The Sword and the Scripture: Reassessing the Myth of the Religion of Islam’s Violent Spread
By the opening of the eighth century, a rumor had begun to harden into dogma among Islam’s detractors. It claimed that the Arabs who emerged from the desert were not missionaries of faith but marauders of creed—men who spread their religion by the sword, who forced the conquered to murmur the shahāda beneath threat of death, and who built their empire upon coerced conversions. In time, this tale would become one of the most enduring myths in world history: that Islam was born in blood, and the Qur’an carried on a blade.
Yet, the closer one approaches the age of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ and his Companions, the fainter that legend grows. The evidence of the first century of Islam—from the Constitution of Medina, to the treaties of Jerusalem, Damascus, and Hira, to the eyewitness accounts of Christian chroniclers—tells a story not of forced confession, but of negotiated coexistence. In the earliest records preserved by both Muslim and non-Muslim pens, we find no decrees commanding conversion, no mass baptisms at sword point, no campaigns to compel belief. What we find instead are treaties safeguarding life and worship, taxes levied for protection, and invitations to faith—never commands to abandon one’s God under duress.
The silence of the conquered is revealing. Syriac, Greek, Coptic, and Armenian sources, so quick to lament their losses, never accuse the first Muslims of religious coercion. Christian martyrs, as recorded by Anastasius of Sinai and others, died not because they refused forced Islamization, but because they renounced Islam after having once embraced it—a crime of apostasy, not a refusal of compulsion. As Christian Sahner has shown, the earliest “martyrs under Islam” were those who turned away from the faith they had freely entered, not those forced into it.
Even within Islam’s own archives, the pattern holds. The Companions of the Prophet ﷺ, as depicted by Ibn Saʿd, al-Balādhurī, and al-Ṭabarī, converted tribes through oaths, envoys, and covenants, not violence. Uriel Simonsohn observes that early conversion often carried social and economic incentives, not terror; it offered relief from burdens, inclusion within a new community, and access to justice, not fear of the sword, the Qur’an itself declares, “There is no compulsion in religion; truth stands out clear from error.” (2:256) —a verse no conqueror could easily reconcile with coercion.
The myth of Islam’s violent spread was born not in Medina, Mecca, or Damascus, but in the polemical workshops of later centuries—among Christian chroniclers seeking to sanctify their losses, and among Western apologists seeking to demonize their rivals. It was a myth that reimagined treaty as tyranny, tribute as persecution, and conversion as compulsion. But the sources of the seventh century tell another story: one of faith by conviction, not force; of daʿwa, not domination; of scripture, not sword.
This blog will trace how conversion truly unfolded between 622 and 718 CE—how Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and pagans entered Islam through persuasion, example, intermarriage, and social transformation, not through imperial decrees. It will show that the early Muslim conquests were political in scope, but moral in restraint, and that the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions conquered hearts as much as lands.
Above all, it will challenge the slander that the first Muslims compelled belief at the edge of a blade. For to believe that is to mistake empire for faith, legend for history, and the sword for the scripture.
This is the story of how a faith spread—not by violence, but by vision.
⚔️ 1. The Legend That Would Not Die: The Deafening Silence of the 7th Century
👉 In the seventh century—the very century of Islam’s birth—there is a deafening silence.
Not a single contemporary Christian chronicle from the lands newly conquered by Muslim armies describes a campaign of forced religious conversion. The earliest Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian sources—those written by the people who were actually there—describe military defeats, political subjugation, and taxation. But their lament is one of divine punishment for their own Christian sins, not of Islamic compulsion.
As historian John Tolan explains, writers like Patriarch Sophronios of Jerusalem (d. 638) viewed the Arab Conquests as a “scourge of God.” ✝️ His sermons, delivered even as Muslim armies approached, lamented Christian moral failure, not Islamic theological aggression.
“What could be more dire than the present evils now encompassing the civilized world? To see a barbarous nation of the desert overrunning another land as if it were their own, to see our civilization laid waste by wild and untamed beasts who have merely the shape of a human form.”— Maximus the Confessor (634-640)
For Maximus, these "beasts" were a divine punishment; he showed no interest in their beliefs. His solution was not resistance, but Christian repentance.
🕊️ The Bottom Line: To the Christians of the 630s and 640s, the Arabs were God's punishing whip—a temporary, if brutal, chastisement. They were not missionaries with swords.
| Christian Writer (7th Century) | Their View of the Muslim Conquests | What They Did NOT Accuse Muslims Of |
|---|---|---|
| Patriarch Sophronios | A "scourge of God" for Christian sins. | Forced conversion to a new faith. |
| Maximus the Confessor | A punishment from God; "barbarous beasts." | Systematic religious persecution. |
| Anastasius of Sinai | Allies of demons; a result of Monophysite heresy. | A coherent religious rival to Christianity. |
Even later in the century, a writer like Anastasius of Sinai was far more concerned with fighting Christian heretics (Monophysites) than with Islam. He saw the Saracens as demonic allies but had almost no understanding of their faith. He knew of the Ka'ba in Mecca but, as Tolan notes, interpreted it through a lens of superstition, claiming a demonic woman appeared there at night.
➡️ In short, the Christians who directly experienced the Muslim conquests never accused Muslims of compelling conversion. Their problem was political domination and theological confusion, not a campaign of religious violence. Islam, to them, was an enigma—God’s instrument of chastisement, not a new faith spread by compulsion.
🕰️ 2. The Turning Point: From Temporary Scourge to Permanent Heresy (c. 700 CE)
For the first generation, the hope was that the Arab armies, like other barbarian invaders, would eventually be defeated or assimilated. This hope was shattered by the end of the 7th century.
The pivotal moment was the reign of the Marwanid Caliph Abd al-Malik (685–705). He consolidated Muslim rule and made a breathtaking theological and architectural statement: the construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (completed 691–692 CE).
This was not just another building. It was a gleaming golden proclamation of Islam’s victory and permanence, built on the most sacred ground in Jerusalem. As John Tolan powerfully observes:
“The crisis in Christian minds would have been accentuated by the construction of the Dome of the Rock mosque, a refutation of the Christian vision of history anchored firmly in the bedrock of Jerusalem, spiritual center of the Christian world.”
Jerusalem, the heavenly axis of Christian salvation history, was now crowned with Qur'anic inscriptions that directly refuted the core of Christian faith: "God does not beget, nor was He begotten." 💔
The message was clear: God had transferred His favor. The "scourge" was not leaving. It was building its house on Christianity's front lawn.
⚖️ 3. The Birth of the "Religion of the Sword" Myth: The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius (c. 692 CE)
In this spiritual crisis, a radical new interpretation of Islam emerged: The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. Written in Syriac around 692 CE, this text transformed history into a cosmic drama and gave birth to the polemical image of the Muslim as a savage, sword-wielding barbarian.
The shift in tone was dramatic:
| Earlier View (c. 630-650) | New View (c. 692 - Pseudo-Methodius) |
|---|---|
| Temporary divine punishment. | Permanent "Furnace of Trial" & precursor to Antichrist. |
| Focus on Christian repentance. | Focus on Muslim barbarity & eschatological hope. |
| Arabs as a political/military problem. | "Ishmaelites" as a theological and cosmic enemy. |
Pseudo-Methodius "dehumanized" the conquerors to make conversion to Islam abhorrent. His text is filled with horrific, sensationalist imagery:
“They are spoilers, and they are sent for desolation… they tear open pregnant women; they dash infants against the rocks; they are abominable people who love abomination... They are a furnace of trial for all Christians.” 😱
But why was God allowing this? Pseudo-Methodius blamed rampant sexual sins among Christians. More importantly, he provided a specific, hopeful timeline: the Ishmaelite dominion would last only "ten weeks of years"—seventy years.
This was a desperate message to Christians: "Hang on! Endure this 'furnace of trial' for just a little longer, and God will send the Roman Emperor to deliver you!"
➡️ But history refused to cooperate. The seventy years came and went. The Dome of the Rock still stood. The Muslims remained.
The psychological consequence was immense: Islam could no longer be seen as a transient punishment. Its endurance demanded a new, more vicious explanation—one that denied its legitimacy altogether and cast it as a diabolic counterfeit.
🧩 4. The Intellectual Reckoning: Branding Islam as a Heresy
As mass conversions to Islam began, simple apocalyptic hope was not enough. Christian intellectuals needed to confront Islamic doctrine directly. The most influential figure in this effort was John of Damascus (d. 749).
John, a high-ranking Christian official in the Umayyad Caliphate, bridged both worlds. In his monumental work, The Fount of Knowledge, he did something crucial: he placed Islam in the chapter "On Heresies." For John, Islam was not a new religion, but the last in a long line of 100 Christian heresies.
He labeled it the "heresy of the Ishmaelites... the forerunner of the Antichrist." His strategy was to attack the legitimacy of Muhammad's revelation, arguing it had no witnesses (unlike Moses on Mount Sinai), and to deflect common Muslim accusations:
👉 When Muslims called Christians "Associators" (for believing in the Trinity), John retorted that by denying God's Word and Spirit, Muslims were "Mutilators of God."
👉 When Muslims accused Christians of idolatry for venerating the cross, John pointed to the Ka'ba, which he claimed was the head of the idol Aphrodite (Khabar).
John’s work was defensive apologetics, not missionary polemic. Its goal was to provide beleaguered Christians with arguments to silence Muslim interlocutors and slow the tide of conversions. By framing Islam as a heresy, he made it a familiar—and dismissible—problem within a Christian worldview.
✝️ 5. Desperate Measures: Martyrs and the "Religion of This World"
Some Christians took a more radical path. They deliberately publicly insulted the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an, seeking martyrdom at the hands of Muslim authorities.
Hagiographers recorded their stories to boost Christian morale. The tales of martyrs like Anthony Ruwah (a Muslim official who converted) or Ampelon (a Muslim noble who witnessed a Eucharistic miracle) carried a powerful polemical message:
Islam is the religion of this world (wealth, power, sensuality), while Christianity is the religion of the next world (spiritual truth, eternal reward).
The caliph offered Anthony wealth and honor to return to Islam; he chose death. This narrative reassured Christians that their subordinate social status was a mark of their otherworldly virtue. Their Muslim rulers were successful because they were worldly, not because they were right.
➡️ Conclusion: The Myth Takes Root
The journey from 634 CE to 750 CE reveals the true origin of the "sword of Islam" myth:
📜 Initial Silence (634-690): No contemporary sources mention forced conversion. Conquests are seen as a divine scourge for Christian sins.
🏛️ The Crisis (691-692): The Dome of the Rock proves Islam is permanent, shattering the "temporary scourge" theory.
👹 The Apocalyptic Recast (692): Pseudo-Methodius re-imagines Muslims as subhuman, eschatological barbarians—forging the image of the sword-wielding fanatic.
⚖️ The Intellectual Response (700-750): John of Damascus systematizes the response, branding Islam a heresy to be refuted, not a religion to be understood.
✝️ The Polemical Extreme: Martyr stories cement the dichotomy: Islam = worldly power, Christianity = spiritual truth.
The "sword" was not the primary engine of Islam's spread. The historical record shows that political, social, and economic factors, alongside the powerful appeal of its message, were far more significant.
The legend of the sword was born not from Muslim practice, but from Christian despair. It was a theological and psychological coping mechanism, a way to explain an unbearable reality: the loss of God’s apparent favor. This defensive polemic, crafted in the 7th and 8th centuries, would be eagerly adopted by later Western writers, its origins forgotten, until it became one of history's most enduring and deceptive myths.
🕊️ 2. — The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ and the Covenant of Faith: Beyond the Sword
If the "sword" myth was born from Christian anxiety, what was the reality on the ground in early Muslim society? The evidence from the foundational texts of Islam—the Qur’an and the historical documents from the Prophet's time—paints a radically different picture: one of a pluralistic community bound by a social contract, where faith was a matter of conviction, not compulsion.
🌿 1. The Constitution of Medina (622 CE): Building a Pluralistic Ummah
The most powerful refutation of the "conversion by the sword" narrative comes from the very beginning of the Islamic polity. Upon his migration (Hijra) to Yathrib (later Medina), the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ did not seize power by force. Instead, he acted as a mediator and statesman, drafting a revolutionary social contract known as the "Constitution of Medina."
As historian Uriel Simonsohn notes, this document was innovative because it assembled the first Muslims around social principles stemming from their new spiritual convictions, gradually replacing tribal blood allegiances with faith.
"The Constitution of Medina was innovative in the sense that it assembled the first Muslims around social principles that stemmed from their new spiritual convictions. The kinship and blood allegiances that constituted the foundations of Arabian tribal solidarities were to be gradually replaced by the belief in Allah and an acknowledgment of His Messenger."— Uriel Simonsohn
This constitution transformed the warring tribes of Medina—Muslims, Jews, and pagans—into a single political community, or Ummah. The key clauses establishing this pluralistic state are breathtaking in their modernity.
📜 Essential Clauses of the Constitution (in Arabic and English)
1. One Political Community, Multiple Religions:
النص العربي:أنهم أمة واحدة من دون الناسEnglish Translation: "They are one community (Ummah) to the exclusion of all other people."This established a new political identity superseding old tribal and religious rivalries.
2. Religious Autonomy for the Jews:
النص العربي:لليهود دينهم وللمسلمين دينهم مواليهم وأنفسهمEnglish Translation: **"The Jews have their religion and the Muslims have their religion; their clients and their persons."This is a formal guarantee of religious freedom. Loyalty was civic, not confessional.
3. Collective Security and Mutual Defense:
النص العربي:وأن بينهم النصر على من حارب أهل هذه الصحيفةEnglish Translation: "And between them (the signatories) is assistance against whoever wars against the people of this document."Muslims and Jews were bound to defend each other against external aggressors.
4. Internal Dispute Resolution:
النص العربي:وأنكم مهما اختلفتم فيه من شيء فإن مرده إلى الله وإلى محمدEnglish Translation: "And that whatever you disagree on, of anything, its recourse is to God and to Muhammad."The Prophet ﷺ was designated the political arbiter for the entire community, not just for Muslims.
➡️ The Verdict: The Constitution of Medina creates a multi-religious state where membership is based on accepting the social contract, not on converting to Islam. The notion of forced conversion is structurally impossible within this framework. The "sword" was not the entry ticket to this community; citizenship was.
📖2. The Qurʾānic Mandate: “No Compulsion in Religion”
The Qurʾān—the foundational scripture of Islam—presents the act of faith not as a coerced submission, but as a return to the primordial truth (fiṭra) that God instilled in every soul. From the very beginning, the Qurʾān distinguishes between political submission (accepting Muslim rule) and spiritual surrender (embracing Islam in faith). The first could be enforced for the sake of peace; the second could never be compelled.
🕋 The Eternal Principle
لَا إِكْرَاهَ فِي الدِّينِ ۖ قَد تَّبَيَّنَ الرُّشْدُ مِنَ الْغَيِّ“There is no compulsion in religion. The right way has become distinct from error.”— Qurʾān 2:256 (Surat al-Baqarah)
This verse, revealed in Medina at the height of Islam’s political ascendancy, is nothing less than a theological atomic bomb 💥 against the myth of forced conversion.
As Abdullah Saeed explains:
“The Qurʾān rejects conversion by force, given the view that belief cannot be coerced... A key aspect of this ‘bringing back’ is the influence of God’s guidance (hudā). It is only God who can guide people... The invitee is free to either accept or reject this call.”— Abdullah Saeed, Conversion in the Qurʾān
Faith, in Qurʾānic theology, is a matter of conviction, not compliance. Even in a moment of political power, the Qurʾān affirms that the human heart remains inviolate—no ruler, no army, not even the Prophet ﷺ himself could force belief upon another.
🌍 From Polytheism to Tawḥīd: The Prophet as Warner, Not Enforcer
In Mecca, the Prophet’s mission began with an invitation—not a decree. The Qurʾān portrays him not as a conqueror with a sword, but as a nadhīr—a warner who calls humanity back to the truth of the One God.
قُلْ يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ إِنَّمَا أَنَا لَكُمْ نَذِيرٌ مُّبِينٌ“Say, O humankind! I am only a clear warner [sent by God] to you.”— Qurʾān 22:49
إِنَّا أَرْسَلْنَاكَ بِالْحَقِّ بَشِيرًا وَنَذِيرًا“We have sent you [O Muhammad] with the truth—as a bearer of glad tidings and a warner.”— Qurʾān 2:119
The Prophet’s message was a call to recognize the Creator through creation—to see in the sun, the moon, and the order of the cosmos the signs of a single divine origin. In the earliest years, “conversion” meant little more than this acknowledgment: a return to the truth of tawḥīd (Divine Unity).
🌱 The Natural Religion: Returning to the Fiṭra
The Qurʾān envisions every human being as born in a state of primordial submission—the fiṭra, the natural inclination toward the worship of God alone.
فَأَقِمْ وَجْهَكَ لِلدِّينِ حَنِيفًا فِطْرَتَ اللَّهِ الَّتِي فَطَرَ النَّاسَ عَلَيْهَا ۚ لَا تَبْدِيلَ لِخَلْقِ اللَّهِ“So set your face toward the [true] faith, turning away from all that is false, in accordance with the natural disposition (fiṭra) which God has instilled into humankind. There should be no change in the creation of God.”— Qurʾān 30:30
Faith, then, is not a new identity to be imposed from without—it is a reawakening of what is already within. Conversion in Islam is literally inversion—a turning back to one’s original spiritual nature.
✨ God Alone Guides
Because faith is a matter of the inner heart, the Qurʾān insists that guidance belongs solely to God. Neither prophets, nor caliphs, nor armies can compel it.
اللَّهُ يَدْعُو إِلَىٰ دَارِ السَّلَامِ وَيَهْدِي مَن يَشَاءُ إِلَىٰ صِرَاطٍ مُّسْتَقِيمٍ“And [know that] God calls to the abode of peace, and guides whomever He wills to a straight path.”— Qurʾān 10:25
Even the Prophet ﷺ is reminded:
إِنَّكَ لَا تَهْدِي مَنْ أَحْبَبْتَ وَلَٰكِنَّ اللَّهَ يَهْدِي مَن يَشَاءُ“You cannot guide whom you love, but God guides whomever He wills.”— Qurʾān 28:56
The Prophet’s duty was daʿwa (invitation), not coercion; tablīgh (conveyance), not enforcement.
فَإِن تَوَلَّوْا فَإِنَّمَا عَلَيْكَ الْبَلَاغُ ۗ وَاللَّهُ بَصِيرٌ بِالْعِبَادِ“If they turn away, your duty is only to deliver the message; God sees what is in the hearts of His servants.”— Qurʾān 3:20
🕊️ Here lies the Qurʾān’s moral radicalism: the right to disbelief is preserved precisely because faith must be authentic.
⚖️ Submission vs. Coercion: The Political Dimension
When the Prophet migrated to Medina (622 CE), Islam became a community and polity, not merely a creed. In this setting, the Qurʾān demanded loyalty and protection—but not forced belief.
Those who accepted Muslim political authority but retained their own faiths—Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians—were recognized as Ahl al-Kitāb (People of the Book). Their submission was legal, not theological. They were to pay the jizya tax in exchange for security, not as a penalty for disbelief but as participation in the social compact.
قَاتِلُوا الَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ بِاللَّهِ وَلَا بِالْيَوْمِ الْآخِرِ ... حَتَّىٰ يُعْطُوا الْجِزْيَةَ عَن يَدٍ وَهُمْ صَاغِرُونَ“Fight those who do not [truly] believe in God nor in the Last Day... until they pay the jizya, being in submission [to Muslim authority].”— Qurʾān 9:29
Here the goal is not conversion but order. The Qurʾān differentiates between theological truth (īmān) and political peace (silm). The former cannot be coerced; the latter can be maintained through just governance.
🌌 Conversion as Return
In the Qurʾānic worldview, to “convert” is to return (tawba)—to repent of falsehood and rediscover one’s created purpose.
وَمَا خَلَقْتُ الْجِنَّ وَالْإِنسَ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونِ“I did not create the jinn and humankind except that they may worship Me.”— Qurʾān 51:56
The Qurʾān’s call is therefore not a demand for cultural conformity or political allegiance—it is a universal invitation to the house of peace (dār al-salām). Those who answer it regain harmony with the cosmic order; those who refuse remain free, though estranged from that peace.
وَمَن يَبْتَغِ غَيْرَ الْإِسْلَامِ دِينًا فَلَن يُقْبَلَ مِنْهُ وَهُوَ فِي الْآخِرَةِ مِنَ الْخَاسِرِينَ“Whoever seeks a religion other than islām [self-surrender to God], it will never be accepted from him, and in the Hereafter he will be among the losers.”— Qurʾān 3:85
But crucially: even this loss is eschatological, not political. Punishment belongs to God, not to man.
🌠 Conclusion: Faith as Freedom
From Mecca’s defiant monotheism to Medina’s civic pluralism, the Qurʾān’s message is consistent:
The Prophet ﷺ was not a maker of believers but a messenger of truth. His mission was to invite, not to impose—to awaken hearts, not to break them.
🕊️ “No compulsion in religion” is not merely a verse—it is the very heartbeat of Islamic revelation, the Qurʾān’s declaration that freedom of belief is sacred because the act of faith itself is sacred.
⚔️ The Prophetic Military Doctrine: A Code of Ethical Combat
When military conflict with the hostile Quraysh of Mecca became inevitable, the Prophet ﷺ established strict rules of engagement for his armies. These rules, preserved in the Hadith, explicitly forbid forced conversion and outline a clear ladder of escalation where fighting is the last resort.
The following is a profound Hadith from Sahih Muslim, which served as a military doctrine for commanders:
Hadith on Military Conduct (Sahih Muslim)
الحديث العربي:عَنْ بُرَيْدَةَ قَالَ: كَانَ رَسُولُ اللهِ صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ إِذَا أَمَّرَ أَمِيرًا عَلَى جَيْشٍ أَوْ سَرِيَّةٍ أَوْصَاهُ فِي خَاصَّتِهِ بِتَقْوَى اللهِ وَمَنْ مَعَهُ مِنَ الْمُسْلِمِينَ خَيْرًا، ثُمَّ قَالَ: اغْزُوا بِاسْمِ اللهِ فِي سَبِيلِ اللهِ، قَاتِلُوا مَنْ كَفَرَ بِاللهِ، اغْزُوا وَلَا تَغُلُّوا وَلَا تَغْدِرُوا وَلَا تُمَثِّلُوا وَلَا تَقْتُلُوا وَلِيدًا. وَإِذَا لَقِيتَ عَدُوَّكَ مِنَ الْمُشْرِكِينَ فَادْعُهُمْ إِلَى ثَلَاثِ خِصَالٍ (أَوْ خِلالٍ) فَأَيَّتُهُنَّ مَا أَجَابُوكَ فَاقْبَلْ مِنْهُمْ وَكُفَّ عَنْهُمْ:ثُمَّ ادْعُهُمْ إِلَى الْإِسْلَامِ فَإِنْ أَجَابُوكَ فَاقْبَلْ مِنْهُمْ وَكُفَّ عَنْهُمْ.
ثُمَّ ادْعُهُمْ إِلَى التَّحَوُّلِ مِنْ دَارِهِمْ إِلَى دَارِ الْمُهَاجِرِينَ وَأَخْبِرْهُمْ أَنَّهُمْ إِنْ فَعَلُوا ذَلِكَ فَلَهُمْ مَا لِلْمُهَاجِرِينَ وَعَلَيْهِمْ مَا عَلَى الْمُهَاجِرِينَ.
- فَإِنْ أَبَوْا أَنْ يَتَحَوَّلُوا مِنْهَا فَأَخْبِرْهُمْ أَنَّهُمْ يَكُونُونَ كَأَعْرَابِ الْمُسْلِمِينَ يَجْرِي عَلَيْهِمْ حُكْمُ اللهِ الَّذِي يَجْرِي عَلَى الْمُؤْمِنِينَ، وَلَا يَكُونُ لَهُمْ فِي الْغَنِيمَةِ وَالْفَيْءِ شَيْءٌ إِلَّا أَنْ يُجَاهِدُوا مَعَ الْمُسْلِمِينَ.فَإِنْ هُمْ أَبَوْا فَسَلْهُمُ الْجِزْيَةَ، فَإِنْ هُمْ أَجَابُوكَ فَاقْبَلْ مِنْهُمْ وَكُفَّ عَنْهُمْ، فَإِنْ هُمْ أَبَوْا فَاسْتَعِنْ بِاللهِ وَقَاتِلْهُمْ.
English Translation:
On the authority of Buraidah, who said: Whenever the Messenger of God ﷺ appointed a commander over an army or a battalion, he would exhort him personally to fear God and to be good to the Muslims with him. Then he would say: "Fight in the name of God and in the way of God. Fight those who disbelieve in God. Do not cheat, do not break trust, do not mutilate, and do not kill a child.""When you meet your polytheist enemies, invite them to one of three options. Whichever they agree to, accept it and cease hostilities:
👉 Invite them to Islam. If they accept, then accept it from them and cease hostilities.
👉 If they refuse, then invite them to relocate from their land to the land of the Emigrants (Medina) and inform them that if they do so, they will have the same rights and duties as the Muhajirun.
👉 If they refuse that, then inform them that they will be like the Muslim Bedouins, subject to the same law of God as the believers, but they will have no share in the spoils of war unless they fight alongside the Muslims.
👉 If they refuse all this, then demand from them the Jizyah (tax). If they agree, then accept it from them and cease hostilities. If they refuse, then seek God's help and fight them."
ثُمَّ ادْعُهُمْ إِلَى الْإِسْلَامِ فَإِنْ أَجَابُوكَ فَاقْبَلْ مِنْهُمْ وَكُفَّ عَنْهُمْ.
ثُمَّ ادْعُهُمْ إِلَى التَّحَوُّلِ مِنْ دَارِهِمْ إِلَى دَارِ الْمُهَاجِرِينَ وَأَخْبِرْهُمْ أَنَّهُمْ إِنْ فَعَلُوا ذَلِكَ فَلَهُمْ مَا لِلْمُهَاجِرِينَ وَعَلَيْهِمْ مَا عَلَى الْمُهَاجِرِينَ.
- فَإِنْ أَبَوْا أَنْ يَتَحَوَّلُوا مِنْهَا فَأَخْبِرْهُمْ أَنَّهُمْ يَكُونُونَ كَأَعْرَابِ الْمُسْلِمِينَ يَجْرِي عَلَيْهِمْ حُكْمُ اللهِ الَّذِي يَجْرِي عَلَى الْمُؤْمِنِينَ، وَلَا يَكُونُ لَهُمْ فِي الْغَنِيمَةِ وَالْفَيْءِ شَيْءٌ إِلَّا أَنْ يُجَاهِدُوا مَعَ الْمُسْلِمِينَ.فَإِنْ هُمْ أَبَوْا فَسَلْهُمُ الْجِزْيَةَ، فَإِنْ هُمْ أَجَابُوكَ فَاقْبَلْ مِنْهُمْ وَكُفَّ عَنْهُمْ، فَإِنْ هُمْ أَبَوْا فَاسْتَعِنْ بِاللهِ وَقَاتِلْهُمْ.
"When you meet your polytheist enemies, invite them to one of three options. Whichever they agree to, accept it and cease hostilities:
👉 Invite them to Islam. If they accept, then accept it from them and cease hostilities.
👉 If they refuse, then invite them to relocate from their land to the land of the Emigrants (Medina) and inform them that if they do so, they will have the same rights and duties as the Muhajirun.
👉 If they refuse that, then inform them that they will be like the Muslim Bedouins, subject to the same law of God as the believers, but they will have no share in the spoils of war unless they fight alongside the Muslims.
👉 If they refuse all this, then demand from them the Jizyah (tax). If they agree, then accept it from them and cease hostilities. If they refuse, then seek God's help and fight them."
This doctrine is a masterclass in ethical warfare. Conversion to Islam is the first and most preferred option, but it is only one of several peaceful resolutions. The ultimate goal is political submission to the Islamic state's authority, not religious conversion, which is why the payment of the Jizyah—a tax for non-Muslim citizens in lieu of military service—is a valid and accepted outcome.
💰 The Jizyah in the Prophetic Era: A Covenant of Protection, Not Punishment
The term Jizyah is often misrepresented as a punitive tax designed to force conversion. However, an examination of the primary sources from the Prophet's ﷺ lifetime reveals a different reality: it was a political contract of protection and civic responsibility, offered as a peaceful alternative to war for non-Muslim communities that rejected Islam but accepted the sovereignty of the Islamic state.
To understand its true nature, we must distinguish between the foundational Prophetic model and the later legal expansions that occurred in the Caliphal era.
The term Jizyah is often misrepresented as a punitive tax designed to force conversion. However, an examination of the primary sources from the Prophet's ﷺ lifetime reveals a different reality: it was a political contract of protection and civic responsibility, offered as a peaceful alternative to war for non-Muslim communities that rejected Islam but accepted the sovereignty of the Islamic state.
To understand its true nature, we must distinguish between the foundational Prophetic model and the later legal expansions that occurred in the Caliphal era.
⚔️ The Prophetic Military Doctrine: Jizyah as the Final Peaceful Offer
The clearest and most authoritative guide to the Jizyah in the Prophet's ﷺ time is the military directive he gave to his commanders, which we have previously cited. This text is a primary record of his official command, The Prophet ﷺ established a clear, graduated protocol for engagement:
Step Invitation Outcome & Status 1. 👉 First Offer "Then invite them to Islam." ➡️ If they accept: They become full Muslim citizens with all rights and duties. Hostilities cease. 2. 👉 Second Offer "Then invite them to relocate to the Land of the Emigrants (Medina)." ➡️ If they accept: They become like the Muhajirun, full members of the Muslim polity without converting. 3. 👉 Third Offer "If they refuse to relocate, inform them they will be like the Muslim Bedouins." ➡️ If they accept: They are under Islamic law but do not share in war spoils unless they fight. 4. 👉 Final Peace Offer "If they refuse, then demand from them the Jizyah." ➡️ If they accept: You accept it from them and cease hostilities against them. 5. 👉 Last Resort "If they refuse, then seek God's help and fight them." ➡️ If they refuse: Only now is military engagement sanctioned.
➡️ The Key Insight: In this Prophetic doctrine, the Jizyah is the definitive peaceful alternative to war. It is the mechanism to end a conflict without requiring the enemy's conversion or capitulation. The goal is to secure a political settlement, not a religious one.
The clearest and most authoritative guide to the Jizyah in the Prophet's ﷺ time is the military directive he gave to his commanders, which we have previously cited. This text is a primary record of his official command, The Prophet ﷺ established a clear, graduated protocol for engagement:
| Step | Invitation | Outcome & Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1. 👉 First Offer | "Then invite them to Islam." | ➡️ If they accept: They become full Muslim citizens with all rights and duties. Hostilities cease. |
| 2. 👉 Second Offer | "Then invite them to relocate to the Land of the Emigrants (Medina)." | ➡️ If they accept: They become like the Muhajirun, full members of the Muslim polity without converting. |
| 3. 👉 Third Offer | "If they refuse to relocate, inform them they will be like the Muslim Bedouins." | ➡️ If they accept: They are under Islamic law but do not share in war spoils unless they fight. |
| 4. 👉 Final Peace Offer | "If they refuse, then demand from them the Jizyah." | ➡️ If they accept: You accept it from them and cease hostilities against them. |
| 5. 👉 Last Resort | "If they refuse, then seek God's help and fight them." | ➡️ If they refuse: Only now is military engagement sanctioned. |
➡️ The Key Insight: In this Prophetic doctrine, the Jizyah is the definitive peaceful alternative to war. It is the mechanism to end a conflict without requiring the enemy's conversion or capitulation. The goal is to secure a political settlement, not a religious one.
📜 The Historical Practice: Applying the Doctrine
The historical records from Al-Sunan al-Kubra and other sources show the application of this principle, though they must be sifted to separate Prophetic precedent from later Caliphal policy.
1. The Case of the Magians (Majūs) of Hajar:
A crucial report, acknowledged by early jurists like Imam al-Shafi'i, confirms the Prophet's ﷺ direct practice.
النص: أن رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم أخذ الجزية من مجوس هجرTranslation: "The Messenger of God ﷺ took the Jizyah from the Magians of Hajar."
This is a foundational precedent. It establishes that the Jizyah was not limited to Jews and Christians ("People of the Book") in the Prophet's ﷺ view, but could be extended to other religious communities as a practical matter of statecraft, based on the principle in Qur'an 9:29.
2. The Case of the Christian Arab Tribes (e.g., Banu Taghlib):
The text from Al-Sunan al-Kubra reveals a critical evolution and a key distinction:
النص: فأما عمر بن الخطاب ومن بعده من الخلفاء إلى اليوم فقد أخذوا الجزية من بني تغلب...Translation: "As for Umar ibn al-Khattab and the Caliphs after him to this day, they took the Jizyah from Banu Taghlib..."
This is explicitly attributed to Caliph Umar and his successors, not to the Prophet ﷺ. This indicates that the application of Jizyah to certain Arab Christian tribes was a post-Prophetic caliphal policy, developed as the empire expanded and faced new administrative challenges.
Later jurists debated this, with some, like Abu Hanifa, arguing that Jizyah should not be taken from Arabs. The author of Al-Sunan al-Kubra concludes: "The Jizyah is upon religions, not upon lineages." This shows the ongoing legal effort to systematize a rule from diverse historical precedents.
The historical records from Al-Sunan al-Kubra and other sources show the application of this principle, though they must be sifted to separate Prophetic precedent from later Caliphal policy.
1. The Case of the Magians (Majūs) of Hajar:
A crucial report, acknowledged by early jurists like Imam al-Shafi'i, confirms the Prophet's ﷺ direct practice.
النص:أن رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم أخذ الجزية من مجوس هجرTranslation: "The Messenger of God ﷺ took the Jizyah from the Magians of Hajar."
This is a foundational precedent. It establishes that the Jizyah was not limited to Jews and Christians ("People of the Book") in the Prophet's ﷺ view, but could be extended to other religious communities as a practical matter of statecraft, based on the principle in Qur'an 9:29.
2. The Case of the Christian Arab Tribes (e.g., Banu Taghlib):
The text from Al-Sunan al-Kubra reveals a critical evolution and a key distinction:
النص:فأما عمر بن الخطاب ومن بعده من الخلفاء إلى اليوم فقد أخذوا الجزية من بني تغلب...Translation: "As for Umar ibn al-Khattab and the Caliphs after him to this day, they took the Jizyah from Banu Taghlib..."
This is explicitly attributed to Caliph Umar and his successors, not to the Prophet ﷺ. This indicates that the application of Jizyah to certain Arab Christian tribes was a post-Prophetic caliphal policy, developed as the empire expanded and faced new administrative challenges.
Later jurists debated this, with some, like Abu Hanifa, arguing that Jizyah should not be taken from Arabs. The author of Al-Sunan al-Kubra concludes: "The Jizyah is upon religions, not upon lineages." This shows the ongoing legal effort to systematize a rule from diverse historical precedents.
⚖️ Sifting the Sources: The Prophetic Model vs. Later Law
To find the "true prophetic doctrine," we must prioritize the earliest and most direct sources:
Source / Ruling Prophetic Era (✓) Caliphal Era / Later Law (→) Core Doctrine The 3-option military protocol, with Jizyah as a peace treaty to avoid war. (Hadith of Buraidah) → Later legal codification of Jizyah as a fixed, annual poll tax with specific rates. Recipients Jews of Medina (via Constitution), Christians of Najran (via treaty), Magians of Hajar. → Expansion to include Arab Christians (Banu Taghlib), Berbers, and others under caliphal rule. Purpose To secure political submission and end warfare, establishing a stable, multi-religious state. → A primary source of state revenue from non-Muslim subjects (dhimmi), and a marker of their legal status. Spirit A contractual agreement for protection (dhimma). In return for payment, the state guarantees security and autonomy. → The spirit of contract remains, but can be overshadowed by political and social tensions in a vast empire.
To find the "true prophetic doctrine," we must prioritize the earliest and most direct sources:
| Source / Ruling | Prophetic Era (✓) | Caliphal Era / Later Law (→) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Doctrine | The 3-option military protocol, with Jizyah as a peace treaty to avoid war. (Hadith of Buraidah) | → Later legal codification of Jizyah as a fixed, annual poll tax with specific rates. |
| Recipients | Jews of Medina (via Constitution), Christians of Najran (via treaty), Magians of Hajar. | → Expansion to include Arab Christians (Banu Taghlib), Berbers, and others under caliphal rule. |
| Purpose | To secure political submission and end warfare, establishing a stable, multi-religious state. | → A primary source of state revenue from non-Muslim subjects (dhimmi), and a marker of their legal status. |
| Spirit | A contractual agreement for protection (dhimma). In return for payment, the state guarantees security and autonomy. | → The spirit of contract remains, but can be overshadowed by political and social tensions in a vast empire. |
💎 The Astonishingly Low Amount: A Token of Civic Duty
If the Jizyah was designed to be oppressive or to force conversion, one would expect it to be prohibitively high. The historical record from the Prophetic era reveals the exact opposite: it was a modest, symbolic tax, a token of civic responsibility from those exempted from military service.
The primary evidence comes from the instructions given to Mu'adh ibn Jabal when the Prophet ﷺ sent him to Yemen.
The Hadith on Taxation in Yemen:
| Arabic Text | English Translation |
|---|---|
| أَخْبَرَنَا أَبُو مُحَمَّدٍ الْحَسَنُ بْنُ عَلِيِّ بْنِ الْمُؤَمَّلِ ... عَنْ مَعَاذٍ ... بَعَثَنِي رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ إِلَى الْيَمَنِ فَأَمَرَنِي أَنْ آخُذَ مِنْ كُلِّ أَرْبَعِينَ بَقَرَةً ثَنِيَّةً، وَمِنْ كُلِّ ثَلَاثِينَ تَبِيعًا أَوْ تَبِيعَةً، وَمِنْ كُلِّ حَالِمٍ دِينَارًا أَوْ عَدْلَهُ مَعَافِرَ | "Mu'adh said: 'The Messenger of God ﷺ sent me to Yemen and commanded me to take from every forty cattle a two-year-old cow, from every thirty cattle a one-year-old calf, and from every hālim (adult male) one Dinar or its equivalent in Ma'āfir cloth.'" |
This is corroborated by the research of early jurists. Imam al-Shafi'i (d. 820 CE), after consulting scholars from Yemen, confirmed:
النص:أن صلح النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم كان لأهل ذمة اليمن على دينار كل سنةTranslation: "The peace treaty of the Prophet ﷺ with the protected people (Ahl al-Dhimmah) of Yemen was for one Dinar every year."
This was not an isolated case. Al-Shafi'i adds:
النص:وروي أنه أخذ من أهل أيلة ومن نصارى بمكة دينارا دينارا عن كل إنسانTranslation: "And it is related that he took from the people of Ayla and from the Christians of Mecca one Dinar, one Dinar, from every person."
💰 Putting the Jizyah into Perspective: A Trifling Sum
To understand how low this was, we must look at the value of a single gold Dinar in the 7th century.
Weight: ≈ 4.5 grams of gold.
Purity: ≈ 95.8% gold (23k).
2. Modern Intrinsic Value (Based on Gold Content):
As of today, the price of gold is approximately $70 per gram.
4.5 grams * $70/gram = ≈ $315.
This means the annual Jizyah for an adult, able-bodied non-Muslim man was the equivalent of about $315 in today's money based on the raw value of the gold. This is a far cry from a crushing financial burden.
Daily Wage: 25 Dinarii
Value of 1 Dinar: ≈ 180-200 Dinarii
Days of Work to Pay the Jizyah: 180 ÷ 25 = 7.2 days of work.
➡️ The Astonishing Conclusion: The annual Jizyah tax imposed by the Prophet ﷺ was equivalent to less than one week's wages for a skilled worker. It was a trivial, symbolic amount.
The evidence from the Prophet's ﷺ own teachings and actions leads to several definitive conclusions that counter the myth of the "sword":
🕊️ A Mechanism for Peace: In the Prophetic military doctrine, the Jizyah was not a tool of oppression but the final offer of peace before the outbreak of hostilities. It was the way to avoid fighting.
📜 A Political Contract: It was the key clause in a social contract, mirroring the Constitution of Medina. In exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of a tax (in lieu of military service), non-Muslims received state protection, full religious autonomy, and judicial independence in their personal affairs.
🌍 An Inclusive, Not Exclusive, Policy: The Prophet ﷺ himself applied this principle pragmatically to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, showing that it was a flexible policy of statecraft, not a rigid theological rule limited to "People of the Book."
⚖️ Distinct from Later Practice: The more systematic and sometimes harsher applications of the Jizyah seen in the later Caliphal periods are developments that occurred after the Prophet's ﷺ death. They represent the evolution of Islamic law in a context of empire, not the foundational model established by the Prophet.
The true Prophetic doctrine presents the Jizyah as a covenant of coexistence. It was the practical implementation of the Qur'anic mandate against compulsion, providing a clear, political path for non-Muslims to live in security and dignity under Islamic rule, their faith intact.
The evidence from the Prophet's ﷺ own teachings and actions leads to several definitive conclusions that counter the myth of the "sword":
🕊️ A Mechanism for Peace: In the Prophetic military doctrine, the Jizyah was not a tool of oppression but the final offer of peace before the outbreak of hostilities. It was the way to avoid fighting.
📜 A Political Contract: It was the key clause in a social contract, mirroring the Constitution of Medina. In exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of a tax (in lieu of military service), non-Muslims received state protection, full religious autonomy, and judicial independence in their personal affairs.
🌍 An Inclusive, Not Exclusive, Policy: The Prophet ﷺ himself applied this principle pragmatically to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, showing that it was a flexible policy of statecraft, not a rigid theological rule limited to "People of the Book."
⚖️ Distinct from Later Practice: The more systematic and sometimes harsher applications of the Jizyah seen in the later Caliphal periods are developments that occurred after the Prophet's ﷺ death. They represent the evolution of Islamic law in a context of empire, not the foundational model established by the Prophet.
🗺️ Addressing the "Expulsion" Narratives: The Hijaz as a Sacred Sanctuary
One of the most challenging sets of narrations for modern readers concerns the reported expulsion of Jews and Christians from the "Arabian Peninsula" (Jazīrat al-'Arab). When taken at face value and out of context, these ahadith seem to contradict the Qur'anic principle of "no compulsion in religion" and the Prophetic model of pluralism established in Medina.
However, a meticulous, source-critical analysis reveals a more nuanced picture: The Prophet's ﷺ intention was specific and limited to creating a secure, independent heartland for the new Muslim community in the Hijaz, not a policy of universal religious expulsion across the entire Arabian landmass.
📜 The Core Narrations and Their Apparent Contradiction
The strongest narrations, found in Sahih Muslim and Sunan al-Tirmidhi, are numerous and seem unambiguous:
عَنْ جَابِرِ بْنِ عَبْدِ اللَّهِ، أَنَّ عُمَرَ بْنَ الْخَطَّابِ أَخْبَرَهُ أَنَّ رَسُولَ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم قَالَ: "لَأُخْرِجَنَّ الْيَهُودَ وَالنَّصَارَى مِنْ جَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِ، حَتَّى لَا أَدَعَ إِلَّا مُسْلِمًا."English Translation:On the authority of Jabir ibn 'Abdullah that 'Umar ibn al-Khattab informed him that the Messenger of God ﷺ said: "I will certainly expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula until I do not leave anyone except a Muslim."
Other versions, like the one in Muwatta' Malik, state:
"لَا يَجْتَمِعُ دِينَانِ فِي جَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِ""Two religions shall not coexist in the Arabian Peninsula."
The apparent contradiction is stark:
❓ How can this be reconciled with the Constitution of Medina, which guaranteed Jews their religion and property?
❓ How does it align with the Prophet ﷺ sending Mu'adh ibn Jabal to Yemen to govern and collect Jizyah from its Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian populations?
🔍 The Key to Untangling the Mystery: Defining "Jazīrat al-'Arab"
The resolution to the apparent contradiction between the expulsion narrations and the Prophetic model of pluralism lies in a precise, historical understanding of the term "جَزِيرَةُ الْعَرَبِ" (Jazīrat al-'Arab). While in modern Arabic it denotes the entire Arabian Peninsula, a deep dive into the primary sources reveals that in the 7th-century Prophetic context, its meaning was far more specific and restricted, primarily referring to the sacred heartland of the nascent Islamic state in the Ḥijāz.
The confusion is not a modern discovery; early Muslim scholars themselves grappled with the term's ambiguity, and historical records consistently show non-Muslim communities thriving in parts of Arabia for centuries after the Prophet ﷺ. To understand this, we must examine three converging lines of evidence: the Prophet's own practice, the conflicting definitions from early authorities, and the undeniable historical reality.
1. The Decisive Evidence from Prophetic Practice
The most powerful argument is the Prophet's ﷺ own actions, which directly clarify the scope of his statement. As established, he appointed Mu'adh ibn Jabal as governor of Yemen in Rabīʿ al-Ākhir, 9 AH.
Yemen is geographically a major part of the Arabian Peninsula. If the command to expel all Jews and Christians was universal and absolute, the Prophet ﷺ would have been the first to implement it there. Instead, his directive to Mu'adh was to govern a multi-religious population and collect Jizyah from them. This action provides an incontrovertible tafsīr al-'amalī (practical exegesis) of the "expulsion" narrations: they did not apply to Yemen.
This practice establishes a crucial principle: the policy for the Ḥijāz was unique, born from its status as the secure political and spiritual core of the Muslim Ummah. It was not a blanket policy for all Arab lands.
2. The Contested and Evolving Geographical Definitions
Early Muslim scholars were acutely aware of the term's ambiguity. The sources compiled by Harry Munt show a wide spectrum of opinions, reflecting a lack of consensus on what "Jazīrat al-'Arab" actually encompassed.
🗺️ A. The Core Definition: The Ḥijāz in Classical Scholarship
A crucial narration in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī provides a contemporary, albeit debated, definition of "Jazīrat al-‘Arab." To understand its significance, we must examine it not in isolation, but through the eyes of the tradition's greatest commentators, particularly Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī (d. 852 AH) in his monumental work, Fatḥ al-Bārī.
The Core Narration and Its Ambiguity:
حَدَّثَنَا يَعْقُوبُ بْنُ مُحَمَّدٍ، قَالَ: سَأَلْتُ الْمُغِيرَةَ بْنَ عَبْدِ الرَّحْمَنِ عَنْ جَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِ؟ فَقَالَ: مَكَّةُ، وَالْمَدِينَةُ، وَالْيَمَامَةُ، وَالْيَمَنُ. وَقَالَ يَعْقُوبُ: وَالْعَرْجُ أَوَّلُ تِهَامَةَ.
"Ya‘qūb ibn Muḥammad said: 'I asked al-Mughīrah ibn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān about 'Jazīrat al-‘Arab'. He said: 'Mecca, Medina, al-Yamāmah, and Yemen.' And Ya‘qūb said: 'And al-‘Arj is the start of Tihāmah.'"
This definition is geographically inconsistent, as it lists specific cities (Mecca, Medina) alongside entire regions (Yemen). Ibn Ḥajar addresses this by citing a range of opinions from early authorities, revealing that the term had both a broad geographical meaning and a specific legal one.
Ibn Ḥajar's Synthesis of Early Definitions:
In Fatḥ al-Bārī, he compiles the various definitions to show the scope of the term:
| Scholar / Source | Definition of "Jazīrat al-‘Arab" (Geographical) | Key Insight |
|---|---|---|
| Al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad | The land surrounded by the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Euphrates, and the Tigris. | A descriptive, geographical definition based on its literal meaning as an "island" or "peninsula." |
| Al-Aṣma‘ī | "What was not reached by the kingdom of Persia... from the farthest of ‘Adan to the outskirts of Syria." | A geo-political definition, defining it as the land independent of the two great empires. |
| Abū ‘Ubayd | From the farthest ‘Adan to the outskirts of Iraq in length, and from Jeddah and its coasts to the outskirts of Syria in width. | A more precise cartographical definition, attempting to set longitudinal and latitudinal boundaries. |
Ibn Ḥajar's Critical Legal Resolution:
After presenting these broad geographical definitions, Ibn Ḥajar makes a decisive distinction that cuts to the heart of the matter. He states:
"However, what prevents the polytheists from residing in it is the Ḥijāz specifically—that is, Mecca, Medina, al-Yamāmah and its surroundings—not what is other than that which falls under the name 'Jazīrat al-‘Arab'. This is due to the consensus of the majority (jamhūr) that they are not prevented from Yemen, even though it is part of 'Jazīrat al-‘Arab'."— Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī, Fatḥ al-Bārī
This is the master key to understanding the entire issue. Ibn Ḥajar, representing the consensus of classical scholarship, makes a critical separation:
Geographical "Jazīrat al-‘Arab": The entire Arabian landmass, as defined by the lexicographers.
Legal "Jazīrat al-‘Arab": The specific zone from which non-Muslims could be barred—the Ḥijāz (Mecca, Medina, and al-Yamāmah).
He points to the undeniable proof: the universal agreement (ittifāq) of the scholars that non-Muslims were NOT expelled from Yemen. Since Yemen is unequivocally part of the geographical peninsula, the expulsion narrations must logically refer to a smaller, more specific legal entity.
This legal-geographical distinction explains the "definitional chaos" noted by Munt. The early reports about Caliph ‘Umar’s actions are conflicting precisely because the boundaries of the legal Ḥijāz were not always clear on the ground.
Some reports claim he expelled Jews from Taymā’.
Others explicitly state he did not, because it was considered part of Syria or "not part of the lands of the Arabs" (bilād al-‘Arab).
This was not a contradiction in the policy, but a reflection of the fuzzy, contested frontiers in the northern reaches of the Ḥijāz.
➡️ The Classical Conclusion
Through the lens of Ibn Ḥajar's analysis, the picture becomes crystal clear. The Prophetic command to expel non-Muslims from Jazīrat al-‘Arab was understood by the most authoritative classical scholars not as a command to purge the entire Arabian Peninsula, but as a directive to purify the sacred Ḥijāz.
The core of the definition—the one point of unanimous agreement—was always Mecca and Medina. The debates about al-Yamāmah, Taymā’, and Wādī al-Qurā were about drawing the precise borders of this sacred sanctuary. The enduring presence of non-Muslims everywhere else, especially in Yemen, was not a failure of the policy but proof of its limited, intended scope. The "two religions" hadith was a rule for the holy land, not for the entire homeland.
B. ⚖️ The Spectrum of Early Legal Opinions on "Jazīrat al-'Arab"
The early legal schools (madhāhib) were united on the core principle that the Ḥijāz—the sacred heartland containing Mecca and Medina—must be a uniquely Islamic space. However, they exhibited significant "definitional chaos" regarding the precise boundaries of the expulsion zone, particularly in the northern and southern frontiers. This confusion arose from scholars attempting to reconcile the general pronouncements in the aḥādīth with the practical, historical reality of enduring non-Muslim communities across Arabia.
The following table synthesizes the opinions of the major schools, showing both their consensus on the Ḥijāz and their divergent interpretations of its periphery.
| Legal School / Scholar | Definition of the Expulsion Zone | Status of the Ḥijāz (Mecca & Medina) | Status of Yemen & Southern Arabia | Status of Northern Frontiers (e.g., Taymā', Wādī al-Qurā) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820) | A defined, geographical zone. | ❌ No permanent residence. ✅ Temporary visits (up to 3 days) permitted for trade in towns other than Mecca. | ✅ Permanent settlement allowed. Non-Muslims could live there as Dhimmīs and pay Jizyah. | ❓ Unclear/Varied. Often considered part of the Ḥijāz or a separate region; rulings depended on specific geographical definitions. |
| Ḥanafī School (Abū Ḥanīfa, d. 150/767) | Focused on the sanctity of specific sites. | ❌ No permanent residence in Mecca. ✅ Could pass through and temporarily visit the wider Ḥijāz, including Mecca for trade. | ✅ Permanent settlement allowed. | ✅ Generally allowed, as these areas were not considered part of the core, sacred Ḥijāz. |
| Mālikī School (Mālik ibn Anas, d. 179/795) | The broadest definition: the entire Arabian Peninsula. | ❌ Strictly forbidden for non-Muslims to reside. | ❌ Theoretically forbidden according to the school's principle, but this clashed with historical reality. | ❌ Theoretically forbidden, leading to legal contortions to explain existing communities. |
| Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) | Offered conflicting, pragmatic definitions. | ❌ Core of the expulsion zone. Defined it as "Medina and what is next to it." | ✅ Implied allowance. His other definition ("lands not controlled by Persians/Romans") implicitly included Yemen outside the zone. | ✅ Implied allowance. Areas like Syria's borders were historically under Roman influence, thus potentially outside "Jazīrat al-'Arab." |
This spectrum of opinions leads to several critical conclusions:
Unanimity on the Ḥijāz: Despite their differences, all schools agreed on the core principle: non-Muslims could not take up permanent residence in the sacred Ḥijāz, the region of Mecca and Medina. This was the non-negotiable, universal application of the Prophetic directive.
Chaos on the Periphery: The "definitional chaos" noted by Munt pertained almost entirely to the edges of the Arabian Peninsula. Was Yemen included? What about the northern towns like Taymā' and Wādī al-Qurā, which were sometimes administratively linked to Syria? The lack of a clear, modern map in the 7th century meant later jurists had to deduce the boundaries, leading to a wide range of opinions.
Evidence of a Limited Original Policy: The very fact that major schools like the Shāfiʿī and Ḥanafī explicitly permitted non-Muslim residence in Yemen is a powerful legal testimony. It proves that these early, authoritative jurists did not understand the Prophetic command as a blanket order for the entire landmass, but as a specific ruling for the Islamic state's heartland.
The Impact of Historical Reality: The Mālikī school's stance, which was the most expansive, created a clear contradiction with the observable fact of large, ancient Jewish communities in Yemen and elsewhere. This tension forced later scholars into a "circular understanding," as Munt describes: redefining the boundaries of "Jazīrat al-'Arab" to exclude places where non-Muslims demonstrably still lived, thereby preserving the authority of the ḥadīth without demanding logistically impossible expulsions.
➡️ The Bottom Line: The debate among the classical schools was not about whether the Ḥijāz was a uniquely Islamic sanctuary—that was a given. The debate was about how far that sanctuary extended. This very debate proves that the original Prophetic policy was limited and specific, not a universal mandate for religious expulsion across the entire Arabian Peninsula. The historical and legal record aligns perfectly: the "two religions" ḥadīth was implemented in the Ḥijāz, while the standard Islamic model of Dhimmi protection and coexistence was applied everywhere else.
Perhaps the most damning evidence against a literal, Peninsula-wide expulsion is the historical record itself, which Munt meticulously documents. Non-Muslim communities are attested in Arabia for centuries after the Prophet ﷺ.
| Community | Location | Period | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jews | Wādī al-Qurā | 4th/10th Century | Al-Muqaddasī (d. c. 990) describes this town in the Ḥijāz as "dominated by Jews." |
| Jews | Khaybar | 3rd/9th Century | Al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) mentions a Jew from Khaybar involved in the Zanj rebellion (255/868-69). |
| Christians | Najrān | 4th/10th Century | Continued presence attested long after reports of their expulsion by ʿUmar. |
| Christians & Jews | Eastern Arabia & Yemen | For centuries | Flourishing communities documented in historical and Geniza records. |
| Non-Muslim Artisans | Medina | Late 1st/7th Century | Caliph al-Walīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malik brought them from Rome to work on the Prophet's Mosque. |
When synthesized, the evidence leads to a single, inescapable conclusion:
The narrations on expelling Jews and Christians from Jazīrat al-'Arab were a specific, context-dependent directive for the Ḥijāz, the sacred sanctuary of Islam. This was a measure to ensure the political security and religious primacy of the Muslim state's heartland after years of conflict and betrayal. It was never intended to be a universal policy for the entire Arabian landmass.
The Prophet's ﷺ own governance of Yemen, the conflicting and evolving definitions of the term, and the continuous historical presence of non-Muslim communities across Arabia all converge to prove this. The "two religions" hadith was a foundational principle for defining a sacred Islamic space, not a blueprint for religious cleansing. The enduring model for Islamic governance of non-Muslims remains the pluralistic Constitution of Medina and the ethical collection of Jizyah—a model that was applied by the Prophet ﷺ himself everywhere outside the uniquely sacred confines of the Ḥijāz.
🛡️ C. The "Two Religions" Hadith in Context: A Strategic Necessity for a Nascent State
To understand the declaration "لَا يَجْتَمِعُ دِينَانِ فِي جَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَب" ("Two religions shall not coexist in the Arabian Peninsula"), we must view it not as a timeless, abstract principle, but as a specific policy born from the urgent, existential challenges the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ faced in the final years of his life. This was a strategic and theological measure for the Ḥijāz, designed to ensure the survival of the Muslim Ummah.
1. 🛡️ Political Security: Learning from the Treachery of Medina
The primary context was raw, immediate political survival. The Muslim community in Medina had been plagued by internal conspiracies and betrayals from powerful, allied non-Muslim tribes, fundamentally shaping the Prophet's ﷺ policy.
The Precedent of Betrayal:
Banū Qaynuqāʿ & Banū Naḍīr: These Jewish tribes, despite signing the Constitution of Medina, broke their treaties. After the Muslim defeat at the Battle of Uḥud, the Banū Naḍīr plotted to assassinate the Prophet ﷺ. Their expulsion was a direct consequence of this treason and sedition.
Banū Qurayẓah: During the Battle of the Trench (5 AH), this tribe entered into secret negotiations with the besieging Quraysh to attack the Muslims from within Medina. This act of wartime treachery during an existential threat nearly led to the annihilation of the Muslim community. Their subsequent fate was a judicial ruling based on their own laws and the laws of war.
Fund and incite the pagan Quraysh and other tribes against Medina.
Act as a central hub for military alliances aimed at destroying the Muslim state.
The conquest of Khaybar (7 AH) was not an attack on a peaceful community but the neutralization of a hostile military base. Even after its conquest, the Jews of Khaybar were initially allowed to remain and work the land, sharing its produce. However, the continued risk of their powerful presence so close to the heart of the Islamic state was deemed an unacceptable security threat.
2. ☪️ Religious Primacy: Establishing the Sacred Sanctuary
Alongside the political rationale was a profound theological imperative: to establish the Ḥijāz as the inviolable sanctuary (Ḥaram) of the new, final revelation.
الآية: ﴿يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِنَّمَا الْمُشْرِكُونَ نَجَسٌ فَلَا يَقْرَبُوا الْمَسْجِدَ الْحَرَامَ بَعْدَ عَامِهِمْ هَٰذَا...﴾"O you who have believed, indeed the polytheists are unclean, so let them not approach al-Masjid al-Ḥarām after this, their [final] year..." (Qur'an 9:28)
This verse purified the immediate sanctuary of the Ka'bah from polytheistic idolatry. The Prophet's ﷺ policy for the wider Ḥijāz can be understood as an extension of this principle of sanctity.
The birthplace of the Prophet ﷺ and the revelation.
The home of the two holy mosques (al-Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca and al-Masjid al-Nabawī in Medina).
The destination of the pilgrimage (Ḥajj), a pillar of Islam.
To allow other powerful religious-political entities to dominate or share this space would be to compromise its unique identity as the exclusive heartland of Tawḥīd. The policy ensured that the environment in which Islam grew and from which it was governed would remain purely dedicated to the worship of God, free from the influence of competing religious-political authorities that had proven hostile.
When viewed through the lens of the Prophet's ﷺ lived experience, the "two religions" hadith emerges not as a call for universal religious persecution, but as a targeted, context-specific state-building measure.
| Context | Problem | Prophetic Solution |
|---|---|---|
| 🛡️ Political Reality | Repeated treason and military conspiracy from powerful non-Muslim tribes within the Ḥijāz (Banū Qurayẓah, Khaybar). | Remove rival political/military power centers from the Islamic state's core territory to ensure its security. |
| ☪️ Theological Identity | The need to establish the Ḥijāz as the pure, inviolable sanctuary of the final revelation. | Extend the sanctity of the Ka'bah to the wider Ḥijāz, making it the exclusive heartland of Islam. |
This policy was never applied to regions outside the Ḥijāz, as proven by the Prophet's ﷺ own governance of Yemen. There, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians lived under Muslim rule, paid the Jizyah, and enjoyed full religious autonomy. The directive was unique to the sacred and strategic heartland, a necessary measure to secure the future of the Muslim Ummah after a decade of near-constant warfare and betrayal. It was about sovereignty and survival, not bigotry.
The evidence leads to several definitive conclusions that resolve the apparent contradiction:
📍 Limited Geographical Scope: The expulsion narrations applied specifically to the Ḥijāz (the regions of Mecca and Medina), not the entire Arabian Peninsula. Yemen, Oman, and other regions with large non-Muslim populations were explicitly excluded, as proven by the Prophet's own governance of them.
🛡️ A Security and Sovereignty Measure: The primary motivation was to secure the political and military heartland of the nascent Islamic state from potential fifth columns and constant internal conflict, as experienced with the Qurayẓah and Naḍīr tribes in Medina.
☪️ An Affirmation of Sacred Space: It was a theological ruling to designate the land where Islam was revealed as a pure sanctuary for the worship of the One God, mirroring the sanctity of the Ka'ba itself.
⚖️ Consistent with Prophetic Justice: When implemented by Caliph 'Umar, the expulsions from the Ḥijāz were conducted with justice, including full compensation for property and land, as recorded in Muwatta' Malik. This was not a confiscation but a state-funded relocation.
Therefore, the "expulsion" narrations do not represent a betrayal of the Yemenite Jews or Christians, nor do they contradict the principle of "no compulsion in religion." They represent a specific, context-dependent policy for the Islamic state's sacred core. The universal, enduring model for interaction with peaceful non-Muslims remains the Constitution of Medina, the ethical military doctrine, and the collection of the symbolic Jizyah—a model of pluralism and protection that was applied everywhere outside the uniquely sacred Ḥijāz.
➡️ Conclusion: The Covenant of Faith, Not the Sword of Coercion
The journey through the foundational texts and historical records of the Prophetic era leads to an inescapable and transformative conclusion. The enduring myth that Islam was spread "by the sword" is not merely an exaggeration; it is a profound distortion of history, a polemical fiction crafted by later adversaries and sustained by ignorance. The evidence from the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ reveals a consistent and revolutionary reality: a covenant of faith, built on pluralism, ethical conduct, and free conscience.
The pillars of this truth are unshakeable:
Invitation to Islam.
Invitation to political alliance and citizenship.
Invitation to a protected, non-combatant status.
The offer to pay the Jizyah—a symbolic tax—to secure peace and protection.
Fighting was the absolute last resort, and even then, he forbade the killing of civilians, monks, and the destruction of crops. The goal of warfare was to subdue political aggression, not to compel faith. The Jizyah itself was a trivial sum—one dinar per year, less than a week's wages—a token of civic responsibility, not a crushing tool of oppression.
Its compelling theological message of pure monotheism and accessible salvation.
Its social justice, which offered dignity and mobility to the marginalized.
- The tangible integrity of the early Muslim community.The "sword" did not convert millions; the example of the believers did.
🕊️ The Final Verdict: A Legacy of Coexistence
The legend of the sword was born from the despair of Christian rivals who could not comprehend their own loss of dominion except as a narrative of diabolical force. It was a myth that served a theological need.
The historical reality, however, is one of a covenant. It was a covenant between Muslims and non-Muslims to build a society together. It was a covenant with God, affirming that faith must be chosen freely, or it is not faith at all. It was a covenant of ethics, even in the brutal theater of war.
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ did not wield a sword to force the confession of faith. He offered a hand to forge a community. The enduring legacy of his era is not one of compulsion, but of invitation—an invitation to a path that, through the power of its own truth and the nobility of its foundational principles, would eventually captivate hearts and transform the world. The sword of coercion is a myth; the covenant of faith is the historical reality.
🏹 Part III — The Conquests and the Question of Coercion (632–680 CE)
🛡️ 4. The Wars of Apostasy (Ridda) and Misunderstood Coercion
⚖️ Between Faith and Rebellion
When the Messenger of God ﷺ passed away in 632 CE, Arabia trembled. The unity that had been forged through revelation suddenly threatened to fracture under the weight of tribal pride, unpaid taxes, and false prophets. To later historians, this convulsion became known as the Ridda — “Wars of Apostasy.”
Yet to read al-Balādhurī closely is to see that this was not a war to force belief — it was a war to preserve the political covenant that the Prophet himself had established. Apostasy (ridda) here did not mean private disbelief; it meant armed rebellion against the state of Medina — a state that, for the first time in Arabian history, had bound the tribes together under a single public order.
“When Abū Bakr became caliph, groups of the Arabs apostatized from Islam and refused to pay the ṣadaqa. Some said: ‘We will pray but we will not pay zakāt.’ And Abū Bakr said, ‘By God, if they refuse me a single rope or a newborn goat that they used to pay to the Messenger of God, I will fight them.’”— al-Balādhurī, Futūḥ al-Buldān, 94
🏛️ The Crisis of Unity
After the Prophet’s death, tribal leaders from Yamāma, Yemen, and Najd began to declare independence. They argued that allegiance (bayʿa) had been personal — owed to Muḥammad alone — and that with his death, so too died their obligation to Medina.
To them, Islam was a prophetic alliance, not a political community.
Abū Bakr, however, understood that the two were inseparable. The ummah was not merely a congregation of believers; it was a covenantal polity whose justice depended on collective obedience to law — not on blood or tribe.
Hence his resolve:
“By God, I will fight whoever separates between prayer and zakāt.”
It was the first moment in Islamic history when order itself became sacred.
🔥 The False Prophets and the Revolt of Tribes
Across Arabia, the vacuum of authority birthed chaos. al-Balādhurī recounts how a patchwork of impostors and tribal seers—Musaylima in Yamāma, Ṭulayḥa in Najd, Sajah the soothsayer, and al-Aswad al-ʿAnsī in Yemen—claimed revelation, tribal sovereignty, or both.
Each “prophet” mixed religion with rebellion. They refused zakāt not out of atheism but out of defiance. They sought to restore the old, pre-Islamic order of fragmented sovereignty.
🐎 “The Arabs apostatized and refused to pay the ṣadaqa. Hypocrisy raised its head in Medina… and Abū Bakr, by God, resolved every dispute and drove it out of Islam.” — ʿĀʾisha (al-Balādhurī 94)
This line — spoken by the Prophet’s daughter and Abū Bakr’s own child — captures the essence of the Ridda: the defense of Islam’s moral and political unity against the relapse into tribal anarchy.
⚔️ “War of Expulsion” and “Humiliating Peace”
In one of the most revealing passages, al-Balādhurī describes Abū Bakr’s two-tiered offer to rebellious tribes:
“He made them choose between the war of expulsion (ḥarb al-ikhraj) and the humiliating peace (ṣulḥ al-dhull). They asked, ‘What is the humiliating peace?’ He said: ‘That you return what you took from us, pay blood-money for our dead, surrender your armor and horses, and acknowledge that your slain are in Hell.’”— Futūḥ al-Buldān, 95
The Ridda was, in short, a war for order, not against conscience.
⚔️ The Campaigns of Khālid ibn al-Walīd
Abū Bakr’s general, Khālid ibn al-Walīd, led a series of campaigns across central Arabia. Each episode al-Balādhurī records shows a clear pattern:
When Ṭulayḥa al-Asadī claimed prophethood, ʿUyayna ibn Ḥiṣn defected mid-battle, shouting:
“O Banū Fazāra! This man is a false prophet!”
He was spared by Abū Bakr and later fought valiantly in the conquests.
💬 “He was brought to Abū Bakr, who said: ‘We shall execute you, for you excluded yourself from amnesty.’ He replied, ‘O Caliph of the Messenger of God, be gracious to me and give me a wife.’ So he did — and married him to his sister.’”
This is not the conduct of an empire imposing creed; it is the conduct of a state restoring covenant.
⚖️ Apostasy as Political Treason
📜 “Abū Bakr ordered that they should fight together against those who refused to pay the ṣadaqa. They should seek the help of the faithful against the rebellious and the obedient against the disobedient.”
Even amidst harsh episodes — such as the execution of al-Fujāʿa for banditry or the killing of al-Aswad al-ʿAnsī the impostor — Abū Bakr’s correspondence shows constant restraint. He regretted excesses, and al-Balādhurī preserves his own reflection:
“There were three things I wish I had done differently: that I had executed al-Ashʿath, not spared him; that I had executed al-Fujāʿa, not burned him; and that I had sent ʿUmar to Iraq and Khālid to Syria.”
Even his remorse shows conscience — not cruelty.
🌍 From Rebellion to Revival
By the end of the Ridda, the peninsula was unified once again. The energy that had nearly dissolved into tribal chaos was redirected toward a universal mission.
Those same tribes who had fought Abū Bakr soon rode north — to Iraq, Syria, and Egypt — not as rebels, but as believers.
🔥 The Ridda Wars thus mark the hinge between tribal Arabia and universal Islam:
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a transition from kin-based loyalty to covenantal unity,
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from private chieftains to public law,
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from anarchy to order.
Even in the crucible of rebellion, the Qurʾānic command remained intact:
“There is no compulsion in religion.” (2:256)
🏙️ 5. Treaties, Not Tyranny — The Pacts of the First Caliphs
⚖️ From Conquest to Covenant
When the armies of Islam crossed the frontiers of Rome and Persia, they did not arrive as destroyers but as negotiators. Their swords cleared the way for the pen. From Jerusalem to Damascus, from al-Ḥīra to Fusṭāṭ, the Companions of the Prophet ﷺ sealed agreements that preserved the lives, faiths, and properties of the conquered — not by coercion, but by covenant.
These surrender treaties — known as kitāb amān or ʿahd al-amān — stand among the most remarkable political documents of Late Antiquity. They echo the ancient pistis of the Greeks and the fides of Rome: the solemn promise of protection to those who submit peacefully. In Arabic, amān derives from the root ʾ-m-n — to trust, to be secure — the same root as īmān, faith. To grant amān was not an act of domination but of trust restored.
Thus began Islam’s international law: not the subjugation of the defeated, but the incorporation of the willing.
This was not an invitation to forced faith, but an order to offer peace before war. The jizya was never a tax on unbelief; it was the ancient Near-Eastern principle of tribute for protection — a fiscal covenant replacing military service.
As the historian Milka Levy-Rubin has shown, the entire structure of the early Islamic treaties mirrors the Graeco-Roman and Sasanian diplomatic tradition. The Muslims inherited a legal language of surrender that stretched from Alexandria to Armenia — they merely Islamized its terminology.
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The Greek pistis and Latin fides became the Arabic amān — assurance of safety.
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The Roman pactum became the Arabic baqt, as in the Nubian treaty.
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The Aramaic qyāmā — covenant — became ʿahd and dhimma.
Each word spoke the same truth: trust for tribute, peace for loyalty.
📜 The Forms of the Pacts
Levy-Rubin demonstrated that these treaties were written, witnessed, and sealed according to the legal forms of Late Antiquity. Each kitāb amān contained:
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The basmala — invoking God’s name.
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Names of parties — the Muslim commander and the local notables.
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Territory and stipulations — protection of life, property, churches, and religious practice.
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Witnesses and seals — guaranteeing the pact’s legality.
The agreements were bilateral contracts, not decrees. The conquered sent envoys with written petitions — letters of surrender — asking for protection on specific terms. The Muslim commander replied in writing, accepting their proposal or amending it, and both sides sealed the document.
“They wrote to us asking for peace and amān, and we wrote them a book (kitāb) granting them safety.”— al-Balādhurī, Futūḥ al-Buldān, Jurjān treaty
These texts were so binding that even centuries later, Muslim judges upheld them in court. Ibn ʿAsākir recounts how the Christians of Damascus produced their kitāb Khalid ibn al-Walīd before the qāḍī in 800 CE — and the Muslim judge ruled in their favor, ordering the restoration of their confiscated churches.
“I read their document and found it specific to them… it was their rightful covenant.”— Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh Dimashq
🕍 The Covenant of Jerusalem
In 637 CE, Caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb entered Jerusalem not as a conqueror but as a guarantor. The ʿAhd ʿUmar — preserved in Arabic sources — pledged:
“This is the assurance of safety (amān) which the servant of God, ʿUmar, grants to the people of Aelia (Jerusalem):Their lives, their property, their churches and crosses shall be secure. Their churches shall not be occupied or destroyed; neither they nor the people within them shall be harmed.”
There was no forced conversion, no expulsion, no burning of sanctuaries. ʿUmar prayed outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre lest future Muslims use his prayer as a pretext to seize it.
This was Islam’s political theology in practice: the sword opens the gate, but the pen writes the peace.
🏛️ Continuity of Law, Not Collapse
From Damascus to Egypt, the pattern repeated. When the people of Damascus surrendered, Khalid ibn al-Walīd wrote:
“You are under the covenant of God and the protection of His Messenger. Your churches shall not be destroyed, nor your people harmed. Upon you is the jizya, and upon us is protection.”
When ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ entered Egypt, he made a pact with the Copts: their churches, clergy, and customs would remain untouched. In exchange, they paid a fixed tribute and were exempt from conscription.
Far from inventing new subjugations, the Companions adopted existing imperial norms — the Roman foedus and Sasanian ʿahd — and purified them of idolatry. The conquered became ahl al-dhimma, “the people under God’s protection.”
🌍 Two Models of Peace
By comparing the treaties, we see two distinct diplomatic archetypes — both inherited from the ancient world:
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The Surrender Treaty (Ṣulḥ / Amān):
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Applied in Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia & Palestine.
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The Muslims guaranteed life, property, churches, and freedom of worship.
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The locals paid jizya in exchange for protection.
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“To you belongs our protection; upon you your tribute.”
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The Vassal Treaty (ʿAhd / Muʿāhada):
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Used in Iran and Armenia, where local princes remained in power.
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The nobles pledged loyalty, offered counsel and troops, and maintained roads and bridges.
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These were continuations of Sasanian marzuban investiture contracts — written, sealed, and witnessed.
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In both cases, Islam did not annihilate pre-existing systems of law — it naturalized them into its moral order.
Even centuries later, Muslim jurists such as Abū Yūsuf in Kitāb al-Kharāj and al-Shāfiʿī in al-Umm affirmed that these covenants were legally inviolable. To violate a dhimma was to betray not merely a contract — but God Himself, whose ʿahd it invoked.
From the Prophet’s covenants with Najrān and Maqnaʾ to ʿUmar’s ʿahd in Jerusalem, a continuous principle guided the Companions:
🕋 Faith cannot be compelled; peace can be contracted.
The amān was not an imperial trick but a theological institution — the extension of divine mercy into worldly governance.
Through it, Islam turned conquest into covenant, power into protection, and domination into law.
🌍 6. How People Actually Converted
Faith, Freedom, and the Fabric of Society (632–850 CE)
The story of Islam’s expansion is not a tale of forced faith but of gradual belonging. In the first century of Islam, men and women entered the new community not by the sword’s edge, but by its embrace. Conversion was not an event; it was a process — social, economic, and spiritual — unfolding over generations.
“There is no compulsion in religion.” — Qurʾān 2:256
🕋 I. The Age of Faith and Friendship — The Prophet and the Companions
In the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions, conversion was an act of conviction. The earliest Muslims were drawn by the character of the new faith — its call to equality, justice, and the living presence of God in human affairs.
In Medina, the Prophet received delegations from every corner of Arabia — Christian, Jewish, and pagan — and invited them to Islam not through pressure but persuasion. His covenants with tribes such as the Christians of Najrān and the Jews of Khaybar preserved their faiths and rights, and his marriages to women like Ṣafiyya bint Ḥuyayy & Rayḥāna bint Shamʿūn turned captivity into covenant — manumission, honor, and union replacing vengeance and humiliation.
Here, conversion meant liberation, both physical and moral. To embrace Islam was to escape the hierarchy of tribe, caste, and servitude. As Elizabeth Urban notes, freedmen like Abū Bakra — a slave who converted during the siege of al-Ṭāʾif — became ṭalīq Allāh (“freed by God”), belonging to no master but the community itself.
By the end of the Prophet’s life, the Arab tribes had entered Islam freely, ʿan tawʿin lā karhan — by consent, not coercion. When the Rightly Guided Caliphs extended this world beyond Arabia, they carried that same ethic into their treaties and tax policies: surrender was not apostasy, and the conquered were not compelled to convert.
⚖️ II. The First Caliphs and the Logic of Coexistence (632–661 CE)
Under Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān, Islam’s frontiers expanded faster than its population changed. As Uriel Simonsohn and Fred Donner emphasize, mass conversion did not accompany the conquests. The Arabs ruled vast Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian populations, but the great majority remained within their own confessions for centuries.
The dhimma system — formalized as a protection pact — preserved the autonomy of conquered peoples. They paid the jizya in exchange for protection and exemption from military service. To convert was to join the umma, not to save one’s life.
This early regime functioned less like an empire and more like a federation — a vast network of covenants linking believers and nonbelievers under one law of peace.
🕊️ III. The Sufyānid Umayyads — Islam Without Pressure (661–684 CE)
During the reigns of Muʿāwiya and Yazīd, the caliphate governed a predominantly non-Muslim population. The Sufyānid state in Damascus, pragmatic and flexible, relied heavily on Christian bureaucrats, Syrian monks, and Coptic scribes. As Hurvitz et al. and Simonsohn note, conversion was rare — not because it was forbidden, but because it was unnecessary.
Christians could rise in administration; Jews thrived in trade; Zoroastrians remained landowners. The Arab elite saw Islam as a communal identity, not a mandatory creed. To become Muslim meant joining an Arab military aristocracy — a process gradual and selective.
Still, conversions occurred through personal and social contact: intermarriage, clientage (walāʾ), and military camaraderie. The new faith spread along lines of trust, kinship, and proximity — not proselytism.
Conversion, as Richard Bulliet observed, “was more a matter of social behavior than of belief.”
💰 IV. The Marwānid Umayyads — From Community to Empire (684–750 CE)
The Marwānid rulers inherited an empire that needed revenue and order. Under ʿAbd al-Malik and al-Walīd, Arabic became the language of administration, coinage, and prestige. The new identity of Muslim began to replace the older category of Arab.
With the Arabic language came admiration — and aspiration. For Christians and Jews in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, Arabic became the language of culture, law, and poetry. To “speak Islam” was the first step toward being Muslim.
Economically, the system began to strain. Non-Muslims paid the jizya, while Muslims paid the zakāt. As populations intermingled, the lines blurred. Converting meant exemption from the poll-tax and entry into a world of shared law and dignity.
Yet, as Simonsohn carefully notes, the relationship between conversion and exemption was complex. In the early period, new converts were not always immediately freed from taxation; administrators sometimes doubted their sincerity. It was only with time — particularly under Caliph ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 717–720) — that conversion was officially linked to fiscal equality.
“Whosoever accepts Islam … shall enjoy all the privileges of the Muslims.”— Fiscal Rescript attributed to ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz
Whether or not the decree was authentic, it reflected a shift: Islam was no longer the identity of conquerors, but the aspiration of the conquered.
⚙️ V. The Abbasid World — Conversion as Belonging (750–850 CE)
Under the Abbasids, Islam became the lingua franca of civilization. Baghdad, Basra, and Cairo thrived as cosmopolitan centers where Persians, Greeks, and Copts entered the Muslim world through learning, marriage, and opportunity.
Here, the motives of conversion diversified:
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Social mobility: Joining the umma opened access to offices and patronage.
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Economic relief: Exemption from the jizya and inclusion in Muslim land tenure.
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Manumission: Slaves who embraced Islam could be freed or gain legal protection.
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Marriage and family: Conversion allowed mixed unions in both directions.
Simonsohn shows that by the 9th century, conversion had become a negotiable social tool. Individuals could invoke the threat or prospect of conversion to secure divorce, manumission, or legal leniency. A Jewish wife might threaten to “attach herself to the Gentiles” to escape a bad marriage; a slave might demand freedom or appeal to Muslim judges.
Yet such manipulation reveals not cynicism but the deep integration of Islam into the social fabric — it was the ultimate point of reference, the new grammar of moral life.
Behind every conversion lay a tangle of motives: faith, hope, fear, and pragmatism. The East Syrian Catholicos Ishoʿyahb III lamented that some of his flock “abandoned faith for part of their property,” yet acknowledged that “the Arabs did not force them.” Their apostasy, he wrote, was voluntary — driven by attachment to wealth, not coercion.
The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius echoes this same world: hardship, taxation, and humiliation in the Marwanid era led some to abandon Christianity “without compulsion, lashing, or blows.” In this quiet confession lies the truth of early Islam’s success — not terror, but temptation by justice.
🕌 VII. From the Prophet’s Mercy to the Empire’s Magnetism
From the Prophet’s hand in Medina to the bureaucrats of Baghdad, conversion evolved from a personal act of faith to a social process of integration. The early converts were the believers; their descendants became the community.
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Under the Prophet and the Rashidūn, conversion was conviction.
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Under the Umayyads, conversion was solidarity — to join a civilization.
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Under the Abbasids, conversion was citizenship — to belong to a moral and cultural order that transcended tribe and race.
No evidence of mass forced conversions exists from the first Islamic century. What emerges instead is a pattern of admiration, alliance, and accommodation.
🕯️ 7. The Martyrs and the Minorities — Resistance, Resilience, and the Limits of Tolerance
The charge that Islam spread “by the sword” collapses under the weight of its own witnesses — and, ironically, it is Christian sources that disprove it. Even Christian Sahner, whose Christian Martyrs under Islam catalogues hundreds of “new martyrs” between the seventh and ninth centuries, confirms that these deaths were not the victims of forced conversion but of apostasy and blasphemy.
In other words, martyrdom did not arise from coerced Islamization, but from boundary-crossing in an already plural society.
🏛️ I. The Historical Context: Islam as a Minority Rule
Sahner begins with a reminder that upends modern imagination: for centuries after the conquests, the so-called “Muslim world” was in fact a Christian-majority world. Egypt, Palestine, and Syria remained overwhelmingly Christian long after they fell under Arab rule. Muslims were a demographic minority ruling through local officials, Christian bureaucrats, and pragmatic governors.
The early caliphs, far from imposing Islam, permitted this coexistence as a matter of statecraft and conscience. The dhimma — the pact of protection — replaced persecution with parity, so long as the non-Muslim paid the jizya and abstained from rebellion.
Thus, conversion was voluntary — and, in fact, rare. Religious change occurred slowly, through cultural osmosis, intermarriage, and the allure of Arabic civilization.
“Private, nonstate violence against non-Muslims was not a major feature of the postconquest period, nor was forced conversion. On balance, the Umayyads and Abbasids were not much interested in persecuting Christians systematically.”
⚖️ II. When the Sword Was Drawn: Apostasy, Not Compulsion
The early neomartyrs — those whom Sahner chronicles with remarkable empathy — died not because Islam was imposed, but because they defied its legal boundaries in a time of close coexistence.
They fall into three clear categories:
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Apostates — converts to Islam who publicly returned to Christianity.
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Proselytes — Muslims who converted to Christianity without prior affiliation.
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Blasphemers — Christians who publicly reviled the Prophet ﷺ or Islam before officials.
Each act violated the laws of loyalty in a confessional state still defining itself. As Sahner notes, executions were “a remarkably bureaucratic phenomenon,” performed to mark the borders of faith in an era when Muslims were still outnumbered by Christians.
“These executions had a performative function — designed to instill obedience and forge boundaries between groups at a time of unprecedented social and religious mixing.”
In other words: this was not jihad by the sword — it was law by the stylus.
🕌 III. The Prophet and the Caliphs Vindicated
Sahner’s data unintentionally vindicates the Prophet ﷺ and the first generations of Muslims. For the period of the Prophet, the Rāshidūn, and the Sufyānid Umayyads (622–684 CE), he records no systematic persecution and almost no martyrdoms.
All but 2 of the 270 cases — the Sixty of Gaza & George the Black — occur under the Marwānid and Abbasid regimes, when Islam had become a bureaucratic empire.
By contrast, during the Prophet’s lifetime, Jews and Christians were left free to worship; during the rule of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, they were protected by covenant; during Muʿāwiya’s reign, they still dominated the civil service.
Thus, the “martyrs under Islam” appear only after Islam became empire — after the prophetic principle of “no compulsion in religion” gave way to imperial anxiety about boundaries and belonging.
“The use of capital punishment against Christians was important, but limited in scope … aimed at establishing the Islamic character of the state and defining boundaries between groups.”
The earliest Islam was not coercive; the later caliphate was defensive.
🕊️ IV. Violence Amid Coexistence
Sahner’s phrase ʿaysh mushtarak — “a common way of life” — captures the paradox perfectly. Muslims and Christians lived side by side in shared cities, spoke the same languages, married into each other’s families, and traded in the same markets. Violence, when it came, was exceptional — precisely because peace was the norm.
“Violent episodes such as martyrdom occurred against a backdrop of a peaceful but begrudging form of coexistence.”
In other words, the martyrologies record ruptures, not routines. They memorialized moments when the ordinary amity of daily life broke under the weight of politics, zeal, or imperial anxiety.
🔥 V. From Constantine to the Caliphate — The Long Late Antiquity
In his closing to the introdcution of his book, Sahner places Islam not outside but within the continuum of late antiquity. Like Constantine’s Christian empire, the caliphate joined monotheism to sovereignty, and with that fusion came the perennial temptation to police belief.
“Far from marking a rupture with the past, the first two centuries of Islamic history have come to be seen as an extension of late antiquity — its triumphant denouement.”
The state’s concern for orthodoxy was not uniquely Islamic but inherited — a “by-product of the Constantinian revolution.” In this sense, the Marwānids and Abbasids were heirs not only to Muḥammad ﷺ but to Constantine himself: rulers in a world where truth had become political.
🩸 VI. Between the Apologetic and the Lachrymose
Sahner criticizes both the romantic and the hostile readings of Islamic history:
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The “apologetic thesis” that idealizes medieval Islam as perfectly tolerant, and
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The “lachrymose thesis” (Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer) that paints it as a perpetual tyranny.
Both distort reality. The truth, he argues, lies between: a state that was confident enough to coexist, and vigilant enough to punish transgression.
Neither utopia nor persecution — rather, a negotiated coexistence grounded in hierarchy and habit.
🌿 VII. The Meaning of the Martyrs
By the ninth century, as Islam became the dominant culture, Christian writers turned the memory of a few executions into a theology of loss. These “new martyrs” were less witnesses of Islamic cruelty than architects of Christian minority identity. Their deaths were not proof of Islamic oppression, but of Christianity’s adaptation to its new condition — no longer the empire’s faith, but the empire’s conscience.
Thus, Sahner’s evidence reverses the polemic. The neomartyrs were not victims of forced Islamization, but symbols of a world in transition, where conversion and coexistence blurred into one another.
“The martyrologies testify to the creation of a Christian identity in the early medieval Middle East grounded in memories of bloodshed and hostility to Christians who switched sides.”— Sahner, p. 7
They mark not Islam’s intolerance, but Christianity’s nostalgia for power.
✨ VIII. Conclusion — The Vindication of Mercy
From Sahner’s own account, one can draw a simple conclusion:
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Under the Prophet ﷺ, faith was offered without compulsion.
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Under the Rāshidūn, coexistence was the law of peace.
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Under the Sufyānids, pluralism prevailed through pragmatism.
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Only under the Marwānids and Abbasids, when empire overtook prophecy, did law become coercive — and even then, in narrow, legalistic contexts.
Thus, the earliest Christian witnesses — the very martyrs Sahner chronicles — contradict the myth of “Islam by the sword.” Their blood does not testify against Islam, but against empire itself — whether Roman, Persian, or Arab.
The Prophet forgave his enemies at Mecca; the martyrs died centuries later under bureaucrats who forgot his mercy.
🕋 8. The Qur’anic Ethic of Persuasion, Not Pressure
The Qur’an’s voice on faith is clear and serene:
“Call to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good counsel.” (16:125)“To you your religion, and to me mine.” (109:6)
Islam was born not as a program of coercion but as a summons to conscience. The Prophet ﷺ himself embodied this principle in both word and deed. At the conquest of Mecca (630 CE), he entered not as a butcher but as a liberator. Those who had expelled him, waged war against him, and desecrated his followers were told: “Go, for you are free.” This amnesty of Mecca became the archetype of Islamic victory — a conquest of hearts, not of corpses. His campaigns, though born in a world of tribal warfare, always retained a moral horizon that placed persuasion above punishment. Conversion was never the fruit of fear, but of moral attraction — the recognition that the new order of Islam promised justice where arrogance and idolatry had reigned.
The early Qur’anic vision of daʿwa (invitation) thus rests on a radical restraint: faith cannot be bought, taxed, or forced, for sincerity is the measure of belief. This ideal, however, would soon meet the weight of empire.
The Historical Reality: Between Ideal and Administration
As Uriel Simonsohn demonstrates in Conversion, Exemption, and Manipulation, the centuries following the conquests saw conversion take on complex social meanings that were not always purely spiritual. Under the Umayyads and ʿAbbāsids, embracing Islam could mean release from the jizya (poll tax), escape from slavery, access to state employment, or social mobility. In the words of the East Syrian Catholicos Išōʿyahb III (d. 659 CE), some Christians “became captivated by the love of part of their property,” choosing Islam not under compulsion, but for relief from fiscal hardship. Later chronicles in the Abbasid age — from the Zuqnīn Chronicle to Coptic and Samaritan sources — echo this pattern: taxation, not torture, drove many to seek conversion.
By the time of ʿUmar II (r. 717–720), policy even formalized this relationship — conversion meant exemption from jizya. Whether or not that edict is authentic (as Luke Yarbrough questions), it captures the direction of change: spiritual identity became entangled with fiscal privilege. Under the ʿAbbāsids, this tendency deepened. Bureaucratic regularization and juristic codification (e.g., Abū Yūsuf’s Kitāb al-Kharāj) linked confessional status to tax liability. Conversion was now a social contract — sincere for some, strategic for others.
Simonsohn’s careful review reveals a world where belief and bureaucracy intertwined. Converts might gain freedom from servitude or marriage restrictions; slaves could use Islam as a path to manumission; even Jewish and Christian litigants occasionally invoked the threat of conversion as leverage to escape communal penalties or gain divorce. Conversion became a negotiation, not a crusade — and manipulation, not martyrdom, defined many encounters with Islam’s expanding power.
Does This History Align with the Qur’anic Ethic?
In spirit — often yes; in structure — increasingly not.
What persisted was the absence of formal compulsion: no empire-wide policy of forced conversion existed, and mass apostasy trials were rare before the Mongol period. Conversion was voluntary in law, but pressured by circumstance. As Simonsohn notes, the state did not coerce belief; it priced it. The jizya, social dependency (walāʾ), and fiscal exemptions made Islam a path of least resistance in a stratified world.
Yet this was not entirely a betrayal of the Qur’an. The Qur’anic ethic of persuasion (16:125) presupposes that human hearts are drawn to justice and mercy. The same Muslims who administered taxes also freed captives, abolished hereditary priesthoods, and built systems of social mobility unprecedented in Late Antiquity. While many converted for worldly reasons, those reasons — dignity, equality, release from humiliation — were themselves reflections of the Qur’an’s moral promise. The attraction of Islam lay as much in its social revolution as in its theology.
By the Marwānid and early ʿAbbāsid centuries, Islam’s spread had become a civilizational process rather than a missionary one. The sword enforced rule, not religion; the pen and the contract did the rest. If the Prophet’s daʿwa had been pure invitation, later rulers transformed it into a system of incentives that preserved the letter of “no compulsion in religion” (2:256) while often dulling its spiritual edge.
The Qur’an’s ethic of persuasion defined the ideal; the first conquerors practiced it imperfectly but sincerely; the administrators of the empire institutionalized it. Even when conversion brought tax relief or social gain, it was still, at its core, an act that had to be chosen. Islam’s expansion, therefore, reveals not the death of daʿwa, but its adaptation — from the Prophet’s personal mercy to the bureaucracy’s moral economy.
🧿 9. The Myth Revisited — Why It Still Matters
Few accusations against Islam have endured as stubbornly as the claim that it spread “by the sword.” From medieval polemic to modern punditry, this image — of Arabs sweeping across the world with scimitars and ultimatums — remains a convenient fiction. It reduces a vast and human story of transformation into a cartoon of terror. Yet when we return to the first century of Islam — through Qur’anic ethics, eyewitness testimony, and the sober analysis of modern historians — a different picture emerges: one of gradual, voluntary, and socially layered change rather than forced conversion.
What the Sources Actually Show
Sahner’s synthesis reveals the rhythm of a centuries-long transformation. In the first wave — the conquests of the 630s and 640s — the Arabs ruled Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians without erasing them. The mawālī (non-Arab converts) entered Islam not through duress but through opportunity: military service, social mobility, and the quest for equality within an Arab-ruled order. When those same mawālī later fueled the ʿAbbāsid Revolution (750 CE), they did so as Muslims, demanding not liberation from Islam, but inclusion within it. Coercion does not breed such loyalty.
The Conversion Mosaic
As Uriel Simonsohn shows, conversion in the early Islamic centuries was less a thunderclap of faith than a negotiation between conscience and circumstance. In his essay “Conversion, Exemption, and Manipulation,” he demonstrates that joining the Muslim umma often brought tangible social relief — exemption from the jizya poll tax, manumission from slavery, or the right to marry freely. But none of this equals forced conversion. The sword was not at people’s necks; the weight of their world was. And even then, the evidence shows vacillation, reversion, and selective sincerity — proof that belief was never mechanically imposed.
Richard Bulliet’s Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period quantified the same reality. Using prosopographic data, he charted how Islam spread not by sudden conquest but by centuries of family-level adoption — often taking two or three generations for a region to become majority Muslim. The curve of conversion follows demography, not dogma; trade routes, not treaties; cities first, countryside later. In his famous model, the tipping point came not in the 7th century but around the 10th — long after the swords were sheathed.
Between Triumphalism and Martyrdom
Sahner insightfully reminds us that both Muslims and Christians mythologized conversion. Muslim chroniclers, writing centuries later, recast their ancestors’ acceptance of Islam as heroic epiphany — a triumphalist “proof” of Islam’s truth. Christian chroniclers, facing their communities’ decline, wrote counter-myths of martyrdom — heroic resistance under “terrific pressure.” Each narrative mirrored the other’s anxiety. In truth, the frontier between faiths was porous and deeply human: converts hesitated, reverted, and negotiated; communities grieved, adapted, and survived. The miracle of Islam’s expansion was not its speed, but its endurance — a revolution of consent, not coercion.
Justice in Victory, Restraint in Power
Measured by the yardstick of Late Antiquity, the Muslim conquests were remarkably restrained. The Persians and Romans had devastated each other for a generation before Islam’s rise; the Lombards, Franks, and Goths crushed their subjects without mercy. By contrast, the early caliphs preserved cities, laws, and lives. They offered dhimma (protection) instead of death, and allowed churches, synagogues, and temples to remain standing. Even Christian sources such as the Chronicle of Zuqnīn acknowledge that Muslim rule “did not weigh so heavily upon the Christians that it went beyond their endurance” — at least until later fiscal mismanagement. The first century of Islam thus stands as a rare model of justice in victory and restraint in power.
Why It Still Matters
To revisit this myth is not to polish Islam’s past, but to reclaim its complexity from both detractors and zealots. The early caliphate was no utopia — it was a human empire, with taxes, hierarchies, and imperfect men — yet its guiding revelation forbade compulsion and sanctified mercy. The Prophet’s ﷺ conquest of Mecca, the amnesty of his enemies, and the Qur’an’s calls to “wisdom and good counsel” still outshine the caricature of swords and scimitars.
Understanding this history matters today because every distortion of Islam’s beginnings — whether Orientalist or extremist — fuels new injustices. Against that, the record of the first centuries offers a humbler, more human truth: Islam spread not because it forced people to believe, but because it gave them something worth believing in — order, equality, and the hope of divine justice.
🕊️ Conclusion — The Victory of the Word over the Sword
From the sands of Arabia to the shores of the Atlantic, the first Muslims conquered lands with armies — yet they conquered hearts with justice, with compassion, with an integrity that even their enemies could not deny. The Qur’an calls, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), and the Prophet ﷺ embodied it when he forgave his persecutors at Mecca, granting amnesty where vengeance would have been easy. His victory was moral before it was military.
The empires that Islam absorbed — Roman, Persian, Gothic — had wielded the sword for centuries; the Muslims wielded something rarer: a word that healed more than it harmed. Their law tempered power with mercy. Their governors often ruled foreign peoples more gently than their own kings had done. Even Christian chroniclers, stunned by the collapse of their old world, conceded that the new rulers were just — that “the Arabs did not compel anyone to abandon his faith.”
Through the Marwānid and ʿAbbāsid centuries, Islam’s expansion continued not as a campaign of conversion but as a current of conviction. Traders, teachers, mystics, and jurists — not soldiers — carried the message from Andalusia to India. The Qur’an, recited in marketplaces and madrassas, became the true vector of empire. The sword had opened the way; the Word made it endure.
In the end, the story of Islam’s spread is not the story of a civilization that crushed, but one that convinced; not one that silenced, but one that spoke. Its weapon was not the sword — it was the verse. Its miracle was not coercion, but conversion born of recognition: that truth, once seen, compels nothing but itself.
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