonian patriarch imposed by Heraclius, who had persecuted the Coptic church and driven its patriarch Benjamin into hiding. When Benjamin came back to Alexandria in the thirteenth year after his flight and went round inspecting the churches, John reports what everyone was saying:

This expulsion of the Romans and victory of the Moslem is due to the wickedness of the emperor Heraclius and his persecution of the Orthodox through the patriarch Cyrus.

The Egyptians, in John's account, explained their own conquest as a judgement on Constantinople.

The tax

Then the arithmetic starts, and the bishop's tone changes again.

Amr exacted the taxes which had been determined upon, but he took none of the property of the Churches, and he committed no act of spoliation or plunder. He had fixed Alexandria's assessment at twenty-two thousand gold dinars. His appointed prefect Menas collected thirty-two thousand and fifty-seven. Amr deposed him for it and put in John of Damietta, a man the bishop says gave away his own property to the poor and wept over their condition.

That is where the chronicle leaves Egypt: not conquered and settled, but paying. People hid because they could not raise the sum, and John says they gave up their children against the monthly payments. Some converted; he names a Chalcedonian monk of Sinai who took Islam, put down the habit, took up a sword and turned on the Christians. To the bishop this was the worst of it, worse than the killing, because the killing ended.

By force or by treaty

Drafted from al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) (1916)expansion

The conquest was not one event. It was several hundred negotiations, across every theatre it reached, and the terms of each of them mattered for centuries afterwards, because the legal status of a town's land, its churches and its inhabitants depended on how it had come under Muslim rule. A place taken by storm was at the conqueror's disposal. A place that capitulated held whatever its agreement said it held.

That distinction is why so much of the earliest surviving material about the conquests reads less like a chronicle than like a bundle of deeds — in Syria, on the Iranian plateau, and in Egypt alike, though the paper meant something different in each.

Damascus, both ways at once

Damascus was besieged for four months. In the end, at sunrise, one Muslim force broke in at one gate — and at the same time the bishop hurried to Khalid ibn al-Walid at another and capitulated, and then opened his gate and walked in beside him holding the written terms Khalid had given him.

So the city fell by assault and by treaty simultaneously, and the two commanders met in the middle, in the oil-sellers' market.

The Muslims argued about it on the spot, and the objection they raised is revealing: Khalid was not the commander, so how could terms he wrote bind anybody? The reply of Abu Ubayda, who was, has become one of the most quoted sentences of the conquest period — that even the lowest of the Muslims can make terms binding on all of them. He signed Khalid's document and disregarded the fact that part of the city had been taken by force. All of Damascus was therefore treated as having capitulated, and he wrote to Umar to say so.

What a capitulation actually contained

At Hims the terms guaranteed the inhabitants their lives, their property, their city wall, their churches and their wells — with one exception written into the grant, a quarter of the church of St John, which became a mosque. Those who did not become Muslims were to pay kharaj.

Then the practical business: the city was divided into lots, one marked for each Muslim to build a house on, and the newcomers were settled in every property whose owners had left and every yard standing empty.

That is the conquest in miniature. A guarantee, a carve-out, a tax, and a housing allocation — and the last of those is where the Arab presence in the Syrian cities actually came from, since a great many people had fled north to Heraclius at Antioch and their houses were standing empty.

The arguments about the paperwork

The compilers were not naive about their documents, and their disagreements are preserved rather than smoothed away.

One authority claimed that the people of Damascus had agreed to give up half their houses and half their churches. Al-Waqidi answered that he had read the statement Khalid issued to the Damascenes and there was nothing of the kind in it, and that he had no idea where the story came from; what actually happened was that many inhabitants fled and the vacant dwellings were occupied.

The dating is disputed too, and the explanation offered for the discrepancy is the sort of thing nobody invents. Khalid's document, it is said, carried no date when he wrote it. Before the Muslims marched to the Yarmuk the bishop came back and asked him to renew it and add Abu Ubayda and other Muslims as witnesses, in case Khalid did not return. Khalid did so, and dated it the day he renewed it — which is why the conquest and the surviving instrument are a year apart.

A besieged bishop asking for a second copy with more signatures, because he had noticed that the man who gave him the first might be killed in the next battle, is a better guide to what the conquest felt like from underneath than any account of the fighting.

Herat, on paper

Farther east the same habit produced documents even where the plateau's usual method — raid, return to garrison, raid again — left no single siege to narrate. When Abdallah ibn Amir sent a column against Herat in Khurasan, its mayor came to terms before the city was stormed, and ibn Amir had the agreement written down rather than left as a spoken understanding a later governor could dispute or deny:

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. This is what Abdallah ibn Amir commands the mayor of Herat, Bushanj and Badaghis: he bids him fear God and be true to the Muslims, and to keep in peace the lands under his hand. And he has made a treaty with him in the name of Herat, plain and mountain, on condition that he pay the jizyah to which he had agreed, dividing this fairly over the lands. He who refuses what is laid upon him has no covenant and no protection. Written by Rabi ibn Nahshal and sealed by ibn Amir.

Five sentences: a warning to keep faith, a tax obligation, an instruction that the burden be apportioned fairly rather than dumped on whichever village a collector reached first, and a penalty clause that answers itself — break the terms and the terms are void, which was the whole of what the document had promised in the first place. Nothing in it touches religion or garrisons or conversion. Baladhuri's eastern volume records the same shape again and again across the plateau, at town after town: a conqueror negotiating a fixed, written payment with local notables who kept their own standing in exchange for it — produced far from Damascus by a different governor, out of the same institutional habit rather than a copied form.

Alexandria, and the covenant Amr did not keep

Egypt's capitulation was not the sack John of Nikiu describes. Alexandria itself never stood a second siege. Cyrus, the same Chalcedonian patriarch the Egyptians blamed for driving them toward the Muslims in the first place, went to Amr himself at Babylon and negotiated while the city behind him was still walled, garrisoned and unbeaten.

The terms John records read like Hims translated into a different vocabulary of concession: a fixed tribute; an eleven-month truce before any of it took effect; safe passage by sea for whichever Roman troops wanted to leave with their goods, and a toll on any who chose the overland route instead; and a clause that mattered as much as the money — Rome would stop warring on the Muslims, the Muslims would stop seizing churches, neither side would meddle in the other's affairs, and the Jews of Alexandria were named specifically as free to stay.

Cyrus brought the terms home and the garrison accepted them without a fight. The ordinary population did not, and gathered to stone their own patriarch for making peace before anyone had asked them. He talked them down — I have made this treaty in order to save you and your children — and they gave him gold to add to the tribute rather than see it broken.

It did not survive its author. John's verdict on what followed is unsparing: Amr, he writes, had no mercy on the Egyptians, and did not observe the covenant they had made with him, for he was of a barbaric race. The taxes were tripled. A treaty this formal — negotiated by name between a patriarch and a general, reported clause by clause — still depended entirely on the winning side choosing to go on keeping it, which is the fact Damascus's dating dispute and Herat's penalty clause both gesture at and Alexandria states outright.

What the paper was actually worth

Three theatres, three negotiators, three different fates for the document afterward. Khalid's survived because a besieged bishop had it re-witnessed before the one battle that might have killed its only signatory. Ibn Amir's survived because the winning side wrote it, with its own enforcement built into the wording. Cyrus's did not survive at all, because the losing side had written it, and the winning side decided before long that it no longer needed the transaction it had signed. The conquest looked nearly identical on paper in every province it reached. What differed — and what the compilers on every side of it kept arguing about for two centuries afterward — was which piece of paper anyone still had to honour once the fighting had actually stopped.

The garrison towns

Drafted from Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (1981)peak

Under Umar the conquering armies were not settled on the land they had taken. They were quartered in new foundations built for the purpose — Basra and Kufa in Iraq, Fustat in Egypt, Qayrawan later in North Africa — and paid stipends from the tax revenue of the surrounding province, registered in a roll called the diwan.

The reasoning was practical: dispersing an army into estates dissolves it, and the revenue depended on the existing agricultural order continuing undisturbed. The consequence was structural, and it outlasted the reasoning by centuries. It produced a conquering class that was concentrated, urban, salaried, and idle between campaigns, living beside a subject population it did not intermarry with at first and did not need to convert, since the tax base depended on the subject population staying what it was.

The amsar are also how Islam actually travelled. Conquest by itself converts nobody; what converts a province is an institution somebody can walk into. Each garrison town was a permanent settlement rather than a camp — mosque, governor's residence, tribal quarters, stipend roll — and these became the cities from which Islam spread into the surrounding countryside over the following two centuries, long after the armies had stopped moving.

They were also where the conquest army did its politics. Kufa in particular spent the next hundred years as the most reliably ungovernable city in the caliphate, and both of the civil wars in this region's history begin with its garrison deciding something.

Twelve years, and who got the surplus

Drafted from Hinds, International Journal of Middle East Studies 3(4), 450-469 (1972)peak

Uthman ibn Affan ruled for twelve years, longer than Abu Bakr and Umar together, and is usually met as a corpse — the murder that starts the civil war. That is the standard shape of the story and it is worth resisting, because the quarrel that killed him is the quarrel the caliphate spent its next century having.

The conquest did not stop under Uthman. Iran was finished — Yazdegerd III was killed at Merv in 651 — the frontier reached the lower Indus, Cyprus was raided and taken in 649, and an Arab fleet met a Byzantine one at sea in the mid-650s, which for a power that had not existed thirty years earlier is a remarkable sentence. But the rate of new revenue fell, and a state whose stipend roll had been written on the assumption of continuous conquest found itself arguing about a fixed pot.

Hinds reads the crisis as distributional, and the argument is unsentimental. Three things moved together. Uthman asserted the centre's claim on the sawafi, the crown lands taken from the Sasanian royal domain, and on provincial surplus generally — money the garrisons had been consuming where it was raised. He appointed kinsmen: Mu'awiya was already in Syria, Abdallah ibn Sa'd held Egypt, Marwan ran the chancery, and the pattern was visible enough to be described by his enemies as a family taking possession of a public office. And precedence in Islam — how early one had come to the movement — was the basis of stipend rank, which meant that the men arriving into the garrisons in the 640s were permanently junior to men whose claim was that they had been at Badr.

The opposition assembled out of that. The qurra', the reciters and early-comers whose standing was religious, supplied what Hinds calls a rallying-cry and a cloak for the material grievances of the tribesmen — and the grievances were real whether or not the cloak fitted. Kufa and Basra produced their own factional versions of it. Egypt produced the party that went to Medina.

He would not resign. Besieged in his own house and offered the option, he refused to disown an office he held to be God's to withdraw, and in June 656 the besiegers came in over the back wall and killed him. He was about eighty and had been reading.

The consequence is the whole of the next chapter, and it is not really about Uthman. Once a caliph could be killed by Muslims over the distribution of revenue, the question of who was entitled to decide such things was open, and nobody closed it again for a very long time.

One reading, and the others burned

Drafted from Sinai, The New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys (2017)aside?What aside means

The traditional account is specific and it is a story about the garrison towns. Hudhayfa ibn al-Yaman, campaigning on the northern frontier, heard troops from the Iraqi and Syrian contingents quarrelling over how the Qur'an was properly recited, and went to Uthman to say that the community would end up disagreeing about its scripture the way earlier communities had. Uthman appointed a committee under Zayd ibn Thabit, worked from a collection held by Hafsa, the daughter of Umar, produced a standard consonantal text, sent a copy to each of the principal centres, and ordered the competing written material destroyed.

Take the political shape of that seriously and it is an act of state rather than an act of scholarship. A state fixed a text, chose the dialectal form it would be fixed in, distributed it through the amsar — the same garrison towns that carried the stipend roll and the provincial administration — and destroyed the alternatives. The network that made it enforceable is the one the previous chapter describes. Very few things this state did reached further or lasted longer, and it did it with the apparatus it had built to pay soldiers.

The historian's position is more careful than either the traditional account or its loudest critics. The sources do not agree closely on the date, placing the project at various points in Uthman's twelve years. They also preserve, without much embarrassment, the memory that respected Companions had collections that differed from the one that survived, and that some of them objected. What the early manuscript evidence shows is a consonantal skeleton that is remarkably stable remarkably early, alongside at least one witness — the lower, erased text of the Sanaa palimpsest — that departs from it in ways the standard tradition does not record. Neither the claim that the text was fixed at a stroke by a committee nor the claim that it was assembled generations later survives that evidence comfortably.

That argument is not going to be settled here. What is not in doubt is the political fact underneath it: the standardisation is the clearest surviving case of the caliphate doing something to the religion rather than merely professing it, and it was done with the machinery built to pay soldiers.

The first fitna

Drafted from Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (1997)end

Uthman's death left the office without an agreed method of filling it.

Ali was acclaimed at Medina in the aftermath and immediately inherited the accusation that he had benefited from a murder he had not prevented. He never cleared it. He fought and beat a coalition of prominent Companions at the Battle of the Camel outside Basra, then faced Mu'awiya, Uthman's kinsman and the governor of Syria for twenty years, at Siffin in 657. Siffin ended not in a result but in an agreement to arbitrate — and the agreement itself split Ali's army, since a faction held that submitting God's judgement to human arbitrators was itself the sin. Those who left became the Kharijites, and one of them killed Ali at Kufa in 661.

Ali's son Hasan came to terms with Mu'awiya rather than continue, and the caliphate passed to the Umayyad house.

Two things end here and it is worth separating them. The office continues — this is the same caliphate, and Mu'awiya took the same titles. What ends is the method: after 661 no caliph is chosen by acclamation at Medina, and the succession becomes dynastic in practice long before anyone defends it in principle. The institution survived; the people who had made it by acclamation did not get to make the next one the same way.

The robes of Najran

Drafted from al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) (1916)afterlife

The Christians of Najran, in the Yemen, made terms with Muhammad himself. They would deliver two thousand robes a year, a thousand in Safar and a thousand in Rajab, each worth an ounce of silver, with any surplus or shortfall in value reckoned up; weapons, horses, camels or goods could be substituted at the same valuation. They would lodge his messengers for up to a month, never longer. In case of war in the Yemen they would lend thirty coats of mail, thirty mares and thirty camels, and anything that died would be made good. In exchange they were not to be pressed to change their religion or their standing in it, not called up for military service, and not charged the tithe.

That is the whole of it: a payment schedule, a billeting clause, an equipment loan, and a guarantee. Nothing in it is theological.

The document went on being the most valuable thing they owned for two hundred years.

Expelled, and still holding the paper

Umar expelled them from Arabia, invoking a saying attributed to the Prophet in his last illness that two religions should not remain in the peninsula. He bought their properties, and they were resettled at a place near Kufa that took their name. His letter ordered that whoever in Syria or Iraq they passed among should clear land for them to till.

They regretted it and asked to be reinstated. Umar refused. When Ali became caliph they came to him and pleaded on the strength of his own closeness to the Prophet, and he answered that Umar had been a man of sound judgement and he disliked to act differently.

So the treaty survived the loss of the country it had been made about. What they carried into exile was the assessment.

Two centuries of appeals

Under Uthman they presented the Prophet's written statement and Umar's recommendation. An inquiry found their situation had become injurious to landowners whose land they were occupying, and the caliph reduced the assessment by two hundred robes — "for the sake of Allah, and in place of their old lands" — and wrote to his governor at Kufa commending them as people under protection.

Under Mu'awiya they complained that they were scattered, that some had died and some had become Muslims, and produced Uthman's reduction. He took off another two hundred.

Then al-Hajjaj, governing Iraq, decided they had sided with the rebellion of Ibn al-Ash'ath. He put the figure back up to eighteen hundred, and specified that the robes were to be of the figured kind.

Umar II had a census taken. It showed them reduced to a tenth of their former number, and his ruling went to the words of the agreement: the tax it imposed was on their heads, not on their land, so the poll-tax of the dead and of those who had become Muslims was cancelled. He fixed the liability at two hundred robes, valued at eight thousand dirhams.

Yusuf ibn Umar, governing Iraq a generation later and a partisan of al-Hajjaj's memory, restored the original figure.

Myrtle in the road

When the first Abbasid caliph rode into Kufa, the Najranis met him on the road, strewed myrtle branches in front of him, and threw some over him as he came home from the mosque. He was delighted. Later they brought their case: how few of them there now were, what Umar II had granted and Yusuf ibn Umar had taken away, and — a nice touch — that they were somehow related to his mother's family. Witnesses spoke for them. He put them back to two hundred robes.

When Harun al-Rashid passed through Kufa on his way to the pilgrimage they came again, complaining of the tax-collectors. He had a statement written fixing the number at two hundred and ordering that they deal with no collectors at all but pay directly into the treasury. Baladhuri's informant adds four words that are the point of the whole story: the statement I myself saw.

What actually outlasted the caliphate

The state that made the original agreement lasted thirty years and ended in civil war. The men who confirmed it were murdered, one after another.

The agreement was still being produced, argued from, revised and re-issued by the fourth dynasty to hold the office, a hundred and seventy years after the Prophet dictated it, on behalf of a shrinking Christian community living beside Kufa in a country it had been expelled from and had never got back.