Umayyad Caliphate

  General Description   The Umayyad Caliphate was formed in 661 CE by Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan following the assassination of Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. ^[1] It ended with the defeat of the Umayyads by the Abbasids in the Third Fitna (a series of Muslim civil wars) in 750 CE. ^[2] The Ummayad Caliphs, based in Damascus in Syria, ruled a large territory stretching from the Near East all the way through North Africa and into southern Spain.
Population and political organization
The caliph was a tribal patriarch and head of the ummah, the entire Islamic community. The central government of the Umayyad Caliphate was almost non-existent at the start of the period but entered a more developed stage in the mid-8th century. One of the reasons for this lack of central administration was the exceptionally successful Arab-Muslim army combined with the existence of functioning bureaucracies in the former Sassanid and Byzantine domains, which were left largely intact. ^[3] Thus, under Muawiya - the first Ummayad Caliph - the ruler was ’surrounded by Arab chiefs’ with no other central administration. ^[4] At Damascus, an administrative system staffed by permanent officials ^[5] dates from the reigns of al-Malik (685-705 CE) and al-Walid (705-715 CE). ^[4]
The caliphs, from their residence in Damascus (661-744 CE) and then Harran (744-750 CE), employed a chamberlain to manage visitors and regulate daily affairs, ^[4] and maintained an office of the chancery ^[6] with officials called diwans to manage the collection of taxes and payment of salaries. ^[7] In order to impose their authority over the provinces, which had a combined population of up to 33 million, ^[8] the Umayyads typically sent civil and military governors (amel and amir). ^[9] In the regions they conquered, the Ummayads had no choice but to use the resident staff because institutions to train and educate bureaucrats had not yet developed in the Arab Muslim context. In Egypt, for the first century of Umayyad rule, ’all the provincial officials were Christians’. ^[10] The Umayyad Caliphate was thus an exceptionally multicultural empire with a diverse governmental and cultural heritage.
This diversity was reflected in the number of languages spoken across the territory conquered by Muslims: from Basque in the far west to Berber and African Romance languages along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and Aramaic, Turkic, Hebrew, Armenian and Kurdish in the east. ^[11] The use of Arabic as an administrative language began in Iraq in 697 CE, but spread outwards to Syria, Egypt and, by 700 CE, Khurasan in modern-day northeastern Iran. ^[5] In Egypt, the adoption of Arabic as the language of local government took over 100 years; initially, almost all papyruses were written in Greek. The first known bilingual Greek-Arabic document dates to 643 CE, and the last to 719. The earliest known Egyptian document written exclusively in Arabic is dated to 709 CE, and Greek was still being used up until 780 CE. ^[12]

[1]: (Madelung 1997, 108, 297) Wilferd Madelung. 1997. The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[2]: (Esposito, ed. 2003, 691) John L. Esposito, ed. 2003. The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[3]: (Lapidus 2012, 55) Ira M. Lapidus. 2012. Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[4]: (Lapidus 2012, 80-90) Ira M. Lapidus. 2012. Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[5]: (Lapidus 2012, 36-38) Ira M. Lapidus. 2012. Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[6]: (Lapidus 2012, 50-51) Ira M. Lapidus. 2012. Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[7]: (Kennedy 2001, 88) Hugh N. Kennedy. 2001. The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State. London: Routledge.

[8]: (Blankinship 1994, 37-38) Khalid Y. Blankinship. 1994. The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hisham Ibn ’Abd Al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

[9]: (Lambton 2011) Ann K. S. Lambton. 2011. ’Cities iii: Administration and Social Organization’, in Encyclopedia Iranica V/6, 607-23; an updated version is available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cities-iii (accessed 2 April 2017).

[10]: (Raymond 2000, 17) André Raymond. 2000. Cairo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[11]: (Lapidus 2002, 126) Ira M. Lapidus. 2002. A History of Islamic Societies. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[12]: (Raymond 2000, 23) André Raymond. 2000. Cairo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.