Still other Christians in the area, notably Mar Gabriel, the abbot of the Qartmin monastery in present-day Turkey which "survives as one of the most venerable centres of eastern Christian monasticism . . . regarded the coming of Muslim rule as an opportunity rather than a calamity." Through Mar Gabriel we know that some Syrian Orthodox Christians did not merely look on helplessly, but actually aided the Muslim conquest because their rule was considered preferable to Byzantine oppression. The Coptic Christian responses were mixed, reflecting both the idea that Muslim rule was a relief from the brutal rule of Cyrus, and the view that they were brutal barbarians sent as punishment from God. An equally mixed reaction is found, Kennedy notes, in the Latin Chronicle of 754 from Spain.

The Jews of the Middle East also had an apocalyptic literature, not unlike the Christians, but they looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, rather than the end of the world. "For the Jews," Kennedy writes, "the last years of Byzantine rule in Syria had been a time of distress and persecution," and "the coming of the Arabs, though attended by much violence and cruelty, promised some alleviation of their condition." One passage describes the second caliph, Umar (634-44), as a lover of Israel, who "'restores their breaches and the breaches of the Temple, he hews Mount Moriah, makes it level and builds a mosque there on the Temple rock.'" However, like many Christian sources (Kennedy writes), they also complained about the taxation.

On the whole, the author writes, "the most striking feature of these voices is the variety of responses," and though many people may have been dissatisfied, few turned that into active resistance. This leads to some answers to the original question of how it was that the Arab conquerors were able to carve out an empire, in just over a century, "similar to the Roman Empire at its height," and which only Tang China could rival. Kennedy attributes the success of the Arab conquerors in part to the fragmented response and the lack of a concerted resistance movement.

Many of the sources, Kennedy points out, also give the impression that "many of the areas conquered had suffered from a declining population in the century after the first appearance of the bubonic plague in the Mediterranean world in 540." Another factor was the series of wars fought between the Roman and Iranian empires. And then there were the internal battles among Christian sects. In many areas conquered by the Muslims, "the invaders benefited from internal tensions in the ancient empires, which meant that, in some cases, they were seen as liberators or at least as a tolerable alternative."

Part of the success, Kennedy suggests, lay also in the unique characteristics of the Muslim forces. Kennedy writes that "[e]nough has already been said about the religious motivation of the invaders, the power of the idea of martyrdom and paradise as incentives in battle," something that is, incidentally, all too frequently mentioned in our media in relation to Islam. It was this "combined with the traditional, pre-Islamic ideals of loyalty to tribe and kin, and admiration of the lone warrior hero. The mixture of the cultural values of the nomad society with the ideology of the new religion was formidable."