The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate ad 661-750

particular in the sphere of religion, where the real authorities, the
guardians of the 
Sunna
 and the heirs of the Prophet, were the
religious scholars (the 
‘ulama’
). In effect, the caliph was simply to
maintain the conditions in which the religious scholars could get on
with their task. (All this, of course, refers primarily to the Sunni
view of the caliphate. The Shi‘ites and Kharijites had different
ideas.)
16
A sharp distinction is then made between the idea of a caliph and
that of a king, between caliphate 
(khilafa)
 and kingship 
(mulk)
.
Unlike the caliph, the king (
malik,
 pl. 
muluk
) is an arbitrary, worldly
ruler whose power depends ultimately on force. The symbolic type
of king for Muslim tradition is the Byzantine emperor (
Qaysar,
 i.e.,
‘Caesar’) and the Sasanid shah (
Kisra,
 i.e., ‘Chosroes’, ‘Khusraw’).
When tradition denigrates Umayyad rule as kingship, therefore, it is
putting the Umayyads in the same category as all the other kings of
this world and contrasting them with its own ideal of Islamic
government.
It is not the personal qualities or defects of a ruler which
determine primarily whether he is to be accorded the status of caliph
or discarded as a king, although the personal piety or wickedness of
an individual could affect the question. There were some personally
upright Umayyads just as there were corrupt and debauched
members of the ‘Abbasid dynasty which took over the caliphate

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Introduction
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when the Umayyads were overthrown. The latter, however, are all
accepted as caliphs by Sunni tradition while the former, with the one
exception, are merely kings. Nor does it depend on the self-
designation of the dynasty. The Umayyads do not appear to have
used the title 
malik
 (king) and they did not, at least in the earlier
Umayyad period, affect in a very marked way the paraphernalia of
kingship such as a crown, throne or sceptre. In contrast to them, the
early ‘Abbasid rule was associated much more with the symbols of a
traditional oriental despotism.
17
In fact it was the Umayyads’ use of the title 
khalifa
 which
probably played an important part in the tradition’s classification of
them as kings. Whereas Muslim tradition regards the title as an
abbreviation of 
khalifat rasul Allah,
 signifying successor of the
Prophet, the Umayyads, as evidenced by coins and inscriptions,
used the title 
khalifat Allah
. While it is not completely impossible to
reconcile the use of this title with the traditional understanding of
khalifa,
 it does seem likely that the Umayyads’ conception of the
title and the office was different. 
Khalifat Allah
 (Caliph of God)
almost certainly means that they regarded themselves as deputies of
God rather than as mere successors to the Prophet, since it is
unlikely that 
khalifa
 here means successor (one cannot be a
successor of God) and elsewhere 
khalifa
 is frequently met with in
the sense of deputy. In other words, the title implies that the
Umayyads regarded themselves as God’s representatives at the head
of the community and saw no need to share their religious power
with, or delegate it to, the emergent class of religious scholars.
18
Above all the charge of kingship is connected with the decision of
Mu‘awiya to appoint his own son Yazid as his successor to the
caliphate during his own lifetime. This event, more than anything
else, seems to be behind the accusation that Mu‘awiya perverted the
caliphate into a kingship. The episode will be considered more fully
later, but, in the light of the Sunni conception of the nature of the
caliphate, what was wrong with Mu‘awiya’s appointment of Yazid
was that one man took it upon himself to choose a caliph with no
consultation with the representatives of Islam (whoever they might
be) and without even a token nod to the idea that the office should be
elective. It is probable that such ideas were not generally held, even
if they yet existed, in the time of Mu‘awiya. But according to
tradition he acted as a king in this matter, introducing the hereditary
principle into the caliphate, and the dynasty which he thus founded,
and which maintained the general principle that the ruler nominated

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