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In the ninth century of the Common Era, a Christian apologist living and writing under Muslim rule in Iraq repeated a very old critique of Islam. ˁAmmr alBaṣr wrote that Islam, like the religion of the Ban Isrˀl (roughly the Sons of Israel), had been spread by the sword, whereas Christianity forbade the use of the sword as a means of promulgating the faith.1 However much we may doubt the assertion that late ancient and early medieval Christians scrupulously abstained from the use of the sword in spreading their religion, the Christian apologist clearly meant to suggest that Islam's history of faithdriven conquest had made moot any claims that Muslims may have advanced concerning the status of their religion as the one true religion of God upon the Earth.2

In tandem with its theological implications, this Christian author's critique of Islam's use of the sword also seems to have taken aim at the early Muslim community or umma's organizing historical narratives about the origins of the Islamic community itself. For Muslims of the era, the events of the conquest period were recalled as a series of monumental episodes that located contemporary Islam and its adherents within an overarching narrative of prophecy, revelation, and salvation.3 Although ˁAmmr alBaṣr was a Christian intellectual, he was intimately acquainted with the holy texts of the Muslimshe was one of a group of Christian scholars who are believed to have often met and studied with local Muslim religious scholarsand he clearly understood the place of the conquests in Muslim sacred history.4 Indeed, the Iraqi Christian author seems to have alluded directly to this early Muslim interpretation of the conquests when, using the Arabic term favored in Muslim histories, he wrote that Muslims of his age boasted about the gains made by their community with the sword during the futḥ (literally openings or conquests) of the lands taken by early Muslim armies.5

For the apologist's Muslim contemporaries, however, to focus on the sword as the primary symbol of the conquests of the lands of the Eastern Roman and Ssnid Persian empires was in many ways to miss the true significance of those conquests. The significance of the futḥ as depicted in the texts of most of our early Muslim sources was the profound reordering of the present world that they brought about. This global reordering was in turn occasioned by the changes effected in the hearts and minds of Muḥammad's followers and companions by the Prophet's message and mission.6

For these Muslims, the great imperial powers of late antiquity represented crucial landmarks within the cultural, political, and religious environment that was realigned and remade by Muḥammad's revelation.7 Perhaps paradoxically, however, the grandscale changes wrought through conquest were but traces left upon the landscape of the present world by the far more profound transformation that had taken place in the hearts of those who had embraced Muḥammad's message and mission. This otherwise invisible revolution of the spirit was, according to the contemporary Muslim narratives of Islam's birth and early growth, manifested in the character and behaviors of the men who carried Islam into the territories of the Romans and Persians.

By the time ˁAmmr alBaṣr produced his Kitb alburhn (The Book of Proof), the text in which he claimed that true religion forbids that the sword be taken up in its service, Muslim authors had for a century and more crafted histories of the conquest period in which the purified souls of Muslim Arab mujhidn (practitioners of jihd) were manifested in their interactions with Roman and Persian imperial agents. In these texts, poor and pious Muslim warriors confronted and bested the armies of the great powers of late antiquity. Intriguingly, however, the meaning that these battles carried within the larger narrative of the conquest period (and so within the evolving metanarrative of Islam's formative past) was signaled in small, quiet meetings between Muslim and Roman warriors just before their respective armies clashed on the field. In a topos common to most early Muslim accounts of the conquests, Muslim authors framed the landmark battles of the period by setting poor and pious Muslim Arab warriors in dialogue with agents of Roman and Persian imperial power. The point of these meetings was always to allow the Muslim heroes to hear and reject offers of imperial beneficence, gifts, and friendship from the Romans and Persians they met.8

In so refusing, these early Muslim heroes were understood by later Muslims to have subverted, disrupted, and reinvented the place of the Arabs within the late ancient political world, and to have done so by means of a revolution fought and won in the hearts of Muḥammad's followers long before they appeared, swords in hand, on the horizon of Syria or Mesopotamia. Moreover, the narratives in which these claims were advanced seem to have taken the form that they did in part as a result of the centurieslong relationships between Rome and her Arab clients, allies, and enemies. This becomes apparent, however, only when we read later Roman and early Muslim sources in tandem, a strategy that has not yet gained wide currency among scholars of late antiquity and early Islam.9

Proceeding in this way, it becomes clear that many accounts preserved in later Roman histories concerning imperial relations with nomadic tribesmen in general and the Arabs in particular specify a fixed array of diplomatic tactics and strategies to be used in dealing with fractious frontier warriors. When we in turn survey the extant early Islamic Arabic accounts of relations between Arab tribesmen and Roman imperial officials during the first days of the conquests, these specific tactics and strategies emerge as crucial elements within the dominant early Muslim narrative of the conquests, the advent of Islam as a community of God, and the establishment of an Islamic empire.

This approach to the early Islamic past represents a departure from a longestablished scholarly tradition whose adherents have frequently found themselves frustrated in their aims. Formerly, the primary goal of most researchers was to determine how closely individual manifestations of early Islamic memory coincided with demonstrable historical fact. In so doing, these historians took it as their primary task to determine the value of various literary texts as documentary sources for the formulation of a narrative of early Islamic history as it really was. Worthy though this pursuit may have been, it most often proved to be a project of diminishing returns for historians; the greater the scrutiny to which early Muslim texts were subjected, the less dependably factual information they tended to yield. By the 1970s and 1980s, some researchers had begun to despair of ever developing a satisfying portrait of the first centuries after the hijra (the seventh and eighth centuries c.e.), while others, although rather more optimistic, had nevertheless to admit that the challenges they faced in producing empiricist recollections of early Islamic history were indeed grave, if not absolutely intractable.10

A change is under way, however. Increasing awareness among Islamic specialists of the work of theorists in other fields has begun to profitably shift the focus of much research on early Islam. One particularly fertile strain of this research suggests that appreciating the development and character of the early Islamic umma's origin narratives is crucial not only for understanding the imaginative bases for early Muslim identities, but also for tracing with greater nuance certain key political and cultural developments within the medieval Muslim community. The foundational work of Fred Donner on the formation of early Islamic communal narratives, for example, explores the evolution of these narratives from scattered oral histories and tribal battle accounts into highly elaborated written histories, and argues that it was in articulating these histories that the monotheistic Arab community of believers collected around Muḥammad's personality and prophecy defined itself as the Muslim umma known to history.11

While Donner's work has proved invaluable for foregrounding the importance of narrative as a component of early Islamic history, beyond the field of Islamic history such scholars as Margaret Somers, Jerome Bruner, Francesca Polleta, Paul Ricoeur, and Hayden White have articulated a highly stimulating set of theoretical positions regarding the role of narrative in the hermeneutic processes whereby human subjects negotiate such problems as individual and communal identity, political decisionmaking, and cultural patterning.12 In turn, this body of research often coincides very usefully with current examinations of the roles of remembrance, memory production, and commemoration in the articulation of communal identities, whether these are national, ethnic, political, confessional, or some combination thereof.13 Although they differ in their objects of study, methodologies, and conclusions, most examples of this literature necessarily attend to the problem of narrative and narration.14 For many narratologists, this connection between memory and narrative can be explained by one simple but compelling argument: these scholars contend that the capacity of any human subject to imagine any past (or present or future) depends upon the arrangement of that past into either discrete but comprehensible episodes or a themedriven story arranged into a plot, which in turn lends cohesive meaning to the characters and events from which that story is constructed.15

Many of these studies suggest that it is through memoryconceived of as an everevolving and socially constructed constellation of recollected episodes, characters, themes, truth claims, and plots, all inflected with meaning via the hermeneutic power of narrativethat individuals tend to locate themselves within specific social, political, and cultural matrices.16 That is, it is by understanding one's community and communal self as actors in a procession of past episodesall of them impregnated with specific and often even metaphysical meaning, and all of them culminating in the contemporary social and political orderthat one can come to understand as innate not only the legal, social, and political boundaries that give shape to the known world, but also the normative relations between individuals and communities mandated by those boundaries.17

For historians of early Islam, the application of these insights can bring new life and new possibilities to very old and muchworried problems. In particular, attention to the question of early Islamic communal memory, specifically the forms that it took and the resources with which it was articulated, has the potential to dramatically elucidate the cultural, political, and social circumstances in which early Muslims thought and wrote. In better understanding these circumstances, it may then be possible to better understand how and why the early Muslim community came to define itself in the ways that it did, and why its members fashioned themselves and their empire as they did. Once we can more readily comprehend these matters, it becomes possible to more effectively address many of the underlying questions that have so motivated empirically minded Islam scholars over the past centuries. In a move that would likely have surprised those scholars, however, we will begin by asking what certain preIslamic Roman sources can tell us about the ways in which the early Muslim community recalled its past.

Our Roman sources for the events of the conquests frequently leave much to be desired.18 In composite, they often allow us to say with surety only that one day soon after the final Roman defeat of the Persian Ssnid shah, Roman imperial officials looked out across the great expanses of the Syrian steppe and watched the approach of mounted Arab warriors. From Roman texts of a slightly earlier era, we know that they and generations of their predecessors on Rome's eastern frontiers had seen this many times before. For the Roman soldiers and administrators responsible for the maintenance of order on the eastern deserts, bands of nomadic warriors had come to represent both a persistent dilemma and a vital resource.19 For centuries, the Arab clients of the two empires had served as dreaded light infantry, whose raids across those empires' frontiers represented a crucial component of each army's tactical array. Through the fifth and sixth centuries, powerful Arab tribal confederations had become each empire's first line of defense against nomadic raids and largescale invasions.20

As they watched the Arab bands ride toward them, these Roman soldiers and officials would have had at their disposal an old and welltested diplomatic strategy for handling troublesome Arab tribesmen. Whether they faced small but threatening bands of Arab raiders or found themselves in need of the support of large tribal confederations, the Romans' diplomatic strategies with regard to the Arabs were regularly predicated upon strategic exchanges of capital in the forms of gifts, honors, and titles.21 It was through such exchanges that they built ties of obligation with their nomadic allies, or bought off troublesome war bands intent on raiding Roman settlements or caravan routes. Wars with nomads were profitless and exceedingly difficult, and nomads, as every Roman knew, were unsuited for inclusion in the ordering bounds of Roman imperium.22 Accordingly, the strategies with which the Romans handled Arab tribesmen reflected quite closely the policies with which they dealt with other nomadic peoples, most notably the Huns.23

Indeed, it was because nomadic Arabs were, in Roman eyes, roving, rootless barbarians who could not be civilized, and whose desert domains were inhospitable to romanitas (roughly Romanness) and the imperial Roman civilized ideal of humanitas, that strategies of gift exchange were ideally suited to the pursuance of Rome's imperial agenda on the eastern frontier.24 Through exchanges of gifts, Arab tribesmen could be bound to the Roman (or Persian) Empire in a way that could not be achieved via Rome's other, preferred methods of inciting consensus and compliance. The Arabs of the desert seemed to have no need of access to Roman law, for example; nor would those Arabs who dwelled in the border spaces between empires have had much occasion to interact with the Roman state on the basis of a shared culture, encounters with officialdom, or public performances of romanitas of the sort that linked settled and urbanized Roman provincials to the centralized government.25 Meanwhile, direct coercion of the Arabs who resided in the borderlands that stretched between the two empires was particularly tricky for the Romans, because if pressured, the Arabs could ally with their Persian enemies, turn their fighting prowess back on their former masters, or simply fade away into the desert, where the settled peoples dared not follow.26 Despite these difficulties, however, throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, the Arabs were increasingly crucial to the defense of the Romans' eastern domains.27

The strategies favored by the Romans in their dealings with the Arab tribes emerge from our sources in scattered anecdotes. In the Roman author Procopius's sixthcentury history of the emperor Justinian's wars, for example, we read of an exchange of gifts that took place between Justinian (ca. 482565) and a band of Syrian nomads. The exchange began when a particularly formidable group of nomads gave the emperor a grove of palm trees, to which the emperor responded with a gift of his own. As Procopius points out, however, the palm grove given to Justinian was the mere form of a gift: it was inaccessible to anyone but the nomads themselves because of its desert location. What Justinian had really received, Procopius says, was the allegiance of the nomads against the enemies of the empire.28

Elsewhere we learn that Justinian made a practice of bestowing gifts even upon the Arab allies of Persia during a period of peace between the two empires. He did so, we are told, because he felt sorry for the leaderless desert nomads, and so entered into an exchange of gifts with them. When his nephew and successor Justin II (d. 578) ended the practice, however, the Arabs protested that from their point of view, Justinian's gifts had been a sort of payoff to buy their forbearance from the raiding of Roman lands. The Romans took strenuous objection to this, insisting that the relationship had been an exchange between the emperor and the Arabs based on altruistic benevolence on Justinian's part.29 In any case, the Romans and Persians tended to agree that one could not expect much from nomads in the way of loyalty.30 Nevertheless, Justinian and his predecessors seem to have given frequently and liberally in their exchanges with nomads, particularly Arabs.31

In addition to material items, the Romans and the Persians bestowed honors upon their Arab allies, and these seem to have become an important aspect of the prestige economy of preIslamic Arabs. Titles including King of the Arabs and such honors as the chance to take one's place among the great men of the Romans were bits of capital distributed to the Arab allies of both empires, and competition for them could be deadly. Moreover, the capital accrued from relations with the imperial powers was used by powerful tribal entities including the Ghassnids and Lakhmids as a means of consolidating and widening their influence within Arab tribal politics.32

Negotiations for such tokens of imperially granted capital could begin with attacks by the Arabs against the territories or interests of their imperial neighbors. In the fifth century, for example, an Arab warrior once allied with the Persians attacked some Roman territories, routed the Romans' Arab allies, kicked out the Roman tax collectors, and began collecting taxes himself. Then he sent the bishop of his tribe to negotiate with the Romans. In the end, the Arab chieftain went to the imperial capital, exchanged gifts with the emperor, and was allowed to sit among the great men of the Romans. It was this last honor that our Roman source for this incident, Malchus of Philadelphia, found most disturbing; that so great an honor should be paid to a barbarian was unheard of, he said, and was simply too much for the Roman people to bear.33 This may have been a bitter concession in the estimation of the elites of the Eastern Roman capital of Constantinople, but on the frontiers of the empire that it was the emperor's duty to defend, such exchanges of prized capital with formidable Arab chieftains were the one semidependable means of ensuring the compliance of restive and potentially dangerous Arab tribesmen.

And so as our seventhcentury Roman imperial officials watched the approach of those Arab raiders, they likely had in mind a plan for dealing with them, one crafted in accordance with a centuriesold mode of diplomatic comportment with regard to nomadic Arabs. If necessary, they would pay the Arabs off, and if possible, they would bind them to the service of the Roman imperial state through gifts of treasure and honor. Then, presumably, with the barbarians pacified and coopted, the world would go on as it had for the better part of a millennium.

Our Muslim sources for the conquest period are both more plentiful and in some ways more problematic than our Roman sources. Transmitted orally for unknown and invisible periods of years, and set down in writing more than a century after the events they describe, they speak to us through the use of persistent topoi and abstracted, stylized narratives.34 Those narratives tell us repeatedly that one day soon after the death of the Prophet, a band of Arab mujhidn, practitioners of jihd on the path of God, approached the Roman army in Syria. These warriors were mounted on horses and camels and dressed for riding. Some of them, we are told, wore their hair plaited like the horns of a goat. Many of them were all but naked; some of them carried only rudimentary weapons and wore no armor, while others bristled with weapons and sported coats of chain mail. They were members of a community that had cohered around the revelation of a Meccan merchant, that had endured persecution, and that had, in time, won control of Arabia. Now they had come to call the peoples of the areas outside of Arabia to embrace the revelation of their prophet.35

As recalled by their descendants more than a century later, these men were defined by their intransigence, their ascetic virtue, and their piety. They were taken as models for the fashioning of specifically Muslim selves by those descendants, and as the agents of God in the opening of the lands of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt to the Arab Muslim umma, the one true community of God upon the Earth.36 The lands they would conquer would become the imperial patrimony of those descendants, and the stories told about them would become the basis for a specifically Islamic imperial narrative, the story of the founding of God's final empire. It was the function of those stories to explain how the creation of that empire had been a manifestation of God's will and proof of the truth of Muḥammad's revelation.37 Over the space of centuries, the descendants of the ragged and ultimately victorious Muslim army that rode onto the field opposite the mighty Roman army would draw upon two modes of remembrance as they narrated the story of the conquests.

On the one hand, the Muslim authors of the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries often drew upon a lexicon of signs and symbols common to many late antique communities in order to craft portraits of their imagined forebears and their deeds.38 The figure of the Christian monk, for example, recurs frequently in very early Muslim texts as a model upon which the image of conquestera mujhidn is fashioned, just as the institution of Christian monasticism was evoked as one means of communicating the essential character of jihd.39

In concert with this late antique semiotic system, however, the narrative of Islam's advent and victory in the lands of Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia also drew upon the memory of relations between preIslamic Arabs and the great imperial powers of the late ancient world. In the early Muslim imaginary, relations with the Romans and Persians underscored the wretchedness of life in the preIslamic jhiliyya or time of ignorance.40 The evolving metanarrative of the advent and triumph of a distinctively Arab Islam in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries cast the dire conditions of life in Arabia during the jhiliyya in stark contrast to the enlightened and civilized condition of life within the Islamic empire. Implicit in this contrast were the effects of Muḥammad's revelation; the word of God had brought unity, piety, and order to the Arab communities of Arabia even before the conquests of the lands of Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia.41

In another sense, however, the empire built by those conquests was in many ways the geographical home of the postjhiliyya Islamic world. Arabia remained a powerful imaginative space in the lives of early Muslims, but the vast new Arabruled domain in the lands outside Arabia was the true fruit of Muḥammad's revelation and mission; it was here that the consequences of his revelation were manifested in the formation of new, specifically Muslim communities, and in Muslim control of ancient cities and populations that long bore the splendid markings of their former imperial masters.42 The figures of the great imperial powers of late antiquity would be crucial resources as Muslim authors sought to trace the trajectory of these changes.

It seems clear from what nonMuslim sources we possess for the seventhcentury conquests that at first the Romans had little idea what to make of the Muslims. For example, the Doctrina Jacobi, an antiJewish seventhcentury text, draws upon the borrowed gaze of the Jews, long believed to possess arcane, numinous knowledge, to interpret the new prophet who had appeared among the Arabs in accordance with certain Christian apocalyptic expectations concerning the Jews.43 Indeed, as Robert Hoyland has suggested, the Jews provided seventhcentury Christian communities with a familiar paradigm of alterity as they attempted to make sense of the Muslims.44 Eventually, Muslim, Syrian, Armenian, and Greek authors would all come to differing versions of the same explanation for the advent of the Muslims; they were an army of God sent to punish the proud and arrogant imperial powers of the age.45

At the time of the conquests themselves, however, the Romans would have had no reason to understand the Muslim bands they encountered as anything other than yet more Arab raiders, or at best a new Arab tribal confederation to be coopted into imperial service. Indeed, even the Byzantine historian Nikephoros, writing almost two centuries after the events he describes, still referred to the Muslim leader ˁAmr b. alˁṣ as a phylarch, the title traditionally applied to tribal leaders taken into Roman service, as he described attempts to coopt ˁAmr with gifts and bribes.46 It would seem that for the Romans of the seventh, eighth, and early ninth centuries, the weight of long centuries of diplomatic and ethnographic tradition regarding Arab tribesmen produced a kind of hermeneutic inertia that carried through the beginnings of the conquest period.47

The earliest Muslim accounts we possess of the conquest period also seem to suggest that as Roman imperial agents encountered the first Muslim expeditions, they interpreted the encounters through the prism of imperial memory. In timetested fashion, the Roman officials pictured in these accounts consistently attempted to initiate gift exchanges with the Arabs as a means of winning their compliance with the Roman imperial order. Such scenes as we find them in the works of second/eighth and third/ninthcentury Muslim authors are not examples of factual reportage in any strict sense, however; instead they are occurrences of a common topos employed to frame subsequent scenes of military gallantry.

The great historian of Muslim historiography Albrecht Noth identified such scenes as a rather insignificant component of what he termed the Summons to Islam or daˁwa topos, in which Muslims summon nonMuslims to Islam as a prelude to battle.48 Noth further argued that the summons of enemies to Islam before engaging them in battle was likely of little importance by the time of the Muslim campaigns outside Arabia; accordingly, scenes featuring this topos are likely fictional.49 For our purposes, however, the operative question is not whether such scenes are empirically factual, but rather why Muslim scholars so consistently included them in their renditions of the futḥ. A subsidiary question is why these scholars chose to craft iterations of this topos in the specific way they didthat is, why do the scenes structured around this topos look as they do and not some other way?

The recurrence of such topoi is significant because it was through the use of these hermeneutic guideposts that the conquest period became comprehensible not simply as a time of military conquest, but more importantly as a period during which the changes wrought in the souls of Muḥammad's followers brought about a momentous transformation of the present world.50 Moreover, the specific forms that this topos took in the texts of early Muslim authors seem to reflect not arbitrary editorial or authorial decisions made by those writers, but rather the lingering impression left by certain late Roman diplomatic strategies upon the imaginations of those who contributed the raw material from which early Muslim origin narratives were constituted.51

Typical of this topos are two passages from Muḥammad b. ˁAbd Allh alAzd alBaṣr's second/eighthcentury Taˀrkh futḥ alShm (History of the Conquest of Syria).52 In these passages, the conquestera heroes Khlid b. alWald and Muˁdh b. Jabal meet with Roman imperial officials on the eve of two battles during the conquest of Syria. Although the details of these scenes differ intriguingly, they share a common theme. In both cases, the Roman imperial officials attempt to seduce their Muslim counterparts into cooperation with the Roman imperial state by extending offers of gifts and honors. In his meeting with Khlid, for example, the Roman general Bhn professes great admiration for a red tannedleather tent purchased by Khlid before their meeting, and offers to trade anything that Khlid might desire for it. Rather than accept anything in return for the tent, however, Khlid simply gives it to Bhn, explaining that he wants nothing from the Romans.53

In the story of Muˁdh's meeting with the Romans, Muˁdh, too, rejects an offer of material gifts in return for his cooperation, but not before he similarly turns down what is presented in the text as a profoundly attractive offer on the part of the Romans. Upon arriving in the Roman camp, Muˁdh is informed that he has been accorded a great honorhe is to be allowed to attend a gathering of prominent Romans. This, he is assured, will be ennobling for him. There is a catch, however. The Romans explain that the Arab may not sit with his interlocutors; he must stand in the presence of the great men of the Romans. Predictably, Muˁdh refuses to do so, explaining that the prophet of his community has forbidden his followers to stand in honor of any creature. Accordingly, he sits in the presence of the Romans. Notably, Muˁdh also refuses to have anything to do with the effete finery of the Roman nobles, their carpets and cushions, and so he takes his seat on the ground (God's carpet, as he calls it), holding the reins of his horse.54

Repetitions of these topoi, situated in tales of various conquestera battles against both the Romans and the Persians, are to be found in many early Muslim accounts of the futḥ, including those of Ibn ˁAbd alḥakam (d. 871), Ibn Aˁtham (d. 926), and alṬabar (d. 923). In Ibn ˁAbd alḥakam's history of the Muslim conquest of Egypt, for example, ˁAmr b. alˁṣ, whom we encountered above described by the Roman historian Nikephoros as an Arab phylarch, also refuses Roman overtures toward a negotiated, exchangebased settlement, and does so very much in the style of alAzd's Khlid b. Wald and Muˁdh b. Jabal. One remarkable feature of Ibn ˁAbd alḥakam's iteration of this topos follows ˁAmr's initial refusal, however, and seems to underscore its significance. After turning down an offer of negotiated settlement from the Alexandrian bishop Muqawqis, who is acting as the representative of Roman power on the scene, ˁAmr sends one of his men, the blackskinned ˁUbda b. alṣmit, to speak with Muqawqis once more. When ˁUbda appears before him, however, Muqawqis screeches, Save me from this black! Send someone other than him to negotiate with me! ˁUbda's companions promptly explain to the official that ˁUbda is the most accomplished Muslim among them, and is accordingly the most fitting representative of their community.55 The central point of the conquest narratives we have encountered thus far seems dramatically underscored here: the consequences of Muḥammad's revelation have upended the arrangements of power taken for granted by Roman imperial officials, whether these manifested themselves in economies of power and wealth or in hierarchies of human taxonomy or physiognomy.56

There were other ways of making much the same point. In Ibn Aˁtham's epic compilation of early Muslim conquest accounts, a Muslim warrior named alMughra b. Shuˁba punctuates his refusal to accept gifts and friendship from the Persian shah Yazdgird III by dropping heavily into the King of Kings' throne. AlMughra was a huge man and he tipped the throne until Yazdgird was about to tumble from his throne, Ibn Aˁtham wrote. AlMughra ended up on the center of the throne and Yazdgird landed on the left side of it. And Yazdgird was displeased by this. However slapstick the tone of this episode, its point is a familiar one: Muḥammad's revelation has overturned the old economy of imperial power, and even at the court of the Persian shah, the terrors and enticements of that economy no longer touch the hearts of Muḥammad's followers.57

Other early Muslim texts repeat a number of stories that are best understood as variants of those we have examined above. As they appear in the texts of early Muslim authors, these stories vary in their cast; Khlid turns up frequently in them, as do Ab ˁUbayda and other prominent conquestera Muslims. The Roman Bhn is a frequently recurring character as well, but the imperial official in question can also be an anonymous Roman soldier or diplomat, the Persian general Rustam, or, as we have seen, even the last Ssnid shah, Yazdgird III.58 What is constant, however, and what serves as the defining act of such episodes, is the refusal of the Muslim mujhid in question to enter into any kind of agreement with the imperial officials, and in particular his refusal to accept their gifts, whether these are offered in material form or as bits of the kind of social and political capital that Muˁdh b. Jabal turned down when he declined the honor of joining the council of the Romans.

The texts in which Muˁdh, alMughra, and their fellow mujhidn refuse such honors invariably go on to describe monumental conquestera battles such as those that took place at alYarmk and alQdisiyya. The descriptions of these battles as they appear in early Muslim futḥ accounts are showcases for martial heroics of the sort we often find celebrated in preIslamic ayym alˁArab or battle days poetry.59 As Lawrence Conrad has illustrated in the case of alAzd, moreover, such accounts could also contain elements gleaned from jealously cultivated tribal histories.60 However, these episodes of Bedouin gallantry become comprehensible as episodes within a specifically Muslim narrative of the futḥ era only when they are read in tandem with scenes like those sampled above, in which poor and pious Muslim warriors, men such as Muˁdh and Khlid, stand intransigently before representatives of the late ancient imperial powers and refuse to accept the enticements of this world held out to them by Roman and Persian imperial agents. These are not simply refusals of the gifts and honors offered by the Roman and Persian imperial officials; rather, they should be understood as repudiations of the system through which the empires of late antiquity had long bound Arab tribesmen to themselves and to their imperial agendas. This rejection was in turn to be understood as the result of such men's submission to Islam and the disdain for the present world that this submission inspired.61

In composing such histories, early Muslim authors consistently allude to a common pool of knowledge concerning the diplomatic tactics of late ancient imperial officials, tactics that did their work at the level of the imperial subjects' desires, ambitions, and fears. The precise provenance of this knowledge is difficult to know; as with most questions about the memories of the preIslamic world one encounters in early Muslim texts, there is no way of tracing satisfactorily the origins of this body of knowledge.62 Nevertheless, it corresponds remarkably well with what one reads in Roman texts produced over the space of centuries describing relations between the empire and its Arab clients.

Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the sense that later Roman imperial officials would have readily recognized their own diplomatic tactics in the portraits that our Muslim authors crafted of them. Think, for example, of the second/eighthcentury Muslim author alAzd's story of the Roman general Bhn's professed desire for Khlid b. alWald's leather tent, and his offer to trade anything the Arab might want for it, and then of the Roman author Procopius's story of the inaccessible palm grove accepted by Justinian from the Arabs of Syria. The palm grove was presumably as valueless to Justinian as the tent would have been to Bhn, except that both items would have initiated a process of gift exchange through which frontier Arabs would have been bound to a Roman imperial patron. AlAzd, like Procopius, seems to have understood very well the point of such exchanges, and to have taken this tenet of Roman imperial practice in service of his own narrative.

Consider also the story cited above of the Arab chieftain who was called to Constantinople and allowed to sit among the great men of the Romans as one means of seducing him into the service of the empire. As we have noted, the Roman author of this text seems to offer testimony to the significance of the capital that such meetings represented through the vehemence with which he condemns the emperor's decision to allow a barbarian such an honor. When we read this text in tandem with alAzd's story of Muˁdh b. Jabal's meeting with the council of Roman nobles and what that meeting was assumed to represent to such a man as Muˁdh, it would seem that alAzd, writing in the eighth century but presumably working with much older sources, understood quite well the role that such meetings played in Roman diplomatic practice with troublesome Arabs.63

Nor does it seem a mere coincidence that in the context of Muslim accounts of meetings between Roman and Persian officials and Muslim warriors, the imperial officials are often made to refer in concise and rather accurate ways to the history of relations between the Romans and the Arab peoples.64 In the Roman general Bhn's conference with Khlid b. alWald as it appears in alAzd's history, for example, Bhn makes reference to the long history of what he styles as traditional Roman generosity to the Arabs. He recalls, for example, that the Romans long had Arab neighbors whom they allowed to settle in Roman territory and with whom they scrupulously maintained their treaty obligations and kept faith in all things. He then expresses dismay that any Arab would attack the Roman Empirehe would have thought, he explains, that the empire's kindness to its Arab neighbors would incite the admiration and loyalty even of those Arabs who are not our neighbors.65

The Romans did indeed enjoy long and valuable relations with Arab tribes and tribal confederations. In the version of Bhn and Khlid's dialogue that he includes in his own history of the conquests, for example, Ibn Aˁtham identifies the Arabs to whom Bhn refers here as the tribal confederation of Ghassn, which was to become the Roman Empire's counter to the Persian Arab ally the Lakhmid confederation.66 To understand the true significance of Bhn's reference to these relationships, however, it is necessary to understand that reference within the context of Bhn's meeting with Khlid, and within the history of Rome's relationship with the Arabs as it was recalled within the evolving Islamic metanarrative in accordance with which alAzd shaped his history. In alAzd's text, Bhn's narrative of the history of RomanArab relations is situated within a larger and multifaceted campaign undertaken by Bhn to draw Khlid into cooperation with the Romans, and at each turn this campaign hinges upon offers of gifts and friendship. Khlid is not fooled, however, and while acknowledging the past benefactions of the Romans with regard to their Arab neighbors, he observes that this was all done to benefit the Roman Empire and to further its worldly aims. For, he asks, did you not think a third of them or half of the Arabs would take up with you in your religion and they would fight with you?67

From the third/ninthcentury Muslim author Ibn Hishm's collection of preIslamic Arabian tribal lore, we get a vivid illustration of the way in which early Muslims would likely have understood the sort of imperial clientage to which Khlid is invited in alAzd's text. According to Ibn Hishm (d. 834), whose work depended upon much earlier sources, the relationship between the mighty Arab tribal group called Ghassn and Rome began with Ghassn's desire to escape hard living and conflict, and to live in peace and quiet in the lands of Caesar. To this end, they convinced the Roman client tribe of Salḥ to vouch for them with the emperor. They were accepted, and took up residence in Syria as neighbors with Salḥ in a most beautiful area.68

Soon, however, Ghassn learned that residence in Roman lands meant paying Roman taxes. This revelation came during the visit of an imperial tax collector to their new home area. He is recalled as a man who was hard on Ghassn and hard to bear, a strutting and abrasive man whose manner was peremptory and whose methods were crude.69 He is described as making his way among the proud Ghassnid warriors, demanding one dnr from each of them. Finally he came to one elderly man who explained that he did not have the required tax, but offered his sword as a hostage until he could come up with the money. The tax collector responded to this offer by suggesting that the old man perform with his sword what would have been an uncomfortable and unhygienic act. When the man's fellow tribesmen explained to him what the Roman had said, the old warrior struck the Roman official on the head with this sword, drawing blood.70

War with the Romans ensued. The central tragedy of this conflict, as it is described in Ibn Hishm's text, was that it pitted two kindred Arab peoples against one another. Ordered into the field against Ghassn by their Roman imperial masters, the people of Salḥ lamented, We are betraying our brothers and they have sought asylum with us, and we see only good in them. A comment attributed to one of the men of Salḥ captures the dilemma that he and his tribesmen faced. You are between two paths, he said. On the one hand is Caesar, and on the other is Ghassn. So let your bodies be with Caesar, but let your hearts be with Ghassn. Accordingly, Arab unwillingly fought Arab on Rome's behalf. In the ensuing battle, the skulls of those slain by Ghassn were said to litter the ground like so many ostrich eggs.71

This, in the opinion of our early Muslim sources, was one cost of accepting Roman beneficence. But there were also other, more profound prices to be paid for the acceptance of Roman and Persian imperial largess. To accept the gifts of the Romans or Persians had been to submit to the terrestrial order for which those two empires were universally legible emblems. This, at least, was the contention set forth in the texts of many early Muslim authors, and it was hardly a suggestion with which the Romans would have disagreed. Indeed, the diplomatic strategies deployed by the Roman Empire with regard to the nomadic peoples on its frontiers, and particularly the Arabs, had, by the seventh century, long depended upon rituals of gift exchange as a means of domesticating threatening nomadic groups and binding them to the imperial agenda of the Roman state. The Roman relationship with Ghassn, for example, was recalled by the Romans to have been cemented by means of the bestowal of the title King of the Arabs by Justinian upon one ḥrith, a Ghassnid chieftain.72 From the point of view of early Muslim authors, however, Arabs who entered into such exchanges made themselves subject to the will of the great imperial powers of late antiquity, often to their great peril.

An incident described in Ab lFaraj alIṣfahn's third/ninthcentury Kitb alaghn (Book of Songs) provides an intriguing illustration. Among the figures we know to have been involved in preIslamic political relations between the Arabs and the imperial powers of late antiquity is ˁAd b. Zayd, a Christian poet and ambassador native to the Arab cultural center of alḥra. Ab lFaraj's Kitb alaghn contains an account of the effort of the Persian shah Kisr (presumably Hormizd IV, son of Khusraw I, who ruled from 579 to 590) to find a new King of the Arabs, a project in which he enlisted the aid of ˁAd b. Zayd.73

When the head of the Lakhmid tribal confederation, alMundhir IV, died around 580, he left behind a number of sons, all of whom seem to have been contenders for rulership among the Arabs of Kisr's realm. When the King of Kings' initial efforts to find a suitable successor to alMundhir failed, the shah turned to ˁAd b. Zayd and asked him, Who remains of the family of alMundhir? And is there any one of them with any good in him? ˁAd replied that there were several sons of alMundhir left, and that there was good in all of them. ˁAd then summoned the sons of alMundhir to meet with the shah, so that he might choose a new ruler of the Arabs in his domain.74

ˁAd now acted as a broker of both political power and cultural taste. He met with the candidates for power one by one, and instructed them in the proper mode of comportment for their meeting with the shah. He advised them to wear their most splendid garments when they met with the king, and to eat modestly in his presence. When asked if they could control the Arabs on the king's behalf, they should say yes, all except their own brothers.75

Finally, however, ˁAd met with a man named alNuˁmn and told him confidentially that he would support no other than him for sovereignty over the Arabs. Then ˁAd gave alNuˁmn very different advice from that which he had given alNuˁmn's kinsmen about their meeting with Kisr:

AlNuˁmn followed ˁAd's advice, and Kisr made him king, giving him a crown of gold bedecked with pearls. Later, however, ˁAd was imprisoned and killed when the patron of one of those whom he had deceived with his advice arranged a fallingout between the poet and the new king. The patron did so, significantly, by initiating a gift exchange with the king by which he eventually gained ascendance among the nobles of the realm. Finally, the vengeful patron incited the new king, alNuˁmnwho owed his position to ˁAd b. Zayd's loyalty and supportto put his benefactor to death.77

To be sure, interventions in imperial politics were always potentially perilous for the Arabs, and often involved great sacrifice. Think, for example, of the sadness with which the dilemma of Salḥ was recalled when its members were forced to fight against their Ghassnid brothers on Rome's behalf, and in the end to leave the skulls of many of their sons strewn gleaming and vulnerable in the dirt. Indeed, those Arabs who accepted the gifts and friendship of the Romans or the Persians would very likely find themselves, like Ghassn and Salḥ, set Arab against Arab in service of one or the other of the late ancient empires. Similarly, those whose souls coveted the power and prestige that the Romans or Persians held forth as enticements would find themselves pitted brother against brother like the sons of alMundhir, or crushed in the machinery of imperial politics like ˁAd b. Zayd, whose erstwhile client alNuˁmn would also eventually fall victim to ArabonArab rivalry and imperial caprice.78

Nor should we forget that in order to gain ascendancy over his brothers, alNuˁmn had been required to demean himself by playing the barbarous Arab before the Persian king, performing for Kisr in accordance with the shah's ethnographic expectations concerning the Arab. Nor again did this sort of humiliation end with alNuˁmn's ascendancy. Even after he became king, we are told that alNuˁmn was obliged to listen as Kisr described the Arabs as filthy, despicable, and barbarous.79 Kisr made this pronouncement before a gathering of Indian and Roman ambassadors; after praising the qualities of the nations of the other dignitaries, the King of Kings told his visitors, I see nothing good among the Arabs in matters of religion or the present world. The Arabs, he continued, were weak, shiftless, animallike, insignificant, incapable of hospitality, eaters of camel meatwhich even beasts of prey found loathsomeand given to killing their own children out of poverty.80

All of this allows us a detailed sense of what, for early Muslim authors, the rejection of Roman offers of friendship or Persian attempts at giftgiving betokened in the texts of alAzd, alṬabar, Ibn Aˁtham, and others. Such refusals subverted the humiliation, dependency, and weakness that the preIslamic Arabs endured before the power of the Roman and Persian empires. Acts such as giftgiving and exchanges of capital with imperial agents were, from the point of view of such authors, practices that supported the late antique structures of power that had so long subjugated and abased the Arabs. It was these structures, moreover, that Islam had come to overturn. Not only had Muḥammad's revelation undone the power elite in Arabia, it had also undone the imperial arrangements that gave contour to the operations of Roman and Persian power from one horizon to the other. Culturally and politically, the empires had exuded a deadly gravitational pull upon the lives and imaginations of those who resided on their peripheries. This dynamic functioned through the medium of gift exchange. From the point of view of early Muslim and late Roman authors, it was gift exchange that drew the Arabs into the embrace (and so the control) of the imperial powers.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has suggested that such exchanges are of particular utility when they are undertaken by individuals or institutions that have an agenda but lack the means to force the acceptance of that agenda from those whose cooperation it requires.81 In such cases, the exchange of gifts builds ties of obligation between giver and accepter, setting in place what Bourdieu calls a gentle violence through which actors with no means of physical coercion can induce cooperation with their agenda.82 In the case of the preIslamic Arabs, gifts bestowed by the imperial powers of late antiquity, whether in the form of material goods or the prestige associated with honors derived from imperial ceremonies or titles, became a highly valued form of capital among the Arabs themselves, and seem to have played an important role in Arab social and political hierarchies.

The effect of this exchange, however, was that those who accepted these gifts and those who gave them were bound through ties of obligation; the imperial powers took on a crucial role in Arab economies of prestige and power, and the Arabs themselves were accordingly bound to the imperial agendas of those entities through the double imperative of personal ambition and patronclient obligations. This did not always work to the advantage of the imperial powers; think, for example, of the Arab tribesmen who looked upon the gifts they took from the emperor Justinian as payoffs, while the Romans insisted that they had been part of an exchange between the emperor and the leaderless nomads of the desert. Despite this, however, it is clear from our Roman and Arab sources that these gift exchanges were the foundational element for RomanArab relations over the space of centuries, and that the point of these relations was that the Arabs should serve the agenda of their imperial masters.

In this sense, the hold the imperial entities enjoyed over their Arab clients was one that resided finally in the hearts of those Arab tribesmen; it did its work in the double register of worldly ambition and dependent clientage. It was through the bonds represented and preserved by the process of gift exchange that preIslamic Arabs had been bound to the history of the late ancient world. With the advent of Islam, however, the role of the Arabs in this world changed profoundly. Now, although they were still taken for Bedouin raiders by the agents of the imperial powers, the Arab Muslims in many ways mimicked and then supplanted the monotheistic Romans as the one community of God upon the Earth. The imperial arrogance that blinded the Romans to the true character of the Muslim Arabs became the shroud in which the old order was wrapped and then buried.

The token of this change in early Muslim narratives of the futḥ was the refusal of Arab warriors to extend their hands and accept from the Romans or the Persians the hollow honors and lying trinkets upon which the old economy of power had depended. Khlid could now give away his tent to the Roman general Bhn, but would take nothing in return; Muˁdh no longer saw anything to be desired from an audience with the great men of the Romans. In text after text, early Muslim authors narrated such refusals, always framing battlefield victories with such performed signals of the changes wrought by Muḥammad and his revelation in the invisible terrain of his followers' hearts. So narrated, it was the poor and pious Muslim warrior's refusal, and not his sword, that signaled for early Muslim authors and readers the significance and implications of Islam's emergence.