Was the 702 AD Aksumite raid on Jeddah a religious war between Christians and Muslims, or a reactive strike driven by the internal fractures of the early Islamic civil wars?
It was the latter: a defensive economic maneuver by the Kingdom of Aksum to protect its trade network after the Umayyad Caliphate crushed a rival rebellion in the Hijaz, revealing that the Red Sea was a dynamic frontier where Islamic civil wars (the fitnas) exported political refugees and forged a new “Afro-Arab” world rather than a simple clash of civilizations.
The traditional narrative of a Christian kingdom attacking a Muslim port is incorrect. The raid was a direct consequence of the First Fitna (656–661) and Second Fitna (680–692), which split the Islamic community over leadership succession. The Alids (supporters of Ali) and Kharijites fled persecution to the Red Sea fringes, forming a natural alliance with Aksum against the centralized Umayyad power in Damascus. For a decade, the Red Sea became a “Zubayrid-Aksumite Lake,” a zone of cooperation where trade boomed between the rebels in Arabia and the Aksumites in Africa.
The turning point came when the Umayyads violently crushed the rebellion in the Hijaz, replacing the friendly local regime with a hostile, repressive administration loyal to Damascus. The Umayyads imposed heavy taxes and economic warfare, threatening the vital trade routes Aksum relied on. The 702 raid on Jeddah was not an act of imperial expansion but a reactive strike to disrupt this new system and protect the economic network that the Umayyads were dismantling. Local Arabian merchants, squeezed by the new regime, likely encouraged the Aksumite attack.
The Umayyad retaliation—occupying the Dahlak Islands off the African coast—backfired spectacularly. Instead of controlling Aksum, they created a safe haven for their most dangerous enemies: the Alids. Following a massacre in 786, two brothers from the Prophet’s family escaped; one founded a dynasty in Morocco, while the other, Suleiman, established a presence on the Dahlak Islands. This event “exported the Alid Revolution,” planting a powerful center of opposition on the African frontier.
From these seeds grew the Dahlak Sultanate, a brilliant political innovation. The Alids leveraged their theological shield (lineage from Muhammad) to gain legitimacy, acted as essential economic middlemen between Christian Ethiopia and the Islamic world, and became cultural hybrids by marrying into local African elites. This created a new “Afro-Arab” identity that transcended simple religious or ethnic binaries. The story underscores that the Red Sea was a crucible where internal Islamic conflicts reshaped the geopolitical landscape, forging new alliances and states that would define the region for centuries.
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