Authors: Hugh Kennedy

The Great Arab Conquests (37 page)

BOOK: The Great Arab Conquests

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ABOVE Syrian desert. For the Bedouin Arabs the desert was a place of opportunity, danger and beauty, a wild homeland celebrated in poetry and legend. (Author)

TOP Ancient Roman walls of Damascus. The city is still largely surrounded by the Roman walls to which the Muslims laid siege in c. 636. (Author)

ABOVE Jerusalem seen from the Mount of Olives. The temple platform, where the Dome of the Rock now stands, seems to have been a waste land at the time of the Muslim conquests. Here the caliph Umar is said to have constructed a simple place of worship. (Author)

TOP The Zagros Mountains separate the flat plains of Iraq from the Iranian plateau. After the conquest of Iraq, the Muslim leaders decided to push on through this rugged terrain where they defeated the Persian armies once more at Nihāvand (641). (Author)

ABOVE Walls of Bishapur. The Sasanian fortifications of this town in Fars, with their stone walls and regularly spaced round towers, could not survive Muslim attack after the main Persian Imperial army had been defeated. The ruins of the citadel can be seen on the hills in the background. (Author)

TOP Sistan. The wild and remote landscapes of Sistan and Zābulistān saw some of the fiercest resistance to Muslim armies and one of the few major military set-backs Muslim forces suffered. (Author)

ABOVE Central Iranian landscape. The mountains are divided by broad plains, which allowed for the swift movement of armies across long distances. (Author)

The mighty mud-brick ramparts of old Samarqand. Under the rule of its tough and wily Prince Ghūrak, the city was the centre of fierce resistance to the invading Muslims. (Author)

LEFT Old Bukhara seen from the walls of the citadel, home of the hereditary princes, the Bukhara Khudas, who continued to rule alongside the Arab governors after the conquest. (Author)

TOP The Tashtakaracha Pass in the mountains south of Samarqand, where Arab and Turkish forces met in 730 in one of the fiercest battles the whole of the conquests. (Author)