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en masse
would have abolished or
at least weakened the distinction between the elite and the masses.
The crucial privileges of Islam, from this point of view, were in the
area of taxation. In principle the Arabs were to be the recipients of
the taxes paid by the non-Arabs. If the conquered peoples were
allowed to become Muslims, and to change their position from that
of payers to that of recipients of taxes, the whole system upon which
the Umayyads depended would collapse. But as the pressure from
the non-Arabs built up, and the universalist notion of Islam became
stronger, this problem became increasingly urgent for the dynasty
and played a major part in the generally negative attitude of Muslims
towards the Umayyad dynasty.
6
How far the development of Islam in the Umayyad period
involved radical changes in religious practices or beliefs is not easy
to say. Broadly speaking, Muslim tradition assumes that the
fundamental institutions of Islam—such things as belief in
Muhammad as a prophet, acceptance of the Koran in the form in
which we know it as the word of God, and performance of the main
rituals such as the five times daily prayer
(salat)
and the annual
pilgrimage to Mecca
(hajj)
—existed at the beginning of the
Umayyad period and were accepted equally by the Umayyads and
their opponents. The difficulty is to decide how far our Muslim
sources, which are relatively late in the form in which we have them,
are reading back later conditions into an earlier period.
Sometimes, certainly, we have hints that the situation was not so
static or so uniform as the tradition generally implies. For example
we are told that Muslim rebels supporting Ibn al-Ash‘ath against the
6
Introduction
Umayyads in the early years of the eighth century accused the caliph
of ‘murdering’ the ritual prayer
(salat)
and called for vengeance for
it, although what this meant and what exactly was involved, if
anything specific, is not spelled out.
7
Even such tantalisingly
obscure hints are relatively scarce, and when we do sometimes have
more substantial information its significance seems often to be
limited in one of two ways.
First, the information may centre on a point which seems to be
relatively minor. For instance, much play is made with the charge
that the Umayyads insisted on delivering the
khutba
(in the early
period a speech or sermon given usually in the mosque by the caliph
or his representative and often dealing with secular as well as more
purely religious affairs) while sitting, contrary to what is alleged to
have been the practice established by the Prophet and his immediate
successors. This is supposed to be a sign of the haughtiness of the
Umayyads, refusing to stand before their subjects and preferring,
like kings, to remain seated. Even though the detail may have lost
some of its significance because of the later decline in importance of
the
khutba
and its associated institutions and ceremonies, however,
it is difficult to see arguments about the correct posture for the
khutba
as of fundamental importance for the development of Islam.
In the way in which the practice is presented by Muslim tradition, it
does not provide grounds for arguing that the outward forms of
Islam underwent great and radical changes under the Umayyads.
8
Secondly, even when the information is apparently more weighty,
the impression is usually given that the Umayyads were perverting
some orthodox practice or belief which already existed and was
widely accepted by Muslims. There is no suggestion that basic
religious ideas were still in a state of flux and that ‘orthodoxy’ (an
ambiguous term in Islam since there is no central authority to say
what is and what is not orthodox) was only slowly developing. We
are told, for instance, that some of the Umayyads tried to make
Jerusalem a centre of pilgrimage, but the sources imply that this was
against the background of an already generally accepted practice of
annual pilgrimage to Mecca which had been established as the cultic
centre of Islam from the time of the Prophet. The reader should be
aware of such preconceptions in the sources and consider the
possibility that there may not have been, as yet, any firmly
established cultic centre in Islam.
9
Any attempt to argue that there were during the Umayyad period
more fundamental religious developments than the sources allow
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