Amr ibn al-As, one of Muhammad’s companions, brutally swept through Northern Egypt in AD 640, just eight years after Muhammad’s death. John of Nikiu, a bishop in the Nile delta, records one such conquest: “[W]hen with great toil and exertion they had cast down the walls of the city, they forthwith made themselves masters of it, and put to the sword thousands of its inhabitants and soldiers, and they gained an enormous booty, and took the women and children captive and divided them amongst themselves, and they made that city a desolation.”
