16 A Short History of the Middle East
in Egypt the Patriarch of Alexandria had attempted to impose
a doctrinal compromise on the Monophysite Copts by force,
and in his complementary role of civil governor had been
ruthless in the collection of taxes, with the result that the Coptic
Bishop of Alexandria ordered his coreligionaries not to resist the
Arabs. The only effective resistance to them came therefore from
such centres of Greek civilization as Alexandria, Caesarea, and
Jerusalem; and by 660, one generation after Mohammed's death,
his green banner was flying over an empire which extended from
Persia in the east, through the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Libya,
to Tunisia in the west. Of these the only country to offer a deter-
mined resistance was Persia, which had been the seat of an empire
with a thousand-year-old tradition of proud domination. It is this
period of conquering puritanism, of the very essence of Islam, and
not the great age of cosmopolitan culture that was to follow, which
Muslims themselves have always regarded as their Golden Age,
the age of the rightly-guided (Rashidun) caliphs.1
The task of improvising an administrative system for the vast
Arab empire was taken up in the main by the second caliph 'Umar.
Authority in the provinces was placed in the hands of the Arab
military commanders who had conquered them. Arab garrisons
were established in newly-created cantonments in each of the con-
quered countries, of which Fustat, by Old Cairo, and Basra in
Lower Iraq, are examples. In order to maintain their separate
identity from the conquered peoples the Arabs were not at first
allowed to acquire land outside Arabia. Civil administration was
left in the hands in which the Arab conquerors found it—Christians
of Greek education in the lands of the Roman Empire, and non-
Muslims of Persian education in the lands of the former Persian
Empire. It is doubtful whether Arabs, in the stricter racial sense,
have ever acquired any taste, or much aptitude, for such prosaic
occupations.
For the Muslim conquerors themselves the Qur'an, the com-
pilation of the divine revelations received by Mohammed through-
out his ministry, provided the rudiments of a civil and criminal
code of laws, as enunciated by him in the ten years in which he
governed the Muslim community at Madina. This was supple-
mented where necessary by reference to what Ms Companions
could remember of his day-to-day habits, his Sunna or custom;
1 Christopher Dawson, op. cit., 143.