The battle of Sbeitla and the conquest of Ifriqiya under ʿUthman ﵁

A land beyond the desert of Barqa

In the same year of the Hijra in which, in the east of the realm, the fleet of Muʿawiya ﵁ set sail for Cyprus, in the west an army departed that moved toward a direction barely described in the earliest Muslim geography. From Fustat in Egypt, in the year 27 of the Hijra, in the Gregorian years 647 and 648, a campaign set out under the command of ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ibn Abi Sarh ﵁, the governor of Egypt, westward along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, past the oases of Cyrenaica and the wastes of Barqa, toward what the Byzantines called the Exarchate of Africa and what the Arabic sources would soon call Ifriqiya. It was the first time that a Muslim army would cross the borders of what had been reached under ʿUmar ﵁ in Egypt, and it was also the first Muslim expedition toward what in antiquity had been the granary of Carthage, and what in the first centuries of the Christian era had been the province where Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine had written their works.

Suyuti ﵀ treats this remarkable event in two sentences. He writes that ʿUthman ﵁ removed ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ from the governorship of Egypt and appointed ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ in his place, and that this last man undertook an expedition against North Africa, opened the land to Islam, in both the plains and the mountains, and that every man in the army received a thousand dinars, with a narration also of three thousand dinars per man. He adds, in an exceedingly short sentence, that in that same year Andalusia was opened. Two sentences, and a postscript about a rather unbelievable sum of money per soldier: more than this Suyuti ﵀ does not give to the whole campaign. What hides within those two sentences is the story of a march of thousands of kilometres, a battle against an opponent who outnumbered the Muslims many times over, the death of a Byzantine viceroy on the battlefield, and a withdrawal with a treasure unprecedented in the history of the caliphate. We follow Suyuti ﵀ for the framework, and for the separate phases of the battle we refer to the battle-story worked out separately in our cycle.

The change of governor in Egypt

Before the campaign toward Ifriqiya can be understood, the change of governor in Egypt must be discussed, for Suyuti ﵀ links the two events directly to one another. ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ had been governor of that province since the conquest of Egypt in 20 AH under ʿUmar ﵁. He had brought the land into peace, he had established the jizyah administration, he had continued the canalisation of the Nile, and he had founded Fustat as the administrative centre of the Muslim presence in Egypt. He was, in the words later said of him, one of the most astute of the Arabs in matters of state and war.

Under ʿUthman ﵁ a change took place that the sources explain in differing ways. ʿAmr ﵁ was recalled from Egypt, and ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ibn Abi Sarh ﵁ was appointed in his place. The reasons are not unambiguous, for Suyuti ﵀ names no cause for the change. Other sources speak of a dispute between the Caliph and ʿAmr ﵁ over the tax revenues of Egypt, in which ʿUthman ﵁ held that ʿAmr ﵁ was not transferring the full sum to the central bait al-mal in Medina, while ʿAmr ﵁ argued that the expenditures of the province itself entailed high costs. ʿUthman ﵁ chose a governor from his own circle, ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ibn Abi Sarh ﵁, who was his brother on his mother’s side and who in the early years of the caliphate had already shown himself capable of independent administration. It was one of the first signs of the governing policy that in the later years of the caliphate of ʿUthman ﵁ would be criticised as nepotism, but which at this moment the Caliph defended as the choice of a trustworthy man.

ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ accepted the office and went to Fustat. He inherited from ʿAmr ﵁ a well-organised province, with an Arab garrison settled in and around Fustat, with Coptic scribes in the service of the administration, and with a fleet detachment in Alexandria that in the following years would play an important role in Mediterranean naval strategy. The governor soon turned his attention to the west, for beyond Egypt lay a region untouched until then, in which, according to reports from merchants and Bedouins, great riches lay.

The preparation of the expedition

Toward the beginning of the year 27, ʿAbdullah ﵁ received from ʿUthman ﵁ permission for a great military expedition westward. The Caliph had hesitated at first, for the distance was extraordinary and the community already had obligations on many fronts, but under the insistence of the governor and with the assurance that a considerable reinforcement of volunteer Sahaba ﵃ from the Levant under Madin would come along, he gave his approval. Messengers were sent to Damascus, Hims, Antioch and the other Syrian cities with the call for volunteers to report at Fustat for a campaign toward the West. Suyuti ﵀ does not name these detailed preparations, but from other sources it is known that the army that gathered in Fustat was, in its composition, a mixture of Egyptian Arab troops, Levantine Sahaba and their sons, and a considerable group of Berbers who in the first years after the conquest of Egypt had entered Islam.

The size of the army is estimated in the sources at around twenty thousand men, although the figures differ. What recurs in every source is that this was an extraordinarily small force in comparison with what the opponent could bring into the field. The Byzantine Exarchate of Africa had, under Patriarch Gregory, the highest civil and military officeholder of Constantinople in North Africa, an army that in later narrations is estimated at as many as a hundred and twenty thousand men. More realistic estimates place it at sixty to eighty thousand, but even then the ratio was about one to three or one to four against the Muslims. It was, in this numerical proportion, a venture that could only be undertaken by a leader who trusted in the speed, the mobility and the spiritual focus of his troops.

The march westward

In the spring of the year 27 the army departed from Fustat. The route ran by way of the oases of Wadi Natrun and Kharga, then along the Mediterranean coast through Cyrenaica, past Tobruk and Apollonia, to Barqa, which had already paid tribute to the Muslims in the years under ʿUmar ﵁. From Barqa the army moved further west, along a coastal road that in later generations would grow into the main artery of Arab North Africa. The march lasted months, for the soldiers passed Tripoli and then moved deeper inland toward the hilly interior of present-day Tunisia. Along the way they met the first Berber tribes, some hostile, others inclined to conclude treaties or to deliver deserters to the Muslims. The army was continually informed by its guides of the position of the Byzantine troops, who were concentrating around a city that the Latins called Sufetula and that would become known in Arabic as Sbeitla.

Patriarch Gregory and his army

Gregory, called in the Latin sources Gregorius Magister or Gregorius Patricius, was the Byzantine Exarch of Africa and was seated at Carthage. In the years before the Muslim expedition he had been involved in an open conflict with the emperor Constans II in Constantinople, and he had even in 646 assumed a title of his own as augustus, in an attempt to place North Africa as a separate political power under his leadership. When he learned that an Arab army was approaching from the east, he decided to concentrate his troops in Sbeitla, a city that lay deep in the interior, near what is today called the Kasserine plain, and which by its situation on a high plateau was easy to defend against an army coming out of the desert. He gathered his Byzantine regular troops, he summoned his Berber tributary allies, and he assembled an army that in the first reports to the Muslims was given as overwhelming in number.

Gregory was no incompetent general, but he was, in the judgement of later historians, too much reliant on numerical superiority and on the protection of his fortified positions. He expected a battle of attrition, in which the Arab army would be weakened by the heat, the distance and the hunger, after which a large-scale battle would definitively break the Muslim advance. He did not sufficiently reckon, in his calculation, with the mobility of an Arab cavalry army, which, unlike its predecessors in the Persian and Roman wars, operated not as a cumbersome army of heavy equipment but as a swiftly sallying cavalry.

The battle of Sbeitla

The confrontation between ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ and Patriarch Gregory took place on the plain before Sbeitla, presumably in the summer of the year 27, although the exact month is not unambiguously transmitted in the sources. Gregory’s army was drawn up in a half-moon, with Sbeitla itself as a support point behind the central line, while the Muslims had their position further to the west, on terrain that offered them the possibility of swift flanking movements. The opening phase of the battle consisted of reconnaissance by both sides, followed by some isolated skirmishes in which the Muslim horsemen, by their speed, managed to evade the heavy Byzantine cavalry. It became clear already in these first days that the Byzantines, despite their numbers, had difficulty keeping their ranks in orderly motion, and that the Berber auxiliaries did not easily fit into the Byzantine tactical schemes.

The phases in which the battle developed further are described at length in the sources of Tabari ﵀ and Ibn Kathir ﵀, and they form the subject of our battle-story linked above this article. On the battle itself we follow Suyuti ﵀ only in his general outcome: the Muslims opened the land, in both the plains and the mountains, and the spoils were of a size that enabled every participant in the fighting to receive a thousand dinars or more as his share. What lies hidden within this is that the battle at a certain point in its course saw the death of Patriarch Gregory himself, and that the Byzantine army, after that death, lost its cohesion. The Berber allies fled to their mountain regions, the Byzantine regular troops withdrew to the northern coastal cities and to Carthage itself, and Sbeitla fell into Muslim hands, and with that fall there fell also a considerable part of the treasure that the Byzantines had concentrated in the city, into the hands of the victors.

The Ifriqiya tribute and the turning of the tide

In the days that followed the battle, representatives of the Byzantine province and of some Berber tribes came to the camp of ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ to negotiate a treaty. The Muslims, though they had the upper hand in their victory, were not in a practical sense able to take Carthage or the northern coastal cities directly, because their army was too far from its Egyptian base and because reinforcements of men and equipment were difficult to organise over a distance measured in weeks. ʿAbdullah ﵁ chose a pragmatic solution and concluded a treaty in which the Byzantine authorities in Ifriqiya paid a considerable indemnity, a sum given in later sources as two million two hundred and fifty thousand dinars, in exchange for the departure of the Muslim troops from the heartland of Ifriqiya. The Berber allies who had stood on the Byzantine side on the battlefield concluded separate treaties in which they declared their loyalty to the victors without obligating themselves to a fixed tax.

The sum of the indemnity, together with the spoils captured on the battlefield itself, formed the basis for the extraordinary disbursement of a thousand or three thousand dinars per soldier that Suyuti ﵀ mentions in his exceedingly short account of the event. It was a sum without comparison in the history of the Rashidun campaigns. An average soldier of the Arab armies received in these years a fixed annual stipend of a few hundred dirhams, so that the fact that he would receive a thousand dinars in a single campaign, a multiple of his ordinary income, was an exception noted in all the sources.

The withdrawal to Egypt

ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ withdrew with his army and his spoils to Egypt. He left no permanent Muslim garrison in Ifriqiya, and he established no fixed administrative institutions in the west. The conquest of 27 AH was, in a practical sense, a great raid: it had broken the Byzantine power in Ifriqiya, yielded a considerable indemnity, and made the Berber tribes familiar with the presence of a new power from the east, but it had not yet made Ifriqiya a Muslim province. It would only be in the time of Muʿawiya ﵁ as Caliph and of Muʿawiya’s governors that Ifriqiya received a permanent Muslim administrative centre in Kairouan, and it would only be under the Umayyads that the whole Maghrib up to the Atlantic coast came under Muslim rule.

The withdrawal to Fustat lasted months. Along the way the commanders divided the spoils, carried out the burials of the fallen, and sent preliminary reports to Medina. ʿUthman ﵁ received the report in the course of the year, and his reaction was, as with Cyprus, an expression of gratitude toward Allah ﷻ. He ordered the customary division of the khums, the fifth part that belonged to the bait al-mal, and he gave instructions for the care of the families of the martyrs. What he would later do with that khums of Ifriqiya would in the years that followed become one of the points of contention used against him. Az-Zuhri ﵀ mentions in a well-known narration, which Suyuti ﵀ cites in his general characterisation of the caliphate of ʿUthman ﵁, that the Caliph gave the khums of North Africa to Marwan ﵁, and that this was one of the matters for which the community later criticised him.

In this point, which Suyuti ﵀ expressly mentions, lies one of the seeds of the later discontent against the Caliph. But in the year 27 itself, in the elation of a victory on a front where until then no Muslim had been, the discontent had not yet grown. What sounded in 27 AH was praise and gratitude, while what would sound in 30 AH and later was criticism and rancour. The one and the other lay enclosed within the nature of the same decisions.

The incidental opening of Andalusia

Suyuti ﵀ adds to his passage on Ifriqiya a sentence that is deceptive in its brevity. He writes that in that same year Andalusia was opened. Whoever reads this thinks at once of the far later campaigns of Tariq ibn Ziyad ﵀ and Musa ibn Nusayr ﵀ in 92 AH under the Umayyad Caliph al-Walid I, which led to the actual conquest of Spain. But Suyuti ﵀, in his remark about Andalusia in 27 AH, means something else. He refers to a reconnaissance expedition or a raid carried out by a few Muslim ships, possibly in cooperation with the Cyprus operation of Muʿawiya ﵁, to the coast of the Iberian peninsula in this same year. Other sources attribute this reconnaissance to ʿAbdullah ibn Nafiʿ ibn al-Husayn al-Fihri ﵁ and ʿAbdullah ibn Nafiʿ ibn ʿAbd al-Qays ﵁, who were two Muslim commanders in Ifriqiya and who with a small group are said to have undertaken a first expedition to the southern coast of Spain, to map the coastline and the harbours.

It was not the conquest of Spain in the sense of administrative and military occupation, but a first reconnaissance expedition, a meeting between the Muslim expansion and the Visigothic kingdom that ruled over Iberia. Yet it is remarkable that Suyuti ﵀, with his well-known brevity, deems this reconnaissance worthy of the words of an “opening”. In his historiography every contact, every landing, every exchange with a region that until then had remained outside the Muslim circle was an opening, even if it did not at once issue in an administrative conquest. The later conquerors of Spain could therefore in a spiritual sense invoke this first reconnaissance, just as the later conquerors of Carthage and the Maghrib would invoke the battle of Sbeitla.

The spiritual significance of the Ifriqiya expedition

The event of Sbeitla has its own spiritual significance in the Muslim tradition. It showed, in the same way that Cyprus had opened the sea to the Muslims, that the west of the realm was no distant margin standing outside the care of the Caliph, but a field of work that had to be unlocked by the command of Allah ﷻ. It showed that an army of twenty thousand men, in a land thousands of kilometres from its base, was able to defeat a Byzantine viceroy and carry off a treasure that would feed the community for years. And it showed, to the people of the west themselves, that the Arab soldiers were no disordered plunderers, but warriors with a discipline of their own and with a particular manner of making peace that had already become known in the existing customs of the Levantine and Egyptian regions.

For the Berber tribes that in this campaign came into contact with Islam for the first time, this event was the beginning of a long road that in later centuries would lead to their mass conversion and their integration into Muslim civilisation. For the Byzantine government in Carthage it was the first serious warning that the Exarchate of Africa was no longer inviolable. And for the caliphate in Medina it was the confirmation that the expansion which had begun under ʿUmar ﵁ in the east of the realm was being continued under ʿUthman ﵁ in the west, with the same force and with the same aim.

The return and the proclamation in Medina

When ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ finally arrived in Fustat with the tokens of his campaign, he wrote an extensive report to Medina. ʿUthman ﵁ received the report, read it in the presence of some Sahaba ﵃ of his trusted circle, and gave the order for a thanksgiving in the Masjid an-Nabawi. On the following Friday the Caliph mounted the mimbar and spoke of the openings that had taken place simultaneously in the east and the west in this year 27. He thanked Allah ﷻ for the victory over Cyprus and for the victory at Sbeitla, he called the community to live in gratitude, and he gave the order for the just division of the khums among the poor, the widows, the orphans and the Banu Hashim, as the Qur’an had prescribed in Surah al-Anfal.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up the whole Ifriqiya passage in the sentences that we repeat here in translation.

In these few sentences the scholar of Cairo brings the whole campaign under a single summary. It is, in its brevity, a remarkable summary, for it sums up in two sentences what in reality carries within it months of marches, days of battle, and years of consolidation. Whoever wishes to read the scholar, let him read the two sentences; whoever wishes to see the phases, let him read the battle-story that we have worked out separately in this cycle.

The later consolidation of Ifriqiya

What had begun in 27 AH under ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ was not immediately converted into a permanent Muslim administration. The actual founding of a Muslim city in Ifriqiya, the founding of Kairouan, the systematic subjugation of the Berber tribes, and the conquest of Carthage itself, would take place only in later years. ʿUqba ibn Nafiʿ ﵁, who would govern Ifriqiya in the time of Muʿawiya ﵁ as Caliph, would found Kairouan in 50 AH, and Carthage would fall into Muslim hands for the last time only under the Umayyad Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik in 79 AH.

In 27 AH, then, the whole Maghrib was not conquered, but the foundation was laid on which later generations would build. Suyuti ﵀, with his talent for the concentrated utterance, sums up in his “opening” not only the battle of Sbeitla, but the whole process in which the Muslim presence in North Africa was established, a process that lasted decades and that is described in the later sources in numerous separate passages. The community that in 27 AH under ʿUthman ﵁ set its first foot in Ifriqiya would, in the generations that followed, take the whole Maghrib and in time also Andalusia into its spiritual and administrative circle under the Umayyads, and the gate of that wider history was opened in 27 AH at Sbeitla.

In the next article

In the next article we follow the simultaneous opening of the Sassanid remnant provinces in the east, in Khurasan, Sijistan, Armenia and Darabjird, in the years 28 to 31 of the Hijra. It was, in the same period in which Ifriqiya was opened in the west, that in the east the last bonds of the Sassanid empire were severed and that Muslim rule extended as far as the Indus and the Amu Darya. The caliphate of ʿUthman ﵁, in its first six years of which az-Zuhri ﵀ said that the people did not criticise him at all, carried geographically an expansion that surpassed even that of his predecessors in its extent.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (tr. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 166.
• For the phase narratives of the battle of Sbeitla, see the battle-story uthman-sbeitla in this cycle, which draws on at-Tabari ﵀, Tarikh ar-Rusul wa-l-Muluk and Ibn Kathir ﵀, al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya.