Khalid ﵁'s Iraqi campaign, Ubullah & Madāʾin Kisra

The threshold of the peninsula

In the twelfth year after the Hijra, when the Ridda had died down and the tribes of Najd, Bahrain, Oman, Hadramawt, and Yemen had been brought back into the community, Abu Bakr ﵁ stood at a threshold that no predecessor had ever crossed. The peninsula was one, and the question was no longer whether Islam would hold its internal borders, but what it would meet beyond those borders. Beyond the dunes of northeastern Arabia lay a world that had not yet shown itself to the young ummah: the world of the Sasanians, the Persian empire, with its palaces, its archives of arches, its armored cavalry, and its thousand-year-old capital on the Tigris.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up the whole Iraqi campaign of the caliphate of Abu Bakr ﵁ in one sentence, and that sentence carries the whole turn now taking place. “After ending the fighting against those who had apostatized, as-Siddiq ﵁ sent Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ to the land of Basra and he fell upon Ubullah, took it, and took Madāʾin Kisra, which is in Iraq, partly by treaty and partly by force.” One sentence, two places, and between those two places lies the geography on which the whole futuhat would find its foundation.

This chapter follows Suyuti ﵀ step by step. We will say no more than he says, and at the point where his phrasing asks a later reading for clarification, we will say so honestly. But we will, precisely within that strict fidelity to the source, show what it means that Abu Bakr ﵁ sent Khalid ﵁ not to a further tribe in the desert but to the land of Basra.

Who Khalid ﵁ was in these months

Before Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ left Medina for his northeastern charge, a whole chapter of the Ridda lay behind him. He had subdued Banu Asad and Ghatafan, he had broken up al-Yamamah on the battlefield where the Liar fell, he had borne the heaviest losses of early qurra ﵃ on a single day of his career, and he had reported on it to Medina. He was no longer the “Sayf Allah”, the Sword of Allah ﷻ, awaiting his test; he had made good on that name, given to him by the Prophet ﷺ, in two years of campaigns.

And yet Abu Bakr ﵁ sent him again, not home, not to rest, not to Medina to tend his wounded and replenish his men at the hems of the mosque. He sent him eastward, to a frontier where the Arab tribes met with Persian power. The choice of Khalid ﵁ as the man for this charge is no accident; it is a judgment by Abu Bakr ﵁ about the nature of what was coming. A region where the tribes of Bakr ibn Waʾil and the garrisons of Kisra overlapped called for a commander who could act without hesitation and who read the terrain of Central Arabian steppe and light oasis-desert as his mother tongue.

The land of Basra

Basra as we know it, founded by ʿUmar ﵁ as a garrison city in sixteen after the Hijra, did not yet exist in the twelfth year. When Suyuti ﵀ writes “the land of Basra”, he refers to the geography that would later bear that name: the southern bank of the Shatt al-ʿArab, the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the hinterland of date palms and marshlands that runs deep into the Iraqi plain. It was, in seventh-century understanding, the threshold of Persia.

The Shatt al-ʿArab is no ordinary river; it is the channel in which the two great streams of Mesopotamia mingle their waters before they glide into the Persian Gulf. Whoever commands its bank commands the supply to the heart of the Sasanian empire, and whoever holds its harbor controls the shipping between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. No geographer in antiquity could conceal the strategic significance of this place, and the Persians had in the centuries before Islam laid out there a belt of garrisons to protect the southern approach to Ctesiphon.

To this land Abu Bakr ﵁ sent Khalid ﵁, not as a skirmish, not as a reconnaissance, not as an act of reprisal, but as a campaign. The phrasing of Suyuti ﵀ leaves no room for half-measures: Khalid ﵁ was sent, he fell upon, he took, he commanded.

Ubullah: the gate of the river delta

Ubullah lay on the northwest bank of the Shatt al-ʿArab, roughly at the spot where Basra would later arise. It was, in the Persian administration, a harbor, and in the world trade of the seventh century it was a junction. Ships that came from Sind, from Oman, from the harbors of Africa, sailed into Ubullah before their goods were transshipped onto river craft that went up the Tigris to Ctesiphon. Whoever controlled Ubullah got a finger on the pulse of the Persian economy itself.

The Sasanians knew this and had manned the place strongly. A garrison of Persian soldiers and local Arab tribes, mainly of Bakr ibn Waʾil, formed the outer ring of defense. The fortress itself was, in the Persian sense, considered impregnable; it had for centuries been the eastern end of a military frontier that ran westward into the provincial borders of Syria. The idea that an army from Medina, from the Hijaz, from the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, could take this harbor lay beyond what Persian strategy had held possible at all.

Khalid ﵁ came, and he fell upon Ubullah. The verb that Suyuti ﵀ uses indicates the dynamic of movement: it was no slow siege, no patient starving-out, but an assault that was impossibly fast for the defender. Khalid ﵁ had learned with Banu Asad how to wrest a plain from an opponent who was taking up position with cavalry, and at Yamamah he had learned how to break through a garden of fanatical defenders. At Ubullah he made use of the Persian habit of withdrawing to fixed positions: he gave them no time to occupy their fixed positions.

The city fell. Suyuti ﵀ says no more than that Khalid ﵁ took it. No list of the fallen is given, no treaty is cited, no formation of attack is described. But what the sentence conceals by its brevity is what history afterward worked out: the mouth of the Tigris was, for the first time in centuries, no longer held by a Persian garrison. The southern gate of the Sasanian empire stood open.

The weight of a harbor

Before the pen goes on to Madāʾin, one moment must be held. The taking of Ubullah is no footnote in the Iraqi campaign; it is the birth of the Muslim presence in Mesopotamia as a standing presence, not as a raid. A raid withdraws, a conquest remains. Khalid ﵁ did not withdraw from Ubullah, but he occupied it, he placed it under administration, and he used it as a base for what followed.

For Abu Bakr ﵁ in Medina this was a turning point that he probably processed in silence. Until that moment the whole dynastic act of his caliphate had been defensive: restoring what the Prophet ﷺ had left behind, bringing back those who had apostatized, stabilizing what had become unstable. With Ubullah the direction changed. No longer was the hand of Medina occupied only with inner healing; it reached out, and it reached not against a foreign tribe in the desert, but against an empire older than most of the place-names of the peninsula.

Whoever reads history knows what comes after this. The Muslims would, under ʿUmar ﵁, bring down the whole Sasanian empire between al-Qadisiyya in sixteen and Nahawand in twenty-one after the Hijra. The Iraqi campaign of Abu Bakr ﵁ is, in this light, the overture. But it is no piece of music that depends on what comes after it; it is an event in itself, in the twelfth year, with its own sound.

Into the interior: Madāʾin Kisra

From Ubullah Khalid ﵁ marched on. Suyuti ﵀ withholds the intervening place-names, and we keep to his pen. What he does say is that Khalid ﵁ took Madāʾin Kisra, “which is in Iraq, partly by treaty and partly by force.” The phrasing is, read on its own, remarkable in two respects. First, Suyuti ﵀ explicitly states that he is speaking of Madāʾin in Iraq, as though he foresees that his reader might think of another place with that name. Second, he describes the manner in which the city fell: not solely by force, not solely by treaty, but mixed.

Madāʾin means literally “the cities” and was the Arabic name for the Persian capital Ctesiphon, a great urban complex on the Tigris, about thirty-five kilometers southeast of what would later become Baghdad. The city was not one city; it was, to the letter of its name, a plural. On both banks of the river stretched palace quarters, residential districts, markets, and garrisons, and the Taq Kisra, the white arch of the palace of Khosrau, stood on the eastern bank and cast its shadow over an empire that reached from the Euphrates to the Hindu Kush.

Suyuti ﵀ records that Madāʾin was taken under Khalid ﵁ in this twelfth year. He states this with the care of the pen that found it in his source, and we render his text faithfully.

Editor’s note: Suyuti ﵀ here records the taking of Madāʾin Kisra, which historically would fall only under ʿUmar ﵁ in 16 AH after the Battle of al-Qādisiyya. We render the text of Suyuti ﵀ faithfully; the reader should bear in mind that the Iraqi capital was actually taken only under the second caliph ﵁.

This note is no correction of Suyuti ﵀; it is an aid to the modern reader in placing the text within the broader chronicle of the futuhat. The historians after Suyuti ﵀ have dated the fall of Ctesiphon precisely to the year sixteen after the Hijra, and the battles that preceded it, especially al-Qadisiyya in fifteen, lay well after the passing of Abu Bakr ﵁ in thirteen. What Suyuti ﵀ has joined together in his pen is possibly the movement of the whole Iraqi campaign under Khalid ﵁, which began in twelve and years later found its climax through the hand of Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁. We keep to the phrasing of Suyuti ﵀ because this is a Suyuti-faithful article, and we grant the reader the context so that the chronology of the broader history is not lost.

“Partly by treaty and partly by force”

The phrasing that Suyuti ﵀ chooses for the manner in which Madāʾin fell is a phrasing from the fiqh of war that has its own history. Sulhan wa-ʿanwatan, by treaty and by force, is no loose turn of phrase; it is a legal term. What falls sulhan keeps its land in the possession of its original inhabitants; what falls ʿanwatan becomes the property of the Islamic state. The matters that arise from this distinction are extensive: taxation, property, the treatment of religious minorities, and the lawful status of the inhabitants under Islamic governance.

That Madāʾin falls in this hybrid condition is therefore not only a form of reporting; it is a legal portrait. One quarter was surrendered by treaty, the other taken by force; one group of inhabitants kept its property rights under a tribute, the other lost its possessions to the treasury of the Muslims. The pen of Suyuti ﵀ withholds which quarters had which outcome, but the phrasing itself is enough to indicate that the taking of the Persian capital was no simple battle but a mixed series of events that fell under two legal categories.

Geography as argument

What makes the Iraqi campaign of Abu Bakr ﵁ a turning point is the geography it enters. The Arabian Peninsula is, in the broadest sense, an island: surrounded by sea on three sides and by desert on the northern side. The old jahiliyya tribes had known the desert of Nafud and the northwest as their trade route to Syria, but the marshlands between Euphrates and Tigris were a foreign world. Whoever came here came not out of the geography of his own ancestors; he came out of one geographical order into an unknown one.

Khalid ﵁ thereby crossed, with his army, not only a political border; he crossed an ecological border. The rainwater of Mesopotamia is different from that of the Hijaz, the dates are different, the horses must be fed differently, and the humidity in the marshes is an enemy in itself for one accustomed to the dry air of the peninsula. The Sasanians, who knew these marshes, had relied on them for centuries as a natural defense, for no army from the south, so they believed, could maintain its provisions and its animals in such conditions.

The campaign of Khalid ﵁ is, in this respect, a logistical feat that remains hidden in the one sentence of Suyuti ﵀. But it was real. For the first time in Arab history a great army from the peninsula moved successfully to the northeast, broke through the natural barrier of the marshes, and occupied the urban junctions of a world empire. What the Prophet ﷺ had founded in Medina as a community commanded, within two years of his passing, the mouth of the Tigris.

The hand of Abu Bakr ﵁ in Medina

Back in Medina Abu Bakr ﵁ read the reports that came from the northeast. He was, in these months, no young man; he was sixty-two, and the burden of his caliphate, combined with the poison that according to tradition he had taken in a year earlier together with al-Harith ibn Kaladah, he bore without complaint. The reports of Khalid ﵁ must have struck him with a mixture of joy and worry: joy, because the hand of Islam reached to where even the Prophet ﷺ in his lifetime had not moved; worry, because he knew that a campaign to the northeast could not postpone a campaign to the northwest, to Syria.

In that same twelfth year Abu Bakr ﵁ at the same time made the preparation for the campaign that will be treated in the tenth chapter: the sending of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ and his army to Syria. The Iraqi and Syrian campaigns overlap in his caliphate without the one being completed before the other begins. Khalid ﵁ in the east, ʿAmr ﵁ in the west, and in the middle the old caliph ﵁ in Medina who spreads the scrolls of Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ across his lap and sees the Mushaf grow while the borders expand.

What began did not end

Suyuti ﵀ writes one sentence, and that sentence withholds what all generations who come after him know: the campaign of Khalid ﵁ to Ubullah and Madāʾin in the twelfth year was not the last act, but the first act of a longer history. The full taking of Iraq would be completed under ʿUmar ﵁, with the fall of Ctesiphon in its real, historical date, and the battle at al-Qadisiyya that broke Persian power in its core. What Abu Bakr ﵁ had begun, his successor completed, and what the successor completed had already been laid out in the choice that Abu Bakr ﵁ made in his last year of life to send Khalid ﵁ not home but onward.

In that light the Iraqi campaign in this caliphate is not the complete conquest that its Suyuti-sentence suggests; it is the crossing of a threshold. The peninsula left its own borders for the first time, and the Muslims became, for the first time in their history, a power that existed not only for itself but that other powers began to know. And whoever reads the end of the sentence of Suyuti ﵀, “partly by treaty and partly by force”, reads not only a phrasing from the fiqh; he reads the portrait of a community that, in its dealing with the world beyond its borders, learned to be at once hard and soft: the sword where it was needed, the treaty where it was possible, and in both cases one aim, the carrying forth of the message that the Messenger ﷺ in his thirteen years in Mecca and his ten years in Medina had fixed in a text that now, in that same twelfth year, was being collected in the houses of Medina.

A keystone, not a finale

The Iraqi campaign is, for the history of the caliphate of Abu Bakr ﵁, no keystone but an opening. What he does here is not to complete an empire but to uncork the futuhat. He dies before the harvest of his movement is in. Khalid ﵁ would later, by command of ʿUmar ﵁, be transferred from the Iraqi front to the Syrian, and he would win at the Yarmuk one of the greatest victories in the history of Islam. But the strategic decision not to leave him at home after the Ridda, not to dismiss him after the heavy losses at Yamamah, to send him directly after the ending of the apostasy to the land of Basra, is a decision of Abu Bakr ﵁.

The old caliph ﵁ in Medina, with his body that would fail him in the last months, saw what a commander of his stature could not see in the dust of his own campaign: that the fence of the peninsula was no longer a fence but a gate. A gate that would give opening after opening, as long as the hand that pushed it open remained strong. And as long as the Mushaf was being collected in Medina, the hand was strong.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 64.