THE EXECUTIVE CALIPHATE: THE RULE OF THE UMAYYADS
M
U‘ĀWIYA AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE UMAYYAD CALIPHATE
The first of the Umayyad caliphs, Muāwiya b. Abī Sufyān, came to the caliphate in 661 almost by default. The death of Alī at the hands of a Kharijite assassin and his own lucky survival meant that he was in a much stronger position than any of his potential rivals. He was fully in charge in Syria and led a powerful and effective army. His enemies were demoralized, defeated and divided. Soon after Alī’s death he led his forces to Iraq where he made agreements with many of the prominent figures, including the most important tribal leaders, and with Hasan, Alī’s son, who might have been a catalyst for opposition. Hasan was paid considerable sums of money and withdrew to the Hijaz where he lived a life of comfortable retirement. His younger brother Husayn seems to have been less reconciled to Muāwiya’s rule but bided his time as long as the Umayyad leader lived.
These events inaugurated the Umayyad caliphate, which was to last until 750. By any normal standards of historical judgement, it was a period of huge success. The boundaries of the Islamic world were vastly extended: in the west with the conquest of modern Morocco and then, from 711 to 716, most of modern Spain and Portugal, and in the east with the conquests of Central Asia between 705 and 715 and Sind (southern Pakistan) in 712. Not only did Umayyad armies conquer these areas, but they governed them effectively. In the distant Iberian Peninsula, known to Muslims as Andalus, governors were appointed and dismissed on the orders of the caliphs in Damascus and Syrian armies were sent to quell disturbances. At the same time a regular administration and tax system, building on the foundations laid by Umar, were developed, coins were minted using the Arabic language and Muslim religious formulae. The first great Islamic buildings, including the Dome of the Rock and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, buildings we can still see and enjoy, were erected. The Umayyads led the Muslim jihād against the Byzantine Empire and they enabled and secured the hajj to Mecca, either leading it in person or sending members of their family to do so.
Despite all these successes, however, they had a very mixed reputation in the later Islamic tradition. From the start the Umayyads faced a series of challenges, from the Quraysh of the Hijaz and the supporters of the Family of the Prophet in Iraq and numerous groups of Kharijites among others. They were later held to have been impious, and not true Muslim rulers. They were described as ‘kings’ (mulūk, sing. malik), that is, secular rulers, as opposed to the truly Muslim Abbasids who followed them. Looking at the historical record, it is difficult to account for this verdict. Some of the Umayyad caliphs, such as Walīd II (743–4), led wayward lives, much publicized both by admiring poets and pious opponents, but he was very much the exception. Most of them seem to have lived lives of at least conventional piety and one, Abd al-Malik (685–705), enjoyed a considerable reputation as a religious scholar.
To understand this hostility we must look at the people who held and publicized such negative attitudes. The great chroniclers of the Umayyad caliphate, Balādhuri (d. 892) and Tabarī (d. 923), record the deeds of the caliphs of the dynasty objectively and usually without moral judgements. It is with the ulama, the religious scholars, and later historians that these prejudices become apparent. This is partly because they wrote under the rule of the Abbasids, who would have a natural interest in denigrating the achievements of the dynasty they had overthrown. Ulama also overwhelmingly came from Iraq and the Iraqis remembered the Syrian-based regime of the Umayyads and how the Syrian army had been sent to occupy and cow their country from their newly established garrison city at Wasit in central Iraq. But much of this hostility derives from the fact that the ulama of later years used the Umayyads as examples of how not to be caliphs in their veiled criticisms. The Umayyads, in fact, were made to pay for the sins of rulers much nearer their own time. The reality is that most Umayyad caliphs were strong, effective rulers and pious, believing Muslims.
During the Umayyad period, many features of the caliphate became established and in time traditional in ways which continued long after the dynasty itself had been swept away. Among the most obvious of these were the rituals of inauguration. Caliphs were not crowned. A crown of the Byzantine or Persian sort would have represented an acceptance of all the traditions of ancient monarchy, with its pomp and hierarchy, which the early Muslims rejected and sought to replace. There was absolutely no religious figure to take the role of the popes and archbishops of the western tradition and place a crown on a ruler’s head.
Instead of these ancient and discredited rituals, caliphs were inaugurated through the performance of the baya, the public oath of allegiance signifying acceptance of an individual as ruler. A ceremony usually involving hand-to-hand contact—stroking or pressing rather than shaking—in this respect at least it resembled the swearing of homage by knights to their lords in medieval western Europe. In Umayyad and early Abbasid periods such ceremonies could be grand public occasions, a very visible sign that the public accepted their new ruler, and marked the inauguration of a new reign. In later times the baya lost its public role and ordinary people no longer participated. It was confined to the military, who expected and demanded a bonus payment for taking part, and to members of the court. From the beginning too the baya was sometimes offered by proxy on behalf of people who were too distant from the centre of power to be able to attend. It was a ritual through which rebels who wished to claim the caliphate for themselves could attach their supporters firmly to their cause. Despite the varied and apparently informal nature of the ceremonies, the baya was usually taken very seriously. To break it was a bad thing to do, unless the caliph was so obviously wicked or useless as to justify it, and could have the most dreadful consequences.
The fact that the baya became the primary ritual of inauguration in the caliphate was important. It was a fundamentally Arab idea expressed in Arabic words and Arab gestures. It made it clear that this Islamic leadership was quite unlike the ancient empires with their lavish and extravagant ceremonies. It was also a symbol of a relationship between free men, the subjects voluntarily accepting the authority of the new ruler. At the same time it had no divine approval or sanction. Of course, to break a solemn oath went against the law of God as it did the law of man, and most people accepted that the new ruler was in power because, in some way, God willed it thus, but the ritual itself was essentially a contract between men and that was all that was necessary to confirm a new caliph in power.
The idea of baya is an old one used among the pre-Islamic tribes of Arabia to seal alliances and agreement. Some sources say that a baya was taken to Muhammad by the people of Mecca in 630 when he gained control over the city. It is assumed by later sources that a baya was taken to Abū Bakr, Umar and Uthmān in turn as caliphs, but there are no detailed descriptions of how this was done and we may be simply looking at a back-projection of later Islamic practice to the era of the Orthodox caliphs.
Muāwiya’s assumption of the caliphate is the first case in which we have a clear contemporary description of how the oath of allegiance was given and taken. It comes from a rather unexpected source. This is the so-called Maronite Chronicle, written in Syriac, the ancient liturgical language of the eastern churches in Syria, by a Christian author probably between 664 and 681, during the reign of Muāwiya, in fact. This makes it extremely valuable evidence for early practice. Not only is it earlier than any surviving Arabic-Muslim account, but it is not in any way influenced by later Muslim ideas. Its author may even have been an eyewitness. Among accounts of earthquakes and quarrels between different groups of Christians he writes of Muāwiya’s assumption of power:
In . . . Constans’ 18th year [the Christian chronicler dates events to the regnal year of the Byzantine emperor in distant Constantinople] many nomads gathered at Jerusalem and made Muāwiya king and he went up and sat down on Golgotha [the site of the crucifixion of Christ]. he prayed there, and went to Gethsemane and went down to the tomb of the blessed Mary to pray in it.
Later he records how, in July 660,
the emirs and many nomads gathered and pledged allegiance [lit. ‘proffered their right hand’] to Muāwiya. Then an order went out that he should be proclaimed king in all the villages and cities of his dominion and that they should make acclamations and invocations to him. He also minted gold and silver, but it was not accepted, because it had no cross on it [the Byzantine coins in normal use all carried images of the cross as well as those of the reigning emperors]. Furthermore, he did not wear a crown like other kings in the world. He placed his throne in Damascus and refused to go to Mu
ammad’s throne [that is to Medina].1
Earlier the chronicler describes how Muāwiya had gone to Hīra, by which he means Kufa in Iraq, where all the Arabs pledged allegiance to him.
These short accounts make many interesting points. The pledging of allegiance by stretching out the right hand is a key feature. It is done by the people described as nomads and Arabs: non-Arabs are not involved. However, the new caliph visits the site of the crucifixion of Christ and the tomb of his mother Mary to pray. No mosque is mentioned. There is no suggestion that Muāwiya was a crypto-Christian, but both Jesus and his mother are, of course, highly respected in the Muslim tradition. This account may simply be wishful thinking on the part of our author, anxious to show how the new ruler respected the Christian holy places, but it may reflect a gesture by the new caliph to acknowledge his Christian subjects, who were, at this time, much more numerous in Syria than the Muslims. He is confident enough in his religion not to put crosses on his coins, showing that he is not a Christian ruler, but it does not work and he has no power to force the new money on his subjects. It was not until the reign of his successor Abd al-Malik, a generation later, that a Muslim ruler could issue an Islamic currency which would be generally accepted. Finally, the new ruler is different. He may be called a king, but he does not wear a crown as kings usually do. On the other hand, he makes it clear that Syria is to be his base and Damascus his capital when he refuses to go to Medina.
Muāwiya was a forceful and effective ruler, but he was no dictator. Much of the success of his long and largely peaceful reign was that he negotiated and made agreements with local elites in Iraq and Egypt while he largely confined his activities to Syria. His right to rule rested partly on his membership of Quraysh, though his settlement in Damascus represented a rejection of the Qurashi legacy in the Hijaz, and, no doubt, partly of his kinship with the murdered Uthmān, but above all it was based on his ability to attract the baya of the Arab Muslim leaders, not only in Syria but in hostile Iraq as well.
He was clearly a Muslim leader: ‘The earth belongs to God and I am God’s deputy [khalīfat Allah],’ he proclaimed.2 You could not be much clearer than that. He showed his religious authority not by forcing people to accept his beliefs but by leading the Muslim people in jihād against the Byzantines and he devoted massive resources to naval expeditions against the city of Constantinople itself. He also promoted the hajj, so showing deference to the Arabian origins of the new religion of Islam. These two policies, leading the Muslims against the Byzantines and safeguarding the hajj, were to be key elements in the public role of any man who wished to be considered a proper caliph right down through the ages.
CIVIL WAR AND THE RISE OF ABD AL-MALIK
Muāwiya died, full of years and achievement, in 680. Before that, however, he had made a move which aroused bitter opposition and overshadowed his later years. He had his son Yazīd proclaimed as his heir, his successor as caliph. He seems to have known that the adoption of hereditary succession to decide the caliphate would be controversial and to have taken all the precautions he could to ensure that the baya to his son aroused as little controversy as was possible. The young prince was put in charge of a summer expedition against the Byzantines to establish his Islamic bona fides with military Arabs of the frontier region. Muāwiya and Yazīd seem to have led the hajj one after another, again making the point about father and son as leaders of the Muslim community. In Mecca they solicited the baya from some senior members of Quraysh, among them Zubayr’s son Abd Allah, but were rebuffed, at least according to local tradition. Ibn al-Zubayr is said to have called for a new shūra to choose a new caliph. There was also opposition from some Syrian Arab tribes, unhappy with the close family and political connections with the tribe of Kalb to the exclusion of others. Muāwiya could persuade, cajole and bribe, but he could not force the Muslims to accept his decision. In the end, however, his will prevailed: Syrians took the baya in person and delegations came from Iraq and other provinces to offer their allegiance. When the old caliph died, the succession initially passed smoothly: as one contemporary is said to have written to Yazīd, ‘You have lost the Caliph of God and been given the Caliph of God’, a curious parallel with the English formula, ‘The King is dead, long live the King’, on such occasions.
Ostensibly, and according to later tradition, the issue was whether caliphate should be hereditary, which would make it, the critics argued, like an old-fashioned kingship, exactly the sort of arrangement the Muslims had so clearly rejected. Muāwiya had been careful not to claim a hereditary right for his son to succeed but simply to assert that he was the best candidate. His opponents seem to have been unimpressed, which probably reflected their unhappiness about being excluded from the decision. By the time Abd al-Malik was making provision for the succession a quarter of a century later, such doubts seem to have disappeared and it was generally accepted that the caliph could arrange the succession among the members of his family as he saw fit. The Abbasids, their rivals the Alids, the Fatimids and the caliphs of the west all took it for granted that hereditary succession would be the norm and so did their subjects. Hereditary succession within a wider family circle was, however, different from primogeniture. It was by no means the case that the eldest son should automatically be preferred to his younger siblings. Perceived ability, paternal favouritism, maternal pressure and the views of the civil and military establishment all played their part. Only among the Shia did the ideal of primogeniture hold any sway, and that was because it was held to be a manifestation of God’s choice, not of family custom.
The accession of Yazīd in 680 temporarily solved these problems. Except among the diehard supporters of the family of Alī, the new caliph was generally accepted and continued the policies of his father, but the apparent peace was soon to be disrupted by the second great trauma, after the murder of Uthmān, of early Islamic history, one that would end up splitting the Muslim community from top to bottom.
Until recently, when the Iranian government banned the practice, if you walked through the streets of Iranian towns or travelled along the old roads which link them at the time of Ashura, in the first month of the Muslim year, you would come across groups of men, sometimes just a dozen or so, sometimes many hundred in number, walking the dusty routes and flogging themselves over their shoulders with painful whips. Blood was often drawn. The reason for this was to remind themselves of the events of the death of Husayn fourteen centuries ago and to expiate the sins of their predecessors, who failed to come to the aid of the grandson of the Prophet in his hour of need. And in the centre of Iranian towns, small and large, you will see, played out by passionate and emotional actors, the events which surrounded this tragic incident. It is remarkably similar in spirit to a traditional Christian passion play. The heroes and villains are easy to identify: Husayn and his family on one side, the caliph Yazīd and his henchman Ubayd Allah b. Ziyād, the governor of Iraq, on the other. The events that unfold are both entirely predictable and deeply moving as Husayn and his family are surrounded by the forces of brutal oppression, deprived of water and shade and finally done to death by the soldiers of the Umayyad regime. These Iranian passion plays are remarkable as the only form of ancient indigenous theatre in the Islamic world, but perhaps even more so because they show how the events of that remote period still move people and define their thinking so many centuries later.
So what do we know of the historical events which inspired this devotion?
When Muāwiya took over Iraq after Alī’s assassination and made his agreements with the tribal notables, Alī’s eldest son Hasan had been effectively bought off and his younger brother Husayn had remained in Medina, probably looking for an opportunity to seize his father’s inheritance. With the death of the old caliph he saw his opportunity to claim the caliphate for himself and the Family of Muhammad. He must already have been in touch with Alī’s old supporters in Kufa where devotion to the descendants of the Prophet was lively and widespread. Husayn and a small group of family and followers crossed the desert to Iraq, expecting and hoping that the people of Kufa, so enthusiastic in their letters and promises, would come out to meet them and bring them in triumph to the city. Instead they were met by soldiers of the Umayyad governor, forewarned and well prepared. The conflict was short and violent. On 10 October 680, the grandson of the Prophet, whom the old man had fondly played with as a boy, was killed by the forces of godless repression as he tried to claim his father’s caliphate and bring the rule of justice and true Islam to the Muslims.
The killing of Husayn put an end to this first and most famous attempt to establish an Alid caliphate, but the memory of what was attempted and what happened stayed alive. In the immediate aftermath, a large group of Kufans, ashamed of their failure to come to Husayn’s aid, set out from the city to avenge his death. Calling themselves the Repenters, they were enthusiastic but not militarily experienced and were soon defeated by the Umayyad troops. Yet, all these centuries later, modern Iranians remember them and scourge themselves to atone for their shortcomings.
If Yazīd had lived to be as old as his father, he might have established the custom of hereditary succession beyond challenge, but he did not and he died in November 683 in his favourite residence at Hawwarin on the road from Damascus to Palmyra. He left a young son who died after only a few weeks. The hereditary idea, such as it was, had died as a result of obvious natural causes.
Once more the whole future of the caliphate was cast into doubt. For more than five years the Islamic world was divided by bitter rivalries and civil wars. The events were complex, but in the end three main parties emerged to claim the caliphate, each with very different ideas as to what sort of caliphate they wished and where it should be based.
One of these parties was the Umayyad family, but with Yazīd gone none of Muāwiya’s immediate relatives inspired much confidence. However, another branch of the Umayyads came from Medina to take refuge in Syria. They were led by Marwān b. al-Hakam. He was now an old man, having been born around the time of Muhammad’s Hijra, and was one of the last major figures in Islamic politics to have known the Prophet personally. He had served Uthmān well and had remained in Medina after the caliph’s death. He died in 685 soon after his arrival, and his son Abd al-Malik took over the leadership of the Umayyad party. He was an energetic young man who was to become one of the most important figures in the creation of the Islamic world. But at the time of his father’s death it was all he could do to maintain the Umayyad position in Syria where he had to contend with numerous enemies.
The second party was led by Abd Allah b. al-Zubayr, the son of that Zubayr who had been killed at the Battle of the Camel. His political platform was, in the literal sense of the word, reactionary. He reacted against the policies of the Umayyads. He wanted the new caliph to be chosen not just from the Umayyads but from all Quraysh, and he is said to have called for a new shūra to achieve this. He wanted the caliph to be based in the Hijaz and specifically in Mecca, the original stronghold of Quraysh. This Ibn al-Zubayr was a charismatic figure, at least in the accounts we have of him, a stern and modest Muslim who rejected any form of royal display, and his personal courage in battle and in the face of death was indisputable. He was perhaps the first of many Muslims through the ages who advocated a return to what they thought to be the simple certainties of that time and followed the ways of the salaf, the pious first generation. He was also probably the man who rebuilt the Kaba in the form in which we have it today. He was ably supported by his brother Musab, perhaps more worldly and politically savvy, whom he sent to Iraq to drum up support against the Umayyads.
Unfortunately for the Zubayrid cause, Kufa had already been taken over by another pretender, Mukhtār b. Abī Ubayd. Mukhtār came from the Hijazi tribe of Thaqīf, but he was not a Qurashi and never seems to have considered claiming the caliphate in his own right. He was also now an old man, having been born around the time of the Hijra. His father had been the commander of an early, and unsuccessful, Arab raid on Iraq at the very beginning of the conquests and he had deep roots in Iraq. He now proclaimed that the caliphate should belong to the Family of the Prophet. This cause was sure to arouse support in Kufa, where many still remembered the sad fate of Husayn barely five years before and were anxious to avenge his killing and restore their prestige.
The problem for Mukhtār was that he needed to find a member of the Family who would take up the leadership and claim the caliphate. After what had happened to his father, Alī b. al-Husayn, who was living a quiet and modestly prosperous life in Medina, understandably turned him down. He did however get a more favourable response from Muhammad b. al-Hanafiya who did not come to Kufa but allowed his name to be used as a candidate for the caliphate. He was an interesting choice because, although he was a son of Alī, he was not the child of Fātima but, as his name suggests, of a woman of the Hanafi tribe. This meant that the blood of the Prophet did not flow through his veins and his acceptance was a sign that the memory of Alī himself was increasingly revered in Iraq and descent from him alone could justify a claim to the caliphate. Mukhtār proclaimed Ibn al-Hanafiya not just as caliph but as Mahdī, the first time that this title was used by a would-be leader of the community. Mahdī meant God-guided, and implied a leader who could begin a new era and make radical changes to bring in a truly Islamic government. This term was to be used frequently throughout Islamic history, usually in Shiite circles, as a symbol of hope and messianic expectation. Some later caliphs claimed to be Mahdīs, notably the Shiite Fatimid caliphs of Egypt (969–1171), but most did not and the title retained its revolutionary, even apocalyptic overtones.
Mukhtār appealed to and based his support on the ‘weak’, the have-nots in Kufan society, those Arab Muslims who struggled along on low or non-existent incomes, and especially the non-Arab converts, the mawālī, at least 500 of whom joined his army, and he appointed one of their number to the important role of chief of police. The mawālī had plenty of grievances. Although believing Muslims, they were still treated as inferiors by the Arab leaders and in many cases were still forced to pay the jizya. They formed an important part of Mukhtār’s military forces and he came increasingly to rely on them. This alarmed and angered the noble Arabs, the ashrāf, who complained that the mawālī had been given horses, paid salaries and generally favoured. A brief conflict broke out in the city, and the nobles and their allies were driven out. Ten thousand of them promptly marched south to Basra to join the forces being assembled by Musab, Ibn al-Zubayr’s brother. From here they returned with their new allies to reconquer their home town of Kufa, which they did in April 687, Mukhtār himself being killed in the battle. His radical social experiment had been crushed by the forces of conservatism, but the memory lingered on among the marginalized and dispossessed, many of whom continued to believe that a Mahdī from the Family of the Prophet would come to usher in a more just and equal Islamic society. These people were often labelled ghulāt, or extremists, because of their radical views, both social and religious, and they made an important contribution to the Shiite ideology which was to emerge in the ninth and tenth centuries.
With the death of Mukhtār and the dispersal of his followers there were now only two main protagonists, the forces of Ibn al-Zubayr in the Hijaz and Iraq and those of Abd al-Malik the Umayyad in Syria. On the fringes, raiding and killing but with no real possibility of taking over the major centres of power, were the Kharijites, hated by Umayyads and Zubayrids alike.
By 691, six years after he had been proclaimed caliph, Abd al-Malik had reasserted Umayyad control over all Syria and the Syrians. He led his army in person to confront Musab and at a battle near Kufa the Syrians completely defeated the Iraqis, divided and weakened as they were by the bitter rifts which remained as a result of Musab’s killing of Mukhtār and the suppression of his movement. Only Ibn al-Zubayr himself now remained, establishing himself not in the Prophet’s city of Medina but in Mecca, the only centre of Qurashi power. A force was sent to crush him, led by a figure who was to become Abd al-Malik’s right-hand man in Iraq and a lasting symbol of strong, no-nonsense government in the Muslim tradition, Hajjāj b. Yūsuf. He pursued his campaign with ruthless efficiency, having no qualms about directing his siege engines on the Kaba. Ibn Zubayr’s forces were no match for this and he was killed, fighting bravely, in October 692. Finally the unity of the Muslim world had been restored.
The events of this seven-year civil war are, to say the least, complex, but they are also revealing about the nature of caliphate and the different expectations various groups had of the office. The long years of fighting were essentially about who was to be caliph. None of the participants proposed to abolish the office or divide the caliphate into separate areas. Their disagreements were not about personalities or personal rivalries or, in general, about tribal differences and factionalism. They rather reflected profound and lasting social and regional differences among the Muslims. At the regional level the conflict was about where the caliphate was to be based, the Hijaz, Iraq or Syria. The location was significant because wherever the caliph was based would be the centre of power and wealth.
Then there were the social divisions. Both Umayyads and Zubayrids were socially conservative, believing in rule through the tribal elites, whereas Mukhtār proposed a radically new social order where these distinctions would cease to matter. While Zubayrids and Umayyads stood for a caliphate which would maintain the existing social structures with security and justice for all, essentially a governmental role, many of the followers of Mukhtār hoped for a revolutionary caliph who would use his office and his status as a member of the Family of the Prophet to transform society. All these different groups were Muslim and many of the participants personally, no doubt, very devout: non-Muslims played no part in these discussions and struggles. Yet they had very different visions of what an Islamic society should look like and especially of the role and function of the caliph. Finally it should be noted that these differences were not solved and ended by discussion and compromise but by military power and strength. The Umayyads did not win because they had the most persuasive and popular arguments, but because they had the most effective military machine and military leadership.
Abd al-Malik was now the undisputed ruler of the Muslim world, but experience of the long years of civil war and the challenge this had meant to Umayyad rule seems to have made him determined to develop a strong state structure which would prevent such problems occurring again. He abandoned Muāwiya’s tradition of exerting power through a network of alliances and informal agreements and created a more autocratic, top-down caliphate. Much of what we might call the infrastructure of Muslim government as it existed down to modern times was developed by this forceful and imaginative ruler. He began the minting of a specifically Muslim coinage, usually bearing the caliph’s name; he standardized the system of taxation and the paying of the military and the appointment of governors to provinces by investing them with banners. His right-hand man Hajjāj and a small group of trusted men, composed mostly of mawālī, formed a sort of inner cabinet. Some of these mawālī may have been Greek converts with experience of Byzantine administration and techniques, but the structures which Abd al-Malik developed were thoroughly Islamic in presentation and intention.
The foundations of his power lay in the Syrian army. Recruited from the Arab tribesmen of greater Syria, they were organized and paid to maintain Islamic rule throughout the Muslim world. The first priority was Iraq, rich and populous and, in many cases, resistant to Syrian control. Hajjāj developed a new city called Wasit because it was between the old established garrison towns of Basra and Kufa. He ruled here as governor and the Syrian army enforced his orders. What was even more galling for the Iraqis was that they were paid from the revenues of Iraq or, as people at the time put it, ‘they ate the fay, the income from taxation, of Iraq’, which most Iraqis believed should rightly be paid to them. Needless to say, there was discontent which sometimes flared into open rebellion, but the Umayyad forces were always powerful enough to defeat the rebels and maintain the caliph’s authority.
This Syrian army, backbone of the state, needed to be paid and the caliph made an effort to standardize the different systems throughout the caliphate. In around the year 700 Abd al-Malik decreed that all government departments should use Arabic as their working language and that all records should be kept in Arabic. Until this time Greek in the west and Pahlavi (middle Persian) in the east had remained the language of much administrative activity. Now all that was swept away and so was much of the culture that went with it. No one learned Greek or Pahlavi any more because there were no longer any jobs which required them. Even the Melkite (Greek Orthodox) church was using Arabic as a liturgical language in much of the Middle East by the eighth century.
We can be sure about the spread of Arabic because we have surviving documents from two very different areas of the Muslim world. The most numerous are from Egypt. Here government records were written on papyrus (woven reeds), which has survived in the very dry climate. Administrative documents started to be written in Arabic within a year of the initial Muslim conquest in 641, but for many years Greek was still used as well. By the eighth century, however, Arabic was clearly the only language used in the central administration in Old Cairo, though Greek sometimes still appeared in documents for local consumption. From the 750s, at the other end of the caliphate, we have a small collection of tax and legal records written in Arabic on leather. They come from a small town called Rob now in north-eastern Afghanistan, still today a remote and inaccessible area, which was conquered by Muslim armies in the first decades of the eighth century. The Arabic language and figures used in these documents would have been instantly comprehensible to scribes working at the same time in the Egyptian bureaucracy. Such was the reach of caliphal power.
One of Abd al-Malik’s major projects was the establishment of an Islamic coinage. We have already seen how Muāwiya had attempted to introduce a new coinage without the Christian symbol of the cross and how this had been rejected by the people. Abd al-Malik, with greater resources and more determination, tackled this again. He first experimented with coins with portrait images of himself: we have surviving examples of ‘standing caliph’ coins with images of a figure standing in long robes, a straight sword buckled around his waist, with long hair, flowing beard and sporting a recognizably Arab headdress. For reasons which are unclear, this imagery was soon abandoned in favour of a purely epigraphic coinage, that is, one using only Arabic inscriptions. These varied from time to time and according to the types of coins, but they were essentially quotes from the Qur’ān or religious slogans, names of the caliphs, the place of minting and the date. The new coins came in three main types. The most valuable of these was the gold dīnār, based on the Byzantine solidus, about the size of a modern British 5-pence or 2-euro cents piece. Then there was the silver dirham, based on the old Sasanian drachm, slightly larger and thinner than a 10-pence or 2-euro piece. Finally there were copper coins, called fals (pl. fulūs), which were minted locally in different areas to much cruder designs. The gold dinars, mostly minted in Damascus, were predominantly used in the former Byzantine territories of the western half of the caliphate and the dirhams, usually minted in Wasit, in the formerly Sasanian lands of the east. Both types of coins, however, circulated throughout the caliphate. A coin minted in Damascus would be accepted without question in Bukhara or Samarqand.
This monetary reform is interesting for all sorts of reasons. Purely epigraphic coinages continued to be used, with few exceptions, in the Islamic world down to the nineteenth century when images of rulers, on the European model, began to reappear. The memory of these ancient coins survives in modern currency, in the dinars of Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf States and Tunisia and the dirhams of Morocco. Money in general is still referred to as fulūs in modern Levantine Arabic.
The currency was witness to the caliph’s authority. All minting of gold and silver was done by the government. The sikka, the right to have coins minted and to inscribe the ruler’s name on them, became one of the key indicators of sovereignty in the Muslim world. There were none of those private coinages minted by nobles and bishops which were so prevalent in much of western Europe in this era. The inscriptions made clear to all who could read who the ruler was. From Portugal to Central Asia, people used coins which proclaimed an Islamic state. Just as importantly, they carried the Arabic language to the remotest corners of the Muslim world, confirming its status as the language of power and rule.
The caliph had other ways of making his presence known. Abd al-Malik erected a series of milestones along the main roads he travelled in Syria and Palestine—tall, conical pillars about two metres high with Arabic inscriptions giving both distances on the road and the name of the caliph who had commissioned them. Here again he was in some ways following the tradition of Roman milestones, many of which must have still been visible along the main roads, but he was proclaiming that this was now an Arab Muslim empire and that what had been the responsibility of the Roman imperial authorities had now been taken over by the Muslim caliph.
The most conspicuous and lasting of Abd al-Malik’s achievements was in architecture, and here we must include the works of his son and successor Walīd I (705–15), who followed closely in his father’s footsteps. The Orthodox caliphs seem to have built nothing, certainly nothing that has survived in physical shape or written record apart from a small structure on the Temple platform in Jerusalem, which Umar is said to have ordered to be built when he cleaned the site up. We are told that mosques were erected in the garrison towns of Kufa and Basra, but we have no detailed descriptions and no surviving evidence. This was not, all in all, a very impressive record.
Abd al-Malik changed all that with the building of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Now 1,400 years old, this astonishing building still exists in more or less its original form and it preserves much of the original decoration. This is not the place for a detailed architectural description, but something must be said about the caliph’s role in its construction. Two explanations for the building can be put forward. The first is that construction work began when Ibn al-Zubayr was ruling Mecca and that the Dome was constructed as an alternative focus for hajj. Certainly the form of the building, which is centred on the eponymous rock and surrounded by circular and octagonal aisles, seems designed for the circumambulation (tawwāf) which lay at the heart of the hajj ritual. This is not to argue that Abd al-Malik wished to replace Mecca and the Kaba, but rather to provide an alternative while Mecca lay in the power of his enemy; and who knew how long that would be?
The second and complementary explanation is that it was built to assert the Islamic presence in Jerusalem. It looks across the valley which lies at the heart of the old city to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, whose dome, constructed on the orders of the emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century, was the grandest and most conspicuous monument in the city. The Dome of the Rock is higher, looking down on the church, and it is slightly larger. Further support is given to this idea by the gold mosaic inscription which runs around the inside of the dome. This is the earliest monumental inscription in Arabic. It is not a text from the Qur’ān but rather uses Qur’anic quotations to emphasize the oneness of God, a clear critique of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which Muslims often attacked for assigning partners to God (shirk). And the inscription announces for all to see and read that the building was the work of Caliph Abd al-Malik—or rather it used to: when the Abbasid caliph Ma’mūn visited the city in 832, he insisted that his own name be put up in the place of Abd al-Malik’s, a crude substitution which deceived no one). With its conspicuous position and its lavish decoration of marble and gold-leaf mosaic, the Dome of the Rock clearly echoed Byzantine imperial style (though of course without the images of Christ and his saints which would have adorned a Byzantine building). It was a very public proclamation of the glory and triumph of Islam and an equally public proclamation of the caliph as the builder and creator of this triumph.
Walīd followed his father’s example. In Medina he rebuilt the Mosque of the Prophet, though nothing of his work survives there, and in Damascus be demolished the cathedral, after arranging the payment of compensation to the Christian community. Then, sometimes working, we are told, with his own hands, he set about building the magnificent mosque which is still the great architectural glory of the ancient city. A marble inscription, now lost, proclaimed his role as the builder.
In most complex human societies, one of the ruler’s most important functions is the making of law and the passing of judgement. In the Roman Empire law was created by the emperor: ‘Whatever pleases the prince [princeps, that is, Emperor] is law’ runs the maxim. In the Byzantine Empire it was the emperor himself, from Justinian on, who issued and revised laws. In Britain law is created, at least in theory, by the Queen in Parliament. It is interesting to consider, then, whether the caliph had a similar role. Here we are confronted by a problem. The sources on which we depend date from the ninth century and after. In the ninth century it was the case that the caliph was almost completely excluded both from law-making and from judgement. Law-making, or rather law-finding, had become the preserve of the ulama, those who knew the Qur’ān and the Traditions of the Prophet, by this time accepted as the only valid sources of law. But did this apply to the Umayyads in the first half of the eighth century and did the Umayyads function as law-makers and judges?
To begin with we must be clear what sort of law we are talking about. The caliph or his representatives (governors, or emirs) had effective control over what we might call criminal and political offences. Highway robbers, violent criminals and, above all, those who rebelled against the caliph and his government were all summarily punished by the ruler and his officers. This was, however, only a small part of the law. All those issues that can be described as part of sharīa, family law, laws of contract, laws regulating slavery and the complex rules of inheritance were typical of the issues in which law was found by the ulama and cases decided by the qādī, or judge, in his court. This meant that there were whole areas of deciding and enforcing law which lay outside the caliph’s authority, potentially weakening his overall power.
The evidence of the pre-ninth century, such as it is, suggests that the caliph did, at that stage, have the position of ultimate and supreme judge and did have the power in certain circumstances to make and decide law. It comes from letters and poems of the period. The role of the caliph as judge was supported in the Qur’ān where God tells David: ‘We have appointed you caliph on earth so judge among the people with truth’ (38.25). The poets of the Umayyad court took it for granted that the caliph was a judge. In the words of the great Umayyad poet Farazdaq (d. c.729), the caliphs were ‘imams of guidance and beaters of skulls’. Another poet, Ahwas, said of the caliph Sulaymān that he had been appointed by God ‘so judge and be just’; and Jarīr, the great rival of Farazdaq as court poet, said, ‘He is the caliph, so accept what he judges for you in truth’.
Abd al-Malik held formal courts acting as qādī and a page would recite poetry on legal justice before business got underway.3 In a complex and well-reported case we are told how different caliphs responded to the legal problems which arose from the ownership of churches in Damascus and of the attempts of successive caliphs to resolve the issues. Enough evidence exists to show that Umayyad caliphs acted as judges, but it is also clear that they could decide laws. Abd al-Malik wrote instructions to his governors about how to deal with cases of slave girls in whom a defect had been discovered after purchase and Caliph Hishām wrote to his qādī in Egypt to clear up complex points about dowries. Above all, Umar II made a complex decree about the taxing of non-Muslims and converts which has been preserved in full. He did not ask the ulama or consult the Traditions of the Prophet, he made a decision according to his understanding of law and of the equity of the situation and wrote to his governors ordering them to enforce it. Nobody objected that he was acting beyond his powers. Provincial governors and private individuals would write to caliphs like Abd al-Malik seeking their rulings on difficult questions: what to do with a slave who slanders a freeman; is it permissible to revoke a will in which a slave has been manumitted? All these are complex points of law and the caliph was expected to resolve them. His decisions were remembered, perhaps to be used as precedents for future cases.
The caliph could also be credited with almost miraculous powers: for the poet Akhtal (d. c.710), he was ‘the caliph of God through whom rain was sought’, while for Farazdaq he was simply ‘the shepherd of God on earth’. Hajjāj, Abd al-Malik’s right-hand man, considered that the caliph was superior to the Prophet himself and Khālid al-Qasri, Hajjāj’s successor in Iraq, expressed much the same sentiments about Walīd I, sentiments which would certainly have seemed blasphemous to many later and modern Muslims, but which seem to have been unchallenged at the time.
In many ways the caliphates of Abd al-Malik and his son Walīd I represent the high-water mark of caliphal power and prestige. He was deputy of God on earth, commander of the army, leader of the Muslims in jihād and hajj, minter of coins, chief judge and law-maker. Only his obligations to God and his deference to the stipulations of the Qur’ān meant that his powers were more restricted than those of the most absolute Roman emperor.
THE LATER UMAYYAD CALIPHS AND THE FALL OF THE DYNASTY
The death of Walīd I in 715 was followed by the short reigns of one of Abd al-Malik’s other sons, Sulaymān (715–17), and of his nephew Umar II (717–20), both of whom died young of natural causes. Abd al-Malik had made elaborate arrangements for his succession and no less than four of his sons and one nephew became caliph without any overt opposition. The legality of the caliph designating his heirs was accepted as part of the natural order of things.
Sulaymān, named of course after the great biblical King Solomon, has a reputation in the Arabic sources for luxurious living and generous expenditure, but no one seems to have thought that this made him unworthy of the caliphate.
He was followed by the most enigmatic of the Umayyad caliphs, Umar II. Umar was not the son of Abd al-Malik but of his brother, Abd al-Azīz, the long-time governor of Egypt. He spent much of his youth in the Hijaz where he had the reputation of being something of a playboy. As caliph, however, he adopted a puritanical and pious persona, perhaps in imitation of his namesake, Umar I. He has a reputation in later sources of being ‘the good Umayyad’ and of rejecting the oppressive policies of his dynasty, and of ruling according to God’s book and His sunna (ordinances as laid out in the practice of the Prophet and his words).
There was certainly some truth in this. He attempted to break away from the factionalism which increasingly divided the Umayyad ruling class and to make appointments from many different groups across the whole spectrum of the Muslim elite. The important city of Kufa, for example, was governed by a descendant of Umar I in an attempt to win over its resentful and recalcitrant population. He also made a bold move to solve one of the major social problems which had emerged in the caliphate: the tax status of the mawālī converts. Under the rule of Hajjāj in Iraq, converts continued to be taxed as if they were non-Muslims, Hajjāj being concerned about the damage that would be done to state revenues if they escaped paying the kharāj, the land tax which non-Muslims paid on their property, and were required to pay only the alms tax obligatory on all Muslims. In order to reduce the damage done to the treasury, he also decreed that, on conversion, their lands should become the property of their communities, and so still liable for the land tax. It was an ingenious attempt to reconcile the fiscal demands of the state with the teachings of Islamic law. It also shows Umar II as legislator, deciding major issues of policy on the basis of his own judgement.
Umar II also seems to have been the only Umayyad caliph to make an effort to safeguard the rights of his non-Muslim subjects. It was this most pious of caliphs who ruled that churches in Damascus which had been taken over by Muslims should be returned to Christians because they had been taken unjustly according to the original surrender agreements which had been made at the time of the Muslim conquests—a ruling which aroused considerable anger among Muslims who hated to see Christian worship restored in what had been mosques. For Umar, the rule of law and the adherence to solemn agreements was more important. According to a tradition after his death in 720 he was buried near the shrine of St Simeon Stylites, the greatest Christian holy place in Syria. This was not because he was a secret Christian, but probably because he saw Christian holy men of the pre-Islamic period as servants of God in the monotheistic tradition which united Christians and Muslims.
With Umar’s premature death his reforms were undone or allowed to lapse and strong authoritarian government was re-established under the last great Umayyad caliph, Hishām (724–43). Hishām had a reputation for running a puritanical, even miserly, court from his new base at Rusafa in northern Syria, but he also spent very substantial sums of money on public works like the irrigation canal he ordered to be dug to improve the water supply of the expanding city of Mosul in northern Iraq.
Among the Arabic historical sources of the period reflecting on different aspects of caliphal power is a story dating from the reign of the short-lived caliph Yazīd II (720–24), which says much about the prestige and power of his position.4 At this time the Muslim settlers in the frontier province of Cilicia (now in southern Turkey), which bordered the Byzantine Empire, were having problems with the lions which made travelling between the Muslim outposts hazardous (wild lions, smaller than African lions but still dangerous, were found in the Middle East as late as the fifteenth century) and they wrote about this to Yazīd. Now it happened that, shortly before this, Muslim armies had conquered much of the province of Sind. There they had encountered numerous water buffaloes, which seem to have been unknown in the Middle East before then. The conquering Arab general had sent some 4,000 of the beasts to Iraq where they throve in the marshes of the south of the country. The caliph ordered that the buffaloes, with their Sindi keepers, be transferred to Cilicia, a hot and well-watered area where, apparently, they frightened the lions away. In other words, if you had a problem with lions you turned to the caliph and asked him to do something about it. And he did, mobilizing the resources of the vast Muslim empire to resolve the problem—or at least that is what we are told.
On Caliph Hishām’s death in 743 the Umayyad caliphate entered a seven-year crisis of assassination and civil war from which it was unable to recover. A detailed history of this crisis is beyond the scope of this volume, but some salient points can be noted.
Hishām was succeeded, in accordance with family arrangements made long before, by his nephew Walīd II. If Umar II was the ‘good Umayyad’ in later memory, Walīd II was definitely the bad one. Before becoming caliph, he had lived the life of a hedonistic hellraiser well away from the court of his severe uncle. The two did not get on well and Hishām was, rightfully, anxious about the fate of the caliphate when his wayward nephew succeeded.
Walīd II built a series of palaces in the steppe lands bordering the Syrian desert, which are some of the most conspicuous and memorable legacies of the Umayyad caliphate. The Umayyad caliphs did not in general live in towns and visited their ‘capital’ in Damascus only on occasions. Abd al-Malik, like Muāwiya before him, lived what was essentially a transhumant life. The summer was spent in the high plains of the Biqa valley around Baalbek, in what is now Lebanon. In the autumn they passed through Damascus but preferred to stay at a Christian monastery, Dayr Murrān, on the hills overlooking the city rather than at the Palace of the Green Dome Muāwiya had built in the city centre. The winter was spent in the milder climate of the Jordan valley, often at Sinnabra at the south end of the Sea of Galilee. Later caliphs chose different bases. Sulaymān founded a new royal city at Ramla in Palestine while Hishām established his court in the northern Palmyrena.
The ruins of many of their palaces still survive. They resemble in many ways Roman villas in their scale and architecture, a series of courtyards surrounded by colonnades, and often a reception hall where the caliph or prince would sit on a throne in an apse to receive and impress guests. There would always be a bathhouse and a court mosque. Many were decorated with paintings and mosaics and there was no inhibition in these private environments about the portrayal of human beings and animals. A number of the palaces were also the centres of agricultural estates and game parks, and elaborate irrigation schemes were constructed to keep the gardens green and the water flowing in the baths.
The Umayyads were exceptional in their living arrangements and no later rulers of Syria emulated their example. The Abbasids built huge palaces in the centres of towns. Why, then, did the Umayyads adopt this style? An idea which was prevalent in much western scholarship in the twentieth century was that this represented a sort of nostalgia for the Bedouin life of their ancestors. In this romantic vision they were free sons of the desert, in contrast to their Abbasid successors, oriental despots lurking in their gigantic palaces along the Tigris. Perhaps again they wished to keep their hedonistic lifestyles of wine, hunting and dancing girls, what Robert Hillenbrand memorably described as their ‘dolce vita’, away from the censorious eyes of their disapproving subjects.5
Other explanations are more down to earth. The Umayyad caliphs were able to keep hold of power because they enjoyed the support of the leaders of the Syrian Bedouin tribes. Some at least of these palaces were used to maintain these links, the ruler or prince going to the desert margins in those wonderful weeks of spring which the Arabs called rabī, when the steppe is green with grass and bright with flowers. Here he could entertain them with parties, poetry and the luxuries of the bathhouse while hearing their grievances and encouraging them to support his plans. Other historians have pointed out the financial advantages of these developments. Islamic taxation law offers tax breaks to those who bring new lands under cultivation. Even for princes of the blood, it was more profitable to bring new lands under the spade and plough than to acquire properties in already cultivated areas. There is no doubt an element of truth in all these explanations and the life of the ‘desert castles’ has given a stylish romantic gloss to the Umayyad caliphs which later monarchs have lacked.
None of the caliphs cultivated this lifestyle more assiduously than Walīd II. It is to him that we owe the building of Qusayr (little castle) Amra in the Jordanian desert east of Amman. It is a small building which consists of an audience hall with a bathhouse attached. The scale is intimate, with no sleeping accommodation or other living areas. Presumably the people who came to enjoy the facilities pitched their tents around it. What distinguishes Qusayr Amra from other more or less similar complexes is the survival of a whole programme of fresco wall-paintings. These are executed with fluent, confident brushwork which suggests that they were part of a developed art form rather than a one-off. The subjects depicted are various and not all understood. There is a serious element which shows us the prince in his alcove and the portraits of kings whom the Islamic armies had defeated, including naturally the Byzantine emperor and the Sasanian king, but also Roderick, king of the Visigoths in distant Spain. Another series in the ceiling vaults shows us the building of the palace and the preparation of materials. Most of the rest consists of vigorous and lively depictions of the pleasures of bath and hunt. The prince as mighty hunter is shown dispatching the onagers (wild asses) which have been driven towards him for slaughter, while on the opposite walls scantily clad girls dance and sing. These paintings have long been attributed to the patronage of Walīd, but recently, in one of those moments which archaeologists dream of but seldom experience, an inscription has been uncovered which says plainly that it was built by Walīd b. Yazīd, that is, Walīd before he became caliph.
The stories about Walīd were numerous. He was an accomplished Arabic poet in his own right and attracted poets and singers to his court. He is said to have behaved in a brazen and scandalous way. When he went on the hajj, he brought his singing girls with him and, they said, had wine-drinking parties in the Kaba itself. At the same time the caliph held a very definite view of his office. We have a letter in which he announces to the governors of the provinces of the empire that he has appointed his two sons, Hakam and Uthmān, as his heirs. It was clearly composed by a chancery scribe, but it is one of the few documents in which we can see how an Umayyad caliph himself viewed his office.
The letter amounts to some eight pages of closely printed text in the translation provided by Crone and Hinds.6 It is written in an elaborate and repetitive style which cannot have made easy reading then or now, but the message that it is the duty of all Muslims to obey the caliph is clear and repeatedly rammed home. He begins by describing how God sent prophets to mankind until prophethood eventually reached Muhammad. When Muhammad himself passed away, God appointed caliphs to implement His decrees, establish His practice (sunna), administer justice and keep men away from forbidden things. The caliphate was ‘part of the completion of Islam and the perfection of those mighty favours by which God makes His people obliged to him’. At no point does the writer contemplate the possibility that the caliph may commit an error, or that resistance to his authority could possibly be justified; this would be to challenge God. The caliph was, in fact, both judge and interpreter of God’s law and it was God, not any gathering or consensus of men, who had established him in this position. The function and duty of his subjects was absolute obedience and, if they strayed from this path, bad things, very bad things, would happen to them in this world and the next.
This is a theory of rulership which seems very similar the divine right of kings familiar from western European political practice. The letter finishes by explaining how the caliph, in order to avoid any doubt or uncertainty, has decided to appoint his two sons as heirs, Uthmān to succeed his elder brother Hakam in due course of time. Here again there is no question of the caliph taking advice or consulting. He alone has decided this and it will be done.
Not everyone was as impressed by his God-given authority as the caliph himself. Many within the Umayyad elite in Syria were shocked by Walīd’s flagrant behaviour, while his political enemies used it as a pretext to garner support for themselves. They mobilized and found the caliph in one of his desert residences at Bakhra, just south-west of Palmyra: the ruins, abandoned and neglected, can still be seen. He was virtually unprotected and they stormed the building, killing him as he was reading the Qur’ān, like Uthmān before him. The caliph may have been unpopular, and his conduct outrageous, but inevitably the assassination solved nothing and the Umayyad caliphate soon began to disintegrate into rancour and civil war.
Something of the criticism which was directed at the Umayyads can be seen in an angry polemical sermon delivered by a Kharijite leader, Abū Hamza, in the Hijaz around the year 747. In this he gives a potted history of the caliphate, beginning with Abū Bakr, who fought the ridda and acted according to the Qur’ān and sunna. Next came Umar, whose achievements included paying the stipends of the Muslims, establishing the garrison cities and the dīwāns, organizing the night-time prayers during Ramadan and decreeing eighty lashes as the penalty for drinking wine. But things then began to go wrong. Uthmān never measured up to the standards set by Abū Bakr and Umar and got worse as time went on; Alī acted well until he agreed to the arbitration (at Siffin), after which he achieved nothing. Muāwiya was cursed by Muhammad and made the servants of God slaves and his dīn (religion) was a cause of corruption. Yazīd was no better, following his bad example and ‘a sinner in his belly and his private parts’. Things only got worse with Abd al-Malik, who made Hajjāj his imam, leading him to hell-fire; Walīd was a stupid fool; Sulaymān, like Yazīd I, was concerned only with food and sex. Umar II provided a brief interlude in this catalogue of depravity: he had good intentions but was unable to act upon them. Yazīd II was back to the old Umayyad model with picturesque detail added. He dressed up in expensive clothes and
sat Habāba on his right and Sallāma on his left and said, ‘Sing to me Habāba: give me drink Sallāma.’ Then when he had become drunk and the wine had taken hold of him, he rent the garments which had been acquired for a thousand dinars, dinars for which skins had been flayed, hair shaved off and veils torn away [that is, the money had been collected by violence against the ordinary Muslims]. Then he turned to one of the girls and said, ‘Surely I will fly’, and indeed he will fly to hell-fire!
The squint-eyed Hishām misused the funds of Muslims; Walīd II ‘drank wine openly and deliberately made manifest what is abominable’; and Marwān II, the last Umayyad caliph, was distinguished by his cruelty. Abū Hamza ends up with a general diatribe against the whole dynasty:
the Umayyads are parties of waywardness. Their might is self-magnification. They arrest on suspicion, make decrees capriciously, kill in anger, and judge by passing over crimes without punishment. They take the alms tax from the incorrect source and make it over to the wrong people. . . . These people [the Umayyads] have acted as unbelievers, by God, in the most blatant fashion. So curse them, may God curse them!7
The rhetoric is impassioned, but the charges against the Umayyads are fairly predictable—cruelty and oppression, misusing the wealth of Muslims, drink and sex. What makes this speech so intriguing is the fact that, unlike so much of our evidence, it dates from the time of the last Umayyad caliph and reflects not the prejudices of the Abbasid period but the perceptions of people at the time. It can also stand as an epitaph for the dynasty, showing why many Muslims were prepared to reject the Umayyads’ authority and rise against them.