Abd al-Malik handed off power to his son without difficulty. Walid (or al-Walid) had been leading military campaigns against the eastern Romans for some years while his father’s brother was the designated heir. But Abd al-Aziz died in Egypt around the time Musa was fattening his treasury with massive slave income. Walid became the heir, and in 705, his father died.
The three generations of Caliphs Marwan, Abd al-Malik, and Walid shared a genius for administration. Perhaps the key to being good at administration was to be interested in it, rather than in piety (or even conquest). They set up a postal system, which in those days meant literally hiring messengers, horses, and stables, like the short-lived American Pony Express. Ordinary people were asking merchants to carry letters for them, with uncertain results. The Caliphs wanted to send messages to any part of the empire and be reasonably sure of a reply, so that they could maintain authority and guard against breakaway regions.
They also paid attention to coins, the symbol of government authority that people handle every day. During these years, they standardized the way Islamic coins are designed, refusing to put a king’s head or any human representation on them. They minted not only silver dirham coins (as typical in the region), but also gold dinars. Some of these coins have survived to our time, highly prized by collectors. The coins were strictly controlled by the government so that nobody else mined coins and the same coins were accepted from one end of the empire to the other. This was very unusual compared to Europe, even to later medieval Europe, where coins were regional and even local.
Walid’s coins are decorated only with Arabic script. He decided to make Arabic the only language of government in Egypt, which threw native Egyptians into disarray. They had been using Greek since Alexander the Great, and of course many still spoke Coptic, descended from the language of the Pharaohs, at home. Now in order to keep their jobs they had to get serious about learning Arabic. Arabs who had not succeeded in getting good administrative jobs in Egypt suddenly had a leg up. 705 was the beginning of the long conquest of Egypt by the Arabic language.
The flood of wealth from new conquests in North Africa and the far East (which we’ll look at next) made Caliph Walid a very rich man. He built some of the greatest Umayyad buildings, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque next to his father’s Dome of the Rock. He also built the Great Mosque in Damascus — on the site of the demolished cathedral — and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Money for craftsmen from around the empire was lavished on all of these projects, not least the one in Medina. Only the Great Mosque in Damascus, now called the Umayyad Mosque, is still pretty much the same as he built it.
Umayyads were still winning back support in Medina, after its sack in 683. Medinans hated Walid’s building project because he enlarged the mosque—which meant demolishing the old houses of the Prophet and his Companions. He rebuilt it with a larger courtyard, a shrine around the graves, four minarets, and a grand entrance. We today love these beautiful buildings, but Muhammad had considered money spent on buildings to be the greatest waste possible. Medina was the place where the most pious, least ambitious men had stayed on as scholars. Walid may have thought to please them, but it didn’t work. Later, the scholars — the ulama — became powerful in the Muslim community, but for now, the Caliph had his way.
Hajjaj continued as Governor of Iraq during the Caliphates of Abd al-Malik and Walid. He died only in 714, a year before Walid died too. His policies were pro-Arab and brutal. He didn’t hesitate to order executions even on large scale. He decided that more farmers should be out there working, as they used to be prior to the conquest, so he expelled non-Arabs from the garrison cities. They had to pay the tribute tax, jizya, even if they had converted to Islam. Before this, taxation had been on Muslim, not ethnic, identity. He rebuilt canals to help the farmers, but only after forcing them to farm. It wasn’t only in Iraq that this was a problem. In Syria, too, they were having to find native farmers who had fled the land and force them to go back to work.
Hajjaj had to put down both mutinies and Kharijite/Rejectionist rebellions during Abd al-Malik’s reign. He eliminated the Rejectionists as a political threat and got his troops under control, even with pay cuts, but of course he became hated. His response to this was always more brutal repression. In 699, an expedition force from Kufa, sent to fight at the eastern frontier, mutinied. They seized Basra, in addition to their home of Kufa. Syrian troops eventually reinforced Hajjaj and conquered the rebels. The losing fighters fled south into Arabia and Egypt.
Hajjaj founded a new city between Kufa and Basra that would be the seat of Umayyad government, separate from the garrison cities. This town of Wasit was staffed only by Syrians, and across the territory, Iraqis were booted out of power in favor of Syrians. He set up a coin mint in Wasit so he could control the currency. Iraq became a land of Syrian Arab aristocracy, with anyone of part-native descent pushed out of center of power.
In the time of Walid and Hajjaj, they began to see a need to mark vowels in the Quran. Like Hebrew and Aramaic, Arabic had been written only with consonants. In an oral-transmission culture, it makes sense that the consonants would be enough to prompt memory of what it said. Vowels are predictable by grammar and context. But as more non-native speakers were reading the Quran in public, they began to hear simple errors that changed the meaning. Hajjaj is credited with sponsoring an effort to create a regular system of dots and dashes that showed vowels. Eventually, of course, this became a standard part of Arabic writing.
Caliph Walid’s rule is considered the high-water mark of the Umayyads. Politically and in history, that’s good. Morally in human terms, not so good: among other brutalities, he had Husayn’s son poisoned in Medina. We’ll look separately at the conquests of the far East and Spain, which happened during his reign. By Walid’s death in 714, the Islamic empire had reached its greatest size.
- Caliphate: The History of an Idea, by Hugh Kennedy
- A Historical Research on the Lives of the Twelve Shi’a Imams. Mahdi Mahgrebi