Futuh

In classical Islamic literature the futūḥ were the early Arab-Muslim conquests which facilitated the spread of Islam and Islamic civilization.

Futūḥ (Arabic script فتوح, singular fatḥ فتح) is an Arabic word with the literal meaning of "openings".

As is clear from the literal meaning of the word, futūḥ is a term with a strong ideological bias in favor of the conquests it signifies, implying their general beneficence and legitimacy. Here is Lewis on the ideology of futūḥ within classic Islamic thought:

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:

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