Shaddel Periodisation and The Futu Making Sense

Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50
brill.com/arab
Periodisation and the futūḥ: Making Sense of

Muḥammad’s Leadership of the Conquests in
Non-Muslim Sources
Mehdy Shaddel | ORCID: 0000-0001-5821-7331
Universiteit Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands
mehdyshaddel@gmail.com
Abstract
The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of theories on the origins of Islam
which have called into question long-held scholarly axioms. One such axiom is the
traditional date of 632 CE for the death of the prophet Muḥammad, which some schol-
ars have now sought to redate to after the beginning of the Muslim conquests on the
basis of the evidence of non-Muslim sources. The present contribution aims to dem-
onstrate that the prima facie disharmony between these sources and Muslim accounts
of Muḥammad’s life and the conquests is a product of the reading imposed on both
sets of data, which primarily has to do with the fact that, more often than not, modern
scholarship unsuspectingly operates within the rigid framework of the classical peri-
odisation of early Islamic history. Therefore, a revision of either the traditional date
of Muḥammad’s death or the starting date of the conquests based on this evidence is
uncalled for.
Keywords
Muḥammad, Muslim conquests, Roman Palestine, periodisation, Arabic historiography,

non-Muslim sources for the rise of Islam
* I feel particularly privileged to express my heartfelt gratitude to Antoine Borrut, Michael

Cook, Andreas Görke, Martha Himmelfarb, Andrew Marsham, Barbara Roggema, Christian
Sahner, Josephine van den Bent, Marijn van Putten, Devin Stewart, Peter Webb, and Philip
Wood for their highly constructive comments on the many drafts of this paper. I am also
grateful to audiences at the universities of Tehran, Leiden, Tübingen, and Pennsylvania for
their feedback. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for the views expressed herein and
any remaining errors.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/15700585-12341633
ARAB_069_01_Shaddel.indd 1 2/28/2022 6:15:09 PM

2 Shaddel
Résumé
Ces dernières décennies ont été marquées par une prolifération de théories sur les
origines de l’islam, qui ont remis en question des axiomes scientifiques bien ancrés.
L’un de ces axiomes est la date traditionnelle de 632 de notre ère pour la mort du
prophète Muḥammad, que certains chercheurs ont tenté de redater après le début des
conquêtes musulmanes sur la base d’éléments provenant de sources non musulmanes.
La présente contribution vise à démontrer que la discordance de prime abord entre
ces sources et les récits musulmans de la vie de Muḥammad et des conquêtes est le
produit de la lecture imposée aux deux ensembles de données, ce qui tient principale-
ment au fait que, le plus souvent, les chercheurs modernes opèrent sans s’en douter
dans le cadre rigide de la périodisation classique de l’histoire islamique ancienne. Par
conséquent, une révision de la date traditionnelle de la mort de Muḥammad ou de la
date de début des conquêtes sur la base de ces données n’a pas lieu d’être.
Mots clefs
Muḥammad, conquêtes arabes, Palestine romaine, périodisation, historiographie

arabe, sources non-musulmanes sur l’émergence de l’Islam
…
It is not so much time which is the creation of our own minds, as the
way in which we break it up.
Fernand Braudel1
∵
The first half of the seventh century of the Common Era marked a time of
great religious and political upheaval in the Near East. Beginning in 602 CE, a
quarter-century-long conflagration saw drastic fluctuations in the fortunes of
the two superpowers of the era, the Byzantine empire and Sasanian Persia, as
well as the ascent and downfall of five crowned heads – three Sasanian and two
1 Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The longue durée,” in Fernand Braudel, On
History, transl. Sarah Matthews, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 25-54, 48.
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Periodisation and the futūḥ 3
Byzantine. This “last great war of antiquity,” as it is popularly known, drew to a

close in 628 CE with the defeat of the Sasanian side and a return to the status
quo ante bellum.2 But peace did not prevail for long: the two states had barely
recovered from the ravages of the war when, in 634 CE, a tribal army from the
heartlands of the Arabian peninsula unexpectedly emerged on the scene and
inflicted a shock defeat on a Byzantine force at Dāṯin, not far from Gaza, an
event that marked the opening salvo of the Muslim “conquests” ( futūḥ) of the
eastern Mediterranean basin.
The newly arrived had also brought with them a new religion which, in due
course, came to be called “Islam.” Islam began life on the peripheries of the
imperial powers of the era, in central western Arabia, at about the same time as
the Byzantines and Sasanians were locked in warfare. Its prophet, Muḥammad,
who reportedly had visited Syria in his youth as a merchant in the employ of
his future wife, had from early on set his eyes on Syria-Palestine. As early as
8/629, and having just secured a truce with his Meccan enemies, he had sent a
small exploratory expedition to the Byzantine province of Palaestina Tertia (or
Palaestina Salutaris). Muḥammad died in 11/632, before being able to see his
Syrian ambitions fulfilled, but his followers, after putting down a revolt against
their authority and imposing the rule of the nascent Muslim state over the
entire peninsula, pressed on with the plans he had mooted shortly before his
death and sent a large force against Byzantine Syria-Palestine.
Within five years of the Battle of Dāṯin, the Byzantine empire had lost most
of its near-eastern provinces after a string of major setbacks on the battlefield,
of which the most notable was the Battle of the Yarmūk, and the Sasanians
were, after sustaining a crushing defeat in the Battle of Qādisiyya, pushed back
to the Iranian plateau, permanently ceding what is now Iraq, along with their
capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, to the invaders. When the conquest juggernaut
came to a temporary halt during the first Muslim civil war (35/656-41/661), the
Sasanian empire had been entirely wiped off the map and Byzantium trun-
cated beyond recognition. The end of the civil war ushered in a new era, bring-
ing to power the first Islamic dynasty, the Umayyad caliphate. The Umayyads
2 Clive Foss, “The Persians in the Roman Near East (602-630 AD),” Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society, 13/2 (2003), p. 149-170; Geoffrey Greatrex and Samuel N.C. Lieu (eds), The
Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars, Part II, AD 363-628: A Narrative Sourcebook,
London-New York, Routledge, 2002, p. 182-228; Bernard Flusin, Saint Anastase le Perse et
l’histoire de la Palestine au début du VIIe siècle. Tome second, Commentaire: les moines de
Jérusalem et l’invasion perse, Paris, Éditions du CNRS, 1992; and now James Howard-Johnston,
The Last Great War of Antiquity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021.
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4 Shaddel
then embarked on a new phase of conquest, and by the 100s/720s reached

Toulouse in southern France and Samarqand in modern-day Uzbekistan.3
This, though, is the story as told by the Muslim sources, which are, in the
main, written down from about two centuries after the events onwards. There
are a number of earlier, sometimes near-contemporary non-Muslim accounts
that present us with a different picture. Long sidelined by scholars,4 these
accounts have now received due treatment in a highly provocative monograph
by Stephen Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet.5 Taken together, they appear to
suggest that Muḥammad was still alive at the time of the conquests and lead-
ing them.
The realisation that, contrary to what the Muslim sources seem to unani-
mously claim, the prophet of Islam might have died after the onset of the con-
quests is no doubt consequential, for, as Shoemaker himself notes, it might
point to, “significant ideological shifts in early Islamic eschatology, confes-
sional identity, and sacred geography that profoundly transformed the nature
of Muhammad’s original religious movement,”6 thereby necessitating a drastic
revision in his biography sometime in the late first and early second century
of Islam. To put it differently, the issue at stake here is much more than a mere
two- or three-year discrepancy between Muslim and non-Muslim sources in
the date of Muḥammad’s death; what is at issue is no less than a fundamental
metamorphosis in Islamic religiosity that required, and eventually resulted in,
a wholly different memorialisation of its beginnings.
Shoemaker’s forceful thesis has been met with ambivalence on the part of
historians of early Islam, which is evidently indicative of the uneasiness felt
about his evidence and proposed interpretation. This is hardly surprising in the
light of the far-reaching implications of his proposals, but even more troubling
3 For an accessible account of the Muslim conquests, consult Robert G. Hoyland, In God’s Path:
The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, Oxford-New York-Auckland, Oxford
University Press (“Ancient Warfare and Civilization”), 2015. Walter Emil Kaegi, Byzantium
and the Early Islamic Conquests, Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992, still
remains the definitive study of the Muslim conquest of Byzantium’s eastern provinces.
4 The only proper consideration given to the implications of these reports prior to Shoemaker
is to be found in Robert G. Hoyland, “The Earliest Christian Writings on Muḥammad: An
Appraisal,” in The Biography of Muḥammad: The Issue of the Sources, ed. Harald Motzki,
Leiden-Boston-Köln, Brill (“Islamic History and Civilization. Studies and Texts,” 32), 2000,
p. 276-297, as well as a passing reference in Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism:
The Making of the Islamic World, Cambridge-London-New York, Cambridge University Press,
1977, p. 4 and 178-179, n. 72.
5 Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muḥammad’s Life and the Beginnings
of Islam, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press (“Divinations”), 2012.
6 Ibid., p. 14.
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is the fact that, should one side with Shoemaker, there seems to be no way to
account for the abrupt disappearance of the narratives of Muḥammad’s lead-
ership of the first campaigns of conquest from the Muslim tradition. Although
he goes to great lengths to eschew the term “suppression,” Shoemaker himself
seems to believe that the only mechanism through which this could have hap-
pened is the rewriting of history by second-century Muslims. It is undeniable
that the suppression of historical facts was as common among early Muslim
writers as among their premodern (and, indeed, modern) peers elsewhere,7
but there are certain topics that particularly lend themselves to being widely
believed by a large community, even though they never occurred, while oth-
ers are less likely to be so easily accepted as “historical facts.” For instance,
adherents to a religion are more inclined to believe miraculous feats attrib-
uted to their paradigmatic figures or fabulous tales associated with the origins
of their community. A pertinent example of this is the story of the onset of
Muḥammad’s prophetic revelation which dates to no earlier than the latter
half of the first century of Islam, but which quickly gained universal currency
amongst Muslims and became an article of faith by the end of the second
Islamic century.8 But a hypothetical revision in the date of Muḥammad’s death
does not fall into this category, and, generally, one can scarcely conceive of an
amenable side to having one’s prophet die, say, two years earlier than their
actual date of death.
Shoemaker maintains that such a rewriting of history was possible because
of later Islam’s need to distance itself from its original locus sanctus, Jerusalem,
which was to be replaced by Mecca. Yet, while I am generally sympathetic to
the suggestion that the pride of place earliest Islam accorded Jerusalem was
far greater than the later tradition would admit, Mecca does seem to have
played a pivotal role in Muslim cultus already in the days of Muḥammad.9 At
any rate, and more importantly, one may wonder if there is any need to alter
the date of Muḥammad’s death and suppress the accounts of his leadership
of the conquests to obfuscate the original focus of embryonic Islam on
7 E.g. Michael Lecker, “Notes about Censorship and Self-censorship in the Biography of the
Prophet Muḥammad,” al-Qanṭara, 35/1 (2014), p. 233-254.
8 For these narratives, consult Gregor Schoeler, The Biography of Muḥammad: Nature
and Authenticity, transl. Uwe Vagelpohl, ed. James E. Montgomery, Abingdon-New York,
Routledge (“Routledge Studies in Classical Islam,” 1), 2011, p. 38-79; Sean W. Anthony,
Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam, Oakland,
University of California Press, 2020, p. 204-234.
9 Sean W. Anthony, “Why Does the Qurʾān Need the Meccan Sanctuary: Response to
Professor Gerald Hawting’s 2017 Presidential Address,” Journal of the International
Qur’anic Studies Association, 3 (2018), p. 25-41; Peter Webb, “The History and Significance
of the Meccan Hajj: From pre-Islam to the Rise of the Abbasids,” forthcoming.
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6 Shaddel
Jerusalem. There is a strong tendency in the Muslim tradition to explain things

differently, which is far easier than outright suppression. In fact, Elizabeth
Clark’s deployment of Roland Barthes’s statement that, “what has been
said cannot be unsaid, except by adding to it” to describe the predominant
modus operandi in early Christian scriptural exegesis10 would work equally
well for early Islam.11 Later Muslims could have just as easily accounted for
Muḥammad’s supposed leadership of the initial phase of the conquest of
Palestine in the same manner that they accounted for his earlier incursions
into the area by describing them as mundane “punitive” expeditions.
The present essay, therefore, takes it upon itself to reappraise the two bodies
of evidence, Muslim and non-Muslim, and reconsider Shoemaker’s interpreta-
tion of the evidence. I will first address myself to the sources for Muḥammad’s
alleged leadership of the conquests, and will argue that the construal of many
of them as depicting Muḥammad as such is the result of a sanguine approach,
belied by Shoemaker’s rather generous use of the word “reliable” to describe
his sources,12 which sequesters them from their narrative context and disre-
gards the narrative strategies employed by the sources in which these accounts
appear. There are only a handful of sources, it seems, that genuinely appear
to portray Muḥammad as the leader of the conquests in their initial phases.
I will then contend that the key to making sense of the seemingly conflict-
ing evidence at hand is a reappraisal of the “classical” periodisation of early
Islamic history, which modern scholars have taken over, lock, stock, and barrel,
from mediaeval Arabic historiography. It will be shown that the evidence at
hand does not warrant a redating of Muḥammad’s death, and that the non-
Muslim evidence in fact seconds the Muslim evidence for incursions into
Roman Palestine under Muḥammad. By way of conclusion, I will reflect on the
importance of more critical engagement with various periodisation schemes
for writing the history of early Islam and will also interrogate the validity and
analytic value of the division of our sources into such categories as “Muslim”
and “non-Muslim” or “Arabic” and “non-Arabic.”
10 Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity,

Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 6. The quote comes from Roland Barthes,
The Rustle of Language, transl. Richard Howard, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986, p. 76.
11 For one such case, see Mehdy Shaddel, “ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr and the Mahdī: Between
Propaganda and Historical Memory in the Second Civil War,” Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies, 80/1 (2017), p. 1-19, 16-19.
12 E.g. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, p. 2, 4, 21, 23, 38, 58, 64, 71; cf. also the discussion
of the “unreliability” of the Muslim sources in the same work; ibid., p. 82-117.
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1 Non-Muslim Evidence
Shoemaker’s thesis is based on the testimony of eleven texts in Arabic, Greek,

Syriac, Hebrew, and Latin, in the form of chronicles, apocalypses with ex eventu
narrations, and apologia. In keeping with the variety in their form, they are also
of varying quality. As will be seen presently, the interpretation of some of this
evidence as presenting Muḥammad as the leader of the conquests somewhat
stretches the wording of the passage, or is otherwise open to debate. In most
cases, however, the texts in question do in fact depict Muḥammad as leading
the conquests, but only at a cursory glance. Once their genres and form and
redaction histories are taken into account, their association of Muḥammad
with the opening phase of the conquests can no longer be taken as “objec-
tive,” “reliable” testimonies to “what actually happened” in the first third of the
seventh century CE. The following will hopefully demonstrate that a thorough
appreciation of the Form- and Redaktionsgeschichte as well as the genre of our
so-called non-Muslim textual witnesses is as crucial to any coolheaded his-
torical enquiry as the exacting critical engagement with the Muslim sources
which the new minimalist turn in the study of Islamic origins so vociferously
argues for.13
One text whose interpretation as a witness to Muḥammad’s presence dur-
ing the opening salvos of the conquests is open to debate is the eighth-century
Hebrew apocalyptic composition known as the Secrets of Rabbi Shimon ben
Yoḥai. In this case, concurring with Shoemaker requires a sympathetic reader
willing to entertain the idea that the singular pronoun in the sentence “he will
conquer the land for them” in the Secrets refers not to God, but to its Ishmaelite
prophet, understood to be a reference to Muḥammad: “He shall raise up over
them a prophet in accordance with His will, and He/he will subdue the land
for them.”14 This reading does not present any textual problems, but, given the
ambiguity of the text, this passage does not constitute independent evidence
for Muḥammad’s participation in the conquest of Palestine, and should be
considered to be of secondary relevance. One may also argue that a prophet-
king does not conquer territories for their followers, but rather for themself,
while God may indeed bestow victory and conquest on His believers.15
13 See, e.g. ibid., p. 4-5, 138-146. I will not, however, deal here with the dating of the texts in
question, many of which are assigned inconceivably early dates by Shoemaker.
14 John C. Reeves, Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic: A Postrabbinic Jewish Apocalypse
Reader, Leiden-Boston, Brill (“Resources for Biblical Study,” 45), 2005, p. 79.
15 I owe this observation to Ahmad Al-Jallad.
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8 Shaddel
Indeed, God doing the conquering for the Muslims is not only a prominent
theme in the Arabic futūḥ literature, with the expressions used being fataḥa
Llāh ʿalā l-muslimin […] (“God conquered for the Muslims […]”), and such like,16
but also a similar phrase, fatḥun min Allāh (“an opening/conquest from God”),
occurs in the Qurʾān (Kor 4, 141), referring to what seems to be a hypothetical
military victory. What is more, the motif of God endowing the Muslims with
triumph recurs in other near-contemporary non-Muslim writings as well: com-
menting on the Muslim takeover of Persian and Roman territories ca 73/692,17
the east-Syrian monk Yōḥannān bar Penkāyē observed,
when they came in accord with a divine commandment, they seized […]
the two kingdoms without war or difficulty. With neither armour nor
human wiles, in a despised fashion, like a brand snatched from a fire, God
gave victory into their hands so that what was written concerning them
could be fulfilled: “one pursued a thousand, and two put ten thousand to
flight” [Dt 32:30].18
As counter-intuitive as it may sound, Yōḥannān bar Penkāyē’s motives for pre-

senting the conquests as the work of God cannot possibly be further from that
of Muslims themselves in so doing, insofar as he interpreted Muslim triumph
not as a sign of divine favour, but of divine wrath – wrath at Christian impiety.19
16 Cf. Albrecht Noth (in collaboration with Lawrence I. Conrad), The Early Arabic Historical
Tradition: A Source-Critical Study, transl. Michael Bonner, Princeton, The Darwin Press
(“Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” 3), 1994, p. 118.
17 Agreeing with Sebastian P. Brock, “North Mesopotamia in the Late Seventh Century:
Book XV of John bar Penkāyē’s Rīš Mellē,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 9 (1987),
p. 51-75, 52, and contra Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and
Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, Princeton, Darwin
Press (“Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” 13), 1997, p. 199-200, on the date of
composition. I would argue that the most economical solution to the problems presented
by the text is to consider it to have been compiled first ca 687 CE, with the notice of ʿAbd
Allāh b. al-Zubayr’s death (who is conflated with his father in the text) having been added
five years later.
18 Michael Philip Penn, When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac
Writings on Islam, Oakland, University of California Press, 2015, p. 89. Cf. the Chronicle of
Ḫūzistān’s appraisal of Muslim victory: “the victory of the sons of Ishmael who overcame
and subjugated these two kingdoms was from God. Indeed, the victory is his. But God has
not yet handed Constantinople over to them”; ibid., p. 52.
19 For Yōḥannān’s theodical explication of the conquests, consult Michael Philip Penn,
Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World, Philadelphia, University
of Pennsylvania Press (“Divinations”), 2015, p. 25-28; for his theological vision of world
history, check Gerrit J. Reinink, “Paideia: God’s Design in World History according to
the East Syrian Monk John bar Penkaye,” in The Medieval Chronicle II: Proceedings of the
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It is true that, unlike Yōḥannān’s chronicle, the oldest stratum of the Secrets of
Rabbi Shimon exhibits a positive and welcoming attitude towards Islam and
Muslims, but the important point here is that a non-Muslim writer, hostile to
Islam or otherwise, may indeed present the Muslim conquests as a divinely
ordained phenomenon.
In support of his reading of the Secrets, however, Shoemaker adduces the
witness of two other texts, the Prayer of Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai and the Ten
Kings Midrash, which are interrelated with the Secrets and whose wordings
are less ambiguous. Yet, the Secrets is universally believed to be the closest of
all three to the urtext, and the author(s) of the Prayer20 is understood to have
ironed out the wrinkles in the Secrets and improved upon the presentation.21
The account of Muḥammad’s activities in the Ten Kings Midrash, which
uniquely speaks of the Ishmaelite prophet personally conquering Jerusalem,22
is so different from the one in the other two texts that it ought to be considered
separately: only one of the two versions of the account, either the one in the
Ten Kings or that from the Secrets and the Prayer, can go back to the urtext, and
the fact that the Ten Kings version is late and more embellished makes it the
prime suspect for being the derivative version.23 The Cairo Genizah version
of the Secrets24 is essentially the same text with a more polemical bent (and
hence later), and Shoemaker’s reliance on this version in support of his reading
of the Secrets25 ignores the fact that its invectives against Muḥammad, which,
in his opinion, render God an unlikely referent for the pronominal subject of
the clause on the conquest of the land, would have been added to the base text
at a secondary stage.
Another source, the seventh-century Chronicle of Ḫūzistān, which refers to
Muḥammad as the “leader” (mdabbrānā) of the Ishmaelites while recounting
the first Muslim raids into Sasanian territories,26 likewise requires a charitable
2nd International Conference on the Medieval Chronicle, Driebergen/Utrecht, 16-21 July 1999,
ed. Erik Kooper, Amsterdam-Atlanta, Rodopi, 2002, p. 190-198; reprinted in G.J. Reinink,
Syriac Christianity under Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Rule, Aldershot-Burlington,
Ashgate Publishing (“Variorum Collected Studies Series,” 831), 2005.
20 Translation in Reeves, Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic, p. 89-105.
21 Bernard Lewis, “An Apocalyptic Vision of Islamic History,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies, 13 (1950), p. 308-338, at p. 310.
22 A translation of the passage may be found ibid., p. 322 and 324.
23 Cf. Martha Himmelfarb, Jewish Messiahs in a Christian Empire: A History of the Book of
Zerubbabel, Cambridge-London, Harvard University Press, 2017, p. 130: “a somewhat
updated version of the Secrets, or, more likely, of a common source.”
24 Translation in Lewis, “An Apocalyptic Vision of Islamic History,” p. 322, n. 1.
25 Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, p. 30.
26 Ibid., p. 34-35.
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10 Shaddel
reading in order to be considered evidence for Muḥammad’s alleged leader-

ship of the conquests. The term mdabbrānā used of Muḥammad here can also
mean “guide” or “leader” in a spiritual sense,27 and in any case the passage
is too equivocal to allow for definitive conclusions to be drawn based on it.
Again, there is no textual or linguistic problem with Shoemaker’s reading, but
taking this as testimony for Muḥammad’s presence during the campaigns of
the conquests calls for some sympathy on the part of the reader.
Three eighth-century texts (to wit, the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754, the Syriac
Chronicle of 775, and the Chronicle of Zuqnīn) can be shown to exhibit a highly
schematic view of Islamic history and are in fact telescoping the events, inad-
vertently attributing the initiation of the conquests to Muḥammad in the pro-
cess: they place the beginning of the Islamic empire, and thus the conquests,
at Muḥammad’s foundation of an embryonic polity at Medina, referring to
the epoch of the Muslim reckoning system using such phraseology as “when
Muhammad and/or ṭayyāyē28 entered the land.”29 The Chronicle of Zuqnīn
informs us that,
in the year 932 the ṭayyāyē conquered the land of Palestine all the way
to the river Euphrates, and the Romans fled and crossed over to the east
of the Euphrates, and the ṭayyāyē ruled over them in it. Their first king
(malkā) was a man from among them whose name was Muhammad.
They also called this man a prophet.
The text then goes on to state that the Muslims “had defeated the Romans in
battle under Muhammad’s leadership.”30
27 R. Payne Smith, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary, ed. Jessie Payne Smith, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1903, p. 252.
28 Ṭayyāyē (sing. ṭayyāyā) is the word used by Syrophone people to refer to the nomadic
peoples who inhabited the fringes of the Arabian world, and is commonly translated
“Arab” by modern scholars. In the light of Peter Webb’s pioneering work, however, I have
grown ever-more wary of rendering an ancient exonym, used to describe an assortment
of peoples, by a modern endonym; see Peter Webb, Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and
the Rise of Islam, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, for more.
29 The discussion of these sources follows closely the one I have given in Mehdy Shaddel,
‘“The Year according to the Reckoning of the Believers’: Papyrus Louvre inv. J. David-Weill
20 and the Origins of the hijrī Era,” Der Islam, 95/2 (2018), p. 291-311, at p. 301-304.
30 Translation adapted from Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, p. 54; and Amir Harrak,
The Chronicle of Zuqnīn, parts III and IV: A.D. 488-775, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies (“Mediaeval Sources in Translation,” 36), 1999, p. 141.
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The Alexandrian year AG 932 falls on 620-621 CE, but this date, which the
chronicler apparently understands as the first year of “Muḥammad’s reign,”31 is
obviously an erroneous reference to the starting date of the Muslim calendar,
which traditional Muslim sources identify as Muḥammad’s emigration (hiǧra)
to Medina, in 622 CE (or AG 933). Given that from this point on during his
career Muḥammad was, at least in hindsight, as much a temporal sovereign of
sorts as a spiritual leader, it is not hard to see how non-Muslim sources thought
of him as the first Muslim king. In the light of the fact that some of the most
popular late ancient calendrical systems in the Near East counted the years
from the beginning of a reign, such as the Alexandrian calendar, which began
with the reign of Seleucus Nicator, or the era of Diocletian, it comes as no sur-
prise either that the anonymous author of this text equates the starting point
of the Muslim calendar with the founding of the Muslim empire.32 And since
Muḥammad’s assumption of power as the first Muslim king marked the found-
ing of the Muslim empire, this logic goes, he must have also been the initiator
of the conquests that led to the foundation of that empire. That is to say that
the Zuqnīn chronicler is, 1) equating the epoch of the Muslim hiǧrī calendar
with the founding of the Islamic empire, thereby 2) placing the start of the
conquests at this date as well, and 3) treating Muḥammad as the first Muslim
“king,” thereby 4) making him the founder of the empire and, by extension, 5)
the initiator of the conquests.
This superimposition of different events in hindsight is even more pro-
nounced in the case of the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 and the Syriac Chronicle
of 775: the Chronicle of 775, for instance, closes off with a list of Muslim rulers
beginning with Muḥammad and down to the accession of the Abbasid caliph
al-Mahdī (r. 158/775-169/785) in the year AG 1087/775 CE, which indicates that
the author was writing at about this time. The year AG 1087 falls on the year
158 in the hiǧrī calendar, and indeed other sources record the accession of
al-Mahdī as having taken place in the year 158 AH33 – that is, 157 (lunar) years
after Muḥammad’s hiǧra in 1 AH. It is therefore hardly surprising that,
31 Cf. Andrew Palmer, Sebastian Brock and Robert Hoyland, The Seventh Century in the
West-Syrian Chronicles, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press (“Translated Texts for
Historians,” 15), 1993, p. 56, and n. 171 thereto.
32 Shaddel, ‘“The Year according to the Reckoning of the Believers,’” p. 304. As Muriel Debié
has pointed out, this implicit assumption becomes explicit in the Syriac chronicle of
Michael the Syrian: “the empire of the Arabs, called the ṭayyāyē, began in the year 12 of
Heraclius, king of the Romans, when Ḫusraw, king of the Persians, was in his 32nd year”;
Muriel Debié, L’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque: transmissions interculturelles et construc-
tions identitaires entre héllenisme et islam, Leuven-Paris, Peeters (“Late Antique History
and Religion,” 12), 2015, p. 282.
33 Hugh Kennedy, “al-Mahdī,” EI2.
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12 Shaddel
subtracting 157 from the Alexandrian date of 1087, the unsuspecting chronicler
should mistakenly put the rise of Islam at 157 solar years earlier, in AG 930:
“in 930 of Alexander, Heraclius and the Romans entered Constantinople, and
Muḥammad and the ṭayyāyē went forth from the south and entered the land
and subdued it.”34 The date 930, then, is a reference to the epoch of the Muslim
calendar, which has been equated with the “subjugation of the land.”35 In the
following notice, the author of this short chronicle, too, counts Muḥammad
as the first in a series of “kings” who have ruled over the Near East since the
conquests until the time of writing. As may be seen, here we have the epoch
of the hiǧrī calendar equated with the beginning of Muḥammad’s “reign” (and
the founding of the Muslim “kingdom”) again, and this latter with the con-
quests, rather than an erroneous date for the Muslim conquest of Palestine, as
Shoemaker would have it.36
Writing in 692 of the Spanish era and 136 AH (754 CE),37 the author of the
Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 appears to have, likewise, subtracted 136 lunar
years from 692 to arrive at the date 656 of the Spanish era for the “rebellion
of the Saracens,” under the leadership of Muḥammad.38 Again, the epoch of
the Muslim calendar has been equated with the rise of Muḥammad and his
followers, and, by extension, the conquests. To put it simply, a series of pre-
sumptions about the Muslim reckoning system has resulted in a number of
Christian chroniclers presenting the rise of Islam in a schematic way that is
ambiguous and, consequently, open to interpretation.
That Christians living in monastic environments under Islamic rule were
occasionally oblivious to the fact that the Muslim reckoning system was lunar
may come across as puzzling, but there is, in fact, further evidence for this
occasional lack of knowledge (or, perhaps, lapse) on the part of Christian
authors: the Syriac inscription at the Church of St Sergius in Ehnesh from
AG 1091/780 CE, which makes mention of several events since the coming
of the Muslims, dates local events such as the Battle of Ṣiffīn accurately, but
34 Adapted from Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, p. 397.

35 Shaddel, ‘“The Year according to the Reckoning of the Believers,’” p. 303.
36 Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, p. 53. The chronicle gives the correct date for the
beginning of Muḥammad’s “kingship” in the second notice, which apparently comes from
a different source, but the fact remains that, for the chronicler, the start of Muḥammad’s
reign overlapped with the founding of the Muslim empire and, by extension, the con-
quests. For the use of the Muslim calendar in Syriac sources, consult Debié, L’écriture de
l’histoire en syriaque, p. 281-287.
37 Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, Liverpool,
Liverpool University Press (“Translated Texts for Historians,” 9), 2011, p. 125.
38 Ibid., p. 93. Cf. the similar account of the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle of 741; Hoyland, Seeing
Islam as Others Saw It, p. 615-616.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

when it comes to the “coming of the ṭayyāyē to the land” the date given is,
again, AG 930/618-619 CE.39 By this time (780 CE), however, the difference in
the lunar and solar years reckoned since the start of the Muslim calendar had
reached four years, meaning that simply subtracting the lunar hiǧrī time dif-
ference from the Alexandrian date would have given 929, and not 930 as given
in the inscription. This probably indicates the engraver’s reliance on historical
compositions dating to the mid-eighth-century CE, similar to the ones exam-
ined above, but the fact remains that the engraver seems to have had no idea
about the difference between the lunar hiǧrī and the solar Alexandrian reckon-
ing systems.40
In all fairness, however, there is reason to believe that this schematic view
and the presumptions behind it are informed by what at the time was an
incipient Arabic historiographical tradition. The schematic treatment of early
Islamic history that we observe in the above-discussed eighth-century Syriac
texts, whereby everything starts at year 1 of the Islamic calendar and with
Muḥammad, can also be found in extant ninth-century Muslim sources. But
the origins of this view are traceable to (now-lost) late seventh- and eighth-
century Muslim compositions and, in particular, what we may call taʾrīḫ his-
toriography, which starts at 1 AH and casually treats Muḥammad as the first of
Muslim rulers.41 Incognisant of the nature of taʾrīḫ historiography and reading
these texts as chronicling the emergence of the Islamic empire, the authors of
the above-discussed Christian chronicles then took the further step of identify-
ing Muḥammad as the founder of that empire. Certainly, one may argue that
it is these Christian sources and their supposed schematic view that are closer
39 Andrew Palmer, “The Messiah and the Mahdi: History Presented as the Writing on the
Wall,” in Polyphonia Byzantina: Studies in Honour of Willem J. Aerts, eds Hero Hokwerda,
Edmé R. Smits and Marinus M. Woesthuis, Groningen, E. Forsten (“Mediaevalia
Groningana,” 13), 1993, p. 45-84, at p. 62-64 (text and translation) and 67-71 (chronological
notes).
40 As to why the date given for the Battle of Ṣiffīn is accurate, note must be taken of the fact
that it had taken place close by, and it is conceivable that references to it made their way
to contemporary church archives.
41 I hope to take up this issue in a future work, but cf. already Franz Rosenthal, A History
of Muslim Historiography, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 19682, p. 71-86; Chase F. Robinson, Islamic
Historiography, Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press (“Themes in Islamic
History”), 2003, p. 46-50 and 74-79; Tobias Andersson, Early Sunnī Historiography: A Study
of the Taʾrīkh of Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ, Leiden-Boston, Brill (“Islamic History and Civilization,”
157), 2019, p. 166-167; and Mathieu Tillier and Naïm Vanthieghem, “Recording Debts in
Sufyanid Fusṭāṭ: A Reexamination of the Procedures and Calendar in Use in the First/
Seventh Century,” in Geneses: A Comparative Study of the Historiographies of the Rise of
Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam, ed. John Tolan, London-New York, Routledge,
2019, p. 148-188, at p. 158.
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14 Shaddel
to “what actually happened,” but it must be borne in mind that neither Islam
nor the Muslim empire would have come into existence overnight, and that
the emergence of a polity and an empire must have logically spanned more
than one year; hence, this version of the story of the rise of Islam, which envis-
ages the emergence of almost everything as one instantaneous event, is to be
dismissed as implausible.
Yet another source, the disputational Letter of pseudo-ʿUmar II to Leo III,
seems to depict Muḥammad as leading the first wave of invasions of Roman
and Persian territories, but is in fact adducing the Muslim victory over
Byzantium and Persia as the fulfilment, through the agency of Muḥammad,
of the promise in Qurʾān 9, 33; 48, 28, and 61, 9 that God, “sent His messenger
with guidance and the true religion so as to make it [or, perhaps, ‘him’ – mean-
ing the messenger42] triumphant over all other religion” (huwa llaḏī arsala
rasūlahu bi-l-hudā wa-dīni l-ḥaqqi li-yuẓhirahu ʿalā l-dīni kullihi). It is evident
from the summary account of the conquests given in this pamphlet, which
occurs amidst a dispute over the truth of Muḥammad’s message, that the
apologist author of the text is trying to score a theological point by deploying
the common topos of military supremacy, against impossible odds, as proof of
divine favour – indeed, the very fact that this account is produced at the end
of the fragment’s discourse on the divine nature of Muḥammad’s inspiration
is very telling in itself.
The belief that military hegemony was a sign of heavenly approval was,
in fact, a common motif in late ancient Christian anti-Jewish polemic,43 and
Qurʾān 9, 33; 48, 28; and 61, 9 turned this recurrent argument on its head to
assure the book’s adherents of their ultimate victory. The author of the apol-
ogy is now inverting the logic a second time to make a case, along the same
lines as the pre-Islamic Christian adversus iudaeus literature, for the truth of
Muḥammad’s inspiration based on the triumph of Islam, but also to depict
the conquests as the fulfilment of the prophecy made in these qurʾānic verses:
Fa-ṣaddaqnāhu wa-āmannā bihi fa-allafa Llāh bayna qulūbinā wa-

naṣaranā ʿalā ʿaduwwinā wa-anǧānā min al-firqa wa-innahu lā yadillu
ʿalā l-ḫayr wa-lā yaʾmuru bihi wa-lā yadʿū ilayhi wa-lā yanhī ʿan al-ḏunūb
42 This alternative understanding of the verse was favoured by several early exegetes and
may have been shared by the author of the “correspondence”; cf. al-Ṭabarī, Ǧāmiʿ al-bayān
ʿan taʾwīl al-Qurʾān, ed. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Turkī, Cairo, Dār Hiǧr, 2001, XI,
p. 423.
43 David M. Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary Construction of the
Jew, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press (“Middle Ages Series”), 1994, espe-
cially p. 30-50.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

wa-l-ḫaṭāyā wa-maʿāṣī allāh illā al-anbiyāʾ wa-l-rusul wa-ḫiyaratihi min

ʿibādihi wa-amarnā Llāh ʿalā lisānihi an nuqātila man ašraka bi-Llāh
wa-kafara bihi wa-ʿabada ġayrahu ḥattā yaʿbudū rabban wāḥidan
wa-ilāhan wāḥidan wa-dīnan wāḥidan fa-man yafʿalu ḏālika fa-lahu
miṯl allaḏī lanā wa-ʿalayhi miṯl allaḏī ʿalaynā wa-man yatruku ḏālika
wa-yarġabu ʿanhu wa-yukaḏḏibu bihi qātalnāhum ḥattā yaʿṭū l-ǧizya ʿan
yadīn wa-hum ṣāġirūn li-yuḏillahum44 Allāh bi-kufrihim wa-ḍalālatihim
wa-takaḏḏubihim fa-ḫaraǧnā maʿahu taṣdīqan bihi wa-īqānan bihi
ḥufātan ʿurātan wa-bi-ġayr ʿiddatin wa-lā quwwatin wa-lā silāḥin wa-lā
zādin ilā aʿẓam al-umam mulkan wa-aẓharihi sulṭānan wa-akṯarihi
ʿadadan wa-ašǧaʿihi45 nāsan wa-aqharihi li-l-umam fārs wa-l-rūm
fa-sirnā ilayham bi-l-ʿadad al-qalīl wa-l-quwwa l-ḍaʿīfa fa-naṣaranā Llāh
ʿalayhim wa-makkannā fī bilādihim wa-anzalanā arḍayhim wa-diyārihim
wa-amwālihim min ġayr ḥawlin minnā wa-lā quwwatin illā bi-l-ḥaqq
bi-ḥawl Allāh wa-raḥmatihi wa-naṣrihi ṯumma lam yazil bi-raḥmatihi
iyyānā wa-niʿmatihi ʿalaynā yuzīdunā fī kull yawmin wa-laylatin ḥattā
balaġnā mā aṣbaḥnā fīhi min karāmat Allāh wa-niʿmatihi wa-ziyādatihi
wa-sulṭānihi wa-naḥnu narǧū an yatimma Llāh lanā ḏālika mā aṭaʿnā
amrahu wa-ḥafaẓnā waṣiyyatahu wa-ʿamalnā bi-ṭāʿatihi … wa-naḥnu
naǧidu fi-mā anzala Llāh ʿalā nabiyyinā anna Llāh qāla huwa llaḏī arsala
rasūlahu bi-l-hudā wa-dīn al-ḥaqq li-yuẓhirahu ʿalā l-dīn kullihi.
Thereby, we confirmed him [scil., Muhammad] and believed in him,

and God then made our hearts amenable to each other, granted us vic-
tory over our enemy, and saved us from discord. And indeed, no one but
prophets, messengers, and His righteous servants guides and enjoins to
that which is good and makes forbidden sins and errors against God.
God commanded us, in Muhammad’s words, to wage war against those
who indulge in associationism, disavow Him, and worship beings other
than Him, until they turn to worshipping the One Lord and the One God,
and [adhere to] the One Religion. Whoever performs these deeds shall
receive the like of which we have received, and bears the same duties
44 The copy of the edition at my disposal seems to read li-yudillahum, “so as to guide them,”
which hardly makes any sense given the context.
45 The text has aškar, but this is to be emended, perhaps to ašǧaʿ, “most courageous.” The
root Š.K.R in the sense of “plentiful” or “to overflow with something” is only attested in ref-
erence to plants or a mammal’s udder; Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon,
Beirut, Librairie du Liban, 1968, s.v. Š.K.R; Elsaid M. Badawi and Muhammad Abdel
Haleem, Arabic-English Dictionary of Qur’anic Usage, Leiden-Boston, Brill (“Handbook of
Oriental Studies. Section One, The Near and Middle East,” 85), 2008, s.v. Š.K.R.
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16 Shaddel
as we bear, and whoever fails to fulfil these obligations and turns away
from them shall be fought by us ‘until they hand in tribute, humbled’
[Quran 9:29], so that God may bring them low on account of their disbe-
lief, error, and mendacity.
Thus, out of belief and trust in him [viz., Muhammad], we set out for
war alongside him – barefoot and naked, without number and power,
without weapon and ration – against the greatest of nations in terms of
territory, the mightiest of them in terms of domination, the most multitu-
dinous of them in terms of number, the most valiant of them in terms of
people, and the most victorious of them over other nations: the people
of Persia and Rome. We sallied forth against them few in number and
weak in power, but God granted us victory in their face, handed their ter-
ritories to us, settled us in their lands, and [turned over] their property
to us. This was all made possible not since we were in possession of any
might or strength, but because of [our being on the side of] truth, and
because of God’s power, mercy, and aid. He rained His mercy and His
bounty upon us every day and every night, until we reached the state
in which we are now of His grace, bounty, plenty, and domination. And
we desire that God continues to shower all of these on us so long as we
do not desist from obeying His commands, upholding His testament,
and living in His obedience … We find in what God has revealed to our
prophet that, ‘He sent His messenger with guidance and the true religion
so as to make it/him triumphant over all other religion’.
Quran 9:33, 48:28, and 61:946
The first two paragraphs set out a clear case for conjunction between imperial
hegemony and religious truth: “the like of which we have received,” promised
to those who would join the Muslim community, doubtless refers to empire,
as is clear not only from the account of the conquests that follows, but also
from the preceding insinuation that victory over enemy was materialised by
confirmation of Muḥammad’s ministry and from the assertion that Muslim
dominance was made possible by being on the side of truth. It is with a view
to presenting the conquests as the vindication of the truth of Muḥammad’s
message that the pseudonymous author of the pamphlet has the wars and
46 Dominique Sourdel, “Un pamphlet musulman anonyme d’époque ʿabbāside contre

les chrétiens,” Revue des études islamiques, 34 (1966), p. 1-33, at p. 33; a (somewhat lib-
eral) English translation of the pamphlet may be found in Jean-Marie Gaudeul, “The
Correspondence between Leo and ʿUmar: ʿUmar’s Letter Re-discovered?,” Islamo-
christiana, 10 (1984), p. 109-157, with the above quotation on p. 155-156.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

struggles that started under Muḥammad’s leadership seamlessly segue into

“the wars of conquest.” For, as the text intimates, only prophets, messengers,
and God’s righteous servants are capable of such feats, and in order to confirm
Muḥammad’s status as a true prophet he had to be presented as the initiator
of the conquests.47 One may thus observe, as Sean Anthony does in respect
of Muḥammad’s biographical literature – some of whose earliest extant speci-
mens do not stop at his demise either and continue into the reigns of the first
caliphs and the conquest of the wider Near East48 – that, “prophetic mulk [scil.,
‘dominion’] is interwoven into the overarching framework of […] Islamic salva-
tion history whose narratives of Muḥammad’s early life anticipate not merely
his political triumph but also that of his people.”49
Moreover, the ultimate supremacy of Islam had already been foretold in the
Qurʾān, which promised to make Muḥammad and his religion victorious over
other creeds – yet another vindication of the divine origins of Islam.50 It will,
however, be noted that nowhere in this brief account is Muḥammad depicted
as still leading the Muslims when they defeat the Romans and Persians and set-
tle in their lands, as this would have been too blatant a departure from contem-
porary memories of the conquests to be maintainable – after all, even the most
polemical and theologised presentations of events should have some basis in
reality in order to be acceptable.51 If anything, therefore, the absence of an
explicit association between Muḥammad and the conquests in this text con-
stitutes evidence that Muḥammad was popularly perceived, at least at the time
of the text’s composition, to have been absent during the Muslim takeover of
Roman and Persian territories.52
47 Pace Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, p. 63, who maintains that, “there is no reason
to think that the literary confrontation with Christianity has somehow determined
Muhammad’s involvement in the invasions.”
48 These biographies include those of Maʿmar b. Rāšid, Ibn Abī Šayba, Mūsā b. ʿUqba, and
Muḥammad b. Isḥāq, discussed infra.
49 Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith, p. 177.
50 On citation of imperial hegemony as proof of divine favour in early Islamic literature, and
especially prophetic biography, see ibid., p. 175-203.
51 Cf. John Dominic Crossman, “Virgin Mother or Bastard Child,” in A Feminist Companion
to Mariology, ed. Amy-Jill Levine, with Maria Mayo Robbins, London, T & T Clark
International (“Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings,”
10), 2005, p. 37-55, at p. 37: “in both ancient and modern polemics, those devices work best
when they have some basis in reality.”
52 Pace Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, p. 63, who sees, “no reason to think that the liter-
ary confrontation with Christianity has somehow determined Muhammad’s involvement
in the invasions” in this text. On this text, now see Cecilia Palombo, “The ‘Correspondence’
of Leo III and ʿUmar II: Traces of an Early Christian Arabic Apologetic Work,” Millennium,
12/1 (2015), p. 231-264, who argues that the ostensible “letter” and the other fragments of
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18 Shaddel
The account of the conquests in the composition known as The History of the
Patriarchs of Alexandria is woven into a larger narrative, in which the emperor
Heraclius has a dream wherein a circumcised race takes over his empire.
Perturbed by this dream, the emperor orders all the Jews and Samaritans in his
empire baptised, but, “a few short days later” (baʿd ayyām yasīra), Muḥammad
and his followers burst out of Arabia and conquer his kingdom – presumably
nullifying Heraclius’s forced baptism decree in the process.53 What Shoemaker
fails to tell his reader, however, is that the legend of Heraclius’s dream (or, in
some versions, prophecy) and its association with the forced baptism of the
Jews, on the one hand, and the Muslim invasion of Byzantine territories,
on the other, was a late ancient best-seller attested in multiple linguistic
and religious traditions, very few if any of which could have had any solid
anchoring in reality. It appears in Arabic-Muslim texts as well as in Latin,
Georgian, Christian Arabic (with Coptic and Syriac originals), and Ethiopic
compositions,54 and in many of them a connexion is made, one way or the
other, with the coming of Islam.
In the Arabo-Islamic versions of the tale, where Heraclius orders a general
massacre of the Jews rather than a forcible Christianisation, it is the arrival
of the news of Muḥammad’s appearance, followed shortly thereafter by the
arrival of a messenger summoning Heraclius to Islam on his behalf, that averts
disaster.55 The earliest version of the story is recorded in the Latin chronicle that
has come to be associated – falsely, in all likelihood – with a certain Fredegar
and dates to the seventh century CE. This version has recently been shown to
ultimately derive from a Christian Palestinian Aramaic original56 via a Greek
this purported epistolary exchange originally formed a single Christian apologetic work.
For a history of earlier scholarship, consult Barbara Roggema, “Pseudo-ʿUmar II’s Letter
to Leo III,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, ed. David Thomas and
Barbara Roggema, Leiden-Boston, Brill (“The History of Christian-Muslim Relations,” 11),
2009, I [600-900], p. 381-385.
53 Severus b. al-Muqaffaʿ, The History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria,
ed. and transl. Basil Thomas Alfred Evetts, Paris, Firmin-Didot (“Patrologia Orientalis,”
I/4), 1907, II [Peter I to Benjamin I (661)], p. 409-518, 492-3. On this text more broadly,
consult Johannes den Heijer, Mawhūb ibn Manṣūr ibn Mufarriǧ et l’historiographie copto-
arabe: étude sur la composition de l’Histoire des patriarches d’Alexandrie, Leuven, E. Peeters
(“Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium,” 513; “Subsidia,” 83), 1989.
54 Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith, p. 190.
55 For an exhaustive treatment, check ibid., p. 181-201; cf. also Stefan Leder, “Heraklios
erkennt den Propheten: Ein Beispiel für Form und Enstehungsweise narrativer
Geschichtskonstruktionen,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 151/1
(2001), p. 1-42.
56 Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith, p. 181-201.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

intermediary.57 In this telling of the story, too, the account of the coercive bap-
tism serves as the introit to the narrative of the conquests, which, it is inti-
mated, succeeded in breaking Byzantine imperial hegemony in the Near East
on account of Heraclius’s arbitrary behaviour and misguided religious policy,
of which the forced baptism decree and monenergist “heresy” were but two
prominent examples.58 Furthermore, Alexander Beihammer has discerned a
connexion between the account of The History of the Patriarchs and the fol-
lowing passage in the chronicle of Michael the Syrian (d. 1199 CE),59 which is
similarly woven into his narrative of the conquests:
at this time King Heraclius ordered that all the Jews who were found in the
lands of the Roman empire should be baptised and become Christians.
For this reason the Jews fled Roman territory. They came first to Edessa;
expelled violently once again from this place, they fled into Persia. A
great number of them received baptism and became Christians.60
What we have in these narratives, then, is a premonitory prediction of the

rise of Islam initially mistaken for a reference to Jews and resulting in
the promulgation of an anti-Jewish decree, which is in turn aborted by the
coming of Islam. There are various fanciful elements in different versions of
this legend which defy belief.61 It is, nonetheless, possible that the reference
to Muḥammad’s leadership of the first wave of the conquests that follows the
decree was an independent account which was integrated into the story by
the author of The History of the Patriarchs or its source, and which may thus
attest to early memories of Muḥammad as the leader of the conquests. But
57 Stefan Esders, “The Prophesied Rule of a ‘Circumcised People’: A Travelling Tradition

from the Seventh-Century Mediterranean,” in Barbarians and Jews: Jews and Judaism
in the Early Medieval West, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Thomas F.X. Noble, Turnhout, Brepols
(“Diaspora,” 4), 2018, p. 119-154, at p. 148-153.
58 Ibid., esp. p. 146.
59 Alexander Daniel Beihammer, Nachrichten zum byzantinischen Urkundenwesen in ara-
bischen Quellen, Bonn, Habelt, 2000, p. 51 (unfortunately this work has not been available
to me).
60 Translation from Robert G. Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation
of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, Liverpool, Liverpool University
Press (“Translated Texts for Historians,” 57), 2011, p. 95. The full entry for this year, which
is in the main about the conquests, may be found in Jean-Baptiste Chabot, Chronique
de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche (1166-1199), Paris, E. Leroux, 1901, II,
p. 413-414.
61 For an appraisal of these traditions, see Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith,
p. 181-201; Esders, “The Prophesied Rule of a ‘Circumcised People.’”
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20 Shaddel
the problem is that all of the many versions of the story somehow associate
the de facto annulment of the decree with the emergence of Islam, but each
in a different way. The version preserved for us in The History of the Patriarchs
is, therefore, just another version of the legend the individual(s) responsible
for which had the freedom to choose from the multiple versions in existence
and may have, in the process, decided to craft the story in a new way. In sum,
whilst the reference to Muḥammad may have indeed come from elsewhere,
the problematic nature of the evidence renders any inferences drawn from it
of suspect value.
Be that as it may, the weight of the evidence is so much that it cannot
simply be wished away. The best known of our sources for Muḥammad’s
leadership of the conquests is perhaps an anti-Jewish tractate – datable to
634 CE at the earliest – called Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati (The Teachings
of Jacob, the Newly Baptised), which unequivocally speaks of a prophet who,
“has appeared, coming with the [invading] Saracens.”62 Much ink has been
spilt on this tractate, and, although the question of its dating remains much
contested, there seems to be a consensus among scholars that the “prophet”
referred to here is indeed Muḥammad.63 The Doctrina has this “prophet” and
his “Saracens” launch raids into Palestine, and in the light of the very precise
and accurate details it furnishes about Palestinian geography64 it is quite clear
that the author, or their informant(s), must have been a native of the region.
Of like character are the witnesses of the seventh-century chronicle of Jacob
of Edessa (d. 708 CE), who speaks of Muslim “inroads into Palestine” a few years
before Muḥammad’s death,65 and the ninth-century chronicle of Dionysius of
Tel-Maḥrē (d. 845 CE), which confer a prominent role on Muḥammad in initi-
ating the conquest of Palestine.
While Jacob confines himself to mentioning inroads into Palestine during
Muḥammad’s lifetime, Dionysius’s account is longer and much more detailed.
Dionysius’s chronicle is only extant in the form of copious quotations in the
so-called Chronicle of 1234 and the chronicle of Michael the Syrian, but he is
believed to have made use of a mid-eighth-century source, commonly referred
to as the Eastern or Syriac Common Source in modern scholarship, for his
62 Doctrina Iacobi 5, 16: Vincent Déroche, “Doctrina Jacobi,” in Juifs et chrétiens en Orient
byzantine, ed. Vincent Déroche and Gilbert Dagron, Paris, Association des Amis du Centre
d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance (“Bilans de recherche,” 5), 2010, p. 47-229, at p. 208-209.
63 Cf. Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith, p. 42-44, and n. 60 thereto.
64 Pieter W. van der Horst, “A Short Note on the Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati,” in id., Studies
in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, Leiden-Boston, Brill (“Ancient Judaism and
Early Christianity,” 87) 2014, p. 203-208; cf. Averil Cameron, “The Jews in Seventh-century
Palestine,” Scripta Classica Israelica, 13 (1994), p. 75-93, at p. 83-85.
65 Penn, When Christians First Met Muslims, p. 178.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

account of the rise of Islam.66 Dionysius’s presentation of the rise of Islam is

no doubt hostile and caricaturesque, but there are elements in it familiar both
from the Muslim tradition itself and from other non-Muslim sources. These
elements include Muḥammad’s early activities in Syria-Palestine; his direction
of the first raids into that region, also mentioned by Jacob of Edessa and the
Doctrina Iacobi; and the early Muslim focus on Palestine.67 Finally, it would
seem that the admittedly laconic testimony of the continuatio of Abū l-Fatḥ
al-Sāmirī’s chronicle should also be taken for what it says.68
It therefore appears that Muḥammad’s leadership of the Muslim conquest
of the Near East in its earliest phases is a possibility – indeed probability –
that ought to be given more serious consideration. But, instead of postponing
Muḥammad’s death, is it not possible to account for the reports of non-Muslim
sources by redating the beginning of the conquests to two to three years ear-
lier, as some have already suggested?69
In arguing for a later date for Muḥammad’s death, rather than an earlier date
for the conquests, Shoemaker appears to have been informed by four factors.
66 For which see Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical
Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, p. 89-90. On the debates and status quaestio-
nis regarding the Eastern Common Source, consult Muriel Debié, “Theophanes’ ‘Oriental
Source’: What Can We Learn from Syriac Historiography?,” in Studies in Theophanes,
ed. Marek Jankowiak and Federico Montinaro, Paris, Association des amis du Centre
d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance (“Travaux et mémoires,” 19), 2015, p. 365-382; Maria
Conterno, “Theophilus, ‘the More Likely Candidate’? Towards a Reappraisal of the
Question of Theophanes’ ‘Oriental Source(s),’” in Studies in Theophanes, p. 383-400; and
Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Review of Robert G. Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle
and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” Le Muséon,
126 (2013), p. 459-465.
67 Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in
Late Antiquity and Early Islam, p. 89.
68 Milka Levy-Rubin, The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle of Abū l-Fatḥ al-Sāmirī
al-Danafī, Princeton, Darwin Press (“Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” 10), 2002,
p. 50-51 (transl.) and 123 (text).
69 Nicolai Sinai, The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction, Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press (“The New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys”), 2017, p. 45; cf. also Robert G.
Hoyland, “Review of Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muḥammad’s
Life and the Beginnings of Islam,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 134/4 (2014),
p. 728-730, at p. 728. Parvaneh Pourshariati has also argued that Arabian raids into
Sasanian territory started earlier than hitherto thought, and the revised chronology she
proffers places the first raids within the lifetime of Muhammad; Parvaneh Pourshariati,
The Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the
Arab Conquest of Iran, London-New York, I.B. Tauris, 2008, p. 161-286. In my opinion,
even if we were to date the start of the conquests earlier based on Shoemaker’s evidence
(which relies on relative chronology), it would still be irreconcilable with Pourshariati’s
thesis (which draws on absolute, regnal chronology), and hence the two theses ought to
be analysed separately.
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22 Shaddel
The first is the pioneering influence of Patricia Crone’s and Michael Cook’s
Hagarism. Writing in the 1970s, Crone and Cook had passingly suggested that
Muḥammad was probably alive and leading the conquests during their initial
phases, basing themselves on some of the same sources that Shoemaker uses,
chiefly the Doctrina Iacobi.70 It is their interpretation of the evidence at hand
that seems to be mainly responsible for having induced Shoemaker to draw
a similar conclusion. The second factor is the dating of the Doctrina Iacobi to
634 CE by those scholars who are willing to treat it as a contemporary wit-
ness to the conquests.71 The third factor is that Shoemaker apparently feels
more comfortable explaining a hypothetical redating of Muḥammad’s date of
death by later Muslims than the entire saga of conquests, and the fourth that a
conclusion as bold as a redating of Muḥammad’s death, with all the attendant
implications that Shoemaker draws, makes for a far more engrossing read.
The main obstacle in the way of an alternate interpretation in which the
conquests start earlier, then, is the Doctrina Iacobi. The military incursions that
make up the backdrop to the emergence of the Doctrina’s Saracen prophet are
commonly thought to have been the opening salvos of the “Muslim conquests,”
and there is also a reference to the defeat and death of a certain candidatus,
called Sergius in non-Greek versions of the text,72 who seems to be the same
individual as Sergius, the patricius of Caesarea, who is mentioned as having
been slain in combat against the Muslims in ca 633-634 CE by the presumed
dependants of the Eastern Common Source. The basis for the dating of the
events referred to in the Doctrina to 634 CE is, then, its own supposed allusion
to “the conquests” and its reference to Sergius’s death, while “the conquests,”
it is thought, began after the death of Muḥammad – a circularity apparently
lost on Shoemaker. In sum, if Muḥammad was the leader of the conquests in
their early phases, this would invite a reconsideration of the chronology both
of the conquests and of Muḥammad’s life, and hence neither event could be
relied upon as a frame of reference for dating the events referred to in the
Doctrina. One also wonders why it is not the Eastern Common Source’s dating
of Sergius’s death that should be revisited, or, for that matter, the Doctrina’s
unique reference to Muḥammad as alive during this battle considered
70 Crone and Cook, Hagarism, p. 178-179, n. 72; cf. Patricia Crone, “What Do We Actually
Know about Mohammed?,” openDemocracy, June 2008, available at https://www.opende
mocracy.net/en/mohammed_3866jsp/, last accessed 3 February 2022.
71 Those scholars who consider it to be a product of the later seventh century still take its
historical allusions to be the events of the 630s CE. On the Doctrina, the various opinions
on its redaction history, its date, and its possible sources, see Anthony, Muhammad and
the Empires of Faith, p. 41-58.
72 Déroche, “Doctrina Jacobi,” p. 208. For the manuscript tradition, see ibid., p. 47-55.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

erroneous? After all, Theophanes the Confessor places the Battle of Muʾta
(8/629) after Muḥammad’s death,73 which is emblematic of the confused chro-
nology plaguing the dependants of the Eastern Common Source. The question
then is, if, in spite of Theophanes’s testimony, Muʾta could be redated to before
Muḥammad’s death, why not the battle involving the patricius Sergius? The
two options of redating the start of the conquests or Muḥammad’s death, then,
stand on equal footing.
On the other hand, Muslim sources do preserve reports of several raids
against Byzantine Palestine, some of which were personally led by Muḥammad,
and thus redating the start of the conquests to the period of Muḥammad’s life-
time would make it easier to reconcile the evidence of the Muslim and non-
Muslim sources. But these early campaigns reported by the Muslim sources are
never treated as part of the conquests, neither by classical Muslim writers, nor
by modern historians. The first major raid among these, the Battle of Muʾta,
for instance, is said to have been a punitive expedition sent against a regional
potentate for having ordered the execution of one of Muhammad’s envoys.74
But is it fair to speak of these events and the campaigns of conquests as
unrelated ventures? Looking at the whole body of evidence afresh, we have
Muslim sources that speak of “conquests” after 13/634 but use different terms
for the preceding conflicts outside Arabia, while non-Muslim sources report
on all military activity outside the peninsula in generic terms. For their own
part, modern scholars have fallen prey to the terminology used by their
(Arabo-Islamic) sources, and taken the latter to be references to the conquests,
while treating the pre-13/634 conflicts reported in Muslim sources as separate
affairs. The question that is to be addressed here, then, is whether the earliest
generations of Muslims themselves thought of the pre-13/634 campaigns and
the later wars of “conquest” as different, disjointed ventures, or is this differ-
entiation a product of later Islamic historiography? If the answer to the latter
question is in the affirmative, then do the above-discussed non-Muslim sources
preserve traces of a pre-classical historiographical tradition wherein the later,
clear-cut distinction between the pre- and post-Muhammadan conflicts had
73 Cyril Mango and Roger Scott, with the assistance of Geoffrey Greatrex, The Chronicle of
Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284-813, Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1997, 466. On Theophanes’s account of the Battle of Muʾta, check Lawrence I. Conrad,
“Theophanes and the Arabic Historical Tradition: Some Indications of Intercultural
Transmission,” Byzantinische Forschungen, 15 (1990), p. 1-44, at p. 21-26; reprinted in
Arab-Byzantine Relations in Early Islamic Times, ed. Michael Bonner, Abingdon-Burlington,
Ashgate Variorum (“The Formation of the Classical Islamic World,” 8), 2004.
74 David S. Powers, Zayd: The Little-Known Story of Muḥammad’s Adopted Son, Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press (“Divinations”), 2014, p. 49-62.
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24 Shaddel
yet to emerge? If that turns out to be the case, the seeming conflict between
Muslim and non-Muslim sources will prove illusory.
2 The Classical Periodisation Revisited
It is, therefore, our conception of “the conquests,” which we share with mediae-
val Arabic sources, that is acting as an epistemic sticking point here; absent the
term “conquests” from the discussion, and the disharmony would fade away.
As Robert Hoyland perceptively notes in his review of The Death of a Prophet,
Shoemaker, and Crone and Cook before him, are using the tidied-up and
systematized chronology of ninth-century Muslim scholars, who make a
clear distinction between campaigns (maghāzī) waged by Muḥammad,
defections (ridda) dealt with by the first caliph, Abū Bakr (r. 632-34), and
conquests ( futūḥ) prosecuted by the second caliph, ʿUmar (r. 634-44).
These three phenomena are presenting [sic] as occurring consecutively,
with no overlap … Indeed, the whole notion of a single person, whether
Muḥammad or ʿUmar, instigating the conquests and of the whole process
getting under way in a single movement is surely only the product of later
systematization by historians and the reality is likely to have been much
messier […] and the situation […] much more complex than is generally
allowed for.75
This pertinent observation provides us with a third alternative: revisiting our

conception of “the conquests” – borrowed, wholesale, from mediaeval Muslim
writers – in particular, and the periodisation of early Islamic history, in general.
The idea that the conquests were a strictly post-prophetic enterprise that
started in 13/634 is blatantly contrived and an obvious product of later historio-
graphical (re)organisations and renegotiations of the past.76 Classical Muslim
historiography of the second and third Islamic centuries onwards moulds the
early decades of Islam into six neatly stylised phases:77 1) the Meccan period of
75 Hoyland, “Review of Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet,” p. 728-729.

76 See further Antoine Borrut, “The Future of the Past: Historical Writing in Early Islamic
Syria and Umayyad Memory,” in Power, Patronage, and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives
on Umayyad Elites, ed. Alain George and Andrew Marsham, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2018, p. 275-300.
77 This is not, of course, the only possible periodisation of the early days of Islam, but here
I have focused on periods and themes that concern us the most for the purposes of this
paper.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

Muḥammad’s prophetic career (610-622 CE), which begins with Muḥammad’s

call to prophecy; 2) the Medinan period (1/622-11/632), which begins with his
emigration to Medina and the foundation there of the first Islamic polity;
3) the wars of “apostasy” (or ridda, 11/632-13/634), which broke out as a result
of Muḥammad’s death and took around two years to suppress, ending with
the Muslim subjugation of the entire Arabian peninsula; 4) the period of the
early “conquests” (13/634-35/656); which culminated in 5) the first “civil war”
(or fitna, 35/656-41/661); and 6) the Umayyad period (41/661-132/750) – each of
which constitutes a distinct genre in the Islamic historiographical tradition.78
As Albrecht Noth, a pioneer of the critical study of Islamic historiography, has
shown in his monumental Early Arabic Historical Tradition, schematisation
and systematisation are two prominent features of Muslim historiography of
early Islam, and the aforementioned division is no exception to this rule. He
further writes:
the designation of these events as “[the wars of] apostasy” is (consciously

or unconsciously) a tendentious one, for […] the Muslims’ opponents
in these struggles included not only apostates, but also – and perhaps
in the majority of cases – tribes and tribal groups which in the lifetime
of Muhammad had remained largely or completely independent of the
political entity led by him.79
In other words, “the wars of apostasy” were in fact mostly wars of conquest.
Moreover, we have already seen how the Muslim tradition preserves reports
about several campaigns against Byzantine Palestine during Muḥammad’s
lifetime, which are traditionally considered not to be part of “the conquests.”
Of “the conquests” themselves, Noth observes that they constitute, “a – if
not the – principal historical rubric under which the early traditionists consid-
ered the first decades of Islamic history after the death of Muhammad.”80
More recently, Antoine Borrut has argued that, as with much else in early
Islamic historiography, the periodisation of early Islamic history that reigns
supreme in modern-day academic discussions was in fact first crafted in the
early Abbasid period, and that, “the imposition of such a rigid chronological
framework limited the possibilities to rewrite the past or, more specifically,
78 On the appearance of each of the six periods mentioned as a theme in early Islamic his-
toriography, see Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition.
79 Ibid., p. 28.
80 Ibid., p. 31.
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26 Shaddel
locked the past into a teleologically predetermined and binding frame.”81 Of

the examples he adduces, perhaps the most illustrative is the emergence
of the concept of a period of “rightly-guided caliphate” (al-ḫilāfa l-rāšida, 11/632-
41/661), which encompasses the reigns of the first four caliphs (Abū Bakr b. Abī
Quḥāfa, ʿUmar b. al-Ḫaṭṭāb, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, and ʿUṯmān b. ʿAffān), followed by
the “Umayyad dynasty” (usually understood to have begun with Muʿāwiya b.
Abī Sufyān in 41/661). As Borrut notes, the concept of the four “rightly-guided
caliphs” appeared very late in the day,82 and there were earlier, competing peri-
odisations that viewed the third caliph, ʿUṯmān b. ʿAffān (r. 24/644-35/656), as
the founder of an “Umayyad dynasty” that began in 24/644, and whose domi-
nance was briefly challenged during the first civil war (35/656-41/661). The
now-dominant periodisation which takes the Umayyad dynasty to have begun
with Muʿāwiya and in 41/661, he further argues, was a later attempt to dissoci-
ate the Umayyads from ʿUṯmān – who had, in an ideological compromise, by
then been accepted as a “true” successor to the prophet – and thus undermine
Umayyad claims to legitimacy.83
There hence are pitfalls inherent in uncritically thinking of the events of
the seventh and eighth centuries in terms of a pre-Islamic “age of ignorance”
(al-ǧāhiliyya),84 a prophetic period, then a rāšidūn era, an Umayyad “tempo-
ral kingship” (mulk),85 and, finally, an Abbasid “revolution” (dawla)86 – which
supposedly returned the style of governance to the early caliphal model – in
81 Antoine Borrut, “Vanishing Syria: Periodization and Power in Early Islam,” Der Islam, 91/1
(2014), p. 37-68, at p. 41.
82 On this notion, see Tayeb El-Hibri, Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History: The
Rashidun Caliphs, New York, Columbia University Press, 2010; and, more concisely,
Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University
Press, 2004, p. 134-135.
83 Borrut, “Vanishing Syria,” p. 48-52; cf. also Michael G. Morony, “Bayn al-fitnatayn:
Problems in the Periodization of Early Islamic History,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies,
40/3 (1981), p. 247-251; Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority
in the First Centuries of Islam, Cambridge-London-New York, Cambridge University Press
(“University of Cambridge Oriental Publications,” 37), 1986, p. 31-32.
84 For this concept, now see Peter Webb, “al-Jāhiliyya: Uncertain Times of Uncertain
Meanings,” Der Islam, 91/1 (2014), p. 69-94.
85 On the polemical uses of the term mulk, consult Sean W. Anthony, “Prophetic Dominion,
Umayyad Kingship: Varieties of mulk in the Early Islamic Period,” in The Umayyad World,
ed. Andrew Marsham, Abingdon-New York, Routledge (“Routledge Worlds”), 2020,
p. 39-65.
86 On which see Jacob Lassner, “The ‘Abbasid dawla: An Essay on the Concept of Revolution
in Early Islam,” in Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity, ed. Frank M. Clover and
R. Stephen Humphreys, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press (“Wisconsin Studies
in Classics”), 1989, p. 247-270.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

the same way that there is little utility to the periodisation of the military his-
tory of the era, likewise borrowed from the Arabic sources, into the “prophetic
expeditions,” the “wars of apostasy,” the “campaigns of conquest,” and the “first
civil war,” and just as there is a limited heuristic value to the long-outmoded
division of European history into an ancient period of “civilisational apogee,”
a mediaeval “dark age,” and a “renaissance,” a rebirth, that breathed a new life
into the classical tradition and paved the way for our modern era of “rational
enlightenment.”87
It thus seems warranted to cast aside the prevalent periodisation of
early Islamic history: if early non-Muslim sources describe the first wave
of Muslim raids in the region of Palestine as being directed by Muḥammad
and Muslim sources speak of incursions – one of them personally led by
Muḥammad – into Roman Palestine, which, although generally not con-
sidered part of “the conquests,” are occasionally described as attacks on the
“Byzantines” (banū l-aṣfar; al-rūm),88 then it is legitimate to ask if they are not
talking about the same events. It does not necessarily follow from these two
87 For an able debunking of this scheme, see Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into
Periods?, transl. Malcolm Debevoise, New York, Columbia University Press (“European
Perspectives”), 2015.
88 The expedition against Tabūk (9/630) is referred to as such by all of the earliest authori-
ties on prophetic biography: Ibn Isḥāq, al-Sīra l-nabawiyya, ed. Muṣṭafā Saqqā, Ibrāhīm
al-Ibyārī and ʿAbd al-Ḥafīẓ Šalabī, Beirut, Dār al-qalam, 1955, IV, p. 159-160 and 168;
al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, ed. ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī Qalʿaǧī, Beirut, Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya,
1988, V, p. 224 (quoting Mūsā b. ʿUqba and ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr); Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīḫ madīnat
Dimašq, ed. Muḥibb al-Dīn al-ʿAmrawī, Beirut, Dār al-fikr, 1995, II, p. 32 (different transmis-
sion line from al-Zuhrī); Ibn Abī Šayba, al-Muṣannaf, ed. Ḥamad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ǧumuʿa
and Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Luḥaydān, Riyadh, Maktabat al-rušd, 2004, XIII, p. 443;
al-Wāqidī, Kitāb al-Maġāzī, ed. Marsden Jones, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1965-
1966, III, p. 990, 992-993, 995, 1003 and 1023. One of the passages (ibid., p. 995) is cited by
Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981,
p. 102, but misinterpreted by him as “a raid on the Syrians.” For banū l-aṣfar (lit. “sons of
the yellow ones”) as a codeword for the Byzantines in Classical Arabic literature, see Jordi
Ferrer I Serra, “Raphelengius and the Yellow Cow (Q 2:69): Early Translations of Hebrew
ʔādōm into Arabic ʔaṣfar,” in Arabic in Context: Celebrating 400 Years of Arabic at Leiden
University, ed. Ahmad Al-Jallad, Leiden-Boston, Brill (“Studies in Semitic Languages
and Linguistics,” 89), 2017, p. 227-270, and the references cited therein. The expedition
derives its name from Muḥammad’s northernmost stop in the campaign, Tabūk in the
northwest of modern Saudi Arabia, near the Jordanian frontier, but the campaign was
apparently considered to be aimed at Greater Syria (al-Šām) by such Muslim authori-
ties as al-Balāḏurī, Futūḥ al-buldān, ed. Michael Johan de Goeje, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1866,
p. 59 (cited by Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, p. 555, n. 46); al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil
al-nubuwwa, V, p. 224 and 226; and al-Wāqidī, apud Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīḫ madīnat Dimašq, II,
p. 3. The Battle of Muʾta the previous year is universally said to have been fought against
the Byzantines; William Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina, Oxford, Clarendon
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28 Shaddel
bodies of evidence that the armies that poured into the wider Near East after
Muḥammad’s putative death-date of 11/632 were led by him, or that the indi-
vidual battles of the Muslim conquest of Syria-Palestine actually took place
two to three years before what is generally thought. The most immediate con-
clusion to be drawn from them is that Muḥammad despatched expeditions
to Roman Palestine, a point on which both non-Muslim and Muslim sources
agree. The only difference on this point between these two sets of sources is
that while for the former these expeditions evidently marked the initiation of
what we now call “the Muslim conquests,” the latter considered them stand-
alone incidents that had nothing to do with these “conquests.”
It is true that, compared to the battles of the conquests, the northward
incursions of Muslim forces during Muḥammad’s lifetime (the most famous of
which being Muʾta, Tabūk, and Usāma b. Zayd’s expedition89) are depicted as
relative sideshows not worthy of much attention in our Arabic-Islamic sources,
but this does not necessarily mean that they were considered just as routine by
Muḥammad and his followers. If, as scholars have long suspected, this north-
ward expansion was part of a larger plan,90 it would only be natural for the
fledging caliphal regime to have returned to prosecuting this struggle once it
had dealt with the rebellion of Arabian tribes.
It is only through the prism of mediaeval Islamic historiography that these
two phases of the same struggle are seen as separate affairs. Breaking free of
the schematic yoke of this historiographical tradition makes it possible for us
to reconcile the evidence discussed above with the traditional chronology of
both Muḥammad’s life and the individual battles of “the Islamic conquests.” In
all likelihood, the first generations of the believers viewed the later, more suc-
cessful campaigns that followed Muḥammad’s demise as essentially the con-
tinuation of these early, abortive attempts – a view also shared, as it seems, by
seventh- and eighth-century non-Muslim sources. As a matter of fact, traces of
such a construal of the earliest phases of the expansion of the proto-Muslim
community may still be discernible in some of the earliest works of prophetic
biography. The Kitāb al-Maġāzī (The Book of Raids) of Maʿmar b. Rāšid al-Baṣrī
(d. 153/770) is one of the two oldest extant compositions on the biography
of Muḥammad. The term maġāzī in its title refers to raids undertaken by
Press, 1956, p. 53-55; Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests, p. 71-74; Powers,
Zayd, p. 49-62.
89 For a full roster of these northern campaigns, consult Watt, Muhammad at Medina, p. 105-
117; Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, p. 101-111; Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-
1099, transl. Ethel Broido, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 21-32.
90 Watt, Muhammad at Medina, p. 53, 105 and 116; Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests,
p. 102; Hoyland, In God’s Path, p. 38; cf. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, esp. p. 197-265.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

Muḥammad or at his behest in the technical jargon of prophetic biography, but

it is also a synecdoche for prophetic biography itself, more or less interchange-
able with sīra.91 Yet, Maʿmar’s maġāzī work does not conclude, as one would
expect, with Muḥammad’s demise, but includes narratives about several bat-
tles of “the conquests;” the latest episode adumbrated in this composition is the
first Muslim civil war twenty-five years after the death of Muḥammad. Indeed,
the accounts of the first incursions into Syria-Palestine under Muḥammad
and the slightly later ones under his first successors appear as one, cohesive nar-
rative in this early biographical work.92 Based on quotations thereof in extant
sources, this is also true of the Kitāb al-Maġāzī of Mūsā b. ʿUqba (d. 141/758),
which offers a continuous narrative until the beginning of the first civil war.93
Even as relatively late an authority as Ibn Abī Šayba (d. 235/849) can include
the reigns of the first four caliphs and the first civil war in his Kitāb al-Maġāzī.94
Significantly, even Ibn Isḥāq’s (d. 150/768) al-Maġāzī, in its initial conception,
continued – perhaps under the rubric of Taʾrīḫ al-ḫulafāʾ (The History of the
Caliphs), but more likely as part of the Maġāzī – into the period of “the con-
quests” and then on to his own time.95 In other terms, not a single one of the
91 Nabia Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri: I, Historical Texts, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press (“University of Chicago. Oriental Institute Publications,” 75), 1957, p. 87;
John Marsden Beaumont Jones, “The maghāzī Literature,” in The Cambridge History of
Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. Alfred Felix
Landon Beeston, Thomas Muir Johnstone, Robert Bertram Serjeant and Gerald Rex Smith,
Cambridge-New York-Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 344-351; Martin
Hinds, “‘Maghāzī’ and ‘sīra’ in Early Islamic Scholarship,” in La vie du prophète Mahomet:
colloque de Strasbourg, octobre 1980, ed. Toufic Fahd, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France
(“Bibliothèque des centres d’études supérieures spécialisés”), 1983, p. 57-66; reprinted in
The Life of Muḥammad, ed. Uri Rubin, Aldershot-Brookfield, Ashgate (“The Formation of
the Classical Islamic World,” 4), 1998; Martin Hinds, “al-Mag̲ h̲āzī,” EI2; Maʿmar b. Rāšid,
The Expeditions: An Early Biography of Muḥammad [= Kitāb al-Maġāzī], ed. and transl.
Sean W. Anthony, New York-London, New York University Press (“Library of Arabic
Literature”), 2014, p. xviii.
92 Maʿmar, The Expeditions, p. 216-220 and 267-271. Cf. Harry Munt, “Review of Sean W.
Anthony, The Expeditions: An Early Biography of Muḥammad,” Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies, 78/3 (2015), p. 612-613, at p. 613, who observes in Maʿmar’s
work, “a slightly different conception of what constitutes maghāzī.”
93 Muḥammad Bāqšīš Abū Mālik, al-Maġāzī li-Mūsā b. ʿUqba (141 H), Agadir, Ǧāmiʿat Ibn
Zuhr-Kulliyyat al-ādāb wa-l-ʿulūm al-insāniyya, 1994, p. 331-350.
94 Ibn Abī Šayba, al-Muṣannaf, XIII, p. 463-500. His Kitāb al-Maġāzī is extant as part of a
larger tome, his celebrated Compilation of Sayings and Deeds (al-Muṣannaf fī al-aḥādīṯ
wa-l-āṯār). The Muṣannaf also separately treats of some of the same or similar material,
bearing on post-prophetic history, in another section entitled Kitāb al-Taʾrīḫ.
95 According to Anthony, his Taʾrīḫ al-ḫulafāʾ is probably better understood as the “con-
cluding section” of his Kitāb al-Maġāzī, rather than as an “addendum” to it; Anthony,
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30 Shaddel
earliest compositions on prophetic biography prior to the age of al-Wāqidī

(d. ca 207/823) and Ibn Hišām (d. 213/828 or 218/833) which are extant or about
whose scope we can find information in later literature stops at Muḥammad’s
death, but all continue into what we would call “the conquests.”
Of like character is a Kitāb Futūḥ al-nabī (The Book of Prophetic Conquests)
by the historian Abū l-Ḥasan al-Madāʾinī (d. ca 228/843),96 which is no longer
extant, but as its title indicates fails to differentiate between the campaigns
prosecuted by the prophet and the military operations conducted by the
caliphs, at least on the level of semantics. More relevant for our purposes is
another now-lost source, a Kitāb al-Ṣawāʾif (The Book on Summer Campaigns)
by al-Wāqidī. Later historiography reserves the term ṣāʾifa (pl. ṣawāʾif ) exclu-
sively for annual Arab summertime raids into Byzantine Anatolia which began
ca 20/640, during Muʿāwiya’s tenure as governor of Syria,97 and, judging by
quotations therefrom in extant literature, this is precisely what al-Wāqidī’s
composition was about. Nevertheless, he (very consciously) starts enumerat-
ing these anti-Byzantine campaigns with Muḥammad’s northward raids into
Syria,98 and then moves on to what we would call the wars of “conquest” in
Muhammad and the Empires of Faith, p. 159. The evidence (culled by Abbott, Studies in
Arabic Literary Papyri, I, p. 87-99), however, for the separate existence from the outset of
the Taʾrīḫ al-ḫulafāʾ is flimsy at best, as argued by Muṭāʿ al-Ṭarābīšī, Ruwāt Muḥammad
b. Isḥāq b. Yasār: fī l-maġāzī wa-l-siyar wa-sāʾir al-marwiyyāt, Damascus, Dār al-fikr, 1994,
p. 42-43, and the accounts circulated under this title may very well have originally been
part of the Kitāb al-Maġāzī. It is important to observe in this regard that al-Ṭabarī’s direct
quotations from Ibn Isḥāq for post-prophetic history (collected by Abbott, Studies in
Arabic Literary Papyri, I, p. 90, n. 8-11) rely on the Rayy recension of his Maġāzī transmit-
ted by Salama b. al-Faḍl al-Abraš, who is noted to have transmitted both his Mubtadaʾ and
Maġāzī (al-Ṭarābīšī, Ruwāt Muḥammad b. Isḥāq b. Yasār, p. 148), or more likely one work
entitled Kitāt al-Maġāzī wa-l-mubtadaʾ, but not his Taʾrīḫ al-ḫulafāʾ. I would also contend
that, whatever its original title, there were, pace Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of
Faith, p. 159-160; and al-Ṭarābīšī, Ruwāt Muḥammad b. Isḥāq b. Yasār, p. 35-36, no internal
divisions to the text, and that the purported “sections” are names bestowed on the varie-
gated material that it comprised.
96 Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, ed. Ayman Fuʾād Sayyid, London, Muʾassasat al-Furqān li-l-
turāṯ al-islāmī-Markaz dirāsāt al-maḫṭūṭāt al-islāmiyya, 2009, I, p. 316; cited by
Chase F. Robinson, “Conquest,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Damen McAuliffe,
Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2001, I [A-D], p. 397-401, at p. 399.
97 Clifford Edmund Bosworth and John Derek Latham, “Ṣāʾifa,” EI2; Walter Emil Kaegi, Muslim
Expansion and Byzantine Collapse in North Africa, Cambridge-New York-Melbourne,
Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 207-208.
98 Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīḫ madīnat Dimašq, II, p. 3.
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Syria,99 before turning his attention to annual summer raids into Anatolia.100
This indicates not only that a distinction between prophetic and caliphal
incursions into Byzantine territory had likewise yet to be made, but also that
some of the earliest accounts of the conquest of Syria recounted it as part
of a chain of events which began with the prophet and continued well into
the Umayyad era.101 There is indeed ample evidence that historical writing
on the conquest of Syria in the early period more often than not assumed the
form of larger collections called maġāzī or ṣawāʾif which dealt with sundry
subjects from the prophetic up to the Abbasid period.102 It is only from this
period onwards that the distinction between futūḥ and maġāzī becomes clear-
cut and universally observed.103 Thus, Borrut’s observation that the periodisa-
tions of early Islamic history commonly employed by historians today, “would
certainly be quite surprising if not largely unintelligible to most of the actors of
early Islam”104 holds equally true for the later mediaeval and modern scholarly
understanding of Muḥammad’s early Palestinian campaigns and the later
99 Ibid., LXXII, p. 30 and 260.

100 Ibid., XII, p. 80, 81 and 327; XXXII, p. 114; XXXIV, p. 334; LVI, p. 372; al-Mizzī, Tahḏīb al-kamāl
fī asmāʾ al-riǧāl, ed. Baššār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf, Beirut, Muʾassasat al-risāla, 1988, XV, p. 457;
Sibṭ b. al-Ǧawzī, Mirʾāt al-zamān fī tawārīḫ al-aʿyān, ed. Muḥammad Riḍwān al-ʿArqasūsī,
Damascus, al-Risāla l-ʿālamiyya, 2013, VII, p. 23.
101 The question whether the opening verses of Qurʾān 30 (“The Chapter on the Romans”)
preserve reverberations of a Muslim defeat at the hands of the Byzantines and its implica-
tions for our understanding of the northward expansion of the proto-Muslim community
will be taken up in a future study; cf. already Richard Bell, The Qurʾān: Translated, with a
Critical re-Arrangement of the Surahs, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1939, II, p. 392; Edmund
Beck, “Die Sure ar-Rūm (30),” Orientalia, 13 (1944), p. 334-355, at p. 339.
102 Amikam Elad, “The Beginnings of Historical Writing by the Arabs: The Earliest Syrian
Writers on the Arab Conquests,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 28 (2003), p. 65-151,
at p. 65-100, on Ibn ʿĀʾiḏ. In the light of the foregoing, however, it is likely that, pace Elad
(ibid., p. 80), the original title of the work was indeed simply Kitāb al-Maġāzī or Kitāb
al-Ṣawāʾif; cf. Yoones Dehghani Farsani, Text und Kontext des al-Wāqidī zugeschriebenen
Futūḥ aš-Šām: Ein Beitrag zur Forschungsdebatte über frühe futūḥ-Werke, unpublished
PhD dissertation, Göttingen, 2017, p. 220-221.
103 Cf. ibid., p. 220-221. The structuring of the seventh/thirteenth-century text al-Iktifāʾ bi-mā
taḍammanahu min maġāzī rasūl Allāh wa-l-ṯalāṯa al-ḫulafāʾ by al-Kilāʿī, which covers
the biography of the prophet and the campaigns of the first three caliphs (“the con-
quests”) under the rubric of maġāzī, appears to be his own innovation, though probably
informed by the earlier material with which he was working. The case of the somewhat
later al-Balādhurī’s (d. ca 279/892) famous Futūḥ al-buldān (Conquest of the Territories)
is less straightforward, as its original title is not known; Ryan J. Lynch, Arab Conquests
and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh al-buldan of al-Baladhuri, London-New York-
Oxford, I.B. Tauris (“The Early and Medieval Islamic World”), 2020, p. 151-187.
104 Borrut, “Vanishing Syria,” p. 41.
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32 Shaddel
conquest of Syria-Palestine as unrelated undertakings – a further reminder

that periodisation is invariably an ex post facto construct.105
“Conquests” as a period, then, is a subjective term whose termini very much
depend on the perspective we take when looking at events: the non-Muslim
sources, free of the schematic view of the later Arabic material, treat the earli-
est northbound Muslim raids under Muḥammad and the later ones under the
early caliphs as part and parcel of the same venture. They can be said to have
some idea of “the Islamic conquests” as an event,106 but, as a period, it was still
very amorphous for them: for some of them it started with Muḥammad’s hiǧra,
for others later, though still under Muḥammad, and still others – not discussed
here – date it to after Muḥammad’s demise. With the emergence of a proto-
canonical account of the life of Muḥammad and the earliest history of Islam
in the eighth century, “the conquests” establishes itself as a clearly delineated
period that begins with the end of the ridda and whose first phase comes to a
halt upon the outbreak of the first civil war. In this canonical framework, any
foray outside the “Arabian peninsula” with the goal of “conquering” would be a
post-Muḥammadan undertaking, whereas those from the time of Muḥammad
would be explained away as “punitive expeditions,” “proselytising missions,”
and so forth.
Why this was the case cannot be ascertained conclusively and is beyond
the scope of the present essay, but it might partly have to do with the dif-
ferent tax status, at least in theory, of “conquered lands” and “Arabia.” The
nomadic inhabitants of “Arabia” seem to have only paid the ṣadaqa or ʿušr
tax, whilst the inhabitants of other parts of the Muslim empire had to pay
the more burdensome ḫarāǧ or/and ǧizya, etc.107 Emblematic of this state of
105 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 11-74; and Hoyland, In God’s Path, p. 31-65, however, go against
the grain to weave together the two otherwise disjointed episodes.
106 As noted above, for instance, the Syriac Chronicle of 775 states that, in AG 930/618-619 CE,
“Muhammad and the ṭayyāyē went forth from the south and entered the land and sub-
dued it (kibšuho)”; E.W. Brooks, Ignazio Guidi and J.B. Chabot (eds), Chronica minora,
Paris-Leipzig, C. Poussielgue-O. Harrassowitz (“Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum
Orientalium … Scriptores Syri. Textus et Versio. Series tertia”), 1905, p. 348 (text); Hoyland,
Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, p. 397 (transl.).
107 On ṣadaqa as a standard tax collected from Arabian nomads, see Donner, The Early
Islamic Conquests, p. 251-252. At some point in the late first century of Islam, there seems
to have been an attempt to impose the ṣadaqa as a standard tax on the Muslim urban
centres of the wider empire; Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a
Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official, Oxford, Oxford University Press (“Oxford Studies in
Byzantium”), 2013, p. 181-199. I must add that I am using the clear-cut and neat terminol-
ogy employed in literary sources, whereas the situation on the ground was usually much
messier; cf. Marie Legendre, “Landowners, Caliphs and State Policy over Landholdings
in the Egyptian Countryside: Theory and Practice,” in Authority and Control in the
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

affairs is the statement of the chief judge of the Abbasid court Abū Yūsuf in his
Kitāb al-Ḫarāǧ, the oldest extant Islamic manual on taxation, which, despite
using the verb “conquered” (iftataḥa) when speaking of the “Arab lands” (arḍ
al-ʿarab) captured during Muḥammad’s lifetime, treats them as a wholly dif-
ferent category on which the ḫarāǧ tax cannot be imposed, and which is only
liable for the modest ʿušr (lit. “decima”) tax. According to Abū Yūsuf, “nothing
can be added or reduced from [the taxes of] the land of the Hijaz, Mecca and
Medina, the land of the Yemen, and the Arab lands which were conquered by
the messenger of God, for it [i.e. the determination of their taxes] is something
that was done on the orders of the messenger of God” (wa-ammā arḍ al-Ḥiǧāz
wa-Makka wa-l-Madīna wa-arḍ al-Yaman wa-arḍ al-ʿarab allatī iftataḥahā
rasūl Allāh fa-lā yuzādu ʿalayhā wa-lā yunqaṣu minhā li-annahū šayʾun qad
ǧarā ʿalayhi amr rasūl Allāh wa-ḥukmuhu).108 Therefore, Muḥammad hav-
ing engaged in conquering outside “Arabia” was out of the question, or else
the taxes of those regions would have had to be reduced to the same level as
Arabia’s. This issue is closely related to the fact that by the late Umayyad period
“Arabia” was, in theory, considered to be a fully Islamised territory whose
inhabitants should enjoy a different tax status, unlike other lands the majority
of whose populations were non-Muslim in the first few centuries of Islam and
hence liable to more burdensome taxes.109
In conclusion, the sequence of events leading to the Muslim domination of
the Near East may now be reconstructed as follows: 1) with Palestine, newly
returned to Byzantium, as their aim, the early Muslims embarked on cam-
paigns in the southern extremity of Palaestina Tertia shortly after the conclu-
sion of the Perso-Byzantine peace treaty of ca 629 CE, echoes of which could
Countryside: From Antiquity to Islam in the Mediterranean and Near East (Sixth-Tenth
Century), eds Alain Delattre, Marie Legendre and Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Leiden-Boston,
Brill (“Leiden Studies in Islam and Society,” 9), 2019, p. 392-419, at 397-399, 403-404, 405,
407 and 409-410 – although this is not to deny that the situation in Arabia was different
from other places.
108 Abū Yūsuf, Kitāb al-Ḫarāǧ, Beirut, Dār al-maʿrifa, 1979, p. 58.
109 The idea that Arabia was fully Islamised was expressed in a tradition alleging that the
second caliph ʿUmar had evicted all non-Muslims from Arabia, or at least the Hijaz, for
which see Harry Munt, “‘No Two Religions’: Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Ḥijāz,”
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 78/2 (2015), p. 249-269 (cf. also Harry
Munt, “What Did Conversion to Islam Mean in Seventh-century Arabia,” in Islamisation:
Comparative Perspectives from History, ed. Andrew Charles Spencer Peacock, Edinburgh,
Edinburgh University Press, 2017, p. 83-101). On the (theoretical) applicability of ḫarāǧ
and ʿušr, consult Tsugitaka Sato, “ʿUs̲h̲r,” EI2.
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34 Shaddel
be heard in the Doctrina Iacobi;110 2) the proto-Muslim community continued

to send out expeditions bound for Palestine for the next few years, as attested
to by Muslim and non-Muslim sources alike; until 3) Muḥammad’s untimely
death resulted in Medina coming under threat from other Arabian tribes;
4) after (re)establishing their authority over a hostile Arabia, Muslim incur-
sions into Byzantine Syria-Palestine resumed; culminating in 6) the takeover
of the whole region, including Jerusalem, in the 10s/630s. This last definitely
happened after Muḥammad’s demise, as, it will be recalled, no source, whether
Islamic or otherwise, credits Muḥammad with the “conquest” of that region.111
Conclusion
Historians have long noted that periodisation is, more often than not, a hur-
dle in our conceptualisation of the past. With the (questionable) wisdom of
hindsight, as one classicist has remarked with respect to the Greek “dark ages,”
scholars, “necessarily bring the data, as they perceive them, within systems of
thought that are generated outside those data.”112 Yet, this hurdle seldom trans-
lates to confusion over the date of a particular incident, and thus the recent
scholarly doubts over the date of Muḥammad’s death should act as a potent
reminder of how serious the ramifications of the imposition of a rigid frame-
work exogenous to a set of evidence on it may be.113
That the periodisation of early Islamic history which we have inherited is
likewise a late construction should come as no surprise. For, as stated above,
our Muslim sources were mainly written down from the second half of the sec-
ond century of Islam onwards. That is to say that the material that has reached
us in the form of books and manuscripts from the eighth century CE and after-
wards has gone through what Ella Landau-Tasseron has termed the “processes
110 The events related in the Doctrina (and, for those inclined to entertain an early date for it,
the oldest stratum of it as well) should now be likely dated to ca 630 CE, for, as mentioned
earlier, its dating to ca 634 CE is based on the conviction that “the conquests” began in
that year. And its unique reference to the death of patricius Sergius during Muḥammad’s
lifetime should likely be considered erroneous.
111 The problem with such texts as the Ten Kings Midrash and The History of the Patriarchs
has been noted above.
112 Ian Morris, “Periodization and the Heroes: Inventing a Dark Age,” in Inventing Ancient
Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World, ed. Mark Golden and Peter
Toohey, London-New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 96-131, at p. 129.
113 Art history, though, is a wholly different province, as discussed in Fred M. Donner,
“Periodization as a Tool of the Historian with Special Reference to Islamic History,” Der
Islam, 91/1 (2014), p. 20-36.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

of redaction,”114 in the course of which compiler-authors refashioned the atom-

istic, oral accounts of earlier days into a relatively coherent master narrative
with its own chronological subdivisions. This process was mainly an innocuous
attempt at making sense, for oneself as much as for the others: due to their very
nature, the atomistic reports (aḫbār; sing. ḫabar) that constitute the building
blocks of the various extant works of historical appeal deal with individual
episodes in isolation, and thus leave many details out. To reconstruct the larger
picture of things, later historians had to weave together these individual nar-
rations into full-blown “histories.”115 R. Stephen Humphreys offers perhaps the
pithiest description of this modus operandi when he writes,
the compilations make no effort to construct a connected narrative of

events; rather, they consist of a series of discrete anecdotes and reports
[…] which vary in length from one line to several pages. These akhbār
are not explicitly linked to one another in any way; they are simply juxta-
posed end to end, so to speak, each being marked off from the others by
its own isnād [i.e. chain of transmitters].116
114 Ella Landau-Tasseron, “Processes of Redaction: The Case of the Tamīmite Delegation
to the Prophet Muḥammad,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 49/2
(1986), p. 253-270.
115 To the best of my knowledge, the first influential voice to concertedly argue for the com-
posite, even disparate, nature of the early Arabic historical material was Noth, The Early
Arabic Historical Tradition, p. 1-25. Scholarship on the development of narrative struc-
ture in Arabic historiography is, regrettably, in a still-embryonic state, with perhaps the
most important contribution being the seminal work of Stefan Leder. See, for instance,
Stefan Leder, “The Literary Use of the khabar: A Basic Form of Historical Writing,” in The
Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East. I, Problems in Literary Source Material, eds Averil
Cameron and Lawrence I. Conrad, Princeton, Darwin Press (“Studies in Late Antiquity
and Early Islam,” 1), 1992, p. 277-315; id., “The Use of the Composite Form in the Making of
the Islamic Historical Tradition,” in On Fiction and adab in Medieval Arabic Literature, ed.
Philip Kennedy, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz (“Studies in Arabic Language and Literature,”
6), 2005, p. 125-148; see also the interesting studies by Robert G. Hoyland, “History, Fiction,
and Authorship in the First Centuries of Islam,” in Writing and Representation in Medieval
Islam: Muslim Horizons, ed. Julia Bray, London-New York, Routledge (“Routledge Studies in
Middle Eastern Literatures,” 11), 2006, p. 16-46; Landau-Tasseron, “Processes of Redaction”;
and, with special reference to prophetic biography, Andreas Görke, “Authorship in the
sīra Literature,” in Concepts of Authorship in pre-Modern Arabic Texts, eds Lale Behzadi
and Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Bamberg, University of Bamberg Press (“Bamberger
Orientstudien,” 7), 2015, p. 63-92.
116 R. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry, Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1991, p. 73.
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36 Shaddel
Reconstructing the chronology of events, too, was left to these latter-day

compilers. Writing on Muslim campaigns in Syria-Palestine under the first
caliphs, Fred Donner notes that,
well over a dozen discrete sets of accounts about the dispatch of the
Islamic armies to Syria are preserved in the Arabic sources. The separate
accounts communicate much contradictory information and are conse-
quently impossible to reconcile in many respects. The contradictions are
most evident in matters of relative chronology, reflecting the fact that
the authorities who transmitted these traditional accounts were them-
selves relying on extremely fragmentary bits of information, coming from
diverse sources, which each of them attempted to piece together to form
a more or less coherent narrative.117
The first such attempts at coming up with a chronological arrangement of

material were cursory and resulted in clumsy schemes. A prime example
of the confusion attendant upon both the sequence and chronology of the
events of Muḥammad’s life and the conquests may be found in Maʿmar’s
al-Maġāzī: here the incident at al-Ḥudaybiyya, which is traditionally dated to
ca 6/628, is the first in the sequence of Muḥammad’s battles, followed by the
Battle of Badr, traditionally dated to 2/624;118 what follows thereafter is, in the
words of Chase Robinson, “nothing if not dishevelled” in terms of sequence
and chronology when compared to the standardised prophetic biography of
later periods.119 It was only at a later stage, beginning with Mūsā b. ʿUqba and
Ibn Isḥāq, that more robust chronologies were attempted,120 but the resulting
117 Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, p. 111. On the issue of chronology, see further Noth,
The Early Arabic Historical Tradition, p. 40-48 and 57-58.
118 Maʿmar, The Expeditions, p. 26-57.
119 Chase F. Robinson, “History and Heilsgeschichte in Early Islam: Some Observations on
Prophetic History and Biography,” in History and Religion: Narrating a Religious Past,
ed. Bernd-Christian Otto, Susanne Rau and Jörg Rüpke, Berlin-Boston; De Gruyter
(“Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten,” 68), 2015, p. 119-150, at p. 141, n. 42; cf.
Hinds, “‘Maghāzī’ and ‘sīra’ in Early Islamic Scholarship,” p. 65; Anthony, The Expeditions,
p. xxviii-xxix; Andreas Görke and Gregor Schoeler, Die ältesten Berichte über das Leben
Muḥammads: Das Korpus ʿUrwa ibn az-Zubair, Princeton, Darwin Press (“Studies in Late
Antiquity and Early Islam,” 24), 2008, p. 277; Schoeler, The Biography of Muḥammad,
p. 27. Note that Maʿmar likely built on the earlier work of Ibn Šihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742);
Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith, p. 141.
120 Görke and Schoeler, Die ältesten Berichte über das Leben Muḥammads, p. 272-273; cf.
Schoeler, The Biography of Muḥammad, p. 27; Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic
Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing, Princeton, Darwin Press (“Studies
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

details still were, oftentimes, “nothing more than attempts to systematize and
present with an aspect of greater verisimilitude accounts of events of which
very little had survived,” as Marsden Jones notes.121 Further elaboration of
the chronology of the maġāzī came at a tertiary stage and with al-Wāqidī and
Ibn Hišām, the redactor of the main extant version of Ibn Isḥāq’s sīra. It is
perhaps not insignificant that the full title of al-Wāqidī’s composition is Kitāb
al-Taʾrīḫ wa-l-maġāzī wa-l-mabʿaṯ/baʿṯ (The Book on Chronology, Expeditions,
and Appointment to Prophethood).122 The word taʾrīḫ in the title of al-Wāqidī’s
work should evidently be construed as “dating” or “chronology” rather than its
secondary acceptation of “chronicle” or “history,”123 for the summary list of the
names and dates of Muḥammad’s expeditions by which the text is prefaced,124
as well as the precise dating at the beginning of each notice, make it clear that
establishing a chronology for the events of the life of Muḥammad was one of
the principal aims of the author.125 Ibn Hišām occasionally provides precise
dates for accounts that lack chronological precision in the original version of
Ibn Isḥāq’s work, which Jones takes to be, “a reflection of the emphasis on chro-
nology which had characterized the later development of the sīra-maghāzī
literature […] and is exemplified in al-Wāqidī.”126 This trend towards further
chronological precision reached its apex with the rise of annalistic-style taʾrīḫ
historiography at around the same time, best instantiated by the taʾrīḫ works
in Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” 14), 1998, p. 242: “Ibn Isḥāq offers the great majority of
these chronological accounts with no informant, suggesting they are his own opinion.”
121 John Marsden Beaumont Jones, “The Chronology of the maghāzī: A Textual Survey,”
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 19 (1957), p. 245-280, at p. 258. Cf.
Gregor Schoeler, “Mūsā b. ʿUqbas Maghāzī,” in The Biography of Muḥammad: The Issue
of the Sources, ed. Harald Motzki, Leiden-Boston-Köln, Brill (“Islamic History and
Civilization. Studies and Texts,” 32), 2000, p. 67-97, at p. 68-69 and 72, on Mūsā b. ʿUqba.
122 Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, I, p. 308; Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Muʿǧam al-udabāʾ, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās,
Beirut, Dār al-ġarb al-islāmī, 1993, VI, p. 2598. Regrettably, Jones fails to provide any infor-
mation on manuscript headings in his edition of the text.
123 For a semantic history of the term taʾrīḫ, refer to Rosenthal, A History of Muslim
Historiography, p. 11-15.
124 Al-Wāqidī, al-Maġāzī, I, p. 1-7.
125 Contra Jones in his introduction to al-Wāqidī’s al-Maġāzī (ibid., I, p. 13-14) of the Arabic
introduction, who misconstrued the term and considered the full title to be a reference to
three separate compositions. I would like to submit that the absence (as noted by Jones
himself) of any quotations in later literature from al-Wāqidī on any points bearing on
prophetic biography other than the ones touched upon in his Maġāzī as published by
Jones demonstrates that said work is his only composition on the subject, which has
come down to us unabridged and to which the full title refers.
126 Jones, “The Chronology of the maghāzī,” p. 271.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

38 Shaddel
of Ḫalīfa b. Ḫayyāṭ (d. 240/854), al-Yaʿqūbī127 (d. after 295/908), and al-Ṭabarī
(d. 310/923).128
Periodisation is, of course, incidental to chronology, and thus it is not hard
to imagine how the now-dominant periodisation of early Islamic history would
likewise emerge as a near by-product of the above-discussed “narrativization”
process. According to the resulting, rigid framework, Muḥammad was predom-
inantly preoccupied with consolidating his newly-founded polity at Medina,
and never seriously considered “conquest” outside “Arabia.” After his death
there then followed the “mutiny” against the authority of the Medinan caliph-
ate of a considerable number of the Arabian tribes that had previously offered
him their allegiance. It was only after these “wars of apostasy” that Islam’s hold
over Arabia was secure enough to allow the caliphs to despatch raiding parties
beyond the frontiers of the peninsula.
Earlier observers, however, were immune to such schematic views of the
events and perceived them differently. For people living in the seventh-century
Near East, Muḥammad’s northerly campaigns and the subsequent inroads into
Syria-Palestine (and Iraq) under the early caliphs were both parts of one larger
campaign, intersected by the transient episode of tribal unruliness. In fact,
whether these campaigns began during Muḥammad’s lifetime or under his
successors was never so much of a concern for non-Muslims as the fact that
they succeeded in bringing much of the eastern Mediterranean world under
the hegemony of a group of alien masters who adhered to an equally alien reli-
gion. And for the adherents of this alien religion what probably mattered the
most was the fact that they now were in possession of an empire which they
struggled to maintain.
It is this pre-classical view which we see reflected in non-Muslim sources
and which has made us alive to the fact that the most popular periodisation
scheme for early Islamic history is a later construct. This demonstrates, once
more, that the historian’s craft requires an even-handed engagement with all
the sources, and that no set of sources, regardless of the appellations we bestow
on them, commands superiority over others. The division of our source mate-
rial for seventh-century history into “Muslim” and “non-Muslim” or Arabic and
non-Arabic and the prioritisation of one group over the other, which has its
roots in the parochialism so characteristic of the discipline of area studies and
127 Sean W. Anthony and Matthew Gordon, “Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī: A Biographical Sketch,”
in The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī: An English Translation, ed. Matthew S. Gordon,
Chase F. Robinson, Everett K. Rowson and Michael Fishbein, Leiden-Boston, Brill
(“Islamic History and Civilization,” 152), 2018, I, p. 9-22.
128 On the emergence of chronology in Islamic historiography, see Donner, Narratives of
Islamic Origins, p. 230-248; Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition, p. 40-48.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

its earlier iterations (from oriental studies to Islamic and middle/near eastern
studies), and the heated debates of the last few decades as to which group
can serve as a more “trustworthy” source for reconstructing the early history
of Islam have, if anything, hindered sophisticated thinking about some of the
most important questions facing the historian of this period, and engendered
a false and perilous dichotomy which ought to be avoided as far as possible.
Indeed, the willingness of some historians of nascent Islam to entertain the
idea that a handful of sources should suffice for the conducting of our busi-
ness and that one can dispense with a substantial body of precious sources
is a novel suggestion peculiar to this field. But the fact that, as in many other
periods and regions, history-writing in the late ancient Near East cut across
confessional boundaries, and that operating within the framework of only one
historiographical tradition presents us with a lopsided view of events, renders
the validity of this outmoded modus operandi even more questionable.129
As much as we may wish to dispense with periodisation, it has proved too
useful a tool to be so easily set aside, just as our sources, with all their sub-
jectivity, cannot possibly be dispensed with. We obviously need terms to dis-
tinguish between the wars waged by Muḥammad himself and the campaigns
prosecuted by his successors, inasmuch as, when seen from another perspec-
tive, they may indeed be separate affairs. We also need to divide history into
periods because of disciplinary boundaries, and to contextualise events within
a historical context: formative Islam, it is now generally agreed, was part and
parcel of the late ancient world, and this (re)contextualisation has had drastic
consequences for our understanding of its emergence.130 Yet, it must be con-
129 Here I echo Antoine Borrut’s thoughtful observations in Antoine Borrut, “La circulation de
l’information historique entre les sources arabo-musulmanes et syriaques : Élie de Nisibe
et ses sources,” in L’historiographie syriaque, ed. Muriel Debié, Paris, Geuthner (“Études
syriaques,” 6), 2009, p. 137-159, at p. 138-140; id., Entre mémoire et pouvoir : l’espace syrien
sous les derniers Omeyyades et les premiers Abbasides (v. 72-193/692-809), Leiden-Boston,
Brill (“Islamic History and Civilization,” 81), 2011, p. 137-140; and id., “Court Astrologers
and Historical Writing in Early ʿAbbāsid Baghdād: An Appraisal,” in The Place to Go:
Contexts of Learning in Baghdād, 750-1000 C.E., eds Jens Scheiner and Damien Janos,
Princeton, Darwin Press (“Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” 26), 2014, p. 455-501,
at p. 476-481; cf. also Robert Hoyland, “Arabic, Syriac, and Greek Historiography in the
First Abbasid Century: An Inquiry into Inter-Cultural Traffic,” ARAM, 3/1-2 (1991), p. 211-
233; Maria Conterno, “Historiography across the Borders: The Case of Islamic Material
in Theophanes’ Chronographia,” forthcoming. More recently, Anthony, Muhammad and
the Empires of Faith, has ably demonstrated the indubitable interdependence of a select
number of traditions pertaining to the life of Muḥammad which hail from different
religio-linguistic communities.
130 See now the take by Antoine Borrut, “An Islamic Late Antiquity? Problems and Perspec-
tives,” forthcoming.
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

40 Shaddel
stantly borne in mind that periodisation, “is most valuable when we are aware
of its limited validity.”131
Although periodisation is an inescapable, if largely innocuous,132 by-product
of historical thinking, one should be heedful not to become constricted by
the very models that, to paraphrase Ian Morris, were in the first place meant
to enable thinking about the past,133 just as one should avoid falling victim to
overly sanguine approaches to “non-Muslim” sources, usually sustained by the
assertion that they are closer in time to the events they describe and unadul-
terated by “Muslim” sources.134 There is, for instance, nothing wrong about
putting the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty at 661 CE per se when writing
a political history of the period, but any study of political discourse under the
Umayyads ought to take into account that the foundations of Umayyad legiti-
macy were partly established on the fact that the third “rightly-guided” caliph,
ʿUṯmān b. ʿAffān, was an Umayyad, just as it must be borne in mind that the
“Umayyad dynasty” only became a true dynasty during the reign of ʿAbd al-
Malik (r. 65/685-86/705) and in the wake of the second civil war, by which time
the designation of a successor by a ruling caliph gradually became established
practice.135 Similarly, the historian wishing to employ seemingly innocuous
“non-Muslim” sources would do well to remember that some of the
131 Shelomo Dov Goitein, “A Plea for the Periodization of Islamic History,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society, 88/2 (1968), p. 224-228, at p. 224.
132 Cf. Donner, “Periodization as a Tool of the Historian with Special Reference to Islamic
History.”
133 Morris, “Periodization and the Heroes,” p. 96.
134 A case in point is James Howard-Johnston’s prioritisation of the Maronite Chronicle, on
grounds of its being a “contemporary witness,” over Muslim sources for the dating of
the caliph ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib’s assassination; James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World
Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century, Oxford-New
York-Auckland, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 382-383. But, as I have argued elsewhere,
this chronicle is likely to be a composite text which makes use of disparate sources, and
is as problematic as the Muslim sources Howard-Johnston relegates to secondary status,
if not more; Mehdy Shaddel, “Monetary Reform under the Sufyanids: The Papyrological
Evidence,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 84/2 (2021), p. 263-293.
135 Id., The Sufyanids and the Beginnings of the Second Civil War, 660-684 CE, forthcoming;
cf. Ella Landau-Tasseron, “From Tribal Society to Centralized Polity: An Interpretation
of Events and Anecdotes of the Formative Period of Islam,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic
and Islam, 24 (2000), p. 180-216, at p. 190-191. Under these alternative periodisations, one
might instead divide the post-prophetic history of the early Islamic world into the two
periods of the “rightly-guided caliphate” (11/632-23/644), comprising only three caliphs,
and the Umayyad dynasty (23/644-132/750), with two interludes of the first (35/656-
40/661) and second (60/680-73/692) civil wars during the latter, or the five periods of
the “rightly-guided” caliphate (11/632-35/656); the first civil war (35/656-40/661); the reign
of Muʿāwiya (40/661-60/680); the second civil war (60/680-73/692); and the Marwanid
dynasty (73/692-132/750).
Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

periodisations advanced by them equally exhibit signs of subjectivity, favour-

ing one claim to power over others.136 Thus, just as the first question to be
asked of a source, Muslim or non-Muslim alike, is what its biases and forms are,
the first question to be asked before redating an event based not on absolute
dates, but rather on its relative position within a wider chronological scheme
consisting of a certain set of periods, is when the periods in question began,
and when they ended.
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Shaddel Periodisation and The Futu Making Sense

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Arabica 69 (2022) 1-50

Periodisation and the futūḥ: Making Sense of

Muḥammad, Muslim conquests, Roman Palestine, periodisation, Arabic historiography,

* I feel particularly privileged to express my heartfelt gratitude to Antoine Borrut, Michael

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/15700585-12341633

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Muḥammad, conquêtes arabes, Palestine romaine, périodisation, historiographie

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Byzantine. This “last great war of antiquity,” as it is popularly known, drew to a

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then embarked on a new phase of conquest, and by the 100s/720s reached

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Jerusalem. There is a strong tendency in the Muslim tradition to explain things

10 Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity,

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Shoemaker’s thesis is based on the testimony of eleven texts in Arabic, Greek,

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As counter-intuitive as it may sound, Yōḥannān bar Penkāyē’s motives for pre-

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reading in order to be considered evidence for Muḥammad’s alleged leader-

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34 Adapted from Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, p. 397.

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Fa-ṣaddaqnāhu wa-āmannā bihi fa-allafa Llāh bayna qulūbinā wa-

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wa-l-ḫaṭāyā wa-maʿāṣī allāh illā al-anbiyāʾ wa-l-rusul wa-ḫiyaratihi min

Thereby, we confirmed him [scil., Muhammad] and believed in him,

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46 Dominique Sourdel, “Un pamphlet musulman anonyme d’époque ʿabbāside contre

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struggles that started under Muḥammad’s leadership seamlessly segue into

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What we have in these narratives, then, is a premonitory prediction of the

57 Stefan Esders, “The Prophesied Rule of a ‘Circumcised People’: A Travelling Tradition

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account of the rise of Islam.66 Dionysius’s presentation of the rise of Islam is

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