638: The garrison of Gaza, by their Muslim conquerors

ExecutedToday.com ^ | December 17, 2017 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

By the early 600s, Roman and Persian armies had been trading blows for so many centuries that an eternal continuation of their Near East derby must have seemed a certainty. Here a raid into Mesopotamia, there a clash in the Taurus Mountains, border provinces shifting back and forth … countless dynasties had come and gone, world religions risen and fallen, and always there were the Romans and the Persians. It was the way of the cosmos ever since Carrhae.

Tribes boiling out of the Arabian desert were about to reorder the firmament.

After an exhausting and pointless struggle* stretching back generations, Byzantium under the emperor Heraclius had rallied in the late 620s to re-establish its formerly longstanding control of the Levant — incidentally pushing Persia’s Sassanid Empire to the brink of collapse.

Neither polity would enjoy much leave to lick its wounds.

The Byzantines’ first passing skirmish with Muslim warriors had occurred in 629, when the Prophet Muhammad was still alive. By the time of Muhammad’s death and the succession of the Caliphate in 632, Islam had all of Arabia firmly in hand and would begin the dazzling expansion destined within a single lifetime to carry the Quran from the Pillars of Hercules to the Indus valley — greatly facilitated by the scanty resistance offered by is battle-wearied neighbors in Constantinople and Ctesiphon...

[higgmeister]

The reading of history is always worthwhile.

[Cronos]

I actually think Tom Holland is correct that the armies that conquered the Sassanid empire and the southern parts of the Roman empire was actually just Arab, most likely ebionites. And that only later in the 70ps did they invent the religion of islam and a prophet Muhammad.

Reasons
1. No mention of mo, islam, Muslim, Quran for 100 year after the conquest despite the conquered areas being highly literate for millennia.

2. No coins, carvings etc mentioning Muhammad, islam , muslim or Quran.

3. The Ummayyad dynasty minting coins with the cross.

4. The very word Muhammad is not a name but a title meaning the praiseworthy one. It’s not a name one gives a child and wasn’t a name before the 750s.

5. The word Muhammad is used only 4 times in the Quran and each time like a title.