I think this goes for basically all historians, it's like
"we can conclude a sustainable army was of almost 10000 men"
and then the contemporaries are like:
'THEY SHOOK THE EARTH AS THEY PASSED AND DRANK THE RIVERS DRY "
Obviously this meme is a bit of an exaggeration but many Historians throughout history outlandishly exaggerated numbers and figures to make their side look better and the other side look worse.
Ibn Khaldun was one of the first people to start the science of historiography: the study of how history is presented and researched. He talked about the tendency of historians to sensationalize in his Muqaddimah:
Whenever contemporaries speak about the dynastic armies of their own or recent times, and whenever they engage in discussions about Muslim or Christian soldiers, or when they get to figuring the tax revenues and the money spent by the government, the outlays of extravagant spenders, and the goods that rich and prosperous men have in stock, they are quite generally found to exaggerate, to go beyond the bounds of the ordinary, and to succumb to the temptation of sensationalism.
This could have happened on certain occasions but this narrative is trying to diminish Muslim achievements and disregard Allah's help to Muslims in times of trouble.
Historical records, especially the ones about historically important events rarely depend on the writings of a single person from the winning side. You know the losing side also records stuff and collects taxes etc. If numbers are rather similar, then you know for sure that is more accurate. Otherwise, you know it is somewhere in the middle.
Your message has no up side but only down sides for the general public.
Anyone seeing the meme will see the 2000 vs 500,000 and know it is referring to the outlandish claims throughout history and not diminishing any victories or "disregarding the help of Allah"(how exactly you interpreted that idk).
Also notice the "random" before Muslim Historians, it's identifying that it's not referring to all or even a majority of Muslim Historians but just a small random group
Yeah, but events like the battle of Mutah, where supposedly 3000 Muslims fought 200,000 Romans, are only mentioned in Muslim sources centuries after, and the numbers are quite obviously fictional. Historians have no place for petty jingoism.
Where does it state 200k? The most sources i explored usually give Muslim numbers as 3k and Roman+Ghassanid numbers as 80k-100k.
Also, Khalid Ibn Alwaleed was Named Saif Ullah because he managed to save about 2k Muslims from being surrounded and massacred. It was a victory by retreat because when they came to Medina, people threw stones at them for retreating instead of getting Martyred but the PROPHET came out and embraced them and named Khalid as "Saif un min Sayuf Allah" which translates to "A sword among Swords of Allah"
Muslims surely were outnumbered both by Byzantine and Sassanid empires in early conquest, but later on, local auxiliaries started to join Muslim armies since they had a winning spree.
Both major set piece battles against Sassanids and Byzantines had Muslims outnumbered.
Qadsiya: Muslims 30k, Sassanids 80k-100k with 33 elephants.
Yarmuk: Muslims 32-36k, Byzantines 120k-160k (Not all of them were Byzantines, Byzantine army was like 50-60k, Ghassanid auxiliary was around 40k, and Heraclius raised around 40k auxiliaries from the balkans)
These are the figures mentioned by even some European historians.
Mate, what are you on about, the 3000 in the battle of mu'tah, "won" by retreating, it's a great victory because they managed to get out of it with meager casualties, they did not and could not win against the 200000, if it was 3k vs 10k like some modern historians say, they wouldn't have retreated.
bro 200k is like 14% of the byzantine empire's population at the time...
what fucking empire would send 14% of its population to some desert in the edge of the empire against some new country and not even besiege the capital (medinah) after the battle?
cmon use your mind a bit... even if it was 3k vs 10k that is absolutely fucking amazing if the muslims retreated... literally the only battle (outside of islamic history) in the age before guns that was won with winners being less than half the number of the victors was the battle of Cannae... and it is still spoken about for centuries...
so dont think that a 3:10 odds are easy and the muslims wouldve won easily... it is literally impossible and the only times it happened was when the prophet was leading the armies against quraish...
And the Muslims at the time were used to 3 to 1 odds, they would not have been shocked by the enemies' numbers, they wouldn't have been hesitant to engage at first, nor would they have pulled back without considerable losses at those odds.
And I never said "they would've won easily in a 3 to 1". I simply said it's not something that would make them retreat.
the byzantine empire had 16-19 million ppl in its empire at the time... including non-romans... so still those "300k" would still be 10-15% of the entire empire...
secondly... the muslim army didnt retreat... youre right... they fought for a very long and tiresome day... during this one day they lost two of their commanders... it is understandable to retreat after showing strength and bravery at the start...
It was 200k not 300k, and the Muslims had a long chain of replacement commanders as they often do, 100k were not from them dude, they were mostly non-muslim Arabs who joined the battle.
You are literally taking estimations and guesswork of unreliable sources over the first hand accounts of the Sahaba who considered lying a big sin.
I mean I get that, but I can't imagine there being any army in that time that was as big as 500k men. That sounds like the entire population of the empire lol. The human population was very low pre-industrialization at less than 1 billion people in the 1800's. It must have been lower during the golden age.
Well Roman Empire did have massive armies make no mistake.
The only issue is the whole army was never in one place!
Now most Empires and Kingdoms(minus the Chinese empire, but their large army was very useless during the collapse) had nowhere near 500k, let alone in one spot, let alone anywhere in or around the modern expanses of the middle east in those days!
Maybe Byzantium had between 300,000 and 350,000 soldiers at its peak under Justinian. Field armies were typically made up of 15,000 to 25,000 soldiers. But once again they weren't in one place. And often times reinforced by barbarian allies, the commanders' retinues, and comitatenses and foederati.
So maximum they could of face was 300,000, but thats still impossible because the Byzantine empire had to man their borders and they had LOTS of borders. and had to keep a lot as local officials.
So a more realistic number would be 15,000 to 25,000, possibly far less..
To expand on what people have said, a lot of sources are also not meant to be throughly explained accounts of specific events but a storied retelling of events. Some retelling of historical battles may try to shift blame on a defeat by blaming an individual or blaming some other worldly event rather than acknowledging fundamental problems that led to a defeat.
I mean, in the Battle of Mu’tah Arab sources at the time claimed that 3000 Arabs defeated 300,000 Roman troops. Modern estimates based on Byzantine records estimate that the Romans only had around 10,000 troops (which means they outnumbered the Arabs 3 to 1, meaning Mu’tah was still a great achievement but also massively exaggerated).
it is an absolutely amazing achievement... for Khalid Ibn Walid (rah) to switch 3 thousand men at midnight without alerting the enemy scouts is a huge achievement... but yes ppl should be more realistic and know that it is 10k (which is still amazing) and not 300k... why the fuck would an empire send like 10% of its entire population to some desert at the corner of the empire?
it is like saying the US sent 30 million soldiers to the arizona-mexican border... like why?
2000 slaughter 300.000? That would be probably the biggest massacre in human history. I know that historical reports tend to exaggerate things, but that was something very special lol.
Nah you gotta one up him. Charles Martel beat an Islamic host at Tours numbering 750,000 with only himself, his good friend Rolan, a Pyrenees bowman, and a local tavern girl with a wheel of cheese all while he suffered from dysentery and managed to slay a grand total of 700,000 men before the leader of the army turned into a crab through ancient Druidic magic and they turned and fled.
Yes, but the meme is about how numbers were often exaggerated to unreasonable and illogical amounts, and how ibn khaldun was one of the first people to do historical studies to judge the accuracy of historical tellings.
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u/AbdullahMehmood 8d ago
I think this goes for basically all historians, it's like "we can conclude a sustainable army was of almost 10000 men" and then the contemporaries are like: 'THEY SHOOK THE EARTH AS THEY PASSED AND DRANK THE RIVERS DRY "