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been reluctant to take these narratives seriously or to rely on any of the details they contain. I am of a different opinion. There are a number of reasons why we should return to this material and try to use it rather than dismissing it out of hand. The first is that Arabic accounts can sometimes be checked against sources outside the Arabic literary tradition, the Syriac Khuzistān Chronicle, for example, or the Armenian history of Sebeos, both accounts written by Christians within a generation of the events they describe. They are much shorter and less detailed than the Arabic accounts but they tend to support the general outlines of the Arabic history. On occasion they even support the detail. For example, the Arabic sources say that the heavily fortified city of Tustar fell to the Muslims because of the treachery of some of the inhabitants, who showed the Muslims how to enter through water tunnels. Such elements have often been dismissed as formulaic and valueless since we find similar accounts of the conquests of other towns and fortresses. In this case, however, the local Khuzistān Chronicle, a Syriac Christian source quite unconnected with the Muslim tradition, independently tells more or less the same story, suggesting strongly that the city did fall in the way described. This implies that the Arabic sources for the conquest of Tustar, and perhaps by extension for other areas too, are more reliable than has been thought.
     
    We can go further with the rehabilitation of the Arabic sources. Many of them can be traced back to compilers in the mid eighth century, men like Sayf b. Umar. Sayf lived in Kūfa in Iraq and died after 786. Beyond that we know nothing of his life, but he is the most important narrative source for the early conquests. Medieval and modern historians have suspected that he fabricated some of his accounts, but the most recent scholarship suggests that he is more reliable than previous authors had imagined. He is certainly responsible for collecting and editing many of the most vivid accounts of the early conquests. 4 Sayf was writing little more than a century after the early conquests and it is possible that some of the participants were still alive when Sayf was a boy. Furthermore, the later conquests in Spain and Central Asia were still under way in his lifetime. Sayf was as close in time to the great Muslim conquests than Gregory of Tours was to the early Merovingians or Bede to the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, both sources on which historians have always relied for the reconstruction of these events.
     
    There is a further dimension to these sources, the dimension of social memory. James Fentress and Chris Wickham have pointed out how traditional accounts, which may or may not be factually accurate, bear memories of attitudes and perceptions which tell us a great deal about how societies remember their past and hence about attitudes at the time of their composition. 5 The conquest narratives should be read as just such a social memory. In this way the early Arabic sources are very revealing of the attitudes of Muslims in the two centuries that followed the conquests. If we want to investigate the mentalités of early Islamic society, then these sources are of the greatest value. The tendency among some historians has been to denigrate the narratives: if instead we try to go with the narrative flow, to read them for what they are trying to tell us, they can be much more illuminating.
     
    One of the key issues that the sources address is the difference between the Arab Muslims and their opponents, their differing habits, attitudes and values. The Arab writers do not analyse these issues in any formal sense but instead explore them in narrative. Let us take, as an example, one narrative among the hundreds that have come down to us from the eighth and ninth centuries. It comes in the History of the Conquests , compiled in its present form by Ibn Abd al-Hakam in the mid ninth century.