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From the beginning, Islam spread largely through military conquest. Muhammad had been a capable commander, and his caliphs or successors followed in his footsteps. The first Muslim attack on the Byzantine Empire occurred in 629, while Muhammad was still alive. In 635 Arab armies seized Damascus for the first time. Recently converted Syrians took Mesopotamia in 638-639, and Egypt fell to an Arab army in 640. The motives behind this expansion were not entirely religious. Some Muslims regarded the conquests as a jihad, or holy war, and believed that they could attain paradise through death on the battlefield. Not all of the conquerors were religious, however, and some were not even Muslim. For such men, the Arabic tradition of raiding and the hope of booty would have been reason enough. Because Islam prohibits war against fellow Muslims, the raiding impulse tended to be directed outward, at least in the early years when the memory of the Prophet was still fresh.

The terrifying speed of the Arab conquests was in part a measure of Byzantine weakness. The emperor Heraclius (c. 575-641) had been engaged from 603 to 628 in a bitter struggle with the Persian Empire during which parts of Syria and Palestine had been ruined or occupied. At the same time he was forced to deal with Lombard attacks on Byzantine Italy, increased activity among the Slavs on the Danube border, and incursions by Berber tribesmen against the settlements in North Africa. Heraclius was an able general--the first emperor to take the field in person since the days of Theodosius--but a war on four fronts was more than the resources of his empire could bear.

Without adequate manpower in Syria and Palestine, the Byzantines resorted to a mobile defense-in-depth conducted in part by Arab mercenaries. That is, they tried to draw the enemy into the interior, disrupting his communications and defeating his smaller contingents in detail. The size and speed of the Muslim attack coupled with an almost complete lack of intelligence about Arab intentions rendered this strategy futile. The Muslims overwhelmed their Byzantine opponents and then consolidated their victory with mass conversions in the conquered territories. By 640 they had seized Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, often without encountering significant local resistance. Many of the empire's subjects disliked both its taxes and its insistence upon religious orthodoxy and were unprepared to exert themselves in its defense.

The Sassanid Empire of Persia proved a more difficult target, but it, too, had been weakened by its long war with Byzantium. Attacked by several Arab contingents from Mesopotamia, the Persians maintained a heroic struggle until their last armies were overwhelmed in 651. In only twenty years, Islam had conquered everything from the Nile to Afghanistan. . .

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