THE NEW RULERS OF PALESTINE had conquered the area under the banner of Islam. Many of the Muslim warriors settled in Palestine once they had gained control of the area, and they were joined by additional immigrants from the Arabian peninsula and converts from the local Christian and Jewish population. Together these initially formed a small ruling elite, but the Muslim population was to grow over the years, and the Christian population to decline. An important aspect in understanding Christian-Muslim relations during the early Islamic period is, therefore, to establish how many Muslims there were, where they lived, and to what extent the local inhabitants converted to Islam.

The Problem of Identifying Muslims

The immediate problem in any attempt to document the presence of Muslims and the extent of conversion to Islam, however, is that of defining Muslim identity. Bulliet tried to establish the degree of conversion in different areas, in particular Iran, by analyzing the appearances of distinctive Islamic personal names over time. He concluded that by the end of the Umayyad period in Syria only around ten percent of the population, the “early adopters”, had become Muslim, and that it took several centuries for a majority to become Muslim. The statistical size of the number of attestations useful for Syria in the Early Islamic period, however, is very small, and this reduces the reliability of his conclusions.One limiting factor in trying to identify Muslims from their personal names is the uncertainty in some cases as to whether they are uniquely Muslim or not. Names with the element “Allāh” in them, for example, are not necessarily Muslim. “Khalaf Allāh”, “’ Abd Allāh”, and “Sa’d Allāh”, for example, are clearly attested as Christian names both before and after the Islamic conquest in the papyri documents from Nessana, including one (no. 80), probably in 684-85, listing “Sa’d Allāh the priest” .

Another way to establish the presence of Muslims in the Early Islamic period is to determine where mosques are known. Places where definite, or at least possible, early mosques are attested from literary sources or archaeology are listed in Table Six. The places where Muslims are attested and where one could reasonably infer that mosques were built are, of course, more numerous, as the rest of this chapter will show.