THE PERIOD OF pre-conquest Muslim warfare spanned only eleven years, i.e. the time of the Prophet's stay in Medina and the so-called apostasy (ridda) wars (A.D. 622-33). But it was during this short period that the framework for the subsequent Arab conquests was established.

In their attempts to account for this expansion, western scholars generally accept the thesis that in the seventh century, both the Byzantine and the Sasanian empires were declining due to constant wars against each other, and their respective internal difficulties. The Arab conquests were made possible by the opponents’ weaknesses rather than by the power of the nascent Muslim arrnies.

Acceptance of this thesis (on which see the contributions by Isaac and Whitby in this volume) has meant that the subject of the pre-conquest Muslim armies has not received much scholarly attention, except in the context of attempts at reconstructing historical events, that is, battles. The ways in which these armies were recruited, organized, commanded and supplied with food and arms, for example, remain to be investigated. The purpose of this paper is to discuss certain features of the Muslim armies in Muq ammad’ s time, in relation to the common view of states as monopolizing the deployment of military forces.

The task of describing the original features and practices of the Muslim armies is no less difficult than that of reconstructing the historical events, and for much the same reasons. Moreover, whilst the historical events from the conquest onwards are sometimes referred to in non-Muslim sources which may counter-balance the Muslim ones, information about the pre-conquest period can only be obtained from Muslim sources, which were written, at the earliest, a century after the events of concern to us here.