Adham, ‘Abd Allāh ibn al-Mubārak, Hudhayfah al-Mar‘ashī, Yūsuf ibn Asbāt, and others: they guarded the Syrian frontiers. Some would come from Khurasan, Iraq, and elsewhere to guard these frontiers, because the people of Syria were the ones fighting the Christians, who are People of the Book.
The Sunan collections report that the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—said:
“Whoever is killed by the People of the Book receives the reward of two martyrs.”
This is because these people fight on religious grounds. The unbelieving Turks and others like them, however, do not fight on religious grounds. When the former prevail, they corrupt both religion and political rule. The Turks, by contrast, corrupt political rule and those aspects of religion bound up with it; they do not fight on religious grounds.
For this reason, “Tarsus” is frequently mentioned in works of religious learning and jurisprudence written at that time, because it was a Muslim frontier outpost. Indeed, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Sarī al-Saqatī, and other scholars and religious elders would travel there to guard the frontier. Al-Ma’mūn died nearby.
Thus, most statements by the early scholars concerning the merits of Ascalon, Alexandria, Acre, Qazwīn, and other such places, together with accounts of righteous people who lived there and similar reports, relate to their having been frontier outposts, not to any special quality inherent in those places.
Whether a place is a Muslim frontier outpost or not is an incidental rather than an inherent attribute, just as it may be an abode of Islam, an abode of unbelief, an abode of war, an abode of peace, an abode of knowledge and faith, or an abode of