Muslim Conquest of the Levant

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Muslim Conquest of the Levant was the Rashidun Caliphate's campaign, begun under Caliph Abu Bakr and completed under his successor Umar ibn al-Khattab, to conquer the Byzantine-ruled provinces of Syria and Palestine in their entirety. Muslim forces under commanders including Khalid ibn al-Walid and Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah won a decisive victory over a large Byzantine army under Emperor Heraclius himself at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636, which effectively ended organized Byzantine resistance in the whole region for good.

The victorious forces went on to capture Damascus, Jerusalem, Antioch and the other principal cities of the Levant within two years of the victory at Yarmouk itself. Byzantine rule in Syria and Palestine ended permanently as a result, and the conquered Christian and Jewish population was governed under the caliphate's own customary terms for protected non-Muslim subjects rather than expelled or forcibly converted en masse by the new authorities. The speed of the conquest that followed Yarmouk, with Damascus, Jerusalem and Antioch all falling within two years of a single battlefield victory, left Byzantine emperor Heraclius reportedly unable to organize any further serious counteroffensive to recover the provinces he had just lost.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Muslim Conquest of the Levant is framed in the Islamic historical tradition as a direct continuation of the expansion that began with the Ridda Wars, extending the caliphate's own authority beyond Arabia in the name of Islam rather than as any separate undertaking from what came before it. Its religious significance went well beyond territorial conquest alone: the campaign brought Jerusalem, sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike, under Muslim rule for the first time in its long and contested history.

Caliph Umar's own reported visit to Jerusalem in person, and the terms he negotiated directly with the city's Christian patriarch Sophronius, became a foundational precedent for Islamic governance of other faiths' holy sites more broadly, a model later Islamic rule across the conquered Levant drew on repeatedly in the many centuries that followed Umar's own visit. The Levant became a core province of successive Islamic caliphates for centuries after the conquest that had begun at Yarmouk in 636. Later Islamic rulers across the medieval period, from the Umayyads through the Ottomans, continued to cite Umar's own conduct at Jerusalem as the standard against which their treatment of the city's Christian and Jewish communities was measured, giving a single seventh century visit an influence that extended across more than a thousand years of subsequent Islamic governance.