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Organisation and Administration of the Caliphate
3
From the point of view of its rulers, the major division among the
peoples of the territory over which Mu‘awiya had established his
rule was that between the Arabs and the conquered peoples. The
rapid conquest of the Middle East by the Arabs had imposed the
domination of a minority elite, distinct in language, religion and
way of life, over a mass of people which was itself divided by such
The Sufyanids
35
things as language, religion, occupation and status. The
Fitna
had
involved the Arabs and had only incidentally affected the conquered
peoples. At the beginning of the Umayyad period it seems likely that
these conquered peoples were still relatively isolated from their
conquerors in everyday life and as yet largely unaffected by the
processes of arabisation and islamisation which were soon to be so
powerful.
The lands conquered by the Arabs and now ruled by the
Umayyads were divided into provinces, each under a governor,
usually at this period called the
amir
. Apart from Syria and
Mesopotamia (Jazira), which came directly under the authority of
the caliph, there were three other main territorial divisions within
the Umayyad caliphate: Egypt and the North African territories
dependent upon it; Kufa and its eastern territories; and Basra and its
eastern territories. Each of these usually had an
amir
appointed
directly by the caliph and this
amir
was then in turn responsible for
appointing sub-governors to the towns and provinces which came
under his authority. The system was not inflexible, however, and
sometimes we find one
amir
acting as virtual viceroy for the whole
of the east, having authority over both Kufa and Basra and all of
their dependent territories, or we might find on occasion the caliph
directly appointing the
amir
of a sub-province which was usually
under the authority of one of the major
amirs
.
The
amir
was responsible for such things as the collection of
taxes and their remission to Syria (on occasion the collection of
taxes was removed from the sphere of the
amir
), the distribution of
the soldiers’ pay, the preservation of order, the defence of the
borders and the furtherance of conquest, and the organisation and
leadership of the public prayer, which had a political and communal
significance and was not merely an act of worship. In effect he
represented the caliph, who was at the same time religious and
political leader of the Muslims, in his province.
Because of his importance, the appointment of an
amir
was one
of the caliph’s main concerns. In the Sufyanid period the
amir
had
no independent military force at his disposal other than the
tribesmen over whom he had authority, apart from a small police
force (the
shurta
) which would not have been strong enough to
check any major disturbance among the tribesmen. His authority
over the tribesmen of his province, therefore, depended on the
respect he could command and his ability to manipulate them by
exploiting divisions among them. There was a tendency for the
36
The Sufyanids
Sufyanid caliphs to appoint
amirs
from tribes like Quraysh and
Thaqif which had a certain prestige among the Arabs.
4
Below the governors, the key figures in each province were the
tribal leaders, the
ashraf,
who provided the link between the
governor and the tribesmen. This meant that they had to be
acceptable to both parties, to the government and to the tribesmen.
They owed their position among the tribesmen usually to their
descent from an hereditary leading family, but as agents of the
government they were appointed from above rather than below, by
the governor or even the caliph, not by the tribesmen. Their position
was not always a comfortable one and from time to time the
ashraf
had to come down off the fence and side either with the government
or with the tribesmen. At different times they chose to descend on
different sides.
5
As can easily be imagined, the process of conquest had disrupted
the tribal situation which had existed in pre-Islamic Arabia. Tribes
had been removed from their homelands, fragmented, and resettled
sometimes in a number of areas remote from one another, and in
contact with other tribes, which had gone through the same process.
Tribes which before had been strong and important might now be
poorly represented in a given area in the conquered lands and forced
into alliance with other tribes with which they had previously had
little contact. The result was both a reconstruction and
intensification of the tribal system of pre-Islamic Arabia, and a
reformulation of the genealogical links which were its mythological
justification. Probably the most notable example of this
reformulation of genealogy was the case of the tribe of Quda‘a
which dominated central Syria. As a result of the second civil war at
the end of the Sufyanid period, Quda‘a, who had previously been
regarded as ‘northerners’ (descendants of Isma‘il), became
‘southerners’ (descendants of Qahtan) for the simple reason that
most of their opponents in Syria were ‘northerners’ and Quda‘a
found it necessary to obtain the support of the ‘southerners’ there.
The development of the large tribal confederations, culminating
in the polarisation of all the Arabs between the two groups of
‘northerners’ and ‘southerners’, therefore, was the result of specific
social, economic and political conditions and events in the period
following the Arab conquest of the Middle East. It was not, as is
often assumed, something which the Arabs brought with them out of
pre-Islamic Arabia. In pre-Islamic Arabia, certainly, there were
feuds and alliances involving more than one tribe, but they were
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