2

The Umayyad Caliphs

41–132/661–750

1. The Sufyānids

2. The Marwānids

Mu‘āwiya followed ‘Alī and al-Ḥasan as caliph of the Muslims, having adopted the cry of ‘Vengeance for ‘Uthmān’ against ‘Alī and his regicide supporters (Mu‘āwiya and ‘Uthmān were kinsmen, both of them belonging to the Meccan clan of Umayya or ‘Abd Shams). Mu‘āwiya had governed Syria for twenty years, and had led the warfare by land and sea against the Byzantines; he consequently had a disciplined and well-trained army to set against the anarchic Bedouins of Iraq who formed the bulk of ‘Alī’s support. He thus inaugurates the first branch of the Umayyads, the Sufyānids; on the death of the ephemeral caliph Mu‘āwiya II, the caliphate passed – after a period of crisis when it seemed that leadership of the community might go to the Zubayrids, the family of another of Muḥammad’s most prominent Companions – to Marwān I, belonging to a parallel branch of the Umayyads, from whom all the subsequent caliphs of the dynasty (and also the Spanish Umayyads: see below, no. 4) descended.

The three greatest caliphs of the dynasty, Mu‘āwiya, ‘Abd al-Malik and Hishām, each reigned for some twenty years from their capital Damascus, and proved first-class administrators of the empire which the Arabs were conquering. With no precedents for a theory of Islamic government over vast territories and ethnically and confessionally heterogeneous populations, but with a dynamic leadership and a system of society which moved from early rigidity to a more flexible form, the Umayyads were necessarily innovators here. Among other things, they were concerned to adapt and to incorporate within their system of government the administrative practices of the Greeks and Persians whose former lands they now ruled over; the later Umayyad period seems to witness the introduction of several Sāsānid techniques and manners, a process which was to accelerate under the ‘Abbāsids. Military expansion proceeded apace, above all, in the reign of al-Walīd I, even though the easiest conquests had now been made and the Arab troops had to campaign in remote, often mountainous regions and in harsh climatic conditions; nor did plunder come in so easily as in the first stages of Arab conquest. All of North Africa west of Egypt was occupied, and Muslim raiders passed across the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain, subsequently surmounting the Pyrenees and raiding into late Merovingian and Carolingian France. From Egypt, pressure was exerted against the Christian kingdoms of Nubia. Beyond the Caucasus, contact was made with the Turkish Khazars, and the Greek frontiers in south-eastern Anatolia and Armenia were harried. On the eastern Persian fringes, Khwārazm was invaded and Transoxania gradually conquered for Islam against the strenuous opposition of native Iranian rulers and their Turkish allies. Finally, an Arab governor penetrated through Makrān into Sind, implanting Islam for the first time on Indian soil. All these conquests not only increased the taxative resources of the empire but also brought in large numbers of slaves and clients; the use of this labour enabled the minority of Arabs in the empire to live off the conquered lands as a rentier class and to exploit some of the economic potential of regions like the Fertile Crescent.

Yet territorial expansion and economic and administrative progress did not prevent the fall of the Umayyad régime. Within the heartlands, the caliphs faced the unceasing opposition of the Arab tribesmen of Iraq and of sectarian activists like the Khārijīs. The formation of a religious institution centred on Medina made the two Holy Cities of Arabia centres of pious opposition, especially as some of these elements favoured the claims to headship of the community of ‘Alī’s descendants, the Ahl al-Bayt or ‘House of the Prophet’, who regarded themselves as the Imāms or divinely-designated inheritors of the prophetic charge. It was not, as anti-Umayyad views which emerged under their supplanters, the ‘Abbāsids, were later to allege, that the Umayyad caliphs were mere kings, hostile to Islamic religion and introducers of the foreign practice of hereditary succession in the state. We can now discern that the Umayyads had an exalted view of the religious nature of their charge, not just as successors of the Prophet but as God’s own deputies, implied by their title Khalīfat Allāh ‘God’s Caliph’, and considered themselves fully competent to form and to interpret the nascent Islamic doctrine. But social tensions appeared within the caliphate at large. New classes, such as the Mawālī or clients, converts to Islam from the formerly subject populations, began to seek a more satisfactory social and political role within the umma commensurate with their numbers and their skills. Various discontents were skilfully exploited by members of a rival Meccan clan to the Umayyads, that of the descendants of the Prophet’s uncle al-‘Abbās. Hence after 128/746 there began in the Khurasan or eastern Persia a revolutionary movement led by an agitator of genius, Abū Muslim. The anti-Umayyad forces gained military victory and, with the claims of the ‘Alids to the imamate speedily elbowed aside, the ‘Abbāsids succeeded to the caliphate in 132/750 (see below, no. 3). In a general massacre of the defeated Umayyads, one of the few members of the family to survive was Hishām’s grandson ‘Abd al-Rahmān; he escaped to North Africa and eventually founded in Spain a fresh, much longer-lived line of Umayyads (see below, no. 4).

Lane-Poole, 4–6, 9; Zambaur, 3 and Table F; Album, 7–11.

EI¹ ‘Umaiyads’ (G. Levi Della Vida).

Veccia Vaglieri, ‘The Patriarchal and Umayyad caliphates’, in The Cambridge History of Islam, I, 57–103.

H. Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates. The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, 82–123, with genealogical table at p. 403.

G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam. The Umayyad CaliphateAD 661–750, London 1986, with genealogical table at p. xv.

A. Noth, ‘Früher Islam’, in Haarmann (ed.), Geschichte der arabischen Welt, 11–100.