Paul Freedman, professor of history at Yale, lectures on the Arab conquests of the seventh century as part of his course The Early Middle Ages, 284-1000. He opens with the apparent paradox of a fast-moving, religiously charged expansion that did not force conversion on Jews, Christians, or other non-Muslims. The conquests began as raids out of Arabia and escalated once it became clear that Byzantium and Persia, exhausted by decades of war with each other, could not resist, allowing Arab armies to take territory stretching from Spain to India within a few generations. Freedman then turns to the internal strains that success produced, tracing disputes over Mohammed's successors as they grew into deeper criticism of the Caliphate and the ruling family, out of which the Sunni-Shiite split emerged. He closes with the changing, increasingly non-Arab makeup of the Muslim population. Filmed at Yale in 2011.