48 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Muslim community during the early khalifate exemplified these ideals so
much more than ordinary empires, that later Muslims could easily polish
the accounts of that time into a memory of lost perfection.
On the other side of the line, people heard story after story about Mus-
lims scoring military victories against astounding odds. Resistance seemed
useless against such a force; besides, common folk had little incentive tore-
sist, since the conquest wouldn't affect their lives. Their potentates would
lose their treasures, but the masses would keep what they had and go on as
before. Had the Arabs been fighting civilian populations defending their
homes, it would have been a tougher fight that probably would have
eroded their idealism over time. But instead, even far from home they were
mostly fighting mercenaries and draftees.
Let me not minimize a final factor intertwined with the hunger for
meaning. War gave Muslims opportunities for plunder. Under Omar,
however, soldiers had no permission to seize the fixed property of common
citizens. They got battlefield loot and the treasuries of the monarchs they
conquered-which, incidentally, was plenty. Four-fifths of whatever they
won was divided equally among the soldiers, supposedly with no distinc-
tion among commanders and foot soldiers, generals and privates-that
was the Muslim way.
One-fifth of the plunder went back to Medina. In the Prophet's day
much of that money was distributed immediately to the needy, and this
policy persisted though in ever more diluted form through Omar's day.
Add all these factors together, and the sudden expansion of Islam was not
so inexplicable after all.
Conquest led the surge but conquest was kept separate from conver-
sion. There was no "conversion by the sword." Muslims insisted on hold-
ing political power but not on their subjects being Muslims. Instead,
wherever Muslim armies flowed, cultural transmission followed. News of
the Muslim social project proliferated quickly because the expansion cov-
ered pretty much exactly the world historical area sewn together by those
ancient trade routes running between major seas and waterways. In its first
fifty years, Islam expanded to the western edge of the Indian Ocean, to the
eastern lip of the Mediterranean Sea, to the Nile, to the Caspian Sea, to the
Persian Gul£ In this area, this intercommunicative zone so richly perme-
ated with preexisting channels of interaction, Muslim stories and ideas