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[Thread] Early Muslim naval commanders and their strategies on the Mediterranean. I'm reading Avraham Elmakias' newly published book on the 'Naval Commanders of Early Islam'. It's an English translation by Limor Yungman of his Hebrew Ph.D. thesis supervised under Michael Lecker.
It approaches the subject through a prosopography of the early Muslim naval commanders. We don't have much research on this subject, though, admittedly, the sources are rather thin. Nevertheless, the research we do have is very useful. For example, ...
Available to us is Hourani's book on 'Arab Seafaring' and Nadvi's thin book. More recently, we have Rana Mikati's accomplished Ph.D. thesis on early Islamic Beirut, Umayyad-Abbasid naval policies and Awzā‘ī. Much work has been done by Vassilios Christides. (there are others too!)
I want to pick up on one interesting point made by Elmakias, which focuses heavily on the Arabic sources and Muslim narratives (this is not a book about the Byzantine fleets!). Namely, the inexperience of the Muslim navy in both its personnel and strategy.
Elmakias notes that 8th c. Muslim naval commanders 'typically came be commanders following a career of commanding land forces' which 'had crucial implications on the combat tactics that were employed by the Muslim navy. These tactics usually mirrored land combat tactics.'
Muslim inexperience of maritime combat tactics, heritage and stratēgēma, led them to treat the sea as they would the land. When a Muslim ship met an enemy, they tied their ship to the enemy’s, aligned it in rows on the deck and attacked exactly as they would have in a land raid.
For example, when ʿAbd Allāh ibn Saʿd ibn Abī Sarḥ served as naval commander during the 'Battle of the Masts,' the Muslim and the Byzantine ships met at mid-sea and tied their ships to one another (by attaching the masts of both ships). --->
The Muslims proposed to the Byzantines that they 'conduct the battle on shore (in-land) until all the soldiers of one side die'. The Byzantines preferred to fight at sea. Eventually the battle was held on the decks of the ships with swords and knives and the Muslim victorious.
In his al-Iktifāʾ, Al-Kalāʿī notes that at the same battle ibn Abī Sarḥ ordered Muslim vessels to carry half their equipment and crew -not confident about a victory at sea- leaving Busr ibn Arṭaʾa in command of the land forces land.
Elmakias' prosopography also reveals that being appointed as naval commander had attached to it great prestige and a sense of progression/trajectory towards an administrative role. It was common for a commander on land to become a naval commander and then governor of a province.
Ḥafṣ ibn al-Walīd al-Ḥaḍramī’s career is a example of this trajectory. He first commanded a land army in raids on the Byzantines for caliph Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik; then he was commander of the Egyptian navy (737–741); finally, he was appointed governor of Egypt in 741.
Sorry, I completely forgot to add pictures along the thread. So here's the book's cover with some ''Greek Fire'' (which would be a cool thread as Elmakias has a section on it). 
