The conquest of Cyprus and the first Islamic fleet under ʿUthman ﵁

An island in a sea that no Muslim had yet seen

In the twenty-seventh year of the Hijra, the Gregorian year 647 or the beginning of 648, the hills of Akka and Sur and Tartus saw for the first time something that was unprecedented in the history of the Arab peoples. From the harbors of the Levantine coast a fleet set sail, not merchant ships, not fishing vessels, but warships that had been built or hired at the command of a Muslim governor, manned with soldiers of the Sahaba ﵃ and their children, and setting course for an island that in Byzantine strategy had for centuries served as a base between Constantinople and the Levant. Cyprus, which the Greeks called Kupros and which the Arabs would soon call Qubrus, lay one hundred and eighty nautical miles northwest of the Syrian coast. Until that year it had been for the Muslims a rumor; from that year on it would become a conquered land, and the fleet that conquered it would be the first Islamic naval force that the world would know.

Whoever wishes to grasp this event in its true weight must go back to a dialogue that had taken place roughly twelve years before in Medina, between the Caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ and the governor of Egypt ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁. It was Muʿawiya ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁, the governor of Syria under ʿUmar ﵁ and later under ʿUthman ﵁, who had directed the first request for a naval expedition to Cyprus to the Caliph. Muʿawiya ﵁ had from his post in Damascus and in the harbor cities of the Syrian coast seen the Byzantine naval force maneuver between Cyprus and Antioch, and he had recognized that the empire that had just lost Syria would not be able to defend its flank on the Mediterranean so long as Cyprus remained in Byzantine hands. From the island the emperor in Constantinople could prepare landings on the Syrian coast, protect or threaten merchant shipping, and supply his fleet in operations against the south of Asia Minor.

Muʿawiya ﵁ had in repeated letters and messengers requested ʿUmar ﵁ for permission for a naval assault on Cyprus. The Caliph, who himself had never stood upon a ship and who in his office possessed a deep reticence toward every undertaking whose outcome he could not foresee, first asked for a description of the sea. He wrote not to Muʿawiya ﵁ in Syria, but to ʿAmr ﵁ in Egypt, who as governor of a land with a long Mediterranean coast was best placed to describe the nature of the sea. The answer of ʿAmr ﵁ is transmitted in the text of Suyuti ﵀, and it is in its imagery one of the most beautiful pages of early Islamic literature concerning nature.

ʿUmar ﵁ read this description in Medina, and his decision was immediate and without reservation. He wrote back to Muʿawiya ﵁ with a single sentence that is preserved in the sources.

With that sentence the Caliph in Medina closed the matter. So long as ʿUmar ﵁ lived, no Muslim soldier would step upon a ship to conquer Cyprus. The Byzantine fleet continued to sail undisturbed between Cyprus and Constantinople. Muʿawiya ﵁ waited, in the knowledge that his predecessor in Medina had understood his office in a manner that did not allow him to approve a campaign whose risks he himself did not know.

The change of Caliph and the reopening of the matter

When ʿUmar ﵁ in Dhul-Hijjah of the year 23 of the Hijra had been struck by the hand of Abu Luʾluʾah, and when the shura of six had finally in Muharram of the year 24 designated ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁ as Caliph, there arose in the first years of the new office an atmosphere that differed essentially from the strict and circumspect style with which ʿUmar ﵁ had ruled for twelve years. ʿUthman ﵁ was gentler in his dealings with the governors, and he was more open to the undertakings that they laid before him. He trusted his commanders, he let them work within the broader frameworks that they themselves advocated, and he saw the expansion of the realm not as a danger but as a task that the Caliph was to promote when his governors were capable of it.

Muʿawiya ﵁ repeated in the first years of the khalifate of ʿUthman ﵁ his request for Cyprus. This time the request came not only on the ground of strategic considerations, but on the ground of a matured fleet-building in the Syrian harbors. Since the fall of Caesarea in 19 AH under ʿUmar ﵁ the Muslims had gained control of the harbors of the Levant, and in those harbors Muʿawiya ﵁ had quietly laid down shipyards, taken into service shipbuilders of the indigenous Syrian and Lebanese coastal population, and established a small maritime training school. The Coptic-Syrian shipbuilders, who for centuries had worked for the Byzantine navy, passed on their craft to Muslim overseers. The first warships that were built in these yards were in their hull construction nearly identical to the Byzantine dromons, but in their crew the composition was new. Upon these ships Muslim soldiers would sail, with their prayer aboard and their discipline of the battlefield, and with the same fervor that they had proven on the dry roads of Syria and Iraq.

ʿUthman ﵁ gave his permission, but he gave it under conditions. He wrote to Muʿawiya ﵁ that no one might be compelled to sail along; that only volunteers would board the ship; and that the families of the soldiers, should they fall in battle, would be provided for from the bait al-mal in the same way as the families of those who had fallen on land. Suyuti ﵀ recalls in his account that the Caliph also expressly required that the population of Cyprus, should it surrender voluntarily, would stand under protection and be treated on the terms of the jizyah treaties as the populations of Syria and Egypt.

The preparation of the fleet

In the winter of 26 into 27 of the Hijra the fleet was fitted out in the harbors of Akka, Sur, Tartus and Latakia. The Muslims, who by their nature were nomads and horsemen, encountered for the first time the strange world of the shipyard. Some laughed at the building works; others regarded the ships with a mixture of admiration and aversion. It was a general feeling among the Arab soldiers that the horse was the friend of the man, and that the ship was a tool that removed him in an unnatural way from his own element. But among them were also men who in the past had sailed in Egypt on the Nile, and who in the Red Sea had sailed the old trade routes to Yemen and Habashah. These men formed the first nucleus of what in later generations would grow into a Muslim naval tradition of its own.

When all was ready, in a month that in the Arabic sources is not always named the same but that in any case fell in the first half of the year 27, Muʿawiya ﵁ gave the order to set sail. The figures that circulate in later sources range from fifteen hundred ships to seventeen hundred; the figures of men who went along with this fleet range from twelve thousand to fifty thousand. Suyuti ﵀ names no figures, and we hold in this article to his reticence. What is certain is that the fleet was unprecedented in its size for a Muslim undertaking, and that the men who manned it consisted for a great part of the Sahaba ﵃ and their sons.

ʿUbadah ibn as-Samit ﵁ and Umm Haram bint Milhan ﵂

Among the men who sailed along with this fleet was ʿUbadah ibn as-Samit ﵁, one of the very early Sahaba of the Ansar. He had taken part in the first pledge of ʿAqaba and in the second; he had been present at Badr, at Uhud, at al-Khandaq and at al-Hudaybiyya; he had taken part in the wars against the Jewish tribes of Medina and he had served the Prophet ﷺ in numerous missions. He was, in the words that have been recorded about him in later traditions, one of the twelve of the first Aqaba, a man whom the Prophet ﷺ had personally chosen to teach the Qur’an to the inhabitants of Yathrib before the Hijra took place. Under the Caliphs he had served further, and in these years of ʿUthman ﵁ he was attached to the Levantine troops under Muʿawiya ﵁.

At his side sailed his wife, Umm Haram bint Milhan al-Ansariyya ﵂. She belonged to a family whose name recurs repeatedly in the Sira of the Prophet ﷺ. Her sister was Umm Sulaym ﵂, the mother of Anas ibn Malik ﵁; her brothers were among the Sahaba who had fallen as martyrs at Biʾr Maʿuna. She was herself a woman of learning, piety and courage. To her Suyuti ﵀ attaches one of the most beautiful stories from the event of Cyprus, a story that belongs to the ahadith of the Muslim tradition and that had already been foretold during the life of the Prophet ﷺ.

The Prophet ﷺ had once, in the years of Medina, had the habit of taking some rest in the house of Umm Haram ﵂, for she was his kinswoman through milk-relationship. One day, so the well-known hadith relates, he slept in her house and awoke smiling. When Umm Haram ﵂ asked him what made him smile, he answered that there had been shown to him in a vision a group of his community who sailed over the sea like kings upon thrones, on their way to wage battle in the cause of Allah ﷻ. Umm Haram ﵂ asked whether she belonged to that group. The Prophet ﷺ answered that she would belong to it. Then he slept again, and awoke once more smiling. He told that a second group had been shown to him who would sail over the sea. Umm Haram ﵂ asked again whether she would be among them. The Prophet ﷺ answered that she would belong to the first group, not to the second.

Suyuti ﵀ recalls in his account this prediction, for it came true literally in the event of Cyprus. Umm Haram ﵂, who at the time of the vision was a woman with not the slightest indication that she would ever sail, and who lived in an Arab society in which women did not go to war with armies, found herself decades later, together with her husband ʿUbadah ﵁, upon the deck of a Muslim ship on the Mediterranean, setting course for Cyprus, for the first maritime expedition in the history of the community. Her presence on that expedition was the fulfillment of a foretelling that she had heard twenty years before in her own house.

The landing on Cyprus

The fleet reached the southern coast of Cyprus after a voyage of some days. The landing took place in a bay whose exact location is indicated in later sources in the vicinity of present-day Larnaca or somewhat farther east, although Suyuti ﵀ is silent about the geographical details. What he does report is that the Muslims encountered no great resistance on the shore. The Byzantine garrisons on the island were small, the administration was spread over several cities, and the population, for the greatest part Greek-speaking and orthodox Christian, was not militarily equipped to turn back a large-scale invasion. Within a few days the Muslim troops had the harbor cities in hand, and they then began their movement toward the interior, toward the places where the Byzantine flags still flew.

It was in the course of this landing and the first march that the event took place that in the Muslim tradition belongs to a fixed part of the Cyprus narrative. Umm Haram ﵂, who had mounted upon a riding animal, fell from her beast. Suyuti ﵀ mentions this briefly, and he adds that she died and was buried on Cyprus. The circumstances are further elaborated in later sources: she fell upon rocky ground, and the shock was such that she there on the spot, or within a short time, breathed her last. Her husband ʿUbadah ﵁ arranged her burial on the island. The grave was marked, and in the centuries that followed it would become a place of pilgrimage for Muslims who sailed to Cyprus. The place is today known as the Hala Sultan Tekke, by the Larnaca salt lake, and counts as one of the sacred places for the Muslims of the Levant.

The hadith that in the Muslim tradition is attached to this event is that the first army of the community that would sail the sea would have Paradise made obligatory, and that Umm Haram ﵂ would belong to this first army. Her death on Cyprus, on the way to battle, in fulfillment of a foretelling that she had personally heard, was in the eyes of her contemporaries no tragedy but a martyrdom. She was the first Muslim woman to have gone to sea in a military undertaking, she had fallen on the island that the community came to open, and she had received martyrdom in the manner that the Prophet ﷺ had foretold to her.

The treaty with the Cypriots

Suyuti ﵀ attaches to the conquest of Cyprus no extensive description of battles. He reports in a short sentence that the people of Cyprus concluded a treaty with Muʿawiya ﵁ on the ground of the jizyah that they would pay. What this treaty entailed in its practice is further elaborated in other sources, but its main outline is known and accords with the treaties that the Muslims in these years had concluded with the populations of Syria, Egypt and parts of Mesopotamia.

The inhabitants of Cyprus would retain their lives, their property, their churches and their administrative autonomy. They would be free in the exercise of their Christian faith, and their bishops and priests would continue their office without interruption. In return they would pay annually a fixed sum of jizyah, in gold or in equivalent value, that would be collected in installments. Moreover they accepted a special provision that was unique to Cyprus and that arose from the strategic position of the island: they obliged themselves to an equal neutrality toward both great naval powers of that time, that is to say toward the Muslims and toward the Byzantines. Their harbors would be open to both parties, their population would render military assistance to neither. It was an unusual provision, and it shows that the first Muslim maritime rulers were not simple in their thinking, but that they understood that an island in the Mediterranean could impossibly be held entirely within one of the two spheres of influence so long as the sea itself was not yet controlled by one power.

The jizyah of Cyprus was set by Muʿawiya ﵁ at a sum that in later sources is given as seven thousand two hundred dinars per year, to be paid to the Caliph in Medina. The Byzantines, insofar as they later had the opportunity to revisit the same island, received according to the agreement an equivalent sum. Whatever the exact figures were, the pattern is clear: an island that lay between two great powers paid to both in order to preserve its independence within the narrow space between them.

Abu Dharr al-Ghifari ﵁ and the other prominent companions aboard

Among the Sahaba ﵃ who sailed along with this fleet, various later sources also name Abu Dharr al-Ghifari ﵁ and several other prominent figures of the first hour. Suyuti ﵀ does not name them explicitly in this passage, but it is known that Abu Dharr ﵁ in these years resided in Syria under Muʿawiya ﵁, and that he in the course of the years under ʿUthman ﵁ remained prominent in a scholarly and spiritual role until his withdrawal to ar-Rabadhah in the desert. Whether he personally took part in the Cyprus expedition remains uncertain in the sources, and the careful historian follows Suyuti ﵀ in his silence on this point.

What is certain is that the composition of the army and the fleet was a mixture of Sahaba of the first hour, second-generation Tabiʿun ﵀ who had grown up in Syria, and converts from the local population of the Levantine harbor cities. It was, in its composition, a proving ground for what in later centuries would become the Muslim seafaring: an undertaking in which Arab warriors, Syrian shipbuilders, Egyptian seafarers and local guides worked together under an unambiguous command that derived its legitimacy from the Caliph in Medina.

The return and the report to Medina

When the fleet after the summer of the year 27 returned to the Syrian harbors, the spoils were considerable, and the news that went to Medina was that Cyprus had become a tributary territory under Muʿawiya ﵁. ʿUthman ﵁ received the news with gratitude toward Allah ﷻ. He commanded that the families of Umm Haram ﵂ and of the other fallen be provided for immediately from the bait al-mal; that the spoils be divided according to the rules, a fifth for the bait al-mal and four-fifths for the warriors; and that the jizyah payments of Cyprus be entered directly into the central treasury in Medina, where they remained available for the general affairs of the Muslims.

On the mimbar in Medina the Caliph spoke about the event with restrained joy. He thanked Allah ﷻ for the opening of an island of which in the time of the Prophet ﷺ no one could have thought that the community would ever reach it; he called upon the Sahaba ﵃ to express their thanks in prayer and in charity; and he emphasized, in the same spirit as his predecessor had done, that the victory belonged not to the community itself but to Allah ﷻ, who through His grace opened to it the gates of the earth.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up the whole event in a few sentences, which we cite here in their translated form.

In these short sentences the three main facts are brought together: the leadership of Muʿawiya ﵁, the presence of ʿUbadah ﵁ and Umm Haram ﵂, and the outcome of the expedition in a treaty.

The spiritual significance of the naval undertaking

Whoever wishes to grasp the event of Cyprus from the perspective of the first generations of Muslims must realize that the sea in the Arab consciousness of the seventh century was an element of dread and of hesitation. The bedouin of the peninsula knew the desert, he knew the horse and the camel, he knew the oasis and the hand-well. The sea, by contrast, was for him the image of what was unencompassable, and it had in the traditions been described more than once with the words that ʿAmr ﵁ had written to ʿUmar ﵁, as a creation too great to comprehend, too restless to control, too unreliable to trust.

That in this climate of distrust toward the sea, a community within fifteen years after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ was able to fit out a fleet and conquer an island whose strategic position had for centuries been manned by the Romans and the Byzantines, is an achievement that is in its spiritual significance just as great as in its military. It was the first time that the community had extended its borders over a natural obstacle that in their cultural history had been regarded as unfathomable. It was the first time that an Arab soldier in the service of a Caliph had crossed the waters of the Mediterranean to subdue, in the name of Allah ﷻ, an outpost of a foreign empire. And it was, not least, the first time that a woman of the Sahaba ﵂ had found her martyrdom in the carrying out of a prediction that the Prophet ﷺ had spoken decades before in her own living room.

For the community in Medina, which was accustomed to receiving the reports from the Levantine and the Egyptian theaters, the tidings of Cyprus were of a different nature. They meant not only a new province, but a new horizon. They meant that the sea, which ʿUmar ﵁ had not been willing to trust, became under ʿUthman ﵁ a field of work of the Muslim state. They meant that the realm that until then had expanded over the lands around Arabia would from now on also expand over the islands to the north of it. And they meant, on a deeper level, that the task of the community was not determined by geographical borders, but by the measure in which its members were willing, in the service of their cause, to cross those borders.

The fate of Cyprus after 27 AH

The treaty that Muʿawiya ﵁ in this year concluded with the inhabitants of Cyprus did not in the years that followed hold uninterruptedly. The Byzantines, who retained their naval power and who did not give up their interest in the island, succeeded more than once in temporarily challenging the Muslim position on Cyprus. Under Muʿawiya ﵁ himself, and in the years that followed under the Umayyads, the island became more than once the scene of skirmishes between the two naval powers, and the jizyah payments were for some time suspended and imposed anew. It would only be in the time of the later Umayyads that Cyprus came into a more stable tributary relationship with the Muslims, and the island would in the first Islamic century remain a liminal territory, not entirely Muslim and not entirely Byzantine, a frontier zone in which two maritime powers met without either being able to establish its absolute dominion.

For the event of 27 AH itself, as Suyuti ﵀ has transmitted it in his conciseness, this later fate of the island is merely a postscript. What had happened in 27 AH was already history: a fleet had set sail, a martyrdom had been fulfilled, a treaty had been concluded, and the sea had for the first time been crossed under the Muslim banner. The rest, in all its vicissitudes, belongs to the history of later caliphates.

The grave of Umm Haram ﵂ as a spiritual monument

Among the matters that out of this event have led a life of their own in the centuries that followed, the grave of Umm Haram ﵂ on Cyprus occupies a special place. The site was visited in the Umayyad and Abbasid eras by pilgrims; in the late Middle Ages it received a mosque of its own, the Hala Sultan Tekke; in the Ottoman period it was raised to one of the important sanctuaries of the Ottoman empire, and it counts in the Muslim tradition as one of the holiest places on the Mediterranean islands. The grave stands on the shore of the salt lake of Larnaca, in a white domed mosque surrounded by cypresses and gardens, and it is to this day the destination of pilgrims who wish to pay their respects to the first Muslim woman who found a martyrdom at sea.

For the believers who recall to themselves the story of Cyprus, this place is not merely a grave, but a reminder of a specific form of consecration. A Sahabia ﵂, who had been personally foretold by the Prophet ﷺ that she would sail over the sea for the cause of Allah ﷻ, lived for decades in Medina without knowing when or how this prediction would be fulfilled. When the hour had come, she was ready. She boarded the ship with her husband, she sailed over a sea before which her countrymen shuddered, she landed on an island where no Muslim footstep had been before her, and she found there her end in the sentence that the Prophet ﷺ had spoken to her. Her grave on Cyprus has thereby become no chance resting place, but the measurable outcome of a word that had been spoken to her before she knew which way her life would go.

In the next article

In the next article we follow the second great opening of the year 27, in the west of the realm: the campaign of ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ibn Abi Sarh ﵁ against the Byzantine Exarchate of Africa, and the battle of Sbeitla in which Patriarch Gregory met his death and in which the Muslims set their first firm foot in Ifriqiya. It was, in one and the same Hijra year, the combination of two events, in the east Cyprus and in the west Sbeitla, that would show the geographical expansion of the caliphate under ʿUthman ﵁ in its full weight, and that together would show the community that the gates which Allah ﷻ opened for them were not confined to one front or one sea.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 165–166.
• For the phase narratives of the Cyprus expedition, see the battle-story uthman-cyprus in this cycle, which draws upon at-Tabari ﵀, Tarikh ar-Rusul wa-l-Muluk and Ibn Kathir ﵀, al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya.