Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of charts
- Preface
- Addenda and corrigenda
- I THE BEGINNINGS
- 1 THE ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT
- 2 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR AND SECT FORMATION
- 3 THE UMAYYADS
- II THE WANING OF THE TRIBAL TRADITION, c. 700–900
- III COPING WITH A FRAGMENTED WORLD
- IV GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY
- Charts
- Bibliography, abbreviations, and conventions
- Index and glossary
3 - THE UMAYYADS
from I - THE BEGINNINGS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of charts
- Preface
- Addenda and corrigenda
- I THE BEGINNINGS
- 1 THE ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT
- 2 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR AND SECT FORMATION
- 3 THE UMAYYADS
- II THE WANING OF THE TRIBAL TRADITION, c. 700–900
- III COPING WITH A FRAGMENTED WORLD
- IV GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY
- Charts
- Bibliography, abbreviations, and conventions
- Index and glossary
Summary
As the Roman expansion had undermined the Roman republic, so the Muslim conquest of the Middle East destroyed the patriarchal regime in Medina. In both cases, civil war was followed by the emergence of an increasingly authoritarian monarchy. The Muslim counterpart to Augustus was Muāwiya (661–80), who moved the capital to Syria and founded the Umayyad dynasty (661–750), under whom the embryonic state founded by the Prophet acquired a more developed form. But the developments unleashed by the conquests continued to transform Muslim society, rapidly making the political organization of the Umayyads obsolete, their orientation outmoded, and the dynasty itself heartily disliked. Within three generations they had come to be denounced as impious survivors from the pagan past who had somehow managed to hijack the Islamic enterprise. They were ousted in the third civil war, more precisely that part of it known as the Abbāsid revolution. But contrary to what many had hoped, the trend towards more authoritarian government was not reversed. A fully-fledged, if shortlived, empire emerged under the Abbāsids (effectively 750–861; fainéance 861–1258). All the fundamental questions first raised under the Umayyads continued to be debated down to the effective end of the Abbāsid empire some hundred years after the revolution.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval Islamic Political Thought , pp. 33 - 48Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2004