How the f*ck did they do it Veeky Forums?

The Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassannid Empires had exhausted themselves through continuous warfare and the Muslims struck at this moment of weakness. It's blobbing at its finest.

Also, FUCK Copts. Their betrayal of the Empire in Egypt made it all the more easier.

The Byzantines let the land go way too easily I'll give them that, but to be fair a lot of that land was desert or coastal land, which is fairly easy to take over especially during a time when there was little governing power and the state of Europe and the Med is in a literal Dark Age.

Point being is, the Byzantines were the only contender, and once they were out of the way, the rest fell like Dominos.

You are just describing the specifics of Allah's work

In fact, you have proven that this was Allah and not the military genius of the Caliphs. :^)

Go stick your occasionalism up your ass Al-Ghazali.

Not necessarily agreeing with the guy, but the ability to read is super important for learning, say, how people generally thought and fought in eras previous. It's not *absolutely* necessary, we got plenty of examples (particularly the one in question), but it's something that, y'know, it helps.

Oh shit, I was LARPing, did Al-Ghazali actually make that argument?

They had the Mandate of Heaven. It was Heaven's will that they should conquer as it was Heaven's will that they should fall.

1. Pretty decent armies
2. Diffusion of attractive new religion
3. Egyptian peoples much preferring rule of new Arab figures than far-away, disconnected Byzantines
4. System of rule in general better than most at the time
5. Grew rapidly in the wake of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires' skirmishing, both empires' militaries weak and couldn't oppose fresh new invaders
6. Got pretty huge, but keep in mind that it wasn't very centralized
7. Lasted about 100 years or so before fragmenting into various Islamic states

>Allah was with them
Beats me, I don't have his number. Maybe?

No, they were able to easily conquer because of how weak the Byzantine and Sassanid empires were after a 28 year war with each other. Unifying Arabia also tapped into a huge source of manpower.

Al-Ghazali launched a philosophical critique against Neoplatonic-influenced early Islamic philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. In response to the philosophers' claim that the created order is governed by secondary efficient causes (God being, as it were, the Primary and Final Cause in an ontological and logical sense), Ghazali argues that what we observe as regularity in nature based presumably upon some natural law is actually a kind of constant and continual regularity. There is no independent necessitation of change and becoming, other than what God has ordained. To posit an independent causality outside of God's knowledge and action is to deprive Him of true agency, and diminish his attribute of power. In his famous example, when fire and cotton are placed in contact, the cotton is burned not because of the heat of the fire, but through God's direct intervention.

other people haven't really capitalized on how huge the byzantine-sassanian war was, it crippled both states to the point of where they couldn't put up any real resistance.

>but the ability to read is super important for learning

Today, sure. In a society where most people are illiterate? Not so much. They had this thing called "an oral tradition", turns out you can learn just by hearing someone say stuff, crazy I know.

They did what the Romans did - developed a well oiled political machine better able to unite and manage the new cultural, ethnic, and diplomatic landscape that the old order couldn't.

The world that Rome dominated, where city-state elites were in constant contact and alliance and could subjugate the more wild countryside, was nearly gone by the 4th century. It was on life-support thanks to the bureaucracy of the early Church, but by the 6th century that was also nearly dead as attempts to centralize the system created strife and turmoil. The plagues and famines devastated the urban population as well, leading to the rise of tribal kings and clients both in Europe and North Africa and the Middle East.

The Romans couldn't keep up with the new meta, and the Sassanids after playing a winning game for some time lost all support after a few bad decades.