Muslim conquests (632–732), (Arabic: فتح‎, Fataḥ, literally opening,) also referred to as the Islamic conquests or Arab conquests[1], of non-Arab peoples began after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He established a new unified political polity in the Arabian Peninsula which under the subsequent Rashidun (The Rightly Guided Caliphs) and Umayyad Caliphates saw a century of rapid expansion of Muslim power.

They grew well beyond the Arabian peninsula in the form of a vast Muslim Empire with an area of influence that stretched from northwest India, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, southern Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees. Edward Gibbon writes in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

"Under the last of the Ommiades, the Arabian empire extended two hundred days’ journey from east to west, from the confines of Tartary and India to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. And if we retrench the sleeve of the robe, as it is styled by their writers, the long and narrow province of march of a caravan. We should vainly seek the indissoluble union and easy obedience that pervaded the government of Augustus and the Antonines; but the progress of Islam diffused over this ample space a general resemblance of manners and opinions. The language and laws of the Qur'an were studied with equal devotion at Samarcand and Seville: the Moor and the Indian embraced as countrymen and brothers in the pilgrimage of Mecca; and the Arabian language was adopted as the popular idiom in all the provinces to the westward of the Tigris."

The Muslim conquests brought about the collapse of the Sassanid Empire and a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire. The reasons for the Muslim success are hard to reconstruct in hindsight, primarily because only fragmentary sources from the period have survived. Most historians agree that the Sassanid Persian and Byzantine Roman empires were militarily and economically exhausted from decades of fighting one another.

Others suggest that many of the peoples living under the rule of these empires, for example Jews and Christians in Persia and Jews and Monophysites in Syria, were dissatisfied and sometimes even welcomed the Muslim forces, largely because of religious conflict in both empires.[2] In the case of Byzantine Egypt, Palestine and Syria, these lands had only a few years before been reacquired from the Persians, and had not been ruled by the Byzantines for over 25 years.

Fred McGraw Donner, however, suggests that formation of a state in the peninsula and ideological (i.e religious) coherence and mobilization was a primary reason why the Muslim armies in the space of a hundred years were able to establish the largest pre-modern empire until that time. The estimates for the size of the Islamic Caliphate suggest it was more than thirteen million square kilometers (five million square miles), making it larger than all current states except the Russian Federation.[3]

History

The individual Muslim conquests, together with their beginning and ending dates, are as follows:

Byzantine–Arab Wars: 634–750

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Wars were between the Byzantine Empire and at first the Rashidun and then the Umayyad caliphates and resulted in the conquest of the Greater Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Armenia (Byzantine Armenia and Sassanid Armenia).

Under the Rashidun

• The conquest of Persia, 633
• The conquest of Syria, 637
• The conquest of Armenia, 639
• The conquest of Egypt, 639
• The conquest of North Africa, 652

Under the Umayyads

• The conquest of North Africa, 665
• The second Arab siege of Constantinople 717–718
• The conquest of Tbilisi, 736

Later conquests

• The conquest of southern Italy, 827

Frontier warfare continued in the form of cross border raids between the Ummayyads and the Byzantine Isaurian dynasty allied with the Khazars across Asia Minor. Byzantine naval dominance and Greek fire resulted in a major victory at the Battle of Akroinon (739); one of a series of military failures of the Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik across the empire that checked the expansion of the Umayyads and hastened their fall.

Conquests of Muhammad and the Rashidun

Conquest of Persia and Iraq: 633–651

In the reign of Yazdgerd III, the last Sassanid ruler of the Persian Empire, a Muslim army secured the conquest of Persia after their decisive defeats of the Sassanid army at the Battle of Walaja in 633 and Battle of al-Qādisiyyah in 636, but the final military victory didn't come until 642 when the Persian army was destroyed at the Battle of Nahāvand. Then, in 651, Yazdgerd III was murdered at Merv, ending the dynasty. His son Pirooz II escaped through the Pamir Mountains in what is now Tajikistan and arrived in Tang China.

Conquest of Transoxiana: 662–709

Following the First Fitna, the Umayyads resumed the push to capture Sassanid lands and began to move towards the conquest of lands east and north of the plateau towards Greater Khorasan and the Silk Road along Transoxiana. Following the collapse of the Sassanids, these regions had fallen under the sway of local Iranian and Turkic tribes as well as the Tang Dynasty. By 709, however, all of Greater Khorasan and Sogdiana had come under Arab control. By 751, the Arabs had extended their influence further east to the borders of China, leading to the Battle of Talas.

Conquest of Sindh: 664–712

During the period of early Rajput supremacy in north India, during the 7th century, the first Muslim invasions were carried out simultaneously with the expansion towards Central Asia. In 664, forces led by Al Muhallab ibn Abi Suffrah began launching raids from Persia, striking Multan in the southern Punjab in what is today Pakistan.

In 711, an expedition led by Muhammad bin Qasim defeated Raja Dahir at what is now Hyderabad in Sindh and established Umayyad rule by 712.