Titans of History

MUAWIYA & ABD AL-MALIK

The Caliphs and the Great Arab Conquests

Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan is one of the greatest Arab and Muslim Caliphs. He followed in the footsteps of Umar ibn al-Khattab, the Commander of the Believers, in regulating state affairs.

Ibn Khaldun, 14th century

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, his new theocratic realm almost fell apart, but his successors, known as the Caliphs or the Commanders of the Believers, not only restored Islamic rule in Arabia but then embarked on an astonishing military campaign that, in a matter of a few decades, conquered a new empire that stretched from Spain in the west to the borders of India in the east. The first four of the successors were known as the Righteous Caliphs, but this epoch of triumphant success ended in two bursts of civil war, fought for political control of the new empire and religion. These wars remain relevant today because they created the schism in Islam between the Sunni and Shia. But in each case, the scars were healed by two remarkable rulers from the Ummayad dynasty.

After the Prophet’s death, he was succeeded by his old supporter Abu Bakr, who sent probing expeditions into the Byzantine provinces of the Middle East. But on Abu Bakr’s death, the next Caliph Omar the Just—an austere and severe giant—dispatched Arab armies that conquered the great cities of Damascus and Jerusalem and ultimately Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Egypt. Then the Arabs conquered Persia—and this was only the beginning.

In 644 Omar was assassinated, succeeded by Othman, who continued the conquests but whose nepotism and bad management led to his murder. For those who believed the succession should lie with the family of Muhammad, the ideal successor was his first cousin Ali, married to his daughter Fatima—but others felt Ali was implicated somehow in the murder of Othman and so they named as their leader Muawiya, who became one of the greatest Arab rulers.

Muawiya was a Meccan aristocrat, son of Abu Sufyan, who had led the opposition to Muhammad. When Mecca surrendered to Islam, Muhammad welcomed the family into the fold, Muawiya became his secretary, and he married his sister. Caliph Omar appointed Muawiya as governor of Syria, describing him as the “Arab Caesar”—a backhanded compliment that has some truth in it. Muawiya ruled Syria and Palestine for twenty years for his cousin Caliph Othman but on his assassination he defied the new Caliph Ali. In the civil war ensuing in Iraq, Ali was killed—the last of the Righteous Caliphs—and in 661 Muawiya became the Caliph of the vast empire that included Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Persia and Arabia.

He was handsome, shrewd, well bred and prided himself on his prowess both as a general and a lover of women. He built an Islamic fleet that conquered Rhodes and Cyprus and almost took Constantinople in his annual attacks on the Byzantines. He treated Jerusalem as his spiritual capital but ruled from Damascus, creating a new ideal of imperial monarchy, the Islamic-Arab king-ruler, that has lasted to the present era. He ruled through Christian bureaucrats and tolerated Christians and Jews alike, seeing himself as something between Arab sheikh, Islamic caliph and Roman emperor. He was tolerant and pragmatic, following an early, looser version of Islam, happy to worship at Christian and Jewish sites, and share their shrines. Later he expanded the empire into eastern Persia, central Asia, the Sahara and into today’s Libya and Algeria.

Muawiya was famed for his good sense and witty decency at a time when he was probably the most powerful ruler on earth. He prided himself on his patience and forbearance: no one has ever so cleverly stated the essence of politics as Muawiya, who said: “I apply not my sword when my lash suffices nor my lash when my tongue suffices. And even if but one hair is binding me to my fellow men, I don’t let it break. When they pull, I loosen, if they loosen, I pull.”

On his death in 680, his son Yazid failed to grasp the succession, facing rebellions in Arabia and Iraq. Muhammad’s grandson Hussein rebelled to avenge his father Ali’s death but was brutally murdered at Karbala in Iraq, his martyrdom creating the Shia, “the party,” a division that still splits Islam today. However, after Yazid’s early death, Muawiya’s old kinsman Marwan started to reconquer the empire, dying in 685 and leaving this troubled inheritance to his son Abd al-Malik, the second of the titanic Ummayad Caliphs. Abd al-Malik was less humane and flexible but more ruthless and visionary than Muawiya. He first mercilessly crushed the rebellions, retaking Iraq and Arabia; in Jerusalem he built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, a triumph of religious expression and imperial grandeur, the oldest Islamic shrine, and ordered the building of the Aqsa Mosque.

Abd al-Malik was severe, thin, hook-nosed, curly-haired and, his enemies claimed, in what can probably be dismissed as hostile propaganda, that he had breath so noxious he was nicknamed the Flykiller. Abd al-Malik saw himself as God’s shadow on earth: if Muawiya was Caesar of the Arabs, he was a mixture of St. Paul and Constantine the Great—he believed in the marriage of empire, state and god. As such it was Abd al-Malik who collated the book of Islam—the Koran—into its final form (the inscriptions in Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock are the first examples of the final Koran text), who defined Islamic rituals and who unified Islam into a single religion recognizable today with the emphasis on Koran and Muhammad, expressed in the double shahada: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is the apostle of God.” Abd al-Malik and his son Caliph Walid expanded their empire to the borders of India and the coasts of Spain. Yet their dynasty remained part Islamic theocrats, part Roman emperors, often living in a distinctly un-Islamic decadence. This led to the family’s downfall in the revolution of 750, when they were replaced by the Abbasid caliphs who ruled from Iraq and blackened the reputation of the Ummayads. To the Shia, they remained heretics and sinners because the Shia believed the real Caliphs were the twelve descendants from Ali and Fatima: indeed the Shia of Iran still await the return of the Twelfth.