The First Dynasty of Islam

The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750

G. R Hawting

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134550586
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Gerald Hawting's book has long been acknowledged as the standard introductory survey of this complex period in Arab and Islamic history. Now it is once more made available, with the addition of a new introduction by the author which examines recent significant contributions to scholarship in the field. It is certain to be welcomed by students and academics alike.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Importance of the Umayyad Period and its Place in Islamic History

In the summer or autumn of AD 661, Mu‘awiya b. Abi Sufyan, governor of Syria since 639 and already acclaimed by his Syrian followers as caliph (khalifa), religious and political leader of the Muslim state, entered the Iraqi garrison town of Kufa. In historical tradition this event is seen as bringing to an end a bitter period of civil war among the Arabs, achieving the reunification under one ruler of all the territories conquered by them, and initiating the caliphate of the Umayyad dynasty of which Mu‘awiya was the founder. The dynasty was to rule for 90 years or so until its overthrow and replacement by that of the ‘Abbasids in 749–50.

The Umayyad dynasty was the first to emerge in the Middle East following the conquest of the region by the Arabs, a conquest which had begun in the 630s and was still continuing for much of the Umayyad period. Apart from this fact, however, what was the importance of the period of Umayyad rule, a period which in its details is often complex and confusing, and how has it traditionally been regarded by Muslims in relation to the history of Islam? The answer to the first part of this question is provided by discussion of the two concepts of islamisation and arabisation, referring to two related but essentially distinct historical processes.

Islamisation

The term ‘islamisation’ refers both to the extension of the area under Muslim rule and to the acceptance of Islam as their religion by peoples of different faiths, but in the Umayyad period the question is further complicated by the fact that Islam itself was developing from its still to us not completely understood origins into something approaching the religion with which we are familiar. One should not imagine that Islam as we know it came fully formed out of Arabia with the Arabs at the time of their conquest of the Middle East and was then accepted or rejected, as the case might be, by the non-Arab peoples. Although many of the details are obscure and often controversial, it seems clear that Islam as we know it is largely a result of the interaction between the Arabs and the peoples they conquered during the first two centuries or so of the Islamic era which began in AD 622.¹ During the Umayyad period, therefore, the spread of Islam and the development of Islam were taking place at the same time, and a discussion of islamisation has to begin with some consideration of the importance of the Umayyad period for the development of Islam.

In the first place, it was under the Umayyads that there began to emerge that class of religious scholars which eventually became the leading authority within Sunni Islam and which is chiefly responsible for shaping the historical and religious tradition which has come down to us. In effect, it was this class which led the development of Islam as we know it, and it is important to remember that it emerged largely in opposition to the Umayyad government. The Umayyads had their own conception of Islam, itself developing with time and different circumstances, but on the whole we see the religion from the viewpoint of the religious scholars.

In the emergence of this class the most important region was Iraq, and in Iraq Kufa was the leading centre. Other regions tended to follow its lead. Building on and reacting against the ideas and practices available in Kufa and other centres, from the second half of the Umayyad period onwards groups of Muslim scholars tried to develop and put on a sound footing what they saw as a true form of Islam. In doing so they frequently accused the Umayyads of impious or unislamic behaviour.

The main concept which these scholars developed and worked with was that of the Sunna. This idea went through several stages but increasingly came to be identified with the custom and practice of the Prophet Muhammad, which was to serve as the ideal norm of behaviour for his followers, and was eventually accepted as the major source of Muslim law alongside the Koran. Increasingly, Muslim ideas, practices and institutions came to be justified by reference to the Sunna, the words and deeds of Muhammad as transmitted by his companions to later generations. The proponents of the Sunna as thus understood became increasingly influential, and political and religious developments after the Umayyads had been overthrown resulted in the final crystallisation of the Sunni form of Islam with the religious scholars, the guardians of the Sunna, as its leading authority.²

Not all Muslims, though, accepted the primacy or even the legitimacy of the Sunna, and the Umayyad period also saw the emergence of the two other main forms of Islam, Shi‘ism and Kharijism. Tradition dates the fragmentation of a previously united Islam into the three main forms which we know today (Sunnis, Shi‘ites and Kharijites) to the time of the first civil war (656–61), which ended with the accession of Mu‘awiya to the caliphate. However, just as the development of Sunni Islam was a slow process which only began under the Umayyads, so too Shi‘ism and Kharijism were not born in one instant. They too developed in opposition to the Umayyads, in a number of distinct movements which each had individual characteristics, and again Iraq was of prime importance.

Kufa was the centre of the development of Shi‘ism in the Umayyad period. As early as 670, but especially after the revolt of Mukhtar in 685–7, Kufa saw a number of movements aimed at overthrowing the Umayyads and appointing a relative of the Prophet, usually a descendant of his cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali, as imam, which title the Shi‘ites tend to prefer to caliph. Where these Shi‘ite movements differed from one another was in the particular member of the Prophet’s family whom they favoured and in certain other doctrines they developed; what they had in common was devotion to the Prophet’s family and insistence that membership of it was a sine qua non for the imam. Some of them developed more extreme beliefs, such as acceptance of the imam as an incarnation of God and a doctrine of the transmigration of souls. It seems that from an early date the conquered non-Arab peoples were attracted to the Shi‘ite movements, and it may be that some of their doctrines were influenced by the previous beliefs of these non-Arab supporters. Shi‘ism has a long and complex history which extends well beyond the Umayyad period, but it was then that its basic character was established.³

The basic principle of Kharijism was a demand for piety and religious excellence as the only necessary qualification for the imam, and a rejection of the view that he should belong to the family of the Prophet, as the Shi‘ites demanded, or to the tribe of the Prophet (Quraysh), as the Sunnis required. Like Shi‘ism, Kharijism too was manifested in a number of movements, some relatively moderate and others more extreme. The extremists tended to insist on the rejection of all other Muslims, regarding them as infidels and therefore liable to be killed unless they ‘repented’ and ‘accepted Islam’, that is, unless they recognised the Kharijite imam and accepted the Kharijite form of Islam. This fierce rejection of other Muslims, however, involving the duty of rebellion against what was regarded as an illegitimate government, became increasingly difficult to maintain except in areas remote from the authority of the government or in times when the authority of the government for some reason collapsed. In Basra, the second of the Iraqi garrison towns, on the other hand, a more moderate form of Kharijism was elaborated and spread to eastern Arabia and North Africa. It is this form of Kharijism which has survived into the modern world.⁴

Each of these three main Muslim groups came to hold that Islam should be open to all peoples and that all should enjoy the same status within it regarding rights and duties. The development of this idea too, of Islam as a universal religion, can be traced to the Umayyad period, again in circles opposed to the dynasty.

Although it can be debated whether the Koran was addressed to all men or to the Arabs only, the Umayyads and the Arab tribesmen who first conquered the Middle East regarded their religion as largely exclusive of the conquered peoples. There was no sustained attempt to force or even persuade the conquered peoples to accept Islam, and it was assumed that they would remain in their own communities paying taxes to support the conquerors. Although from the start there was some movement of the conquered into the community of the conquerors, the separation of Arabs from non-Arabs was a basic principle of the state established as a result of the conquests. This is clear both from the procedure which a non-Arab had to adopt in order to enter Islam and from the fact that there were, from time to time, official measures designed to prevent such changes of status. Islam was in fact regarded as the property of the conquering aristocracy.

In order to attach himself to the religion and society of the Arabs, a non-Arab had to become the client (mawla, pl. mawali) of an Arab tribe. In other words, in order to become a Muslim, something which it is possible to see as a social or political as much as a religious move, he had to acquire an Arab patron and become a sort of honorary member of his patron’s tribe, adding the tribal name to his own new Muslim one, even though he and his descendants were in some ways treated as second-class Muslims. It is evident, therefore, that membership of Islam was equated with possession of an Arab ethnic identity.⁵

Nevertheless, association with the elite in this way did have advantages for some, and at various times in different places we hear of large numbers of non-Arabs attempting to enter Islam by becoming mawali but being prevented from doing so, or at least from having their changed status recognised, by local Umayyad governors. Probably the best-known example was in Iraq around 700 when large numbers of local non-Arab cultivators sought to abandon their lands and flee into the Arab garrison towns to enter Islam as mawali, only to be forced back by the Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj who refused to recognise their claims.

In the long run it proved impossible to maintain the isolation of conquerors and conquered from one another in this way, and attempts to do so only served to alienate further those Muslim groups which had come to see Islam as a religion open to all. The problem for the Umayyads was that they had come to power as leaders of a conquering Arab elite and to have allowed the conquered peoples to enter Islam en masse would have abolished or at least weakened the distinction between the elite and the masses. The crucial privileges of Islam, from this point of view, were in the area of taxation. In principle the Arabs were to be the recipients of the taxes paid by the non-Arabs. If the conquered peoples were allowed to become Muslims, and to change their position from that of payers to that of recipients of taxes, the whole system upon which the Umayyads depended would collapse. But as the pressure from the non-Arabs built up, and the universalist notion of Islam became stronger, this problem became increasingly urgent for the dynasty and played a major part in the generally negative attitude of Muslims towards the Umayyad dynasty.⁶

How far the development of Islam in the Umayyad period involved radical changes in religious practices or beliefs is not easy to say. Broadly speaking, Muslim tradition assumes that the fundamental institutions of Islam—such things as belief in Muhammad as a prophet, acceptance of the Koran in the form in which we know it as the word of God, and performance of the main rituals such as the five times daily prayer (salat) and the annual pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) —existed at the beginning of the Umayyad period and were accepted equally by the Umayyads and their opponents. The difficulty is to decide how far our Muslim sources, which are relatively late in the form in which we have them, are reading back later conditions into an earlier period.

Sometimes, certainly, we have hints that the situation was not so static or so uniform as the tradition generally implies. For example we are told that Muslim rebels supporting Ibn al-Ash‘ath against the Umayyads in the early years of the eighth century accused the caliph of ‘murdering’ the ritual prayer (salat) and called for vengeance for it, although what this meant and what exactly was involved, if anything specific, is not spelled out.⁷ Even such tantalisingly obscure hints are relatively scarce, and when we do sometimes have more substantial information its significance seems often to be limited in one of two ways.

First, the information may centre on a point which seems to be relatively minor. For instance, much play is made with the charge that the Umayyads insisted on delivering the khutba (in the early period a speech or sermon given usually in the mosque by the caliph or his representative and often dealing with secular as well as more purely religious affairs) while sitting, contrary to what is alleged to have been the practice established by the Prophet and his immediate successors. This is supposed to be a sign of the haughtiness of the Umayyads, refusing to stand before their subjects and preferring, like kings, to remain seated. Even though the detail may have lost some of its significance because of the later decline in importance of the khutba and its associated institutions and ceremonies, however, it is difficult to see arguments about the correct posture for the khutba as of fundamental importance for the development of Islam. In the way in which the practice is presented by Muslim tradition, it does not provide grounds for arguing that the outward forms of Islam underwent great and radical changes under the Umayyads.⁸

Secondly, even when the information is apparently more weighty, the impression is usually given that the Umayyads were perverting some orthodox practice or belief which already existed and was widely accepted by Muslims. There is no suggestion that basic religious ideas were still in a state of flux and that ‘orthodoxy’ (an ambiguous term in Islam since there is no central authority to say what is and what is not orthodox) was only slowly developing. We are told, for instance, that some of the Umayyads tried to make Jerusalem a centre of pilgrimage, but the sources imply that this was against the background of an already generally accepted practice of annual pilgrimage to Mecca which had been established as the cultic centre of Islam from the time of the Prophet. The reader should be aware of such preconceptions in the sources and consider the possibility that there may not have been, as yet, any firmly established cultic centre in Islam.⁹

Any attempt to argue that there were during the Umayyad period more fundamental religious developments than the sources allow for, therefore, involves a certain amount of ‘reading between the lines’ of Muslim tradition and using whatever evidence is available outside the Muslim literary sources. A recent discussion using such methods has questioned whether the name ‘Islam’, as the designation for the religion of the Arabs, existed much before the end of the seventh century.¹⁰ Muslim tradition itself, though, has proved remarkably impervious to analysis with such questions in mind, and one’s attitude to the question of the extent of the religious development of Islam in the Umayyad period must depend greatly on o...