Excerpt from Term Paper:

......As mentioned above, Caliph Umars reign can be termed as the Golden period of Islamic expansion. This had set the stage for future expansion and conquests and once Caliph Umars successors took over, the further spread of Islamic through innumerable conquests continued. Here it is important to understand that Islamic was never spread by force. It was by mere conquest that Islamic continued spreading. During the reign of the caliph Umar the embryonic Arab state -- at this time an alliance of many, but not yet all, of the tribes of the Arabian peninsula -- had defeated the Byzantine empire and wrested from it the provinces of Syria and Egypt, and had dealt such a crushing blow to the Persian empire that it ceased to exist, leaving what we now call Iraq and Persia to be occupied by the Arabs as soon as they could find men to hold them securely. And this was only a beginning. For about a century the Arabs continued to move onwards and outwards. One line of expansion was north-east along the golden road to Samarqand and beyond, and another south-east into the Indus valley, while in the west they progressed through the coast-lands of

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