The Islamic expansion: why did it happen, and so fast? (war, Roman)

[Joao]

How could Islam have expanded so quickly? How one could explain it?

This is the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), it encompassed an area of 15 million km2, almost the size of Russia, much bigger than China, Canada, the US or Brazil:

[HappyRider]

I must admit I too wonder about that. What were Arabs doing in Spain? It's a 5-hour flight. I don't know of big battles as they were expanding westward. Who was trying to stop them? More importantly, who was the aggressor? The Crusaders or Islam? Seems like Islam's occupation preceded the Crusades by centuries.

[cachibatches]

Because Sassanid Persian and Byzantine Rome had utterly destroyed each other. There was a vast power vaccum.

Int every last war, each had marched to the other's gates. There was literally no quality men or material left with which to fight each other or anyone else.

[Unsettomati]

Islam providing an organizing mechanism that had previously been lacking in the Arabian Peninsula. This allowed Islamic forces to consolidate power among the tribes there, before advancing into the territories held by the Sasanian and Byzantine empires.

Further, advance into Byzantine territory was aided by the fact that the advancing Islamic forces of the time were more accommodating of non-Islamic locals than was Byzantine rule of non-Christians. More broadly, the expanding Muslims similarly more accepting of other local cultural practices. This led to less resistance to their rule and, in some cases, their coming being welcomed for that reason.

It may seem odd in light of the 21st century situation, but at the time the young Muslim world held a more liberal attitude to non-Muslim cultures than did the established Christian realms. But, obviously, much time has passed since then.

[mkwensky]

The Plague of Justinian also severely weakened both empires before they turned on each other while leaving the Arabs unscathed.

[theoldnorthstate]

relentless conquest

[HappyRider]

Originally Posted by Unsettomati

More broadly, the expanding Muslims similarly more accepting of other local cultural practices. This led to less resistance to their rule and, in some cases, their coming being welcomed for that reason.

Falsehood. For proof just look at how they ruled Persia, their biggest catch. The stories of massacres by appointed Caliphs(sounds familiar?) to convert and subjugate Persians are legendary. The Persian uprisings continued for two centuries. To this day, Arabs are despised in the present day Iran.

[Joao]

This is how Lothrop Stoddard, American historian and racialist, summed it up:

The rise of Islam is perhaps the most amazing event in human history. Springing from a land and a people
alike previously negligible, Islam spread within a century over half the earth, shattering great empires,
overthrowing long-established religions, remoulding the souls of races, and building up a whole new
world--the world of Islam.

The closer we examine this development the more extraordinary does it appear. The other great religions won
their way slowly, by painful struggle, and finally triumphed with the aid of powerful monarchs converted to
the new faith. Christianity had its Constantine, Buddhism its Asoka, and Zoroastrianism its Cyrus, each
lending to his chosen cult the mighty force of secular authority. Not so Islam. Arising in a desert land sparsely
inhabited by a nomad race previously undistinguished in human annals, Islam sallied forth on its great
adventure with the slenderest human backing and against the heaviest material odds. Yet Islam triumphed
with seemingly miraculous ease, and a couple of generations saw the Fiery Crescent borne victorious from the
Pyrenees to the Himalayas and from the deserts of Central Asia to the deserts of Central Africa.

This amazing success was due to a number of contributing factors, chief among them being the character of
the Arab race, the nature of Mohammed's teaching, and the general state of the contemporary Eastern world.

[j_k_k]

I'm not sure that 128 years qualifies as 'fast.' One of the pitfalls of historical study is time compression: it's easy to misplace the reality that 128 years in the seventh and eighth centuries CE took just as long as 128 years in the nineteenth and twentieth. Put another way, laid across our own modern timeline, 128 years ago was 1889. That may make it easier to imagine how they could digest and extend their reach.

I'd say the magnitude, over any timeframe, is much more surprising than the speed. Islam eventually penetrated to become the dominant faith in significant parts of south Asia and southeast Asia, much of the African east and northwest coasts, and much of central Asia. When one looks at a globe, its spread is at least as impressive as that of Christianity, and it does not seem to have come with nearly as much extermination (thinking in particular of the Americas). Why this occurred is not an area on which I have the knowledge to speculate, but I wouldn't say it happened fast.

[Unsettomati]

Originally Posted by Unsettomati

More broadly, the expanding Muslims similarly more accepting of other local cultural practices. This led to less resistance to their rule and, in some cases, their coming being welcomed for that reason.

Originally Posted by HappyRider

Falsehood. For proof just look at how they ruled Persia, their biggest catch. The stories of massacres by appointed Caliphs(sounds familiar?) to convert and subjugate Persians are legendary. The Persian uprisings continued for two centuries. To this day, Arabs are despised in the present day Iran.

Wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. More pointedly, you think an exception disproves a rule. Here's another example of that type of 'logic': the fact that there are examples of Western Allied atrocities during World War II disproves the claim that the German military committed more atrocities than the Western Allies. Of course, it doesn't. And, of course, your example hardly disproves the fact that Islamic tolerance for non-Muslims in conquered territories during the Expansion was more lenient for the locals than under the Byzantine and Sasanian empires.

This is a widely-understood fact, including among non-Muslim sources, no matter how much it rankles you. This is the History forum. The discussion is of what happened in the 7th and 8th centuries. If you can't address the past without dragging your contemporary ideological obsessions into the discussion, then you should probably leave the topic of history to others. At the very least, know that you're going to get called on such nonsense.

What is most striking about the early expansion of Islam is its rapidity and success. Western scholars have marveled at it, and Muslim tradition has viewed the conquests as a miraculous proof or historic validation of the truth of Islam's claims and a sign of God's guidance. Within a decade, Arab forces overran the Byzantine and Persian armies, exhausted by years of warfare, and conquered Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Persia, and Egypt. The momentum of these early victories was extended to a series of brilliant battles under great generals like Khalid ibn al-Walid and Amr ibn al-As, which extended the boundaries of the Muslim empire to Morocco and Spain in the west and across Central Asia to India in the east. Driven by the economic rewards from conquest of richer, more developed areas, united and inspired by their new faith, Muslim armies proved to be formidable conquerors and effective rulers, builders rather than destroyers. They replaced the conquered countries, indigenous rulers and armies, but preserved much of their government, bureaucracy, and culture. For many in the conquered territories, it was no more than an exchange of masters, one that brought peace to peoples demoralized and disaffected by the casualties and heavy taxation that resulted from the years of Byzantine-Persian warfare. Local communities were free to continue to follow their own way of life in internal, domestic affairs. In many ways, local populations found Muslim rule more flexible and tolerant than that of Byzantium and Persia. Religious communities were free to practice their faith to worship and be governed by their religious leaders and laws in such areas as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. In exchange, they were required to pay tribute, a poll tax (jizya) that entitled them to Muslim protection from outside aggression and exempted them from military service. Thus, they were called the "protected ones" (dhimmi). In effect, this often meant lower taxes, greater local autonomy, rule by fellow Semites with closer linguistic and cultural ties than the hellenized, Greco-Roman élites of Byzantium, and greater religious freedom for Jews and indigenous Christians. Most of the Christian churches, such as the Nestorians, Monophysites, Jacobites, and Copts, were persecuted as heretics and schismatics by Christian orthodoxy. For these reasons, some Jewish and Christian communities aided the invading armies, regarding them as less oppressive than their imperial masters. In many ways, the conquests brought a Pax Islamica to an embattled area:

Chapter 2: The Muslim Community in History

Did the Islamic Empire subjugate people? Did they slaughter some of those peoples? Were Christians and Jews in the conquered territories second-class citizens? Yes. Yes. Yes. None of those facts conflict with the additional facts that their rule during and in the period after the Expansion was less culturally oppressive in the conquered territories, and that this practice facilitated their success by giving the locals fewer reasons to oppose their new rules.

In many ways this was similar to the stance of the Roman Republic (though not the later Empire) toward the religious practices of the peoples it absorbed.