The Conquest of Egypt

The Twentieth Year

In the twentieth and twenty-first years of the Hijra, which in the Gregorian reckoning falls in the years 640 to 642, a land entered the borders of the Islamic state that, since the time of the pharaohs, since the time of Yusuf ﵇ and his brothers, since the time of Musa ﵇ and Aaron ﵇, had held its own place in the memory of mankind: Egypt, the land of the Nile, the granary that had fed the Byzantine Empire, the province from which Constantinople had drawn its wheat ever since the days when an emperor by the name of Augustus had added the region to his realm. It was a land with a history of its own and a people of its own, the Copts, who professed the Christian faith in a form that in the Constantinopolitan capital was regarded as heretical, with a language of its own that still carried the echo of ancient Egyptian within it, and with an ecclesiastical patriarch of its own in Alexandria who knew himself to be more beloved in the heart of his community than in the palace on the Bosphorus.

In this land, in these months, and under the command of a man whose name in the mouth of the Quraysh of Mecca had once been a name that ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ had known as a young man in the assemblies of Dar an-Nadwah, Islam opened its third great province. ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁, the tactician whom the Prophet ﷺ had recognised when he returned with his trading caravans from Egypt to Mecca, led the army that in two years made possible what had seemed impossible. Suyuti ﵀ gives it in a single line, and in that single line lies a history that we shall carefully unfold in this article, without straying from his concise record.

Suyuti’s Lines

Suyuti ﵀ writes that in the twentieth year of the Hijra Egypt was opened by force, and he adds that it is also said that all of Egypt was opened by treaty, except Alexandria, which was opened by force. And in the twenty-first year of the Hijra Alexandria was opened by force, together with Nahawand and Barqah and other places.

Two lines, three dates, and the entire conquest of an empire that had stood for six centuries under Roman and Byzantine authority. We see how Suyuti ﵀ wields his pen with restraint: he does not name the battle of Heliopolis, he does not name the seven months of siege around the fortress of Babylon, he does not name the negotiations with the Coptic patriarch Benjamin, and he does not name the panic in Constantinople when the reports arrived there. He gives the outcome: Egypt opened, Alexandria by force, the years 20 and 21 AH. And so in this article we remain close to that outcome and build its meaning out of Suyuti’s own steady manner of transmitting these months, a conquest that, through the wisdom of a commander and the guidance of a Khalifah ﵁, completed in two years what the Byzantine empire had built up in six centuries.

ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ as a Figure

ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ was, before he became a Companion, a Qurayshite from Mecca whom the older generations in the city respected for his intelligence and his commercial gifts. He had led caravans to the Yemen, to Syria and to Egypt; he knew the languages, he knew the roads, and he knew the customs of the Roman legions he had encountered in his trading years in Caesarea, in Damascus and in Alexandria. When he came to Medina in the eighth year of the Hijra to embrace Islam, the Prophet ﷺ received him with a warmth that astonished the other Companions, for he knew what he saw in him. ʿAmr ﵁ was drawn into important missions, and in the years after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ he was given command over one of the three armies that Abu Bakr ﵁ sent to Syria. He was at Yarmuk, he led men, he knew how a Byzantine army arrays itself, and he knew even better how an Arab army can be manoeuvred around it.

When the idea arose in his mind that after Syria it must be Egypt’s turn, the thought was not reckless, for he knew that Byzantine power in Egypt stood on a fault line. The Copts were on the whole estranged from Constantinople, the patriarch was in exile, the garrisons were overstretched by the wars against the Sassanids that had drained the region in the preceding decades, and the people of the Nile paid heavy taxes to a distant emperor with whom they shared little sympathy. ʿAmr ﵁ laid the matter before ʿUmar ﵁ in Medina. The Khalifah ﵁ hesitated, for he knew that a campaign to Egypt was far away, that his armies in Syria were not yet entirely free of the plague of Amwas that had struck in the year 18 AH, and that an expansion on yet another front carried great risks. He consulted his council and pondered it for long days.

The tradition records that ʿUmar ﵁ at last consented, but with a condition. He sent ʿAmr ﵁ off with a limited contingent of men, four thousand according to the majority of the sources, with the instruction that, should a second letter come from Medina before ʿAmr ﵁ had crossed the border of Egypt, he was to turn back, whereas he might proceed if the letter reached him after the crossing. ʿAmr ﵁ moved his troops into the Sinai at a pace meant to outrun the second letter. When the messenger from Medina overtook him, he asked, without opening the letter, where exactly he stood, and the messenger answered truthfully: on Egyptian soil. ʿAmr ﵁ read the letter, smiled, and gave his troops the command to march on. Thus, with the shrewdness of a merchant and the courage of a soldier, the conquest of Egypt was set in motion.

The Spiritual Meaning

We must, before we go further, pause for a moment at what the Muslims under ʿUmar ﵁ actually wished to achieve in this campaign. It was not, as later imperial accounts would portray it, a conquest for the sake of conquest, nor the expansion of an empire for the wealth of an empire. Suyuti ﵀ writes it briefly, but his brevity has a sound of its own: he speaks of openings, not conquests, in his characteristic word fatḥ, which means an open door. Islam opened Egypt; it did not break the gate open out of greed, but found the gate ajar and pushed it further open because the people on the other side of that gate, the Copts of the Nile valley, were in great number oppressed and forgotten by a distant emperor who had above all declared them heretics.

The spiritual meaning of this opening, as Suyuti ﵀ indicates it elsewhere in his account of the caliphate of ʿUmar ﵁, lies in the continuity of the message that the Prophet ﷺ had given in his days. Islam is no faith for one tribe, for one language or for one land; it is a message of tawhid that must go everywhere, and that wherever it comes leaves the gate open for those who would accept it, and gives protection to those who do not accept it but wish to live justly under its authority. The jizyah, the tax that the non-Muslims paid in exchange for military exemption and protection, was no punishment but a covenant, and the Copts would, in the judgement of the majority of them, exchange this covenant for the heavy taxation they had paid to Constantinople, and they would in the centuries thereafter keep their churches, their patriarch and their language in peace within the Islamic state.

ʿUmar ﵁ knew this, and ʿAmr ﵁ knew it from his Khalifah ﵁ in Medina. The line of march through the Sinai was not conducted in the style of a plundering army, and the towns the Muslims passed were offered the standard covenant: the choice between accepting Islam, accepting the jizyah and the protection, or armed confrontation. The Khalifah ﵁ had charged his commander that no church was to be destroyed without cause, no monk killed, no orphan taken captive, no provision carried off without payment. That was the style, and that was the legacy of the Prophet ﷺ, passed on through the mouth of the Khalifah ﵁ to the commander.

The March and the First Engagements

ʿAmr ﵁ crossed the Sinai with his four thousand men and reached the eastern border of Egypt. He encamped at al-ʿArish, he marched straight through the desert in which the Israelites under Musa ﵇ had wandered forty years, and he kept to the southern path where the water supply remained manageable. At Bilbays, a fortress on the eastern edge of the Nile delta, came a first real skirmish, and the fortress was taken after a short siege. The news of its fall went out across the land, and the Byzantine commander, a Roman whose name the Arabic sources render as al-Muqawqis (in the Greek sources Cyrus, the prefect of Alexandria and patriarch of the Melkite church), was shaken by it.

ʿUmar ﵁ in Medina received the first reports of the victories. He was relieved but also anxious that ʿAmr ﵁ had pressed too far with too few men, and so he sent reinforcements under az-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwam ﵁, who set out personally from Medina with several thousand men and who was to join the army of ʿAmr ﵁ at the fortress of Babylon. With that reinforcement the army numbered about twelve thousand men, a considerable force but still a fraction of what the Byzantine emperor had available in the land, and a minute percentage of the Egyptian population, which in all ran into the millions.

At Heliopolis, to the north-east of present-day Cairo, came the first open battle. ʿAmr ﵁ arrayed his troops in a wide half-circle, lured the Byzantine cavalry into a sally, and struck at the flanks, after which the Byzantines were driven back to the fortress of Babylon, a Roman stronghold on the eastern bank of the Nile where Old Cairo now lies. There a siege began that would last seven months. Suyuti ﵀ does not name the siege explicitly, but places the “opening by force” of Egypt in the year 20 AH; that is, according to the majority of the broader tradition, the year in which the fall of Babylon took place, in April 641 of the Christian reckoning.

The Fortress of Babylon

The fortress of Babylon, not to be confused with the Babylon of Mesopotamia, was the strategic key to Egypt. Whoever held Babylon held the eastern gate to the Nile delta, held the navigation on the southern arm of the river, and held the roads that led to Memphis and further south. The Byzantines knew this, and they had placed their best troops within it, with al-Muqawqis as the highest authority, with the patriarch Cyrus, returned from Constantinople, holding power to negotiate, and with reinforcements brought up over the Nile for as long as that remained possible.

ʿAmr ﵁ encircled the fortress, cut off the access roads, no longer let the ships on the Nile berth at the walls, and rotated his patrols so that his men found rest. He held talks with al-Muqawqis through envoys, some transmitted in sources that lie outside Suyuti ﵀ and which we indicate here in summary. The Byzantine commander offered first sums of money, then deference, then a treaty, but ʿAmr ﵁ held to the three choices he had received from his Khalifah ﵁: Islam, jizyah, or the sword. Al-Muqawqis chose in the end to negotiate over the jizyah for the interior, while Alexandria in the north would still defend itself separately.

The fall of Babylon came in the spring of the twentieth year of the Hijra. The Muslims entered without slaughter; they took the garrisons prisoner, let them march off under guard to the northern coast, and established a government of their own. On the spot where ʿAmr ﵁ had pitched his tent for the siege, on the eastern bank of the Nile, he would in the coming months found the city of Fustat, the first Islamic capital of Egypt, which in the centuries thereafter would grow into what we know as Cairo. A mosque was built there, a simple construction of palm trunks and clay, which would bear the name Masjid ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs and which to this day stands on that spot, in a form restored and widened by countless generations but still marking the place where the first Muslims had pitched their tents in Egypt.

The Delta and the South

With Babylon fallen, the whole of the Nile delta opened. The towns of the delta opened their gates to the Muslims one by one, some by treaty and some after brief resistance. Suyuti ﵀ notes that it is also said that all of Egypt was opened by treaty, and that tradition comes from the majority of the population that went over without battle. The Copts, long estranged from Constantinople, found in the Muslims a conquest that approached their churches and their patriarch with more respect than the emperor on the Bosphorus had shown. The patriarch Benjamin, who had lived for years in exile, returned to Alexandria under the protection of ʿAmr ﵁ and resumed his office, an event that Coptic literature remembers to this day in grateful terms.

The south of Egypt, the Upper Egypt of the old pharaonic cities, opened in the months that followed. Memphis fell without battle, Akhmim and other centres followed, and the Islamic administration extended as far as the first cataract of the Nile. The frontier with Nubia was for the moment held, and there ʿAmr ﵁ would in a later year send a separate expedition that was settled in a treaty, the Baqt, which would keep the Nubian territories for centuries in a peaceful relation with the Islamic state.

Alexandria

One city remained: Alexandria, the great port on the Mediterranean. It was the city of Alexander the Macedonian ﵇ (according to the tradition that identifies him as Dhul-Qarnayn; this identification is contested among scholars), the city of the Ptolemies, the city of the famed library, the city of the Alexandrian patriarchs, the city that with its walls, its harbour, its fleet, its provisions and its community of Greeks and Jews and Copts carried within it an echo of the whole ancient world. Here, they thought in Constantinople, the Byzantines would organise their last defence; here the reinforcements that came by sea from Anatolia and from Cyprus and from Constantinople itself could berth; here the conquest would come to a halt.

In the twenty-first year of the Hijra, Suyuti ﵀ writes , Alexandria was opened by force. The Muslim armies, under ʿAmr ﵁, besieged the city for months, while the Byzantines defended it with every means they had and reinforcements arrived by sea. An initial negotiation under al-Muqawqis broke down because Constantinople rejected it and recalled its negotiator. ʿAmr ﵁ waited, struck where the walls were weak, blockaded the harbour with a fleet of his own that he had had built in the delta, and at last the walls fell in the autumn of 641 of the Christian reckoning, which corresponds to the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first year of the Hijra.

The taking of Alexandria was not without pain, for there was fighting, men fell, and some parts of the city were damaged. But ʿAmr ﵁, faithful to the instructions of his Khalifah ﵁ in Medina, held his men under strict discipline: no plundering, no slaughter of civilians, no destruction of churches. The city was brought under Islamic administration, the patriarch kept his office, the community of Copts and Greeks kept its temples and synagogues, and the harbour remained open for trade. The legend that ʿAmr ﵁ is supposed to have set the library of Alexandria ablaze is a later fiction that is supported neither by Suyuti ﵀ nor by any other early source; the library had already been destroyed several times centuries before the Muslim conquest by internal unrest and fires, and what the Muslims found was a perishable remnant which they left intact in the hands of its Coptic and Greek librarians.

The Letter of ʿAmr ﵁ to ʿUmar ﵁

When the city had fallen, ʿAmr ﵁ wrote a letter to ʿUmar ﵁ in Medina, in which he described what he had taken, described the city, and asked for instructions for its administration. The letter is reproduced more than once in later sources, and even though Suyuti ﵀ does not quote it word for word, its content is known from the whole corpus of traditions surrounding the Egyptian conquest. ʿAmr ﵁ wrote roughly in this spirit, that he had taken for the Khalifah ﵁ a city whose description was impossible without seeing it with one’s own eyes, with four thousand palaces, four thousand baths, four hundred theatres, twelve thousand greengrocers and forty thousand Jewish subjects who paid jizyah. The numbers are by later standards perhaps exaggerated, but they show that ʿAmr ﵁ in his report to his Khalifah ﵁ did not wish to conceal the greatness of what had been won.

ʿUmar ﵁ read the letter, and his answer, as it is transmitted by several sources, was not euphoric but sober. He asked ʿAmr ﵁ to take no dwelling that the Khalifah ﵁ could not also take, to wear no clothing that the people could not also wear, to set no table that would make the Bedouin shudder if they came to it. He confirmed that the capital of the new administration would lie in Fustat, not in Alexandria, and that Alexandria was to be kept as a seaport but that the administrative centre was to stand on the Nile, closer to the source of the population and the land. ʿAmr ﵁ accepted the instructions and turned his work further to the organisation of the administration of Fustat and the wider province.

The Wisdom of a Khalifah ﵁ and the Hand of a Commander

What happened in these two years would change the history of Egypt forever. For the Egyptians it meant the exchange of a distant and often hostile Byzantine rule for a near and generally just Islamic rule. For the Muslim world it meant the conquest of a granary that would feed the capital Medina and the other provinces in years of drought. For Islam it meant the spread of a message of faith to a land that since the time of Yusuf ﵇ had lived in the memory of the believers, and to which the Qur’an itself refers in countless verses.

ʿUmar ﵁, according to the tradition that occurs in the broader sources, said that the opening of Egypt had been shown to him in his sleep. He knew, before the letter of ʿAmr ﵁ came, that the city had fallen; he knew it in the stillness of his supplication. We respect the brevity of Suyuti ﵀ by not building this dimension of the events into a narrative element of this article, but we mention it in the spirit in which Suyuti ﵀ himself speaks of the Khalifah ﵁ in his broader work: a man who in all that he did asked first of Allah ﷻ, then of his council, and only then proceeded to act.

ʿAmr ﵁ remained governor of Egypt for the rest of the reign of ʿUmar ﵁ and would remain in that office for some years under ʿUthman ﵁ as well. He built up Fustat, he kept the population in peace, he sent grain to Medina whenever the Hijaz needed it, he organised the jizyah by the standard the Khalifah ﵁ had set him, and he let the Copts perform their worship in freedom. The mosque that bears his name still stands, and the city he founded has grown into the Cairo of today. But the source of his conduct lay not in his capacity for city planning or his military skill; it lay in the Khalifah ﵁ who had sent him, who had set bounds for him, and who had taught him that an opening is no conquest, and that a conquest is no occasion for luxury but for stewardship.

The Spiritual Reckoning

When the dust of Alexandria had settled, when Fustat had been founded, when the Nile delta fell peacefully under the Muslims, the community of believers could look back on a span of two years in which a land had been opened that had belonged for six centuries to a distant emperor. No euphoria followed in Medina. ʿUmar ﵁ ascended the minbar in the Masjid an-Nabawi and spoke, after the manner of his khutbah, short sentences in which the gratitude was felt not through what he said but through the way he said it. He forbade festivities, he forbade extravagant pricing, he forbade showy clothing for those who had just returned from the field. He received the spoils according to the rules of the Prophet ﷺ, he distributed them according to the priority he would set down in the Diwan, and he sent a portion to the poor of the Hijaz who were still recovering from the drought of the Year of Ashes.

Egypt was within, and that was the outcome that stands in the two lines of Suyuti ﵀. What had to happen before that, thousands of men under ʿAmr ﵁ had delivered in two years, and what made it possible, one Khalifah ﵁ in Medina had made possible by sending the right men to the right place with the right instructions. In the following year Suyuti ﵀ would lead us to yet another opening, which he names in the same sentence as Alexandria: Nahawand, in Persia, the battle after which the Persians could no longer mobilise an army. But before we go there, we must pause for a moment in Medina, for the twentieth year of the Hijra is not only the year of Egypt; it is also the year in which ʿUmar ﵁ in al-Muharram established the pay register, the Diwan, and that decision was, in its administrative consequences, perhaps as far-reaching as the opening of an empire.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed.), p. 136 (years 20 and 21 AH: the opening of Egypt, the opening of Alexandria).
• Further knowledge from the broader Suyuti ﵀ passages on the governing style of ʿUmar ﵁ and the instructions to his commanders, pp. 143–151.