Commenter Sasha Hrongmitts had a rather interesting follow-up question to my last post about the early history of Islam:

Are you sure the Persian Empire used Arabs as troops against the Byzantines? I could be mistaken, but I thought one of the reasons the Arabs were so successful against the Byzantines was their war manual, the Strategikon, did not have any info on Arab armies.

I don’t discount the possibility that the Byzantines simply didn’t know how to fight the Arabs, but it’s worth asking whether the Arabs had made any significant military impact on the world stage before Islam’s rise. The answer is almost certainly “no”.

In this Domain Query podcast, I explain why, at least based on what evidence we have today:

If you look for a history of Arab military conquests before Islam, the silence is deafening – and astonishing. You would expect that such a supposedly important part of the world would have a strong history of military campaigns and conflict, going all the way back to ancient times – but the evidence just isn’t there.

What evidence we do have, especially over the past few years, indicates that the “Arab” conquest of half the known world was a direct result of a power vacuum caused by two superpowers mauling each other nearly to death, and Arabs stepping in to take over one of them, then turning around to attack the other.

As more evidence emerges over the coming years, I anticipate that we will see a severe crisis of knowledge and faith split Islam, in a way that the Islamic world has not experienced since the early days of the split into Sunni and Shi’a. it will be quite something to watch.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments, either here or on SoundCloud.