Download PDF | (Edinburgh History of the Islamic Empires) Andrew Marsham - The Umayyad Empire- Edinburgh University Press (2024).

Download PDF | (Edinburgh History of the Islamic Empires) Andrew Marsham - The Umayyad Empire- Edinburgh University Press (2024).

395 Pages 

Introduction 

Just to the south of the medieval circuit walls of the Old City of Damascus, in Syria, is the Bab al-Saghir Cemetery, where Damascenes have buried their dead for centuries. I visited the cemetery in 2010, about six months before the beginning of the horror of the Syrian War. I had come to see the tomb of the caliph Mu‘awiya b. Abi Sufyan (r. 661–80 ce). Mu‘awiya was a brother-in-law and distant cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, and is usually considered to be the founder of the Umayyad dynasty. Once an extra-mural burial ground, the cemetery was now surrounded by the modern city. It was full of densely packed gravestones, separated only by narrow paths. 

There were also larger monuments, visible across the fields of smaller grave markers. When I visited, one mid-week afternoon in blazing July heat, veiled women pilgrims surrounded the large domed tomb of the Prophet Muhammad’s great-granddaughter, Fatima bt. al-Husayn. Mu‘awiya’s grave was about 100m further along – a modern, pale, concrete cube, about 2m high, encased in green-painted railings and capped by a concrete dome decorated with religious invocations in the same green paint. An inscribed band of Arabic ran around the top of its four walls. The tomb stood in silence, with no visitors. When I got closer, I noticed a large hole broken in the modern inscription, through which the blue and white tiles of an older building showed. The gap seemed unlikely to be accidental damage, since it coincided exactly with Mu‘awiya’s name, all but the last syllable of which had been broken away. 

As the damage to his tomb suggests, although Mu‘awiya lived more than 1,300 years ago, he and his family still excite strong feelings – often ambivalent and sometimes fiercely negative. This may seem surprising, and not just because of the remote time in which he lived; Mu‘awiya has the prestigious status of a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad – someone who is said to have met the founder of the Islamic religion, and converted to Islam while Muhammad still lived. Furthermore, in the ninety years between 661 and 750, Mu‘awiya, and then thirteen of his relatives from the Umayyad clan, presided over an era of astonishing empire-building on a hitherto unknown scale.

No previous empire had ever been as geographically vast as that the Umayyads ruled, and none would be again until the conquests of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, half a millennium later, in the thirteenth century (Figure I.1). During the ninety years of Umayyad rule, many of what were to become the core territories of Islam and the Arab world were conquered by commanders loyal to Mu‘awiya or his Umayyad successors. By 711, the Umayyad Empire stretched from modern Spain and Morocco in the West to modern Afghanistan and Pakistan in the East; by 750, when the Umayyad dynasty fell from power, armies composed of the Arabians and their allies were fighting on imperial frontiers in the Caucasus, Central Asia, East Africa, South Asia and Europe (see Map I.1). The Arabic language had been established as the language of religion and imperial administration across much of the empire, and its governors and soldiers prayed in the mosques that had been built in its cities. Members of the Umayyad family ruled all these lands as a single political entity. 

It is often referred to as the Umayyad Caliphate, after one of the titles used by its rulers – ‘God’s Caliph’ (khalīfat Allāh), meaning ‘God’s Representative on Earth’ – and after the name of their common ancestor Umayya, Mu‘awiya’s great-grandfather. The Umayyad Caliphate remains the largest ever Islamic empire in terms of land area, and the only trans-regional empire in history to be dominated by a military elite who came from the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension, the Syrian Desert and Steppe. The Umayyad era was also the last occasion when the entire Islamic world was politically united – notionally at least – under one ruler; thereafter it began to fragment into separate emirates and, eventually, separate imperial caliphates.

Shi‘is, Sunnis, and the Reputation of the Umayyads

In order to understand why neither Mu‘awiya’s status as a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad, nor his political achievements and those of his dynasty, are enough to protect his name from the anger of modern vandals, we must look beyond the Umayyad period itself, at the history of the first 300 years of Islam and the formation of the two sectarian positions known today as Sunnism and Shi‘ism. Ultimately, the ambivalent and sometimes negative image of Mu‘awiya and his Umayyad successors among many (but by no means all) Muslims is a consequence of the close connection between political leadership and religious authority in the formative era of Islam. In 622, the Prophet Muhammad had established a new community at the oasis now known as Medina (in modern Saudi Arabia). 

This community identified as ‘faithful’ (Ar. mu’min, pl. mu’minūn) monotheists in the Jewish and Christian tradition, emphasising the idea of one God to the exclusion of all others, and the importance of loyalty to that God over other loyalties to family and tribe. By the time of Muhammad’s death, in 632, his political influence reached across much of the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammad’s immediate successors presided over the dramatic conquest of the Middle East, North Africa and western Central Asia. The two great empires that had dominated the temperate lands of West Eurasia for centuries – the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean and the Sasanian Empire of Iran – were overwhelmed in one decade, in the 630s and 640s. By 650, the Sasanian Empire had collapsed, and the Romans had surrendered control of Egypt and Syria. (According to widespread convention, Greater Syria – Bilād al-Shām in Arabic – is here simply called ‘Syria’, by which is denoted modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and parts of southern Turkey.) 

The Romans fought hard for the North African lands west of Egypt, which they abandoned after 700. With these vast conquests by the Arabian monotheists came bitter internal political conflict over resources and legitimate leadership. Because political leadership was also leadership of the new religious community, these conflicts generated passionate and often violent disputes that were at once political and religious. And because the leadership of the new empire of the ‘Faithful’ stayed in the hands of close relatives of the Prophet Muhammad, these religio-political  conflicts also had the character of family, or ‘tribal’, conflicts (see Chart I.1). In the wake of two major civil wars in the seventh century, in which they were victorious, and then a third war in 744–50, in which they were defeated and deposed from power, the reputations of Mu‘awiya and his Umayyad relatives suffered especially badly. By the mid-tenth century, when most of the defining characteristics of the two main sectarian traditions in Islam – Shi‘ism and Sunnism – had taken shape, the Umayyads’ image was entirely negative for the Shi‘is, and often somewhat ambivalent even for Sunnis. 

The Shi‘is had come to believe that things had gone very wrong from the moment of Muhammad’s death, in 632. Muhammad should have been succeeded immediately by a son-in-law and cousin, named ‘Ali, whom the Shi‘is believed had been nominated as heir by Muhammad himself. ‘Ali was unique in that he was the father of the only male descendants of the Prophet who survived into adulthood, via his marriage to Fatima, one of Muhammad’s daughters. Hence, had ‘Ali led the Muslims, he might have established a ruling dynasty of male descendants of Muhammad. But, instead of ‘Ali, three others of the Prophet’s Companions had seized power in sequence. When the third of these was assassinated, in 656, ‘Ali was able finally to claim his right as leader of the Faithful. However, the violent and controversial circumstances of his accession to the caliphate made him politically vulnerable, and he was never universally recognised. Among those who had withheld their allegiance was Mu‘awiya, claiming a right to avenge the murdered ruler’s death. When ‘Ali was in turn himself assassinated, in 661, Mu‘awiya proclaimed himself caliph, intimidating one of ‘Ali’s sons, al-Hasan, into surrendering any claim to power. Twenty years later, when Mu‘awiya died, the other of ‘Ali’s sons by Fatima, named al-Husayn, made a bid for power, only to be slaughtered alongside his family by a commander loyal to Mu‘awiya’s son Yazid. This massacre, which took place at Karbala in Iraq, is commemorated by Shi‘i Muslims every year during Muharram, the first month of the lunar Islamic year. 

Many of the tombs of al-Husayn’s family are in the same Bab al-Saghir Cemetery as Mu‘awiya.1 For the Shi‘is of the tenth century and after, the rightful leadership of the Muslims had resided in a line of leaders descended from ‘Ali and the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. The line includes ‘Ali himself, then the Prophet’s grandsons, al-Hasan and al-Husayn. In the majority ‘Twelver’ Shi‘i tradition, there are nine more individuals, making twelve in all, one in each generation. These men are the true spiritual leaders of Islam, or Imams, though none after ‘Ali held the caliphate. The twelfth of them, named Muhammad, disappeared in 874, to return – in much the same way as Christians believe Jesus will – at the end of time. All but this last of the twelve Imams are believed in the Shi‘i tradition to have been murdered by the ruling caliphs. Mu‘awiya’s refusal to recognise the caliphate of ‘Ali or his son al-Hasan (whom Shi‘is believe he later assassinated), and Yazid b. Mu‘awiya’s association with the killing of al-Husayn, have given Mu‘awiya, his son Yazid and the Umayyads in general a profoundly evil reputation in Shi‘i thought. For tenth-century Sunnis, in contrast, legitimate Islamic political leadership on earth was a reality, and existed in the form of the caliphate, which had been established by Muhammad’s first successors and sustained first by the Umayyads and then by the Abbasid dynasty. The Abbasids were the branch of Muhammad’s tribe who had replaced the Umayyads in a bloody revolution in 747–50. 

The Abbasids went on to hold the caliphate legitimately (in Sunni eyes) for over 500 years, until the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. The Abbasid caliphs had come to align themselves with Sunni religious scholars, opposed to the Shi‘i understanding of authority in Islam. For these Sunni scholars, the caliph was the proper political leader of the Muslims, and necessary for legitimate (that is, divinely favoured) political organisation in Islam, but authority in matters of religion and law was to be found in the memory of the era of the Prophet Muhammad, as transmitted and interpreted by the religious scholars (‘ulamā’, sing. ‘ālim), and not in the person of any one Imam, or individual leader, of the later Muslims. For Sunnis, the key point was that the majority of the Muslims had remained within a single religio-political community – a point emphasised in the longer name from which the label ‘Sunni’ derives, ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamā‘a (‘people of tradition and unity’). In contrast to Shi‘i claims, the Sunnis held that the Companions of the Prophet had not acted in error when they chose their leaders. Among Sunnis, the special status of these first four caliphs, Abu Bakr (r. 632–4), ‘Umar (r. 634–44), ‘Uthman (r. 644–56) and ‘Ali (r. 656–61) is marked by their being remembered collectively as ‘The Rightly Guided Caliphs’ (al-khulafā’ al-rāshidūn). This idea of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’ can be seen as an attempt at détente with the Shi‘i view of history, making retrospective sense of the violent conflicts of the Muslim past (see Chart I.1). The Shi‘is were correct that ‘Ali had been a legitimate leader, but they were wrong to claim that Muhammad had nominated him specially, and that the first three caliphs had been illegitimate. Criticism of ‘Ali for taking advantage of the assassination of the third caliph, ‘Uthman, in order to become caliph himself, was now overlooked; both ‘Uthman and ‘Ali had been rightly guided and were models for the present. Indeed, for the ninth- and tenth-century Sunnis, the contemporary Abbasid caliphs were legitimate political and military leaders, ruling with divine sanction. 

The Umayyads held a liminal and somewhat ambivalent status; they had successfully ruled the Muslims as caliphs, but Mu‘awiya’s accession marked the end of ‘rightly guided’ rule. Furthermore – almost as much for some Sunnis as for Shi‘is – the killing of al-Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson, together with many of his family, was a deep stain on the Umayyads’ reputation. 2 This Sunni idea of the ‘rightly guided’ caliphate being brought to an end by the assassination of ‘Ali and the accession of Mu‘awiya has continued to exert a powerful hold over the way that Umayyad history is perceived. For Sunni Muslims, Mu‘awiya’s place in history, and that of his Umayyad successors, has always been placed just beyond the line that divides the exceptional era of God’s most important intervention in the world, through Muhammad and his leading Companions, from a more mundane historical time, where the caliphs were the legitimate dynastic political figureheads for the Muslims, but righteous authority in religious matters lay in looking back to the prophetic era. In contrast, for Shi‘i Muslims, Mu‘awiya and his son Yazid are emblematic of the tyrannical oppression of God’s chosen righteous family and, by extension, of true, Shi‘i, Islam. If the damage to Mu‘awiya’s tomb that I saw that summer was indeed something more than an accident or mindless vandalism it was probably an expression of Shi‘i hostility to the man who had kept the Prophet’s family out of power and so became a lasting symbol of injustice.

Re-framing the Umayyad Empire

Most of the Arabic narrative sources about these events were composed in their extant form in the ninth century or later. Hence, it is difficult to assess what we can know of how and why things happened at the time, in the seventh and eighth centuries, and how they were perceived by contemporaries. As we have seen, one question that concerned the compilers of our sources was whom among the Muslims’ leaders had rightfully held power, and with whom religious authority rightfully resided. Associated with this question was the correct way to rule God’s people, and so the personalities of leaders, their management of the affairs of state, and their interactions with men of religion, are all also prominent themes. So too is the question of their relationship to the proper interpretation of the religious tradition; as we have seen, the later Sunni and Shi‘i perspectives on the Islamic past were quite different, and there were many other topics where the perspective of the scholar composing the text shaped the narrative. What most scholars shared was a focus on how God’s will had been manifested in the history of the Muslims. Above all, Islam was presented as a break with the misguided traditions of the past and – especially among Sunni scholars – the unity and coherence of the Muslims, and continuities within their history, tended to be emphasised over conflict, diversity, hybridity and discontinuity. Until recently, the perspectives of the later Islamic tradition have shaped the treatment of early Islam in modern scholarship, and they still have significant influence today. The break with the pre-Islamic past is reflected in the tendency of many modern histories to begin with a short preliminary discussion of pre-Islamic Arabia and the Middle East, before turning to the narrative of the expansion of Islam from Mecca and Medina in Arabia and then development of the Caliphate. This can lead to the impression that the Islamic empire formed in something of a vacuum, with developments internal to it being far more important than the interaction of Arabians and Muslims with the world around them, and where the pre-Islamic history of the Middle East counted for little in the face of the new Arab culture and the religion of Islam. Recent scholarship has broken with these teleological views by investigating continuities with the pre-Islamic past and the history of Islamic belief and practice before the consolidation of the Sunni and Shi‘i perspectives outlined above. Such reframing of early Islamic history is often expressed by the idea that early Islam belongs within the period of ‘Late Antiquity’ (often c. 200–750 ce). 

Late Antiquity was the era of the transformation of the power structures of the Roman Empire, including the adoption of Christianity as the empire’s ruling ideology, together with the replacement of Roman rule by new elites from the margins of the former empire, who also took up Christianity as their legitimating belief system. Reframing the history of early Islam in this way has led to the questioning of many assumptions that might otherwise be adopted from the later source material, including the religious and ethnic identities of the rulers of the Umayyad Empire, and the power structures upon which they depended.3 This book similarly seeks to reframe the Umayyad Empire by moving beyond the narratives provided by the ninth- and tenth-century sources. It seeks to explain how the empire came into being and how it functioned, as well as the forces that brought about the fall from power of its ruling family and their allies. In so doing, it is necessary to uncover the social, economic, military and ideological forces that shaped the history of the Middle East, North Africa  and western Asia in the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. Vast new empires do not simply come into being because of the ideas of a single person, nor even because of the actions of a small group of people around them. 

Ideas and people do of course matter – and the case of Islam, where a tiny religious community was a crucial element in the formation of a new ruling elite, and ultimately of something that can be called a new civilisation, is a particularly eye-catching example of this. But ideas and people have their moment. Or, to put it another way, ideas have a context; social structures, economic patterns and, in the case of empire, the ability to marshal military force, must all be aligned to allow them to flourish. This book seeks to pay sufficient attention to all these dimensions of the era of the Umayyad Empire, and to take account of the long pre-Islamic context that gave rise to it and the forces that shaped its evolution. What is perhaps hardest of all to recover is a full sense of contingency: in the seventh century, that Islam would both shape and be shaped by a lasting empire, let alone a huge world civilisation, was unknown to everyone; furthermore, Islam itself was different from what Muslims of later decades and centuries would know. Indeed, there is no evidence that the conquerors of Rome and Iran at the time of Mu‘awiya usually called themselves ‘Muslims’, nor is the term ‘Islam’ widely attested. Rather, it was during the later Umayyad period that the label ‘Muslims’ (Ar. muslimūn) became a more prominent label for the group whose precursors seem more often to have called themselves the ‘Faithful’ (mu’minūn) or ‘Emigrants’ (muhājirūn); at the same time, this successful new community’s religious tradition (or, rather, diverse competing versions of that tradition) changed and developed; by the latter decades of the Umayyad period, it becomes more straightforward to refer without qualification to various forms of ‘Islam’ as a religious tradition, as well as to ‘Muslims’, as its adherents. Although, even then, much of the doctrine and practice we consider intrinsic to Sunni and Shi‘i forms of Islam today had yet to take shape.4 Another anachronism in many modern narratives about the Umayyad Empire is the emphasis on the history of the Muslims, to the exclusion of other groups. This tendency reflects the concerns of medieval Muslim historians with the history of what they saw as their community – the Faithful of Arabian origin, who had conquered Rome and Iran. Of course, the Arabian armies were a tiny minority among the people they encountered in the territories they conquered – Romans, Persians, Aramaeans, Copts, Nabataeans, Kurds, Armenians, Albanians, Berbers, Khazars, Sogdians, Goths, Indians and Turks, according to some of the labels used in the sources. 

The languages, religions and cultures of these groups persisted far beyond the Umayyad period. Indeed, many still exist in in the Middle East of today. While the conquering Arabian armies articulated their unity in religious terms, notably through pledges of allegiance made before God, they did not usually expect the populations they ruled to change their religious practices so long as they acknowledged the suzerainty of God and His community of the Faithful. Comparatively large-scale conversions to Islam among the conquered populations happened only towards the end of the Umayyad period and, even then, Muslims remained a tiny minority. By the best estimate, about 90 per cent of the empire’s population at the very end of the Umayyad period were neither of Arabian heritage nor Islamic faith.5 Conversion then accelerated significantly in the ninth century. Hence, most of the Muslim historians of the ninth and tenth centuries were descendants either of the conquered peoples or of both Arabian migrants and people from the lands they had conquered. Their ancestors had converted to Islam and adopted Arabic as the lingua franca of the world in which they lived. These shifts in identity were reflected in the concerns of their historical writing. When they discussed the histories of their own, non-Arabian, non-Muslim, ancestors they tended to do so within a framework provided by Islam – situating their people’s preIslamic past in relation to God’s creation of the world and the prophecy of Muhammad. 

Thus, the Umayyad world was in many respects an as it were ‘pre-Islamic’ world, insofar as ‘Islamic’ is often shorthand for a majority-Muslim, Arab civilisation and its various Persian, Turkish and other successors. Instead, in Umayyad times a diverse conquering elite, led by a ruling group from West Arabia but composed from the various peoples of the Arabian Peninsula and the Syrian Desert, were dominant in the former lands of Rome and Iran. Like many of the other new elites of Late Antiquity, the conquerors’ leaders articulated their political unity in religious terms. For the West Arabians, the example of the Prophet Muhammad and a sense of their own faith tradition as distinct from and superior to those of the conquered peoples were both important. However, much remained in contention, and many of the features of Islamic belief and practice that became core to the later tradition had yet to develop or gain widespread acceptance. Moreover, converts retained some previous beliefs and practices, which in turn shaped the development of Islam. Indeed, the context is still recognisably Roman and Sasanian: Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, Middle Persian, Sogdian, Bactrian and other languages were employed by the diverse peoples of the empire and the ideas, structures and institutions of Roman and Iranian rule shaped those developed by the Arabian conquerors. Among the peoples of the conquered territories were Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Buddhists and others, who attained high office in the service of the new imperial rulers or ruled themselves as allies of the new empire. Most definitions of empire depend upon the idea of a dominant ruling group, with a distinctive cultural or religious identity, exerting various forms of power over other, diverse, groups, but also co-opting some conquered peoples into the new hegemony. 

This definition holds true for the Umayyad era. The distinction between ‘conqueror’ and ‘conquered’ was often critical – with the former extracting tribute and taxes from the latter. The ‘conquerors’ defined themselves by shared faith, in God and one another, as ‘the Faithful’ or, increasingly, also as ‘Muslims’. However, they also shared somewhat similar languages and cultures, as peoples from the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension, the Syrian Desert and its steppe. Indeed, Arabian heritage and membership of a military elite were closely connected, and so non-Arabians serving in the army or the administration tended to be given a distinctive status as ‘clients’ (Ar. mawālī, sing. mawlā) of the Arabian person or group to whom they were affiliated. However, just as much of what came to form the later Islamic religious tradition had yet to take shape, so too had some of the later ideas about ‘Arabs’. The more geographical ‘Arabians’ is usually used here to describe the conquerors and their descendants instead of the ethnic ‘Arabs’. This is because, ‘the Arabs’ (Ar. al-‘arab) only began to gain widespread currency as a label for all the peoples who traced their heritage back to the Arabian Peninsula (or, alternatively, for all the people who spoke Arabic) during the Umayyad era. Out of the migration into the conquered territories came new questions of identity and belonging and it is in this context that ‘the Arabs’ began to gain its inclusive, but still contested, collective meaning among the migrants and the other members of the new imperial military elite. As a result, the term ‘Arab’ became inflected in some contexts with the idea of status and rulership; sometimes ‘the Arabs’ came to be used as a label for the imperial military elites of the Umayyad era. Meanwhile, many of the rebel movements in the later decades of Umayyad rule drew in part upon non-Arabs’ resentments of the Arabs’ privileges and power.

This is not to say, however, that there were not already some shared cultural characteristics among the various groups who comprised the first conquering armies. Indeed, the Arabian backgrounds of the West Arabian leadership and their armies are crucial to understanding the unique characteristics of their empire – a settled leadership, who could claim a sacred status by virtue of their association with the shrine at Mecca, led armies drawn primarily from nomadic pastoralist Peninsular and Syrian steppe groups. The strategic mobility of the pastoralists helps to explain the vast scale of their conquests, which anticipate in some respects the far larger thirteenth-century conquests of the Mongols. Moreover, the religious and governmental traditions established by the Meccan leaders, in combination with the Arabian backgrounds of their armies, meant that their empire developed a new and distinctive religious and cultural character. Much of this religion and culture took shape in new garrison settlements where many of the Arabian groups settled after the conquests, retaining and developing their sense of separateness from the non-Arabian populations around them.

An Umayyad Empire?

In what senses, then, can we speak of ‘the Umayyad Empire’? Few, if any, Muslims in early Islamic times would have thought of the Muslim polity as an empire in the sense that the label is now used. Political power was described in more personal terms, as ‘sovereignty’ or ‘kingship’ (mulk). Where it was abstracted from a person, it was often simply the ‘command’, ‘affair’ or ‘affairs’ (amr, pl. umūr). Moreover, the conquering Faithful often deployed the rhetoric of suspicion of worldly power that was also widespread in Jewish and Christian cultures of the time. Indeed, the nascent religion of Islam came to be defined in part against the ‘idolatry’ (shirk) of Roman and Sasanian imperial rule. (Of course, the Roman and Sasanian rulers themselves had made very similar claims to divine sanction against the claims of their enemies.) The new political dispensation established by the Arabians was amr Allāh or mulk Allāh – the ‘government’, ‘rule’ or ‘sovereignty’ of God. In this, too, their language echoed that of their Roman and Sasanian opponents.7 From 661 at the latest, and quite possibly earlier, the ruler of the new empire used the formal title amīr al-mu’minīn, ‘The Commander of the Faithful’ (as noted above, ‘the Faithful’ is a more common term than ‘Muslim’ for the adherents of Islam in early Arabic texts). ‘Command’ (imāra) was held by him (and hence the residence of the ruler or his governors was the dār al-imāra, ‘the House of Command’, or ‘Government Palace’). Occasionally, in panegyric poetry, in some speeches and public letters, and on rare coins, the ruler was also khalīfat Allāh, ‘God’s Caliph’ – that is, ‘God’s Deputy’. From this, a name for his office – the Caliphate (khilāfa) – came to be derived. (‘Caliphate’ did not tend to be used to refer to the territorial entity of his dominions, in the way that it is today.) He could also be described as a malik (king), but this was not a formal title, and is found only in the panegyric poems performed at the caliphal court, in some graffiti or informal inscriptions, and in Syriac Christian texts. Again, much of this political titulature echoes that of the Christian Roman emperors, who were the Umayyads’ main rivals for dominance of the eastern Mediterranean and against whom the Umayyads came to define themselves.8 

Thus, the Umayyads had much in common with their Roman and Sasanian imperial rivals. Moreover, there is a second reason for referring to the Umayyad Empire as an empire. This is to use the word empire not as a straightforward translation of a label that might have been used by its inhabitants, but rather as a term with analytical and descriptive utility. The vast domains of the Umayyads, comprising numerous religious, linguistic and ethnic groups, under the notional authority of a single monarch fits most modern definitions of empire. The exploitation of the resources of a conquered or subordinate population for the benefit of an elite or elites is another a defining feature of empire, and in the Umayyad Empire, tribute and taxation were collected for the benefit of a small ruling elite of Arabian conquerors and migrants and their descendants, together with their (often non-Arabian) administrators and allies. In the world of Late Antiquity, narratives of universal monarchy under universal divine sanction – Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian – were the explanatory frameworks for such political arrangements. The institution of the caliphate and the religion of Islam developed as a distinctive iteration of this late antique pattern of imperial thought.9

The other element in ‘Umayyad Empire’ is dynastic. Dynasties – like other imagined human groupings – are established over time, and so the label ‘Umayyad Empire’ is to some extent retrospective. With hindsight, the period is indeed dominated by the political success of the Umayyad family. However, it was marked by persistent unrest, with two phases of prolonged internal conflict (656–61 and 680–92), between which Mu‘awiya’s long caliphate of 661–80 marks only a hiatus. Although Mu‘awiya passed power to his son in 680, this was immediately contested, and it was only after 692 that ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwan – from a different, sometimes rival, branch of the Umayyad clan than Mu‘awiya – was able to establish his own family as more lasting leaders of the empire (see Chart I.2). Nonetheless, although no one at the time could have known for how long the various members of the Umayyad clan and their descendants would hold power, the Umayyads and their contemporaries all thought about politics in tribal terms and acted in ways that were demonstrably related to ideas about kinship connections. In these respects, the idea of an ‘Umayyad dynasty’ is not anachronistic.10 In attempting to think about history as it took place at the time, we should reconsider who we include in the Umayyad dynasty. Although Mu‘awiya is often taken to be the first of the Umayyad dynasty, interconnections with the reign of the third caliph ‘Uthman, who was also from the Umayyad clan, are emphasised here. ‘Uthman’s caliphate is rarely considered part of an ‘Umayyad period’. Because later Sunni orthodoxy saw him as the third of four ‘rightly guided caliphs’, preceded by Abu Bakr and ‘Umar, and succeeded by ‘Ali, ‘Uthman’s reign is usually separated from that of his second cousin Mu‘awiya. Furthermore, whereas Mu‘awiya definitely sought to establish dynastic succession by appointing his son as his heir, it is less clear what ‘Uthman’s intentions for the caliphate may have been before he was killed, and so for this reason too he is often not seen as part of the Umayyad dynasty. However, it is likely that ‘Uthman had dynastic ambitions for his own sons. Moreover, ‘Uthman was indubitably an Umayyad in that he was a grandson of the eponymous Umayya. He is remembered for having acted in a self-consciously clan-based manner, drawing upon kinship ties among the Umayyads and the wider clan of ‘Abd Shams. During ‘Uthman’s rule, crucial foundations were laid for the success about thirty years later of his cousin, ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwan. Moreover, ‘Uthman was claimed as a founding figure by later Umayyad caliphs: claims to legitimacy in the later Umayyad caliphs’ public rhetoric often depended upon claims of rightful succession to him. When we include ‘Uthman, we find that members of the Umayyad clan claimed the caliphate for all but four of the 106 years between 644 and 750, albeit always facing rebels, rivals and challengers, and in a context of great turmoil for the periods 656–61, 680–92 and 744–50.

The Sources and Modern Perspectives

As noted above, the formation of the Umayyad Empire can be seen as belonging to the latter part of the era often referred to as Late Antiquity (often c. 200–750 ce) or, alternatively, to the Early Middle Ages (often c. 500–1000 ce). While the use of these periodisations beyond Western Europe has been questioned, the histories of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East certainly share sufficient features to justify using them – ­advisedly – for the whole region. The character of the historical evidence is one consequence of these shared features. In Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Rome and Iran lost territory and power to groups from the empires’ former frontier zones, or from regions beyond those frontiers. Only a much-reduced Eastern Roman Empire survived; the Western Empire collapsed in the fifth century, and Iran in the seventh. (The surviving Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, is sometimes called the ‘Byzantine Empire’,  but this anachronistic label is avoided here – they and their neighbours still used ‘Roman’.) In the West as in the East, new ethnic groups were formed as Roman and Iranian rule was replaced or challenged. In the West, these groups included the Goths, Franks, Angles and Saxons and, in the Eastern Roman Empire and Iran, the Slavs, Bulgars, Turks and Arabs. These peoples tended to be ‘non-literate’ – that is, their cultures depended primarily on the spoken word – although in many cases they were aware of writing and did use it for some purposes. One consequence of the predominantly oral nature of the culture of these new ‘barbarian’ (from a Roman perspective) elites is that the written historical record contemporaneous with the formation of their new polities within the lands of the old empires is often very thin indeed.12 This holds true for the Umayyad Empire. As noted above, most of the extant narrative sources date from the mid-ninth century and after – that is, from about 100 years after the fall of the Umayyads and 200 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. In contrast to the Latin West, where even the later sources are comparatively short, the later narrative sources in Arabic are extensive and detailed. However, they present significant problems of interpretation. After all, the whole Arabic written tradition has its origins in a social and cultural transformation on an epoch-making scale; in the space of three or four generations, the new Arabian polity went from being a small community of ‘the Faithful’ at an isolated oasis in the region of West Arabia known as the Hijaz to an imperial entity that outstripped Rome and Iran. As a result, the texture of life in the Hijaz at the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries is obscured in the extant tradition, which looks back across more than two centuries of empire-building to the memory of Muhammad as its founding figure. At the same time, the changing fortunes of the various descendants of the members of his original federation led to reworkings of the material that were favourable to the ancestors of the politically successful and critical of the losers. The extent of the transformation of the historical memory can be contested, but that significant transformation took place is beyond doubt. A generation of so-called ‘revisionist’ or ‘sceptical’ historians, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, argued that the evidence for early Islam was uniquely problematic.13 However, there is now a growing recognition that the evidential situation is not so dissimilar from that for the ‘barbarian kingdoms’ of the Latin West, which replaced the Roman Empire there in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries ce, even if the volume of later Arabic material is far greater than its Latin equivalent. In both regions, it was the adoption of scriptural religion by the ‘barbarians’ alongside their achieving political power that led to the production of narrative history writing about their peoples. This written tradition emerged only slowly, leaving a ‘Dark Age’ about which it can seem difficult to know much. However, in recent decades historians of both West and East have reappraised the most sceptical views. In the case of the history of very early Islam, three new perspectives have led to advances in historical understanding: first there are literary and source-critical approaches to the Arabic sources; second, the same kinds of approaches have been taken to relevant sources in languages other than Arabic; third, the value of material culture has received growing recognition, including its potential to address questions that the literary sources do not. These points are addressed in sequence in what follows. The later Arabic chronicles and other narrative sources are now recognised as evidence primarily for the time in which they were composed, telling us about the interests and agendas of their authors and audiences; they cannot be taken as straightforward evidence for the past events they describe. Such an awareness of the socially constructed and literary character of these sources is crucial to accounting for their teleologies and omissions. However, although the extant texts were composed in the ninth and tenth centuries and after, they were largely compiled from earlier materials. Much of the extant material clearly derives from earlier texts composed at the very end of the Umayyad period and, more often, in the first decades of the Abbasid period. This brings us closer to the Umayyad era.14 Among the very earliest strata in the Arabic material are layers of information about people, their kin relations and their positions within the governing apparatus of the empire. Where they can be cross-checked with the surviving documentary materials such as coins and administrative documents, the narrative sources can be shown to be fairly accurate about people and their roles (but very far from complete, or completely accurate). Much of what follows in this book on the structures of power and the political history of the Umayyad Empire depends on these kinds of more reliable prosopographic (‘relating to the person’) material. Of course, these ‘facts’ are themselves also socially constructed, in that they were organised, recorded and remembered because they were important to the idea of the legitimate power of the Muslim empire. In particular, the extent of the central control exerted by the caliph, continuities within institutions and their distinctive Islamic character all tend to be exaggerated. Nonetheless, the people, places and dates were not easily invented from nothing because they were easily falsifiable. Thus, they are vital evidence if one wants to understand the history of that empire, reflecting its structures of power.15 Furthermore, certain forms of Umayyad cultural production can be shown to have been remembered and transmitted more often and more carefully than others. Indeed, the scripture of Islam, the Qur’an, is in many respects an Umayyad document. A first compilation of the Qur’an as a single book (a ‘codex’) is said to have been presided over by ‘Uthman, the third successor to Muhammad, and the first Umayyad to hold that office. How far his role may have been exaggerated in the later tradition is not clear. Complete large-format Qur’ans sponsored by the ruling Umayyad elite do survive from around the time of the Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), and he and his allies made far more use of the Qur’an and its language in articulating their authority than their predecessors had done. Even then, other very slightly different Quranic recensions remained in circulation. The fact of the Umayyad elite’s decisive role in the written compilation of the Islamic scripture is itself important evidence for the relationship between religious authority and political power, as well as for specific religious and political ideas among the Arabian Faithful.16 While there are echoes of concern in the sources about the act of compiling of the Qur’an, the idea of ‘the Book’ (al-kitāb) succeeded quickly and comprehensively – probably because it resonated with the idea of the importance of ‘writing’, or ‘scripture’ (both also kitāb in Arabic) in religion, which was important in late antique Judaism and Christianity and is frequently echoed in the Qur’an itself.17 Indeed, the other scriptures of the Jewish and Christian traditions were also accorded authority, both in the Quranic text itself and by members of the Faithful.18 Besides the Qur’an, no other books in the sense of bound texts for public use, whose contents were quite stable and repeatedly reproduced, are known to have been produced in Arabic in the Umayyad period. However, collections of non-Quranic religious and historical traditions had begun to be made in writing towards the end of the Umayyad period and some elements from these texts can be traced back to the early-to-mid eighth century. Versions of the poetry performed at the courts of caliphs and their allies are preserved in the much later Abbasid tradition, as are reports of famous speeches and – from the last three decades of the Umayyad era – public letters, issued for public promulgation by the caliph’s senior scribes on his behalf. These poems, speeches and letters were often remembered for their literary merit and historical interest. Although the extant texts are very late, the character of the language of these materials and the world view and ideas they espouse tend to suggest that some of them reflect material that was composed in Umayyad times.19 Beyond Arabic and Islamic texts, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of sources composed in languages other than Arabic and by writers who were not Muslim. Materials composed in late antique and early medieval times in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Middle Persian and Hebrew are susceptible to the same kinds of analyses as the Muslims’ Arabic texts. There are also medieval Arabic texts composed by Christians living under Islamic rule and, after about 1000 ce, New Persian texts composed by Muslims. These texts often interconnect with the Arabic-Islamic sources, through translation or shared bodies of orally transmitted knowledge; it is easy to underestimate the reach and volume of flows of information in the late antique and early medieval world. Some of the non-Arabic sources were composed in the seventh and early eighth centuries and so offer contemporary perspectives on events. The most important of these are the Greek, Syriac, Armenian and Hebrew chronicles, saints’ lives and religious treatises, written by Christians and Jews living in the lands conquered by the Arabians in the seventh and eighth centuries, or in lands adjacent to them. There are also important Greek narrative materials composed in Roman imperial court circles in the later eighth century, as well as materials in Middle Persian from later Zoroastrian contexts. Perspectives on the reach and character of the Umayyad Empire can also be gleaned from contemporaneous sources composed in more remote places that were nonetheless connected with it, notably the Kingdom of Northumbria, in northern Britain, and the Tang Empire, in China.20 Besides our written sources, the other crucial array of evidence about the early Islamic past, just as for other regions of the late antique and early medieval world, is the material evidence uncovered by archaeologists, specialists in documentary evidence and epigraphy, numismatists, and historians of art and architecture. Just as the development of a written historical tradition in Arabic reflects the development of a literate scholarly and scribal tradition among the rulers of the new empire, the production of a distinctive material culture reflects the marshalling of the resources of empire in the service of a new ruling class. The material evidence not only augments the evidence of the written sources but also provides data on subjects such as the environment, settlement patterns, the imperial administration and the economy that cannot be investigated in any detail through the literary material alone.

Umayyad History and the Structure of this Book

This book is arranged in three parts, which correspond with its main arguments. Because the Arabic historiography sees the coming of Islam in the early seventh century as a defining discontinuity, it tends to mask some of the underlying processes that brought about the success of Muhammad’s community of the Faithful. In particular, the dynamics of political, religious and cultural change on the Arabian Peninsula and in its northern extension, the Syrian Desert and steppe, are beginning to be more fully understood. These processes are the focus of the first part of the book. While there is limited evidence that the peoples of Central and North Arabia thought of themselves collectively as ‘the Arabs’, there is evidence for the development of a shared culture in those regions. This culture is defined by the use of Old Arabic, which is the precursor to the Arabic language of later Islamic times, by a religious culture where Judaism and Christianity combined with local religious beliefs and practices, and by a political culture shaped by close interdependencies between nomadic and settled tribal groups. The decline of the power of the South Arabian kingdom of Himyar, the dissolution of the Roman and Sasanian networks of alliance in the Syrian Desert, and war on an unprecedented scale between Rome and Iran brought about the circumstances for the political success of Muhammad’s Meccan and Medinan followers. Long experience of maintaining networks of alliance with the nomadic pastoralist tribes of the western Arabian Peninsula made the Meccans and their Medinan allies well placed to take advantage of this ‘world crisis’.21 Muhammad’s prophethood (c. 610–32) disrupted some of the more long-established local power structures in West Arabia but also catalysed West Arabian military and political expansion. While the well-established and locally influential Umayyad clan at Mecca are said to have initially lost out to Muhammad’s network of followers, their participation in campaigns of the 630s and 640s secured them a place at the centre of the new religio-political federation. Mu‘awiya’s branch of the Umayyads took a leading role in campaigning against Roman forces in Syria and bringing the Arabic-speaking pastoralists of the Syrian steppe into alliance, while ‘Uthman, one of the only early supporters of Muhammad from among the Umayyads, took the leadership of the federation in 644. This combination established the Umayyad clan as a powerful network within what was fast becoming an empire, uniting territories on the Arabian Peninsula with lands in Syria, Egypt and Iraq taken from Rome and Iran. However, the interests of rival networks in the conquered territories led, in the 650s, to widespread support for alternative leaders than the Umayyads. Mu‘awiya’s victory against these rivals depended upon the pastoralist tribes of the former Roman desert frontier, which thereafter became the empire’s military and political centre. Indeed, the empire after Mu‘awiya might be described as a ‘Syro-Mesopotamian pastoralist’ empire, insofar as the military forces that underpinned Umayyad rule were drawn largely from the pastoralists of the Syrian steppe and – after the 690s – also from the highland zones of Mesopotamia (modern eastern Turkey, northern Syria and northern Iraq). This is itself remarkable – the Umayyad Empire is the only large-scale, truly trans-regional empire in history whose monarchs resided in Syria.22 Ultimately, the long-term sustainability of Umayyad power was limited by this dependence on the resources of the Syrian steppe. However, in the short term, the re-centring of the empire in Syria had two important consequences for its subsequent evolution. First, as the rulers of post-Roman Syria, who contended directly with the Romans for territory and influence, Mu‘awiya and the subsequent Umayyad rulers of the Arabian empire strove to replace their Roman rivals as God’s chosen world rulers. This conflict further entangled the fortunes of the two empires and so shaped the articulation of Umayyad legitimacy and the character of the religion of Islam itself. A second consequence of the Umayyads’ dependence on the military support of the Romano-Syrian tribes was that they ruled from a predominantly Christian Syria, while most of migrants from the Peninsula and the greatest economic resources of the new empire were elsewhere, in the formerly Sasanian lands of Iraq. Mu‘awiya ruled a large and decentralised ‘conquest society’, where military commanders in the other conquered territories wielded autonomous, but not completely independent, military and fiscal power in diverse post-Roman and post-Sasanian cultural contexts.23 Groups from Iraqi garrisons had backed the Umayyads’ rivals in the civil war and so Mu‘awiya’s death in 680, followed by the premature death of his son three years later, created the conditions for a second civil war. This second internal conflict again pitted the Umayyads against rivals from other branches of the Prophet’s wider tribe of Quraysh, who again drew on the support of the Iraqi migrants. During the twelve-year war against these rivals, power structures in Syria were shaken; Mu‘awiya’s direct descendants lost the leadership of the Syrian tribes, who pledged allegiance instead to Mu‘awiya’s second cousin and former ally, Marwan b. al-Hakam. The victory of Marwan and his son ‘Abd al-Malik in the second civil war in 692 marks an important break in many aspects of the empire’s history and so it is where part two of the book begins. This second civil war took place when many of those who were adults at the time of the Prophet Muhammad had died. As a consequence, the era of the Prophet and his followers now became the focus of memorialisation, often in the context of competition for power. Furthermore, the demographic, economic and military structures of the empire were changing fast, with large communities of the Faithful established in new garrisons in the former Roman and Sasanian lands, and new frontiers for conquest developing in North Africa, Iran and Central Asia. It was among these communities, including Umayyad circles, that the religious and historical traditions of Islam began to be elaborated; some of the earliest written strands of that tradition can be traced back to around 700, making this post-692 era much more precisely delineated in the later Arabic literary sources than the seventh century. Following his victory in 692, ‘Abd al-Malik and other descendants of Marwan were able to assert an exclusive claim to leadership of the empire during the next fifty years. Collectively, this new ruling branch of the Umayyad clan – the first real dynasty in Islam – are known as the Marwanids. They ruled as collaborators and competitors, with competition between the different branches of the Marwanid clan being driven by their wider kinship connections and alliances. For the Marwanids, as for Mu‘awiya before them, competition with the Roman Empire and the challenge of ruling Iraq from Syria were two primary concerns. However, unlike Mu‘awiya, they sought to assert greater control over the provinces of the empire, aiming to bridge the institutional divide between the former lands of the Sasanian and Roman empires. In Iraq, they diverted the resources of the province to pay for Syrian soldiers to support their governors there, generating waves of resistance to their rule as a result. Conscious of the need to legitimate their rule beyond Syria, they promoted their authority through monumental architecture, on the precious metal coins and in other media, including huge parchment copies of the Qur’an. A consequence was a distinctive Marwanid horizon in the material evidence after c. 690, which reflects their efforts to assert leadership of a distinctive imperial religious tradition in direct competition with the Roman Empire, but also their need to address diverse audiences across what remained a huge and decentralised empire. In the war with Rome, the Marwanids sponsored two further campaigns against Constantinople. The first culminated in a failed siege of the Roman capital in 717–18, and the second ended with defeats for the Muslims’ armies in Roman Sicily and western Anatolia in 740. These defeats were damaging for the Marwanids, whose prestige depended on their status as competitors with the Roman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. However, Marwanid imperial power only unravelled when competition within the dynasty and between different tribal groups in Marwanid Syria turned violent at the same time as new forms of rebellion broke out on the western and eastern frontiers of their empire. Independent groups from North Africa challenged Umayyad rule in the name of Islam in the 740s, while a rebel movement in western Central Asia, retrospectively known as the ‘Abbasid Revolution’ (al-dawla al-‘Abbāsīya) took advantage of the bloody succession crisis in Syria to march against the Marwanids and end their rule, founding a new caliphate led by their Abbasid relatives. Thus, Umayyad domination of the empire ended as it had begun, with the conquest of the empire by military groups from its frontiers. The third part of the book steps back from the dynamics of politics and war to explore in more detail the geography, and economic, social and administrative history of the Umayyad era, in three chapters. The first is on ecology, settlement patterns and the economy. The second explores further the impact of the empire on the conquered religious communities. The third addresses the development of imperial administration and government. Together, the three chapters assess the character of environmental, economic, social and institutional change in the Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries. The era of the Umayyad Empire was comparatively brief, but it sits at a hinge point in world history, brought into being by a unique combination of longterm and short-term processes of change and in turn bringing about a new Arab and Islamic world.

  

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