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52 According to the Islamic point of view, the warriors who engaged in the military expeditions known as the Islamic Conquest were committed Muslims. Historical sources identify them as ethnic Arabs commanded by people who followed the leadership of Muhammad and his deputy successors , the caliphs. But written documentation of the conquest is incomplete . The Qur’an, the authoritative revelation upon which the emerging religion of Islam was based, was not canonized finally until the caliphate of Uthman (644–656), after much of the Middle East had already been conquered . And aside from the Qur’an itself, there were no written Islamic texts until at least three generations after the conquest. Even if the story of hoisting the Qur’ans on Mu`āwiya’s lances is true (which would mean that a significant number of handwritten copies of the Qur’an were available to warriors already in 657), they had not been available during the period when Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and much of Iraq had been conquered under Umar. While one might claim that those engaged in the conquest were committed to Muhammad and the nascent views of Islam—strict ethical monotheism , belief in a Day of Judgment after which humans will enter heaven or hell, obedience to the will of God as articulated in general terms by divine revelation—these views were also common to Judaism and Christianity. It is not clear what the boundaries of identity were that the Muslim community understood or applied to itself. How “Muslim,” then, were the Arab warriors who carried out the Islamic Conquest? CHAPTER 7 The Conquests 53 C H A P T E R S E V E N In his work on identity in the early Islamic community, Fred Donner suggests that those who engaged in the conquest were not yet “Muslims” in the sense of belonging to a self-defined religious community. Rather than Muslims, he calls this early community “Believers.” He says they are made up of those who fulfilled the basic belief requirements of the monotheist umma and who joined this pious movement; this included Christians and Jews. The Believers eventually defined themselves as independent of the established monotheisms, just as emerging Christianity had separated itself from Judaism. Later Muslim tradition tried to hide that early unified community and its eventual split into an independent form of monotheism. As Donner puts it: [F]or the first few decades of the Islamic era, the Believers may have been quite ready to accept among their number those Christians and Jews who shared their zeal to spread the message of God and the Last Day, and who agreed to live piously by the law, even though the theological implications of some passages in the Qur’an would eventually exclude the ahl al-kitab (“People of the Book”) from the ranks of Believers. It may have been several decades before [the Qur’anic passages in question] became even known among Believers generally, and several decades more before the full implications of the Qur’an’s theological stand for communal self-definition became clear to Believers . Until this had happened, however, some Christians and Jews— those who shared the Believers’ insistence on the omnipotence and omnipresence of the one God, the imminence of the Last Day, and the need to lead a life of strenuous piety according to the revealed Law— may have remained part of the community of Believers, particularly within the “colonies” of Believers that were established (initially as garrisons) in newly-subdued provinces of what was becoming a growing empire. A Christian Nestorian monk named Yohannan bar Penkaye of northern Mesopotamia wrote in the late 680s, at least two generations after the death of Muhammad, that a significant number of Christians were engaged among the followers of Muhammad in the military expeditions.2 Although there is no hard evidence regarding Jews who were engaged in the conquest, one could surmise the possibility of Jewish involvement as well. Bar Penkaye also notes that “from every person they demanded only tribute, and each one could remain in whatever faith he chose.” This and other evidence suggest that the military campaigns were nonconfessional, meaning that they were not intended to bring converts into a religion called Islam, but were more likely part of a process of state formation with roots in a monotheistic revival movement that may have caught the enthusiasm of many non-Muslim monotheists as well. 54 A N I N T R O D U C T I...

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