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Modern Developments in the Study of and Attitudes to
Umayyad History
Although some traditional Muslim scholars, such as the renowned
Ibn Khaldun, took a relatively individual view of the Umayyads, in
general the hostile attitude to them enshrined in Muslim tradition
and summarised in chapter 1 persisted into the nineteenth century.
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, however, a reaction
against the tradition began and the way was opened for further
research. In the works of some European scholars two main
developments took place.
One was an advance in understanding the nature of the sources.
Insofar as the Umayyads specifically are concerned, the major name
was undoubtedly that of the important German Semiticist Julius
Wellhausen. Using a method similar to that which he had pioneered
in analysing the early books of the Bible, Wellhausen sought to
provide a critical analysis of the earlier sources (the so-called
akhbariyyun
) upon which our earliest written sources such as Tabari
drew when compiling their accounts of Umayyad history. He
thought it was possible to isolate various ‘schools’, each with its
own outlook, special interests and tendencies, among these
akhbariyyun,
and then one could judge their reliability as sources
and proceed to write a more accurate account of the period which
would correct the distortions inherent in the Muslim tradition.
Slightly earlier, the Hungarian Jewish scholar Ignaz Goldziher
had produced the second volume of his
Muhammedanische Studien
(
Muslim Studies
in the English translation) in which he had
subjected to critical study the Muslim religious tradition, the mass
of reports
(hadiths)
claiming to transmit the words, opinions and
deeds of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Goldziher had argued
that, far from originating in the time of the Prophet, these
hadiths
emerged mainly in the eighth and ninth centuries and reflect the
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Appendix 2
concerns of Islam as it developed at that time—that is, a century or
more after the death of its Prophet. According to Goldziher, a
political, religious or legal argument among the Muslims would lead
eventually to the elaboration of a
hadith
in which one or more of the
conflicting opinions would be supported by attributing it to the
Prophet himself. In the course of his discussion Goldziher examined
material reflecting the views of supporters and opponents of the
Umayyads.
The second development of this period, and one connected with
the more critical attitude to Muslim tradition, was a trend to a more
positive appreciation of the achievements of the Umayyads. In
Wellhausen’s work one can see an admiration for the achievements
of the Umayyads in creating an empire and holding it together by the
development of an effective administrative system, and in the
writings of the Belgian Jesuit Henri Lammens this admiration was
taken much further. Lammens regarded the Umayyads as the
creators of a Syrian-led Arab national state, strong and successful
because of their refusal to be dominated by Islam. Matching an
expatriate’s love of his adopted country (he spent his working life in
Lebanon, historically part of greater Syria) with a dislike of Islam,
Lammens used his erudite knowledge of the Arabic sources to
support an extremely favourable image of Umayyad rule. What he
did, in fact, was to accumulate and stress the material in the sources
which is favourable to the Umayyads and to use it to attack the
general Muslim bias of the tradition.
In general, until relatively recently western scholarship continued
and built on these two developments without advancing significantly
beyond the works produced by Goldziher, Wellhausen, Lammens
and some of their contemporaries like C.H.Becker. In the late 1940s
the American D.C.Dennett, who shortly afterwards died in an air
accident, argued that Wellhausen’s analysis of the Umayyad fiscal
system was faulty and that this had implications for his analysis of
the so-called ‘Abbasid revolution. Another criticism of
Wellhausen’s interpretation of the overthrow of the Umayyads has
come from some scholars who feel that he overstressed the
importance of the Persian
mawali
at the expense of the Arabs in the
Hashimiyya movement, and there has consequently been a trend to
stress the importance of Arabs in the history of the period. In this
connection one may mention the works of M.A.Shaban. In spite of
these criticisms, however, the structure of Umayyad history created
by Wellhausen survived largely intact.
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