The Near East before Islam: the Byzantine and Persian empires

What this chapter is for

When the Holy Prophet ﷺ was born in Makkah, in 570 or 571, Arabia sat between two great empires. To the north-west was the Byzantine empire of the Christians, which the Arabs called Rum. To the north-east was the Persian empire of the Sasanid kings, whom the Arabs called the Kisras. This chapter teaches those two empires as they stood in the sixth and early seventh centuries. It shows how each was governed, how its people lived, what they believed and quarrelled about, how they earned and spent their wealth, and how they fought each other almost to death in the very years the Quran was being revealed. By the end you should be able to explain why, when the Muslim armies reached Iraq and Syria in 633, two empires that had ruled the Near East for centuries gave way within a few years.

The chapter has four parts. First come the two empires themselves, their states, their religions and their trade. Then come the lands between them, the Arab kingdoms on their borders and Yemen in the south. Then comes the last war between them, from 602 to 628, which the Quran itself speaks of in Surah al-Rum. Last come the reasons both empires were worn out, what that meant for Islam, and how Muslim scholars and other historians have read this age. The next three chapters turn from the empires to Arabia itself, to its tribes and politics, its society and religion, and its trade.

FPSC’s syllabus opens with this subject, “Political, Social, Cultural, Religious and Economic Conditions in the Near East including Arabia before the dawn of Islam”, and three of its papers since 2016 have asked about the conditions before Islam (CE-2017, CE-2018 and CE-2026).¹² Those questions name Arabia, but a good answer to any of them opens with the empires around it, and this chapter gives you that opening.

Before you start

The words

• Empire. One ruler governing many peoples and lands, usually won by conquest. The two empires here each ruled peoples of many languages and faiths.
• Byzantine empire, or Rum. The eastern half of the old Roman empire, ruled from Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). Its people called themselves Romans, which is why the Arabs and the Quran call them al-Rum. “Byzantine” is the name later historians gave it, from Byzantium, the old name of its capital.
• Sasanid empire, or Persia. The empire of the Sasanid family of kings, who ruled Iran and Iraq from the third century until 651. Its kings were called Shahanshah, king of kings. The Arabs called every Persian king Kisra, from the name Khusrau.
• Zoroastrianism. The old religion of Iran and the faith of the Sasanid state. It teaches a war between a good god and an evil spirit, and its worship centres on sacred fire kept burning in fire temples. Muslims called its followers Majus.
• The Church. The body of Christian bishops and priests, with its own law and its own councils.
• Monophysites and Nestorians. Two groups of Christians who disagreed with the Byzantine emperor’s church about the nature of Hazrat Isa (AS), whom Christians call Christ. The section on the Christian quarrels explains both. The Monophysites of Syria were later called Jacobites.
• Client kingdom. A small kingdom that is allowed to rule its own people as long as it fights for a bigger power. The Ghassanids were Byzantium’s clients and the Lakhmids were Persia’s.
• Land tax. A tax on farmland and what it grows. It was the main income of both empires, and the Muslims later called it kharaj.

The places

• Constantinople. The Byzantine capital, on the strait between Europe and Asia.
• Ctesiphon, or al-Mada’in. The Persian capital, on the Tigris in Iraq, south of today’s Baghdad. Al-Mada’in means “the cities”, because Ctesiphon was a cluster of towns on both banks of the river.
• Syria, or al-Sham. The lands of today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. It was Byzantine, with Damascus, Antioch and Jerusalem its great cities.
• Iraq. The plain of the Tigris and the Euphrates. It was Persian, and the richest province of that empire.
• Egypt. The Byzantine province on the Nile, whose wheat fed Constantinople.
• Al-Hira. The town of the Lakhmid kings, on the edge of the desert west of the Euphrates in Iraq.
• Bosra. A town of the Ghassanids’ country, south of Damascus. Makkan caravans traded there.
• Yemen. The fertile south-west corner of Arabia, with Sana’a its chief town and Najran in its north.
• Abyssinia. The Christian kingdom across the Red Sea from Yemen, in today’s Ethiopia and Eritrea. Its king was called the Najashi.

The story in plain words

1. Two empires shared the Near East, Christian Byzantium in the west and Zoroastrian Persia in the east.
2. They had fought each other on and off for three hundred years, along a frontier in Syria, Iraq and Armenia.
3. Each paid an Arab tribe to guard its desert border, the Ghassanids for Byzantium and the Lakhmids for Persia.
4. Inside each empire, the people paid heavy taxes, and those who did not share the ruler’s religion were often punished.
5. In the south, Yemen fell first to Christian Abyssinia, in 525, and then to Persia, in about 570.
6. From 602 to 628 the two empires fought their longest and hardest war. Persia took Syria, Jerusalem and Egypt, and then Byzantium won it all back.
7. The Quran spoke of this war in Surah al-Rum, foretelling the Byzantine victory years before it came.
8. By 632 both empires were exhausted, and Persia was in civil war. When the Muslim armies came, from 633, neither could stand against them.

1. Two empires and the land between them

Picture the Near East in the year 600. From the Bosphorus in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Nile in the west to the mountains of Iran in the east, almost every settled land belonged to one of two empires. Byzantium held the Mediterranean side, with Anatolia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Persia held Iraq and the Iranian plateau. Between them, and pressing down into the south, lay the great desert peninsula of Arabia, which neither empire had ever conquered. This is the world into which the Holy Prophet ﷺ was born, and it is the world the first Muslims carried Islam into.

The two empires were not strangers to each other. They had shared a frontier for centuries, running through Upper Mesopotamia and Armenia, and they had fought across it again and again. Each saw the other as its only equal. Each was a religious state, in which the ruler stood at the head of an official faith and treated the followers of other faiths as suspect. Each lived mainly on the taxes of its farmers, and each spent much of that money on its armies and its court. A student who understands these two states understands why the Muslim conquests, which seem so sudden on a map, happened as they did.

This matters for the exam in two ways. First, every question on Arabia before Islam is really a question about a land squeezed between two powers. Arabia’s trade ran to their markets, its border tribes took their pay, and its south was ruled by one or the other of them for most of the sixth century. Second, every question on the early conquests, under Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA) and Hazrat Umar (RA), asks in one form or another why the empires fell so fast. The answer begins here, in the condition they were in before the first Muslim soldier crossed their borders.

The Muslim historians who wrote about this age, above all al-Tabari in his History of the Prophets and Kings, gave it a great deal of space, because they wanted their readers to understand the world Islam came into.³ Modern Muslim scholars have done the same. Maulana Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi opens his life of the Holy Prophet ﷺ with a long chapter on the state of the world before Islam, and he begins it with these two empires.⁵ The section on how scholars read this age returns to his view. First, though, you need the facts, and the map is the place to start.

2. The map of the Near East about 600

Figure 1 shows the Near East as it stood around the year 600, about ten years before the first revelation. Every place on it is marked by the power that held it. Look first at the two capitals. Constantinople sits at the top left, on the narrow strait where Europe meets Asia. Ctesiphon sits on the Tigris in Iraq, far to the east. Between the two capitals lay more than 1,600 kilometres of mountain and desert in a straight line, and the frontier between the empires ran roughly through the middle, from the Black Sea down to the Euphrates.

Now look at the circles, the cities of Byzantium. Antioch, Damascus and Jerusalem were the great cities of Syria. Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile, was one of the greatest cities of the whole empire. Byzantium’s wealth came from these provinces as much as from the capital. Then look at the squares, Persia’s places. Nisibis was the frontier fortress in Upper Mesopotamia that the two empires had fought over for centuries. Ctesiphon stood in the middle of the richest farmland of the Near East, the irrigated plain of Iraq. Al-Hira, the town of Persia’s Arab allies, guarded the edge of the desert. Far to the south, Sana’a in Yemen was also Persian by 600, for reasons the section on Yemen explains.

Last, look at the diamonds. Makkah, Yathrib and Najran were towns of Arabia that no empire ruled. Notice where they stand. Makkah lies on the road between Yemen and Syria that the caravans took north and south, about 800 kilometres from Sana’a and 1,400 from Damascus. That position explains much of Makkah’s wealth and importance before Islam, which the chapter on Arabia’s trade teaches in full. Notice too how close the Byzantine town of Bosra and the Persian town of al-Hira were to the Arabian desert. The empires did not stop at a wall. Their power thinned out into the desert through the Arab tribes they paid to guard it.

The map draws no border around either empire, and that is deliberate. Neither empire had a surveyed border running through the desert, and the line between them in the north moved with every war. So the map marks places by who held them rather than drawing lines that were never there. When you sketch this map in the hall, as you should for any answer on the Near East before Islam, draw the two capitals, the main cities, the Arab allies and Makkah, and label who held what. That is more accurate, and quicker, than inventing borders.

Figure 2 sets out who ruled each part of the Near East across the century before the conquests, with the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime beneath. Look along it as you read the sections that follow. It shows at a glance that Khusrau II, Heraclius and the last Lakhmid king were the rulers of the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ adult life, and how short the reigns in Persia became after 628.

3. Byzantium: the Christian empire of Rum

The Byzantine empire was the Roman empire’s eastern half, which had carried on after the western half fell in the fifth century. Its rulers still called themselves Roman emperors, its law was Roman law, and its capital, Constantinople, had been founded as a new Rome. By the sixth century, though, its language of government was Greek and its faith was Christianity, and it was a very different state from the old Rome. Nadwi lists its lands as Greece, the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, the Mediterranean islands, Egypt and the coast of North Africa.⁵ That is a vast empire, and three things held it together, the emperor, the army and the Church.

At the top stood the emperor, who ruled as God’s chosen servant and the protector of the true faith. He made law, appointed the governors and generals, and called the councils of bishops that settled what Christians must believe. The greatest emperor of the sixth century was Justinian I, who ruled from 527 to 565.⁴ He reconquered Italy and North Africa from the Germanic kings who had taken them, collected the old Roman laws into one great code that Europe still studies, and built churches across the empire. His reign also showed the empire’s weakness. In 532 the people of Constantinople rose against him in the Nika riot, named after the crowd’s cry of nika, “conquer”. Nadwi, following the historians he cites, gives the dead at 30,000.⁵ Justinian kept his throne only because his soldiers trapped the crowd in the city’s racecourse and killed them there.

Justinian’s wars cost more than the empire could pay for. His successors faced Persia in the east and new enemies in the Balkans, the Avars and the Slavs, who crossed the Danube and settled. The emperor Maurice, who ruled from 582 to 602, restored some order and made peace with Persia, as the section on the last war tells. In 602 his own army rose against him, and a junior officer named Phocas had him and his sons killed and took the throne.³ Phocas ruled badly for eight years, until Heraclius, the son of the governor of North Africa, sailed to Constantinople with a fleet in 610, overthrew him and became emperor. Heraclius ruled until 641. He is the emperor of Surah al-Rum, and the emperor to whom the Holy Prophet ﷺ later sent a letter inviting him to Islam. Sahih al-Bukhari records that the letter reached him at Jerusalem, during the truce between the Holy Prophet ﷺ and the Quraysh that followed Hudaibiyah.¹³

Byzantine society was deeply religious and, at the same time, divided and restless. Monks and monasteries were everywhere, and ordinary people argued about the finest points of belief in the streets and markets. The same people packed the racecourse at Constantinople, which by one account held 80,000, and split into two rival factions, the Blues and the Greens, whose fights could turn into riots.⁵ The great landowners and the officials lived in luxury, while the farmers who fed the empire carried its weight.

That weight was the land tax. The empire needed huge sums for its armies and its court, and it took them from the provinces. Egypt sent its wheat to feed Constantinople. Nadwi, drawing on the historian of the Arab conquest of Egypt, says the whole machinery of government in Egypt was directed at “wringing profits out of the ruled for the rulers”, and he likens the province to a cow milked and never fed.⁵ In Syria, he records, the taxes were so heavy and so unfairly shared that families sometimes sold their children to pay them.⁵ Even allowing for a scholar’s strong words, the picture is of provinces that paid much, received little and had small reason to love their masters.

Keep in mind that Byzantium’s wealth came from Syria and Egypt. These were also the provinces furthest from the capital, nearest to Arabia, and fullest of Christians who did not share the emperor’s faith. That last point is the subject of the next section, and it is one of the main reasons the Muslims were received as they were. Hitti quotes a statement attributed to the people of Hims, in Syria, and calls it typical of how the Syrians felt about their new masters. They told the Muslims, “We like your rule and justice far better than the state of oppression and tyranny under which we have been living.”⁹ A province that speaks like that of its old rulers had been lost to them long before the battle.

4. The Christian quarrels inside Byzantium

Byzantium’s people were nearly all Christians, but they were not one church. For two centuries before Islam they had quarrelled bitterly over the nature of Hazrat Isa (AS). Christians believed him to be both God and a man. Muslims reject this, for the Quran says, “The Messiah, son of Mary, was not but a messenger; [other] messengers have passed on before him” (Al-Ma’idah 5:75).¹⁰ The quarrel among the Christians was over how the two were joined in him. To a Muslim student this can seem a strange thing to fight over. To the people of the time it decided whose church was true and whose prayers would be heard, and the emperor took one side with the full force of the state.

The emperor’s side was settled at the Council of Chalcedon, a great meeting of bishops near Constantinople in 451. Chalcedon declared that Hazrat Isa (AS) had two natures, divine and human, joined in one person. This became the faith of the emperor and of the Greek church of Constantinople.⁹ Many Christians of Syria and Egypt refused it. They held that he had a single nature, in which the divine and the human were made one. For this they were called Monophysites, from Greek words meaning “one nature”. In Syria their church took the name Jacobite, after Jacob Baradaeus, a Monophysite bishop of the sixth century so zealous in spreading its faith that the church took his name.⁶ In Egypt the Monophysite church was the church of the Copts, the native Egyptians.

A third group, the Nestorians, stood at the other extreme. They stressed the two natures so strongly that they seemed to divide him into two persons. Condemned by the emperor’s church, the Nestorians moved east, out of Byzantine reach, and became the main Christian church of the Persian empire, as the section on religion in Persia explains.³ The table below sets the three side by side.

The quarrel was not only about belief. The Monophysites were mostly the native people of Syria and Egypt, who spoke Syriac and Coptic, while the emperor’s church was the church of the Greek-speaking rulers. So a dispute about faith became a dispute between the provinces and the capital. Hitti, writing of Syria, says the gap between the Semitic people of the country and their Greek masters “was augmented by sectarian differences.”⁹ Emperors swung between trying to force the Monophysites into line and trying to find a form of words both sides could accept. Heraclius tried the second. In 638 he put forward a new formula, that Hazrat Isa (AS) had one will even if he had two natures. Hitti’s judgment is that “like other religious compromises this one neither pleased the orthodox nor satisfied the dissenters.”⁹ By then the Muslims were already in Syria.

The result is the most important point of this section. Large numbers of the Byzantine empire’s own Christian subjects, in exactly the provinces the Muslims reached first, felt that the emperor’s government persecuted their church. When the Muslims came and left their churches alone, many of them saw no reason to fight for Constantinople. The chapter on the conquests of the Rightly Guided Caliphs returns to this.

5. Persia: the Sasanid state

The Persian empire of this age was ruled by the Sasanid dynasty. Ardashir I founded it in the 220s by overthrowing the older Parthian kings, and his family ruled until 651, more than four centuries.⁴ Nadwi describes the Sasanid empire at its height as larger and richer than Byzantium, stretching from Iraq across Iran to Khurasan and Central Asia, and for a time reaching the Indus delta, Kachh and Kathiawar.⁵ Its capital was Ctesiphon, which the Arabs called al-Mada’in, a group of cities on both banks of the Tigris in the heart of Iraq.

The Sasanid king was called Shahanshah, king of kings, and he ruled as a man set apart from his people. His court was famous for its splendour, its ceremony and its wealth, and later Persian tradition remembered its throne room, its crown and its carpets with wonder. Nadwi quotes the titles Khusrau II gave himself, “the immortal soul among the gods and peerless god among human beings.”⁵ Around the king stood the great noble families, who held land and led the army, and the Zoroastrian priests, the mobads, who guarded the state’s faith. Below them came the scribes and officials, and at the bottom the farmers and craftsmen, who could not rise out of the class they were born into.

Persian society was divided in this way into four fixed classes, the priests, the warriors, the scribes and the common people. A man’s class decided his work, his marriage and his rights. This rigid order made the state strong when the king was strong and fragile when he was weak, because the great nobles were always ready to choose a new king from the royal family if the old one failed them. That is exactly what happened in 628, as the section on the last war shows, and in the four years after it.

The greatest Sasanid king of the sixth century was Khusrau I, called Anushirwan, who ruled from 531 to 579.⁴ He is the Kisra of many Arab and Persian stories of a just king. Al-Tabari tells how he completed a survey of the land that his father Kawad had begun. Every field, plain and hillside was measured, the date palms and olive trees were counted, and the men liable to the poll tax were listed. Then Khusrau’s counsellors fixed the tax by the unit of land, the jarib, and by the tree, instead of taking a share of each harvest.³ Al-Tabari gives the rates. A jarib of clover paid seven dirhams; four good date palms paid one dirham; six olive trees paid one dirham. Crops other than the seven named were left untaxed, and the tax was paid in three instalments over the year.³

Bosworth, al-Tabari’s translator, explains why this reform mattered. Under the old system the tax was a share of the crop, so the state’s income rose and fell with the harvest, and a farmer’s crop could rot while he waited for the assessor. Under the new system the state knew in advance what it would receive, which suited a king with armies to pay. The farmer, though, owed the same sum in a bad year as in a good one, and could be ruined by a failed harvest.³ Al-Tabari tells of one scribe at Khusrau’s court who dared to say so, and Bosworth notes that his objection was exactly this.³ By al-Mas’udi’s account the reform applied only to Iraq, the richest province of the empire.³ It matters to this subject because the Muslims inherited it. When Iraq came under Muslim rule, its land was taxed on the basis of surveys of this kind, as the chapter on Hazrat Umar’s (RA) administration explains.³

Khusrau I also reorganised the army. Al-Tabari records that he divided the command of the empire into four quarters, east, west, north and south, each under its own general, the ispahbadh.³ With these reforms he made Persia stronger than it had been for a century, and he fought Justinian’s Byzantium on equal terms. His grandson Khusrau II would push that strength to breaking point.

6. Religion in Persia: fire temples, Mani, Mazdak and the Christians

The faith of the Sasanid state was Zoroastrianism, the old religion of Iran, named after its founder Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. At its centre was the belief in a struggle between two powers, a good god of light, Ahura Mazda, and an evil spirit of darkness. Its worship centred on fire, the symbol of the good god, kept burning in fire temples and tended by priests. The priests were rich and powerful, and the king relied on them as much as they relied on him. Muslims called the Zoroastrians Majus, and treated them in law much as they treated the People of the Book, a ruling the chapter on minorities under Islam explains.

Zoroastrianism had two great challengers from within Persia. The first was Mani, a prophet of the third century, who taught that the world was a battle between light and dark mixed together in every person, and that the soul must free itself by strict self-denial. Nadwi records that Shapur I followed Mani for a time before returning to the old faith, and that Mani was later arrested and executed under Bahram I.⁵ His followers, the Manichaeans, lasted for centuries, and the word Muslims later used for a dangerous heretic, zindiq, was first used for them.³

The second challenger was Mazdak, who preached under King Kawad I in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Al-Tabari records his teaching that God had placed the means of living on earth to be shared equally among His servants, and that the rich had taken more than their share. The poor and the low-born rallied to him. By al-Tabari’s account the Mazdakites grew so strong that they would burst into a man’s house and seize his property and his women, until “a man among them no longer knew his own son, nor a child his father.”³ Kawad at first supported the movement, perhaps, as Bosworth suggests, because it helped him break the power of the nobles.³ Bosworth, summing up recent historians, thinks it unlikely that Mazdak really preached a full sharing of property and wives.³ What is certain is that the movement shook Persian society badly.

Khusrau I ended it. Once his throne was secure, and before he went to war with Byzantium again in 540, he turned on the Mazdakites, had them massacred and restored the old order of property and class.³ Nadwi reads the episode as showing a society that swung from one extreme to the other, from despotic kings and priests to unruly communism, and never found a balanced middle way.⁵ That reading is part of his larger argument about this age, which the section on how scholars read it takes up.

Persia was not only Zoroastrian. Iraq, its richest province, had a large Christian population, and most of them belonged to the Nestorian church, which the Byzantine emperors had driven out. The Persian kings let this church organise itself, partly because its enemies were Byzantium’s. Its first synod on Persian soil met in 410, under the head of its church at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital itself.³ Nisibis, the frontier city, became a great Nestorian centre of learning, and Nestorian Christians brought Greek medicine into Persia.³ Bosworth notes that Nestorianism was the dominant Christian church in Persia, with the Monophysites a smaller presence.³ Iraq also had old and large Jewish communities, with their own schools of learning. Christians and Jews were tolerated as long as they were loyal, but in wartime a king could turn on them as friends of the enemy.

So both empires were religious states, and both had large religious minorities who did not share the ruler’s faith. In Byzantium the minority was mainly the Monophysite Christians of Syria and Egypt; in Persia it was the Nestorian Christians and the Jews of Iraq. In neither empire did these people have much reason to die for their rulers.

7. Money and trade: what the empires lived on

Both empires lived on farming. Egypt’s wheat and Iraq’s irrigated grain, dates and fruit were the treasure of the Near East, and the land tax on them paid for the armies, the courts and the cities. Al-Mas’udi, as Bosworth notes, says Khusrau I’s land-tax measures were only for Iraq, “the richest province” of the empire.³ Nadwi notes that Constantinople depended largely on Egypt’s corn.⁵ When the Muslims took Iraq and Egypt in the 630s and 640s, they took the two richest farmlands of the Near East, and the tax of those lands paid for the early caliphate.

Trade was the other source of wealth. The luxuries of the East, silk from China, spices and pepper from India and the islands beyond, and incense from southern Arabia, travelled west to the cities of Byzantium. They came by two main routes. One ran overland through Persia, which could tax the silk trade or stop it when it chose. The other ran by sea, across the Indian Ocean to Yemen, and then either up the Red Sea or overland through western Arabia to Syria. Because Persia sat across the land route, Byzantium had every reason to want the sea route and the Arabian road kept open and in friendly hands.

That is the reason Makkah mattered. A Makkan caravan going north to Syria in summer, and south to Yemen in winter, carried goods between the two worlds, and the Quran itself speaks of “the caravan of winter and summer” of the Quraysh (Quraysh 106:2).¹⁰ Mufti Muhammad Shafi, in Ma’ariful Qur’an, explains that Makkah grew nothing, so the Quraysh had to trade to live, going to Syria in summer because it was cool and to Yemen in winter because it was warm, and that the respect the Arabs had for them as keepers of the Ka’bah kept their caravans safe.¹⁸ Bosra, the Byzantine market town on the edge of the desert in Figure 1, was one of the places those caravans reached. The trade of Makkah depended on the two empires’ markets, and on Arabia staying free of either empire’s control. The chapter on Arabia’s trade teaches it in full.

The empires’ wealth was also their burden. Both raised the land tax as high as it would go to pay for their wars, and both spent heavily on their courts. Nadwi describes the Persian nobility’s love of luxury, and repeats a report that when Yazdagird III, the last Sasanid king, fled his capital before the Muslims, he took with him a thousand cooks, a thousand musicians and a thousand keepers of his hunting leopards.⁵ Whether or not the numbers are exact, the story shows how Muslims remembered the Persian court, and why the simple life of the early caliphs struck the conquered peoples so strongly.

8. The Arab borderlands: the Ghassanids, the Lakhmids and Dhu Qar

Neither empire could guard its long desert frontier with its own regular soldiers. The desert was too large and the Arab raiders too quick. So each empire hired an Arab dynasty to do the job, paying it with money, titles and the right to rule the tribes on its side of the border. These client kingdoms, the Ghassanids in Syria and the Lakhmids in Iraq, were the first Arab states most Arabs of the time knew, and the first place many Arabs met the culture of the empires.

The Ghassanids were an Arab tribe settled on the eastern edge of Syria. Their greatest ruler was al-Harith II bin Jabalah, who ruled from 529 to 569. Hitti records that in 529 the emperor Justinian, as a reward for his victory over the Lakhmids, made him lord of all the Arab tribes of Syria, with the rank of patrician, the highest rank below the emperor’s own.⁶ The Ghassanids spent much of their history fighting the Lakhmids for Byzantium. Hitti judges their culture higher than their Lakhmid rivals ever reached. He describes a civilisation that grew up along the eastern edge of Syria under their rule and in the Roman period before it, mixing Arab, Syrian and Greek ways, with houses of basalt, palaces, baths and churches.⁷

They were Christians, and Monophysite Christians, which caused them trouble with Constantinople. Al-Harith used his visit to Justinian’s court in 563 to have the Monophysite Jacob Baradaeus made a bishop for the Arabs of Syria.⁶ His son al-Mundhir protected the Monophysites as his father had, and the emperors came to suspect the family’s loyalty. Al-Mundhir was arrested and taken to Constantinople, and after him the Ghassanid state fell into disorder, with the tribes choosing their own chiefs. Hitti judges that the Persian capture of Damascus and Jerusalem in 613 and 614 “dealt the last blow” to the dynasty.⁷ So by the time the Muslims reached Syria, Byzantium had lost the Arab shield that had guarded its desert border for half a century.

The last Ghassanid king, Jabalah bin al-Ayham, fought for Byzantium against the Muslims at Yarmuk in 636. A well-known story, which Hitti gives as a story (“so the story goes”), says he then accepted Islam, but on pilgrimage struck a bedouin who stepped on his cloak, and when Hazrat Umar (RA) ruled that he must accept the same blow in return or pay a fine, he left Islam and went to Constantinople.⁷ Use it, if you use it, as a report that shows the equality of Muslims before the law under Hazrat Umar (RA), and call it a report.

The Lakhmids ruled from al-Hira, near the Euphrates, as Persia’s guards on the desert. Their strongest king, al-Mundhir III, ruled for about half a century until his death in 554, fighting Byzantium’s Arabs for most of it. Hitti records that al-Harith of Ghassan finally killed him in battle.⁶ Al-Hira was a centre of Arab culture, and the great poets of pre-Islamic Arabia came to its court.³ Many of its people were Christians.

The last Lakhmid king, al-Nu’man III, ruled from 580 to 602.⁴ Khusrau II grew angry with him, summoned him to court, put him in chains and sent him to prison at Khaniqin, where he died. The Arab sources disagree on how he died. Some say it was plague, and others that he was trampled by elephants.³ Khusrau then ended the Lakhmid line and put al-Hira under a governor of his own, Iyas bin Qabisah of the tribe of Tayyi’, the first ruler of al-Hira who was not a Lakhmid.³ Persia had thrown away its Arab shield, just as Byzantium had let its own fall apart.

The cost came quickly. The Arab tribe of Bakr bin Wa’il, which had been close to al-Nu’man, clashed with Persia, and at a place called Dhu Qar, near the Euphrates, the Arabs defeated a Persian army and its Arab allies under Iyas bin Qabisah.³ Al-Tabari records a saying attributed to the Holy Prophet ﷺ when the news came: “This [has been] the first military encounter in which the Arabs have secured their just due from the Persians, and it was through me that they were given the victory.”³ Al-Tabari gives the saying with no chain of narrators, so treat it as a report, not as a hadith you can cite from the collections.

Two cautions come with Dhu Qar. The first is its date. The sources give no firm one, and Bosworth puts it between about 604 and 611, before or near the start of the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ preaching.³ The second is its size. Later Arab memory made it a great national victory, but Bosworth, following the historian Fred Donner, judges it probably one of several clashes on the border, and notes that many of the clans who fought Persia at Dhu Qar later fought on Persia’s side against the Muslims.³ What Dhu Qar does show is that by the early seventh century a Persian army could be beaten by Arabs, and that the border Persia had guarded through the Lakhmids was open.

9. Yemen between the empires

Yemen, in the south-west of Arabia, was the richest part of the peninsula. It was green and terraced, watered by the monsoon, and the source of the frankincense the whole ancient world wanted. Its old kings, the Himyarites, had ruled it from Zafar and Sana’a for centuries. In the sixth century it became a prize the two empires fought over, through their allies. The story runs in three acts, and the Quran speaks of the first two.

The first act is the persecution at Najran. In the early 520s the throne of Yemen was taken by a king who had become a Jew, Yusuf As’ar, called Dhu Nuwas. Najran, in the north of Yemen, was a strong Christian town with its own bishop. Dhu Nuwas set out to destroy the Christians of southern Arabia and the Abyssinians who supported them. In 523 he took Najran and killed its Christians, burning many in a trench of fire, and burned their churches.³ Most historians date this to November 523, though some argue for 518.³

Muslim tradition has long connected these martyrs with the opening of Surah al-Buruj, which says: “Destroyed [i.e., cursed] were the companions of the trench, [containing] the fire full of fuel, when they were sitting near it. And they, to what they were doing against the believers, were witnesses. And they resented them not except because they believed in Allāh, the Exalted in Might, the Praiseworthy” (Al-Buruj 85:4-8).¹⁰ Mufti Muhammad Shafi, in Ma’ariful Qur’an, tells the story of the trench from the hadith in Sahih Muslim of the boy, the king and the monk, which ends with the king having ditches dug and filled with fire for those who would not give up their faith.¹⁴ He adds that by Hazrat Ibn Abbas’s (RA) account the king was Yusuf Dhu Nuwas of Yemen, about seventy years before the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ birth.¹⁷ Other commentators read the verses without naming a place, and the identification is a reading of the commentators, not the words of the verse.³

The second act is Abyssinia’s revenge. The Christian king of Abyssinia, Byzantium’s ally, crossed the Red Sea in 525 with a great army, defeated Dhu Nuwas and made Yemen an Abyssinian possession. Dhu Nuwas seems to have been killed in the fighting. The story that he rode his horse into the sea is, as al-Tabari’s translator notes, a later Yemeni touch.³ A soldier in that army, Abrahah, soon made himself master of Yemen, ruling nominally for the king of Abyssinia from about 533 until after 552.⁴ He repaired the great dam at Marib and built at Sana’a a cathedral so splendid, al-Tabari says, that its like had not been built anywhere in its time.³ Al-Tabari, following Ibn Ishaq, says Abrahah built it to draw the Arabs’ pilgrimage away from the Ka’bah at Makkah.³

From that grew the event the Quran names in Surah al-Fil: “Have you not considered, [O Muḥammad], how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant? Did He not make their plan into misguidance? And He sent against them birds in flocks, striking them with stones of hard clay, and He made them like eaten straw” (Al-Fil 105:1-5).¹⁰ Abrahah marched on Makkah with an elephant to destroy the Ka’bah, and Allah destroyed his army. Muslim tradition places this in the year of the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ birth, which is why that year is called the Year of the Elephant, about 570. Some modern historians, reading Abrahah’s own inscriptions, which record a campaign into central Arabia in about 552, have put the expedition earlier, and others have shown that some early reports also point to an earlier date. Bosworth judges that the two dates “may not be unresolvable.”³ In the exam, give the tradition’s date, the Year of the Elephant, and if you mention the other view, mention it once as a question modern historians have raised. The chapter on the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ life in Makkah teaches the event from the Makkan side.

The third act brought Persia in. The Yemenis resented Abyssinian rule. A Yemeni noble, Sayf bin Dhi Yazan, went to Khusrau I to ask for help. Al-Tabari tells that the king, unwilling to risk his army, sent the men in his prisons, about eight hundred of them, under a commander named Wahriz.³ They drove out the Abyssinians in about 570, and Yemen became a Persian province, ruled by Persian governors.⁴ The last of them, Badhan, was still in office when, in al-Tabari’s words, “God sent His Messenger Muhammad”, and Persian rule in Yemen ended around 630.³

So Yemen shows the rivalry of the two empires in miniature. Byzantium’s ally Abyssinia took it in 525; Persia took it from Abyssinia in about 570. For the rest of the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ life in Makkah, the Persian empire stood not only to the north-east of Arabia, at al-Hira, but also to its south, in Yemen.

10. The last war, 602 to 628, and Surah al-Rum

The two empires had made peace in 591, when the emperor Maurice helped the young Khusrau II win back the throne of Persia from a rebel general. Khusrau had fled to Byzantine territory in 590 and asked Maurice for help, and Maurice gave it; al-Tabari even says Maurice gave him his daughter in marriage.³ So when, in 602, the Byzantine army killed Maurice and put Phocas on the throne, Khusrau declared war to avenge his benefactor. Bosworth notes that the killing was a pretext, since tension had been building already.³ The war that followed lasted twenty-six years and brought both empires close to ruin. Figure 3 shows its main events beside the events of the Seerah.

Persia triumphant, 602 to 622

At first everything went Persia’s way. Phocas was hated at home, and his reign was chaos. Even after Heraclius overthrew him in 610, the Persian armies kept coming. They took Damascus in 613. In the spring of 614 they defeated the Byzantines in the Hauran, between Adhri’at and Bosra, and marched into Palestine.³ In June 614 they took Jerusalem, sacked it for three days, carried off its patriarch into captivity, and took the relic Christians held most sacred, the True Cross, back to Persia.³ Then they invaded Egypt. Bosworth dates the fall of Alexandria to about 617; al-Tabari says its keys were sent to Khusrau in the twenty-eighth year of his reign, which falls in 618 or 619.³ A Persian army reached Chalcedon, on the Asian shore facing Constantinople, while the Avars from the north reached the capital’s suburbs. By 618 the situation looked so hopeless that Heraclius considered abandoning Constantinople for Carthage, and was talked out of it by the patriarch.³

This was the moment the Quran spoke. In Makkah, the Muslims were a small, persecuted group. The pagan Quraysh rejoiced at Persia’s victories, because the Persians, like them, had no revealed scripture, while the Byzantines, like the Muslims, were People of the Book. Then Surah al-Rum was revealed: “The Byzantines have been defeated in the nearest land. But they, after their defeat, will overcome within three to nine years. To Allāh belongs the command [i.e., decree] before and after. And that day the believers will rejoice in the victory of Allāh. He gives victory to whom He wills, and He is the Exalted in Might, the Merciful” (Al-Rum 30:2-5).¹⁰ Maulana Syed Abul Ala Maududi, in Tafhim al-Qur’an, dates the surah to about 615, after the Persian conquests of Syria and Palestine and in the same year as the Muslims’ migration to Abyssinia.¹⁵ “The nearest land” is usually understood as the part of Syria nearest Arabia. Al-Tabari records a report from Ikrimah that the battle was at Adhri’at, and Ma’ariful Qur’an, citing Ibn Hajar, places it between Adhri’at and Bosra, which matches the Byzantine defeat in the Hauran in 614.³¹⁶

The wager of Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA)

Jami’ at-Tirmidhi records what followed, in a hadith graded sahih. When the verses came down, Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA) went out proclaiming them in Makkah. Some of the Quraysh challenged him to a wager on it, and he accepted, “before betting has been forbidden”. The Arabic word in the verse for “a few years”, bid’, means between three and nine, and they agreed on six. When six years passed with no Byzantine victory, the pagans took their winnings. In the seventh year the Byzantines defeated the Persians, and “at that time, many people became Muslims.”¹¹ Another report in Tirmidhi, from Hazrat Ibn Abbas (RA), gives the term as five years and has the Holy Prophet ﷺ ask why it was not made longer.¹² Maududi, following other reports, names the man who wagered as Ubayy bin Khalaf and says the stake was raised to a hundred camels, which Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA) gave in charity when he won.¹⁵ The reports differ in the details, as reports of one event often do. They agree on the main point. The Muslims staked their faith on a prophecy that, when it was made, no observer of the war would have believed.

Byzantium’s return, 622 to 628

In 622, the year of the Hijrah, Heraclius began his counter-attack. He had made peace with the Avars, rebuilt his army, and taken the Church’s gold and silver to pay for it, and he fought as if in a holy war to recover the Cross.³ Instead of attacking the Persian armies in Syria head-on, he struck at Persia itself, through Armenia and Azerbaijan, in six campaigns. He defeated a Persian army early in 623 and drove the Persians out of Anatolia.³ Counted from about 615, when the surah came, those first victories fell in the seventh and eighth years, within the nine the verse allowed. Maududi notes that in 624, the year of the Battle of Badr, Heraclius was campaigning in Azerbaijan and destroying the great fire temple there, so that the two victories the surah promised, Byzantium’s and the believers’, came close together.¹⁵ A report in Tirmidhi, from Sufyan, says the news of the Byzantine victory reached the Muslims on the Day of Badr itself, 17 Ramadan 2 AH (13 March 624).¹²¹⁹

The Persians struck back once more. In 626 a Persian army stood again at Chalcedon while the Avars besieged Constantinople, but the city held.³ In the autumn of 627 Heraclius marched into Iraq. Near Nineveh, by the Tigris, he defeated the Persian army and killed its commander, Rahzadh, with six thousand of his men.³ Khusrau fled his palace at Dastagird for Ctesiphon, and his authority collapsed. At the end of February 628 his own nobles deposed him in favour of his son Kawad II, called Shiruyah, who had him killed.³ Kawad made peace with Byzantium and gave back the conquered lands, the captives and the True Cross. Heraclius brought the Cross back to Jerusalem himself. The date of his visit is uncertain, and the restoration was later celebrated on 14 September 629.³

Notice the dates the Seerah gives beside these. The treaty of Hudaibiyah was made in Dhu al-Qadah 6 AH, March 628, the month after Khusrau’s death.³¹⁹ Al-Tabari records that the news of Khusrau’s death reached the Holy Prophet ﷺ on the day of Hudaibiyah, and that he and his Companions rejoiced at it.³ The Quran calls the treaty “a clear conquest” (Al-Fath 48:1).¹⁰ By 628 Persia’s defeat was complete, and the believers had their own victories to rejoice in, as the verse had said they would.

11. Why both empires were worn out

When the Holy Prophet ﷺ passed away in Rabi al-Awwal 11 AH (June 632), the two empires had won and lost the same war. Byzantium had its provinces back, but it had lost them once already and its hold on them was weak. Persia had lost everything it had won and its king had been killed by his own son. Within months the first Muslim armies were on their borders. In 12 AH (633) Hazrat Khalid bin Walid (RA) was sent to Iraq, and between 633 and 640 all Syria was taken.²⁰⁹ To understand why it went so fast, look at the five causes in Figure 4, and then weigh them.

The first cause was the war itself. Twenty-six years of fighting, from 602 to 628, had killed great numbers of soldiers, ruined the cities that changed hands, and emptied both treasuries. Syria, Palestine and Egypt had been occupied by Persia for well over a decade, and Bosworth notes that the time between Heraclius regaining them and the Muslims arriving was too short for the Christian communities there to recover what they had lost.³ Iraq had been invaded and plundered by Heraclius. Neither empire had an army left that matched its old strength.

The second cause was the cost of the war to the ordinary people. Both empires had paid for it with taxes that were already heavy. Byzantium had taken even the Church’s treasure. Persia’s fixed land tax, which Khusrau I had designed to give the state a steady income, fell hardest on the farmers in bad years, and these were bad years. A farmer taxed to ruin by his own government has little reason to resist a new one that promises a lighter tax.

The third cause was religion. In Byzantium, the Monophysite Christians of Syria and Egypt had been pressed and punished for their faith by the emperor’s church. In Persia, the Nestorian Christians and the Jews of Iraq lived under a Zoroastrian state that could turn on them in wartime. Many of the people of both empires felt their rulers were their persecutors. The Muslims, who left them their churches and synagogues in return for the jizyah, a fixed tax on those who did not fight, seemed to many of them a change for the better.

The fourth cause was Persia’s collapse at the top. Khusrau II’s death in 628 opened four years of chaos. Kawad II’s reign ended within the year, and the child Ardashir III followed him. The general Shahrbaraz seized the throne with Heraclius’s backing and was soon murdered by rival nobles. Khusrau’s daughter Buran was raised to the throne, and then another of the family, and then others, until in 632 the throne passed to Yazdagird III.⁴³ He was the last Sasanid, and he spent most of his reign in flight. He died in 651.⁴

The fifth cause was the loss of the Arab borders. Persia had destroyed its own shield when Khusrau II ended the Lakhmids in 602, and Dhu Qar showed what that cost. Byzantium had let the Ghassanid state fall apart, and the Persian conquest of Syria finished it. When the Muslim armies came out of Arabia, there was no Arab client kingdom on either border to meet them.

Which cause mattered most? Most historians would put the war first, because it made the others worse. It raised the taxes, it sharpened the religious quarrels, and it brought down Khusrau II. A Muslim answer will add one thing more, and it is the answer the next sections explain. The empires were weak, but weakness alone does not build a new state. What took their place was a people united for the first time by a faith, and that is a cause no account of the empires’ weakness can supply.

12. What these conditions meant for Islam

The condition of the two empires shaped the first century of Islam in several ways, some at once and some over the long run.

The first result was the speed of the conquests. Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt fell to the Muslims within about ten years of the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ death, and the whole Persian empire within twenty. Persia, whose king had fled, never recovered, and the Sasanid state ended with Yazdagird III’s death in 651. Byzantium survived, but only as a smaller empire around Anatolia and Constantinople; it never won back Syria or Egypt. So the first great result is that the Muslim state, within a generation, ruled the old heartlands of both empires.

The second result was that the Muslims inherited the empires’ government. The first caliphs did not tear down what they found. They kept the tax systems, the land surveys and much of the administration, at first even the Greek and Persian clerks who ran them. Bosworth notes that later Muslim rulers often used land surveys of this kind as the basis of their own assessments of the kharaj.³ The Byzantine and Persian coins went on being used until the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik issued Islamic coins. The chapters on Hazrat Umar’s (RA) administration and on the Umayyads’ reforms teach this in full.

The third result was the meeting of cultures. Islamic civilisation drew on the learning of both empires. From the Byzantine and Syrian side came Greek philosophy, medicine and science, much of it carried in Syriac by the very Christian scholars the emperors had persecuted, and translated into Arabic under the Abbasids. From the Persian side came statecraft, court ceremony, the ideas of a ruler’s duties and the art of the secretary. Persian itself became, in time, a great language of Muslim culture. That last result reached the Muslims of South Asia directly. The Muslim courts of the Subcontinent, from the Sultans of Delhi to the Mughals, wrote and ruled in Persian, and the Urdu that Pakistan speaks today is full of Persian words that came that way.

The fourth result, and for a Muslim the deepest, was the proof the age gave of the Quran’s truth. The prophecy of Surah al-Rum came true against every expectation, within the time it set, and Tirmidhi records that many people accepted Islam because of it.¹¹ Maududi calls it “a conclusive piece of evidence that the Qur’an is the Word of God.”¹⁵ In an exam answer on the Near East before Islam, this is the point to end the narrative on.

13. How Muslim scholars and historians read this age

Every historian agrees on the main facts of this chapter, the two empires, the long war, the heavy taxes, the divided churches and the sudden collapse before the Muslims. They differ on what those facts mean.

The Muslim scholars read this age as the darkness before a dawn. Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi gives the fullest modern account of it. He describes Byzantium as crushed by taxes, torn by riots and religious quarrels, and its provinces treated as property to be milked; and Persia as a state of god-kings and oppressed classes, swinging between the rule of priests and the disorder of Mazdak.⁵ He then widens the view to India, Europe and the rest of the world, and concludes that the sixth century, the century of the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ birth, was “the darkest era of history”, in which mankind had forgotten its Creator and lost the difference between right and wrong.⁵ On this reading, the weakness of the empires is the background against which the coming of Islam is a mercy to the worlds. Nadwi supports his account by quoting Western historians who said the same, among them H. G. Wells, who wrote that the Byzantine and Persian empires were “manifestly bent upon a mutual destruction.”⁵

Maududi reads the war through Surah al-Rum. For him its history is the setting of a prophecy, and the point of telling it is to show how impossible the prophecy looked when it was made and how exactly it came true.¹⁵ Mufti Muhammad Shafi in Ma’ariful Qur’an reads it the same way, and draws out why the Muslims’ sympathy lay with the Byzantines. As People of the Book, they shared with the Muslims a belief in revelation, prophethood and the Hereafter.¹⁶

Western historians tell the same story with a different emphasis. Philip Hitti, in his History of the Arabs, stresses the religious and national divisions inside Byzantium, with the Monophysite Syrians and Copts turned against their Greek masters and every compromise failing.⁹ On the causes of the conquests, Hitti goes further, and argues that economic need drove the Arabs out of their desert more than faith did, quoting a line of Arabic poetry that tells the nomad he did not leave the desert for Paradise but for “thy yearning after bread and dates”.⁸ He also credits al-Baladhuri, “the most judicious of the historians of the conquest”, with recording that Hazrat Abu Bakr’s (RA) call to arms for Syria spoke of booty as well as of holy war.⁸

A good answer names both readings and weighs them. The facts behind Nadwi’s account, the taxes, the persecution, the war, are confirmed by every source in this chapter, including the Western ones. His judgment that the age was morally dark is a believer’s judgment, and a strong one, but it rests on evidence an examiner will accept. Hitti’s economic reading explains why ordinary bedouin might have joined the armies, but it does not explain why tribes that had fought each other for centuries suddenly fought as one, under discipline, for a cause. That needs the faith Hitti plays down. Most Muslim historians therefore hold that the empires’ weakness made the conquests possible, and the faith of the Muslims made them happen. Say that, with the evidence, and you have the analysis the examiners ask for.

14. What students mix up

Some students write that the Byzantines were Romans from Rome. By this time Rome itself was not part of the empire’s centre, and the capital was Constantinople. The empire called itself Roman because it was the continuation of the Roman empire. That is why the Quran calls them al-Rum. Write “the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) empire” once, and then “Byzantium”.

Others write as if the Persians of this age were Muslims, or even Shia. That is centuries too early. The Sasanid Persians were Zoroastrians, and Persia became a Muslim land only after the conquest. Iran became mainly Shia only under the Safavids, more than eight hundred years after the conquest.

It is easy to assume that the Christians of the empires had one church. They had at least three. There was the emperor’s church, which followed Chalcedon, the Monophysite church of Syria and Egypt, and the Nestorian church of Persia and Iraq. The quarrels between them are half the explanation for the conquests, so getting them right earns marks.

Dhu Qar is sometimes written up as a great war that freed the Arabs from Persia. It was a border clash of uncertain date, made larger by later memory. It shows that Persia’s Arab frontier was open; it did not free anyone.

Abrahah is sometimes called a Persian governor. He ruled Yemen for Abyssinia, the Christian ally of Byzantium. Persia took Yemen only after him, in about 570, when Sayf bin Dhi Yazan brought in Persian troops.

Some answers say that Surah al-Rum foretold the fall of Persia to the Muslims. The verses foretold a Byzantine victory over Persia within a few years, and the believers’ rejoicing on that day. Both came true by 624 to 628. The Muslim conquest of Persia came later and is not what the verses describe.

The two Khusraus are often mixed up. Khusrau I (Anushirwan, 531-579) was the reformer of the tax and the army. Khusrau II (Parvez, 591-628) was the conqueror of Jerusalem who lost the war and his life.

15. What FPSC has asked

FPSC has not yet set a full question on the two empires alone. It has set three on the conditions before Islam, each naming Arabia:

• “Write notes on any two of the following: (b) Religious Conditions in Arabia before the dawn of Islam.” (CE-2017, ten marks)
• “Describe the Socio-Political conditions of Arabia before the dawn of Islam.” (CE-2018, twenty marks)
• “Critically analyze the economic structure of Arab society before the dawn of Islam.” (CE-2026, twenty marks)²

Each of these is answered mainly from the next three chapters, which teach Arabia itself. This chapter gives each answer its opening and its frame. A political answer on Arabia must show that Arabia was squeezed between two empires, with Persian rule in Yemen and the client kingdoms on its borders. A religious answer must say where Christianity in Arabia came from, through Najran, the Ghassanids and al-Hira, and where Zoroastrian influence came from, through Persian Yemen and al-Hira. An economic answer must show that Makkah’s trade depended on the empires’ markets. The syllabus itself names “the Near East including Arabia”, so a question on the empires alone is entirely possible, and you should be ready to write one. In Part-I, the CE-2025 paper asked which religion was predominant in Arabia before Islam, and what the main source of cultural influence on pre-Islamic Arabian society was, with “Persian culture” among the options.² Both rest on this chapter as much as on the chapters on Arabia.

16. Facts to take into the examination hall

17. What loses marks on this topic

Writing about Arabia and forgetting the empires. A question on “conditions before Islam” that never mentions Byzantium, Persia, Persian Yemen or the client kingdoms has missed the political frame the syllabus itself names. One paragraph and a sketch map fix it.

A sermon in place of history. “The whole world was in darkness” is a scholar’s conclusion, not a fact. If you open with it and give nothing else, the examiner reads a speech. Give the facts first, the taxes, the persecution, the war, the collapse of Persia’s throne, and then quote Nadwi’s judgment as the conclusion they support.

Dates without their calendar, or wrong pairs. Badr is 2 AH (624), Hudaibiyah 6 AH (628). If you set the Seerah beside the war, the pairs must agree, because the whole point of the comparison is the timing.

Disputed points written as certain. The date of the Year of the Elephant against Abrahah’s inscriptions, the date of Dhu Qar, the identification of the people of the trench with Najran, and the Jabalah story are all reported or debated. Write “by one report”, “the commentators connect”, or “the date is uncertain”, once, and move on.

Muddled names. Two Khusraus, two Mundhirs, three churches. Keep each with its date and its one main deed, and the examiner will trust the rest of your answer.

18. A worked answer plan

Take the CE-2018 question: “Describe the Socio-Political conditions of Arabia before the dawn of Islam.” The full answer draws on the next two chapters for Arabia’s tribes and society. Here is how this chapter’s material gives it the opening and the frame. Try it yourself first: in five minutes, write the one sentence that answers the question and the headings you would use, then open the plan.

What to remember from this chapter

• In 600 the Near East belonged to two empires, Christian Byzantium (Rum), ruled from Constantinople, and Zoroastrian Sasanid Persia, ruled from Ctesiphon. Arabia lay between them, ruled by neither.
• Both lived on the land tax of their farmers, raised high to pay for war, and both were religious states with large minorities who did not share the ruler’s faith, the Monophysites of Syria and Egypt and the Nestorians and Jews of Iraq.
• Each guarded its desert border through an Arab client kingdom, the Ghassanids for Byzantium and the Lakhmids for Persia, and each let its client collapse before Islam.
• Yemen passed from Abyssinia (525, Abrahah) to Persia (about 570), so Persia stood on both sides of Arabia during the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ life in Makkah.
• The war of 602-628 took Persia to Jerusalem and Egypt and then brought Heraclius to the gates of Ctesiphon. Surah al-Rum (30:2-5) foretold the Byzantine victory when it seemed impossible, and it came within the nine years the verse allowed.
• By 632 both empires were exhausted and Persia was in civil war. Muslim scholars read the age as darkness awaiting a prophet; others stress weakness and economics. The empires’ weakness made the conquests possible; the faith of the Muslims made them happen.

Check yourself

Answer each from memory before you open it.

1. Why do the Quran and the Arabs call the Byzantines “al-Rum”?

2. What was the quarrel between the emperor’s church and the Monophysites, and why did it matter for the Muslim conquests?

3. What did Khusrau I change about the land tax, and who gained and who lost by it?

4. Who were the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids, and what happened to each before Islam?

5. Put these in order, with their years: the Persians take Jerusalem; the first revelation; the Hijrah; Khusrau II is killed; the Persians take Damascus.

6. What does the word bid’ in Surah al-Rum mean, and how do the reports of Hazrat Abu Bakr’s (RA) wager use it?

7. Give two reasons Persia could not resist the Muslims in the 630s, and say which you think mattered most.

8. From the chapter on how to answer: what are the five parts of a twenty-mark answer?