Muʿāwiyah I

Muʿāwiyah I (born c. 602, Mecca, Arabia—died April/May 680, Damascus) was an early Islamic leader and founder of the great Umayyad dynasty of caliphs. He fought against the fourth caliph, ʿAlī (Muhammad’s son-in-law), seized Egypt, and assumed the caliphate after ʿAlī’s assassination. He restored unity to the Muslim empire and made Damascus its capital. He reigned from 661 to 680.

Early years

It is ironic that a man who was to become the political-religious head of Islam was born into a clan (ʿAbd Shams) that rejected the Prophet Muhammad in his home city, Mecca, and continued to oppose him on the battlefield after he had emigrated to Medina. Muʿāwiyah did not become a Muslim until Muhammad had conquered Mecca and had reconciled his former enemies by gifts. Possibly as a part of Muhammad’s policy of conciliation, Muʿāwiyah was made a scribe in his service. But Muʿāwiyah’s contributions to Islamic history are wholly associated with his career in Syria, which began shortly after the death of the Prophet, when he, along with his brother Yazīd, served in the tribal armies sent from Arabia against the Byzantine forces in Syria.

Upon the death of Yazīd in 640, Muʿāwiyah was appointed governor of Damascus by the caliph ʿUmar and gradually gained mastery over other areas of Syria. By 647 Muʿāwiyah had built a Syrian tribal army strong enough to repel a Byzantine attack and in subsequent years to take the offensive against the Byzantines in campaigns that resulted in the capture of Cyprus (649) and Rhodes (654) and a devastating defeat of the Byzantine navy off the coast of Lycia in Anatolia (655). At the same time, Muʿāwiyah periodically dispatched land expeditions into Anatolia. All these campaigns, however, came to a halt with the accession of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib to the caliphate, when a new and decisive phase of Muʿāwiyah’s career began.

As a kinsman of the slain caliph ʿUthmān, Muʿāwiyah bore the duty of revenge. Because ʿAlī neglected to apprehend and punish ʿUthmān’s murderers, Muʿāwiyah regarded him as an accomplice to the murder and refused to acknowledge his caliphate. Thereupon ʿAlī marched to the Euphrates border of Syria and engaged Muʿāwiyah’s troops at the famous Battle of Ṣiffīn (657). Muʿāwiyah’s guile turned near defeat into a truce. Resorting to a trick that played upon the religious sensibilities of ʿAlī’s forces, he persuaded the enemy to enter into negotiations that ultimately cast doubt on the legitimacy of ʿAlī’s caliphate and alienated a sizable number of his supporters. When these former supporters—the Khārijites—rose in rebellion against ʿAlī, Muʿāwiyah took advantage of ʿAlī’s difficulties in Iraq to send a force to seize control of Egypt. Thus, when ʿAlī was assassinated in 661, Muʿāwiyah held both Syria and Egypt and, as commander of the largest force in the Muslim empire, had the strongest claim to the caliphate. ʿAlī’s son Ḥasan was persuaded to remove himself from public life in exchange for a subsidy, which Muʿāwiyah provided.

Caliphate

During his 20-year governorship of Syria and during the war against ʿAlī, Muʿāwiyah had succeeded in recruiting and training a large Arab tribal army that was remarkably loyal to him. It was therefore natural that he should base his caliphate in Syria, with Damascus as the new capital of Islam. But, if Muʿāwiyah’s chief support came from the tribes of Syria, the tribes of other areas posed the chief threat to his reign. It is not surprising then that early Umayyad government followed certain tribal principles as a means of retaining and winning the loyalty of the Arabs. The clearest examples of such a policy are provided by Muʿāwiyah’s adoption of two tribal institutions: the council of notables—the shūrā—which was convoked by the caliph for consultation and the delegations—and the wufūd—which was sent by tribes to keep the caliph informed of their interest. Within this context, Muʿāwiyah ruled as a traditional Arab chieftain. Although he may not have consciously encouraged renewed warfare against non-Muslim territory as a means of directing Bedouin aggressive tendencies into channels that would aggrandize Islam and stabilize his own power, there is no doubt that warfare served these purposes during his reign, and in this respect it is significant that Muʿāwiyah used the Syrian army only for domestic defense and for campaigns against the Byzantines, who threatened the borders of Syria.

During the civil war, Muʿāwiyah had purchased a truce with the Byzantines in order to free his army for the struggle against ʿAlī. Soon after his accession to the caliphate, however, he curtailed the payment of tribute and sent expeditions against the Byzantines almost yearly. These campaigns served both to fulfill Muʿāwiyah’s obligation to conduct holy war (jihad) against unbelievers and to keep his Syrian troops in fighting trim. Otherwise, the war against Byzantium was inconclusive. Even though two expeditions reached the vicinity of Constantinople, the Arabs never succeeded in permanently occupying territory in Asia Minor beyond the Taurus Mountains. Troops stationed in other parts of Muʿāwiyah’s empire were sent on campaigns into remote areas. In North Africa, raids were conducted as far west as Tlemcen in present-day Algeria. More permanent, however, was the conquest of Tripolitania and Ifrīqiyyah, which was consolidated by the foundation in 670 of the garrison city of Kairouan, soon to become the base for further expansion later in the Umayyad period. At the same time, a vigorous campaign was being conducted in the east by means of which Muslim borders were extended to the Oxus River (modern Amu Darya) and Khorāsān was established as an Umayyad province.

It had become apparent during the reigns of the first caliphs that tribal tradition and the practices of Muhammad in Medina were inadequate resources for administering a vast empire. To solve this problem, Muʿāwiyah resorted to a solution that lay at hand in Syria—that is, the imitation of administrative procedures that had evolved during centuries of Roman and Byzantine rule there. Although the process by which the borrowing took place is not fully known, it is clear that Muʿāwiyah initiated certain practices that were apparently inspired by the previous tradition. Basically, he aimed at increased organization and centralization of the caliphal government in order to exert control over steadily expanding territories. This he achieved by the establishment of bureaus—dīwāns—in Damascus to conduct the affairs of government efficiently. Early Arabic sources credit two dīwāns in particular to Muʿāwiyah: the dīwān al-khatam, or chancellery, and the barīd, or postal service, both of which were obviously intended to improve communications within the empire. Prominent positions within the nascent bureaucracy were held by Christians, some of whom belonged to families that had served in Byzantine governments. The employment of Christians was part of a broader policy of religious tolerance that was necessitated by the presence of large Christian populations in the conquered provinces, especially in Syria itself.

Such administrative innovations coupled with the observance of tribal traditions caused historians of a later period to deny Muʿāwiyah the religious title of caliph and to characterize him as a king (malik) instead. As a symbol of the increasingly secular nature of the caliphate, derived in part from a non-Islamic tradition, the title is apt for Muʿāwiyah and for most of the Umayyads. It is particularly appropriate for the most startling of all of Muʿāwiyah’s innovations, the one by which he secured the allegiance of the tribes for the caliphate of his son Yazīd and thereby established the practice of hereditary rule in Islam. As an alternative to the various unreliable precedents for selecting a caliph, this measure was certainly consonant with Muʿāwiyah’s policy and achievement as caliph, which, in summary, consisted of invigorating the theocratic origins of Islamic governance with borrowings from other traditions better adapted to the demands of tribesmen and the needs of an empire.