Why the Arabs Lost Their Military Edge After the Great Conquest
The king of the Hawkeye clan reined in his white stallion and lifted his sword toward the horizon. Iron birds traced a crescent above the temple’s crest, as warriors and chariots poured like drifting sand toward the white holy city.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon, May 18, 1948. In Arab history, this stands as only one pivotal moment. The man who raised the sword was Abdullah I, the thirty-eighth direct descendant of the Prophet, son of the Custodian of the Holy Sites, leader of the Arab coalition and King of Jordan.
He did not believe that, after this war, the Jews could ever rule over the Arabs.
To Arab eyes, their adversary, the Jews, had for a thousand years been little more than beggars and jesters within the Islamic world. They were no match for the great nation that had forged the sweeping Great Conquests of the seventh century. True, this people had not built another military empire in the millennium after those conquests, yet they carried immense psychological confidence when facing the Jews.
Within five short months, however, Arab arrogance crumbled to nothing. King Abdullah was forced to swallow defeat, still baffled by all that had unfolded in those months.
What had happened to the Arab nation over those thousand years? Where had that invincible army gone—the force that put the Byzantine emperor to flight and shattered the Sasanian Immortal Guard? King Abdullah’s bleak five months held no full answer, nor had the ten preceding centuries yielded one.
To pierce the fog of history, we must travel back four thousand years, to the dawn of civilisation.
A poet’s lament: Women flee, beneath the onslaught of desert nomads, the gilded palace of Gilgamesh crumbles to dust, and kingship passes to Sargon.
In the fourth millennium BCE, in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians gave way to the Akkadians. For centuries, desert pastoralists had drifted into the cradle of civilisation. Now they became its new masters.
Wait a moment—are we not supposed to be talking about the Arabs? Why leap so far back in time? These Akkadians were the forebears of the Arabs, fellow Semitic peoples bred in the Arabian Peninsula. Only by understanding the peninsula can we grasp the source of ancient Arab strength.
Jordanes, the medieval Byzantine historian, coined a concept in his Getica: the “womb of nations.” Such wombs of nations usually arose in rugged, marginal lands, too tough for settled empires to subdue, yet capable of spilling surplus population endlessly, birthing new groups and sending migrants outward.
Many such wombs existed across the world. The most vigorous lay in the Altai Mountains of Northeast Asia, birthplace of countless Inner Asian nomadic peoples. In Asia, there was another, smaller yet equally ancient and consequential womb of nations: our subject, the Arabian Peninsula.
The desert nurtures death, yet scatters life outward.
Among the first Semitic groups to leave the peninsula, the Akkadians are the best known. Long after Sumerian civilisation took shape, Semitic migrants drifted into Mesopotamia, peacefully or by force. Sumerian culture absorbed them, and in turn they seized control of it.
Wave after wave of Semitic peoples emerged: Akkadians, Amorites, then the Arabs; followed by the Phoenicians, famed traders, the Chaldeans who founded the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the Jews. The biblical “barbarians” — Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites.
From the fourth millennium BCE onward, the Arabian Peninsula poured forth migrants without cease. These migrants formed countless polities, including great powers such as Akkad, Babylon, Assyria and Carthage.
As centuries passed, however, Semitic peoples lost their dominance over the Middle East. By the early centuries CE, after the rise of Christianity, Rome and Persia dictated regional order. Most Semitic groups lived as subjects of these two empires. Neither empire could secure the remote Arabian Peninsula, and this womb of nations never ceased its work.
Only then did the Arabs step onto the stage of history. Within the older civilisations of the Middle East, Arabs stood near the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy. In the Bible, they were called Ishmaelites, a minor people barely worthy of note. Yet they unleashed the final great wave of Semitic expansion, carrying Islamic civilisation to the ends of the earth, as their Prophet had foretold: “unto the farthest corners of the land.”
In 636 CE, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius fled across the desert, then turned to gaze back at the land and wept. “Syria is lost forever to the Romans.”
For centuries, Romans and Persians had dismissed the Arabs as no threat. They ruled over Arab client kingdoms along the peninsula’s northern edge, using them as vassals and auxiliaries. The camel-riding nomads deep in the desert drew no concern at all.
In the sixth and seventh centuries, these two empires fought a brutal, protracted death struggle, the Byzantine‑Sasanian War, draining each other to exhaustion. Neither foresaw the sudden rise of the Arabs at this exact moment.
A womb of nations operates in two broad ways. The first is slow: steady, incremental outflows of migrant groups. The second is explosive: internal political unification first, then a massive outward military surge.
The Arabs took the second path. Bound together by a new faith and a new political order, the Arab tribes coalesced into a formidable military force. By chance, the two great Middle Eastern empires stood at their weakest in generations.
Within decades, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Iran fell one after another. North Africa, the Indus Valley and the Iberian Peninsula soon followed.
Was this simply because Arabs made exceptional warriors? Not at all. Among the Semitic groups born in the Arabian Peninsula, they were not uniquely gifted. The Arabs themselves were no stronger than their Semitic cousins who had left the desert before them. Their spectacular success stemmed above all from the catastrophic weakness of their enemies.
Once they conquered settled lands, the Arabs quickly blended with their Semitic kin. These cousins adopted the Arab tongue and the new faith; in return, the Arabs were absorbed into the urban civilisation of the Middle East.
Yet barely two hundred years after the empire’s founding, decline was already plain. Local governors broke away into autonomous states, the central court grew heavily Persianised, and the leading religious scholars of Islam were far more often Iranian than Arab. The explosive energy of the seventh‑century Great Conquest had burned out by the ninth century.
So why, for the next thousand years, did the Arabian Peninsula never erupt again, and why did Arab states beyond the peninsula fail to build strong armies?
The answer still lies with the womb of nations — yet now the relevant womb was no longer Arabia, but the Altai. The Turks had arrived.
At first, Turks served merely as mercenaries for Islamic dynasties in Central Asia. Over time, they rose to become generals, viziers, and monarchs, bearing the title “Sultan,” holder of power in the Islamic world.
Rolling westward from the steppe, the Turks converted to Islam, seized the Prophet’s sword from the enfeebled Arabs, and became the vanguard of Islam’s next phase of expansion.
In 1055, the Seljuks entered Baghdad, ruling through the caliph. A little more than a decade later, their kinsman Alp Arslan shattered the Byzantine army at Manzikert, opening the gate for Turkish expansion into Europe. Meanwhile, Turkish dynasties led expansion in India and Central Asia, while kingdoms across Islamic North Africa leaned heavily on Turkish soldiery.
The Islamic world drew constant supplies of Turkish manpower from Central Asia, yet this was still not enough to absorb the Altai’s massive outflow of peoples. In the thirteenth century, the Altai erupted once more as the Mongols swept westward across Asia. Mongol armies inflicted ruin on the Islamic world, yet the Mongols themselves eventually converted to Islam and underwent Turkification, further cementing Turkish military dominance across the Islamic sphere.
Across those centuries, the Arabian Peninsula never stopped sending out migrants. It was simply that, beside the overwhelming power of the steppe peoples from the Altai, the sons of the desert bowed before the sons of the grassland.
On certain fringes of the Islamic world, Arab nomads from the peninsula remained agents of expansion. In the eleventh century, the Fatimid Caliphate unleashed two Bedouin tribes to raid North Africa, leaving widespread devastation. It was also through centuries of slow Arab migration that the Arabs gradually secured Nubia, modern‑day Sudan.
Even under Turkish rule, the Arabian Peninsula kept exporting migrants. Arabs founded local dynasties in Ottoman Iraq, formed powerful brigand bands in Syria, and settled in large numbers in Khuzestan, Iran. Yet under the Turkish‑dominated order, Arab nomads no longer claimed the spotlight.
Furthermore, outside powers sought to drain the vitality of this ancient womb of nations, cooperating with the Hashemite Custodians of Mecca and Medina. The guardians of the holy cities could deploy troops to discipline unruly desert tribes.
Modern Arab intellectuals named the period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries the “Age of the Turkish Yoke.” In their view, material and intellectual life, and military vitality alike, stagnated under Turkish rule.
Only in the early nineteenth century did the Arabian Peninsula stir toward a new explosion. Under the banner of Wahhabi religious reform, the House of Saud forged political unity and religious fervour across the peninsula, readying itself for expansion. At the same time, the successors of Byzantium and Sasanian Persia — the Ottoman Empire and the Qajar dynasty of Iran — were exhausted after years of war. Once again, history seemed poised to repeat itself.
Saudi forces of zealous nomads marched into Iraq and sacked the shrine at Karbala, shocking both empires. It appeared the House of Saud was about to unleash energy pent up for a millennium.
But the world had changed.
This Arab army met another Arab army. This second force belonged to a new era, one that would draw the final line under the age of the womb of nations. Modernity was arriving, and the rules of war had been rewritten entirely.
The founder of that army, Muhammad Ali Pasha, once said: “I see the empire decaying, and I will build a new kingdom upon its wastes, stretching to the Euphrates and the Tigris.”
Years before he defeated the Saudi nomads, fortune had favoured him. Napoleon’s invasion had destroyed Mamluk rule, while the Sublime Porte in Constantinople lacked the strength to reassert direct control over Egypt. This ambitious governor planned to remake Egypt into a modern power.
One pillar of his reforms was a European‑style regular army. For twenty‑five hundred years, the fellahin, Egyptian peasant farmers, had only tilled the soil for foreign mercenaries. Now the demands of the modern state opened military service to them.
Within decades, the reforms made Egypt extraordinarily powerful. Marx wrote that Egypt was the only living force within the decaying Ottoman body.
Muhammad Ali challenged the authority of the Ottoman Sultan, and his new Egyptian army twice marched toward Constantinople. The second advance, in 1839, triggered the Oriental Crisis.
It seemed the Arabs might finally break free of Turkish dominance through modernisation. At that moment, European powers intervened. Guided by imperial interests, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia backed the Ottoman Empire, forcing Egypt to withdraw its troops, disarm, and abandon its hold over Syria. Even Russia, long an Ottoman foe, sent warships into the Dardanelles to defend Constantinople.
Muhammad Ali spent his final years in poor health and bitterness. His son and heir, Ibrahim Pasha, Egypt’s most gifted general, died only months later. Later Egyptian rulers lost the will to press their advantage. By 1883, Egypt fell under British occupation, delaying the Arab national revival for decades.
After the First World War, Arab states emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. During the war, the Entente had allied with Arab nationalists, promising a unified Arab nation after Turkey’s defeat. Britain and France broke those pledges after victory, carving the Middle East into spheres of influence, backing Zionism, and allowing the House of Saud to rebuild its power on the peninsula.
By the end of the Second World War, whether Arabs admitted it or not, the Arab states were a collection of fragile post‑colonial polities.
The defeat of 1948 ignited the fire of Arab nationalism. Monarchies fell in Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Libya. King Abdullah I of Jordan, who had led the Arab war effort in 1948, was assassinated.
Arab nationalists rallied again under the red‑white‑black banner and fought Israel three more times, yet never secured a decisive victory. The Six‑Day War of 1967 brought crushing defeat to Egyptian and Syrian forces. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 saw the Egyptian‑Syrian coalition squander early gains, and its outcome locked in the basic regional order we recognise today.
What became of the Arabs? We may set aside the rapid shifts of the twenty years after the Second World War. The ancient womb of nations offers little guide, and blaming everything on colonial legacy is too simplistic. We must examine the specifics.
The Arab world is not a single bloc today. Broadly speaking, Arab states fall into two groups: the oil monarchies of the Gulf, and the nationalist republics elsewhere.
Oil monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE generally possess limited military effectiveness. Though armed with advanced hardware, their armies resemble ornate, brittle showpieces. Saudi performance in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2014 Yemen conflict stunned outside observers with its weakness.
The reason is straightforward. Historically, armies have been breeding grounds for nationalism and republican revolution. Monarchs fearful of military coups have avoided building genuine national armies, and still rely heavily on foreign mercenaries.
Nationalist republics such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq field far more capable forces, yet remain far from great military powers. Outdated tactics, dysfunctional command structures, deep rifts between officers and conscripts, and divides between elite loyalist units and ordinary formations all cripple their fighting power. Arab conscripts showed fierce nationalist passion in the Arab‑Israeli wars, yet passion alone could not fix these fatal flaws.
After all this discussion, the core idea becomes clear. Arab military power followed one logic in antiquity and another in the modern age; monarchies operate by one set of rules, republics by another. “National character” is the emptiest explanation of all.
In the late nineteenth century, the Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky commented on a common prejudice of his time. Germans were then widely seen as gentle, peaceable Europeans dismissed as poor fighters — until the Franco‑Prussian War overturned that view. In biblical times, the Jews imagined themselves a warrior people, ruled by judges and kings who bore arms. Later, their public image shifted to traders, and in modern discourse they are often reduced to a stereotype of clever scholars.
Are Germans, Jews or Arabs inherently good or bad at war? People who refuse to dig deeper reach for “national character” as a lazy shortcut, ignoring geography, social structures and the tides of historical change.
From the Atlas Mountains to the marshes of Khuzestan, from the desert mirages of Casablanca to the concrete skyline of Abu Dhabi — can we treat Arabs across this vast sweep of time and space as a single, simple group, tagged with one crude label?
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