Well, of course. I learned that in grammar school.
Moreover, the Monophysites of those provinces were happier (at that time) under Muslim rule than they had been under Orthodox rule.Well, of course. I learned that in grammar school.
I thought you were being serious before. Now, I suspect there might've been a touch of sarcasm... LOL
Well, what I was getting at is this: Egyptians in the 7th century mostly adhered to a Monophysite Christology that held Christ to have only one nature (mono = one and physi = nature, in Greek). This was opposed to the Orthodox Chalcedonian position that Christ is both fully human and fully divine. The Egyptians were inclined toward Eutychian version of Monophysitism, which held that Christ's human element, if he had any, was completed submerged by his divinity ("dissolved like a drop of honey in the sea").
By contrast, many Syrians were Nestorian, which for some enigmatic reason I don't fully understand is oftentimes confused with Monophysitism (although there were also many Syrian Monophysites, but those tended to be Apollinarians or Monothelites, which basically held that although Christ had indeed been human his mind was in full divine union with God's). Anyhow, Nestorians believed that Jesus Christ was two distinct, separate entities: One human and the other divine, so it was indeed the opposite of Monophysitism (which is why the confusion is inexplicable to me).
Nestorianism was basically Neo-Adoptionism, which is the idea that Jesus was a regular man who was so holy as to be adopted by the divine Christ as his emissary. Adoptionism was a view held by many Jewish-Christians before they faded with the rise of rabbinic Judaism. Jewish-Christian ideas were very influential in Antiochene theology and evidently spawned Nestorius' creed.
In any case, both Monophysite and Nestorian Christologies were regarded as the worse type of heresy by the Orthodox overlords, who mistreated the natives accordingly. When they found that the Muslims were (initially) much more tolerant of heterodox Christian views (obviously, since the Muslims didn't care which version of Christianity their Christian subjects followed) they were not at all inclined to return to the persecution of the Orthodox Byzantines.
One thing that the Muslims did achieve was to sweep away much of the variety in Christian thought, since most all of the opposition to what became Orthodoxy and Catholicism was centered in the regions that the Muslims conquered. Things were relatively orderly after that until Martin Luther came along, not counting the whole Albigensian unpleasantry (and they were more Manichaean than Christian).