The Rise and Decline of the Muslim Civilization 15
the submission to Islam of almost all the townspeople, and des-
troyed all the idols in and around Mecca. His triumph was com-
plete, and the small Jewish and Christian communities of the
Hijaz, and Arabs from as far away as Bahrein, Oman, and Southern
Arabia recognized him as their overlord.1
His sudden death in 632 left the Muslim community in con-
fusion, since he left no son and had not designated a successor.
The very real danger of a breach between the diverse sections of
the community was averted by the selection of the venerable and
respected Abu Bakr as Khalifa (successor, hence our 'caliph') of
Mohammed in his secular capacity as ruler and lawgiver only, but
not in his spiritual role as prophet. In Abu Bakr's short reign of two
years the whole of Arabia was brought under the dominion of
Islam. Already in the lifetime of the Prophet the Muslim bands
had essayed a raid across the borders of the Byzantine Empire into
Southern Transjordan, but had met with a serious reverse. Now
however, under the second elected caliph 'Umar able commanders
led large raiding-parties into Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, and
met with astonishingly little effective resistance. What began as
raids for booty after the customary Arab fashion thus developed
imperceptibly into campaigns of permanent conquest. Muslim'1
historians attribute the great successes of their ancestors to the
inspiration of Islam but though it cannot be denied that the new
religion played an important part in providing a social bond which
held together for the time the fickle loyalties of the tribes, the main
factor in the Arab conquests was the feebleness of the forces that
opposed them. The Byzantine and Persian Empires were both ex-
hausted by a generation of warfare; the Semitic majority of the
inhabitants of Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia were more
nearly akin to the Arabs, in race and sympathies, than to their
Byzantine and Persian rulers, from whom they were further
estranged by generations of excessive taxation and bureaucratic
misrule; the Bani Ghassan, who should have taken the first shock
of the invasion of the Byzantine Empire, had been alienated be-
cause the Emperor Heraclius, his treasury emptied by his victorious
Persian expedition, had in 629 stopped his annual subsidy to them;
1 The Muslim tradition that the whole of Arabia was converted in the Pro-
phet* s lifetime, and that he addressed to the rulers of the great Empires to the
North demands that they also should accept Islam, is probably fabulous.
Effectively, his political control did not extend beyond the Hijaz. (Fr. Buhl, in
Encyclopaedia of Mdfri, Art. Murmmmads 653 ff.)