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The Arabs also had history on their side, for they emerged just as the two old eyes of the world had exhausted each other in a protracted war for dominion over the Fertile Crescent. Arab fighters might have been unskilled in warfare, but they were fresh; many of them were used to hardship, they were inspired by religious fervour and they were led by some extremely capable generals. Among the leaders were Khalid ibn Walid, whom the Prophet had called the Sword of Islam, and Uqba ibn Nafi al Fihri, who brought the Prophet’s message to North Africa with such missionary zeal that he stopped only after he had ridden his horse into the Atlantic surf somewhere beyond Tangier.
The Arab Conquests provides an excellent prelude to Marozzi’s previous two books, Baghdad and Islamic Empires, although it is briefer and has a tighter time frame. Starting with the first conquest at Badr, near the Arabian coast, where Mohammed led a small force against his own Qurayshi tribespeople in 624, Marozzi plots the military progress, and the politics behind it, from the first international victories after the Prophet’s death, to the 730s. By then, the caliph’s armies had dominion over the former Persian empire as far as what is now Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, and across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco and up through Spain and Portugal, where Al Andalus, the Muslim kingdom in Iberia, would become a cultural beacon.
The end also comes as something of a surprise — half way up through France, in 732, where Charles, duke and prince of the Franks, ended Arab ambitions in the north and earned himself the title of Martel, or Hammer. Eighteen years later at Talas, on what is now the Kazakh–Kyrgyz border, a Tang Chinese army marked the easternmost limit of Arab achievements.
The story of their remarkable 120 years of expansion has been often and well told by writers from Edward Gibbon to Hugh Kennedy and Barnaby Rogerson. Marozzi’s beautifully illustrated volume sits well beside them as a shorter, lighter overview of a movement that was, as he claims, ‘the midwife for the birth of a glorious new civilisation’ that was to change the world.
Because you read about islam
Also by Anthony Sattin
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