Futuh


In classical Islamic literature the futūḥ were the early Arab-Muslim conquests of Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, etc. which facilitated the spread of Islam and Islamic civilization.
Futūḥ is an Arabic word with the literal meaning of "openings", as in "liberation".

Ideology/etymology

As is clear from the literal meaning of the word, futūḥ is a term with a strong bias in favor of the conquests it signifies, implying their general beneficence and legitimacy. Historian Bernard Lewis describes the meaning of futūḥ within classic Islamic thought:
These were not seen as conquests in the vulgar sense of territorial acquisitions, but as the overthrow of impious regimes and illegitimate hierarchies, and the "opening" of their peoples to the new revelation and dispensation... The use of the root ftḥ is thus not unlike the 20th century use of the verb "liberate", and is indeed sometimes replaced by the latter verb in modern Arabic writing on early Islamic history. The Arabic verb ghalaba, "conquer", with its connotation of overwhelming by means of superior force, is sometimes used in early accounts of the Muslim conquests, but only in the context of actual military operations...
Underlying this usage, clearly, is a concept of the essential rightfulness or legitimacy of the Muslim advance and the subsequent illegitimacy of Muslim retreat before infidel conquest... The advance of Muslim power is thus an opening or a liberation, to give free scope to this divinely implanted propensity.

''Futūḥ'' literature

Many histories from the classical period of Islamic civilization dealing with the early conquests have futūḥ in their title and are considered to form their own genre of literature, called futūḥ reports. Like many other histories from the early period, the futūḥ reports contain a mixture of genres and material, with some clearly of an administrative, religio-legal, philosophical, or edificatory nature. For example, a common feature of the genre is an account of the opposing ambassador's first impression of the Arab army in which he remarks favorably upon the primitive virtues of these early Muslim warriors, thus implicitly criticizing the luxury and over-refinement of the author's own time.
The following is a partial list of these histories:
The impact of the futūḥ conquests was immense, not least of all on the conquerors themselves, who incorporated many features of the advanced cultures they absorbed into what eventually became classic Islamic civilization.
Among the conquered peoples, the upheavals: Islamization and Arabization. The former occurred as Islam became a society's regnant religio-political framework. The latter occurred as Arab customs and the Arab language became widely adopted by a population. Though the two developments often occurred in tandem, the expression of one did not necessarily mean the expression of the other. Many Middle Eastern Christians, for example were Arabized but never Islamicized, while the Persians were Islamicized but did not Arabize.
Of the two upheavals, Islamization had the greater impact on social and cultural identity. In all cases Islamization led to a people's near total rejection of their pagan, pre-Islamic past, such that their ancestral achievements and heritage were either forgotten or actively denigrated. When in the 19th Century European Orientalists began recovering this past, their findings were at first ignored by the Muslim residents of the Near East:
Though this alienation may be partially explained by the Arab cultural imperialism implicit in Islamization, there is a more direct theological rationale for this, which is the Islamic concept of jahiliyyah, or state of ignorance and barbarity which supposedly prevailed in pre-Islamic Arabia. Readily applied by the first Islamicized peoples to their own pagan pasts, it led them to view these epochs as times of rampant impiety, ignorance, and injustice from which little of value could be gleaned.
Thus one trope of converted Muslims' perception of their own history is the depiction of the pre-Islamic political order as one of rampant exploitation and tyranny, with rulers ordering society according to malign whim rather than in humble subordinance to God's beneficent law for mankind:
And in Islamic Persia, "Chosroes", from the great Persian king Khosrau II, became as strong a by-word for tyrannical pagan kingship as "Pharaoh".
Such hostile depictions of the pre-Islamic political order are a necessary complement to the ideology of futūḥ: in order for the Muslim conquests to be seen as liberatory, the social orders which they replaced had to be depicted as negatively as possible.
With the rejection of the pre-Islamic political order came the
rejection of its cultural legacy as well, often expressed by the iconoclastic destruction of its
monumental remains as in the recent demolition of the Buddhas of Bamyan. In Egypt, for example, the missing nose of the Great Sphinx of Giza was broken off by a fanatic Sufi when he saw the local farmers making offerings to the Sphinx. And in Iran:
The popular dissemination of Orientalist discoveries led to a revision of these attitudes, however, and at least a partial reassertion of pre-Islamic identities. In Egypt, the works of native scholars such as Rifā'a Rafi' al-Tāhtawī led to renewed interest in the Pharaonic past and helped give rise to Egyptian national identity movements such as Pharaonism. Though initially derided by other Arabs as tafar'un, the Egyptian movements were in time emulated elsewhere:

Contemporary Attitudes

The acceptance of classical Islam's interpretation of the futūḥ conquests by the Islamicized/Arabized peoples of the Near East and beyond varies.
It has been least contentious among the Arab countries of Asia, where identity with the original Arab conquerors is strongest. In modern Arab historiography there has been a trend, to portray the earliest conquests as liberations of Arabs from Sassanid/Byzantine imperial domination:

North Africa

In North Africa, a reassertion of ethnic and linguistic identity among Berbers called Berberism has recently developed.

Iran

Despite a rich pre-Islamic political and cultural heritage, attempts at a reassertion of national identity in Iran have often met with strong resistance:
With the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, traditional notions of identity returned to Iran, as can be seen by the unabashed embrace of the classic futūḥ interpretation of Persian history in the propaganda of the Iran–Iraq War:

[Indian subcontinent]

Acceptance in Pakistan of futūḥ "salvation history" can be seen in current expressions of alienation from both the political as well as cultural legacies of its pre-Islamic past:
An interesting cultural adaptation found mainly here, though, is the widespread claim of descent from the Arab conquerors:
The psychic relation of "converted" Muslims to Islam is the subject of V. S. Naipaul's literary travelogues Among the Believers and .