Posted on 03/29/2005 11:52:07 AM PST by robowombat
Kadisiyah And The Cost Of Conquest
I The trouble with the second Persian Empire was that it was not an empire. Its rulers bore the Achaemenid title of "king of kings", but the kings to whom the titular ruler acted as chairman of committee were so numerous and had so much individual authority that the head of state hardly dared to promote for ability unless it appeared in one of the lordly houses. There were not only the great feudatories known as "lords of the marches", but also the lesser "lords of the villages" and "knights", who had authority over part of a city or the whole of a smaller town. And in addition there were the Magi, or Mazdean priests, who could always bring a man up for heresy, and any kind of incorrect conduct might turn out to be heretical. The system was completely interlocked, ironbound; there was no possibility that a change would be made in it at any point. And while the tradition that stood for a constitution required that the king of kings should be a member of the royal house, it was not specific about which member, so that there was usually a war of succession at the end of each reign, and sometimes one in between. On the whole, it is rather surprising that the general political talent which seems endemic in the Indo-European race should have been able to overcome such handicaps and produce an administration that was reasonably orderly and a system of taxation that was reasonably fair.
It also produced a military organization that was one of the most effective of the early Middle Ages. The nobility down to and including the knights was a nobility of service, specifically military service. The Achaemenid tradition that a noble need only know how to ride, shoot, and speak the truth had been thoroughly revived, like so many traditions of the pre-Alexander empire, and even improved upon. The nobles knew nothing but war, though not in a way to be confounded with the feudalism that sprang up later in the West. The military caste of the Sassanid empire were not domiciled in isolated castles, and their allegiance was not transmitted by stages through a series of terraced lordships, but went directly to the king of kings.
Professionally also they differed from the Western knights and from any predecessors. They were all cavalry, of course; the decline of the infantry already pronounced at the time of Justinian and Belisarius had reached its nadir, and the only footmen who accompanied a Sassanid army were troops of the baggage train, armed with a small spear and a wicker shield covered with hide. The horsemen were a development of the comitatus of Justinian's time. They had scale armor, steel caps, and light shields, and carried almost every conceivable kind of weapon--a six-foot spear, a bow, a short straight sword, a mace, a hand ax, and two ropes, which together made a kind of lasso and was used for pulling an opponent off his horse. In view of the amount of training necessary to obtain dexterity with all these weapons, it is not surprising that they had to make a profession of war. At moving in close-knit formations for heavy shock to the sound of the trumpet they were good; they employed many barbarian auxiliaries of the usual desert light cavalry type and had picked up a considerable amount of siegecraft from the Byzantines. Their armies usually employed armored elephants, but only as a reserve. The Westerners had worked out a battlefield technique for dealing with these animals, and refused to be borne down or panicked.
Two institutions of the Persian army were unique and of some importance in the psychological warfare department. It always carried a huge throne, which was set up in the center of the battle line and occupied during action by the shah or the general acting for him. It was surrounded by the picked bodyguard, called "the Immortals", as they had been in the days of the old empire, nearly a thousand years before, with an outer circle of foot archers. Before it there was always borne the other institution, the Diraish-i-kaviyani, theoretically the leather apron of the heroic smith who had founded the empire back in legendary times by leading a revolt against the ruling Semites. It had become a banner of fifteen feet by twenty-two, and was all one crust of precious stones, since it was regarded as holy and each successive king added new decorations to it with the help and approval of the Mazdean priests. When a Persian army was defeated, the first care was always the preservation of the sacred standard; men gave their lives for.
The greatest weakness of this army was the lack of control by the high command during the frequent struggles for succession. But as no one could remain king of kings very long without making himself thoroughly feared, this was not usually a difficulty. About the turn of the sixth into the seventh century, Chosroes, second of the name, got his war of succession under control and began to think about other things. In a state organized like Sassanid Persia there was only one line intellection could follow; the strong, rigig system permitted no major activity but war. An able grandfather had pushed Chosroes' eastern frontier up to the Oxus and the Himalayas, and there was not much point in proceeding farther in that direction. The only thing the new king of kings could do was take up the war against the Byzantine Empire that had been running off and on for nearly a hundred years, or ever since his great-grandfather attacked Justinian.
The usual thematic material of this war was a series of battles and sieges in Mesopotamia and Armenia, wtih Persian raids into Syria and Byzantine counterraids into Persian Iraq. Just at this juncture the Byzantine Empire was experiencing some dynastic troubles of its own, the Balkan provinces were pulverized by a huge incursion of Slavic Avars, and the Persians were lucky enough to turn up a couple of highly competent generals besides Chosroes himself. He introduced a variation into the pattern, so effective that it gained him the name of Chosroes Parvez, "Chosroes the Conqueror", and he deserved it. Armenia was so thoroughly subdued that its church split from that of Constantinople; Cilicia and Cappadocia were subdued. Jerusalem was taken in 614, with 57,000 killed and 35,000 more carried away as prisoners. Damascus, Tarsus, Antioch were occupied. Alexandria was captured and all northern Egypt passed into Persian hands. Persian armies cruised at will through Asia Minor and an attempt was made on Constantinople itself.
All this was the work of some years, but by 619 it would have struck a contemporary new chronicler that the Byzantine Empire was done for. The loss of Egypt had cut off the usual grain supply and there were famine and pestilence in the capital. There was no money and no taxes were coming in. Even outside the cities, where the Persians were only too glad to see the Greeks quarreling among themselves, administration had collapsed to the edge of anarchy. The armies had been beaten and broken up in the field. And with Illyria in the hands of the Avars, Armenia, Anatolia, and the mountain districts of southern Asia Minor in those of the Persians, the recruiting grounds where new forces could be raised were no longer available.
However, there remained intact the African province Belisarius had conquered for Justinian after the suppression of the Nike sedition, the conquest which the sedition was started to prevent. The Emperor Heraclius himself was from that province, and to it he turned for men. Its very existence had made it necessary for the empire to keep up a navy; what was left of Byzantium held the sea and the communications it offered. For money Heraclius appealed to the Church, and in view of the fact that the Magians had conducted some fairly intolerant persecutions and encouraged the Jews to join them in massacring the Christians at Jerusalem, the cash was willingly given. The various generals had all proved failures or tried to sieze the decaying empire for themselves. In spite of the fact that it was warned that only ruin could come of it, Heraclius held a solemn communion, then called a great meeting of Senate, officials, and people in the Hippodrome, placed the empire in the charge of the Patriach Sergius, and took the field in person.
The date was April 5, 622; five months later an Arab who had been making a nuisance of himself by preaching that he was a prophet in the important desert commerical center of Mecca was forced to leave town.
II
The surviving records about Heraclius and his campaigns are not very satisfactory, nor are the details important, but it is clear that in the tactical field he recovered part of the lost art of infantry, and in strategy he was something like a master. He maneuvered the Persians out of Asia Minor, beat them in a battle in which the enemy army was almost destroyed and, instead of trying to recover the lost places in the south, drove northeast into the country at the foot of the Caucasus. During the next six years the destruction in the West was repaid with doubly compound interest. Every time the Persians sent army against Heraclius he broke it, usually with heavy loss, and every time he came to a city he sacked it. He reached the Caspian and swung southward; he inflicted a deadly blow to Persian morale by taking and destroying the greatest fire temple in the country; and his ambassadors succeeded in calling in the Khazar tribes of the steppes to do some more damage. In 628 it became evident to the Persians that Chosroes the Conquerer was losing his grip. One of his sons had him thrown into the "Well of Darkness" and then murdered.
The son got a peace out of Heraclius but he did not get much else; that year the Tigris and Euphrates produced a flood of Noahan proportions and the new king of kings died in the ensuing pestilence. His only son was an infant, and as might be expected, there was a chain reaction of wars of succession, in which the various candidates were backed by groups of magnates. It is probable that losses in defeats by Heraclius had weakened the lords, both intellectually and physically. During four years no less than twelve persons, two of them women, wore the mountainous royal tiara, and none of them kept it more than a year, or could get recognition from enough of the country to bring the rest into line. At last the supply of eligible princes began to run low, even for a royal house so prolific as the Persian; in 632 it was generally agreed that a child named Yezdigerd II was the real article. A general named Rustam became what we would call regent.
During the next year there was a raid of Arabs against Hira on the border of Iraq; the town was ransomed for the absurdly small sum of 60,000 dirhams, and Rustam followed by a raid into Arab territory to remind the tribes that they must not do this sort of thing.
III
Historians of an exclamatory temperament often voice surprise over "the explosion of the Saracens". This is because they have been taken in by Muslim chroniclers, who refer to the period before Muhammad as "the time of ignorance", with the implication that the Prophet was a civilizer as well as a religious leader. It also completely overlooks the nature of the material that exploded. Actually, there was throughout the Arabian peninsula at the time something which, if not meeting all the demands of a civilization, was considerably above barbarism. There were tribes grouped in clans, yes, and feuds among them; a good part of the population were nomads. But the arts flourished, especially poetry (which may be considered a barbaric art), commerce wsa reasonably secure (Mecca owed its importance to the fact that it was a trading town which had become sacred to business, so no violence was allowed in the area), and the position of women was higher than in most of contemporary Western Europe, a very good index. There was no little agriculture, partly based on peaches and pomegranates, which did not ship well, but partly also on dates and aromatics, which did ship and were in wide demand.
At the time of Muhammad this nascent civilization was suffering from a malaise. There were two basic causes. One was a persistent overproduction of children in spite of the common practice of female infanticide. The consequence was emigration by seepage; Arab stocks had heavily infiltrated the whole of Syria, Palestine, and even Egypt, where they readily mingled with kindred stems that had no basic differences even in language. By the sixth century these emigrant Arabs even had two kingdoms of their own, Ghassan at the northwestern edge of the desert and Hira on the northeast. Ghassan was subdued and broken up into districts by the Byzantines while Hira became a Persian dukedom. But the key fact was that throughout most of Syria, Iraq, and Mesopotamia the bulk of the population was strongly Arabic, with blood and clan connections back in the homeland.
The second difficulty was economic: both on the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf shipping had become efficient as a common carrier. As water transport is always easier and cheaper than that by land, the old caravan routes that had provided a way of life for so many Arabs fell into decline. That is, there was unemployment in the overpopulated peninsula, and almost anything would have touched off some kind of explosion.
That the energies of the explosion were directed outward and not inward was due to several causes. One was the nature of the Prophet's teaching, which contained several features unique to an area where prophets were not uncommon. It made positive virtues out of several things that were necessities of life in the desert--abstemiousness, the avoidance of luxury, the laws of hospitality. This made it very easy to be a Muslim. It forbade the infanticide which is contrary to every human instinct and offered a viable substitute in polygamy. It turned fighting and plunder into profoundly religious acts, provided they were directed against unbelievers; and it provided a common ground on which every Arab could meet every other Arab, without distinction of tribe or clan. The appeal of Islam on a purely spiritual basis is not to be neglected; but it is worth noting that if the faith had been put forward in the most cold-blooded rationalism as a solution to the problems of place and date, it could hardly have been better conceived.
In the second place, Muhammad had the good fortune to number among his earliest converts an extremely able administrator, Omar, and a general far beyond the ordinary, Khalid ibn al-Walid. The Prophet himself was certainly an administrator of the highest skill, but as a military commander he was energetic rather than able. The special merit of Khalid as an officer was that he managed to convert a tactical doctrine into a strategic system. The Saracens were naturally light cavalry, bow- and spearmen, and in view of the shortage of natural materials their bows cannot have been much beeter than those of the Persians, which were not as good as the Byzantine bow. The tactics of this kind of light horse are dictated by their equipment: they are skirmishers. What Khalid did ws skirmish the enemy to death. In the period following the death of the Prophet, when many of the desert converts seceded and half a dozen new prophets claiming divine inspiration appeared, Khalid did fight some semi-formal battles which were decided by his own furious energy; but later, when he came up against the Byzantines, a typical "battle" lasted for days, and in one case weeks.
The problem faced by all commanders down to the equalization imposed by firearms was that of using a military tool developed in and intended for one kind of country in a region of quite different physiographical characteristics. The irresistible horsemen of the Tartars were quite helpless when they tried to attack the Japanese by sea, and they had to turn back from an utterly inferior military establishment in the jungles of Burma. The armored knights who ruled Western Europe had terrible trouble when they met pikemen in the Swiss valleys. Khalid turned the skirmishing tactic into something that could be used anywhere. He brought his army into the presence of the enemy and waited. Not passively, for he attacked everything and anything that moved outside a tight array. But all the same he waited until the battle became one made up exclusively of small skirmishes, his kind of battle. Superior mobility and superior logistics helped him greatly; his men could maneuver around any formation, they needed nothing but a bag of dates and access to water, while his opponents had to have provision convoys.
With this technique he conquered the whole of Syria and Palestine within four years after the death of the Prophet. He was considerably aided by racial and religious forces. The Arabs of Ghassan and, above all, those of southern Palestine, who might have formed a buffer state, had become Christians. But just at the juncture of Khalid's appearance the Emperor Heraclius had been forced to discontinue the customary subsidies to the Palestinian Arabs because, the Persian danger being exorcised, the Church wanted its money back from him in a hurry. Moreover, throughout Syria and Egypt, Christianity retained a strong Monophysite strain. Heraclius and his patriarch sought a compromise formula, the Monothelite, but the men they placed in charge of propogating it turned out to be persecutors instead of persuaders, and the whole area was unhappy over something that meant a great deal to it.
When Khalid and his Arabs appeared, they were welcomed as deliverers by people of their own race, many of whom wished and were allowed to accept the new faith. Christians of non-Semitic stock and Jews found they were allowed to practice their religion in any form they chose, provided they paid a head tax far less than what Constantinople demanded in other forms of contribution. The Bishop of Damascus helped arrange his city's surrender and only the thoroughly Greek cities of Jerusalem and Caesarea held out for any time in hope of relief.
The relief never came. Heraclius was now too old to take the field himself, and after two of the armies he had entrusted to generals who could make nothing of Khalid's tactic were wiped out, he was unable to raise a third. Everything from Antioch and Edessa southward became permanently Muslim. The Prophet's old friend Omar, now caliph, or "successor", Commander of the Faithful, began preparations for the invasion of Egypt. Conditions there were much the same as in Syria.
IV
Hira, like Ghassan, was a state of Arab blood, ruled by non-Arabs. The marshes of the lower Euphrates separated it from an area occupied by a nomadic clan called the Bakr. The head of this clan, one Muthanna, waited on Khalid during his march to Syria, and although the Bakr had not accepted Islam and had no current intention of doing so, suggested a joint raid on Hira as a highly profitable enterprise. Khalid agreed; this was the 60,000 dirham raid of 633, which provoked Rustam to countermeasures. The preparations for these measures were no secret, and as Muthanna did not like the prospect of dealing with a major Persian army unaided, he appealed to Omar at Medina for help. He may also have thrown out some hint about joining the new religion.
It is necessary to note that at this stage Islam, in spite of the Prophet's statements of universality, was a racial movement. The policy of Medina was to take in only pagan, Christian, and Jewish Arabs (of the last there were a great many), leaving non-Arabs as payers of the head tax. In Syria no effort was made to push beyond the ethnic limit. Muthanna was within that limit and thus entitled to help, regardless of his religion. But at the date of his appeal the Syrian campaign was at its height, Khalid was facing the first of the major Byzantine armies with the issue undecided, and Omar was mobilizing every possible resource in support. The caliph was not interested in fighting Persia. Unlike the sprawlike empire, it was a well-knit unit of non-Arabic people, which already claimed some vague suzerainty over the peninsula, and there was not much sense in stirring up such a sleeping lion. The help sent to Muthanna was therefore a small, purely defensive force.
It was not well led, and in the Battle of the Bridge, November 26, 634, it was crushingly defeated, mainly as a result of a charge of elephants which the Arab horses refused to face. Muthanna had difficulty in pulling a third of his force out of the wreck, and Abu Obayd, the captain from Medina, was taken and trampled to death by a huge white elephant.
At this date Rustam was only about as much interested in Arabia as Omar was in him; he still had some internal difficulties to settle and undertook nthing beyond a minor raid for the next year and a half. But by the fall of 636 the whole strategic situation had changed: the last of the great Byzantine armies had been wiped out in Syria; Damascus and Antioch were in the hands of the Saracens, Jerusalem and Caesarea were under siege. Rustam assembled an army to put an end to this menace.
As usual, the news crossed the frontier before the troops did, and Omar set about gathering a fore to defend not merely fellow Arabs this time, but also the line of communications to the new possessions in Syria. Command was given to an old companion of the Prophet, Sa'ad ibn Abu Wakkas, a man afflicted with boils. Shortly after his arrival in the area Muthanna died and, in accordance with Arab custom, Sa'ad secured the allegiance of the Bakr by marrying his widow. Making up the army was not so easy; word had run through the peninsula that the fertile fields of Syria were something like paradise, and the first great wave of immigration was washing into the corridors. It was doubtless a high religious duty to smite the infidel in the name of the Prophet, but a man had to look out for his family; that also was in the Qu'ran. Sa'ad probably had not collected above 6,000 men (in spite of enormous figures given in the chronicles) when Rustam crossed the Euphrates and encamped just north of the marshes on the border of the cultivated zone, at Kadisiyah. It was May or June 637.
The Arab tale is that the Muslims sent fourteen ambassadors who reached King Yezdigerd himself with a demand that the Persians either adopt their religion or pay a head tax. The people of Ctesiphon jeered at the tattered homely garments of the emissaries. Yezdigerd told them that if they were not ambassadors he would have had them beheaded, and spoke feelingly about Arab customs.
The head of the embassy said, "The prince speaks truly. Whatever you have said regarding the former condition of the Arabs is true. Their food was green lizards; they buried their infant daughters alive. But God in His Mercy has sent us a holy Prophet, a holy volume which teaches us the true faith. Now the Arabs have sent us to ask you either to adopt our religion or fight with us."
The Persians gave them one sack of dirt per man to carry away; they laid the burdens before Sa'ad as an omen: "for earth is the key to empire".
Rustam had considerably more men than the Arabs, and Sa'ad appears to have been unwilling to fight until the arrival of some reinforcements promised from Syria. But the Saracens began to run short of provisions, and when they sent out a foraging corps to collect some fish from the river, the Persians attacked and Sa'ad felt compelled to draw up in battle formation. The ball was opened by a number of Persian knights riding out of the ranks, shouting "Man to man!" as their custom was, challenging the Muslims to single combat. As it suited the Khalid tactical system to fight this way, they got plenty of customers, but the result of these personal encounters was usually in favor of the better-armed Persians. But as skirmishing went on all along the line Rustam perceived he was not going to get the close general action he wanted and, with the memory of the Battle of the Bridge in mind, ordered up the elephants. Once again the Arab horses would not stand; in fighting that lasted till evening Sa'ad's forces were driven back, much scattered, and saved from destruction only by some foot archers who slowed down the elephants.
An army not inspired by Muslim fanaticism might have broken up then and there, but Sa'ad managed to pull his men together during the night, doubtless not without assuring them that help was on the way from Syria. It began to come toward morning; the Arabs again took the field in their loose formations, and all day long there was one of the typical skirmishing battles of the Khalid system. Light cavalry had rather the better of it that day over heavy; the Persian losses are stated at five to one of the Muslims, but neither army showed any real sign of breaking when night shut down on the second day.
There was anxiety in both camps that night. Sa'ad was so troubled by his boils that he had barely been able to stay on his horse during the day, and in an Arab army, where personal leadership means everything, was unable to provide that indispensable quality. The main body of the Syrians had not arrived and until they did the enemy would be in superior force. There was a grave conference; Sa'ad turne dover his field command for the following day to Kakaa ibn Amru, the captain of the Syrians--and one must picture messengers going from campsite to campsite through the dark informing everybody of the change.
In the Persian camp Rustam was still hopeful of victory, but considerably disturbed by his inability to fix on any solid tactical plan in this formless desert fighting. The enemy had no real camp to attack or communications to cut. He received some reinforcements during the night, and doubtless as a result of his report on the first day's fighting, it included additional elephants. In the morning they were to be the main reliance in dealing with the sinuous Saracen formations; they were placed in front and center when the Persians drew out toward where the Muslims were advancing in clouds of dust.
But the Persians were not now dealing exclusively with desert Arabs who had never seen an elephant; they now had on their hands the Syrian troops, many of who had previously served the Byzantine Empire and knew all about elephant fighting. They galled the big animals frightfully with bowshot and javelin and even had the nerve to attack them on foot with spear and sword, jabbing at eyes and cutting off trunks. The elephant was always a two-edged weapon; now these stampeded through the Persian ranks, doing frightful damage, and into the gaps they made, Kakaa poured in his formations.
The Persians did not give up easily. Rustam left his official throne to mount a horse and personally rally his lines. They were driven back to a wide canal, where the battle hung for a time, but it did not end even with darkness, since the Arabs, now confident of victory, kept pressing on in small groups, at one point or another. It was called the "Night of Clangor" or "Night of Delirium", "because each one caught the other's beard", and it must have been a wild scene in almost complete darkness, but in this confused close combat most of the Persian advantages were canceled and the gains were all on the side of the Saracens.
With daybreak came a sandstorm, and it blew in the faces of the Persians. Rustam took refuge from it among the baggage camels; a sack of money fell from one of them, injuring his back, and he plunged into the canal to swim to safety. At that moment there appeared an Arab named Hillal ibn Alkama. He hauled the Persian generalissimo from the canal by one foot and cut off his head, then ran to the official throne, by this time in Muslim hands, and mounted it, shouting, "By the Lord, I have slain Rustam!"
It was the final blow; what was left of the Persian army panicked. But there was no place left for them to go; hundreds in their heavy armor were drowned in the canal and thousands were cut down along its banks in utterly open country by Arabs who had no reason for giving quarter and no intention of giving it.
V The booty was immense, since a Persian knight carried most of his portable wealth on his back, and Rustam's army chest was considerable. When accounts of what had been gained, and still more when some of the tangible booty began to reach Medina, Omar and his advisers decided there was something in this Persian business. Sa'ad, who was resting his army after its victory, was directed to form a military colony at Kufa, near the scene of the battle, and push on later.
Hira town surrendered readily enough, and when the Muslims got into the blackened country between the Tigris and the Euphrates they found conditions basically similar to those in Syria--a population composed of Aramaic peasants, who had been under both economic and religious pressure from Aryan overlords, and who were glad to see invaders of their own race. All Iraq fell into the hands of the conquerors without further contest; they pushed on to the Tigris, and when Yezdigerd offered to accept the line of this river as a boundary and was refused, he evacuated his capital at Ctesiphon and fell back into the mountains.
For the second Persian empire was done. The lost commander's throne could be replaced, but the sacred Diraish-i-kaviyani, which had been sent to Medina to be cut up in pieces, could not. With its loss the national morale sustained a blow hardly less paralyzing than the one that resulted from Heraclius' destruction of the great fire temple, the more so because one topped the other. Nor could the fighting men lost at Kadisiyah be replaced in any important quantity, and their loss, like that of the symbolic banner, had to be added to those sustained in the war with the empire and the civil troubles that followed it. The Persian upper class was even more seriously crippled than the English was to be in the War of the Roses, and the organization of the state was such that there was no yeomanry underneath, out of which a new upper class could grow.
Yezdigerd, who was now old enough to be considered not to need a regent, managed to assemble a force which met the Muslims again at Jalula, the entrance to the mountains, but not long after Sa'ad took Ctesiphon it was heavily beaten. Four years later the last army of the Persian Empire was destroyed at Nihawand and Persia became a Saracen province.
It took the full four years to reach this point, because the advance into Persia proper represented something completely new, strange, and changed in Saracen policy. Soon after Jalula, Mesopotamia fell into their hands, but like the rest of the early conquests, it was largely Semitic with tribal connections southward and its subjection involved no more than the capture of a few garrison towns. But Persia proper was different; it was inhabited by an alien race, one that already had a strong religion of its own. They heavily outnumbered any Saracen governing class that could be placed in possession.
This was at least dimly visible at the time and was one of the reasons for the delay in completing the work of Kadisiyah. But the results of the battle, including the capture of Ctesiphon, made the prospect irresistible. For if the booty of Rustam's camp was immense, that of the Persian capital was beyond all counting in terms of purchasing power. It was one of the richest cities in the world and it was taken under conditions that made plunder rather than occupation practically obligatory. Arabs who had been living on dates and camel's milk suddenly found themselves with jewels that represented the income of several lifetimes.
Persia thus became a promised land, where wealth could be had for the taking, and a wave of Arabian emigration followed the armies thither. But quite aside from the effects of sudden wealth, which are pretty much the same everywhere, the capture of Persia introduced new factors into the Muslim polity--factors not covered by any revelation to the Prophet.
It has already been noted that the policy of the early caliphs was to let non-Arab Christians and Jews keep their religion and make them a source of revenue by means of the capitation tax. They were so small a minority as hardly to be an irritant; the oyster of the Arab state could readily convert them to pearl. But the classic method clearly would not do in dealing with the Magian fire-worshippers. There was no element in their religion on which a Muslim could find agreement with his own as a basis for toleration; they had no Solomon or Moses or Jesus, who have honored places in the Muslim pantheon. But more importantly, as soon as the Arab state had engulfed Persia, it found itself in possession of a huge racially and religiously alien bloc, violently different in customs and culture.
The Western peoples later developed systems of colonial administration for dealing with this type of situation. But the seventh-century Saracens had no long tradition of politics and administration behind them, and no experience with any kind of administration except the patriarchal, with an overlay of the political-religious control from Medina. In their view the only means of assuring political control over the new conquest was through religious control; the Persians had to be converted under the sword and the Magian religion wiped out, or Islam could never control Iran.
The effectiveness of religious persecutions is often underestimated. Mazdaism was wiped out in a practical sense; but it took a good deal of doing, and the detestation with which fire-worshippers are mentioned in the Arabian Nights shows that the issue was not wholly dead a couple of hundred years later. In the meanwhile the forced conversion of Persia completely changed Islam itself. It ceased to be a racial movement; it necessarily becae more militant, more willing to expand the frontiers in every direction. If so large a mass as Persia could be digested and become a source of new sinews, there was no reason why other and even larger entities could not be absorbed, and the command of the Prophet to convert or slay was not a figure of speech, but something deserving of literal obedience.
The attempt at complete absorption, of course, was only a partial success. There were too many Persians and they had too much political experience. In the end, under the Abassid caliphs, the Muslim Persians came into command of the whole movement. They swept away the patriarchal system Muhammad had known and designed for his polity in favor of a new, monarchial, conquering system, which completely forgot the democracy that was one of the Prophet's most basic doctrines.
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Note: this topic is from March 2005. |
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