ABSTRACT
Muslim sources, frequently confirmed by the unintentional witness of contemporaneous Greek and Syriac writers, make it clear that the Arabs came surging out of the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century, with the initial attack on Damascus in 635 (the city being taken finally in 637), Ctesiphon in 637 and Jerusalem in 638. The area had been made ready for such an invasion by the political situation of the Near East as sketched in Chapter 1. A critical matter of dispute among historians is the extent to which religion was a motivating factor in these wars of expansion. The simple explanation that religion, in the common sense of the word, provides the underpinning of the whole phenomenon is not necessarily supported by the archaeological data available; nor is it substantiated by the historical texts, at least not when they are critically assessed in the light of an understanding of the theological back-reading of history which took place well after Islam was fully established. What appears fairly plain is that, in the first century of Arab rule in the Near East, a religious ideology was being employed both by those in power and by those struggling for power; it was by means of this ideology that authority was established in the community. Once again, then, one must be careful in speaking of the religion in the earliest period. To call it “Islam” leads easily to the glossing of the difference between what was conceived then and what the religion became by the beginning of the third Muslim century when a fixed religious system had certainly emerged (although its orthodox form was still at least a century off even at that point). Some scholars have suggested that we should refer to this early religion of the Arabs as “Hagarism,” a word derived from the name used in some Greek and Syriac sources when talking about the “Muslims.”1 Others have suggested a term such as “Muhammadanism” or even “Arab monotheism.”2 Be that as it may, in general some of the most important evidence for making
a distinction between the earlier and later roles and forms of the religion in the area comes from the political actions of the early rulers of the conquered territory, especially as the rulers affected the religious ideology and symbolism through their employment of it.
