Heraclius, exhausted by two decades of warfare, took command behind the lines as the Arabs besieged Roman Damascus, negotiating its surrender just as the caliph died and was replaced by Omar. Hulking and indomitable, a wrestler in his youth, Omar, who wore plain robes and brandished a whip, started to compile the Quran and Hadith of the Prophet. An austere and prudish man, he devised restrictions on women never mentioned by Muhammad, and had his own son thrashed to death for corruption. He loathed the freebooting swagger of Khalid, whom he recalled to Mecca. ‘Take your booty out of your arsehole!’ he growled. Khalid surrendered his treasure and was dispatched back to Syria.
Heraclius ordered his brother Theodoros to stop the Arabs. At Yarmuk, south of Golan, the two evenly matched armies faced each other. The cannibal poetess of Arabia, Hind, was there to encourage her two sons, crying, ‘Go on! Prune the Foreskinned Ones with your swords!’
Khalid told his men, ‘This is one of God’s battles!’ His cavalry trapped the Romans between rocks and rivers, then cut them up, aided by the defection of their Christian Arab allies. Theodoros was killed.
Amid the booty, the Arabs received another gift from the Romans: plague. Yazid, first governor of Syria, died of it, handing over Damascus to his brother Muawiya. The cities of Homs, Tyre and Caesarea negotiated their surrender in return for promises of freedom of Christian worship and payment of
Omar sent Khalid raiding into Persia where Shah Yazdgard struggled to resist as the Arabs galloped right up to the wall of Ctesiphon–Seleucia, that complex of canals and palaces, the fruit of centuries of civilization, that the raiders called the Cities. When Yazdgard mobilized his army with its colossal tiger banner, his armoured steeds and elephants, he drove off one Arab army, but in 636, at Qadisiyya and then Jalula, his forces were defeated. The Arabs besieged Yazdgard in the Cities until their fall was imminent, whereupon he fled eastwards, leaving the Bedouin to enjoy their astonishing good fortune. They prayed in the splendid
In 638, Arab armies converged on Jerusalem with its special eschatological aura that Muhammad had often cited: ‘The Hour has drawn nigh!’ and it would take place in Jerusalem. The patriarch of the Holy City refused to surrender to anyone but the Commander, so Omar rode up on a mule and negotiated the covenant, witnessed by Muawiya, that protected Christian worship. Then Omar entered the city, walking up to the Temple Mount where, shown the location of the Jewish Temple by a Jewish Believer, he prayed, setting up an open-air mosque. But after hearing that Khalid had enjoyed a wine-soaked bathhouse orgy where poets had sung of his exploits, he sacked the Sword of Islam.
When Omar returned to Mecca, he left Muhammad’s brother-in-law and secretary Muawiya in charge of Syria, where the population was overwhelmingly Christian.
Christian Arabs fought for the Muslims, as did Jews; and even Persian Zoroastrians were accepted in the form of a corps of cataphract cavalry. In Jerusalem, Jews were allowed to pray with Muslims at the mosque on the Temple Mount for many decades, while in Damascus Christians and Muslims prayed together in the Church of St John (today’s Umayyad Mosque). Monophysite and Nestorian Christians persecuted by Heraclius probably regarded the Arabs as uncouth ruffians but fellow monotheists.
In 640, Omar ordered Amr al-As to invade Egypt. When Alexandria fell, it marked the end of nine centuries of Graeco-Roman culture and three of Christianity. The Arabs then rode on westwards across north Africa. Some 150,000 Arabs had conquered much of west Asia, fanning out across the world.*
