Quotes from Graham E. Fuller

Ideology, wherever it exists, is almost invariably pressed into the service of local geopolitics. In short, we witness the role of anti-Byzantine impulses facilitating the Islamic conquest in many of the Semitic regions.

Note throughout all of this that it was the pope who called for all of these wars and campaigns over a nearly two-hundred-year period. The pope in effect inspired, directed, and commanded the political and military actions of European princes. We are hard put to find any parallel of purely religious authorities in Islam directing the actions of Muslim armies.

Religion was the ideology of the period, working in support of conflicting geopolitical interests.

The Arab conquerors did not require the conversion as much as the subordination of non-Muslim peoples. At the outset, [the Arab conquerors] were hostile to conversions because new Muslims diluted the economic and status advantages of the Arabs.