Revelations on the Road to Damascus
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
One little-known side effect of the early Islamic conquests, which began around 635 A.D. and within a century had extended the sway of Islam from the Straits of Gibraltar in the West to India and beyond in the East, was the sudden accumulation of vast amounts of wealth. Of one early Muslim warrior we read that at his death he owned 11 houses in Medina alone, as well as secondary residences in Basra, Kufa, and Alexandria, along with coffers brimming with plundered loot. Another left an estate of more than 30 million dirhams; a fortune when you consider that a single dirham consisted of approximately 3 grams of pure silver.
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