Islam in its earlier form was entirely an Arab religion. The temporal side of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission shows him engaged in an effort to unite the tribes of the Hijaz in a fraternal union, to limit the custom of the razzia (ghazza) or marauding foray, and to form an orderly community. These temporal aims were due to the influence of Madina on the Prophet and to the conviction that it was only in such a community that his religious teaching could obtain a serious attention. In Mecca he had been faced with constant opposition chiefly due to the tribal jealousies and strife which formed the normal condition of a Bedwin community. Madina was a city in a sense quite different from that in which the term could be applied to Mecca. It had developed a civic life, rudimentary no doubt but very far in advance of the Meccan conditions, and had inherited a constitutional tradition from Aramaean and Jewish colonists. At Madina the Prophet began to perceive the difference produced by the association of men in an ordered communal life as contrasted with the incoherence of the older tribal conditions, and the accompanying difference of attitude towards religion. This last was not really due to civic life but more directly to Jewish influence, although no doubt the conditions of city life were more favourable to the evolution of speculative theology than those of the wilder tribes. The older Arabs seem to have accepted the idea of one supreme God, but speculated little about him: they did not regard the supreme deity as at all entering into their personal interests, which were concerned only with the minor tribal deities who were expected to attend diligently to tribal affairs and were sharply censured when they appeared to be negligent about the interests of their clients. The desert man had no tendency to the sublime thoughts about God with which he is sometimes credited, nor had he any great reverence towards the minor members of his pantheon. The Prophet found it one of his most difficult tasks to introduce the observance of prayer amongst the Arabs, and they do not appear very much attached to it at the present day. In Madina the Prophet was in contact with men whose attitude towards religion was very different and who were more in sympathy with the principles which he had learned from very much the same sources as themselves.
In Madina, therefore, the Prophet added a temporal side to the spiritual work in which he had been previously engaged. It was not consciously a change of attitude, but simply the adoption of a subsidiary task which seemed to provide a most useful accessory to the work which he had already been doing. Its keynote is given in the Madinian Sura 49.10, “Only the faithful are brethren, wherefore make peace between your brethren.” It was a call to his fellow Arabs of the Hijaz to cease their strife and to unite in the bonds of brotherhood. Such a union on the part of those whose habits and ideals were warlike and who were disinclined to the arts of peace, necessarily produced an attitude of hostility towards persons outside their community. Was this militant attitude any part of Muhammad’s plans? The answer must certainly be in the negative. The military enterprises of early Islam were no part of its original programme. In those enterprises the Prophet and his immediate successors show a hesitating and dubious attitude; obviously their hands were forced and they take the lead reluctantly. As Fr. Lammens says:—
Le Qoran travailla à réunir les tribus du Higaz. La prédication de Mahomet réussit à mettre sur pied une armée, la plus nombreuse, la plus disciplinée qu’on êut vue jusque-là dans la Péninsule. Cette force ne pouvait longtemps demeurer sans emploi. Par ailleurs l-islam, en imposant la paix entre les tribus, ralliées à la nouvelle religion ou simplement à l’état médinois en formation,—le ta´līf al-qoloūb poursuivait ce dernier objectif—l’islam allait fermer tout issue à l’inquiète activité des nomades. Il prétendait supprimer à tout le moins limiter, le droit de razzia, placé à la base de cette société patriarcalement anarchique. Il fallait s’attendre à voir le torrent; momentanément endigué, déborder sur les régions frontières.
“Que Mahomet ait assigné ce but à leurs efforts? Il devient difficile de défendre cette thèse, trop facilement acceptée jusqu’ici.”
(Lammens: Le berceau de l’islam. Rome, 1914, i. p. 175.)
In the expedition against Mecca a militant attitude was the inevitable result of compelling circumstances. The Meccans were actively hostile and had adopted a persecuting attitude towards those who accepted the new religion. At the time the Quraysh tribe, to which Muhammad belonged, was so far in the ascendant that its adhesion was necessary for the progress of Islam in the Hijaz: the championship of some prominent tribe was essential, and Muhammad himself was deeply attached to the traditional “House of God” at Mecca, to which his own family was bound by many associations; besides he desired the adherence of his own tribe as his mission was to it in the first place. Had the Meccan opposition not been broken down the Muslim religion could have been no more than the local cult of Madina, and even as such would have had to be perpetually on the defensive. No doubt the “holy war” as an institution was based on the traditions of this expedition, but such a war is related to the later enterprises for the conquest of non-Arab nations by a line of development which the Prophet himself could hardly have anticipated. The challenge to Heraclius is on a similar footing. Although we may not be disposed to accept the traditional account given by Bukhari, there no doubt was some such challenge. But Heraclius had only recently re-conquered Syria for the Byzantine Empire, the land he had acquired included a considerable portion of the Syrian desert which formed a geographical unity with Arabia, and amongst his subjects were Arab tribes closely akin to those of the Hijaz.
Islam became a militant religion because it spread amongst the Arabs at a time when they were beginning to enter upon a career of expansion and conquest, and this career had already commenced before Muhammad had got beyond the first—the purely spiritual—stage of his work. The only reason why the earlier Arab efforts were not followed up immediately seems to have been that the Arabs were so surprised at their success that they were unprepared to take advantage of it. For some time previously Arab settlements had been formed in the debateable land where the Persian and Byzantine Empires met, but this encroachment had been more or less veiled by the nominal suzerainty of one or other of the great states. The Quda, a tribe of Himyaritic Arabs, had settled in Syria and become Christian, and was charged by the Byzantine Emperor with the general control of the Arabs of Syria (Masudi: iii., 214-5); that tribe was superseded by the tribe of Salih (id. 216), and that by the Arab kingdom of Ghasan which acknowledged the Emperor of Byzantium as its overlord, whilst the Arab kingdom of Hira acknowledged the Persian king. Somewhere between A.D. 604 and 610, when the first beginnings of persecution were falling on the Prophet in Mecca, the Arabs led by al-Mondir inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Persian army under King Khusraw Parwiz, who, a few years before, had led a victorious force to the invasion of the Byzantine province of Syria. This victory showed the Arabs that, in spite of its imposing appearance, the Persian Empire, and presumably the Byzantine also, were vulnerable, and a determined effort might easily place the wealth of both at the disposal of the Arabs.
The Muslim conquests of the 7th century A.D. form the last of a series of great Semitic outspreads of which the earliest recorded in history resulted in the formation of the empire of Babylon some 2225 years before the Christian era. In all these the motive power lay in the Arabs who represent the parent Semitic stock, the more or less nomadic inhabitants of the barren highlands of Western Asia, who have always tended to prey upon the more cultured and settled dwellers in the river valleys and on the lower slopes of the hills.
“The belts between mountain and desert, the banks of the great rivers, the lower hills near the sea, these are the lines of civilization (actual or potential) in Western Asia. The consequence of these conditions is that through all the history of Western Asia there runs the eternal distinction between the civilized cultivators of the plains and lower hills and the wild peoples of mountain and desert. The great monarchies which have arisen here have rarely been effective beyond the limits of cultivation; mountain and desert are another world in which they can get, at best, only precarious footing. And to the monarchical settled peoples the near neighbourhood of this unsubjugated world has been a continual menace. It is a chaotic region out of which may pour upon them at any weakening of the dam hordes of devastators. At the best of times it hampers the government by offering a refuge and recruiting ground to all the enemies of order.” (Bevan: House of Seleucus, i., p. 22.)
Scornful of agriculture and with a strong distaste for settled and especially for urban life, the Bedwin are those who have remained nomads by preference, and like all races at that stage of evolution, find the most congenial outlet for their vigour in tribal warfare and plundering expeditions. From the earliest dawn of history they have always been strongly tempted by the wealth of the settled communities within reach, and appear in the oldest records as robber bands. Sometimes predatory excursions were followed by settlement, and the invading tribes learned the culture of those amongst whom they settled: all the Semitic groups other than the Arabs had formed such settlements before the 7th century A.D., and these groups are distinguished one from another, and all from the parent stock, simply by the cultural influences due to the earlier inhabitants of the lands they entered; the Arab stock itself remained high and dry, the stranded relic of more primitive conditions, though itself not absolutely free from a reacting influence. The only thing that ever has restrained the incursions of these nomadic tribes into such neighbouring lands as offer hope of plunder is the military power of those who endeavour to place a barrier for the protection of the settled community of the cultivated area, and every Arab outspread has been due, not to the pressure of hunger resulting from the desiccation of Arabia, nor to religious enthusiasm, but simply to the weakness of the power which tried to maintain a dam against them.
In the 7th century A.D. the two powers bordering on the Arab area were the Byzantine and Persian empires. Both of these were, to all appearance, flourishing and stable, but both alike were in reality greatly weakened by external and internal causes which were closely parallel in the two. Externally, both had been severely shaken by some centuries of warfare in which they had disputed the supremacy of Western Asia, and both had suffered from rear attacks by more barbarous foes. Internally, both alike had a thoroughly unsatisfactory social structure, though the details differ: in the Byzantine Empire almost the whole burden of a very heavy taxation fell upon the middle classes, the curiales, and the armies were mainly composed of foreign mercenaries, whilst in the Persian Empire a rigid caste system stifled natural development. In both we see a state church engaged in active persecution and thereby alienating a large section of the subject population.
The career of Muslim conquest came with great suddenness. Between the years 14 and 21 A.H. (A.D. 635-641) the Arabs obtained possession of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Persia. They owed to Islam the united action which made these conquests possible, but the older Muslims who had shared the ideals and labours of the Prophet, though put at the head, were carried forward reluctantly and yet irresistibly by the expanding force behind them. Many of them viewed these large accessions with very real anxiety. When the second Khalif Umar saw the large number of prisoners and captives from Jalûlâ (Persia) flocking into Arabia, he exclaimed, “O, God, I take refuge with thee from the children of these captives of Jalûlâ.”