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What Was the Umayyad Caliphate? The Full Story of Islam's First Dynasty
For ninety years the Umayyads ruled one of the largest empires in history, from Spain to the edge of China. They also turned the leadership of the Muslim community into a family business. This is the plain story: the timeline, what they built, what they did wrong, and why the sources are a problem.
The Gap Nobody Explains
Most people meet the Umayyads by accident.
You read about the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) and the four leaders who came after him. Then you read about Baghdad, paper, algebra and the golden age of Islamic science.
There is a ninety-year gap between those two stories, and something big is sitting in it.
That something is the Umayyad Caliphate. It ruled from Spain to the borders of China, it built the oldest Islamic building still standing, and it made Arabic the language of an empire.
It also turned the leadership of the Muslim community into a family business, and the Prophet's own grandson was killed by its army.
So there is no one-sentence answer to "what was the Umayyad Caliphate". The story has real achievements and real crimes in it, and Muslims have been weighing the two against each other for thirteen hundred years.
Here is the whole thing.
Two Short Phrases You Will See a Lot
Before we start, two small things that carry real meaning.
(SAW) appears after the Prophet Muhammad's name. It stands for sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, pronounced roughly "sal-lal-LAA-hu a-LAY-hi wa sal-LAM". It means "may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him."
Muslims do not only write it. They say it out loud, or under their breath, every time they hear his name.
It is a small act of love that Muslims have been repeating for over fourteen hundred years. If you are not Muslim, you are warmly invited to read it aloud too. There is no obligation, and it is worth reading rather than passing over.
(RA) appears after the names of his companions. It stands for radiyallahu anhu, which means "may Allah be pleased with him." Muslims say that one out loud too, for the same reason.
The Short Answer
The Umayyad Caliphate was the first hereditary dynasty to rule the Muslim world. It lasted from 661 to 750 CE.
Its capital was Damascus, in what is now Syria. Not Mecca, not Medina, and not Baghdad, which did not exist yet.
Fourteen men ruled as caliph in those ninety years, and all of them came from one extended family.
A caliph is the political leader of the Muslim community after the Prophet. He is not a prophet, and he receives no revelation.
At its largest the empire stretched from Portugal to Pakistan, and reached north into Central Asia.
Modern historians estimate it held around 62 million people, which was roughly 29 percent of everyone alive on earth at the time. Those numbers are reconstructions rather than real census figures, so treat them as rough. Even so, by land area and by share of world population it ranks among the largest empires in history.
And then it collapsed almost completely, in about three years.
Keep that shape in mind as you read. Almost every place named in this article is somewhere on it.
Where the Name Comes From
The name is a family name.
Banu Umayya, meaning the children of Umayya, were a clan inside Quraysh, the leading tribe of Mecca. The Prophet (SAW) belonged to a different clan of the same tribe, called Banu Hashim.
So the Umayyads were the Prophet's distant relatives and his tribal rivals at the same time. Both things are true, and both matter later.
The Awkward Part
There is one detail that makes the Umayyad story uncomfortable from the first page.
The head of the clan during the Prophet's lifetime was Abu Sufyan. For about twenty years he was the most powerful opponent of Islam in Mecca, and he led the armies that fought the Muslims at Uhud and at the Trench.
He became Muslim in 630 CE, when Mecca surrendered and there was no point resisting any longer.
His son Mu'awiya (RA) became a scribe for the Prophet and later a companion. And Mu'awiya's son would one day be caliph.
There is a second thread in the family, and it is the more respectable one. Uthman ibn Affan (RA), the third caliph, was an Umayyad himself.
He became Muslim early, he was married to two of the Prophet's daughters one after the other, and Sunni Islam honours him as one of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs.
So the same clan produced the Prophet's fiercest enemy and one of his most beloved sons-in-law.
That mixed inheritance is why the Umayyads never stopped being controversial. Their critics could always say these were the people who fought the Prophet. Their defenders could always answer that these were the people who became his companions, and that the Quran does not hold a man's past against him once he accepts Islam.
How They Took Power
The Umayyads did not grab the caliphate out of nowhere. They inherited a broken situation.
In 656 CE, Uthman (RA) was murdered in his own house by rebels. Ali ibn Abi Talib (RA), the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, became the fourth caliph the next day.
What followed was the first Muslim civil war, and it turned on one unanswered question. Who killed Uthman, and what should be done to them?
Mu'awiya was governor of Syria by then, and a relative of Uthman. He refused to accept Ali's authority until the killers were punished. The two sides fought at Siffin in 657 and settled nothing.
In January 661, Ali was assassinated in the mosque at Kufa by a member of a third faction, the Kharijites.
His son Hasan (RA) was declared caliph and held the position for about seven months, then stepped down. His army was deserting, he had been wounded in an assassination attempt, and his own commander had been bribed.
That whole sequence is told properly in Why Were 3 of the First 4 Caliphs Assassinated?, including why it kept happening.
661: The Year of Unity
Hasan stepping down left Mu'awiya as the only man still claiming the office. He became caliph in 661, and the early Muslim sources call that year am al-jama'a, meaning the year of unity, or of the community coming back together.
That name is not sarcastic. After five years of Muslims killing Muslims, one man ruling everything really did feel like relief.
Mu'awiya moved the capital to Damascus, where he had already been governor for around twenty years.
The move was practical. Syria gave him a disciplined army that was loyal to him personally, real tax income, and a working Byzantine bureaucracy he could take over and keep running.
It was also symbolic, and nobody missed it. The centre of the Muslim world had left Arabia.
What Mu'awiya Was Actually Good At
Muslim history has often written Mu'awiya off. But he was a very capable administrator, and skipping that makes the rest of the story impossible to follow.
He organised the government into departments. There was a chancery for official correspondence, a seal office to stop people forging orders, and a postal relay system called the barid that could carry messages across the empire quickly.
He also built the first Muslim navy, back when he was still only governor of Syria under Uthman.
That navy sailed against Cyprus in 649 CE. On the way, Umm Haram bint Milhan (RA), an elderly relative of the Prophet, fell from her mount as they landed and died. Her tomb is still there, near Larnaca.
We know she was on that ship because of something the Prophet had said years earlier. It comes down to us as a hadith.
Hadith“Paradise is granted to the first batch of my followers who will undertake a naval expedition. Umm Haram added, I said, O Allah's Messenger! Will I be amongst them? He replied, You are amongst them.”
The Decision That Changed Everything
Mu'awiya ruled for nineteen years. Then he made the most important decision in Umayyad history.
Around 676 CE he named his son Yazid as the next caliph, and began collecting oaths of loyalty for him while he was still alive.
Power had never passed from father to son in Islam before. The first four caliphs each came to power in a different way: a hurried meeting, a written nomination, a six-man council, public acclaim. Never by birth.
It also broke a specific promise. The treaty Hasan (RA) signed in 661 included a clause saying that after Mu'awiya died, the next leader would be chosen by consultation rather than handpicked.
The Quran describes believers as people who settle their affairs by consulting each other.
Quran“And those who have responded to their Lord and established prayer and whose affair is determined by consultation among themselves, and from what We have provided them, they spend.”
Some senior figures refused the oath outright. Among them were Husayn ibn Ali (RA), the Prophet's grandson, and Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr (RA), the son of a famous companion.
Mu'awiya died in April 680, and those refusals turned into a crisis straight away.
Karbala, 680
Yazid demanded pledges of loyalty. Husayn refused, left Medina, and eventually set out for Iraq after receiving thousands of letters from the people of Kufa asking him to lead them.
The support collapsed before he got there. He was intercepted in open country and cut off from the Euphrates.
On 10 October 680 CE, the tenth of Muharram, he and around seventy companions and family members were killed at Karbala by an army acting under Yazid's governor.
Husayn was the Prophet's grandson, and he was beheaded on a battlefield by soldiers of a Muslim state.
Sunni scholarship does not defend this. Sunni literature condemns the killing of Husayn as an atrocity. The argument inside Sunni Islam is narrower than people assume. It is about whether Yazid personally can be cursed by name, not about whether Karbala was a crime.
The full story, what each tradition holds, and what Sunni scholars actually wrote about Yazid, is in What Is Muharram? and in Who Are the Shia?.
For this article, the point is what Karbala did to the dynasty. It did not weaken Umayyad power militarily at all.
It destroyed something else. From that day on the Umayyads were a government that had killed the Prophet's family, and no amount of good administration ever washed that off.
The Second Civil War
Yazid ruled three years and spent most of them fighting.
In 683 the people of Medina, the Prophet's own city, rejected him and threw out the Umayyad garrison. A Syrian army defeated them at the Battle of al-Harra on 26 August 683, then looted the city for three days.
The same army marched on to Mecca, where Ibn al-Zubayr had declared himself caliph. The siege ran from 24 September to 26 November 683, with catapults firing into the sanctuary.
On 31 October 683 the Kaaba caught fire and burned, and the Black Stone cracked into pieces.
Be careful with that last event, because people use it as a weapon. Later sources blamed the Umayyad besiegers, and it appears in every list of Umayyad crimes. The more reliable accounts trace the fire to a torch carried by one of Ibn al-Zubayr's own men, which blew onto the wooden scaffolding around the building.
Ibn al-Zubayr rebuilt the Kaaba afterwards and bound the three fragments of the Black Stone in a silver frame. That frame is why the stone sits in silver today, and the story is in The Kaaba, Explained.
The Dynasty Nearly Ended Here
Yazid died suddenly in November 683. His son Mu'awiya II ruled a few months and died, apparently without naming anyone to follow him.
At that point the Umayyads had effectively lost. Ibn al-Zubayr was recognised as caliph across most of the Muslim world, including Iraq, Egypt and Arabia itself.
What saved them was tribal politics inside Syria. A different branch of the family put forward Marwan I, a cousin and former secretary of Uthman, and his supporters won the Battle of Marj Rahit in August 684.
From here the family splits into two branches, and the names are worth knowing because historians always use them. The Sufyanids (661 to 684) descend from Abu Sufyan. The Marwanids (684 to 750) descend from Marwan.
Every Umayyad caliph after 684 is a Marwanid.
Marwan died within a year. Rebuilding the empire fell to his son, and that man changed it permanently.
Abd al-Malik: The State-Builder
Abd al-Malik ruled from 685 to 705. If you only remember one Umayyad after Mu'awiya, remember him.
First he finished the war. His commander al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf besieged Mecca again and killed Ibn al-Zubayr in 692. That ended the second civil war and put the empire back under one ruler.
Then he did something more interesting than winning. He asked what an Islamic state should actually look like, and he answered in three ways.
He Made Arabic the Language of Government
Up to this point the conquered provinces had kept using their old paperwork. Iraq did its accounts in Persian, Syria in Greek, and Egypt in Greek and Coptic.
Abd al-Malik and his successors changed that department by department. Iraq in 697, Syria in 700, Egypt in 705 or 706.
It sounds like boring administrative housekeeping. It is one of the most consequential decisions in world history.
It is a large part of why Arabic is spoken from Morocco to Iraq today, and why scholars across the whole Muslim world would later write in one shared language.
He Invented Islamic Money
Before this, Muslims used Byzantine gold and Persian silver. Those coins carried crosses and portraits of foreign emperors.
Abd al-Malik replaced them. His first attempt in 693 still had the caliph's image on it. Then in 696 and 697 he issued something genuinely new: coins with no pictures at all, carrying only Arabic writing, including verses of the Quran and declarations of faith.
Silver coinage in the east followed in 698 and 699.
Choosing writing instead of faces set the visual character of Islamic art for centuries.
He Built the Dome of the Rock
The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was completed in 691 or 692, and it is the oldest major Islamic building still standing largely intact.
Its inscriptions run for around 240 metres, and they are the earliest surviving Quranic text on any monument anywhere.
Historians argue about why he built it. Some read it as a statement aimed at the Christian world. Others point out that Mecca was in his rival's hands at the time, so a magnificent sanctuary under Umayyad control was useful.
Both readings can be true together. Either way it is still standing, and you can still read the inscriptions.
The Empire at Its Biggest
Abd al-Malik's son al-Walid I ruled from 705 to 715, and the map exploded.
In the east, Qutayba ibn Muslim took Bukhara between 706 and 709, then Khwarazm and Samarkand in 711 and 712, and Farghana in 713. That pushed Muslim rule deep into Central Asia.
In the south-east, Muhammad ibn al-Qasim campaigned from 708 and 709 into what is now southern Pakistan and created the province of Sind. That is the origin of Islam in South Asia, which today holds more Muslims than the Middle East does.
And in the west, in 711, a commander named Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa into the Iberian Peninsula. Within five years most of Spain and Portugal was under Muslim rule, and parts of it stayed that way for nearly eight centuries.
The rock he landed at still carries his name in a worn-down form. Jabal Tariq means Tariq's mountain, and English turned it into Gibraltar.
Al-Walid also built the Great Mosque of Damascus between 705 and 715. It is the earliest surviving stone mosque, and still one of the most beautiful buildings in the Muslim world.
It is worth being honest about how he got the site. He confiscated the Christian cathedral of St John the Baptist that stood there and had it replaced.
Where It Stopped
Two defeats mark the outer edge of Umayyad expansion, and the less famous one matters far more.
Constantinople, 717 to 718. A huge Umayyad force under Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik besieged the Byzantine capital for thirteen months. The sources say around 120,000 men and 1,800 ships, which is certainly exaggerated, but it tells you the scale they had in mind.
It failed completely. The fleet was destroyed by Greek fire, storms and winter, and the losses were enormous.
After this the caliphate mostly gave up on conquering the Byzantine Empire and settled into raiding across a fixed border. Constantinople would not fall to a Muslim army for another seven hundred years.
Tours, 732. In France, an Umayyad raiding army from Spain was beaten by the Frankish commander Charles Martel, and its governor Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi was killed.
You will often read that this battle saved Europe from Islam. Be sceptical of that.
The earliest sources treat it as a fairly ordinary defeat of a raiding party. The grand version was built much later by European historians, mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Edward Gibbon gave it its most famous form.
The Umayyad push into France had already run out of supply lines and interest. Tours is remembered as a turning point mostly because a later age wanted one.
The Caliph Everyone Makes an Exception For
In September 717 a man became caliph who does not fit the story at all.
Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, usually called Umar II, ruled for less than three years. He is the one Umayyad that Sunni tradition holds in something close to reverence, and many Muslims call him the fifth rightly guided caliph.
Part of the reason is his background. His father was an Umayyad governor, but his mother was a granddaughter of Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA), the second caliph, who was famous for plain living and strict justice.
Here is what he actually did in thirty-two months.
He fixed the tax injustice. Non-Arab converts to Islam had been kept paying the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, even after they became Muslim. He exempted converts from it and issued an order stating that whoever accepts Islam has the same rights and duties as anyone else.
He stopped the cursing of Ali. For about sixty years, Umayyad governors had led congregations in cursing Ali (RA) from the pulpit during Friday prayers. Umar II wrote to his governors telling them to abolish it, and reportedly had a verse of the Quran recited in its place.
Quran“Indeed, Allah orders justice and good conduct and giving help to relatives and forbids immorality and bad conduct and oppression. He admonishes you that perhaps you will be reminded.”
That verse is still recited at the end of the Friday sermon in mosques all over the world today. Most of the people hearing it have no idea what it replaced.
He called the army home. The siege of Constantinople was still grinding on when he took power, and he pulled the survivors out.
He ordered hadith to be written down. He wrote to his governor in Medina, Abu Bakr ibn Hazm, telling him to collect and record the sayings of the Prophet before the scholars who carried them died. Al-Zuhri, one of the greatest early scholars, worked on the same project.
That letter is preserved in al-Bukhari's Book of Knowledge, and its reasoning is stated plainly. Religious knowledge will disappear as the learned men pass away.
Nearly every hadith collection Muslims use today comes downstream of that decision.
He died in February 720, at around thirty-nine. Some sources say relatives who had lost money under his reforms poisoned him, though that cannot be established for certain.
One detail says everything about how he was remembered. Thirty years later, when the victorious Abbasids dug up Umayyad graves in Syria out of revenge, they left his tomb alone.
The Crack That Brought It Down
Now the thing that actually killed the Umayyad Caliphate. It was not any single battle.
Islam says clearly that Arabs have no superiority over anyone.
Quran“O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and Aware.”
In practice the Umayyad state ran on the opposite principle.
Non-Arab converts were called mawali, meaning clients. If you became Muslim as a Persian or a Berber, you attached yourself to an Arab tribe as a dependent.
The mawali prayed the same prayers and fasted the same month. But they were often still taxed as if they were not Muslims, they were kept out of the best jobs, and in some places they could not settle in the garrison cities where the power and the money were.
This is the whole story in one sentence. A Persian convert could be told his conversion was sincere, his prayer was valid and his fasting was accepted, and that he still owed the tax on unbelievers.
That is the gap between what the religion said and what the government did. And the mawali were not a small minority.
Umar II tried to close the gap and died before the reform could hold. His successors reversed much of it, because the treasury depended on the money.
The Umayyads had a second problem of the same kind. The Arab tribes were themselves split into two rival blocs, usually called Qays and Yaman, and every caliph had to favour one of them. Whichever bloc lost that round spent the next decade waiting for its turn.
So by the 730s the empire contained a huge population of Muslims with a clear, specific grievance, and a ruling class permanently at war with itself.
All that was missing was someone to organise it.
The Fall
Hisham ruled nineteen years, from 724 to 743, and held it all together. He was the last Umayyad caliph who managed that.
Even during his reign the cracks were opening. The Berber Revolt began in Tangier in 740 and ran until 743. It was a rising of North African Muslims against Arab rule and Arab taxes, and it was the first successful breakaway from the caliphate. Umayyad control of the far west never recovered.
When Hisham died the dynasty fell apart with startling speed.
Al-Walid II was killed in April 744, and his severed head was carried to Damascus. Yazid III ruled a few months, promised reform, and died in September 744. Ibrahim could not hold the throne at all.
Marwan II, the last Umayyad caliph, fought his way to power and then moved the capital from Damascus to Harran in 745. Syria was the province the whole dynasty rested on, and it read that move as abandonment.
He spent his reign putting down rebellions. In 746 he tore down the walls of Syria's own cities so they could not be used against him.
The Black Banners
The movement that ended the Umayyads had been organising quietly for decades in Khurasan, the far east of the empire. Arab settlers there had intermarried with the local population, so the line between Arab and mawali had blurred.
Its message was deliberately vague. It called for rule to be handed to a member of the family of the Prophet, without saying which member. That meant Shia sympathisers and ordinary discontented Muslims could each read it as their own cause.
On 9 June 747 a commander named Abu Muslim raised the black banners of the revolt in Khurasan.
After that it moved fast. Kufa fell on 2 September 749. On 28 November 749 the movement finally named its candidate, and he was not a descendant of Ali. He was al-Saffah, of the Abbasid family, descended from the Prophet's uncle Abbas.
On 16 January 750 the Abbasid army destroyed Marwan II's forces at the Battle of the Greater Zab in Iraq.
Marwan fled through Syria, then Palestine, then Egypt. He was tracked down and killed there in August 750.
What Followed
The Abbasids did not simply take the throne. They set out to make sure no Umayyad could ever claim it back.
Umayyad family members were hunted across the empire. In one notorious episode in Palestine, around eighty of them accepted an offer of amnesty, gathered in one place, and were killed.
Umayyad tombs across Syria were opened and desecrated. All except the grave of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz.
The One Who Got Away
One young man escaped, and his story is the strangest ending in early Islamic history.
Abd al-Rahman, a grandson of Hisham, was about twenty when the massacres started. He fled Damascus with his brother, his small son and a freedman named Bedr.
His brother did not survive the journey. Abd al-Rahman crossed Palestine, Sinai and Egypt, then kept moving west across North Africa for five years while dodging repeated Abbasid attempts to kill him.
In September 755 he landed at Almuñécar on the coast of Spain. In May 756 he defeated the sitting governor and made himself Emir of Córdoba.
He founded the Great Mosque of Córdoba in 785 or 786, and died around 788.
So the dynasty the Abbasids wiped out in the east kept going in the west for nearly three more centuries. It ran as the Emirate of Córdoba from 756 to 929, and then as a rival Caliphate of Córdoba from 929 until it broke apart in 1031.
Córdoba became one of the great cities of the medieval world. The Umayyad story ends in a library rather than a massacre.
So How Do Muslims Judge Them?
This is the question people actually want answered, so here is a straight response.
The mainstream Sunni position is roughly this. The Umayyads were legitimate rulers, and they were kings rather than caliphs in the full sense.
That distinction is not a modern invention. It comes from a hadith the Prophet (SAW) is reported to have said.
Hadith“Al-Khilafah will be in my Ummah for thirty years, then there will be monarchy after that.”
Thirty years after the Prophet's death in 632 brings you to 661, the year Mu'awiya took power.
The companion who narrated it, Safinah (RA), was asked directly about the Umayyad claim to the caliphate. The report preserves his answer, and it is not gentle. They are lying, he said. They are kings, and among the worst of kings.
Not every scholar reads it that harshly. Ibn Khaldun, the great fourteenth-century historian, described the same shift from caliphate to mulk, meaning kingship. But he defended Mu'awiya's motives, arguing that he named Yazid because the men who actually held power had agreed on him, and that the alternative was another civil war.
So the tradition holds several things at once, and it does not regard that as a contradiction.
The Umayyads were Muslims. The scholars of that era prayed behind their governors, took their salaries or refused them, and did not declare them outside Islam.
Their crimes are named plainly. Karbala, al-Harra, the cursing of Ali from the pulpits, and the tax on converts.
Their achievements are not erased either. The Quran was carried to Spain and to Sind under their banner, the first Islamic architecture and coinage are theirs, and the order that produced the written hadith collections came from an Umayyad caliph.
And one of them, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, is loved in Sunni Islam almost without qualification.
One Honest Warning About the Sources
There is a problem sitting underneath everything you have just read, and leaving it out would be dishonest.
Almost nothing survives that the Umayyads wrote about themselves.
The big narrative histories we depend on, above all al-Tabari, were written a century or more later under the Abbasids. The Abbasids were the dynasty that overthrew the Umayyads, hunted their family, and needed the world to believe the men they replaced had been godless kings.
That does not make the accounts fabrications. Modern historians take them seriously, and other kinds of evidence often back them up: coins, inscriptions, papyrus documents, and Byzantine and Syriac sources written by outsiders.
But it does mean the picture we have was shaped by the winners. Where a story is unusually convenient for the Abbasid case, careful historians flag it, and so should you.
The buildings and the coins are the exception, which is why they matter so much. The Dome of the Rock is not a report about the Umayyads written by someone else. It is the Umayyads speaking in their own words.
The Timeline in One Place
661 — Hasan (RA) steps down. Mu'awiya becomes caliph. The capital moves to Damascus. The year of unity.
676 — Mu'awiya names his son Yazid as heir. Hereditary rule begins.
680 — Mu'awiya dies. Husayn (RA) is killed at Karbala on 10 Muharram.
683 — Medina sacked after the Battle of al-Harra. Mecca besieged, and the Kaaba burns. Yazid dies.
684 — The dynasty nearly ends. Marwan I wins at Marj Rahit. The Marwanid branch begins.
685-705 — Abd al-Malik. Arabic becomes the language of government, the first Islamic coinage is struck, and the Dome of the Rock is completed in 691 or 692.
692 — Ibn al-Zubayr killed at Mecca. The second civil war ends.
705-715 — Al-Walid I. Spain (711), Sind and Transoxiana are conquered. The Great Mosque of Damascus is built.
717-718 — The siege of Constantinople fails badly.
717-720 — Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz. Tax reform for converts, the cursing of Ali abolished, hadith ordered to be written down.
724-743 — Hisham. The last long, stable reign.
732 — Defeat at Tours in France.
740-743 — The Berber Revolt breaks Umayyad control of North Africa.
744 — Al-Walid II killed. Three caliphs in one year. Marwan II takes power and moves the capital to Harran.
747 — Abu Muslim raises the black banners in Khurasan.
750 — The Umayyads are destroyed at the Battle of the Zab in January. Marwan II is killed in Egypt in August.
756 — Abd al-Rahman I founds the Umayyad emirate at Córdoba in Spain.
929-1031 — The Caliphate of Córdoba. The Umayyad dynasty's long second life, and its end.
What to Take Away
If you keep five things from all of this, make it these.
The Umayyads were the first dynasty, not the first caliphs. Four caliphs came before them, chosen by other methods. What the Umayyads introduced was inheritance.
They built the machinery of an Islamic civilisation. Arabic as an imperial language, Islamic coinage and Islamic architecture all start with them, and all three outlived them by more than a thousand years.
What killed them was never military. They won nearly every war they fought. What destroyed them was the gap between a religion that says the most noble of you is the most righteous, and a state that taxed converts for converting.
Sunni tradition holds two verdicts at once, and does not treat that as a failure. Legitimate rulers. Kings rather than true caliphs. Condemned for Karbala. Credited for what they built. And one of them genuinely beloved.
Be careful with the sources. Nearly everything we have was written under the dynasty that overthrew them.
The Quran has its own way of describing powers rising and falling, and it reads well after ninety years of this.
Quran“And these days of varying conditions We alternate among the people so that Allah may make evident those who believe.”
If you want what came next, the dynasty that replaced them and the golden age they presided over, that is What Was the Abbasid Caliphate?. It starts the moment Marwan II falls.
And if you want the other half of what Karbala set in motion, go to Who Are the Shia? The Full History.
Quran References
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