Umayyad Caliphate

• 1. Introduction

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  The Umayyad Caliphate once covered 15,000,000 square kilometres, which makes it one of the largest empires in history by geographic size. A single dynasty ruled it from 661 to 750. Its territory stretched from Hispania in the west to Transoxiana and Sindh in the east.

  Yet the family behind this empire had once led the Meccan opposition to the Prophet Muhammad. How did that same clan come to command the Muslim world from Damascus? What changed when one ruler chose his own son to follow him? And what could survive when a dynasty's enemies came looking for every last member of the family?

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• 2. Outsiders Inside

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  By the end of the 6th century, the Banu Umayya had come to dominate the rich Quraysh trade routes running to Syria. The clan also built military and economic alliances with the nomadic Arab tribes of the northern and central Arabian deserts. Those ties gave it real political weight in Mecca. Under Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, the Umayyads became the principal leaders of the opposition to Muhammad.

  In 630, Muhammad captured Mecca, and Abu Sufyan and the Quraysh embraced Islam. Muhammad chose to win over his former enemies by giving them a stake in the new order. Abu Sufyan and the Umayyads then moved to Medina, the political centre of Islam, so that they could keep their influence.

  Abu Bakr, who led the community from 632 to 634, rewarded the clan with command roles in the conquest of Syria. One appointee was Yazid, a son of Abu Sufyan who already owned property and ran trade networks there. Under Umar, who ruled from 634 to 644, Syria was all but conquered by 638. When the overall commander Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah died in 639, Umar named Yazid governor of the districts of Damascus, Palestine and Jordan.

  The plague of Amwas had killed Abu Ubayda, and it soon killed Yazid as well. Umar appointed Yazid's brother Mu'awiya in his place. Historians offer several reasons for this favour toward Abu Sufyan's sons. Umar may have respected the family, or valued their alliance with the powerful Banu Kalb tribe against the Himyarite settlers of Homs. He may simply have lacked another suitable candidate.

  Uthman ibn Affan, a wealthy Umayyad with marital ties to Muhammad, was chosen next by a council of five early companions. The council picked him over Ali. Uthman would keep state power in the hands of the Quraysh, while Ali wanted to spread it among all Muslim factions. Uthman then placed his own relatives as governors across the conquered lands of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt. In Medina he leaned on his cousins, the brothers al-Harith and Marwan ibn al-Hakam. The historian Wilferd Madelung traced this to Uthman's belief that the house of Umayya was "uniquely qualified to rule in the name of Islam".

  In 645 or 646, Uthman added the Jazira, or Upper Mesopotamia, to Mu'awiya's governorship. He also let Mu'awiya take over all the Byzantine crown lands in Syria to pay his troops. Meanwhile, surplus taxes from Kufa and Egypt flowed to the treasury in Medina, where Uthman spent them freely on his kin. The rich Sasanian crown lands of Iraq, which Umar had set aside for the garrison towns of Kufa and Basra, became caliphal property.

  Resentment among the Ansar, the Quraysh of Medina, and the people of Iraq and Egypt ended with the killing of Uthman in 656. The historian Hugh Kennedy judged that Uthman died for trying to centralize government under the old Quraysh elite, at the expense of many early Muslims. Ali now took his place, and the first rival to challenge him came from the Quraysh itself.

  Al-Zubayr and Talha had opposed Uthman's favouritism toward the Umayyads. They also feared that the Quraysh would lose influence under Ali. Backed by Muhammad's wife Aisha, they tried to rally the troops of Basra. Ali went to Iraq and defeated them at the Battle of the Camel. Both men were killed, and Aisha withdrew into seclusion. Ali then made Kufa his capital.

  Mu'awiya was a harder problem. Twenty years of command in Syria had given him a strong base and an effective army against the Byzantines. He did not yet claim the caliphate. Instead he refused to yield Syria and accused Ali of complicity in the death of his kinsman Uthman.

  In early 657, Ali's Iraqi army and Mu'awiya's Syrian forces fought to a stalemate at the Battle of Siffin. Ali agreed to arbitration, but the talks settled nothing. The decision hurt him, because it forced him to bargain with Mu'awiya as an equal. It also pushed a faction of his own men into revolt, and they later became known as the Kharijites.

  Ali's coalition came apart. Many Iraqi tribal nobles quietly defected to Mu'awiya, and Mu'awiya's ally Amr ibn al-As drove Ali's governor out of Egypt in July 658. In July 660, Syrian tribal allies recognized Mu'awiya as caliph in Jerusalem. A Kharijite dissident assassinated Ali in January 661. His son Hasan took over but gave up the office in return for compensation when Mu'awiya's Syrian army invaded Iraq that summer.

  Mu'awiya entered Kufa and received the allegiance of the Iraqis. The traditional Muslim sources call this moment the "year of unification of the community".

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• 3. Damascus Rules

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  When the caliphal treasury and the capital moved to Damascus, they landed in a province that Mu'awiya had spent twenty years making his own. Several things explain why Syria, and not Iraq, became the heart of the empire. Its relatively large Arab population was spread across the province instead of sealed inside garrison cities. A single tribal confederation, the Quda'a, led by the Banu Kalb, dominated it. Iraq, by contrast, held a crowd of competing tribal groups.

  The Syrian tribes had long served the Byzantine army and the Ghassanid client kings. The historian Julius Wellhausen thought this left them "more accustomed to order and obedience" than their Iraqi counterparts. Mu'awiya secured their loyalty through the Kalbite chief Ibn Bahdal and the Kindite nobleman Shurahbil ibn Simt. He added the Qurayshite commanders al-Dahhak ibn Qays al-Fihri and Abd al-Rahman, son of the general Khalid ibn al-Walid.

  His marriage to Maysun bint Bahdal, daughter of the Kalb chief, was a political move. The Kalb were a large Syriac Orthodox Christian Arab tribe. The plague had killed much of the Muslim army in Syria, and the marriage let Mu'awiya draw on these Christians against the Byzantines.

  Nearly every year, or every second year, he sent his Syrian troops on land and sea raids against Byzantium. The raids brought battlefield experience and plunder but no lasting territory. Near the end of his reign, he agreed to a thirty-year truce with the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV, who ruled from 668 to 685. In exchange, the Umayyads paid the empire a yearly tribute of gold, horses and slaves.

  Christians held prominent posts under the early Umayyad caliphs, and some came from families that had served the Byzantines. The historian Tom Holland writes that Mu'awiya treated Christians, Jews, Samaritans and Manichaeans well. He even restored the cathedral of Edessa after an earthquake toppled it. Holland also writes that "He allowed everyone to live as they wanted."

  Iraq, with its rival towns of Kufa and Basra, needed a different touch. The garrison towns resented the shift of power to Syria. They were also split among tribal nobles, supporters of Ali and Kharijites. Mu'awiya made alliances with local leaders such as the Kufan al-Ash'ath ibn Qays. He handed Kufa to the experienced al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba of the Thaqif tribe. Basra went to al-Mughira's protege Ziyad ibn Abihi, whom Mu'awiya adopted as his half-brother. The governors forwarded a token share of tax revenue and kept order. In return, they ruled almost independently.

  When al-Mughira died in 670, Mu'awiya attached Kufa to Ziyad's governorship of Basra. That made Ziyad the practical viceroy of the eastern half of the caliphate. He launched a campaign to fix Arab rule in Khurasan and to restart conquests beyond it. After his death, his son Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad succeeded him.

  Egypt was run from the provincial capital of Fustat by Amr ibn al-As as a virtual partner of Mu'awiya until his death in 663. Afterward, loyalist governors made the province an appendage of Syria. In 670, the commander Uqba ibn Nafi began the conquest of Ifriqiya, in central North Africa. His troops reached Byzacena, in modern southern Tunisia, and there he founded the permanent Arab garrison city of Kairouan.

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• 4. Heirs and Rebels

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  In 676, Mu'awiya nominated his own son, Yazid I, as his successor. No one in Islamic politics had done this before. It introduced hereditary rule and in practice turned the caliphate into a kingship. The Iraqis and the Hejaz-based Quraysh, including other Umayyads, disapproved. Most of them were bribed or pressured into accepting.

  Yazid took power in 680, and the Kufan supporters of Ali invited Ali's son Husayn, Muhammad's grandson, to rise against the Umayyads. An army mobilized by the governor Ibn Ziyad intercepted Husayn outside Kufa and killed him at the Battle of Karbala. Open opposition in Iraq went quiet for a time. But many Muslims were outraged, and Kufan hostility toward the Umayyads grew, along with sympathy for the family of Ali.

  From the Ka'aba in Mecca, Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, grandson of Abu Bakr, called for the Quraysh to elect the caliph by council. The Ansar and Quraysh of Medina joined the anti-Umayyad cause and in 683 expelled the Umayyads from the city. Yazid's Syrian troops beat the Medinans at the Battle of al-Harra and plundered Medina. They then besieged Ibn al-Zubayr in Mecca.

  Yazid died in 683, and the Syrians withdrew. Ibn al-Zubayr declared himself caliph, and most provinces, including Iraq and Egypt, recognized him. In Syria, Ibn Bahdal arranged for Yazid's son Mu'awiya II to succeed. Mu'awiya II was ill from the start, and al-Dahhak handled the practical duties of the office. When he died in early 684 without naming an heir, the Sufyanid line, named for Mu'awiya's father Abu Sufyan, was finished.

  Even Syria nearly slipped away. Al-Dahhak in Damascus backed Ibn al-Zubayr. So did the Qays tribes in Qinnasrin and the Jazira, the Judham in Palestine, and the Ansar and South Arabians of Homs. Marwan ibn al-Hakam, leader of the Umayyads expelled from Medina, was ready to submit as well. Ibn Ziyad, driven out of Iraq, talked him into running for the caliphate.

  At Jabiya, the old Ghassanid capital, Ibn Bahdal gathered the pro-Umayyad tribes, and they elected Marwan in return for economic privileges. In August 684, at the Battle of Marj Rahit, Marwan's smaller force crushed a much larger Qaysite army, and al-Dahhak was killed. The South Arabians of Homs and the Judham joined the Quda'a to form a confederation called the Yaman. A feud between the Qays and Yaman followed. The Qays regrouped at the Euphrates fortress of Circesium under Zufar ibn al-Harith al-Kilabi. The strife undermined the Syrian army, the foundation of Umayyad power.

  Marwan died in April 685, and his eldest son Abd al-Malik succeeded him. In August 686, at the Battle of Khazir, Qays-Yaman divisions helped bring about a massive rout of the Syrian army. Ibn Ziyad died at the hands of the pro-Alid forces of Mukhtar al-Thaqafi of Kufa. Pressure from Byzantium and raids by its Mardaite allies forced Abd al-Malik into a peace treaty in 689 that raised the annual tribute.

  At the siege of Circesium in 691, Abd al-Malik won over Zufar and the Qays with privileged places in the court and army. He and his successors would try to balance Qays and Yaman from then on. With a united army, and with Iraq's leading tribal chiefs secretly bought, he defeated Ibn al-Zubayr's brother Mus'ab at the Battle of Maskin in 691. In 692, the commander al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf besieged Mecca and killed Ibn al-Zubayr. The Second Fitna was over. The man who ended it would soon be given far more of the empire to govern.

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• 5. Remaking the State

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  In 694, Abd al-Malik joined Kufa and Basra into one province and gave it to al-Hajjaj. Both garrisons were worn out from fighting Kharijite rebels, and al-Hajjaj put those revolts down in Iraq and Iran by 698. He was then given authority over the rest of the eastern caliphate. His methods included death threats to force men into war and cuts to stipends. Around the year 700 they provoked a mass Iraqi rebellion under the Kufan nobleman Ibn al-Ash'ath. Al-Hajjaj beat the rebels at Dayr al-Jamajim in April.

  The defeat ended the Iraqi fighters as a military force and began Syrian military domination of Iraq. Al-Hajjaj founded a permanent Syrian garrison at Wasit, between Kufa and Basra. Iraq's Arab nobility, religious scholars and non-Arab clients became virtual subjects of the Syrian troops. The produce of the rich Sawad lands now went to the treasury in Damascus to pay those troops.

  The pay system set up by Umar, which gave stipends to veterans of the early conquests and their descendants, was ended. Salaries went only to men in active service, and Abd al-Malik gained a professional army paid from tax proceeds. The registers held perhaps 300,000 troops in the year 700, though Blankinship puts the figure at 400,000 under Hisham. Around 40 percent came from Syria, which helps explain how Syrians could dominate every other region.

  Syrian soldiers fought in close order and favoured a kneeling wall of spears, probably learned from their encounters with Roman armies. That was a world away from the mobile, individual style of the original Bedouin fighters.

  The state's money changed too. In 693, the dinar replaced the Byzantine gold solidus in Syria and Egypt. At first it showed the caliph as spiritual leader and supreme military commander of the Muslim community. That image proved unacceptable to Muslim officials. In 696 or 697 it gave way to coins with no images, inscribed with Qur'anic quotes and religious formulas. Similar changes reached the silver dirhams of the former Persian lands in 698 or 699.

  The dinar was worth twenty silver coins, and the dirham was minted in far greater numbers than in the earlier Byzantine era. The bronze coin was called a fals. Earlier designs had been more varied. Some Arab-Sasanian coins from 692 to 696 replaced the fire altar with three men in Arab dress, possibly showing prayer or the Friday sermon. One coin from about 695 to 698 shows a spear beneath an arch. A group of bronze coins from Palestine shows a menorah topped by the shahada, first with seven branches and later with five.

  Arabic replaced Persian as the language of the administrative register in Iraq in 697. It replaced Greek in Syria in 700, and Greek and Coptic in Egypt in 705 or 706. Khurasan did not follow until the 740s. Bureaucrats who knew Arabic kept their jobs, even if they spoke Greek or Persian.

  One casualty was Sarjun ibn Mansur, a Melkite Christian and the son of a prominent Byzantine official of Damascus. He had served Mu'awiya I and Yazid I and led the fiscal administration of Syria. In 700, Abd al-Malik dismissed him as part of the push to Arabicize the government. Another Christian, Sulayman ibn Sa'd al-Khushani, took over.

  In 691 or 692, Abd al-Malik also completed the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. It may have been a monument of victory over the Christians that set Islam apart in a city holy to Judaism and Christianity. It may also have drawn Muslims' attention away from the Ka'aba in Zubayrid Mecca, where the Umayyads were condemned during the Hajj.

  In Damascus, Abd al-Malik's son al-Walid I seized the cathedral of St. John the Baptist and built the Great Mosque in its place. The historian Robert Hillenbrand calls it a "victory monument". Craftsmen from Greek, Persian, Coptic, Indian and Maghrebi backgrounds were brought in to build it. Byzantine-style mosaics decorate both it and the Dome of the Rock. They omit human figures, a sign of the new Islamic reluctance to show figures in religious art.

  The desert palaces of Khirbat al-Mafjar and Qusayr 'Amra were freer. They were decorated with floor mosaics, frescoes and relief carving, and some showed people and animals. Branches of the dynasty later raised the Great Mosque of Córdoba and Madinat al-Zahra in Iberia, which shaped later building across the western Islamic world.

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• 6. Edges of the Map

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  Carthage was captured and destroyed in 698, which Kennedy calls "the final, irretrievable end of Roman power in Africa". The commander Hassan ibn al-Nu'man al-Ghassani had won back Ifriqiya from the Byzantines and Berbers between 695 and 698. Kairouan was now a secure launchpad. On Abd al-Malik's orders, the port of Tunis was founded with an arsenal to build a strong Arab fleet. Hassan went on to defeat the Berbers and kill their leader, the warrior queen al-Kahina, sometime between 698 and 703.

  His successor, Musa ibn Nusayr, subdued the Berber confederations of the Hawwara, Zenata and Kutama. In 708 or 709 he took Tangier and Sus. Musa's Berber client Tariq ibn Ziyad then invaded the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania in 711, and within five years most of it was conquered.

  In the east, Qutayba ibn Muslim, lieutenant governor of Khurasan under al-Hajjaj, attacked Transoxiana between 705 and 715. Earlier Muslim armies had found the region nearly impenetrable. Qutayba faced distance, harsh terrain and numerically superior enemies, yet persistent raiding won him the surrender of Bukhara, Khwarazm, Samarkand and Farghana. In 707, he defeated a coalition of Turks and Tang forces, whose army reportedly numbered roughly 200,000. In Samarkand and Bukhara he placed Arab garrisons and tax offices and demolished Zoroastrian fire temples. Local rulers kept their power in exchange for tribute.

  Al-Hajjaj's kinsman Muhammad ibn al-Qasim conquered northwestern South Asia from 708 or 709 and organized it as the province of Sind. By 705, Armenia had been annexed along with Caucasian Albania and Iberia, forming the province of Arminiya. The plunder from Transoxiana, Sind and Hispania rivalled the spoils of Umar's reign.

  After al-Walid I, the momentum faded. Al-Hajjaj died in 714 and Qutayba in 715, and the Arab armies in Transoxiana fell into disarray. For the next 25 years, no new eastern conquests were attempted, and territory was lost. In 717, the Tang Chinese defeated the Arabs at the Battle of Aksu.

  Under Sulayman, who ruled from 715 to 717, his brother Maslama besieged Constantinople by land while Umar ibn Hubayra al-Fazari led a naval attack. The Byzantines destroyed the Umayyad fleets and beat Maslama's army, and he withdrew to Syria in 718. Raids resumed in 720, but conquering the city was effectively abandoned. The frontier settled along the Taurus and Anti-Taurus Mountains, where both sides kept raiding for centuries.

  Hisham, who ruled from 724 to 743, moved his court to Resafa in northern Syria, closer to the Byzantine border than Damascus. His new campaigns brought successful raids into Anatolia but also a major defeat at the Battle of Akroinon. In the west, the Arabs were checked at Toulouse in 721 and beaten by the Franks at the Battle of Tours in 732. Narbonne held out until 759.

  The Caucasus proved bloody. The Arabs made Derbent a major base but could not subdue the Khazars. They also suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Marj Ardabil in 730. Marwan ibn Muhammad, the future Marwan II, ended the war in 737 with an invasion reported to have reached the Volga. The Khazars remained unconquered.

  The deepest wound came in 739, when a major Berber revolt broke out in North Africa. It was probably the largest military setback of Hisham's reign. Some of the first Muslim states outside the caliphate emerged from it. Morocco never again came under an eastern caliph or other foreign ruler until the 20th century. In India, the Chalukya and the Pratiharas defeated Umayyad armies, which halted eastward expansion.

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• 7. Converts and Taxes

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  The Umayyad world had four social classes, and the arithmetic of taxes ran through all of them. Muslim Arabs sat at the top, followed by non-Arab Muslims who were clients of Arabs, then the dhimmis, and finally slaves. Muslim Arabs saw ruling the conquered lands as their duty. They held themselves above non-Arab Muslims and generally did not mix with them.

  Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and pagans were dhimmis. They had legal protection as second-class citizens if they accepted Muslim supremacy, and they paid the jizya poll tax, from which Muslims were exempt. Muslims paid the zakat instead. Conversion complicated this. The jizya was still imposed on non-Arab converts, and all Muslims who farmed conquered land owed the kharaj land tax.

  This produced a trap for the treasury. Tax avoidance encouraged mass conversion, and it encouraged people to leave their land for the garrison cities. Revenue suffered most in Egypt, Iraq and Khurasan. The scholar Hawting concluded that the rulers had "a vested interest in preventing the conquered peoples from accepting Islam".

  Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, who took power in 717, tried to solve it. He had been named by his cousin Sulayman, against expectations that a son or brother would follow. He dismissed all of his predecessors' governors, choosing competent men he could control, and broke up the vast viceroyalty of Iraq and the east. He abolished the jizya on the converts, who were the mawali. Their lands became the property of their villages and still owed the full kharaj, so revenue would not collapse.

  Umar II also pushed Islamization further. He made rules to distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims and began Islamic iconoclasm. Yet Umar was reported to have written that no one should destroy a synagogue, a church or a Zoroastrian fire temple. This applied to communities that had reached terms with the Muslims. The historian Fred Donner notes that Zoroastrians in northern Iran won nearly complete autonomy for tribute.

  Sunni tradition remembers Umar as unique among the Umayyads. He is the only one recognized as a righteous and legitimate caliph rather than a worldly king. The biographer Ibn Abd al-Hakam wrote that Umar stopped the personal allowance his relatives received. His reasoning was that he could only pay them if he paid everyone in the empire. The same writer credited the tax cut with stimulating the economy, though it also shrank the government's budget, including defence spending.

  Umar was poisoned in 720, and his successors tried to undo his tax policy. Yazid II brought the jizya back on the mawali, which set off revolts in Khurasan in 721 or 722 that lasted some twenty years. Berbers in Ifriqiya resisted fiercely, and the Umayyad governor there was assassinated by his own discontented Berber guards.

  Under Hisham, the Day of Thirst in 724 brought a defeat in Transoxiana. Afterward Ashras ibn Abd Allah al-Sulami, governor of Khurasan, promised tax relief to Sogdians who converted. He retracted it when the offer proved so popular that it threatened provincial revenue. After the losses at the Battle of the Defile in 731, discontent among the Khurasani Arabs rose sharply. In 734, al-Harith ibn Surayj led a revolt backed by Arab settlers and native inhabitants alike. It took Balkh but failed at Merv.

  The rights of non-Arab Muslims stayed unresolved to the end of the dynasty. One scholar, Previté-Orton, argued that mass conversion of Persians, Berbers, Copts and Aramaic-speaking peoples doomed the Umayyads. These clients were often better educated than their Arab overlords. Previté-Orton added that a feud between Syria and Iraq weakened the empire further.

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• 8. Fall and Afterlife

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  Al-Walid II reached the throne in 743 with a reputation for chasing earthly pleasures over religion. The decoration of the desert palaces attributed to him seems to support it. He made enemies by executing men who had opposed his accession and by persecuting the Qadariyya. In 744, Yazid III, a son of al-Walid I, was proclaimed caliph in Damascus while his army killed al-Walid II. Yazid III had a reputation for piety and died six months later.

  Marwan II, grandson of Marwan I, marched from the northern frontier and entered Damascus in December 744. He promptly moved the capital to Harran, in present-day Turkey. Syria rebelled, perhaps from resentment at the move, and in 746 he razed the walls of Homs and Damascus. Kharijites in Iraq and Iran also set up rival caliphs, first Dahhak ibn Qays and then Abu Dulaf. By 747, Marwan had restored control of Iraq, but a far greater danger was growing in Khurasan.

  The Hashimiyya movement, led by the Abbasid family, had been preparing for decades. Its name seems to refer to Abu Hashim, a grandson of Ali. According to certain traditions, Abu Hashim died in 717 at Humeima. He died in the house of Muhammad ibn Ali, the head of the Abbasid family, and named him his successor. That claim let the Abbasids gather the followers of the failed revolt of Mukhtar.

  From around 719, Hashimiyya missions began seeking followers in Khurasan. They presented their work as a call to the faith and asked support for an unnamed "member of the family" of Muhammad. Arabs and non-Arab clients both joined, and the clients may have been especially important.

  Abu Muslim took over the movement in Khurasan around 746. In 747 he began an open revolt under black flags and expelled the Umayyad governor Nasr ibn Sayyar. Kufa fell to the Hashimiyya in 749, and in November that year Abul Abbas as-Saffah was recognized as caliph in the mosque there. Marwan marched from Harran, and in January 750 the armies met at the Battle of the Zab. The Umayyads lost. Damascus fell in April, and Marwan was killed in Egypt in August.

  The Abbasid victors desecrated the Umayyad tombs in Syria and spared only that of Umar II. Most of the family were hunted down. When the Abbasids announced an amnesty, eighty Umayyads came to receive pardons, and all of them were massacred. One grandson of Hisham, Abd al-Rahman I, escaped across North Africa and founded an emirate in Moorish Iberia, known as al-Andalus. He claimed that the true caliphate continued through him in Córdoba, although no one outside al-Andalus accepted this. His line would last for centuries.

  Descendants of Syrian survivors tried again during the Fourth Fitna. Abu al-Umaytir al-Sufyani and Maslama ibn Ya'qub each seized Damascus and called themselves caliph between 811 and 813, but both rebellions were put down.

  The Umayyads called themselves khalifat Allah, "deputy of God", rather than the "successor of the messenger of God" that tradition preferred. They saw no need to share religious authority with the emerging class of scholars. Those scholars, mostly in Iraq, recorded the traditions that became the sources. Historians now rely on works such as those of Tabari and Baladhuri, written at the Abbasid court in Baghdad. G.R. Hawting wrote that "Islam was in fact regarded as the property of the conquering aristocracy."

  Later Shia sources call the dynasty "tyrannical, anti-Islamic and godless". Even the earliest Shia account, by al-Masudi, is more balanced. It says Mu'awiya spent much time in prayer despite running an empire. Modern Arab nationalism, especially in Syria, treats the Umayyad age as part of an Arab Golden Age. The banners of the Umayyads were white, after the banner of Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan. That white is still one of the four Pan-Arab colours on the flags of most Arab countries.

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