Slow Beginnings

How the Arab conquest changed the land (Part One)

Despite taking place nearly 1,400 years ago, the Arab conquest of the land feels remarkably present in debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Especially in recent years, in response to the settler colonialism charge against Zionism, supporters of Israel have begun describing the Palestinians as settler colonisers who spread throughout the land in the wake of the Arab conquest. On both sides, though, those discussing these issues are often ignorant of the historical record and what the impact of the Arab conquest actually was. To address this problem, in this three-part series, which will take us from the conquest in 634 to the arrival of the Ottomans in 1516, I’ll try to lay out what happened, what remains uncertain, and how these events changed - and didn’t change – the land.

Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second of the four Rashidun (‘Rightly Guided’) caliphs, conquered Palestine between 634 and 644. There was little resistance from the Byzantine, who were weakened from their decades of war with the Persians, although there were some battles in Gaza, Eleutheropolis (Beit Guvrin), and most famously the Battle of the Yarmuk in 636. Caesarea, the capital of Palaestina Prima, held out the longest, surrendering to the Muslims in 640 following a lengthy siege.

Throughout the countries, surrender was handled locally. Those who surrendered peacefully received a kitab aman, a written promise of security. To maintain personal and communal property and freedom of worship, the non-Muslim population had to pay a tax (jizya) to the Muslims. These agreements lasted until well into the ninth century, before they were replaced by a far less tolerant arrangement (which I’ll explore in the next part of this series), known as the Pact of Umar, although this probably refers to a later Umar. This can be confusing, because, as already noted, it was Umar who conquered Palestine for the Muslims. Indeed, according to legend, Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, only agreed to surrender the city personally to the caliph.

Sophronius spoke out about Muslim atrocities in his sermons, declaring that Arabs “ravage all with feral and cruel design,” and he also built an oratory in honor of the Martyrs of Gaza in Jerusalem and a church dedicated to them in Eleutheropolis. According to the Passion of the Sixty Martyrs of Gaza, which survives in a tenth-century Greek manuscript (there is also a later Latin manuscript which some scholars argue is more accurate), ten Byzantine soldiers captured in Gaza were executed in Jerusalem for refusing to convert to Islam, with a second group of 50 soldiers executed for the same reason at Eleutheropolis. Before the execution of the latter group, Sophronius had ministered to them and encouraged them not to convert.

Mass executions of captured garrisons who refused terms was not unusual, although the text is a hagiography rather than a history, and there are some details that have been disputed – for example the claim that Sophronius himself was martyred. Nor are there any surviving Arabic or Syriac records of this event. The convert-or-die ultimatum is also strange for early Islam: In general, the early Muslims preferred for conquered people to retain their religion so they could pay the jizya, although specifically Arab Christians or apostates from Islam were often exceptions to this rule. It may be, then, that this was a transposition of older Christian martyrology templates (for example the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste) onto the new Islamic villain rather than a record of actual Umayad practice.

Either way, there certainly was violence during the early stages of the conquest. For example, a contemporary Syriac source says that in a battle near Gaza in 634, 4,000 poor Christians, Jews, and Samaritans were killed. But most were too powerless to do anything other than meekly surrender. As Malka Levy-Rubin writes in her chapter titled ‘The Coming of Islam’ in The Oxford History of the Holy Land:

There is good reason to believe that there was violence and bloodshed as described, particularly in battles fought in the open field and in the first stages of the conquest – it was not a velvet revolution. Yet as more and more settlements surrendered and concluded peace treaties, there was no need for further violence. This made sense for the Muslims too, who had evidently come to stay and so had no interest in cutting off the hand that would feed them.

Palestine, of course, had religious significance to the Muslims. The first direction of prayer (qibla) set by Muhammad was Jerusalem, although this was later changed to Mecca (the reasons for this remain contested). And according to the hadith, the ‘furthest mosque’ (Al-Aqsa) where Muhammed travelled on his famous night journey (described in Sura 17 of the Koran), was located in Jerusalem. Thus, a Gallic Christian pilgrim called Arculf who visited the city in 670, wrote: “near the wall on the east, in the famous place where once had stood the magnificent Temple, the Saracens have now built an oblong house of prayer, which they pieced together with upright planks and large beams over some ruined remains. This they attend and it is said this building can hold three thousand people.” Later Muslim traditions even suggest that Umar prayed at the Temple Mount following his conquest and, like Japanese fans at the World Cup, personally led the clearing of the garbage that had been left there by the Byzantines.

It was the fifth Umayyad caliph, though, ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (685-705) who built the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhra), marking the traditional spot where Muhammad ascended to heaven. This was because he wanted to build an alternative political and religious center to Mecca, where he faced a rebellion from Abdallah ibn al-Zubayr, while the building’s octagonal design resembled Christian sites like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, reflecting the supersessionist aspects of Islam. Unlike those who today deny the site’s history, the early Muslims were very clear that they were building on the site of Solomon’s Temple, even holding rituals that echoed priestly Jewish practice at the site. This is also why Jerusalem became known as Bayt al-Maqdis, the Arabic equivalent of Beit Hamikdash.

Either Abd al-Malik or his successor al-Walid (705-715) built the permanent Al-Aqsa Mosque, although today – unlike the Dome of the Rock - no trace of the original building remains. His brother and successor Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik, while governor of Palestine, founded Ramla, which replaced Lydda as the provincial capital. Tiberias, meanwhile, became the capital of Jordan.

What, though, did the Arab conquest mean for the local inhabitants? Christians were most impacted, because they had been the most powerful group for the previous few centuries. Jews and Samaritans and non-Chalcedonian Christians, however, had suffered at the hands of the Byzantines during the fifth and sixth centuries, most notably the Samaritans, who from 529 to 531 had launched a rebellion against the Byzantines, during which between 20,000 and 100,000 Samaritans were killed or enslaved. Naturally, then, they generally welcomed the Muslims.

Most of the changes occurred along the coast, which like today, had been the beating heart of Byzantine Palestine. The Muslims built fortified strongholds (ribats) and exiled or encouraged the local population to leave, most prominently in Caesarea, where many residents were taken captive and sent to Medina as servants of the Muslim elite. Some left for Byzantium, while there was also internal migration – in the seventh and eighth centuries many Christian towns and villages east of the Jordan began to flourish. In another prefiguration of more recent history, a contemporary Samaritan chronicle describes wealthier Christians leaving their belongings with co-religionists in Neapolos (Nablus) before leaving for Byzantium, believing that they would soon return.

What did this look like on the micro level? Let’s turn to the situation in the Negev, which has been studied closely by Gideon Avni, Head of the Archaeological Division in the Israel Antiquities Authority and lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of the book The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine. In the sixth century, the northern Negev and central Negev Highlands were densely inhabited, with extensive agricultural activities, including the manufacture of oil and wine. While it was previously thought that the Islamic conquest was swift and sometimes violent, leading to the abandonment of Byzantine settlements, based on recent excavations in the area it now seems that the transformation between the sixth and ninth centuries was slow and gradual. Most places continued to exist well into the early Islamic period. ‘Avdat, for example, was not destroyed and abandoned around 630 as previously thought, but may have been severely damaged by an earthquake in the first half of the seventh century. Rehovot-in-the-Negev and Shivta were inhabited into the eighth century; Shivta and Nessana may have been abandoned as late as the tenth century. There is no evidence of these sites being destroyed violently by the Muslims.

If we zoom in even further, in Shivta a mosque was built next to a church, with both seemingly active at the same time. This led some scholars to conclude that the Islamic takeover was relatively tolerant. But more recent discoveries have challenged this thesis. In 2015, a team from the University of Haifa discovered a stone in ancient Greek that was used as the threshold of a mansion near the city’s water reservoir. The inscription reads: “the atrium of the holy church,” suggesting that it was taken from one of Shivta’s churches. This means that either the house was re-inhabited by Muslims or the original inhabitants converted to Islam and sought to reject Christian symbols. Elsewhere, at the entrance to the city’s mosque, scholars have found a threshold with a cross, also taken from one of the churches. Analyzing these findings, Dr. Yotam Tepper, a researcher with the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of Haifa, says:

When you go up to the mosque you step on thresholds that bear crosses. That does not reflect a picture in which Abdullah and Theodorus come to the place together, and one goes off to the mosque and one to church. In my opinion, today we can show archaeologically that they did not operate alongside each other. There is no coexistence.

More recently, in 2017 an Armenian graffito was found in Shivta’s southern church. This has been dated to the 9^th-11^th centuries, evidence of continued Christian pilgrimage to the site well after its supposed abandonment, which of course complicates matters even further.

Rural sites in the Negev, meanwhile, were also abandoned by the ninth century and not at the start of the Islamic period. It is also in the rural Negev where we see some of the earliest Islamic villages, for example Sde Boker, which may have had an open-air mosque (some dispute this label). Dr. Mordechai Haiman has argued that this was a deliberate settlement project by the Umayyads (perhaps some might call it settler colonialism) aimed at strengthening the southern border of Palestine (something attempted in earlier centuries by the Hasmoneans through the construction of fortresses), while Avni and Rosen think it was more organic.

Either way, according to most reconstructions Christians remained a majority of Palestine’s population until after the Crusades (the precise demography varies from region to region) and continued to be employed in the Umayyad civil service. And for the first 50 years at least, this continuity was also reflected in the style of Islamic law, with a maintenance of the existing civil service and coins. Abd al-Malik, however, declared Arabic the official language, and began minting coins in Arabic without images. For the first time, Islam was at the heart of Arab rule. And in the early eighth century, probably following the failed Muslim siege of Constantinople in 717, several limitations were imposed on non-Muslims, including restrictions on personal appearance and behavior. All this would get worse, though, with the coming of the Abbasids in 750, which I’ll discuss in part two.