80 No god but God
locked in a permanent state of religious war for territorial expansion.
The Muslim armies that spread out of the Arabian Peninsula simply
joined in the existing fracas; they neither created it nor defined it,
though they quickly dominated it. Despite the common perception in
the West, the Muslim conquerors did not force conversion upon the
conquered peoples; indeed, they did not even encourage it. The fact is
that the financial and social advantages of being an Arab Muslim in
the eighth and ninth centuries were such that Islam quickly became an
élite clique, which a non-Arab could join only through a complex
process that involved becoming first the client of an Arab.
This was also an era in which religion and the state were one uni-
fied entity. With the exception of a few remarkable men and women,
no Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, or Muslim of this time would have
considered his or her religion to be rooted in the personal confes-
sional experiences of individuals. Quite the contrary. Your religion
was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity; it defined
your politics, your economics, and your ethics. More than anything
else, your religion was your citizenship. Thus, the Holy Roman Empire
had its officially sanctioned and legally enforced version of Christian-
ity, just as the Sasanian Empire had its officially sanctioned and legally
enforced version of Zoroastrianism. In the Indian subcontinent, Vais-
nava kingdoms (devotees of Vishnu and his incarnations) vied with
Saiva kingdoms (devotees of Shiva) for territorial control, while in
China, Buddhist rulers fought Taoist rulers for political ascendancy.
Throughout every one of these regions, but especially in the Near
East, where religion explicitly sanctioned the state, territorial expan-
sion was identical to religious proselytization. Thus, every religion was
a “religion of the sword.”
As the Muslim conquerors set about developing the meaning and
function of war in Islam, they had at their disposal the highly devel-
oped and imperially sanctioned ideals of religious warfare as defined
and practiced by the Sasanian and Byzantine empires. In fact, the term
“holy war” originates not with Islam but with the Christian Crusaders
who first used it to give theological legitimacy to what was in reality a
battle for land and trade routes. “Holy war” was not a term used by
Muslim conquerors, and it is in no way a proper definition of the word