Mu'awiya ibn abi Sufyan: From Arabia to Empire

161 Pages·2006·1.11 MB·English

by  R. Stephen Humphreys

MAKERS
of the
MUSLIM
WORLD
Mu‘awiya ibn Abi
Sufyan
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Series editor: Patricia Crone,
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
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MAKERS
of the
MUSLIM
WORLD
Mu‘awiya ibn Abi
Sufyan
From Arabia to Empire
R. STEPHEN HUMPHREYS
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MU‘AWIYA IBN ABI SUFYAN
Oneworld Publications
185 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 7AR
England
www.oneworld-publications.com
© 2006 R. Stephen Humphreys
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available
from the British Library
ISBN 1–85168–402–6
978–1–85168–402–1
Typeset by Sparks, Oxford, UK
Cover and text design by Design Deluxe
Printed and bound in India by Thomson Press Ltd
on acid-free paper
NL08
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For Cymbre, Michael and Brian
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CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
1 THE PROBLEM OF MU‘AWIYA 1
Mu‘awiya in the eyes of later Muslims 3
How do we know what we claim to know: the sources
for Mu‘awiya’s life 10
Mu‘awiya’s career: a chronological sketch 19
2 THE FIRST THREE DECADES (600–632) 23
The Meccan milieu 23
The politics of genealogy: why Mu‘awiya’s ancestry is
important 28
The lineage of Mu‘awiya 30
The Banu Umayya 31
The descendants of ‘Abd Manaf: the clans of ‘Abd Shams
and Hashim 33
3 LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF POWER:
MU‘AWIYA AS MASTER OF SYRIA
(632–656) 43
Mu‘awiya and the conquest of Syria 43
Mu‘awiya becomes Governor 45
The war against Byzantium 50
The war at sea: creating the Muslim navy 53
The war in Anatolia and Armenia 58
Mu‘awiya and the Arab tribes in Syria 60
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4 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR AND MU‘AWIYA’S
RISE TO POWER (656–661) 65
The revolt against ‘Uthman 65
The aftermath: who can claim the right to rule? 71
The confrontation between ‘Ali and Mu‘awiya 77
5 COMMANDER OF THE FAITHFUL
(661–680) 85
The war against Byzantium renewed 104
6 THE PRINCE OF OUR DISORDER: MU‘AWIYA
AS A SYMBOL OF CULTURAL TENSION 115
Bibliography 137
Index 143
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PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Mu‘awiya ibn Abi Sufyan is a figure of critical importance in the
formative period of the caliphate and the Arab-Muslim Empire
but even in the flood of scholarship dealing with the first
Islamic century he has received surprisingly little attention.
The last scholar to devote close attention to him and his era
was the learned but erratic Henri Lammens. That was nearly a
century ago and even Lammens, lover of the Umayyads as he
was, never devoted a full-length monograph to the dynasty’s
founder. More recently, the admirable but necessarily concise
article by Martin Hinds in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (published
in 1991) suggests that he would have been Mu‘awiya’s ideal
biographer, but his untimely death deprived us of that pos-
sibility. The reasons for this neglect – perhaps a better word
would be skittishness – are many and some of them should
become clear in the pages that follow. However, Mu‘awiya was
and is a hard man to pin down. It is hard to be sure just what
we really know about him and hard to make sense of what we
do know (or think we know). In addition, many problems and
trends in early Islam, which seem shadowy or ill-formed during
Mu‘awiya’s lifetime, become much easier to talk about in the
context of the decades following his death.
I hope that this book will help to renew interest in this
remarkable man. This is not, however, a book for early Islamic
specialists. It is aimed at readers who are just beginning to get
involved with the study of Islamic history – whether mem-
bers of the Muslim diaspora, who want to learn more about
ix
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