Thread by @MouinRabbani

THREAD: I have repeatedly stated that I have not encountered serious evidence that the existing population of Palestine was expelled, exterminated, or otherwise replaced as a result of the Muslim conquest during the seventh century CE.

In so doing, I’m adhering to the scholarly consensus that the Arabisation and Islamisation of Palestine was a gradual process that took place over many centuries, and also that there is no evidence that Muslim Arab immigrants from the Hijaz who arrived as a result of the conquest ever outnumbered the existing population.

Rather than the existing population being replaced, the majority of Palestine’s inhabitants over time and for a variety of reasons adopted the language and religion of the Muslim Arabs, and fused the culture of the new rulers with their own traditions. While the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Palestine, including almost all of its Christians and Jews, over time adopted the Arabic language, a significant minority did not convert to Islam and maintained their previous religious affiliations.

It is also worth noting that Arabs – primarily Christians – were already to be found in Greater Syria, including Palestine, long before the advent of Islam. Herod the Great’s mother, for example, was a Nabatean Arab pagan princess, and his father, whose ancestors had been forcibly converted to Judaism, also had Arab heritage.

I have also made clear that these issues are relevant only as a matter of acquiring a better understanding of the historical record. The demography of Palestine 3,000, or 1,000, or 500 years ago has no relevance whatsoever for establishing or determining the contemporary rights and wrongs of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. This is for the simple reason that claims of ancient title are not only extremely difficult if not impossible to demonstrate; they also have zero standing under international law, which gives primacy to the right of self-determination and other factors.

“Who was here first”, at least in Palestine, is an entirely meaningless question. The ancient Israelites were almost certainly the descendants of local Canaanite tribes rather than immigrants, there is no evidence the many other (including Canaanite) inhabitants of the land collectively disappeared, left, or later converted to Judaism, and there is no individual Palestinian or Jew alive in 2025 who can definitively trace their ancestry back to Palestine during ancient times.

To get back to the point, several days ago I responded to a post by @History__Speaks which had made broadly similar arguments. I noted: “If the Christian population of Palestine was expelled [by the seventh-century Muslim conquerors], where did they go and why did they fail to leave so much as a single poem lamenting their loss? If they were exterminated why did their killers not boast of their deeds?”

@History__Speaks A habitual charlatan on this site responded with a citation from a Christian chronicler writing during the period in question, and claimed it demonstrates that there was a mass departure of Christians from Palestine to Cyprus as a result of the Muslim conquest.

Yet, true to form, the charlatan in question concealed that the author of the academic work from which the citation was lifted, Dr Daniel Galadza, a recognized scholar of the subject in question who is also a deacon of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, had on the same page made clear why the citation cannot be considered as evidence of a significant exodus of Christians from Palestine to Cyprus as a result of the Muslim conquest. That it might have been a forced expulsion is not even considered by Galadza.

In further exchanges with the charlatan, I also made clear that my point was about expulsion or extermination, and not departure for the purpose of seeking refuge, something which always accompanies armed conflict and the installation of new rulers, and which can be safely assumed to have also been the case in seventh-century Palestine.

Professor Sean W. Anthony of Ohio State University @shahanSean thereafter kindly provided me with additional information that could potentially point to an error on my part. Although it concerns a Muslim rather than Christian source and is – as explained below – inconclusive in multiple respects, it is not insignificant and raises additional issues worthy of consideration. In the interests of accuracy, I reproduce it here for the reader to judge its significance.

@History__Speaks @shahanSean The text referred to me by Professor Anthony concerns Ahmad b. Yahya al-Baladhuri, a ninth-century Arab Muslim historian, who was chronicling events as he understood them to have transpired two centuries earlier.

@History__Speaks @shahanSean The text is cited on page 152 of Ahmad b. Yahya al-Baladhuri, History of the Arab Invasions: The Conquest of the Lands, translated by Hugh Kennedy and published by I.B. Tauris in 2022. In this passage, al-Baladhuri provides two, contradictory accounts of the same event.

Both of al-Baladhuri’s accounts concern an Arab Christian leader named Jabala b. al-Ayham. Jabala was purportedly the last ruler of the Ghassanids, an Arab Christian kingdom aligned with the Byzantines that prior to the Muslim conquest ruled much of Greater Syria, including northern Palestine. I write “purportedly”, because while the reality of the Ghassanid kingdom is well-established, there is ongoing debate as to whether Jabala actually existed or was subsequently invented as a literary device by Muslim chroniclers to address broader themes.

@History__Speaks @shahanSean In al-Baladhuri’s first account, Jabala converts to Islam after his defeat at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 CE, which ended Byzantine rule in Syria. Subsequently, Jabala violently abuses a man in the retinue of the Caliph Umar bin al-Khattab, causing the man to lose an eye.

The Caliph, applying the principle of iqtisas (retribution in kind, in this case literally an eye for an eye), orders that Jabala be punished. An enraged Jabala responds, “Is my eye the same as his eye? By God, I will not stay in a town where there is any authority over me”. Jabala gathers his men, leaves for Byzantine territory, and renounces Islam.

In the second of al-Baladhuri’s accounts, Jabala remains a Christian after his defeat at Yarmouk. He meets with the Caliph Umar, who explains to him the principles of Islam and of sadaqa, presumably a reference to the obligatory zakat tax required of all Muslim subjects. Jabala responds, “I will keep my faith and pay the sadaqa”. Umar explains that this is not possible: “If you keep your faith you will have to pay the jizya”.

The difference between the two taxes is that zakat, paid by Muslims, was intended for the needs and maintenance of the Muslim community. The jizya, paid by dhimmi, entitled recognized religious communities to freedom of worship, communal autonomy, and exemption from military service, but was typically higher and went to the central treasury rather than being spent on the community that paid it. At least in theory, the state extended to dhimmi formal recognition and provided security of person and property, and in exchange received higher taxes than from its Muslim subjects to fund its bureaucracy and operations.

@History__Speaks @shahanSean According to al-Baladhuri’s account, Umar responded to Jabala’s insistence on keeping his Christian faith and refusal to pay the jizya as follows: “We are offering you a choice of one of three things, conversion to Islam, payment of the jizya or going away wherever you want.”

Al-Baladhuri continues that Jabala went to the lands of the Byzantines and took 30,000 of his men with him. “When the news reached Umar, he was sorry about what he had done and Utaba b. al-Samit reproved him [Umar], saying, ‘If you had accepted sadaqa from him [Jabala], you could have persuaded him to accept Islam.’”

In the year 637, al-Baladhuri continues, Umar “sent Umayr b. Sa’d al-Ansari to the land of the Romans [i.e. Byzantines] with a large army … He ordered him to treat Jabala b. al-Ayham kindly and to seek his friendship on account of their [shared Arab] kinship and invite him to return to the lands of Islam in exchange for the payment of the equivalent of the sadaqa and he could keep his religion.” Jabala however “refused the offer”.

While there is continued debate as to whether Jabala even existed, and while al-Baladhuri offers incompatible accounts, and the figure of 30,000 men can be taken with a grain of salt, the second of the two accounts does demonstrate that under certain circumstances groups of Christians, perhaps in significant numbers, did leave territory that came under Muslim rule.

@History__Speaks @shahanSean Does this amount to expulsion? On the one hand Jabala was not ordered to leave under pain of punishment. At the same time, he could not remain without accepting certain conditions, in this case either conversion or a higher rate of taxation on account of his faith.

Some will argue that an unequal rate of taxation, determined on the basis of faith alone, is sufficient evidence those on the receiving end were undesirables. Others would respond that by seventh-century standards this hardly constitutes evidence of expulsion, particularly because Jabala and his co-religionists could have been massacred or deported with impunity.

@History__Speaks @shahanSean In further correspondence Professor Anthony notes that there is an additional case in al-Baladhuri’s chronicle that specifically relates to Palestine and that clarifies some of these issues:

“The stories about Caesarea in al-Baladhuri are also interesting – it was a major city of Roman Palestine and was nearly entirely destroyed when conquered by the Arabs after a lengthy siege. Obviously the survivors who supported the Romans had to flee or face captivity. (In general this was the exception; most cities would not be reinforced by sea and were quick to come to terms.) The Arabs needed/wanted a strong tax base to pay them tribute and taxes and had no interest in depopulation.”

@History__Speaks @shahanSean Significantly, Professor Anthony adds that al-Baladhuri’s accounts regarding Jabala also demonstrate that “Arabs were major players in Palestine before the Islamic conquests.”

Perhaps my own views on the matter are coloured by an entirely unambiguous case of expulsion from Palestine – the Nakba. Unlike the accounts concerning Jabala in the seventh century, whether real or imagined, Palestinians in the twentieth –Christian and Muslim alike – were not given the option to remain in their homeland by the Zionist movement, were repeatedly expelled at gunpoint or massacred, and to this day have not received an Israeli emissary inviting them to return. Quite the contrary.

@History__Speaks @shahanSean END. Also available as a single text on my Substack ()mouinrabbani.substack.com