Caliph al-Walid I was the son of Abd al-Malik, son of Marwan I, one of the generation that knew Muhammad but worked to found the Umayyad dynasty. He died in 715. In Arab tradition, rule is taken not by a son, but by a brother who has been standing by as the second-in-command. We see this in today’s Saudi Arabia, where the very last son of the conqueror, King Abdulaziz, is now in his 90s and will hand off power to his son. So when power passes to the next generation, it could be to the youngest son’s son, not the eldest. It could be to the son of a brother in the middle of the line.
In this case, after Abd al-Malik’s son al-Walid died in 715, the next brother Sulayman took power. He didn’t live long. He was followed by Umar II, a son of Abd al-Malik’s brother who had ruled Egypt during much of the North African conquest. Nor did Umar II live long, but was followed by Yazid II, brother to Walid and Sulayman. By 724, Yazid II had also died, replaced by Hisham, the youngest son of Abd al-Malik. Hisham ruled from 724 to 743.
Umar II’s short reign was marked by pious reforms intended to shore up the aristocratic power of Arabs and Muslims. Muslim converts were exempt from the jizya, the poll tax; but their land became community property with full taxation. Umar II ordered some Syrian churches to be handed back to Christians, since the treaty of Damascus’ surrender had specified that churches would not be seized. On the other hand, he laid down edicts such that both Christians and Jews had to follow restrictive rules.
Umar II’s rules began with no public display of a cross unless it was somehow defaced. Next, when Jews or Christians rode on horses, mules or donkeys, they could not use a regular riding saddle that might be mistaken for a warrior’s gear. They could only ride on obvious pack-saddles. The men were not to wear turbans, and instead, they had a distinctive unfashionable short hair cut.
In spite of this, one of the great Orthodox saints lived during the Umayyad period. John of Damascus was a grandson of Mansur, the Christian Damascene who had opened the gates to Khalid, turning a defeat into a less-destructive surrender. John Mansur moved to Jerusalem, where he wrote tracts against the heresies of his time. Having grown up near the Umayyad court, he understood Islam much better than most monks at the time. The last chapter of his work On Heresies was about Islam; it talks about many conversations he had with Muslims, where they called him an idol-worshipper and he fired back that the Black Stone was from an idol of Aphrodite. He was probably not Umar II’s favorite Christian, which may be why he moved to Jerusalem rather than staying home in Damascus.
Umar II stopped the ritual cursing of Ali and his family that had been done in Syrian mosques since Mu’awiya began doing it. He sent emissaries to China and Tibet to invite their rulers to submit to Islam. During this time, of course, the gradual conquest of Transoxiana was going on. In addition, Umar II also ordered scholars to start collecting stories about Muhammad in writing. Before this, they had not written them, lest these stories start to compete for attention with the Holy Quran. The full hadith collections didn’t come until much later, though.
Umar II’s generals also forced some sea battles in the Mediterranean and first encountered the new Roman “nuclear” weapon: Greek fire. Arab ships had pushed up into the Sea of Marmara to support land attacks on Constantinople. Emperor Leo ordered fire ships to attack. These ships used siphons to shoot chemicals across the water. Once set on fire, this liquid burned in spite of contact with water. Some survivors wintered over on shore, keeping their ships out of sight. When reinforcements came with food, from Egypt, they joined the freezing encampment. Some Egyptian Christian sailors decided to defect; they took some small boats to the city and told the Emperor where the remaining fleet was hidden. Leo’s fire ships destroyed most of what remained. “Greek fire” was the terrible fear of all sea battles from that time forward.
Yazid II took power on Umar II’s death. During his time, the Muslim armies fought against the Khazars in Armenia, the frontier between Syria and the Khazar stronghold north of the Black Sea. The Khazars are interesting on their own. They had come from central Asia, and they are known as Turks, but apparently they were blue-eyed and red-haired. This raises the question of a link to the mysterious Tocharians, who lived in central Asia and spoke an Indo-European language.
Also, there are theories that the Khazars adopted Judaism around this time, because they stayed independent from both Constantinople and Damascus, though at this time everyone was going monotheistic. Apparently there isn’t as much solid evidence for this conversion as you might think, considering that there’s a conspiracy-theory idea that all of Europe’s Jews are actually Khazars. Eventually, the Khazar kingdom crumbled and many of its people joined the Huns in establishing Hungary. This returns them to a more likely Turkic heritage, not Indo-European, since then they could more easily understand the Huns.
The next Caliph was Hisham, the youngest son of Abd al-Malik, therefore a grandson of someone who had known Muhammad—although his reign took place 100 years after the Prophet’s death! The 740 appointment of that last great Arab governor, Nasr, to Transoxiana was Hisham’s doing. Additionally, the push to conquer all of Spain continued—and in 732, during Hisham’s years, the governor of al-Andalus pushed into southern France. We’ll talk about that separately.
Hisham built palaces in the cooler hill country of Resafa, north near the Euphrates River.. The later Umayyad Caliphs spent as little time in hot Damascus as they could. There’s no doubt this played into the fall of the dynasty. But at this time, they had no hint of trouble. The families lived in palaces, the caliphs founded schools and mosques and commissioned grand buildings.
In 740, Hisham sent a large army, 90,000 men, against Constantinople. The main army raided Cappadocia, while a smaller contingent met the Emperor Leo’s forces at Akroinon. This city (now Afynokarahisar, which means Opium Black Castle) was well into western Anatolia. Had the Muslims won the battle, they might have been set up to conquer Constantinople much sooner, but Leo’s forces won decisively. Still, one of Hisham’s sons remained in the field and nibbled back the frontier town by town.
Also in 740, there was a huge Berber revolt, partly provoked by some Arab Kharijites (Rejectionists) who had emigrated to North Africa. Their position was that all authority was corrupt, that only each individual believer could determine truth. They proclaimed people to be apostates and worthy of death. It wasn’t a good theology to migrate and multiply in a new place, but that’s what it did. It took two years to put down the Berber revolt, and by “put down” I mean fight several full-scale battles that finally killed thousands of Berbers.
- Caliphate: The History of an Idea, by Hugh Kennedy
- Christians and Others in the Umayyad State, ed. Antoine Borrut and Fred Donner
- Great Arab Conquests, by Hugh Kennedy