Download PDF | Alain George_ Andrew Marsham - Power, Patronage, and Memory in Early Islam_ Perspectives on Umayyad Elites-Oxford University Press, USA (2017).
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Contributors
Nadia Ali is a postdoctoral researcher with the Empires of Faith project, a collaboration between the British Museum and Oxford University (Wolfson College). Before joining this project she completed a PhD in Islamic art history at the University of Aix en Provence, France, and has trained in Arabic and Islamic studies. Her research interests focus on the emergence of early Islamic art in the context of Late Antiquity. Antoine Borrut is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of, among other works, Entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers Omeyyades et les premiers Abbassides (v. 72-193/692-809) (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
Nicola Clarke is Lecturer in the History of the Islamic World at Newcastle University. She is the author of The Muslim Conquest of Iberia: Medieval Arabic Narratives (Routledge, 2012), which won the 2014 La Corónica International Book Award. François Déroche holds the chair “Histoire du Coran: Texte and Transmission” at the Collège de France. He is the author of numerous books and articles about early Qurʾanic manuscripts, including Qur’ans of the Umayyads: A First Overview (2014). He was previously Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE, Paris).
Denis Genequand is specialized in Islamic archaeology, with a strong focus on the transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Syria and Jordan, and also in Yemen, Central Asia, and West Africa. He was the director of the Syrian-Swiss projects in Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Sharqī (2002–2011) and Palmyra (2008–2011). He has published widely on Umayyad Syria and is the author of Les établissements des élites omeyyades en Palmyrène et au Proche-Orient (2012). He holds alectureship in Islamic archaeology at the University of Geneva and is also in charge of Roman archaeology at Geneva’s archaeological office.
Alain George is Ieoh Ming Pei Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Oxford. He has previously taught at the University of Edinburgh. His main areas of research are early Qur’ans, Islamic calligraphy, the Islamic arts of the book, and Umayyad to early Abbasid art and architecture. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his research in 2010.
Mattia Guidetti is Universitätassistant in Islamic art at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte at the University of Vienna. He is the author of In the Shadow of the Church: the Building of Mosques in Early Medieval Syria (Leiden: Brill, 2016). He researches and publishes on the role of Late Antique Christian art in the making of Islamic art in the Syrian area.
Robert Hillenbrand is a Professorial Fellow at the University of St Andrews and a Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Between 1971 and 2007, he taught the history of Islamic art and architecture at the University of Edinburgh. His interests include Umayyad iconography and architecture; Islamic architecture, with a focus on the Iranian world, Greater Syria, and North Africa; and Persian miniature painting.
Robert G. Hoyland is Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He has written numerous books and articles exploring different aspects of the region’s history in the period 300–900.
Andrew Marsham is Reader in Classical Arabic Studies at the University of Cambridge and formerly Head of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: Accession and Succession in the First Muslim Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and a number of articles and chapters on Islamic political thought and practice.
Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen is Professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His field of research is contemporary Islam, with a focus on the establishment of a modern Muslim public sphere, and the role of the Muslim ulama in modern Arab states. His recent publications include Global Mufti: The Phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, coedited with Bettina Gräf (London, New York: Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2009); Islam på TV i den arabiske verden [Islam on TV in the Arab World] (Copenhagen: Vandkunsten, 2013); Arab Media Moguls, coedited with Donatella della Ratta and Naomi Sakr (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015).
Philip Wood completed his DPhil at Oxford with Averil Cameron. He has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, and SOAS and now holds an Associate Professorship at Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London.
Introduction:
Umayyad Elites and the Foundation of the Islamic Empire
Alain George and Andrew Marsham
IN 644 AD, the wealthy merchant ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (d. 656) became the leader of the new Arabian community that his father-in-law, the Prophet Muḥammad (d. 632), had founded just over two decades earlier. For most of the following century, his relatives, starting with Muʿāwiya (r. 661–680), retained leadership of what we now know as the caliphate— the first Muslim empire. Collectively, they came to be known as the Banū Umayya—the Umayyads—after their shared ancestor, ʿUthmān’s greatgrandfather, Umayya ibn ʿAbd Shams. Although the beginning of the Umayyad caliphate is usually placed in 661, with Muʿāwiya’s accession to power, ʿUthmān’s dependence upon his Umayyad relatives could equally suggest 644 as its starting point.1
From this period until their downfall in 750, the Umayyads presided over the evolution of the Muslim polity from a federation of Arabian tribes that had challenged the hegemony of the Roman (or “Byzantine”) and Iranian empires into an established Arabian and Islamic empire that dominated a vast swath of western Eurasia. It is under their rule, and partly through their actions, that a civilization of Islam began to coalesce and flourish, building up foundations that last to this day. The Umayyads lead us back to a period that is not easily documented yet is of long-lasting importance. The present collection of essays explores ways in which power and identity, both sacral and temporal, were articulated and projected by this first great dynasty of Islam. The Umayyad Empire was the largest empire in terms of land area that the world had thus far ever seen.2 The core lands of the caliphate had been captured by Arabian armies in the 630s, 640s, and 650s: Roman Syria and Egypt, Sasanian Iraq, and parts of Sasanian Iran. Under the Umayyads after ʿUthmān, two further major waves of conquest, in the 670s and early 700s, saw extensive settlement in Sistan and Khurasan, at the eastern end of the Iranian plateau, and in Roman North Africa and Visigothic Spain in the south and west Mediterranean. At the same time, recurrent land campaigns penetrated the South Caucasus and the Anatolian highlands, while naval campaigns contested control of the Mediterranean Sea. Sind, at the northwestern corner of the Indian subcontinent, also fell under Muslim rule. By the apogee of the empire, in the 720s and 730s, commanders who had paid allegiance to the Umayyads were raiding Merovingian France in the West and contesting power in Central Asia with the Turgesh allies of the Chinese Tang Empire.
The success of the Umayyad dynasty was founded upon the political skill of its most successful rulers, such as Muʿāwiya and ʿAbd al-Malik, and their alliances with the Arabic-speaking tribes of post-Roman Syria. The loyalty of the Syrians provided crucial support during two major civil wars (656–661, 683–692) and then helped the Umayyads suppress the rebellions against their rule that broke out in Iraq in each subsequent generation. Eventually, in the 740s, unrest in Iraq and Iran coincided with internal conflict within the Umayyad elite, leading to the events now known as the “Abbasid Revolution.” In 750, the leading members of the Umayyad clan were massacred by the revolutionary armies and Umayyad rule was thereafter confined to the far-flung Iberian Peninsula, with the Abbasid family—distant cousins—taking over the leadership of the central lands of the empire. These Abbasid successors of the Umayyads were by far the longer-lasting dynasty. The Abbasids (named after the Prophet Muḥammad’s uncle, al-ʿAbbās) ruled much of the empire for the next two hundred years, down to 945, and retained the title of caliph—and so ultimate authority over what had by then become the Sunni Islamic world—for a further three hundred years, until 1258. As a result, the Umayyad period risks being viewed as something of a temporary aberration—a period of interest for the astonishingly rapid conquests and the establishment of the Muslim empire, but of little lasting significance compared to the subsequent half millennium of the Abbasid era.3 A further problem is posed by the written record: all the extant literary evidence for early Islam was composed in its extant form only during the Abbasid period, and hence many historians have tended to be skeptical of the prospects for writing detailed Umayyad history.4 Others have accepted later representations of the Umayyads as impious and ungodly—not truly “Islamic” monarchs—a portrayal that continues to hold sway in much of the Islamic world today.5
For some time, the perspectives offered by art, architecture, and numismatics have provided a counterpoint to these widespread views, by showing that Umayyad experiments and syntheses laid the cornerstones for later developments in their respective fields.6 The perception of these evolutions has gained in complexity over the years, thanks to such factors as the more refined study of texts; the uncovering of new archaeological evidence; and the gradual identification of Umayyad Qurʾans.7 Epigraphy, notably in modern Saudi Arabia, has also yielded a growing body of inscriptions from the period: short texts set in stone, often formulaic, yet of undoubted historical importance.8 This body of material evidence, ranging from small-scale coins to monumental mosques, represents the most direct remains of the period—and it is extensive. It has brought widely held notions into question and fueled ongoing debates about issues of meaning and sociocultural context. In a parallel line of investigation, textual research is progressively showing that the Umayyad period was foundational on several other levels, and that its documentation is not as hopeless as it once seemed. Both strands, the textual and the material, are increasingly being combined as facets of the same history. Challenges to deeply ingrained assumptions are emerging, and approaches revealing continuities and discontinuities with the Late Antique and Abbasid eras are gradually opening up new perspectives. Historians working primarily with texts increasingly recognize the possibilities for more nuanced approaches to Abbasid and later sources, taking into account the processes of their transmission in order to not only understand the later contexts that shaped them but also discern materials that are likely to be much earlier than the date at which they were finally set down.
At the same time, both the potential of earlier nonArabic material and the complexities of its relationship to the later Arabic texts have been recognized.9 One important consequence of these new approaches is that many of the developments in Islam that were formerly attributed to the Abbasid period—for example, the emergence of Islamic theology and law, the rise of science in the Islamic world, and the development of key institutions of Muslim government—are now dated by many scholars to the Umayyad period.10 As a result, the Umayyad era is coming vividly to life, not only as the crucial moment of imperial conquest that established the borders of what would become the Arab world, but also as a turning point in world history, in which the tribes of Arabia joined the literate world of Mediterranean and West Asian monotheism with their own highly successful iteration of this tradition. Umayyad elites are being reevaluated— and to some extent rehabilitated—as actors within this new tradition in its formative phase, not simply as the “secular” and impious aristocrats that can easily be derived from the later Arabic tradition. The chapters in the present volume reflect many of these current developments. Two principal themes run through them. The first of these is the material culture of the Umayyad era and its relationship (or not) to articulations of legitimate authority. The second is the historiography of the Umayyad period and the implications of the nature of the texts for our understanding of this period.
The book is divided into three parts in which these two strands intermingle more or less closely. Part I, “Caliphal Authority in Text and Image,” addresses articulations of caliphal legitimacy and power as they are found both in texts and in iconography. Part II, “Patronage and Power: The Evidence of the ‘Desert Castles,’ ” looks specifically at the Umayyad patronage of residences, often surrounded by agricultural estates, in the Syrian steppe and its fertile peripheries. Part III, “Historiography and Historical Memory” focuses on the sources and their uses in Abbasid Iraq, Umayyad Spain, and among Christian communities under Umayyad rule. The volume ends with a reflection about the distant echoes of this era in the modern media culture of Egypt and Syria. What was the relationship between earthly and sacral authority in Umayyad times, and upon whom was ideological authority vested? These are key issues when considering any of the Late Antique polities of western Eurasia, and they lie at the heart of part I. The essays in this section suggest that the Umayyads were patrons of carefully composed articulations of sacral monarchy that took a distinctive and self-confident position within a wider discourse of images and texts, directly challenging the stance of Roman emperors and early Christian civilization with whom they were in competition. Andrew Marsham investigates the ideological underpinnings of the Umayyads’ title “God’s caliph,” suggesting, through a close reexamination of the evidence, that it should be understood in the wider context of Late Antique monotheist political culture and, specifically, as an epithet in a competitive and theologically charged dialogue with Roman imperial titulature. Alain George considers the mosaic decorations at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Damascus and explores how their iconography simultaneously projected claims to earthly rule and religious authority, the latter reflected in paradisiacal imagery.
François Déroche shows that patronage of monumental Qur’an manuscripts was also an act of imperial monarchy—promoting a distinctive Umayyad style of Qurʾanic script and its decoration. Part II includes four chapters on Umayyad-era settlements in Greater Syria. Robert Hillenbrand argues that the palatial architecture of Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Gharbī represented a deliberate synthesis, under the aegis of Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 724–743), of Roman and Sasanian forms and decoration in order to lay claim to inheritance of both empires. Robert Hoyland reflects on the archaeology of Khanāṣira and Andarīn in Syria in the context of late Roman and Umayyad rule; he presents an edition and translation of a new ink inscription—a request for a tax payment drafted on behalf of an Umayyad amīr, probably a son of the caliph Hishām. Denis Genequand presents evidence from recent excavations he led at Qaṣr alḤayr al-Sharqī, showing that the settlement was much more extensive than is usually recognized.
Some stucco images recently found there, he argues, may be atypical representations of the caliph, or at least leading members of the ruling elite. Nadia Ali and Mattia Guidetti question the dominant paradigm for interpreting the “desert castles.” Taking Quṣayr ʿAmra and Khirbat al-Mafjar as case studies, they argue that the habitual repertoires of craftsmen played a determining role in shaping their muchdiscussed decoration—thereby challenging the idea that buildings can be read as simple “texts” authored by their patrons. Part III presents four chapters on sources and historical memory. Philip Wood looks at textual evidence about Iraqi Christianity, mainly from Syriac sources, to suggest that the Umayyad period was a unique moment between the Sasanian and Abbasid periods when the link between the imperial state and the Christian leadership in Iraq was briefly interrupted. Antoine Borrut makes the case that elements of Umayyad historical writing long obliterated or obscured in the Arabic tradition can be recovered from Syriac sources. Nicola Clarke offers a different perspective on the historiographic tradition, considering how the western limits of the great Umayyad-era conquests were remembered by Arabic writers in Abbasid times and then in Islamic Spain—the one region of the Islamic world to remain in Umayyad hands after 750 (for another 259 years, down to 1009). Finally, Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen looks ahead a further one thousand years, to the present-day representation of Umayyad rule in Ramadan TV serials from Egypt and Syria, reminding us of the potent (and often stereotyped) images that still hold wide currency in the Arab world today.
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