Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

WHEN THE PROPHET Muhammad died in 632 CE, Syria was a battered region. It had been afflicted by frequent outbreaks of the “Justinianic Plague” for nearly a century and was still recovering from the recent Sasanian conquest in 614 and Byzantine reconquest in 629. These events facilitated the Muslim conquest of Syria, starting in 634. This conquest, and the various processes and events that followed it, eventually led to the conversion to Islam of most of the local population. Conversion occurred in many other regions, as well. In most areas conquered by the Muslims around the Mediterranean, religious conversion was accompanied by a shift from the vernacular languages to Arabic, emigration of local elites and immigration of Muslims, many of them Arabs, and changes in the urban network, as well as substantial changes to the plans of those Roman–Byzantine cities that continued to exist during the Early Islamic period.

The aim of this book is to answer three basic questions: when, where, and under what circumstances did the majority of the Holy Land's population become Muslim? Its working hypothesis is that the causes that led to the conversion of most of the Holy Land's population, as well as the survival of some religious communities, are essentially social and geographic in nature, rather than theological. Namely, conditions in some regions facilitated conversion, whereas in other areas they did not. Consequently, local communities in those areas resisted conversion more vigorously. This book does not deal with issues such as the economic or social pressure exerted by Muslim authorities. Those measures were presumably imposed indiscriminately on all religious communities, in all regions, and in rural areas as well as urban ones.

I suggest that two parallel processes were the main catalysts of Islamization: de-urbanization and urbanization. In areas where existing urban nuclei were abolished, nearby rural communities converted to Islam. Similarly, the establishment of an urban centre in a previously rural region facilitated the conversion of the nearby villages’ populations. However, in areas where the pre-existing cities endured, the minorities managed to survive. In my opinion, the continuous existence of cities over the centuries allowed for the survival of religious and social institutions, which played a vital role in the survival of urban and rural religious communities.