>>14038360Myth: “Following their conquests of the region, Arabs replaced the local populations of West Asia, Egypt and the Maghreb”
While there are many hazards around making demographic estimates about pre-industrial societies, there is nothing in the available sources to suggest that the Arab conquests led to rapid and dramatic changes in the local populations.
Archaeological evidence, Muslim chronicles and the accounts of non-Muslim locals all converge on the point that the conquests led to a military and political transfer of power while the social and religious situation remained largely untouched. Field battles and sieges were commonplace as part of the conquest but the relatively small size of the Muslim armies dictated that peaceful handover of towns was the norm whenever possible. Muslim armies also often preferred to settle in newly-built army camps outside of large cities and moved around constantly, leaving a few number of soldiers to garrison the conquered cities. As a result, the social and religious makeup of urban and rural communities went through little change in the immediate aftermath of the conquests.
The post-conquest Arabization and Islamization (which are not the same thing) of West Asia were complex processes but population change through mass immigration was a very small part of those processes, if at all. In most of the Byzantine territories that the Muslims conquered, Christians were the majority and remained so in the next few centuries and much longer in certain areas. Some local Christian communities eventually adopted Arabic as their liturgical and everyday language, i.e. became Arabized, and made up a large chunk of the local population up to the modern era. Conversion to Islam, on the other hand, was a long and slow process where several factors such as social mobility and tax incentives might have played a role. Forceful conversion or large-scale Muslim immigration to tip the demographic balance, however, was extremely rare.
In the case of Palestine, when the Muslim armies arrived the local population was majority Christian, including in Jerusalem, but there was a sizeable Jewish minority in Galilee around Tiberias as well as a large number of Samaritans in and near Neapolis (Nablus). Since the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-136 CE), which took place during the reign of Hadrian, Roman authorities had put severe restrictions on Jewish presence in Palestine (see #EOPalestine 17). There are indications that those restrictions were eased after the Muslims took over Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. However, the population of Palestine, especially in rural areas, continued to be majority Christian well into the time of the First Crusade (1096 CE).
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