ABSTRACT
Within a few decades after the death of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, in 632, his successors had established an empire that stretched far beyond the Arabian Peninsula, where the new religion had been born. In 636, the Muslim forces routed the Romans at the battle of Yarmuk and established control over Syria and Palestine by 641; from there, they went on to conquer Iraq and Persia, defeating the Persian army in 637 at the battle of Qaydisiyya. The conquests of Egypt and North Africa followed, and by the early 700s, the Muslims had extended their empire all the way from Spain in the West to Afghanistan in the East. Having dismantled the ancient Persian Empire and taking possession of the Byzantine territories in the Near East, this vast empire of the Muslims now included the overwhelming majority of world Jewry under the shared roof of Islamic rule. For centuries, the major centers of Jewish lifePalestine and Babylonia-had been divided by the political frontier that separated the Roman and the Persian Empires. After the rise of Islam, the Jews of both areas were now, for the first time since the days of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, united under one empire. Unlike Alexander’s empire, however, the Islamic caliphate lasted for centuries and most areas conquered in the early decades of Islamic history, with the notable exception of Spain, remain part of the Muslim world to this day.
