Coins From Chaos
I’m taking a bird’s-eye view of the timeline of Syrian history and I’m getting the distinct picture of, might as well call it anarchy, from the taking of Antioch by the Arab army in 637 CE to the coming of the Ottomans in the 15th century. I’m reading the synopsis in the Wikipedia article, and I see 14 regimes duking it out over those eight centuries. I haven’t done a deeper analysis, but it looks like no part of Syria was without war for more than maybe 30 years at a time.
So what did the Arabs do after the death of the Prophet, Muhammad? The people closest to him sat around and talked about what to do. They had a hard time deciding, Muhammad had left no instructions, but they settled on Abu Bakr, who became the first caliph.
Abu Bakr completed the conquest of Arabia, begun by Muhammad, and began working on Persia, where the Byzantines had recently killed the last competent king of Sasanid Persia. Abu Bakr nominated another of Muhammad’s companions, Umar, to succeed him. The transition was smooth.
Umar had a talent for war and took the armies of Islam through Persia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt in a few years. Now what were they going to do? They had little to no experience in dealing with foreigners, let alone many foreigners. Fortunately for them, there were already bureaucracies and bureaucrats who knew how to run things, so they kept them on.
They did a bit of persecuting, like people did back then. They tolerated Christians, Jews and Persian Zoroastrians. This meant they could pay and stay where they lived, doing what they were doing mostly, but for followers of the various old religions we call “pagan” they gave the choice of
