Umayyad Caliphate: Abd al-Malik's Gold Dinar, the Jizya and a Death Banquet

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The Banu Umayya were Mecca's wealthy Quraysh trading elite who, led by Abu Sufyan, fought the Prophet Muhammad for years before converting after he took Mecca in 630. The third caliph, Uthman, an early convert from the clan, handed rich governorships to relatives and treated conquered lands in Iraq as crown property, and his assassination in 656 set off the first fitna. Muawiya, governor of Syria, outlasted Ali after Siffin, founded the Umayyad Caliphate in 661 and moved the capital to Damascus, ruling through a loyal Syrian army, deals with local strongmen and Christian administrators who had served Byzantium.

Muawiya's hereditary succession to his son Yazid brought the killing of Husayn at Karbala and the second fitna, with Ibn al-Zubayr ruling as rival caliph in Mecca. Abd al-Malik rebuilt the state on centralized lines: Arabic for all government records, an imageless gold dinar bearing Quranic verses, and the Dome of the Rock, followed by al-Walid I's Great Mosque of Damascus. Conquests reached Iberia and Sindh, but converts who should have been exempt from the jizya kept paying it. Umar II briefly abolished it, the Qays and Yaman feud split the Syrian army, Abu Muslim raised the Abbasid revolt in Khorasan, and the dynasty fell at the Zab in 750.

• Umayyad society ranked Arab Muslims, then non-Arab converts called mawali, then dhimmi non-Muslims, then the enslaved.
• Umar II declared that God sent Muhammad as a prophet, not a tax collector, and his reform was reversed after his death.
• The Abbasids invited 80 Umayyad nobles to a reconciliation banquet, killed them all and ate over the covered bodies.
• Abbasid forces dug up the Umayyad caliphs' graves in Damascus, sparing only that of Umar II.
• The sole surviving prince, Abd al-Rahman I, fled across North Africa to found the Emirate of Cordoba in al-Andalus.