How did they do it?

how did they do it?

By being a finally united "nomadic" people. Nomads are fucking S tier warriors/expansionists OP. History shows this time and again. They're a non concern most of the time, because they're too busy fighting each other to focus on a singular goal, but every now and again, when the stars align, a person (or people) come along and whips everyone into shape, and whenever that happens shit has literal global consequences. See PIE, Huns, Arabs, and Mongols.

the byzantine and persian empires were weakened from years of war with eachother
and the islamic army was led by the very talented general khalid ibn walid

go ahead and add Turks to that list as well.

Did they really conquer anybody or just take over land? What was Persia like during these years? Surely North Africa was just tribal. Egypt wasn't much. I'm not impressed.

Egypt and the Maghrebi coast was controlled by the Byzantines.

>Did they really conquer anybody or just take over land?
The only people they fought and didn't conquer were the Byzantines and the Visigoths (by a thread).

>What was Persia like during these years?
Tired from war with Byzantium, but still very much a sophisticated civilization.

>Surely North Africa was just tribal
Uhhh, user you do realize that this was well after the conquests of Rome correct? North Africa was not devoid of cities, and was being run and sustained by the Byzantines. I think you ought to check your timelines, because the questions you're asking make it sound like you think this all happened in antiquity.

They effectively conquered 2 Empires: Most of the Roman Empire and the Persian one. How did they do it? Simple Rome and Persia had engaged in 300 year continual bitchfest since Constantine the Great Decided "Persia must be destroyed" he was right. This of course followed the 50 year bitchfest they had following Severus Alexander. The bitchfest reached such critical levels of bitchiness that by time all was said and done, Heraclius and Khosrau II had exhausted the majority of their soldiers (and pretty much all their skilled soldiers), so all the Arabs had to do was take out a few garrisons (Egypt for instance was unprotected because its defence was in Syria and Palestine) and then take out their remaining shell of an army. Once Rome and Persia were gone, those same resources were now used to take out the shitty "empires" and "kingdoms" that neighboured them.

Too add, it helped that the Arabs effectively were to the Eastern provinces, especially during the 5th and 6th centuries what the Germanics/Goths had been to the West: federated troops, with a good number of the eventual commanders owning property in Rome and having served in the military for either Rome or Persia

During the 6th and 7th centuries, the Eastern Roman Empire, North Africa, and Iran suffered a series of economic and demographic collapses not unlike the Western Roman Empire did earlier, and just like them a variety of nomadic groups began to settle the countryside while urbanization declined rapidly. This led to the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires relying on tribal auxiliaries and allies to fight in their wars and guard the frontiers. But they could never exert the same level of control over these tribes as they could with the city-states Rome and Persia had originally conquered centuries before. At best, they could only prop up a petty king among many and play them off against each other.

Enter the Hedjazi Arabs, a confederation of semi-nomadic tribes who solved Arabia's hatred for kings with religion, theoretically doing away with tribal jealousies and clannish ambitions by appealing to a supreme moral authority to arbitrate their disputes fairly and putting an end to internecine warfare in the peninsula. Only this now left all the fighting men without a war to fight. With the feuds now settled in court cases and the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires no longer fighting, groups of Arab raiders began to strike out into Iraq and Syria for loot and glory. After sending a fraction of the treasure to the new high court of the Arabs as tribute, the court agreed to support further raids by offering all those who pledged their obedience to the court a stipend, effectively turning the confederate tribal alliance into a centralized empire.

These soldiers were experienced, and rather than target the fortified towns of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt they swept through the countryside subjugating and uniting both Arab and non-Arab tribes under their command in ways the old empires never could. The cities were then rolled up fairly easily after that. Once a region was subjugated, those who could not find a stipend serving in the garrison of the area moved on, and on, and on.

Then how did the indians beat them back?

More or less the same reason everyone else began to beat the Umayyads back starting in the 8th century: they took over what had been the unifying figurehead of the confederacy and turned it into a dictatorship supported by a clique of tribes better established and enjoying most of the benefits of the initial conquests in Syria and northern Iraq. They began to rely on their own forces to police and conquer an already extensive empire as others began to form local power bases far from Syria and strike out on their own. They became the new Byzantine/Sassanian Empire, with all their old problems.

Arabs+desert = British+sea

The Arabs are the only people who can freely move across the desert and it let them attack with full force in cities and battlefields at the edge of the desert and use the desert like a sea. Combine this with the fact that the Arabian horse is the strongest and fastest horse in existence.

not really. First the Indian armies were huge. In BC,when Alexander invaded mainland kingddoms fielded armies of hundreds of thousands individually. Quantiy has its own quality.

Second, at that point in Indian history, three empires had subjugated petty kingdoms and ran a centralized state. So more unity.

Third, the Gurjara-Pratiharas themselves were expert desert cavalry warriors which blunted one adv of the arab desert armies

Last religious fervour but this time on the Indian side too. Both Chalukyas and Gurjara-pratiharas were hardcore Hindu empires and "defence of dharma" against barbarians played a huge role in morale

Allah was on their side

>how did they do it?
By being absolute Umayyadmen.

Interesting theory, but I am always skeptical of sociological explanations.

Why didn't the tribes unite in 400 AD? The idea of uniting to attack outsiders instead of fighting among yourselves isn't rocket science.

>How did they do it?

The Sassanids and Byzantines just finished up a 20+ year war that bled both sides dry. They were in no condition to fight another major war, so the Byzantines were beaten out of Egypt and the Levant, and held in Anatolia, while the Persians were completely conquered.

North Africa and Spain put up little to no resistance, the Muslim armies didn't come across any major armies that could challenge them on the field until the battle of Tours in central France.

What would eventually become the Caliphate was not so much about tribal unification, which did periodically happen and mostly led to some raiding that would end when the leader died, but rather subjugation of the settled Arabian tribes of the Arabian coasts.

This.

No one had the steam to put an end to their shenanigans.

Plus the religious oppression practiced by the Eastern Church against the various Oriental churches alienated places like Syria, Iraq etc. that the Christian population wasn't that aggrieved to see the back of Constantinople. Plenty were willing to pay jizya or convert.

this is possibly the worst post I've seen in Veeky Forums

they captured key points then declared wictory, same as isis did

its just they did this in a weird time when there was a sort of power vacuum in the mena area, so few people opposed them once they conquered a place

it would probably be interesting to see what arianism and the vandals had to do with it since they were the ast to rule most of north africa in the 300-400eds, how come those were exactly the regions where christianity was the strongest and most missionaries that christianised europe came from in the centuries before islam, and was a large part of it a sort of resistance against the bizantines

There used to be a few hundred bishops of Africa before the Vandals, then after the Byzantine reconquest there were only about 40 or 50. Add to that various harbors and irrigation fields silting up due to mismanagement and desertification, plus the advance of Berber kingdoms that pushed Roman urban culture to the coast, and the Arabs basically had to deal with other desert tribes more than anything else.