Muʿāwiyah I

▪ Umayyad caliph

Introduction

in full  Muʿāwiyah Ibn Abī Sufyān, Muʿāwiyah  also spelled  Moawiyah 

born c. 602, , Mecca, Arabia

died , April/May 680, Damascus

      early Islāmic leader and founder of the great Umayyad Dynasty of caliphs. He fought against the fourth caliph, ʿAlī (Muḥammad's son-in-law), seized Egypt, and assumed the caliphate after ʿAlī's assassination in 661. 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 Islām was born (c. 602) into a clan (ʿAbd Shams) that rejected the Prophet Muḥammad 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 Muḥammad had conquered Mecca and had reconciled his former enemies by gifts. Possibly as a part of Muḥammad's policy of conciliation, Muʿāwiyah was made a scribe in his service. But Muʿāwiyah's contributions to Islāmic 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 Alīʿ 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 (Ṣiffīn, Battle of) (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 Islām. 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 Islām 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 Ifrīqīyah, 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 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 Muḥammad 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—dīwān (divan)s—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-Islāmic 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 Islām. 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 Islāmic governance with borrowings from other traditions better-adapted to the demands of tribesmen and the needs of an empire.

Assessment

      Muʿāwiyah stands out as one of the few caliphs who is depicted both in Muslim historiography and in modern scholarship as a decisive force in Islāmic history. Undoubtedly one reason for the prominence that is assigned to him is that he was a controversial figure. Pious scholars of the dominant Sunnite sect of Islām together with writers of the minority, dissenting Shīʿites, have always heaped opprobrium on Muʿāwiyah: the Sunnites because of his deviations from the pattern of leadership set by the Prophet Muḥammad and the “rightly guided” caliphs; the Shīʿites because he had usurped the caliphate from ʿAlī.

      Although Muʿāwiyah has been and still is condemned for his sins from these two quarters, he has also been the subject of lavish praise in Arabic literature as the ideal ruler. In other words, unlike most of the other caliphs, Muʿāwiyah looms large in Islāmic history because he has consistently aroused partisanship at different extremes. But, beneath the biased portraits given in traditional Muslim historiography, there is a person whose actual accomplishments were of great magnitude quite apart from partisan value judgments and interpretations. These accomplishments lay primarily in political and military administration, through which Muʿāwiyah was able to rebuild a Muslim state that had fallen into anarchy and to renew the Arab–Muslim military offensive against unbelievers.

Donald P. Little

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