Commanders of Sea Raids (wulat ghazw al-bahr): Early Islamic Maritime Policy in the Syrian Coast

Studies on Byzantine-Muslim relations have focused on their land frontiers, thus ignoring the component of its maritime policy. This bias is due to the nature of the sources, which have mostly preserved accounts of land expeditions, and only discussed maritime issues when it intersected with crucial historical moments such as the failed sieges of Constantinople. Thus, both Muslim and non-Muslim communities on the maritime periphery of the Islamic Empire have been seen as marginal to the development and workings of the early Islamic polity, and rarely appear in the sources.

In order to be able to write the history of communities at the margins of the Islamic empire, scholars have to delve into the depths of the unique Islamic biographical literature. This study will examine a list of individuals appointed by the Muslim authorities from the reign of Mu’awiya (d. 680) to the reign of al-Mansur (d. 775) as commanders of maritime expeditions (wulat ghazw al-bahr) from the Syrian coast, as compiled from the biographical literature. Interestingly, very few of these individuals appear in the standard chronicles used to write the history of the early Islamic period.

This list forms the starting point to demonstrate the concern taken by Muslim authorities, as early as the reign of the first Umayyads, to the management of the coastal frontier. The turnover and patterns of appointments by the caliphs mesh perfectly into the narrative of political conflicts at the center. On another level, these appointments, and especially their consistency throughout the first hundred years of Muslim control, show the integral role played by an area marginal to the development of the Islamic Empire. This study thus aims to construct a history of these Muslim coastal communities and their relationship with the caliphal powers in Damascus and later, Baghdad.