21.2 The near east: a.d. 601 to 700

The near east (an amazing conquest of the near east by islamic arabs)

Back to The Near East: A.D. 501 to 600

It was in this century that the people of Kurdistan were converted to the Sunni variety of Islam. The Kurds are a people closely related ethnically to the Persians, who have tried through the ages to keep themselves intact as sheep-raising and rug weaving nomads, without respect to political boundaries. Kurdistan embraces the present day areas of east TURKEY, Soviet Armenia, northeast Iraq and northwest Iran. (Ref. 38 )

Arabia and jordan

Muhammad (or Mohammed) was born in the south of Arabia of poor parentage early in the century. He married wealth and soon began to teach a new religion, taking as basic beliefs the monotheism of the Jews. He accepted Jesus as a prophet and formulated a new creed of behavior for his fellow Arabs. He had the visionary power of a seer, the astuteness of a master politician and a poet's mastery of language. (Ref. 83 ) By the time of his death in A.D. 636 his followers had already become almost fanatical in their zeal to spread the new faith and their armies poured out of the Arabian Peninsula to sell the religion by force of arms. The Arabs' military success approached the miraculous as they subdued the greatest kingdoms with small armies made up of mounted men on the famed Arabian horses. (Ref. 122 )

Mediterranean coastal areas of israel and lebanon&Iraq and syria

The early part of the century was a period of some general decay in this entire area, with Persia and Byzantium more or less splitting control. At the death of Emperor

Maurice of Byzantium at the hands of his own soldiers, Chosroes II of Persia went on a conquering spree, taking Roman Mesopotamia in 607-615, then Armenia and some of Anatolia itself. But the pestilences which had visited the Romans and Persians alike from 542 on may explain in great part the little resistance their forces offered the Moslem eruption in 634. By the time of the Arab conquest Syria, in general, was an impoverished and stricken land. Damascus, as well as Jerusalem, had not recovered from the effects of the previous long and terrible sieges. Palmyra stood empty. In Mesopotamia there is some evidence that many irrigation canals had been abandoned, probably from a lack of labor supply due to the plague, before the Moslems had even arrived and it is doubtful if the Arabs actually destroyed much. (Ref. 137 , 140 )

The first incursion of Arabs into Iraq occurred in A.D. 633 with forces under Khalid ibn-al-Walid, although the main advance was a little to the west into Syria. They defeated the Byzantines in a last battle at Yarmuk in 636 and Jerusalem capitulated in 638. The chief administrator of Iraq and the coastal region from 644 to 656 was Othman (also Uthman) of the Omayyad (also Umayyad) family. Using his nepotism as an excuse, troops from Iraq and Egypt assassinated Othman in Medina in 656 and he was succeeded by Ali, the prophet's cousin and son-in-law. Mo'awiya, an Omayyad governor of Syria, disputed this succession, proclaimed himself caliph