Umayyad History

Between 644 and 750 ce, the Umayyad branch of the Prophet Muhammad’s tribe of Quraysh presided over the expansion of the first Islamic empire. Control over the former lands of Rome and Iran in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent was consolidated, while new conquests were made in North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia. The first Umayyad leader (and third leader after the Prophet), ʿUthman, ruled from Medina, in West Arabia, as his predecessors had done. ʿUthman’s killing in 656 triggered widespread conflict within the new elite, from which his second cousin, Muʿawiya, emerged victorious. Muʿawiya ruled from Syria, where he had close ties with the tribes of the Syrian Desert. After Muʿawiya’s death in 680, there was a second episode of widespread violence. It ended in c. 692, when a third branch of the Umayyad clan—ʿUthman’s first cousin, Marwan, and his descendants—took power, retaining Syria as their capital but seeking greater control over other territories. Under the Marwanid caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) and his successors, the empire’s resources supported the public articulation of a distinctive claim to rule in the name of Islam, manifested in monuments such as the Dome of the Rock and on coins bearing only Arabic text in place of images. In 750, tensions in Iraq and in the frontier armies, and conflict within the Marwanid family and their army, brought about the end of Umayyad rule everywhere except al-Andalus. (This medieval Umayyad “successor state,” in what is now Spain and Portugal, is not addressed in this bibliography.) The Umayyads were supplanted as imperial monarchs by their Abbasid cousins, who ruled the empire from Iraq. Since the revisionist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, source-critical, literary-critical, and prosopographical approaches have been taken to the (mostly 9th- and 10th-century) literary sources for the Umayyad era. Meanwhile, archaeology and numismatic, epigraphic, and other documentary sources have been crucial to understanding not only the empire’s administration but also social and economic history. Earliest Islam and Islamic history have also been recontextualized within the frameworks of Late Antiquity and world history. Despite the problematic evidence, the era of the Marwanid Umayyads stands out as the period when a recognizably “Islamic” identity becomes visible across the various material evidence and as the earliest period to which some of the earliest textual elements of the later Arabic-Islamic tradition can be traced.