Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests.

AuthorShahid, Irfan

Kaegi's Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests is the first fundamental work on this subject to appear after Fred Donner's Early Islamic Conquests, and the two are related even in their titles. Kaegi's is more concentrated and focuses on the Byzantine profile of the early conquests, while Donner's deals with the conquest of Persia as well as the dismemberment of Oriens - the detachment of Bilad al-Sham (Syria from the Taurus to Sinai) and al-Jazira (Mesopotamia) from Byzantium. Both have become standard works on the early Arab conquests. Walter Kaegi had written extensively on related topics before he attempted writing what most scholars and probably he himself would consider his magnum opus - on, what is more, a major theme of world history. The Arab conquests in the seventh century changed the course of the Persian, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean world, and ushered in the middle period in the history of the Byzantine state. In view of the long period of gestation that antedated the writing of this work, it is possible to speak of the "nativity of a book." Walter Kaegi is a bona fide Byzantinist who is thoroughly at home with the early and middle periods in Byzantine history, a periodization made possible by these very conquests; hence, he can write professionally on their antecedents as well as their sequel. The conquests themselves need a trained military historian and such is the author, who paid special attention to res militaris when he lectured at the University of Chicago. Furthermore, he attended to strictly Byzantine military history with studies on the Strategicon, the most relevant Byzantine military manual for the Arab conquests, not to speak of articles on military history and a book titled Byzantine Military Unrest. Many other Byzantinists share with him his expertise in Byzantine history but few his knowledge of Arabic and Arabica, without which any discussion of the Arab conquests must necessarily be amateurish. The pioneers of Byzantino-arabica, A. Vasiliev and M. Canard, avoided the conquests, presumably because of the difficulties that attend their treatment. Leone Caetani, the distinguished Italian scholar, is the only one who treated the conquests extensively and intensively but he was an Orientalist who had only a modest knowledge of Byzantine history. Walter Kaegi is thus the first scholar to broach the theme after a long journey through both sets of sources, Byzantine and Arabic. He has reflected long on the problems that beset, even plague these sources, and has offered preludes to the work under review with a series of articles on related topics, based on the Arabic sources. Finally, he did not remain an armchair historian of the conquests; he visited the region, acquainted himself with its geography, and inspected the battlefields. Consequently, the book under review is a professional work by a true historian, who had studied all the dimensions of his subject before he permitted himself to write BEIC - a truly outstanding achievement and a substantial contribution to both Byzantine and Arabic studies.

Kaegi's comprehension of the multitude of problems that the Arab conquests raise is fully reflected in the range of topics treated, even in the titles of the chapters and the various section titles within each chapter. It is therefore necessary to go briefly through these chapters to do justice to the amplitude of the author's...

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