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Islam Enters Byzantine Territory
How Islam actually expanded says a lot about the complex process of religious
conversion and civilizational change. It also tells us something about the nature
of religious accommodation and coexistence; here, Samuel Huntington’s facile
term “bloody borders of Islam” is little more than a caricature of the complex
political and social interactions that took place.
After the earlier sagas of rebellion in Edessa and Palmyra against Byzantine
power, Damascus was next. Here, too, we already see the first impact of
dissenting religious groups facilitating the Muslim conquest of the city in 635
CE—the first major city to fall to Arab Muslim armies.
The city had actually fallen to the Persians some twenty years earlier, assisted
by the Jews and Monophysite Christians, who were unhappy with Byzantine
discrimination and taxation. The city was recaptured by the Byzantines, only to
fall again quickly, this time to the Muslim Arabs. The Arab conquest, too, was
facilitated by support from within the city by much the same dissident elements
of Nestorian and Monophysite Christians. Above all, Islam’s well-known
profession of the single, strictly human nature of Jesus could hardly have come
as any surprise to Christian populations already steeped in their own debates and
heresies over the nature of Jesus; Islam was just one more variation on the many
contending arguments. What mattered about Islam was not its theology, but its
political power and the type and character of rule to be imposed.
After much debate, the Arab commanders in charge of the siege were
persuaded that an offer to Damascus of peaceful surrender was strategically wise
if they wished to avoid fierce resistance from other Syrian cities in their advance.
Thus, after long confrontations between Arab and Byzantine forces, in 634 CE
the city finally agreed to surrender when promised by the Muslim commander
Khalid bin Walid that
when the Muslims enter, they [the people] shall have safety for
themselves, their property, their temples and the walls of their city, of
which nothing shall be destroyed. They have this guarantee on behalf of
Allah, the Messenger of Allah, the Caliph and the Muslims, from whom
they shall receive nothing but good so long as they pay the Jizya [poll
tax].
Jerusalem was next to fall to Arab forces in 638 CE. The city agreed to

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surrender if the caliph would personally guarantee its safety. The Caliph ‘Umar
then entered the city riding on a white camel, accompanied by the city’s
patriarch, with whom he signed an agreement guaranteeing the city’s safety and
preservation of Christian rights of worship. Arab sources reported that ‘Umar
helped clean out the abandoned Jewish Temple Mount and prayed there, later
ordering a mosque to be built in the southwest corner.

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