Early Muslim conquests

The early Muslim conquests, also called the Arab conquests, were a series of campaigns between the 630s and the mid-eighth century that carried Muslim rule out of Arabia across the Middle East, North Africa, Iran, parts of Central and South Asia and the Iberian Peninsula. Within about a century, a new state centred first on Medina, then Damascus, came to govern one of the largest empires the world had yet seen, and the religious and cultural map of a vast region was permanently changed.

The movement began with the Prophet Muhammad, who in 622 moved with his followers from Mecca to Medina and founded a community there that was both religious and political. By his death in 632 most of the Arabian Peninsula had accepted his leadership. His first successor, Abu Bakr, fought the Ridda wars to restore authority over tribes that broke away, and Arab forces then began raiding into Byzantine Syria and Sasanian Iraq.

The two great powers of the region, the Byzantine Empire and the Sasanian Empire, had just exhausted each other in a long war that ended in 628, and both had been weakened by plague and internal strife. Under the caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar of the Rashidun Caliphate, Arab armies won decisive victories. The Byzantines were routed at the Battle of the Yarmuk in 636, and Syria and Palestine were lost; Jerusalem surrendered around 637 or 638. In Iraq the Persians were defeated at al-Qadisiyya around 636, and the capital Ctesiphon fell soon after. Egypt was taken between 639 and 642. The Sasanian state collapsed, and its last king, Yazdegerd III, was killed in 651.

Civil war divided the Muslim community after the murder of the caliph Uthman in 656, but under the Umayyad Caliphate, founded in 661 with its capital at Damascus, expansion resumed. Armies pushed slowly across North Africa against Byzantine garrisons and Berber resistance, capturing Carthage in 698. Twice, in the 670s and in 717–718, Muslim forces besieged Constantinople and failed. In 711 a force led by Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed into Spain and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom within a few years. In the same years Arab armies conquered Sind in the Indus valley and campaigned deep into Transoxiana, in modern Uzbekistan.

By the 730s the conquests were reaching their limits. A Frankish army defeated a raiding force near Poitiers at the Battle of Tours in 732, Byzantium held Anatolia, and the Khazars blocked the Caucasus. Costly defeats and revolts strained the Umayyad state, which was overthrown in 750 by the Abbasids; the following year Muslim and Chinese armies met at the Battle of Talas in Central Asia.

Historians point to several factors: the exhaustion of the older empires, the mobility and motivation of the Arab armies, effective leadership, and a policy of making terms with local populations. Many cities surrendered in return for security of life and property and the payment of tribute. Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians were generally allowed to keep their religion as protected communities paying a special tax, though they faced restrictions.

Conversion to Islam was gradual and in many areas took centuries; Arabic slowly became the language of government and, in much of the region, of everyday life. The conquests created a single political and economic space from Spain to Central Asia, the basis of the later Abbasid Caliphate and of classical Islamic civilisation.

Our 600 map shows the Byzantine and Sasanian empires on the eve of the conquests, the 700 map shows the caliphate's rapid growth, and the 800 map shows the Abbasid state at its height.