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

Introduction
they recognised the Kharijite imam and accepted the Kharijite form of
Islam. This fierce rejection of other Muslims, however, involving the
duty of rebellion against what was regarded as an illegitimate
government, became increasingly difficult to maintain except in areas
remote from the authority of the government or in times when the
authority of the government for some reason collapsed. In Basra, the
second of the Iraqi garrison towns, on the other hand, a more
moderate form of Kharijism was elaborated and spread to eastern
Arabia and North Africa. It is this form of Kharijism which has
survived into the modern world.
4
Each of these three main Muslim groups came to hold that Islam
should be open to all peoples and that all should enjoy the same status
within it regarding rights and duties. The development of this idea too,
of Islam as a universal religion, can be traced to the Umayyad period,
again in circles opposed to the dynasty.
Although it can be debated whether the Koran was addressed to all
men or to the Arabs only, the Umayyads and the Arab tribesmen who
first conquered the Middle East regarded their religion as largely
exclusive of the conquered peoples. There was no sustained attempt to
force or even persuade the conquered peoples to accept Islam, and it
was assumed that they would remain in their own communities paying
taxes to support the conquerors. Although from the start there was
some movement of the conquered into the community of the
conquerors, the separation of Arabs from non-Arabs was a basic
principle of the state established as a result of the conquests. This is
clear both from the procedure which a non-Arab had to adopt in order
to enter Islam and from the fact that there were, from time to time,
official measures designed to prevent such changes of status. Islam
was in fact regarded as the property of the conquering aristocracy.
In order to attach himself to the religion and society of the Arabs, a
non-Arab had to become the client (
mawla,
 pl. 
mawali
) of an Arab
tribe. In other words, in order to become a Muslim, something which
it is possible to see as a social or political as much as a religious move,
he had to acquire an Arab patron and become a sort of honorary
member of his patron’s tribe, adding the tribal name to his own new
Muslim one, even though he and his descendants were in some ways
treated as second-class Muslims. It is evident, therefore, that
membership of Islam was equated with possession of an Arab ethnic
identity.
5
Nevertheless, association with the elite in this way did have
advantages for some, and at various times in different places we hear

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Introduction
5
of large numbers of non-Arabs attempting to enter Islam by
becoming 
mawali
 but being prevented from doing so, or at least
from having their changed status recognised, by local Umayyad
governors. Probably the best-known example was in Iraq around 700
when large numbers of local non-Arab cultivators sought to abandon
their lands and flee into the Arab garrison towns to enter Islam as
mawali,
 only to be forced back by the Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj
who refused to recognise their claims.
In the long run it proved impossible to maintain the isolation of
conquerors and conquered from one another in this way, and
attempts to do so only served to alienate further those Muslim
groups which had come to see Islam as a religion open to all. The
problem for the Umayyads was that they had come to power as
leaders of a conquering Arab elite and to have allowed the
conquered peoples to enter Islam