Fragment on the Arab Conquests are fragmentary notes that were written around the year 636 AD on the front blank pages of a sixth-century Syriac Christian manuscript of the Gospel of Mark. The fragment depicts events from the early seventh century conflict between the Byzantines and "the Arabs of Muhammad", particularly of the battle of Yarmouk. [1]
Text in square brackets is conjectured, being unreadable in the original. This is clear in the original manuscripts.
In January [the people of] Ḥomṣ took the word for their lives and many villages were ravaged by the killing of [the Arabs of] Mūḥmd and many people were slain and [taken] prisoner from Galilee as far as Beth...
On the tw[enty-six]th of May the Saq[īlā]ra went [...] from the vicinity of Ḥomṣ and the Romans chased them [...]
On the tenth [of August] the Romans fled from the vicinity of Damascus [and there were killed] many [people], some ten thousand. And at the turn [of the ye]ar the Romans came. On the twentieth of August in the year n[ine hundred and forty-]seven there gathered in Gabitha [a multitude of] the Romans, and many people [of the R]omans were kil[led], [s]ome fifty thousand. [1]
The fragments are believed to be contemporary to the events of the Arab conquest of the early 7th century. They also provide one of the earlier date for the battle of Yarmuk as having taken place on 20 August 636, assuming Yarmouk is to be identified with the "battle of Gabitha" mentioned in the fragments. [2]
Cook and Crone in Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World take the fragments to indicate that Muhammad was still alive in 636 at the battle of Yarmouk, contradicting the Muslim accounts of his death. [3] [ page needed ]
Mu'awiya I was the founder and first caliph of the Umayyad Caliphate, ruling from 661 until his death. He became caliph less than thirty years after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and immediately after the four Rashidun ('rightly-guided') caliphs. Unlike his predecessors, who had been close, early companions of Muhammad, Mu'awiya was a relatively late follower of Muhammad.
Bilad al-Sham, often referred to as Islamic Syria or simply Syria in English-language sources, was a province of the Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid caliphates. It roughly corresponded with the Byzantine Diocese of the East, conquered by the Muslims in 634–647. Under the Umayyads (661–750), Bilad al-Sham was the metropolitan province of the Caliphate and different localities throughout the province served as the seats of the Umayyad caliphs and princes.
The historiography of early Islam is the secular scholarly literature on the early history of Islam during the 7th century, from Muhammad's first purported revelations in 610 until the disintegration of the Rashidun Caliphate in 661, and arguably throughout the 8th century and the duration of the Umayyad Caliphate, terminating in the incipient Islamic Golden Age around the beginning of the 9th century.
The early Muslim conquests or early Islamic conquests, also known as the Arab conquests, were initiated in the 7th century by Muhammad, the founder of Islam. He established a new unified polity in Arabia based in Medina that expanded rapidly under the Rashidun Caliphate and the Umayyad Caliphate, culminating in Muslim rule being established on three continents over the next century. According to Scottish historian James Buchan: "In speed and extent, the first Arab conquests were matched only by those of Alexander the Great, and they were more lasting."
The Battle of Nahavand, also spelled Nihavand or Nahawand, was fought in 642 between the Rashidun Muslim forces under caliph Umar and Sasanian Persian armies under King Yazdegerd III. Yazdegerd escaped to the Merv area, but was unable to raise another substantial army. It was a victory for the Rashidun Caliphate and the Persians consequently lost the surrounding cities including Spahan (Isfahan).
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World is a 1977 book about the early history of Islam by the historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. Drawing on archaeological evidence and contemporary documents in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Syriac, Crone and Cook depict an early Islam very different from the traditionally-accepted version derived from Muslim historical accounts.
Hagarenes is a term widely used by early Syriac, Greek, Coptic and Armenian sources to describe the early Arab conquerors of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt.
The Teaching of Jacob has a controversial dating from the early 7th century to the late 8th century. It is a Greek Christian polemical tract supposedly set in Carthage in 634 but written in Syria Palaestina sometime between 634 and 640. It supposedly records a weeks-long discussion ending on July 13, 634, among Jews who have been forcibly baptized by order of the emperor. One of them, Jacob, has come to believe sincerely in Christianity; he instructs the rest about why they should also sincerely embrace their new faith. Halfway through, a Jewish merchant named Justus arrives and challenges Jacob to a debate. In the end, all of the participants are convinced to embrace Christianity, and Jacob and Justus return east. In addition to several partial Greek manuscripts, the text survives in Latin, Arabic, Ethiopic and Slavonic translations.
The Battle of Dathin took place during the Arab–Byzantine Wars between the Rashidun Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire in February 634, which became very famous in the literature of the period.
AG 945, indiction VII: On Friday, 4 February, [i.e., 634 CE / Dhul Qa'dah 12 AH] at the ninth hour, there was a battle between the Romans and the Arabs of Maḥmet [Syr. tayyāyē d-MḤMT] in Palestine twelve miles east of Gaza. The Romans fled, leaving behind the patrician Jordan, whom the Arabs killed. Some 40,000 [according to the original edition, but the more recent English translation reads "4000" without comment] poor villagers of Palestine were killed there, Christians, Jews and Samaritans. The Arabs ravaged the whole region.
AG 947, indiction IX: The Arabs invaded the whole of Syria and went down to Persia and conquered it; the Arabs climbed mountain of Mardin and killed many monks there in [the monasteries of] Qedar and Bnata (Benōthō). There died the blessed man Simon, doorkeeper of Qedar, brother of Thomas the priest.
Robert G. Hoyland is a historian, specializing in the medieval history of the Middle East. He was a student of historian Patricia Crone and was a Leverhulme Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is currently Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, having previously been Professor of Islamic history at the University of Oxford's Faculty of Oriental Studies and a professor of history at the University of St. Andrews and UCLA.
Seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam from the Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam series is a book by scholar of the Middle East Robert G. Hoyland.
Thomas the Presbyter was a Syriac Orthodox priest from the vicinity of Reshaina in Upper Mesopotamia who wrote the Syriac Chronicle of 640, which is also known by many other names.
The Maronite Chronicle is an anonymous annalistic chronicle in the Syriac language completed shortly after 664. It is so named because its author appears to have been a Maronite. It survives today only in a single damaged 8th- or 9th-century manuscript in London, British Library Add. 17,216. Owing to the damage, portions of the chronicle are lost.
The Rashidun Caliphate was the first caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was ruled by the first four successive caliphs of Muhammad after his death in 632 CE. During its existence, the empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in West Asia and Northeast Africa.
The historicity of Muhammad refers to the study of Muhammad as a historical figure and critical examination of sources upon which traditional accounts are based.
The Siege of Jerusalem (636–637) was part of the Muslim conquest of the Levant and the result of the military efforts of the Rashidun Caliphate against the Byzantine Empire in the year 636–637/38. It began when the Rashidun army, under the command of Abu Ubayda, besieged Jerusalem beginning in November 636. After six months, the Patriarch Sophronius agreed to surrender, on condition that he submit only to the Caliph. In 637 or 638, Caliph Umar traveled to Jerusalem in person to receive the submission of the city. The Patriarch thus surrendered to him.
The Judham was a large Arab tribe that inhabited the southern Levant and northwestern Arabia during the late antique and early Islamic eras. Under the Byzantine Empire, the tribe was nominally Christian and fought against the Muslim armies between 629 and 636, until the Byzantines and their Arab allies were defeated at the Battle of Yarmouk. Afterward, the Judham converted to Islam and became the largest tribal faction of Jund Filastin.
Khalid ibn al-Walid ibn al-Mughira al-Makhzumi was a 7th-century Arab military commander. He initially headed campaigns against Muhammad on behalf of the Quraysh. He later became a Muslim and spent the remainder of his career in service to Muhammad and the first two Rashidun caliphs: Abu Bakr and Umar. Khalid played the leading command roles in the Ridda Wars against rebel tribes in Arabia in 632–633, the initial campaigns in Sasanian Iraq in 633–634, and the conquest of Byzantine Syria in 634–638.
The revisionist school of Islamic studies is a movement in Islamic studies that questions traditional Muslim narratives of Islam's origins.
Shurahbil ibn al-Simt ibn al-Aswad al-Kindi was a Kindite commander in the Muslim army against the Sasanian Persians at the Battle of al-Qadisiyya in 636 and later a Homs-based member of the inner circle of Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan during the latter's governorship of Syria (639–661) and caliphate (661–680).