Further Conquests under ʿUmar ﵁ — Sham, Iraq and the Years Between

The Year-Table as Backbone

Whoever wishes to see the history of the caliphate of ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ at a glance, as Suyuti ﵀ recorded it in his Tarikh al-Khulafa, must open pages 134 through 136. There stands, in a careful, restrained enumeration, what took place between the year 13 and the year 23 after the Hijra on the northern and eastern fronts of the world that came under the hand of the Caliph in Medina. It is a table, year after year, with a few sentences per year, without long battle narratives, without heroic histories of individual commanders, without detailed diplomatic instruments. There is rather a chain of openings, futuhat, in which the names of cities and regions pass by like place names upon a milestone.

In this article we shall not attempt what Suyuti ﵀ does not do. We shall not narrate the phases of the individual battles, for those phase-narratives are best sought in Tabari ﵀ and Ibn Kathir ﵀, and in our cartography in the phase-stories on the map. We remain within the strict text of Suyuti ﵀, and we let the year-table itself speak, for in it there lies enough. The pattern that rises from it is the pattern of a caliphate that in ten years reached from Medina to the banks of the Oxus and the banks of the Nile, and it did so without the Caliph ever having left Medina except for the Hajj or for one journey to Sham.

The Year 14 AH — The Openings of Sham and Basra

The year that began shortly after the baiʿah of the Caliph was the year in which the first great openings of his office fell. Suyuti ﵀ summarizes it: “In the year 14 AH Damascus was opened, partly by treaty and partly by force, and Hims (old Emessa) and Baalbek were opened by treaty, and Basra and Ubullah by force.” Four names in one line, and behind those four names lies a considerable history.

Damascus was the old capital of Roman Sham, a city with a history of millennia, where the walls had been strengthened by the Romans and the marketplaces filled by the Eastern Roman emperors. When the Muslim armies in 13 AH under Abu Bakr ﵁ had entered Sham, they had from south to north won or besieged the outlying districts one by one. With the baiʿah of ʿUmar ﵁ in Jumādā al-Akhirah of 13 AH the command over the campaign entered a new phase, for the Caliph in Medina held the strategic line, while the commanders in the field bore the tactical execution.

Damascus fell in 14 AH, and Suyuti ﵀ notes in one half-sentence the peculiar dual nature of that opening: partly by treaty and partly by force. Whoever entered the city would recognize the mixture of it in its streets. In some quarters, where the inhabitants had come in time to an agreement with the Muslim commanders, the protection of the treaty applied, and the inhabitants paid the jizyah, kept their churches, kept their property, and received the guarantee of the protection of the Muslim state. In other quarters, where the walls had been stormed, the right of the victor applied, and the property was divided according to the rules of the spoils. Suyuti ﵀ does not give the names of the commanders in this passage; he gives only the fact.

Hims, the old Emessa, fell in the same year by treaty. It was a city in the interior of Sham, on the road between Damascus and the north, and its inhabitants had chosen not to follow the second road, for they had come to an agreement. Suyuti ﵀ mentions in other passages that the inhabitants of Hims, Christians among them, repeatedly declared after the fall of the city that the jizyah under the Muslims was lighter for them than the imperial taxes under the Romans had been. Baalbek, the old Heliopolis with its imposing temple of the sun and its Corinthian columns, likewise fell by treaty: a city of priests and Hellenistic temples, which in its new form under Muslim protection could continue its life without its inhabitants being forced to change their faith.

On the eastern front, on the threshold of Iraq, two other cities fell in that same year 14 AH, Basra and Ubullah, both by force. Basra was a place yet to be founded for the Muslims, on the southern tip of Iraq, not far from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, and Ubullah was an existing city to the south of it, at a trading place where the seagoing ships from India and the Persian Gulf put in. Whoever won Ubullah won access to the sea, and whoever founded Basra won the urban base for the Muslim soldiers in the south of Iraq. The combination of the two gave the caliphate in a single year both a naval gate and a garrison capital.

The Year 15 AH — Yarmuk and Qadisiyyah, and the Founding of Kufa

When Suyuti ﵀ enters the year 15 AH, the pen briefly leaps into vividness. “In the year 15 AH all of Jordan was opened by force except Tiberias, which was by treaty. In this year were the battles of Yarmuk and Qadisiyyah.” Two battles that tilted the whole of world history, summed up in two names.

In earlier articles we have already paused separately at Yarmuk and al-Qadisiyyah. Yarmuk was the decisive encounter between the Muslim army and the Eastern Roman field army in the Wadi al-Yarmuk in the northern Hauran, in Rajab of 15 AH. The Roman emperor Heraclius had hoped that a concluding battle might drive the Muslims back to the desert again, but the battle lasted days, and ended in an irreversible defeat for the Romans, so that the depth of Sham, and with it the whole coast of the eastern Mediterranean, lay open thereby for the caliphate. For the phase-narrative geography we refer to the battle-story with this article:

.

Al-Qadisiyyah was the Iraqi parallel, in 15 or early 16 AH, on the western bank of the Euphrates facing the Sasanian army of Rustam. The Persian empire had fought its battle with its elephants and its heavy cavalry, and the Muslim army under Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ had won the battle in an encounter that had lasted days. What came after was what Suyuti ﵀ adds in the same passage: “In the year Sacd founded Kufa, and ʿUmar ﵁ established regular pay (for the warriors), registers, and gave allowances according to priority.” The founding of Kufa was a direct consequence of al-Qadisiyyah, for the old Persian city of al-Hira lay too far, and its climate was too unhealthy for the Arab warriors, so that Saʿd ﵁ chose a spot on the Euphrates where the breeze blew from the desert, and built Kufa there. For the phase-narrative geography of al-Qadisiyyah we refer to:

.

In the Levant, parallel to these events, Jordan fell. Tiberias, the city on the lake of Galilee, came to a treaty before it came to an encounter, while other cities in Jordan fell by force, and the Levantine coast, with its harbour cities Acre, Tyre, Sidon and Beirut, slowly came into the sight of the Muslim commanders.

The Year 16 AH — Madāʾin Kisra and Jerusalem

The year 16 AH was the year in which the Sasanian heart fell and the Christian heart wavered. Suyuti ﵀ writes: “In the year 16 AH Ahwaz and Madaʾin were opened, and in the latter Sacd ﵁ established the Jumucah prayer in the great hall of Khosrau, and this was the first Jumucah prayer that was held in Iraq. That was in the month of Safar. In that same year Takrit was opened, ʿUmar ﵁ travelled and took al-Bait al-Maqdis (Jerusalem) and gave his famous khutbah at al-Jabiyyah.”

Madāʾin Kisra, the urban conglomeration in which the old Sasanian capital Ctesiphon and the adjoining cities had grown together, was the heart of the Persian empire. Its Iwan, the imposing hall of Khosrau with its enormous parabolic vault, was the place where the Sasanian rulers had reigned for centuries. When Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ entered it in 16 AH, he did something that would resound in the Iraqi memory for centuries, for he performed on Friday the first Jumucah prayer in Iraq, in the great hall of Khosrau. The community stood praying in the direction of the Kaʿbah, in a space where a few months earlier the Persian shah had sat upon his throne. Suyuti ﵀ marks it as the first Jumucah of Iraq, and the image itself is a turning point: an empire that had thought itself untouchable lay open, and the audience hall of an emperor had become a mosque.

With Madāʾin Kisra the treasure of Khosrau was brought to division under the hand of Saʿd ﵁, and the precious things were sent to Medina. Suyuti ﵀ mentions elsewhere, in a connection with the report of Salman ﵁, how the Caliph burst into tears at the sight of the treasure. Another would have rejoiced; ʿUmar ﵁ saw in the treasure a test. He would say, in a statement that Suyuti ﵀ transmits in another passage, that a community that gathers the treasures of the world either knows how to preserve its virtue or perishes at the hand of those treasures, and he gave the order to distribute the entire treasure among the community.

Besides Madāʾin, Takrit on the Tigris also fell, a city north of Baghdad, and again a treaty arrangement was made. And in that same year 16 AH Bayt al-Maqdis, Jerusalem, received its new Lord. The Caliph travelled himself from Medina to al-Jabiyyah, a place in the Hauran, and there he gave the khutbah that would become known in history as the khutbah of al-Jabiyyah. There he negotiated the Umariyya treaty with the patriarch Sophronius, and there he gave protection to the Christians and Jews of Bayt al-Maqdis, the protection of their churches, their possessions, their forms of worship, in exchange for the jizyah and submission to the Muslim state. For the phase-narrative geography of Jerusalem we refer to:

.

In the same passage where Suyuti ﵀ notes the arrival of the Caliph in Jerusalem, he also adds something that would change the organization of the whole state: “In Rabīʿ al-Awwal the dating from the Hijra was begun on the advice of ʿAli ﵁.” The Hijri calendar, which we have used ever since to count every year in Muslim history, was instituted in that same year 16 AH, alongside the fall of Madāʾin and the conquest of Jerusalem, a year of turning points.

The Year 17 AH — Enlargement of the Mosques, Tustar and Suza

The year 17 AH was the year in which the Caliph, back from Sham, turned his attention again to the Hijaz. Suyuti ﵀ writes on the same page: “In the year 17 AH ʿUmar ﵁ enlarged the area of the Mosque of the Prophet ﷺ.” We devoted the previous article to that subject, but in that same year 17 AH the eastern operations also continued. Suyuti ﵀ notes in his year-table the conquests of Tustar and Suza, two cities in Khuzestan, where the Sasanian authority had drawn up its second line after the fall of Madāʾin, and both cities fell, not without hardness of resistance.

The Year 18 AH — Jundaysabur, Hulwan, and the Plague of Amwas

The year 18 AH was the most sorely tried year of the caliphate of ʿUmar ﵁. Suyuti ﵀ writes: “In the year 18 AH Jundaysabur was opened by treaty, and Hulwan by force. In this year was the plague of Emmaus; Urfa (Edessa) and Sumaysat were opened by force; Harran, Nasibin and a part of Mesopotamia by force, and it is said, by treaty; and Mosul and its environs by force.”

Toward the east the operations went on. Jundaysabur, an important city in Khuzestan with a famous medical academy, came to the caliphate by treaty, while Hulwan, a city in the southern Zagros on the road from Iraq to Iran, fell by force. In the north the operations against the Mesopotamian cities continued: Urfa, which in Roman times was called Edessa, and Sumaysat further north, fell by force, and Harran in the Mesopotamian interior, Nasibin on the road between Edessa and Mosul, and finally Mosul itself fell likewise. Mesopotamia, the region between the Euphrates and the Tigris in its northern course, came largely under the caliphate in 18 AH.

But the same year was written into history for another reason. The plague of Amwas, an outbreak of what in modern diagnosis is most often identified as bubonic plague, broke out in the city of Amwas (the old Emmaus) in Palestine, and spread with speed through the Muslim army and the population in Sham. Many of the Sahabah ﵃ died, among them Abu ʿUbaydah ibn al-Jarrah ﵁, the commander of Sham, and with him Muʿadh ibn Jabal ﵁, Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁ and many others. The army was weakened, and the Caliph in Medina received the sorrowful tidings one by one.

A closely related trial fell in the same years over the Hijaz itself. Suyuti ﵀ does not name it expressly on this page in his table, but refers to it elsewhere as the years of Ramadah, the years of ash, the years of the great drought. The earth of the Hijaz turned grey, the cattle died, the people went hungry, and the Caliph did what a Caliph does in such years: he declared himself in covenant with the people in their want. He ate no more than bread and olive oil, and he is said to have stated that he would not eat what his people did not have. He had food brought from Egypt along a restored road, he distributed what lay in the bait al-mal among those who needed it most, and he raised his hands, praying in the rain that finally came, with the words of a servant who hopes upon his Lord alone.

The Years 19, 20 and 21 AH — Egypt and Nahavand

In the following years the southern front was opened. Suyuti ﵀ notes: “In the year 20 AH Egypt was opened by force. It is also said that all of Egypt was opened by treaty except Alexandria, which was opened by force. In the year 21 AH Alexandria was opened by force, and Nahavand, after which the Persians could no longer build an army, and Barqah and other places.”

The campaign of Egypt was under the command of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁. He had convinced the Caliph in Medina of the necessity of opening old Roman Egypt, not out of a desire for spoils, but to protect the southern flank of Sham against attacks from the Nile. The Caliph had given permission, with the strict order to protect the population and not to cause needless suffering, and ʿAmr ﵁ entered Egypt in 19 AH. The fortress of Babylon, the Roman stronghold on the eastern bank of the Nile on the site of present-day Cairo, fell in 20 AH, and a new city was founded beside it, Fustat, the city of tents, which would become the capital of Muslim Egypt. In 21 AH Alexandria fell, after a long siege, and the great harbour city of the Mediterranean, where the old Library had stood and where the Roman fleet had gathered, fell into Muslim hands.

In that same year 21 AH Nahavand fell. It was the decisive battle against what remained of the Sasanian army, for Yazdegerd III had gathered his last reserves in the northern Zagros for one breakthrough, and the Muslim army under al-Nuʿman ibn Muqarrin ﵁ went out to meet him. The battle was so heavy and the victory so decisive that the report named it Fath al-Futuh, the Opening of the Openings. After Nahavand, Suyuti ﵀ writes, the Persians could no longer build an army, and the Sasanian empire ceased to exist as a military great power. Yazdegerd would after that flee for ten more years through the eastern provinces of his empire, until in 31 AH at Merv he would be killed by an accomplice. For the phase-narrative geography of Nahavand we refer to:

.

Barqah, in present-day Libya, fell in the same period, and the Muslims for the first time entered the old Roman province of Cyrenaica.

The Year 22 AH — Azerbaijan

The year 22 AH brought the operations into the far north. Suyuti ﵀ notes simply: “In the year 22 AH Azerbaijan and Dimavand and Hamadhan were opened.” Three names from the north and east of Persia, three names that mark the expansion of the caliphate beyond the northern Zagros. Azerbaijan, with its old cities, came under Muslim rule, Dimavand, at the foot of the mountain of the same name to the east of present-day Tehran, came under treaty, and Hamadhan, on the old royal road between Iraq and Iran, fell. The Muslim commanders in these northern campaigns were al-Mughirah ibn Shuʿbah ﵁ in Azerbaijan, Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman ﵁ in Hamadhan, and others.

The Pattern of a Conqueror Who Rarely Fought

Whoever reads through this table sees a pattern that reveals the whole manner of the caliphate of ʿUmar ﵁. The Caliph was in Medina in every year, except for the Hajj and except for the single journey to al-Jabiyyah in 16 AH to receive Jerusalem. He led not one of the battles that are enumerated here in person, he stormed not one of the walls that are opened here in person, but he appointed his commanders, gave them instructions, received their reports, and corrected them where it was needed. He exercised power from Medina, in the same woollen garment that he wore every day, on the minbar of the same mosque whose walls he had widened in 17 AH.

This is the opposite of what the Roman emperors and the Persian shahs did. They marched out with their armies in full splendour, with diadem and banner, with staff and armour, and they wished to be seen in person on the battlefield, so that the victory might perpetuate their glory. ʿUmar ﵁ did not go, for he trusted the commanders he had appointed, and he held them responsible. He knew that the Caliph who leaves Medina leaves the heart of the caliphate, and he knew that the community, which in the desert of Medina could not be without a shepherd, needed him on the minbar, not on the battlefield.

He bore, in ten years of governance, an empire from Hims to Mosul, from Alexandria to Hamadhan, from Basra to Nahavand: a territory that in area and population was far larger than the Roman empire in its glory days, and in cohesion reached far beyond the city-states that the Quraish had known in Makkah. He bore that territory from the minbar in Medina, with letters to his governors, with incoming reports from his informants, with his hand upon the pulse of a community that he could feel every day on the streets of Medina.

The Restraint of the Caliph

In one spirit that Suyuti ﵀ lets resound through his whole biography of the Caliph, ʿUmar ﵁ is not only a man who permitted the openings, but also a man who set their bounds. When a commander wished to go too far, he reined him in, and when a governor wished to see land divided among the soldiers, he held fast to the care of the original inhabitants. He did, in one of his most famous decisions, which is preserved in sources other than Suyuti ﵀ as well, not divide the farmland of Sham and Iraq among the soldiers as war spoils, but kept it in collective stewardship for the community. He let the native population cultivate what it had always cultivated, and let the revenues flow into the bait al-mal to serve the whole community.

He kept the pilgrim routes open for whoever was not a Muslim, provided they did not settle within the Hijaz. He let the churches and synagogues in Sham and Iraq stand. He set down in writing, in the treaty of al-Jabiyyah, what he had decided for the Christians in Bayt al-Maqdis, and he sharply reprimanded the governor who had imposed a long waiting time at the church for the visitor. The restraint of the Caliph was the counterforce to the openings of his commanders, for he knew that an empire that expands can only continue to exist if it does not humiliate its inhabitants.

The End of a Table That Went On

On the page where Suyuti ﵀ comes to the year 23 AH, the table breaks off, not because the openings cease, for they continued under ʿUthman ﵁, but because the Caliph was murdered in that year. We shall return to that in a separate article. We wish here only, in closing this table of conquests, to make one observation that sums up the whole manner of governance of ʿUmar ﵁.

He built, in ten years, an empire without ever claiming to have built it himself. He said on the minbar that he was stern and prayed for gentleness, he spent sixteen dinars on the Hajj, he patrolled in the night to listen to the weeping of a woman behind a clay wall, he distributed the treasure of Khosrau in tears, he sharply reprimanded his governors, and he received the pilgrim at the gate of Medina as though he himself were an ordinary Sahabi ﵁.

And at the same time he bore an empire that within a generation would reach from the Atlantic Ocean to the Oxus. All of this, in the words that Suyuti ﵀ so concisely sums up in his year-table, happened under his hand. “He carried out the command most completely”, Suyuti ﵀ writes in his general characterization of the Caliph, “and there were very many openings in his days.” It is a simple sentence, and it is all that must be said of these ten years in a single line.

In the next article we return to Medina to see him in his last days, to the Fajr prayer in which Abu Luʾluʾah stabbed him with the two-edged dagger in his shoulder and his flank, to the sickbed on which he had ʿAʾishah ﵂ asked whether he might be buried beside his two companions, to the Shura of Six in which he gave ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʿAwf ﵁ the delegation to choose ʿUthman ﵁ as his successor. The year-table of the openings closes, and the biography of the Faruq draws near to its deepest chapter.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 134 (years 13–14 AH, Damascus, Hims, Baalbek, Basra, Ubullah), p. 135 (years 15–17 AH, Yarmuk, Qadisiyyah, founding of Kufa, fall of Madāʾin, Jumucah of Saʿd ﵁, Jerusalem, khutbah of al-Jabiyyah, Hijri calendar, enlargement of the Masjid an-Nabawi), pp. 135–136 (years 18–22 AH, Jundaysabur, Hulwan, plague of Amwas, Mesopotamian cities, Egypt, Alexandria, Nahavand, Barqah, Azerbaijan).