Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #201289 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

The Scotsman
An exciting story gets extra colour thanks to Kennedy's ease with the sources"

Review
"a lucid and enlightening work that is surely to become the standard popular history of early Islam for many years to come" (Adam Levitt BIRMINGHAM POST )

The Economist
Mr Kennedy tells a remarkable tale with skill and authority

Customer Reviews

Enigma
The Great Arab Conquests is a summary of the initial 100 years (approx) erruption of Islam from its founding heartland of Arabia, relating events on a territory by territory basis.

Kennedy begins discouragingly by setting out the problem faced by the historian: the lack of detailed and reliable contemporary record. Unfortunately, but predictably, this problem is not overcome and the success of the conquests ultimately remains an enigma.

At commencement the two regional superpowers were Byzantine and Persia. To the east the Arabs subsumed the whole of the Persian Sasanian empire and extended their dominion beyond as far as Sind. They took from the Byzantines the Fertile Crescent and northern Africa before conquering almost all of Spain and Portugal, and leaving a Byzantine rump corresponding to modern day Turkey, Greece and the Balkans.

Both empires had been ravaged in the 6th century by bubonic plague. At the turn of the 7th century they fought a ruinous war against each other leaving them further depleted economically and demographically. Trade in the mediterranean had partly collapsed due to the strife in the former Western Roman Empire. Great cities were left depopulated by this combination of circumstances. Religious divisions between Christians meant that local communities often felt little allegiance to Byzantine. Yet these factors alone do not explain why time after time Arab armies overcame substantially more numerous opponents. Ultimately Kennedy has no real explanation for this - a Muslim is left entitled to attribute it to God's will.

What is striking for the modern reader is that the primary purpose of the conquests does not appear to have been religous conversion, which usually occurred only gradually over the ensuing 200-300 years. Rather it was a process of military conquest. There was a strong economic imperative in the initial form of "booty" and subsequently by means of the poll tax that non-muslim peoples required to pay in order to live peacefully. Wealth flowed from the conquered lands to Damascus in the form of precious metals and stones, and in human form as slaves (the Berbers of north Africa suffering in particular). Relatively small Arab populations formed miltary and administrative elites in the conquered lands with life otherwise going on much as before for the local populations. It is difficult not to see a parallel with the British presence in India a thousand years later.

Kennedy tells his story in a simple narrative style with occassional humour but his prose is often flat. The territory by territory presentation has its drawbacks. It is often hard to relate simultaneous events in different geographic areas. The central policy of Damascus (if one existed) is hardly defined. The religous and political disputes within the central authority are alluded to but not well explained.

Don't underestimate this book
This is a necessary book. The subject is poorly covered in the generally accessible historical literature and it needed someone steeped in the difficult source material to fill the gap.
Hugh Kennedy does this very well indeed. Certainly his style can be a little pedestrian, and I thought in the later parts of the book battle followed battle in rather monotonous fashion. But those are minor shortcomings.
The reader gets a clear picture of the nature of the Muslim conquests, which came as a surprise to me, and how it was almost an accident of historical timing that allowed them to take place. Kennedy is particularly good on the geopolitics of the late Antique world, explaining how relations between Byzantine and Persian empires and splits within the Christian church let Islam in through the back door.
This should be the standard introduction to the subject for years to come.

Superb introduction to early Islamic history
This is a superb introduction to early Islamic history. It deals with the historical material cautiously but without totally dismissing it out of hand. It is, of course, written from a Christian perspective but that's to be expected and does not detract overall from the quality of the research.
Kennedy is respectful of his sources but some of his conclusions could have been elaborated further. It's not enough to attribute the crushing defeat of the 2 greatest empires of Eurasia within 8 years of the Prophet Muhammad's death to the bubonic plague and Romano-Persian wars: the Arab position was rather as if Poland had decided to attack both the Soviet Union and Germany in 1937 - both the Soviets and Germans had suffered from war and contagion - the great influenza epidemic - and, in the former case, even mass starvation but just as Poland wouldn't have lasted more than a couple of weeks, I would have expected the same for the Arabs in CE 632. We need to look elsewhere for the answer and it's a shame that Prof. Kennedy does not do so.
The writing is at times pedestrian but this book is a lot better written than The Court of the Caliphs and tackles a subject rarely covered well in history books.