Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Between 705 and 732, Arab armies destroy the Visigoths, fail to capture Constantinople, and are turned back from Frankish land by Odo of Aquitaine (and Charles Martel)." [Bauer: Medieval World, p. 341] "The Umayyads, the new dynasty that came to power, were both Arabs and Muslims, and they symbolized the original fusion of a culture—and especially a language—with a revelation, a fusion that was the very soul of a new religion and civilization. But they moved their capital from the provincial and dangerously factional Medina to the more open and friendly spaces of Damascus, and in coming out of the isolation of the Arabian desert and making Syria over into the new homeland, and in the conversions of people far removed from Mecca and Medina, the Umayyads’ Islam forged a new culture that added generously to the Arab foundation." [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 20-1] "The Umayyads continued the Muslim conquests, incorporating the Transoxiana, Sindh, the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula (Al-Andalus) into the Muslim world." It included 33 million people at its greatest extent, making it one of the largest empires in history. [Wikipedia]