The Umayyad World

Andrew Marsham, Andrew Marsham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317430049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

The Umayyad World encompasses the archaeology, history, art, and architecture of the Umayyad era (644–750 CE).

This era was formative both for world history and for the history of Islam. Subjects covered in detail in this collection include regions conquered in Umayyad times, ethnic and religious identity among the conquerors, political thought and culture, administration and the law, art and architecture, the history of religion, pilgrimage and the Qur'an, and violence and rebellion. Close attention is paid to new methods of analysis and interpretation, including source critical studies of the historiography and inter-disciplinary approaches combining literary sources and material evidence.

Scholars of Islamic history, archaeologists, and researchers interested in the Umayyad Caliphate, its context, and infl uence on the wider world, will find much to enjoy in this volume.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

The Umayyad World¹

Andrew Marsham

The Umayyad era was comparatively fleeting, but it has a pivotal place in world history. For about 100 years, from 644 to 750 CE, members of the Umayyad tribe presided over an expanding empire in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The empire’s immediate origins lay in the Prophet Muhammad’s (fl. c. 610–32 CE) success in creating a religious political community in West Arabia. Muhammad was a member of the Quraysh – the tribal group from the town of Mecca to which the Umayyads also belonged. In the last years of his life Muhammad had unified large parts of the Arabian Peninsula through war and diplomacy. The first Arabian settlements outside the Peninsula took place under Muhammad’s second successor, ʿUmar I (r. 634–44), who was from another branch of the Quraysh.² Thereafter, members of the Umayyad clan led the empire for most of the next century. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the power structures of the Umayyad Empire both facilitated and shaped the development of new religious and ethnic formations across the southern Mediterranean, the Middle East and western Central Asia – including, most importantly, Islam. These changes transformed all these regions and regions around them in profound and long-lasting ways.

Religious traditions – most of them monotheist – were central to the new social, military and political formations established across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the middle centuries of the first millennium CE.³ In the northern Mediterranean and in northwest Europe, the collapse of Roman imperial power in the fifth century had left behind a series of ‘barbarian’ kingdoms, whose leaders had acknowledged the religious authority of the priests and monks of the Latin churches. In the Eastern Roman Empire (also known in modern literature as the ‘Byzantine Empire’), the Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–65 CE) had built upon the established place of Christianity as the ideology of his empire, issuing new imperial laws with a distinctively Christian character and prosecuting wars of imperial reconquest in the name of ‘orthodox’, Chalcedonian Christianity. Further East, in Sasanian Iran (224–651 CE), the ruling elite had adopted the Zoroastrian religious tradition as an ideology of imperial rule, even as Syriac Christianities were making significant advances among some of their subjects, and had spread beyond the Sasanians’ eastern borders, into Central Asia, China and India.⁴ The Jewish populations of Egypt, Palestine and Iraq also formed substantial minority groups in these regions of the Roman and Sasanian empires. Many regions in East Africa and West Asia that were independent of Rome and Iran, such as Armenia, Ethiopia and South Arabia, were also Christian (in the case of Armenia and Ethiopia) or Jewish (in the case of Himyar, in South Arabia).

In the middle decades of the seventh century, the Arabian conquerors under ʿUmar I and his Umayyad successors supplanted the Roman Empire in the southern and eastern Mediterranean and the Sasanian Empire in Iraq, Iran and points east. In so doing, they entered more fully into a world where various forms of Christianity and Zoroastrianism were the dominant religious traditions, alongside various types of Judaism and numerous smaller religious belief systems. The Arabian conquerors had much in common with their fellow monotheists and, like the peoples they conquered, expressed military and political loyalty in strongly religiously inflected terms.⁵ Indeed, practices of knowledge transmission and ideas about religious authority and religious observance were widely shared across confessional boundaries in the seventh-century Middle East. It is not clear exactly how the Arabians themselves initially conceived of those confessional boundaries; after all, new religious traditions usually emerge as reformist or apocalyptic versions of existing ones. Certainly, the conquerors’ beliefs and practices – that is, the religion of Islam in an embryonic, or ‘pre-classical’ form – had particular affinities with those of both the rabbinic Jews of the Levant and also the Coptic and Syriac Christianities of the wider region. At the same time, other aspects of nascent Islam clearly relate to other pre-Islamic Arabian ‘pagan’ religious concepts and customs.⁶

It is important to note that in the Umayyad century, the new West Arabian monotheism of Islam was adopted for the most part only by the conquering armies and their descendants. There is limited evidence for widespread proselytising in the Umayyad era. Non-Arabians do seem to have adopted the new religion in small numbers, usually as they took roles in the new military or administration, but there is good evidence that some soldiers and scribes retained their pre-conquest faith, especially among Christian groups. Traces of controversies over individuals joining the conquerors can be found in both Christian sources (who sometimes perceived this as apostasy from Christianity) and Muslim sources (who argued over the participation of Christians in the Islamic administration).⁷ Substantial conversion outside the new Arabian settlements took much longer – in some regions, centuries. One widely cited but approximate estimate has it that in the older urban centres of northeast Iran in 750, at the very end of the Umayyad era, perhaps fewer than ten per cent of the population would have identified as Muslim.⁸

The Islam of the seventh and eighth centuries was very different, therefore, from the religion we know from later periods. Many of the practices of later, medieval, Islam – which were supported by high rates of urban literacy and Arabic book production, and sophisticated traditions of religious and legal scholarship – had yet to take shape.⁹ Indeed, Aziz Al-Azmeh proposes that this first century might better be called the era of ‘Paleo-Islam’, while Fred Donner argues that the Arabian conquerors – in the seventh century at least – are more accurately described as ‘the Believers’ Movement’.¹⁰ These formulations seek to capture, on the one hand, the nascent, ‘pre-classical’ character of the religion of the seventh-century followers of Muhammad and, on the other, the unformed or fluctuating doctrinal boundaries between the beliefs and practices of the Arabian monotheists and other Judaeo-Christian groups – at least as they were perceived from the point of view of the conquerors. For the same reasons, ‘West Arabian monotheists’ and ‘conquerors’ are used here as respective labels for the new seventh-century religious movement and for the new military and political formation associated with it. The evidence suggests that for the early eighth century and after, ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ become less anachronistic, while ‘Arab’ also began to be used in new ways in the same period by those claiming a heritage in the Arabian Peninsula.

Whatever the exact character of the West Arabian monotheism of the mid-seventh century, it is certainly the case that the religious tradition that became known as Islam was shaped decisively by the social and political developments of the Umayyad era. The very fact of the military and political success of the conquerors is what allowed the new religious tradition to thrive. But contests over power and authority within the emerging Umayyad Empire also shaped that tradition. One clear example of this is the coalescence of much of the opposition to Umayyad rule around ideas of the legitimacy of the Prophet Muhammad’s more immediate Hashimite relatives among the Quraysh – that is, the formation of traditions that informed what became Shi’i Islam. Another important focus of opposition was the Zubayrid branch of the Quraysh, one of whose number claimed the caliphate from 683–92. Many of the other forms of opposition are labelled ‘Kharijite’ in the sources; some of these informed later Ibadi Islam.¹¹ All these reactions against the Umayyads appear to have provoked ideological responses by the Umayyads themselves. Numerous other instances of contests over authority and right practice can be detected in the sources, with the Umayyad rulers both intervening in, and being constrained by, the wider culture in which they sought to maintain their power. For shared symbolic idioms, beliefs and practices do not bring about peaceful coexistence in themselves. Status and class, as well as tribal or regional loyalties, can all cut across or align with religion and culture.¹² Group definition very often amounts to the emphasis of difference within mutually intelligible, or at least partially intelligible, belief systems – a ‘narcissism of small differences’.¹³ In the Umayyad era these conflicts shaped the various strands of the Islamic tradition as well as relationships between those strands and the other religious traditions of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Many of the elements now seen as fundamental to Islam developed only in Umayyad times. The beginning of the Umayyad period witnessed the compilation as a book of the canonical text of the Qurʾan.¹⁴ The mid-to-late Umayyad period perhaps saw the very beginnings of the formal transmission of the Hadith – the reports about the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions that in very different forms became important to both Sunni and Shi’i Muslims.¹⁵ Some of the practices of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca – the Hajj – were also established only under the Umayyads. Some of the defining features of the architecture and fixtures of the congregational mosque likewise only developed in the Umayyad period.¹⁶ The distinctive Islamic aniconic and epigraphic coins were an Umayyad innovation (after 696–7 CE), on which the image of the ruler, which had been a feature of all Middle Eastern coinage for centuries, was replaced with the Arabic statement of the faith and citations from the Qurʾan.¹⁷ It was also under the Umayyads that scribes and scholars elaborated new forms of poetry and prose in a distinctive version of the dialects of North Arabia, initiating the ‘classical Arabic’ of a new imperial elite.¹⁸ In the same period the ethnonym ‘the Arabs’ (al-ʿarab) ...