The Umayyad Caliphate: Karbala and the Dome of the Rock

In 661, after the murder of ʿAlī ended the first civil war (§4), the governor of Syria, Muʿāwiya, became caliph and ruled from Damascus. He made the office hereditary, and his clan, the Umayyads, held it for ninety years. The dynasty’s first test was Karbalāʾ in 680, where its troops killed Muhammad’s grandson al-Ḥusayn, an event that created the Shia as a movement. Its second was a long civil war, which ended in 692 with the death of the rival caliph Ibn al-Zubayr in Mecca. The winner, ʿAbd al-Malik, made the empire look Islamic for the first time: the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, coins that named Muhammad and then carried only scripture, Arabic as the language of government, roads marked with Arabic milestones. His sons extended the empire to Spain and Sindh and built the great mosques of Damascus and Medina. Most of their subjects remained Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian, and the status of non-Arab converts became one of the grievances that brought the dynasty down in 750. Majority

Almost all the narrative of this century comes from Arabic histories written under the Abbasids, the dynasty that overthrew the Umayyads and had every reason to paint them as worldly kings rather than pious caliphs (§0). The documents of the period, its inscriptions, coins, buildings and papyri, carry their own dates and are the main check on those histories.^[1]​^[2] Consensus This chapter leans on them wherever it can.

Timeline

Muʿāwiya and the making of a dynasty

A caliph in Syria

Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān belonged to the Umayya clan of Quraysh, the Meccan tribe that had opposed Muhammad until the conquest of Mecca. He had governed Syria for some twenty years when ʿAlī was murdered in 661, and he had fought him to a standstill at Ṣiffīn (§4). Syria became the centre of the empire, with an army loyal to him and an administration of Greek-speaking Christian officials, such as Sarjūn ibn Manṣūr, the father of John of Damascus.^[1]​^[14] Consensus

The outside sources see him as a ruler, not yet as the head of a new religion. A Syriac chronicle written by a Maronite Christian records that Muʿāwiya received the allegiance of the Arab chiefs at Jerusalem around 660, prayed at Christian holy places there, and “did not wear a crown like other kings”.^[16]​^[17] Majority A Greek inscription in the hot baths of Hammat Gader, near the Sea of Galilee, carved for a restoration in December 662 by a Christian official with a cross at its head, dates itself “in the days of the servant of God Muʿāwiya, the commander of the believers” and “according to the Arabs, the forty-second year”.^[3] Consensus His Arabic dam inscription near al-Ṭāʾif, of 677–678, uses the same titles: “servant of God” and “commander of the believers” (§0).^[4] Neither names Muhammad. Consensus

The hereditary principle

Muʿāwiya’s most consequential act was to have the leading men swear allegiance to his son Yazīd as his successor. The first four caliphs had not been followed by their sons. Later Muslim historians, writing under the Abbasids, made this the moment when the caliphate became mulk, mere kingship.^[1] Majority that the designation was new; Contested on how much it was resented at the time.

Karbalāʾ and the first Shia movements

The death of al-Ḥusayn, 680

When Muʿāwiya died in April 680, al-Ḥusayn, the son of ʿAlī and of Muhammad’s daughter Fāṭima, refused to swear allegiance to Yazīd. Men of Kufa, ʿAlī’s old capital, wrote inviting him to lead them. He set out from Mecca with his family and a few dozen companions. The governor of Iraq, ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Ziyād, cut off Kufa and sent an army to stop him. At Karbalāʾ, on the Euphrates, the small company was surrounded, denied water and, on 10 Muḥarram 61 AH, 10 October 680, killed almost to a man. Al-Ḥusayn’s head was sent to Kufa and then to Damascus; the women and his surviving son ʿAlī were taken as captives.^[5]​^[1] Consensus on the event and its date.

The detailed story is known mainly from the Kufan historian Abū Mikhnaf (d. 774), whose account al-Ṭabarī preserved two centuries after the battle. It already has the shape of a martyrdom narrative, with dialogues, omens and the thirst of the children.^[5]​^[2] Majority that the outline is reliable and the detail shaped by later devotion.

The penitents and al-Mukhtār

Karbalāʾ turned a political loyalty into a religious one. In 684–685 several thousand Kufans who had failed to come to al-Ḥusayn’s aid called themselves the tawwābūn, “the penitents”, and marched out to die for their failure. Most of them did, at ʿAyn al-Warda in January 685.^[1] Consensus Later that year al-Mukhtār ibn Abī ʿUbayd seized Kufa in the name of another son of ʿAlī, Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥanafiyya, whom he called al-mahdī, “the rightly guided one”, one of the earliest uses of the title for a redeemer. He hunted down the killers of Karbalāʾ and drew support from non-Arab converts, before being killed in 687.^[1]​^[14] Majority Some of his followers held that Ibn al-Ḥanafiyya had not died but was hidden and would return, an early form of the idea of the hidden imam that later Shia communities developed (§6). Majority

What Karbalāʾ became

Shīʿa means “party”: at first the party of ʿAlī and his descendants, as rightful leaders of the community. In this century it was a set of loyalties and revolts, not yet a separate community with its own law and theology; that came later (§6).^[1] Majority The commemoration of al-Ḥusayn on ʿĀshūrāʾ, the tenth of Muḥarram, grew over centuries. Public processions of mourners in black are first recorded in Baghdad in 963, under the Buyid emirs, and the Persian passion plays, taʿziya, developed under the Safavids and Qajars.^[18] Majority

The second civil war and Ibn al-Zubayr

After Karbalāʾ the more serious challenge came from Mecca. ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr, son of one of Muhammad’s companions and nephew of ʿĀʾisha, refused allegiance to Yazīd and made the sanctuary his base. In 683 a Syrian army besieged Mecca, and the Kaʿba caught fire. Yazīd’s death that November broke off the siege, and for a decade Ibn al-Zubayr was recognised as caliph across most of the empire: the Ḥijāz, Iraq, Egypt and much of Iran.^[1] Consensus Tradition says he rebuilt the Kaʿba on a larger plan, which his enemies later reversed. Majority

In Syria the Umayyads survived only by a narrow victory at Marj Rāhiṭ in 684, which put the older Umayyad Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam on the throne; on his death in 685 his son ʿAbd al-Malik succeeded.^[1] Consensus ʿAbd al-Malik defeated al-Mukhtār’s successors, retook Iraq through his general al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf, and in 692 al-Ḥajjāj besieged Mecca. Ibn al-Zubayr was killed that autumn, and the civil war ended.^[1]​^[12] Consensus

The war matters for the history of the religion as well as the state. It was on a Zubayrid coin of 685–686, struck in Iran, that Muhammad’s name first appears on a dated Muslim object (§0).^[6] Both sides now claimed the Prophet. When ʿAbd al-Malik won, he did the same, on a much larger scale. Majority

ʿAbd al-Malik: an empire that looked Islamic

ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) is the caliph whose works survive. In the decade after 691 the empire’s public face changed: its buildings, coins, roads and registers began to speak Arabic and to proclaim God, his oneness and his Prophet.^[12]​^[19] Consensus Jeremy Johns, surveying the archaeological and documentary evidence, concluded that Islam as a public, state religion becomes visible in the 690s, and that before then the evidence shows a Muslim elite whose religion was largely private.^[19] Majority What that change means is the subject of a live debate (below).

The Dome of the Rock

The Dome of the Rock stands on the platform in Jerusalem that Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims the Ḥaram al-Sharīf, over an outcrop of bedrock. It is an octagon with a gilded dome, built in the manner of Byzantine churches and martyria, and decorated inside with mosaics of jewels, crowns and trees but no human or animal figures.^[20] Consensus A band of mosaic inscription in gold on blue, about 240 metres long, runs round both faces of the octagonal arcade inside it, and gives its date: the year 72, 691–692.^[7]​^[21] Consensus The caliph who built it was later erased: under the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 813–833) his name was replaced, but the date was left as it was (§0).^[7] Consensus

The inscription is the longest Arabic text surviving from the first Islamic century. On the outer face, it repeats the creed, “there is no god but God, alone, he has no partner”, and “Muhammad is the messenger of God”, with sūra 112 (“He is God, One… He begets not, nor was he begotten”) and other verses on God’s oneness and on blessing the Prophet. On the inner face it turns to Christians: it quotes Qur’an 4:171–172, “the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of God and his word… do not say ‘Three’”, a version of 19:33–36 on Jesus as a mortal servant of God, and 3:18–19, “the religion with God is islām”.^[7]​^[21]​^[22]​^[23] Consensus on the passages; Estelle Whelan argued that its departures from the standard text are the adaptations of an inscription, not evidence of a different Qur’an (§3).^[21] Majority

Why was it built?

No source of ʿAbd al-Malik’s time says, and the answers turn on which later source is trusted.

• To replace the pilgrimage to Mecca. The historian al-Yaʿqūbī, writing in the late ninth century, says that because Ibn al-Zubayr used the pilgrimage season to make Syrians swear allegiance to him, ʿAbd al-Malik forbade them to go to Mecca, declared the Rock “in the place of the Kaʿba”, and had people walk round it as pilgrims walked round the Kaʿba.^[24] Ignaz Goldziher accepted the report in 1890.^[25] S. D. Goitein rejected it in 1950: al-Yaʿqūbī was hostile to the Umayyads, other early historians do not mention so dramatic a step, and ʿAbd al-Malik could not have hoped to win Muslims by abolishing a duty laid down in the Qur’an.^[26] Amikam Elad, re-examining the Arabic sources in 1992, argued that the report is also found in sources without al-Yaʿqūbī’s bias and cannot simply be dismissed as propaganda.^[27] Most historians still doubt it; the inscription, completed in the year Ibn al-Zubayr fell, says nothing about Mecca. Contested
• To answer the Christians. A tenth-century geographer of Jerusalem, al-Muqaddasī, reports his uncle’s view that ʿAbd al-Malik, seeing “the greatness of the Dome” of the Holy Sepulchre, “was moved lest it should dazzle the minds of the Muslims”, and so built a dome over the Rock.^[13] Goitein took this line, and Oleg Grabar, reading the inscriptions and the decoration together, argued in 1959 that the building announced the arrival of Islam in a Christian city: its form borrowed from Christian architecture and its texts corrected Christian belief.^[26]​^[20] Majority
• To claim the Temple. The Rock was already associated with the Jewish Temple and with Abraham, and later Muslim tradition linked it with Muhammad’s night journey and ascent to heaven. Several historians read the building as claiming Jerusalem’s sacred history for the new faith; the association with the ascent is not in the inscription and is probably later.^[20]​^[12] Contested on what ʿAbd al-Malik intended.

These readings are not exclusive. The building stood in a Christian city, during a civil war over the caliphate, in the decade when the dynasty first proclaimed the Prophet in public. Each of those contexts can be read in it.^[12] Majority

The coins

The conquerors kept the money they found. In the former Sasanian lands they struck silver drachms of the Persian type, with the king’s bust and a fire altar, adding short Arabic phrases in the margin; in Syria they struck copper coins on Byzantine models, often with crosses and emperors.^[10] Consensus Muhammad’s name entered this coinage in Iran in 685–686, in the civil war (§0).

ʿAbd al-Malik then tried a new image. From 74 to 77 AH (693–697) the Damascus mint struck gold dinars and copper coins showing a standing figure in Arab dress, with a sword: the caliph himself. Their legends proclaim the creed, “Muhammad is the messenger of God”, and on some types call the ruler “commander of the believers” and khalīfat Allāh, “deputy of God”. On the reverse, the Byzantine cross on steps became a pole or globe on steps.^[9]​^[10] Consensus Stefan Heidemann calls the type the first representation of the new empire’s power in the manner of the Byzantine emperor or the Persian king of kings.^[10] Majority

In 77 AH, 696–697, the images went. The new gold dinar carried only Arabic: on one side “There is no god but God, alone, he has no partner” and, round it, “Muhammad is the messenger of God, whom he sent with guidance and the religion of truth to make it prevail over every religion” (Qur’an 9:33); on the other, the opening of sūra 112, “God is One, God the eternal; he did not beget and was not begotten”, and the date.^[11] Consensus A new silver dirham followed within two years. The design, words instead of a ruler’s portrait, became the model of Islamic coinage for centuries.^[10] Consensus Both sūra 112 and verse 9:33 answer Christian claims about God’s son, and the coins circulated among a population that was still largely Christian.^[12] Majority

Arabic government

Until the 690s the registers of the empire (dīwān) were kept in the languages of the old empires: Greek in Syria and Egypt, Persian in Iraq and Iran. Arabic histories report that al-Ḥajjāj had the Iraqi registers translated into Arabic around 697, and that ʿAbd al-Malik’s secretary Sulaymān ibn Saʿd did the same for Syria around 700; Egypt followed.^[12]​^[14] Majority on the dates. The officials often stayed in post, and Greek papyri continued in Egypt for decades: the change was of the language of record, not of the men who kept it. Majority

Roads and milestones

ʿAbd al-Malik also marked the land. An inscription found near Fīq, on the steep ascent (ʿaqaba) from the Sea of Galilee to the Golan, records that he ordered the pass levelled in Muḥarram of the year 73 (692), the oldest Islamic inscription about road building.^[8] Milestones on the road from Damascus to Jerusalem give the distance in Arabic miles, invoke God and name “the servant of God ʿAbd al-Malik, commander of the believers”.^[8]​^[12] Consensus The Qur’an’s text in this decade, and al-Ḥajjāj’s reported part in copying and distributing it, are discussed in §3.

Islam as a name and a boundary

When did the community of Muhammad’s followers come to see itself as a religion distinct from Judaism and Christianity? The documents give a pattern: the caliph’s titles and the Hijri era from the 640s, the Prophet’s name only from the 680s, and the word islām in public only on the Dome of the Rock, with its argument against Christian doctrine (§0).^[17]​^[19] Consensus on the pattern.

• The traditional view. Islam was a distinct religion from Muhammad’s lifetime, with the Qur’an, the prayer and the pilgrimage; ʿAbd al-Malik made public and imperial what already existed. Silence in the early documents reflects how few survive. Majority
• Donner’s “Believers”. Fred Donner argues that the first community called itself al-muʾminūn, “the believers”, far more often than muslimūn, and was open to pious Jews and Christians who accepted God’s oneness and the coming judgment; only under the Marwanids, ʿAbd al-Malik and his sons, did it define itself by the Qur’an and the Prophet as a separate religion called Islam.^[28] Critics answer that the Qur’an already distinguishes believers from Jews and Christians, and that the shift in the documents may record a change of public language rather than of belief.^[17] Contested

What is not in doubt is that the empire’s public religion was defined, visibly and in Arabic, in ʿAbd al-Malik’s reign, and that its first great statement was addressed to Christians. Majority Christian writers of the time noticed. John of Damascus, whose family had served the caliphs, wrote in the 740s the first Christian treatment of Islam as a heresy, “the heresy of the Ishmaelites” (Christianity §7).^[29] Consensus

Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians under Umayyad rule

Conquest did not make the conquered Muslim. Under the surrender treaties of the 630s and 640s Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians kept their religions and their places of worship in return for paying tribute, and most of them remained in their faiths throughout the Umayyad century.^[30]​^[31] Consensus Richard Bulliet, counting converts’ names in later biographical dictionaries, estimated that Muslims were still a small minority in Iran and Iraq in 750 and a majority only in the ninth or tenth century.^[31] Majority on the shape of the curve; Contested on its numbers.

Protected non-Muslims came to be called ahl al-dhimma, “people of the pact”, and paid a poll tax, the jizya, named in the Qur’an (9:29). The rules that later defined dhimmī status are best known from the Pact of ʿUmar, a document in which Christians promise the caliph not to build new churches, not to display crosses in public, to dress differently from Muslims and not to ride on saddles or bear arms.^[32] Tradition ascribes it to ʿUmar I or ʿUmar II. Milka Levy-Rubin traces it to the surrender agreements of the conquest and to Byzantine and Sasanian models, and dates its known form to the ninth century.^[30] Majority It was enforced unevenly, more often in moments of tension than as daily practice (Judaism §8). Majority How it should be characterised, as toleration by the standards of its age or as institutionalised inferiority, is fought over in modern polemic on both sides. Political

ʿAbd al-Malik’s son al-Walīd I (r. 705–715) took the cathedral of St John in Damascus for the new Great Mosque, built between 706 and 715 with mosaics of trees, rivers and buildings, and had the Prophet’s mosque in Medina rebuilt on a grand scale.^[13]​^[14] Consensus Al-Muqaddasī’s uncle explained the Damascus mosque, like the Dome, as an answer to “the beautiful churches” of Syria, built so that Muslims would not be dazzled by them.^[13] That is a tenth-century explanation, not a record of al-Walīd’s own words. Majority

From Spain to Sindh

The conquests resumed after the civil war. Arab armies took Carthage in 698 and reached the Atlantic. In 711 an army under Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād crossed to Spain and defeated the Visigothic king Roderic; within a few years most of the peninsula was under Muslim rule, the province the Arabs called al-Andalus (Judaism §8).^[14] Consensus In the same years Muḥammad ibn al-Qāsim, a young relative of al-Ḥajjāj, conquered Sindh in the lower Indus valley (711–712), and Arab armies crossed the Oxus into Central Asia.^[14] Consensus The fullest account of Sindh, the Persian Chachnāma, was written in the thirteenth century, and historians use it with caution. Majority

In 732 a raiding army from Spain under the governor ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ghāfiqī was defeated between Tours and Poitiers by Charles Martel, and its commander killed.^[14] Consensus European historians long made the battle the moment Europe was saved for Christianity. Most now see it as the defeat of a raid at the far edge of an empire that was already overstretched, important for the rise of the Carolingians more than for the history of Islam. Majority

ʿUmar II, converts and the mawālī

Conversion created a problem the conquerors had not planned for. A non-Arab who became Muslim had to attach himself to an Arab tribe as its client, mawlā (plural mawālī). Converts expected to stop paying the poll tax and to share in the stipends of the Arab army; governors short of revenue sometimes kept taxing them, and in places sent converts back to their villages.^[33]​^[14] Majority

ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, ʿUmar II (r. 717–720), remembered in later sources as the one pious Umayyad, ruled that converts were to be treated as Muslims and freed from the poll tax, while land that had paid the land tax (kharāj) continued to pay it whoever owned it. H. A. R. Gibb studied the “fiscal rescript” attributed to him.^[15] Majority that the policy is his; Contested on the authenticity of the documents. Measures to mark Christians and Jews off from Muslims are also attributed to him. Majority

The grievances of the mawālī, unequal status within a religion that claimed equality before God, fed the revolts of the dynasty’s last decades.^[33] Majority

The fall of the Umayyads, 747–750

The dynasty’s last decades brought feuds between Arab tribal factions in the army, revolts in Iraq and North Africa, and a third civil war after 744. The decisive movement came from Khurasan, in the far east of the empire, where Arab settlers and Iranian converts lived side by side. Agents of a family descended from Muhammad’s uncle al-ʿAbbās had organised there for years, calling for rule by al-riḍā min āl Muḥammad, “one chosen from the family of Muhammad”, a slogan that let supporters of ʿAlī’s family believe the revolt was theirs.^[14] Majority

In June 747 Abū Muslim raised black banners near Merv. His armies took Kufa in September 749, where Abū l-ʿAbbās was proclaimed caliph, and in January 750 they defeated the last Umayyad caliph, Marwān II, at the river Zab. Marwān was killed in Egypt that August, and most of his family were massacred.^[14] Consensus One grandson of Hishām, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, escaped to Spain and founded the Umayyad emirate of Córdoba in 756. The new dynasty moved the centre of the empire east, to Iraq (§6). Consensus

The evidence

Primary sources

What is absent

• An Umayyad history of the Umayyads. The dynasty’s own court chronicles, if they existed, are lost; the narrative was written under its enemies, the Abbasids. Consensus
• A contemporary statement of why the Dome of the Rock was built. The inscription gives a date and a creed, not a reason. Consensus
• A contemporary account of Karbalāʾ. The earliest detailed narrative is Abū Mikhnaf’s, preserved two centuries later. Consensus
• Separate Sunni and Shia communities. There were partisans of ʿAlī’s family and revolts in their name, but not yet two bodies of law and theology (§6). Majority
• The schools of law and the hadith canon. Scholars in Medina, Kufa and Basra were debating law and collecting reports, but the schools and the great collections are later (§6). Consensus
• A Muslim majority. Most of the caliphate’s subjects in 750 were not Muslims. Majority

Debates

Why was the Dome of the Rock built?

Contested; the second and third are compatible and together are the majority view.

When did Islam become a distinct religion?

Donner’s ecumenical community of Believers, defined as Islam only under ʿAbd al-Malik, against the traditional view of a distinct religion from the start, with the 690s as the moment it became the state’s public face.^[28]​^[19] Contested

How were the Umayyads seen?

The Abbasid-era histories present them as kings who turned the caliphate into a monarchy, killed the Prophet’s grandson and taxed converts. Their buildings, coins and titles show rulers who presented themselves as God’s deputies and the champions of his religion. Historians from Gerald Hawting to Chase Robinson read both as partial.^[1]​^[12] Majority

Further reading