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

Introduction
broken up and put together with material from different sources in
order to make it relate to a different theme; long narratives might be
abridged by omitting material considered irrelevant; short narratives
might be filled out by interpolation or by linking material together
without making it clear where the link occurs or even that it has been
made; material might fall out of circulation or it might be reshaped
consciously or subconsciously by substitution of words or phrases,
by the addition of glosses, or even by formulating entirely new
material. It is obvious, therefore, that there was plenty of scope for
the material to change in the course of its transmission, and it would
be natural that it should change in accordance with changing
political, social and religious circumstances. Generally speaking,
the material would have been constantly revised to make it relevant
and acceptable, and the original significance and context of the
material would come to be forgotten.
This process continued for some generations until, in the ninth
and tenth centuries, written versions of the material were produced
which have survived as our earliest Muslim literary sources, our
earliest examples of Muslim historical writing, biography, Koranic
exegesis, and so on. In fact, of course, the process continued even
beyond the ninth and tenth centuries: even in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries Muslim scholars were selecting from and
reshaping the works of their predecessors, but, when we have the
material in both its early and its later form, we can clearly see what
has happened to it in the course of transmission. Our problem with
our earliest sources for the Umayyad period is that the material prior
to the ninth and tenth centuries has been lost and we have to depend
on relatively late versions of it transmitted to us by scholars such as
Baladhuri (d. 892) and Tabari (d. 923).
22
An important point is that a decisive role in the collection,
transmission and reduction to writing of the material was played by
scholars representative of the opposition to the Umayyads. That is,
scholars associated with the Muslim circles hostile to the dynasty,
predominantly in Iraq, took a leading role in collecting, arranging
and editing the material. If we add to this the fact that the written
material which has come down to us was produced in the period
after the Umayyads had been overthrown, under the caliphate of the
‘Abbasids who had supplanted them, it is not hard to understand
why it has the fundamental hostility to the Umayyads which has
been indicated. It is not a question of the ‘Abbasids employing
scholars to produce deliberate justifications for ‘Abbasid rule, rather

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Introduction
17
that the scholars involved inherited material from, and were
themselves part of the tradition of, Muslim opposition to the
Umayyads.
Although we often refer to scholars like Baladhuri and Tabari as
historians inasmuch as they were concerned with producing a
picture of the past and its relationship to their own times, objectivity,
which has been regarded as at least a desideratum of the historian
since the nineteenth century, is not to be expected from them.
Fundamentally they were religious scholars and it is useful to
remember that Tabari, whose 
Ta’rikh
 (a mixture of history and
chronicle) is one of our fullest sources of information on early Islam
and the Umayyad period, wrote a Koranic commentary which is
even more voluminous and which, regarding the life of Muhammad,
often provides more ‘historical’ information than is available in the
Ta’rikh
.
If the outlook of these scholars was likely to make them generally
hostile to the Umayyads, however, certain things mitigated this
hostility and help to explain the more ambiguous material which has
been noted. Most importantly, the material collected and transmitted
by any individual scholar may be traced ultimately to a wide variety
of sources, including even pro-Umayyad sources, and there was no
central directory imposing a censorship on the scholars. It used to be
thought, following Wellhausen, that the scholars could all be
classified as the representatives of one or another ‘school’, that the
material associated with the name of a particular scholar would be
biased to support the geographical and religious viewpoint of the
‘school’ to which he belonged. So Abu Mikhnaf was regarded as a
representative of the Iraqis, Ibn Ishaq of the Medinese, and so on.
But it is now recognised that one will find many different shades of
opinion represented in the material transmitted under the name of
any individual. Even the earliest of them already had an amount of
material from which to select, and we cannot point to a particular
time or individual as being decisive in the formation of the tradition.
Any analysis of the tradition needs to take into account both its final
editing and arranging and its earlier transmission.
23
Secondly, the scholars were strongly aware of the element of
continuity in the history of Islam, and to have been too hostile to the
Umayyads, portraying them as non-Muslims for example, would
have been incompatible with this sense of continuity. It may be that
the traditions about ‘Umar II, linking the Umayyads with the period
of Rightly Guided Caliphs, are particularly influenced by this sense

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18
Introduction
of continuity. Those scholars representing the Sunni tendency had a