Other Christians saw the Arab conquests not as a sign of the end times, but as divine punishment. For John bar Penkaye "the Arabs were the instruments of God, sent to punish the Christians for moral laxity and, above all, for heresy; but for him both the Chalcedonian Church supported by the Byzantine authorities and their Monophysites were the real enemy." We must remember that at this time there were a number of Christian Churches, each claiming to be Orthodox, and there was much mutual enmity and even persecution. For John, the rule of Muslims "might be either good or bad depending on the behaviour of the Christians."
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.
Article comments
1 - ali soegiharto
when I looked at this book, I remembered that I have a book with the same title only written by another, a retired British General, Sir John Bagot Glubb. Published by Hodder and Staughton, and was first printed in 1963. Is it ok to write a book with a title that existed. I have no intention to disregard the quality of the current book, but merely curiousity of such happening.
2 - Abram Bergen
I think book titles on such a broad topic often overlap. Think of books on WWI or WWII. How often do they share similar titles? There is so much to be written, and so much new scholarship to be brought to bear on the subject, that books with similar titles can be vastly different.
I did a little checking and it appears that the title does not have a subtitle, as Hugh Kennedy's does. Also, Glubb's book focuses only on the first 50 years of expansion. And though I haven't read Glubb's book, I imagine his perspective to be much different from Kennedy's. Glubb was a British General under the British occupation of Arab lands, so his perspective is likely influenced by his personal colonial involvement, whereas Kennedy approached the subject from a strictly academic perspective. However, since I haven't read Glubb's, I cannot comment further. It would be interesting to read them side-by-side.
Thanks for bringing it up.