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

The Umayyads in Muslim Tradition
The second question asked at the beginning of this chapter
concerned the way in which the Umayyad dynasty has been
regarded by Muslim tradition and how it has been seen in the context
of Islamic history generally. Discussion of this question, which
involves some consideration of the way in which our Muslim
sources for the period came to be formed, is a necessary condition
for an understanding of the narrative history which the remainder of
this work undertakes.
Even allowing for the qualifications which will be made shortly,
there is no doubt that in its broad outlines as well as in its details
Muslim tradition is generally hostile to the Umayyads. When the
two can be distinguished, Shi‘ite tradition is more hostile than that
of the Sunnis, but many of our sources contain material which
reflects both Shi‘ite and Sunni points of view so that there is some
justification, for our purposes here, in talking about Muslim
tradition as a whole.
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 The hostility of tradition is reflected in both
what the tradition reports and the way in which it reports it.
We are told that before Islam the Umayyad family was prominent
in the opposition to Muhammad among the Meccans and that most
of the members of the family only accepted Islam at the last moment
when it became clear that the Prophet was going to be victorious.
Once inside the Muslim community, however, they exploited
circumstances, and, by skilful political manipulation not entirely
free from trickery, they obtained power, displacing those whose
claims to the leadership were based on long service to Islam, piety,
and relationship to the Prophet. In power they pursued policies
which at best paid no regard to the requirements of Islam and at
worst were positively anti-Islamic. Among the charges brought
against them, some of the most prominent are that they made the
caliphate hereditary within the Umayyad family; that they oppressed
and even caused the death of numerous men of religion and of the
Prophet’s family, most notably of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn;
that they attacked the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, going so far
as to bombard Mecca with catapults on two occasions— an image
which may well symbolise the conception of the Umayyads in
tradition; and that they prevented non-Muslims from accepting
Islam and obtaining the rights due to them. They ruled by force and
tyranny. Literary works came to be produced devoted to cataloguing
the crimes of the Umayyads, singing the praises of their opponents,

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12
Introduction
and explaining why God allowed the community to fall under the
sway of these godless tyrants. The best-known of these works are
those of Jahiz in the ninth and Maqrizi in the fifteenth centuries.
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Tradition expresses its hostility to the dynasty above all by
insisting that they were merely kings and refusing to recognise
them, with one exception, as caliphs. The caliphate, according to
tradition, emerged in Medina on the death of Muhammad in order to
provide a leader for the Muslims in succession to him. The title
khalifa
 is interpreted as meaning ‘successor of the Prophet’, in full
khalifat rasul Allah,
 and the caliph was to be motivated solely by the
interests of the Muslims. The Muslim theory of the caliphate took
time to evolve and was never static, but two ideas in particular came
to be prominent. First, the caliph was to be chosen, from among
those with the necessary qualifications, by some sort of election.
How this election was to be carried out was never agreed on but the
feeling was that the caliph should not simply seize the office by
force or be appointed by one man with no consultation of the
Muslims. Secondly, the caliph’s authority was to be limited, in