Hugh Kennedy ISLAMIC HISTORY OF THE UMAYYAD CALIPHATE

well thank you very much Mizan for that introduction very generous introduction hope can live up to it and been build in this way it's always bit of challenge and I'm going to be I'll I'll talk for about 45 minutes and then we'll have 15 minutes for question and answer and then break and then well that's that's the pattern we'll go on through today I've left up on the table here which I'll just leave out during the break of three of my books which are available in paperback this isn't sales talk I'm not don't have copies to to sell or anything it's just so that if those of you are interested to get some idea what I've been writing and and and and and the approach take one of them the the prophet in the age of the Cs Cates is sort of really history text book for aimed at students of Islamic history and so on the other two books the great Arab conquests which is about what it says it's about it's about the great expansion of Islam in in in the Cent In the century or so after the death of the Prophet and the second one the courts of the cffs which is about courton Society in Abbasid Baghdad and Samara and so on it focuses on the Abbasid period so that's not really an omad period book but these two are aimed at at more General audience and they've been published as you see in paperback both of them which I'm very very pleased about have been translated into Arabic but they've also been translated into number of other European and Asian languages so that's what do basically and I've come to talk to you today about theads and the question really want to start off with is why should we bother with the ummayads put it that way the CIS of the Islamic World from 661 to 750 and think the omad period is is though it seems far away and very remote is at the same time extremely important in our understanding of the formation of the Islamic world and and Islamic society it's also controversial and it's controversial because there are really two ways of broadly speaking two ways of looking at the OMS the first of them is what an an attitude taken by many Scholars from all over the world and sees the omad period as period when Islamic rule becomes established when the foundations of Islamic government are laid down and institutions appear the institution of thei the institution of the short and so on idea institutions appear at this time which have very very long life and we can see the omad as establishers of state they are also the cffs under whom the Second Great phase of Conquest takes place the great phase of Islamic conquests that takes Muslim rule to Spain and the mreb on the one hand and to what we call what central Asia to usbekistan and and andistan'dhin ing armies or directors think because they don't actually lead them in person directors of the Conquering armies on one hand and for founders of the Islamic State on the other but then there is another argument held by many Muslims and some that sees the omad cff califate as essentially illegitimate and of course amongst the sh this would be the the dominant narrative and among other Muslims too this is idea that is particularly generated in the posted period under abbasids and of course the certain people at least in the Abbasid califate were were concerned to emphasize the legitimacy of the abbasids and the illegitimacy of the amads the argument being simply that the omad family were until at least the last two years of the prophet's life long-standing opponents of the prophet Abu sufyan the father of the first of the OM cffs was mu the father of the first ofes was of course amongst the leading opponents of the prophet in Mecca and subsequently one of the leaders of the of the resistance of qures to the prophet and then the seizure of power if you like by the OMS can be seen as couet if you like an illegitimate couet and that the real that they were in sense UNP imperious or they were even and it's not until they were overthrown that truly Islamic approach to politics can be seen at the highest level so we've got these two very contrasting points of view about them and that think is and that raises the whole issue of legitimacy in Islamic government of course the first time who this is the fundamental debating point that goes on in the first century of Islam or the first two centuries of Islam is who should be the rulers it's debate about who should have authority within the community and what this Authority should mean so want to start off therefore by talking about these institutions of legitimacy and how is it that the amads became the rulers of the Islamic community even though they were not of the family of the Prophet even though they were not early converts to Islam what's going on here well we have to remember after the death of of the Prophet there is very early on discussions even disputes in the Muslim umah about who should provide the leadership and from very beginning as far as we can tell there were people who certainly felt that the family of the Prophet represented by Fatima his daughter and of course Ally her husband were in sense the should be considered the legitimate rulers of the leaders of the Muslim Community but there was also another point of view of course that the the leaders of the Muslim Community should not be necessarily be of the family of the Prophet but should rather be people who were chosen by the community as the most the wisest the most Pious the most satisfactory leaders and the people who are most likely to continue though not as prophets nonetheless as it were the political and Military dimensions of of of the prophet's achievement and these people elected or or chose Abu Bakr and then Omar kab and the names of these people are on on your hat sheet here as the leaders of the community so in sense there is distinction here between Divine choice of the ruler as represented by the family of the Prophet whose authority comes from God by virtue of their being family of the prophet and the other which point of view which we might call Proto Sunni though these distinctions emerge quite slowly in the Islamic community just in in brackets don't think it's really till the 10th Century Common Era third Islamic Century that we can start talking about sunnis and shes as distinct groups think before then there are lot of flexible ideas there sort of Continuum of of of different ideas going around but these these people believe in sense that the Muslims that the Muslim Community should elect and choose in one form or another whether it's represented by sort of nus sort of designation or whether it's represented by the sort of sh that we have in the period of the rashidun that the Muslims should choose their rule the rise of the amads might seem improbable but there are two things that were going for the ums the family the first was that while they had for many years opposed or particularly the older generation represented by Abu sufyan had opposed the teaching of the prophet and the activities of the Prophet his Sons certainly became Muslims and MOA the first the kis seems to begin his career as one of the Prophet secretaries so though they had as it were made bad bad start in Islam nonetheless mua was member of zahaba young member for sure but he was one of the companions of the Prophet nobody could dispute that and secondly he was member of qures now apart from the karage the kites in the early Islamic period who I'm not going to spend lot of time today all early Muslims seem to have accepted that the leader of the Muslim Community should come from qures the the tribe of the Prophet the tribe that was were managing the Haram in in Mecca in pre-islamic times now qures included not just the family of the Prophet himself and Ali and Fatima qures also included the omad family so they had that sort of legitimacy to go for but they also had realistic power Base by which mean that we are told with every reason to believe that that in the pre-islamic times even in the in the or in the early years of Islam that the omad family had property they had landed Estates in Syria in the area that's known as the the Bela in the early Islamic sources that's the area south of Amar in Jordan that we don't know exactly where they were but they owned Villages and agricultural land and so on in this area so even before the coming of Muslim armies and so on they had contacts they knew people they had certain loyalty perhaps amongst following there and then in the time of the conquest muawiya who is the first cffs of course mua's elder brother yazan was one of the main military commanders in Syria at the time of the conquests and he was one of the four commanders who it said for example to have led the Muslim armies in the conquest of Damascus so while they were not family of the prophet and while they had had become they didn't have Saka or they didn't have very much Saka Saka is key Concept in this early Islamic discussions about who should be the rulers of the leaders of the community Saka is can be translated into English that there precedence in Islam CA the people with the most CA so to speak are the people whose whose families or whose fathers or grandfathers or grandmothers whoever have become Muslims very early on and one of the criteria for being part of the early Muslim Elite was was this Sabaka those whose families had become Muslims for example in Mecca before the Hijra clearly had high degree of SAA the the amads had as it were some CA they clearly become converted to Islam before the death of the Prophet but they didn't have the highest rank in them nonetheless they did have some Islamic legitimacy and as say both mua and his elder brother yazid had been amongst the sahaba amongst the the companions of the prophet and this is important because it didn't meant that they were they had certain legitimacy from that direction but let's look in bit more detail about what happens in the actual achievement of Power by the and we go back here to the death of the kff Osman the third of the rashidun cffs in of course the the year 656 now the death of oan was the first if you like major trauma of the Islamic community for though many people criticized Osman for some of his actions nonetheless the murder of the defensless kff as he sat read reading the Quran in his house in Medina was profound shock to the Muslim Community that it should have become divided and that this should have been the result of it and it's important to remember that oan was member of the omad family he was was cousin of the first omad calebs he wasn't directly in the same line but he was cousin of the first omad calebs and when he was murdered there was clearly question about what was going to happen next this this terrible event left the Muslim Community really trying to decide how the leadership should move on now it was gener generally accepted think widely accepted that the person who should succeed Usman was Ali ABI Talib of course the the son-in-law of of of of the prophet and so on but there were problems and the main problem with Ali's succession was the question of what should be done with the murderers ofman the murderers ofman were well known there wasn't any dispute about who it was it wasn't something that happened secretly and you know behind closed doors or anything it was well established and they were the Muslims among the Muslims of from Iraq and the Muslims too from lesser group from Egypt the question was how should these people be punished now the problem for Ali was that the murderers ofman were amongst the strongest supporters of his caliphate it was very difficult for him to move against them without alienating lot of his his his supporters and so on who felt thatman had you know had deserved what was coming to him so to speak so Alice cipate even though there was no immediate opposition Alice cipate gets off to very bad start because there are lots of people in the Muslim Community who feel that he should have take be taking action against the murderers of Osman and yet for political reasons he's finding this very difficult and so we get this this tension from the beginning and of course nobody is more incensed or no no nobody is more angry about the murder ofman than the members of his family amongst them these very powerful people now in Syria leaders of the conquest yazid and his younger brother muaah and we can finish with yazid at this stage because he died of the like so many early Muslims did in Syria in fact he died of the plague the the the many of the Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula were simply not resistant to these Urban diseases that you that they encountered in in places like Damascus and so on there was high mortality rate many more early Muslims were killed by the plague and were killed in battle dur in in the early years in in in in in Syria so the omad family took up the leadership of the the the cry for the revenge on for Osman and muawiya made it clear who was by this time governor of Syria and by Syria we mean the whole of what is nowadays known as badam from the Turkish border right down to the Red Sea and the siai desert and so on the whole of the EAS Mediterranean seabo there and that's why I'll use Syria throughout but something else was so they were in in Scot in Syria mua argues that he cannot acknowledge Ali until this business of the murderers of ofman is sorted out to his satisfaction the but there is something else going on here in the early Islamic community and that is the question of regional tensions and this is something that historians have think curiously underestimated but if you read the Arabic accounts the early Muslim accounts of the confrontation between Ali and MOA the Battle of Seine which I'm going just going to come to in minute at the Battle of spine it's clear that Regional tensions were evident from very early stage the is constant reference to the aash Sham and the Iraq and this was be dominant feature in the whole of omay politics what's the issue here well Syria was the first Focus the prophet himself after all had actually visited Syria and had visited Damascus were told and almost certainly correctly Kore should strong links with Syria they didn't have very many strong links with Iraq in the pre-islamic very early phases of Islam and there's no doubt during the time of the conquest that many of the Syrian Elite many of the quray elite and so on like the the OMS themselves migrated to Syria and settled in Syria and used the resources of Syria for their political aspirations the conquest of Iraq was rather different very few of the elite of qures settled in Iraq in fact practically none of them the conquest of Iraq was rather achieved by tribes from Northeast Arabia from the yamama and the the the NJ but Northeast Arabia and and Arabia more generally and two things were important about this the first was many more Arab Muslim tribesmen settled in Iraq than settled in Syria as far as we can tell clearly we don't have lists we don't have numbers and so on and so forth but it's in Iraq that the first great cities are founded the first great Islamic cities are founded kufa now of course to the southwest of Baghdad and Basra down on the gulf and it's in these areas that large numbers of Arab Muslims are settled very soon after after they begin the settlement of the city of mosul which is another Islamic new town that appears in the early om period so you have much larger number perhaps of Iraqi Muslims settled in Iraq and the second issue was that Iraq was by far the richest part of the new Islamic empire we can sort of tell this because we have records of tax receipts or tax yields from the omad and Abbasid period and these show that the sad of Iraq that is the aluvial lands from Baghdad down to the head of the gulf provided four times as much revenue to the government as the next richest province which was Egypt and five times as much of the whole of Syria all the provinces of Syria put together so though Syria was the the the the destination of the elite and an important area and and and and so on and so forth nonetheless the economic power if you like was was in Iraq and we get this Regional rivalry between and it runs right the way through to the end of the omad period between the aam and the Iraq now when we when we use the word we don't mean of course all the people of Syria or all the people of of of of Iraq we mean the Muslim populations of these areas because the non-muslim population who are certainly majority at this stage I'll talk bit more about conversion later on but the majority at this stage did politically did not count and they were not part part of the discussion they you know their communities live different sorts of lives so we've got this rivalry it's rivalry for resources so we got two issues here as so often happens in in the complicated history of human societies we've got as it were an ideological and issue here about leadership of the community whether Ali can be leader without punishing the the the murderers of Osman and so on and we've got regional more if more financial if you like rivalry going on here and the and what happens in political terms is the Ali moves from Medina which had hitherto been the capital of the Islamic world and the seat of the califate he moves from Medina to Iraq to be with his supporters in Iraq and what started off as dispute about the legitimacy of Ali and the murderers and and the fate of the murderers of oosman becomes regional rivalry as well and there is major confrontation at the place called Seine which is now actually underwater with the new Euphrates dams in Syria towards the borders of Iraq and the two Armies come together the AQ supporting Ali and the akasham supporting muaa come together for confrontation at Seine and what exactly happened at Seine has been subject of controvery ever since amongst historians and amongst amongst Muslims it's clear that the the armies faced each other there was certain amount of skirmishing not really major battle but certain amount of fighting and so on it was confrontation that probably lasted several months before the people of the akasham the people of Syria famously raised the mif the the leaves of the Quran on their Spears and demanded that there should be an arbitration that Muslims shouldn't be fighting each other that there should be an arbitration and the two armies parted now the question then was what was this arbitration going to be about was it going to be about the fate of the murderers of Osman because this this problem still remain or was it going to be about who was going to be the leader of the Muslim Community and the sources are quite unclear about this various people different different Chronicles different Arab writers say different things but in the end the whole issue was rendered Irrelevant in sense because Ali was murdered in the year 661 and murder as far as we know this murder had nothing to do with with mua though some in the sh would would would think that it did it seems to been the result of tension or lot of personal grudges but Ali had retreated from saine from this confrontation to Iraq and there his support had disintegrated there were lots of people who were not pleased by what had happened Ali seemed to have surrendered his right to the caliphate or at least put his right to califate on on on the line so to speak become subject of dispute by his agreeing to the arbitration and number of PE of his most militant supporters deserted him and these are the PO people who called kites or karage in the Arabic plural kites now kites represent an important group within the early Islamic State and once again there is as it were an ideological background of Chism at this stage and more physical if you like or social attitude to colum the ideological one the essence of kism was that anyone could become kff if were the most Pious and the most suitable of the Muslims that means there is no need for the kff to be member of qures and that marked them off from both the Shia and or the protos Shia call them and the Proto sunis the second issue was that anyone who committed major sin was kafir not just sinner not just Muslim who committed sin but was essentially an unbeliever and as an unbeliever and as an ex-muslim then they could be attacked and slaughtered and so on so we get this idea of small if you like Puritan Community here with very strong ideological basis but it also looks as if the kites were those bedin Arabs who didn't want to accept settlement and becoming part of the new Islamic State the idea of Hijra is is an idea that persists in the early Islamic period the Hijra of course of the Prophet from from Mecca to Medina is is the great Hijra but the idea of Hijra from the desert to the towns was very important part of being part of the Muslim Community the early califate encouraged and in many cases insisted on Arab Muslims of the Arabs of the desert coming and settling in kufer and Basra and so on becoming part if you like of the organization and accepting the salar the ATA from the state and again this year I'll come back to and so but there were certain there were certain people think for all sorts of quite understandable reasons people who were very reluctant to abandon the bedin lifestyle to which they were used and very reluctant to settle in houses and towns very reluctant to accept the obligation to to pay taxes and accept the rule of of of of governor and things like that and these people tended to become kage so they're at once if you like once again we have an ideological framework to cism and social if you like framework to to Chism and and the two come together and for the rest of after the confrontation of sine until the death of Ali his main problem was with the scarites while the MOA and the yads were able to consolidate their power in Syria the carites of course continued to be as it were brigands and and so on in the OM period the early Abbasid period but by the middle Abbasid period by the 10th well 8th Century Common Era second half of the 8th Century kism mutates Chang es and becomes essentially peaceful and quietist sect of Islam and they're of course still carites in or people who descend from different kite groups in Oman today and in parts of Algeria who Trace their ideology right back to this early period but who've long since abandoned the violence that was characteristic of early kism so in 661 and I'm using Common Era dates almost all the way through here in the year 661 Ali is murdered and what happened after that was essentially peaceful mostly peaceful takeover by moaa of the lands of Iraq and and under the leadership of the entire Muslim Community mua has reputation in the early Islamic sources as being the superb politician even his enemies recognized his political skills he had that virtue which the the Arabic source is called Helm and Helm is about skills in negotiation about in some cases paying the people who need to be paid in some cases offering them favors in some cas is simply being generous to them in and and and welcoming them and so on and essentially with Ali gone muaa made agreements with the leaders of the tribes in Iraq that they would accept him as ruler in exchange essentially for being allowed to do what they wanted to or being allowed to be you know effective rulers of Iraq it was what MOA was really generating was sort of federal state if you like federal state in which the people of Iraq would the Iraq would essentially rule Iraq enjoy the resources of Iraq but would accept mua as kff but muawia would really stay in Syria and so on and so forth now Ali as I'm sure we all know had two sons actually more than two sons but two sons that are are important for this discussion the eldest alhassan and the youngest younger sorry Al Hussein now alhassan is was and here again the sources are in general agreement alhassan was prepared to accept quiet life he stayed in Medina he was paid generous pension and he stayed in Medina and he died in Medina without having in any sense attempted to realize and actualize the the claim that he might have had to the califate and Hussein for the time whole of mua's Lifetime Hussein remained in Mecca in Medina as well and as far as we know had very little political role now what happened after the death of moawia in the year was led to and the Second Great trauma of the Islamic community and before his death moaa had persuaded most people by mixture of threats and bribery essentially that power should pass after his death to his son yazid and that yazid could be expected to inherit if you like the CIF now this was problem for lots of people in the Muslim Community because firstly it suggested that the monarchy should be hereditary or the caliphate should be hereditary in the family of moaa and lot of people who were quite prepared to accept moaa because what he'd done and so on were very reluctant to accept the rule of yazid automatically inheriting from his father but once again there were Regional tensions as well the people in Syria by and large supported yazid because the yads were their people they the but the Muslims of Iraq and the increasing numbers of Muslims in Iran were very reluctant to do so because to accept yazid would be more dominance by the syrians it would mean that power was continued to be held in Damascus not in kufur or Bas and so on so once again with have the regional tensions and the ideological tensions and in the aftermath of mua's death and yazid accession to the throne group of people considerable number of people in kufa as probably the largest well certainly one of the largest Arab cities in in Iraq wrote to Hussein suggesting that he should come to Iraq and Lead what would essentially be an Iraqi movement to claim the calefate or at least and to resist the imposition of yazid and this is where the whole tragedy of of of Hussein stems from because he as as we know left Medina went across the desert with fairly small number number of followers and his family and the supporters of and the supporters of theads in Iraq who who of whom there were some including the governor obah IB zad come back that family later on the om Syrian soldiers in Iraq effectively surrounded him and killed him with his family and this was as said the Second Great trauma of the Islamic Comm Community for the grandson of the Prophet had been done to death in what seemed to many people to be heartless and and Dreadful way with lot of suffering and the death of Hussein was going to become one of the major weaknesses of the Amed quest for legitimacy the killing of the grandson of the Prophet by the Agents of the omad meant that for many people and obviously particularly people in Iraq that the OMS could never be the legitimate rulers of the Muslim Community because this was major sin it also created trauma in another way of course that the people of kufa who had invited and persuaded Hussein to come across the desert from Medina to leave his comfortable home in Medina and come and fight failed to do anything to help him and failed to rise up as they promised they would or their leaders had promised they would to support him and this gives rise of course to movement known as the tabun the penitence amongst the people of kufa who were deeply ashamed of what they failed to do and they fa their failure to support Hussein and this gives rise of course I'm sure it's familiar territory to lot of you to the flagellations and the the whipping of themselves that that goes that is characteristic of Iranian particularly commemoration of Ash commemoration of the death of Hussein people feeling they still punishing themselves for the fact their predecessors 50 00 years ago had failed to support Hussein but the point that because I'm really discussing is or my legitimacy here was that the death of Hussein rapidly Hussein was seen as martyr amongst the people of Iraq nobody in Syria was terribly interested as far as we can tell about this but amongst the people of Iraq Hussein was seen as the Lost leader the Marty the and Hussein's children and grandchildren great grandchildren of 12 Generations no eight 10 Generation after that become the focus of anti-ed movement in Iraq and the whole ideology of the family of the Prophet the whole ideology of of the importance of the family of the Prophet is generated in Iraq in this period period and this meant that the amads were never generally accepted in Iraq and come back to the point that Iraq was the richest province of the caliphate the most populous there were more Muslims in Iraq probably than the whole of the rest of the CIF put together at this stage so omad rule was forever bit precarious should we say but there was always the possib ability for popular resistance in Iraq and the final point in this bit is that the amads attempted to counter this by sending Syrian soldiers to Iraq to rule Iraq and to keep order in Iraq in the name of the of the omad cffs and this of course provoked enormous resentment in Iraq the Syrian soldiers from the the Syrian Arab bedwin tribes basically were stationed in city called waset which you can still find on the maps so the the original site is now completely ruined waset which was called waset because it was halfway between Bas and kufa the two great cities of the early Islamic the early Islamic place the early Islamic Iraq and so and came to Iraq and they lived off the resources of Iraq now know it sounds you know bit strange I'm going on about economic issues here but they were they were very real and the economics and the ideology are just very very closely bound up here that the people of Iraq bitterly resented the fact that syrians were coming living in Iraq and living off the resources which they the people of Iraq thought to belong should belong to them them and so we get this profound this profound resentment in Iraq and also later in in kusan in Iran because most of the people most of the Arab Muslims who settled in kisan which is the far Northeast of Iran and what is now turkistan and and usbekistan were deeply resentful of the what the syrians and what the omad and their Syrian supporters had done to Iraq so as say the OM califate for all its strength at various stages was very had was fundamentally insecure because there was this continuing and it's the family of the Prophet it's the descendants of Hussein particularly who provide the leadership the figureheads around whom this resentment grew up so while many Muslims accepted the amads as the legitimate CS there was always strong and numerous body who rejected om rule both on ideological grounds and on as it were political Regional Financial grounds and this theads never really succeeded in diffusing this and when there were rebellions they increasingly looked to military repression rather than negotiation but muawia had used negotiation later cffs increasingly look to military force to solve this problem with predictably unsatisfactory results now what we've been talking about so far is essentially about differences of opinion and rivalries within the Muslim Community in the earli stages but what of course the other great thing that's going on at this stage the other major change at this stage in the history of the Middle East and and The Wider Islamic world is of course the process of Islamic conquest which starts of course before the coming of theads but continues under omad leadership as said it's not leadership it's it's it's under the OM CIF and thought it might be interesting to talk bit about the of what the Islamic conquests are about and somebody raised question earlier on with me but just the start of the break it was was you how the what was the nature of conquest and and and so on and think what and because this is still you know this is still live issue that's very much with us today the sort of Islam was spread by the sword Paradigm if you know or cliche or whatever you going call it is still part of some people's political rhetoric today and it's think from historian one of the things historian can do is just look at this and say is this true is this what and if it's true how is it true and blah blah blah so what want to do is interrogate this Paradigm now think that part of the think it's important thing fundamentally to recognize there are two separate processes involved in the islamization of the Middle East and what became the Arab lands and so and and and so forth and there are two separate processes one is process of conquest and the other is the process of conversion and the two are linked but they're not the same thing Conquest is about military takeover and the establishment of vly Arab but fundamentally Muslim ruling class and governing class and these are the people who run the armies these are the people who collect taxes these are the people who provide the rulers and the governors of provinces and so on and so forth and Conquest is at least in part violent process we find for example the great battles well recorded great battles of between the Muslims and the bantine rulers of Constantinople and so on the battle of the aruk in 636 for example where the bantine armies are defeated in field battle the Battle of cesia and the other battles that follow in Iraq and Iran and the the destruction of the armies of the sassanian Persians the cenans of the the dynasty that rules Iran before the coming of the of the Muslims and these are violent confrontations between two armies and almost without exception the Arab Muslim armies defeated the armies of the existing powers and we could go into that in in questions if people are people are interested in that but the actual but there was another process going on in conquest and we're still in conquest at the moment the another process going on in Conquest is that once the armies of the great Powers the Byzantine Christian Greek speaking Empire of Constantinople and the cenan zoroastrian Empire of Iran once the armies of these two great Powers had been defeated then there on the whole and there were exceptions but on the whole the record shows that the Arab Muslim conquerors offered should we say very easy terms to the existing inhabitants and we get records of number of treaties with cities like Damascus and Jerusalem and so on that were made between the incoming Muslims and the inhabitants of these cities who were not by large you know not part of the armies of the defeated and the the fundamental bargain was that we will leave you with your houses your churches some the walls of your cities and so on on condition that you do not help our enemies and on condition you pay taxes and this was pattern of agreement but we find over and over again in the course of the Arab Muslim Conquest of these areas that it is the armies of the enemy are defeated but most of the major Urban centers and Rural centers and and and so on come to an agreement with the conquerors on those sorts of that that is the nature of the bargain the and the conquest happens very quickly there are two big phases of the conquest there's conquest immediately after the death of Muhammad the prophet when Syria and when Syria Iraq Egypt and what is modern Iran are conquered by 650 we get the the great range of conqu Syria Iraq essentially invaded and mostly conquered in 636 637 Egypt conquered by 641 the whole of Iran Iran not necessarily completely conquered but coming under Muslim rule by the year 650 and then there's gap and then in the middle omay period and sponsored by the omad regime there is renewed burst of Conquest from about 680 onwards but particularly from 700 onwards that sees 711 the conquest of Spain and Portugal the Iberian Peninsula at one end and then in exactly say 705 to 715 the conquest of Central Asia if you like bukara samakan and and and so on and also 711 712 the conquest of sinned in southern Pakistan so we get two waves of Conquest first one and second one the process of conversion of the majority of the population to Islam however is much slower you can imagine you have Islamic rule but people individuals abandoning their Christian zoroastrian Jewish faith whatever and moving to and moving to become Muslims is process that happens over centuries not just in few decades or few years but process that happens over centuries it's process that is almost entirely peaceful there is no the very very few records of forcible conversion I.E people being told either you become Muslims or we kill you was very was there is dialogue that says you accept Muslim rule or we kill you but that accepting Muslim rule is not the same as becoming Muslim because as we know lots of Muslims have always lived not so non-muslims always lived under Muslim rule according to these sort of VII Arrangements that come in with the early with with the early conquest and as said process of conversion is largely peaceful and it takes Generations we think and certain amount of scientific or yeah hopefully scientific research reveals that in the seventh and eth centuries the first century or so the rate of conversion was very slow but by the early Abbasid period perod by that's we're talking about the late 8th and 9th century the pace of conversion is much quicker and many more people it's sort of statisticians would call bell curve it's curve that starts off quite slowly and then becomes much much steeper more people convert so more people convert it's sort of cumulative it's social cumulative change until by probably just before the start of the Crusades should we say around the year 1100 it's probably true that the majority of the people of the central Muslim lands were converted to Islam but that's four centuries of slow change and there are even after and then there's more conversion in the later Middle Ages but by the early modern period you have still have position where between 10 and 20% of the inhabit of these areas remain non-muslim but the vast majority are now Muslims of one sort or another so think when we're looking at this as say this this Paradigm this cliche of Islam being spread by the sword think that's helpful way of deconstructing it and there there are battles there is violence but conversion to Islam is very different sort of process and people convert to Islam of course for all sorts of reasons because they they impressed with Islamic teaching and the the prophethood of the prophet and and and and so on there's also people wanting to become part of the new community becom part of the elite community and so on think there are people change their religions for all sorts of reasons some of them are ideological spiritual if you like some of them are material and often it's mixture of both in normal human behavior people convert for all sorts of reasons and conversion to Islam becomes part of different Community part of there's debate about what happens in the Roman Empire which is perhaps in some ways bit helpful to understanding historical parallel when the Romans conquer France what they call what happens is you get the imposition of Roman political rule because famously Julius Caesar conquered etc etc and you get Roman establishment what happens in the next centuries is that most of the people of want to become Romans in the sense that they want to adopt Roman lifestyle they want to dress like Romans they want to eat Roman food they want to go to the BS like Romans do and they even sort of adopt new religion that is is the worship of the emperor and they want to acculturate to the new dominant power the new dominant discourse and so it is bit with with with becoming Muslim typically in places like Iran becoming converted to Islam means leaving your village and going and living in Muslim Town your own little Hijra if you like there's Hijra from the zoroastrian villages to the Muslim towns that's very characteristic so becoming Muslim is not not just reciting the shahada and and reading Quran it's also about change in lifestyle because when you move to the from your village to the Medina then not only do you go to the mosque you also go to the ham you're also eating Muslim food and you're dressing like Muslim whole lot of processes that that go on during this period And as say it it is slow process but one that gathers Pace it starts in your mind period it gathers Pace after that and so when people raise this question about Islam being spread by The Sword and so on think that's the that's as it were the reply to it or the deconstruction of this this cliche that we're looking at number of different processes initial Conquest certainly is military operation the the later developments are are almost entirely peaceful so I'll leave that there and think that important to notice that this is one of the things going on but want to think to talk now about little bit about administration because stressed and when just introduced the myads that one of the things that was going on here was the laying of the foundations of an Islamic Administration and this is think important for administrative history but as hope to show in the next quarter of an hour or so it's it's important for all sorts of other CLE more General cultural reasons as well but let's get down to first and foremost the administrative reasons here and let's see I'm sorry I'm just going to to write some things if this pen Works which it doesn't really do you think we can we've got one anywhere it's always should have brought my own usually do but see how we're doing because want to write out one or two yeah one or two well sort of anyway I'll do I'll do I'll do my best should have brought my own pen want to talk about the foundations of an Islamic Administration this is yeah that's nice one the when the and Islamic Administration is fundamentally formed in Iraq not as you might imagine the capital in Syria but the outlines of the Islamic Administration are formulated in Iraq what happens in Iraq is this that very considerable number of Arab bedin tribesmen that's pastoral peoples move move from Eastern and North Eastern Arabia into Iraq they are they make their Hijra and the term is is is used for this process they make their Hijra to the new Islamic cities and particularly the cities of kufa and Basra which are the sort of paradigms for the early Islamic City kufa and Basra and these cities are given the name of misser which of course we all think of as being referring to Egypt but Egypt was just one of the original amsar is is the Arabic plural of this word and I'll talk bit about that but when they move of course from the the landscape of the desert into living in towns they lose they don't just stop start living in different environment they also lose their means of subsistence because if you're living in town you can't sort of live better lifestyle you can't live off your camels and your sheep and so on in the way that you can if you're pastoral person wandering around so you have to find new means of support and what seems to have happened very early after the initial Islamic conquest and we're told that the system was set up by Omar the second of the cffs was that the local that the people were settled in towns and they were paid what you might call salary or you might call pension the people who have been involved in the Congress they were paid sum of money that the Arab word calls ATA and ATA is about it means gift but it's not just present that you might give to somebody on on their birthday or anything it is regular payment of money to to the Arab Muslim conquerors and to their descendants now this was as said believe and other people would disagree with me that this is something that was established very soon after the conquest because these people had to live if they were going to live in towns they had to live off something they weren't as it were trained to be Carpenters or ship Builders or what that that's not the background they came from they were they didn't have much background in trade they were paid as the as dominant military class and they weren't just paid in anything they were PID in coined money now this may seem little bit funny thing to stress the early Islamic coinage of course introduced and I'll talk bit more about coinage later on in the umad period the silver Durham and the gold Dina and if you want to see what these coins look like there are excellent examples in the Addis Gallery that's the Islamic Art Gallery in the British museum you can 5 minutes walk from here you can just walk in and see them the silver Durham is coin bit like 10 piece but thinner the gold din is about the size of 5 piece but again thinner and these precious metal coins were the universal coinage of the early Islamic world and as say I'll come along bit more to that so here's the thing the early Islamic State even before the coming of the umiads established mechanism where taxes were collected from the conquered people and were paid in salaries ATA to the conquerors and to the descendants of the conquerors it was initially hereditary payment this is the idea that if you had and come back this idea of CA if you had CA within Islam then you had much higher rate of ATA than if your ancestors had been bit slow Off the Mark and had only joined the Muslim conquering Muslim Conquest after the death of the Prophet when everything was going well by then you didn't have SAA or not you know much inferior SAA and your your salary was your pension was con consequently reduced so it's it's hierarchy they different grades and so on now this is important because it means that in the Islamic world the tradition of public taxation was continued into the omad period I.E that the expectation that everyone pays taxes the sort of expectation that we have in in in modern State now what makes this distinctive is there are lots of other areas that had been ruled by the Roman Empire where the system of public taxation disappears it disappears in all of Northwest Europe where essentially different Warlords call them Barons or call them whatever you like to call them take over different areas and they just extract such money and largely Goods in kind food and and so on from the people they're ruling over very primitive sort of administration but you don't need state to run it you just need strong men with swords going and sort of extracting it beating people up if necessary mean it's very simple sort of well the the there's no government really in any meaningful sense in this sort of society and even just across the border in the Byzantine Empire to large extent this public taxation or the use of coinage for public taxation disappears what happens in the Amir State on the other hand is that taxes continue to be collected and they paid out in coined money to people who are soldiers or administrators and live in cities now you can see immediately that this is very different sort of society from the much more primitive societies of of of Northwest Europe and but this has lot of important consequences the most obvious of this is in order to run system like this you need to have state you need to have government apparatus you can't just do it on sort of ad hoc basis you need to keep records of who needs to pay what taxes you need to keep records of who's going to get the payments you need in fact to have literate bureaucracy you can't just do this by remembering in the back of your mind you know this that and the other and so because of this whole lot of Institutions grow up that whole lot of Institutions are developed during the OM period and little bit before come to exact chronology and amongst these institutions are the institution of the dwan the dw1 now the the D1 in early Islamic period is the list of people who need to be paid it's register of people divided we know we no none of the Dand survive at least in their entirety none that he wantes survive from this period but it's list of people who need to be paid how much they need to be paid which tribe they belong to and so on and so forth and which area they were going to be paid for and the word D1 is very interesting word if you're interested in the way words migrate and so on because the word D1 comes into Modern English in two very distinct ways it comes into Modern English or not modern European languages better be bit careful about this D1 as government office is adopted in the generally speaking in the medieval Mediterranean and it comes into French as danan for taxes into Italian as danana for sorry for Customs Italian for danana for customs danana in Spanish and so on all the southern European Latin words for Customs offices and accounting and so come from the Arabic dwan sorry I'll just pressed that by mistake well doesn't matter come from the Arabic word D1 because it it reflects the Arabic The the influence of Arabic in in in the in the Mediterranean world but it also comes into English as Divan or daan meaning bed or couch without head and so on and this meaning of it comes because the pronunciation you'll recogniz it's not dwan but Divan comes from Persian originally Persian pronunciation through the Ottoman Empire where the dant is not the office itself but the bench on which the the administrative officials sit and then it comes into Western Europe with its its meeting meaning of couch or bed without head or so on but in both senses it's very interested this early Islamic coinage because new early Islamic early Arabic or period in fact use of this word has had so much influence in quite unexpected ways and it's it's it's worth it reflects think the importance of the administrative Arrangement now the consequences of this development the maintaining of public taxation system and the collection and payment of taxes has profound effect on the new period and later on the Middle East in order to run system like this you need government app at us you need what is really state in the sense that we understand state state that collects taxes and pay salaries that's what really states do isn't it to armies and so on and early Arabic has word for this which is and the word is Sultan now we think of Sultan think mostly as as title you get the ottoman Sultans for example but in early historical Arabic up till the 10th Century sultan is an abstract word it means the authorities the administration the state okay so in the omad period in response to the system you get real State apparatus you get paid Tax Collectors paid bureaucrats people keeping records in archives of what they what they need to collect but also what they've done and so on in way that you simply don't get in Western Europe in in Western Europe during this this period And so you you can talk about an early Islamic State historians medieval historians particularly very cautious about using the word State because they often say what is the state and so on but in the early Islamic world we can definitely because of this vocabulary because of the use of the word Sultan we and because of the tax apparatus we can definitely recognize in om society as society that has state and in many ways that was the most important and lasting achievement of the omay califate was to develop this apparatus and it the apparatus or the man who seems to have originally set up this system with the approval of the kff Omar and going of Ali was man called zad and say and he was called zad and he has variety of names he is sometimes by people who didn't like him essentially called zad ABI because nobody they said knew who his father was I.E he came from slightly by the standard at the time slightly dodgy background or he and in fact he was illegitimate child or he's also known as zad iben ABI sufyan and that's how he signed himself that we know that's what he called himself because that's the name that appears on the coins that were issued in his name so he called himself Aban he was half brother of the caleff Moa and he was appointed as the first am governor of Southern of Iraq by muawiya and it seems to he we know he was an educated man we know he had good Arabic education and good apparently mathematical education and so on and he was seems to have been the man who set up this system of administration actually made it work in southern Iraq he died during the reign of mua his son aalah zad was the man who was responsible for the killing of Hussein but his father has is is key figure in the development of Islamic Administration but this goes Way Beyond just setting up the institutions of the state because during the reign of the kff Abdul Malik and you'll find it it's 685 to 705 you'll find the name on on that list of aired cffs Abdul Malik decreed that the administration should all be conducted in Arabic and previously the administr particular tax collecting had been done in Greek in the western half of the Islamic empire those bits that have been part of the Roman Empire before and the Eastern Roman Empire Greek was the language of administration not Latin and we know that this continued to be the case because the surviv from from Egypt lot of papari little fragments of paparis that have right from in fact the earliest days of the Muslim Conquest there are fragments of Papyrus surviving which show us an Administration working in Greek and also sometimes in Arabic but fundamentally at local level stuff happened in Greek and we must presume no papy survive from Syria or only because the climate's too wet but in Egypt so dry that these things survive so we have very early testimony for the fact that the early Muslims continued to use Greek and we have bits and pieces of documents as well from Iran which show that tax collection happened in in Middle Persian it's predecessor of modern Persian which was the language of the cian Empire okay then in 85 Abdul Malik decid Ides that the administration should all be done in Arabic we can see this we know this from accounts and Chronicles that this is what happened we can see it happening in the case of the coinage and here again if you're at all interested in these things the Addis Gallery at the British museum has very nice little display of coins and we can see how the earliest coins that were the earliest Islamic minted coins come from the rain andu they are silver durhams that look just like cenan silver durhams I.E they have the picture of the ruler on their head but they're counter struck with bismah and the name of the governor zad I.E somebody's taken the coins when they're being minted and put little extra bit on them to show these are Islamic coins so that's what they did mean it's it's it sort of Rough and Ready way of providing coinage but also giving this coinage Muslim identity with the bismah even though you have the portrait of cian ruler on it it's sort of mixture and so then in the reign of Abdul Malik there was an attempt to create an iconographic picture coinage that was particularly Islamic mean it may seem bit strange to people the idea that Islam forbids the depiction the human figure and so on which was only ever partly true but we might come to that later on but the fact that the there's an attempt to De to design pictorial coinage and what it comes in in the early years of ABD Mal is the idea of the standing califf coins and there are very good examples of that in the British museum collection where the figure on the front is not the cenan ruler or or or or the bantine or anything but califf standing with sword and recognizably Arab headdress and beard on the front of theit coin and this was tried and then for whatever reason we don't really know why that was completely abandoned and around the year 700 we start to get the emergence of completely new style of coin which just has an inscription on it no pictures at all it has an inscription and of course the inscription is in Arabic and there's usually quranic phase phrase phrase from Quran there is usually the date on which this coin was produced and usually the place where it was produced particularly in the case of the silver coinage we can see where it was minted and when it was minted and we also often have the name of the governor or kff who caused it to be minted so actually these coins pack lot of information in them and that that there historical documents they're very useful because partly because unlike the texts the historical texts they clearly date from the period that from the omad period but also they meant that Arabic was diffused far and wide people in the remotest areas of Iran had pieces of money with Arabic written on them so we get the arabization of the tax records and tax collecting records we get the arabization of the coinage we get things like particularly in greater Syria we get the setting up of Milestones beside the road which have inscriptions in Arabic the Romans used to put up milestones and they had you know so many miles to see or whatever it was and it had the name of the emperor on it and blah blah blah Abdul Malik produces Arabic Milestones that look very like the Roman Milestones they are public Arabic documents so to speak that every passer by on the road sees and those who can read them read them and this is interesting and important because both the coinage and the Arabic for two reasons first lastly they show that and abdor Malik seems to been the driving force in this they show that the omay ciff was setting up an Administration that in many ways borrowed from the Roman Administration the Persian Administration it was an imperial government if you like it was state government and the state announced its existence in an Arabic coinage in Arabic administrative documents in Arabic milestones and sometimes in inscriptions as well couple of examples that one very famous and one new and not nearly so famous of the use of inscriptions public writing in fact the first is is the inscription in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem which sure is something I'll come back to this afternoon the inscription of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is the earliest public writing in Arabic it undoubtedly despite the fact that the name of the caleff was changed from Abdul Malik to the Abasi kff Almon in rather sort cheeky attempt to immortalize himself there's no doubt this inscription dates from the time of Abdul Malik it is koranic or there's lot of phrases that come from Quran but it's not passage of Quran it's different phrases that are recognizably quranic but it it's not single text of Quran and it proclaims the work of Abdul Malik and it the rest of it is essentially exalting Islam above Christianity it's essentially concentrating oned and essentially concentrating on monotheism as opposed to the Sher and the trinitarianism of Christianity so it's making it it's packing big punch ideologically but from the point of view of what I'm talking about now the interesting thing it's in Arabic but Arabic inscriptions were used at much more humble level recently in the city of basan skopis now in Northern Israel those there was lot of excavation an inscription was found and this inscription was found in building that everybody had assumed was Roman or Byzantine building it had columns with arches on top and blah blah blah look it looked very like classical building and then when they came to excavate it they found mosaic inscription which said that this souk was built by the local governor who's now think but doesn't matter on the orders of the omad hasham and there we see again we see two very interesting things happening of course the the the the kaliff ordering the building of auk the local governor building the Suk and putting an Arab Mosaic inscription up to commemorate this and to make this public an inscription that everyone could see so what we're getting is something really important happening here until the time of Abdul Malik Arabic obviously had been used for Quran and we must assume that there's not much evidence for it there is sort of Proto Hadith that is emerging an early Hadith that is emerging in Arabic but Arabic was therefore essentially the language of religion the administration was conducted in Greek or Persian what Abdul Malik does is ensure that Arabic as it were moves out of the religious Zone it is it moves out into the world of secular Administration the world of public life and this has of course lots of effect it ensures that the Middle East became not just Muslim but Arab speaking except for Iran and you know I've written quite lot about why Iran doesn't become an Arab country but don't want to go down that road at the moment because it's different discussion but it ensures that and the there was nothing inevitable about that it could have been situ situation where Arabic was the language of religion and religious discourse and Hadith and so on but everyone carried on speaking Greek or Coptic or or or or middle Persian or what or whatever they were doing and that would you know there lots of parallels the use of Latin in medieval Europe for example mean people in Anglo-Saxon England spoke Anglo-Saxon which is Germanic language but for purposes of religion and religious discussion and the Bible and so on that was all in Latin and these two for centuries this sort of diglosia these two different languages function together with different roles in society and Islamic Society could easily have gone down that road and as say Arabic would be like medieval Latin the language of of certain sorts of religious sciences and so on that this was not the case was really result of decisions made by think particularly of the AR the the kale Abdul Malik and this pushed Arabic out because everybody as said everybody in the remotest areas of Iran or Southern Morocco or something had coins with Arabic written on them and they might have said can't understand word of this and I'm not going to bother but lots of people would have been become familiar with Arabic that sort of way in in in in that sort of way and through the administration and so but the importance of this decision just doesn't end with the prevalence of Arabic because what happens also is you get whole lot of bureaucrats whole lot of civil servants if you like who are using Arabic now to conduct their Affairs and originally conduct their Administration and so on lots of people are learning Arabic lots of people whose fathers and grandfathers had spoken Greek or Coptic or or middle Persian now learning Arabic nobody in by the end of the OM Peri period nobody is learning Greek in Syria Palestine Egypt they're not learning Greek except as they particularly interested in in scripture and so they're not learning Greek because there are no jobs in Greek anymore if you want to get decent job you have to know Arabic even if you're learning it as complete stranger complete non-arab so non-arabs are learning Arabic and by and by of course their sons and grandsons are thinking of themselves as Arabs in way that people change their identity according to according to their language and so on and so forth and so you get the spreading of Arabic into the administrative vocabulary and then it goes into secular literature and every sort of literature starts being written in Arabic we get by the end of the omad period the secretary of the last omad kff Maran II composes number of Epistles letters about Administration about political philosophy really and he composes them in Arabic by the late om period early Abbasid period Arabic is being used for everything to do everything apart from certain amount of Christian Church literature and so on everything else is is in Arabic Arabic and this is the background that astonishing flourishing of Arabic literature that happens in from the late through into the Abbasid period where you get the great poems great his historical Works being composed and so on all this is now happening in Arabic but if the omad cff had not made if Abdul Malik really believe this if Abdul Malik had not taken certain number of decisions it might have been completely different it might well have been that secular literature and and so on continued to be in Greek and so on and so forth though there are there are other influences in at work here of course was the influence of Islamic poetry is very important for example but think it's the administrative Arabic that is driving Arabic as say pushing rolling out Arabic is perhaps what the modern administrators would and modern governments would talk about rolling out Arabic throughout the Islamic world to the the extent that by the end of the am period the melite Christian church are the Greek Orthodox Christian Church in Sy Palestine and so on is celebrating church services in Arabic not Greek anymore and people are writing Christian theological texts in Arabic because that's what you do and the old languages like syak and Coptic in Egypt become dead languages they Retreat to the Closter and Coptic is still Coptic which is Coptic is basically ancient Egyptian written in in Greek letters and Coptic disappears it shrinks back into just some monasteries and some religious usages and so on it disappears as vernacular it disappears as really as literary language and in any meaningful sense so think it's if we're looking for asking that sort of question about what did the OMS do for us one of the answers is make that make sure that the Middle East was not just Islamic but was arabic speaking as well and as said the stress it need not necessarily have been said what thought I'd talk about in this session is the later omay califate and or how it evolves and look at the end about why it collapsed why the om CIF failed to survive and here the list of kaiis will help you there are two phases if you like of the omad califate and they are rather different in character some of this is is stuff I've talked about before but we can talk about the sanid in in that anglophone way sanid and the marids the sanid are basically the descendants of Abu sufyan as you imagine that's muawiya and his son yazid who ruled just for three or four years and then there were two other very shortlived cffs moaa the second and so we don't need to worry about then the sopyan line died out there was then major major crisis in thead cipate when it almost disappeared mean it was almost two Generation cipate MOA and yazid because with the death of yazid there were challenges the yazid had Sons but they were small boys they and apparently not very well either we don't really know what but they died very young and the question that meant that the whole question of succession was again up in the air within the Muslim Community and we get number of different groups trying to take power the most important of these most important of these figures was probably Abdullah Zu I'll talk bit it more right I'll talk about for bit just call it Ian and the other group were led by person called mkar and I'll talk little bit about both of these because they show that in this crisis of the califate there was nothing automatic about the OM califate continuing it was there were other people who just as good claims even Abdullah as was the son of that AAR who had been one of the closest of the sahaba to the prophet Muhammad and he had been muhajer from Mecca to Medina right in in the foundations as you like of the Islamic community of the umah he had in one of the first of of the Civil Wars he had been defeated and think I'm right in saying killed at the Battle of the camel at the start of Ali's Reign which is something haven't talked about because it's not directly or my material but his son had very he was he was living in the haramain think he's he's actually living in Mecca and he had reputation for being being both Brave and Pious and even his enemies ConEd that and he claimed the cipate on after the death of yazid on the basis that the kaliff Fate should be decided amongst the leading members of the of the of the Muslim Community shouldn't be an OM family thing now the OM the AMS had done their thing okay MOA had been great kif yazid had been bit less impressive now they were gone any but you know it's up to other people to claim the kif And he as the son of his father as sahabi himself though he must have been quite small boy but nonetheless he that still counts claimed the califate and his platform if you like was that the cipate should be returned to Medina that it was an anti-syrian thing and that it the real power should be rested in qures and the sahaba and their descendants it was an attempt to grab the Kate back from Syria and back from the omad family to restore it if as as would have said to the to its Origins get right back to the the early Muslim Community and the descendants of those first Muslims who had gathered around Abu Bakr and umab even Zu attracted lot of support including some in Syria but not much in Iraq and in the end it was clear that you the the the haramain hij you couldn't rule the Muslim World from Mecca and Medina it was too remote there weren't enough resources to do that and in the end his attempts to to spr read his his word and his and and his propaganda failed and famously he was besieged in Mecca by the OM troops by the OM troops led by man who are going to come back to haaj and YF haaj and yusf thaki and in an event which became famous and notorious in Islamic history haaj yusf besieged in Mecca it was typical of I's perhaps even romantic attempt to bring the califate back to the heartlands of Islam that he chose to make his last stand in Mecca which completely hopeless place to defend because it's the water supply is very unreliable there's no natural food supply everything has to be brought in or most things have to be brought in and so on from strategic IC military point of view defending Mecca was not an intelligent move from an emotional and religious point of view it exactly was what zuel was all about and he was the and haaj andf set up Siege engines these big catapult Stone throwing catapults and bombarded the Caba and that was something that much later at the time of the Abbasid Revolution that was one of the things people remembered about the omad was the bombardment of the cabba the damaging of the cabba even was about was was very interesting man he's always described as sort of anti- califf or Rebel or something like that but for lots of people he was the real kff and interestingly believe to this to be the case that the Kaba as it stands today was essentially the cabba that was reconstructed by Zu and the literature is not clear and obviously there been no archaeology of the cabba but it looks as if from the early histories of Mecca the early Arabic histories of Mecca that the cabba in the form that we have was was built byah and it had to be reconstructed after the damage of The Siege engines it had to be rebuilt the various stages there were floods and disasters and so on that damaged bits and pieces of it and but it was always reconstructed along the IBU lines and Ian of course was was building in sense on the on the previous Caba but he seems to have developed it in various ways it's not always easy to work out what's going on but got involved in this discussion some of you may have been the Hajj exhibition in the British museum and wrote the chapter on the early medieval hjj in the book that went with it so got involved in trying to find out what the Arabic sources tell us about the building of the cabba which is which is you'd think was really important issue but there's very little liter very little discussion about it and the whole architecture of the Caba and so so anyway that's why got involved in of zuar and and and the cabba and so on so of zuar Was Defeated and killed there was more vigorous and dangerous prooi Revolt in Iraq and somebody was asking about hanfia earlier today the son of the hanfi woman who is the half brother therefore of Hassan and Hussein and he had rep he seems to have not ever been to Iraq himself but whole body of Iraqi opinion settl around the figure of MTAR MTAR AB led the people of Iraq against om Rule and so on and the whole of Iraq was really lost to theads but the omad struck back the Maran the first and above all his son Abdul Malik who I've talked about before recovered the OM position and they recovered the omir position they were able to do that think well partly Abdul Malik was extremely able man as probably suggested to with his administrative Innovations and so on they were able to do it because they had the wholehearted support of the aasam or at least they they came to have the support of the the aash Sham and whereas the people of whereas imno Zu was you know in in in in the wrong place so to speak from military point of view and the people of Iraq were as often happened in the early Islamic period very much divided into different groups fairly soon the amads represented by Abdul Malik the son of Marwan which is why that group of omad are called marids because Maran was cousin of mua not direct descendant United the akasham and it was the aam that enforced omay rule in Mecca and Medina and in Iraq and in forer and the leader of the was this man haaj yusf I'll come to him little more in second but the nature of the omad regime changed stressed in talking about when we were talking about moaa we were looking at sort of federal structure muaa made agreements with local Arab Elites and they it was decentralized system much more what happens under Abdul Malik is that theads and the akasham conquer the rest of the Islamic well basically they conquer Mecca and Medina and they conquer Iraq in series of battles against the supporters of the atate the supporters of the family of the prophet and also against the tribal leaders of Iraq as well who are different group not necessarily aate but people who came from the great Iraqi tribes of of tamim and AB case and so on and there were series of large scale battles in which the syrians took Iraq and talking about the establishment of the city of waset in way the omad califate changed into Syrian military dictatorship if you like the tribes of Syria formed the elite of the army they were the ruling class they were the ruling group and in Iraq we get this continuing resentment against the dominance of the syrians and the way that and something important happens under hijaj let's so haaj is figure of the OM is that he was the governor of Iraq and all the East the califate was essentially divided on unofficial basis between the omad family who ruled essentially Syria Egypt and Points West and the and hajaj at least up to his death in 714 who ruled Iraq and all the East he also figure who lingers long in the Arabic literary Administration sorry literary memory not Administration literary memory as the example of the fierce Stern ruler Fierce Stern But ultimately within his own life's just ruler he's the the the later Arabic sources and contemporary Arabic sources indeed probably have very mixed view of him mean he's Fierce implacable great public speaker some of ha's sermons to the people of kufa where he says all about how he he sees next with heads waiting to roll in the congregation in front of him and so on these sort of this sort of rhetoric is so often quoted in later sources about you know that the strong heartless efficient Incorruptible Governor is what and so there sort of half admiring half condemning attitude to her judge and it reflects the way in which he his personality dominated what went on in Iran and there was major dispute and the dispute was this it comes back to the question of was talking about the question of ATA the question of payment and so on it comes down to money in the end and it comes down to money because the question was the early Muslims had been in in Iraq and it all happened in Iraq in the end had been paid according to how their families had participated in the conquest and there was the general idea that the revenues that were collected in Iraq should be distributed among the Iraq because it was in sense there there and and don't want to give you too many Arabic words but there's an Arabic word called Fay fa ay and the Fay is the the revenues of Iraq the whole lot the whole pot if you like of the revenues they collected in Iraq which were huge and the idea of many people was that the fate of Iraq should be distributed among the Iraq are the Muslim people of Iraq all the cles that were collected there should be spent there and if there was any left over some of it might go to the administration in Damascus but basically it should be distributed amongst SE Iraq it they conquered it their ancestors had conquered it it was theirs by right and furthermore they could argue that this right to the control of the Fay had and the to get their ATA from the Fay had been approved by Omar that Ali ABI Talib had confirmed these rights and so the right to the fate of Iraq for the AL Iraq becomes not just part of their dun not just part of their Earthly Administration but it part of their Dean as well it because of this religious sanction because the two great greatest legislators of early Islam had they claimed organized this why you know stipulated this why then they had this right to it now this of course Allowed no position for the omad administration in Damascus to take any share of the revenues of Iraq and I've already stressed it Iraq was the most valuable area and so they developed Titanic struggle for power between the omad Administration represented by haaj Ian yusf and the Syrian military and the people of Iraq and this came down to in the end Reb Rebellion after rebellion led and by two different groups of people one were the tribal Chiefs of Iraq and I'll I'll give you little bit of detail here because these are these are figures of again whose people remembered centuries after the greatest of the tribal leaders was man called Ian as or Ki he's asath like this Ki were the kis were great South Arabian tribe and Kinder kinda was great South Arabian haven't written that very well the Great South Arabian tribe and alashi was the greatest tribal leader of his of of the early 8th Century in Iraq inly this is another the whole concept tribal leaders this is another word whose meaning changes which you you might be interested the use of the word Sharif with its plural ashra in early Arabic in early in omad Period Arabic early Abbasid period Arabic the word Sharif Ashraf means tribal leader part of the aristocracy every mean it wasn't just the Muslims who community that that had an bate big tribes had bate the leading tribe sometimes called the buut sort of double plural of bait meaning the the the the great families in in an individual tribe and these were called Sharif hasra by the 10th 11th century the word Sharif always means descendant of the Prophet it's it meaning has been restricted to the family of the Prophet which is of course the meaning it has right down to the 20th century but in early Arabic it means tribal Chiefs anyway just put that on on one side and so there this struggle for the resources of Iraq becomes the main battle and the second group who are are people of the family of family of the Prophet who are not the same as the leaders of the tribes but members of the family of the prophet and the most important of these is ali who leads rebellion in the year 740 740 in kufa it was an unsuccessful Rebellion as they all were but it gave rise to the movement that was talking about earlier on that we know as zadia and the the followers of Zade and the descendants of always descendants of and zismo which is is still was was long time important in areas of Iran now mostly confined to Northern Yemen where it's still very active political force in yemeni politics of course is is direct we can trace its Origins to the rebellion of Zade imman ali nonetheless despite these struggles by the year should we say 740 when Zade was killed his rebellion was conspicuously unsuccessful but as said it it's this important ideological and and it's an important memory Abbasid sorry omad control was established in Iraq and in many ways one of the less least known but greatest of the cffs was the kff Isham but I'll come to him in minute so why don't just go through if you've got this list of cffs because they the Arabic sources gives them lots of very different personalities and again these personalities survive in historical literature but also in poetry and so on and they lots of them have different characters Abdul Malik I've said lot about and perhaps it better just the final point about Abdul Malik the great administrator and so on he also had great reputation as transmitter of Hadith and so on he was just in the sense of definition he was sahabi because he had been small boy at the time of the of the prophet's life and that was enough to count but he also had reputation for piety and the transmission of Hadith which is perhaps not surprising in way for member of the umad family I'll we lead the first we don't need to worry too much about he was his father's son I'll introduce talk to him more this afternoon about the Builder as the builder of the mosque in Damascus he was succeeded by another son of Abdul Malik suan suan comes across in the Arabic sour any role for very little time as you see two years he comes across in the Arab sources as Man Who Loved luxury Comfort extravagant generous to poets builder he founded the city of ramla in southern Palestine which became in the early middle ages one of the the most important cities in that area so he comes across as say it's the luxury then we come to Omar abdulaziz who was in fact nephew of Abdul Malik who's known as Omar II Omar II is an important figure in the later image of the OM family because he is the one that later generations of Muslims under the Abbasid period thought of as the good Amad the pious Amad and after Omar he is major legislator if you like or that's not really very good word in Islamic law but he's major generator of Islamic legal ideas there's lot of talk about compared with Solan how Pious and athetic he was how he listened to Scot how he tried to legitimize the tax system of the state which of course as said is always major bone of contention and so he's different figure and he's the one again and again in in later literature we find him praised as being the exception to the omad rule at time when later critics as it were were were were condemning the omad he's the one who escapes yazid II we don't need to worry about anymore very much and then we get the figure of Hisham hasham you see ruled for long time Hisham has very interesting person mean it's not name that that's sort of it's on everyone's lips but he has very interesting reputation again in the Islamic sources and later on as strict puritanical ruler past Muslim but not at all the luxury loving image of the omad but also repeatedly as builder and developer the Digger of canals the founder of the Builder of water Mills in the local history of mul of that comes from the Islamic period from the early basid period there's long description about Hisham developing water Mills on the for grinding corn and so on in mosul and so on how invested money in that and that sort of he's sort of bit of by the English analogy bit of sort of farmer George amongst the the Oman and we found all sorts of what we might think is rather unamir stories about how carefully he was to make sure that he sold the crops of from his Estates at the right time for the right amount of money how meticulous he was in looking after the the assets of the state and and and and encouraging Economic Development and so on and he was also great Builder and he shifted to the center of the omad state the shifted the capital almost he never in fact the theads seldom actually lived in Damascus it was administrative capital for most of time they seldom lived in Damascus and just sort of little in Brackets bit here we the omad the early omad but mua and Abdul Malik said to lived sort of transhumant existence if you know what mean they spent the summer in the bikar valley where it was quite cool where there was lots of water grazing on the mountain sides and so on where they built very interesting archaeological site well interesting city which BEC an archeological site Anar and so on they spent in the neighborhood of Balck then in the winter in the Autumn they would go down to Damascus and according to this account which is the only one we really have of my Lifestyles of the caiis they didn't actually stay in Damascus they stayed in what either still was or had been Christian Monastery at place called Dale Moran which is up on the hills on the old bayout road out of Damascus to the to the West they didn't go down into the city but they stayed outside the city in slightly elevated we don't know exactly where de Morana was but we know it was somewhere in that area where there were sort of Wards and streams and so on and that's why they stayed and then in the winter they went down to the Jordan Valley where the climate is much more moderate than than than staying either Damascus or or bukar Valley or anywhere else and here they built number of palaces around the Sea of Galilee the famous Palace that subscribe to Hisham kbat Al MAA for example but also building has recently been identified as probably moa's Palace at the bottom end of the Sea of Galler sea of Galler just where it goes down into into the Jordan River at place that the Arab sources called Cabra and so and then in the spring they they left the Jordan Valley the Jordan Valley is not very nice in the summer they left the Jordan Valley and went up again to Damas crawling through Damascus back into the Baka to enjoy the cool and well-watered Uplands of the Bika Valley so led us slightly you know Damascus was only part of where they were though there was MOA when we know had palace in Damascus as well hasham spent most of his time in Northern Syria around the area of the desert around palmara up towards russafa up towards Euphrates and doesn't seem really to have come to thing doesn't really seem to come come to Damascus at all his nephew succeeded him and his nephew is wed thei Al wed has the very different reputation from Hisham in fact they two completely hated each other and ham disproved very strongly of for wed is the poet of the OM Cate his poetry survives in the Great Book of songs that kabani and as genuinely genuinely important contribution to Arabic literature and he was very gifted poet singer etc etc he also has the reputation as liking what he thought of was good life far too much he seems to have lived almost completely in desert palaces he never seems to have gone to administrative centers whatsoever and in the desert palaces he Liv lived as he chose and his parties were famous for the amount of wine that was drunk the number of attractive women the were the number of poems that were sung and produced and so on he was he had this reputation which no doubt his enemies of whom there were many no doubt his enemies assiduously propagated and and and spread abroad as very unsatis Factory Islamic ruler from an Islamic point of view indeed from an administrative point of view because he doesn't seem been interested in that whatsoever his main interest in life in fact was hunting and then all the other things came after that but we actually have quite sort Vivid impression of wed II's lifestyle from the little Jordanian Palace at KRA which some of you may have seen east of Aman where the little bath house beside the in in the desert there was just part of complex of buildings it's the only one that survives and these amazing wall paintings survive of astrological scenes hunting scenes building of the palace and so on extraordinarily fluent and Vivid paintings that just been restored and something interesting when just shows you how new new things can come up there's recent restoration project at the paintings of go rra which is bar reasons have been badly damaged over the years that's going on at the moment now it's always been assumed that with it some luxurious atmosphere and so on was something to do with wed II what has happened last year is that somebody has actually found an inscription that talks about and makes it ABS the connection between KRA and wed is now firm and it's he's not referred to as the the califf so the palace and people have debated about the dating of the Palace of Raman for years and years we now know the palace must have been built by before he became kff because if he'd been kff the inscription would have said or or or whatever and that's just even buildings and and and monuments that people have visited millions of times and tourists have visited you know in in loads of those still suddenly new things come up and to get that identification of building with Builder is is is is is very interesting well Leed II made lot of enemies quite quickly when he became caleff because of his lifestyle and because people were generally dissatisfied with him and he ends up by being murdered in palace whose ruins still survive just south of palmara just south of tadmur in the Syrian desert by as his enemies come and like oan he is portrayed rightly or wrongly as being killed while he sits in his Palace reading Quran for all that his reputation for wild living this is this is how he he ended up excuse me now Islamic history the period and later if it tells us one lesson that Muslims might have contemplated afterward is that the murder of cffs leads to trouble it does not solve problems it creates whole raft of new ones and the death of thei far from solving the problem of having wayward ruler actually Unleashed whole lot of problems and what essentially happened was that the OM ruling class broke into two different groups or rather two different groups that have been there for some time actually now moved into open hostility and these two groups are known in the Arabic sources as cases cases Casey and case and Yemen just case and Yemen now these groups were ESS political parties not the particular we can as far as we can work out different ideologies but they were different political parties within within the ruling group but because of the way that the Arabs at that time thought of politics they present themselves as if they were tribal groups they were tribal confederations but the it it seems to be lot more complicated than that and what the basis of it is is not clear it seems to me and not that the Yemen were essentially those Syrian Arab tribes which had lived in Syria and on the borders of Syria before the Islamic conquests many of them had been originally Christian by this time they probably all converted to Islam or the vast majority of them were converted to Islam whereas the cases were people who'd come up with qures at the time of the Muslim Congress and there seems to have been residual friction between as you imagine those Arabs who'd lived there forever and those Arabs Who coming into the area and all sorts of problems you could all too easily imagine about whose grazing was where and and you know dispute for resources and so on what happens with the death of II is what had been political rivalry and economic rivalry and something spreads into open Warfare and different cffs come come and go very quickly haven't for some reason written on this little list the name of the last kff Maran II but the OM Elite divides amongst itself and there are frequent battles between members of the umite and as result of that it gives the enemies of the ums the opportunity that they haven't had before and the me MERS of the omad elite are prepared to cooperate with anti-ad elements against other members of the omad elite is classic example of political system that destroys itself really from within and there may have been Financial economic problems and so on that that went along with it so where does the opposition come from well you'll have guessed from what I've been saying all the way through that lot of the opposition comes from Iraq the people of Iraq now they they don't get their share of the Fay the syrians have been dominating them they're not getting their their their salaries anymore they're very much subject second class citizen population but as always again in early Islamic this period of the Amir period the Iraqis are divided the Iraq are divided amongst each other they can't present united front there are those who support the old tribal leaders th there are still around there are those who looking for Sunni sorry shi or at least an alled candidate and they're thoroughly disorganized and the Syrian Army in in in waset is basically strong enough to keep them under control even though the political leadership is divided and so on that the syrians in waset are strong enough to keep them under control the overthrow of the omad is not going to come from Iraq despite the overwhelming hostility of the Iraq to the it's coming from much further east the Abbasid family descendants of the prophets Uncle alabas Abdul mutalib had been living in Syria they were sort of part of the OM establishment actually that we think of them as bitter enemies they were comparatively prosperous they attended the courts of the OM cffs they you know did that sort of thing and for long time they seem to have no political ambition and interestingly enough this is another sorry I'm just falling over wre here but it's another piece of archaeological evidence that has come into the equation is about 15 years ago now there were excavations at place called Huma now Huma is in southern Jordan on the road to akaba and it's been known as site for long time it's also said that the Abbasid family lived in Huma before the Abbasid re before they became cffs that's where they lived and there are stories about how they cultivated olives there and so on and so forth but interestingly this it's more country house than palace it's not really terribly Grand it's little mosque outside it and some of the pictures in fact in my book on the on the court of kalis of it it's excavation has made it clear that this is the place where the Abbasid family lived before they became cffs it was abandon well after they became cffs of course they went to live in Iraq and bad and so on and it was abandoned and it became ruin and it was an unknown ruin really until Jordanian and in fact British archaeologists started to excavate it quite recently and it shows the you know their lifestyle it's quite luxurious comfortable house in the sense it's got some ornamentation little bit of painting bit fragments of what was obviously quite Posh furniture and so on and so forth but it wasn't grand palace at all but they they were well off now what happened was or we don't know exactly because the whole mythology developed about that but it's clear that around the year 100 of the around 720 of the Common Era that disaffected Muslim in kisan in the far Northeast kusan is is partly in Iran but partly beyond the Iranian Frontier in what used to be Soviet Central Asia we're looking for candidate to put up against your so to speak not this was an election this was going to be violent confrontation for sure and in ways that we don't un quite understand contact was made between the Abbasid family Ina and the koranis and members of the Abbasid family started to send dies of course missionary caller toan and they sent amongst other people or they emerged amongst other people as say lot of Mythology lot of contradictory stories here man called Abu Muslim and Abu Muslim became the Abbasid family's manager if you like political agent in horisan and he began to gather the people of kisan in military force against the OMS the people in Coran suddenly fought back but the momentum was irresistible so what was the what were the omad what were these do the these missionaries calling for in karasan well it was all quite cleverly done they really had two things they proclaimed that they wanted not an Abbasid the name Abbasid doesn't seem to have or ban abas doesn't seem to have come in their propaganda at all they wanted Ram chosen one from the family of the Prophet nicely vague it's catchall phrase anybody with she or sympathies can can relate to it and they never specified name of who they candid up for the be what they said is we overthrow the amads we'll find member of the House of chosen one from the house of the prophet and so as result lots and lots of people not only in kisan but later in Iraq were prepared to join in this because most people particularly Iraq must have assumed that it was going to be one of the alled family was going to be the new new leader but the abbasids also promised something else because horasan was an area where on the Frontiers lot of Arab Muslims had settled they didn't settle so much in Western Iran and so on which was well within the Dal Islam they tended to go to the Frontiers because that where they were sent as soldiers that's where the action was and so on so conversion to Islam was much quicker strangely enough in the northeastern frontiers of the Islamic world than it was in places much more so inside the Islamic world the the because of of all this settlement so you get whole population of Muslims who non-arab Muslims inasan it was one of the places where the conversion to Islam was much quicker you got lot of non-arab Muslims in in kisan you also got lot more intermarriage think between people who are of Arab descent and people of local korani Iranian descent and so on so you get whole lot of aasan who are not part of the Arab Elite but are Muslims and what of something that the basid propaganda well what Abu Muslims propaganda which was in fact basid propaganda so speak in Disguise emphasized was that the difference between Arabs and non-arabs would disappear where were all Muslims from kusan it didn't matter whether you came from the posist Arab tribe imaginable from or tamim or whatever or whether you just came native Iranian origin were all Muslims of kisan together it broke down the barriers and Prejudice between Arabs and non-arabs and created as say Muslim Army and Muslim movement and that was perhaps its real strength because anybody from whatever background could join in this Abu muslim's Army and so they with this really Mass support they came West they defeated the omad in the end killing the last omad cff Maran II in Egypt and setting up the new regime and once they' conquered lo and behold the man who stood up in the Mosin kufa and gave the first sermon the first of the wasn't he was first sermon of the new regime turned out to be abas asafa not not an alled at all but member of the Abbasid family and when people objected to this firstly Abu Muslim sent his agents to dispose of them in very brutal way and the Abasi califate was born in this almost sort of accidental one it wasn't accidental it was very carefully planned but just like the om's final thought perhaps the abbasids came in with difficult legitimacy problem because the lot of people who had supported the revolution that brought the abases to power had actually thought they were supporting somebody else member of the Alid family and so on so just like the omad the Abasi cipate begins with as say legitimacy problem what want to to the point want to make think is that in many ways the theads can be considered as the founders of Islamic architecture and what went on in rule under rule no I'm just going search bit during this period essentially just am so sorry should have should be much better doing these things what what I'm trying to suggest is that what if we're asking the question that slightly jokingly put before what did the OMS do for us then one of the things is that began Islamic architecture and they began it in such spectacular way that what went on under am myed rule in in in in in in Jerusalem and Damascus had profound effect on the development of Islamic Arch ecture in subsequent years now of course the the question of the origins of the mosque and of Islamic architecture is is is naturally quite controversial and we know that there were mosques before the Dome of the Rock and the Dome of the Rock is is is is wonderful building partly because extremely beautiful and elegant but partly because of its historicity and its historical context we know very we know as certainly as we can never know anything like this when it was built who it was built by and to an extent why it was built and all these things should talk about but it the the date is around the year 690 so we've got what 670 years since between the death of the prophet and the first standing is Islamic monument and people have been puzzled by this and trying to work out why this long Gap but don't think we need to be this isn't major problem think the the early build buildings that the Muslims put up the early mosques and enclosures and so on as described in in and Hadith and so on but also in the early written early historical sources the first buildings were very simple we have literary descriptions texal descriptions the early mosques at kufa and Basra it is possible that we have archaeological evidence of the first mosque in Bas as well that that's not needs more investigation to be certain about that and what we can be certain about what we we think is that these early mosques were simple enclosures built of mudre brick probably mud brick is the the the key building material of course of of the eastern half of the Islamic world and the earliest mosques which are described are indeed in the eastern part of the Islamic World in bason Kua and so on so we'd expect them to be built mud brick now mud brick is is an excellent material in sorts of ways for building it's it's cheap and easy to construct it's also got extremely good insulating Pro qualities mean it keeps things cool in the summer and and warm in the winter and so on but inevitably its shelf life is quite limited and in particular if it's not protected by roof and so on then it simply dissolves under under the rain and when it dissolves then it simply becomes Heats of mud and it's very difficult to distinguish archaeologically what's going on here and so the sort of materials that the earliest mosques were built of were very fragile or very temporary if you know what mean and the decoration in so far as we know anything about it was either in wood or in Stucco and staco is plaster work plaster surface put on mud brick wall or not very beautiful wall and then carved when it's about as about hard as butter is when it comes out of the fridge I.E it you can make shape in it and it will keep the shape except rather than putting it back in the fridge you you dry it and then you can paint over it with thin layers of plaster and so on and the point here is that the Stucker work Pro could provide beautiful decoration but again it's very sensitive to to weather if it gets damp and so on then then it simply dissolves and Stucker work mud brick or brick and Stucker work were characteristic of cenan building in the pre-islamic period and we must imagine that when the early Muslims settled in in Iraq then they took on the Technologies of building that were already around and they probably took on lots of the workmen that were already around so the fact that these buildings don't survive and and should not surprise us mean that's it's completely natural we don't have to have some elaborate idea that they didn't build buildings or whatever whatever or you know they clearly did they described as say in the in the literature and so it's not until we come to theay rule in Syria that we start to get permanent buildings because in Syria things are very different in terms of materials the building materials of Syria are Stone there two important varieties of stone and no doubt many others but one is the white Limestone or whitish Limestone typical of Syria and and Palestine and the other is the black bassal that occurs naturally on the surface in in many areas in eastern Syria Eastern Jordan and so on and so forth so You' got these two kinds of stone but it wasn't just the the fact there's loads of stone around whereas in Iraq and southern Mesopotamia there is virtually no Building Stone at all in Syria there's tons of it and lot of it very good but also they inherited tradition of building in stone whereas in Mesopotamia in in Iraq from the cenans they inherited tradition of say mud brick and plaster building in the western Islamic World they inherited tradition of stone building stone building tradition that went right back to Roman time times with tall round columns arches and finely carved things finally carved ornamentation and and also traditions of decoration of which the most conspicuous and and and fabulous is the use of glass War mosaics which was developed in in late Roman Byzantine times and was still very much alive at the time of the UMAS as we shall see so the fact that the earliest Islamic architect survives in in Syria rather than in Iraq or indeed in Iran or anywhere else is think largely function not of the fact that it was it was the first and there wasn't any others but largely function of the materials that we used and the fact that it's much more permanent and so on and the two buildings want to go on about today are as you might have guessed the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the and the the OM mosque in Damascus let's start with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem don't know whether this will give me pointer or not yes it does good this is the the old city of Jerusalem an arrow photograph taken in the late 1960s beginning 1970s you see the walls of the city of Jerusalem here of the old city of Jerusalem going down there to Mount Zion and along the that represents the old city and the area of the old city contains two major cultic sites if you like don't mean that in any disparaging sense there is the cultic site that is represented by the Church of the Holy seeler in this area here and the Church of the Holy Seer is of course the main Christian Shrine developed from the beginning of the 4th Century onwards the site where Christians believe that Christ is both crucified and rose again from the dead and the Church of the Holy sea has always been major monument in Christian worship though architecturally must say it's it's bit of mess and then this site here what Muslims known as the harama Sharif the Haram Sharif is of course the platform on which the herodian Temple was built it dates from the late 1st Century BC say 20 or 30th Century BC the site was destroyed and laid waste by the Romans and the temple was pulled down by the Romans in the year 70 and we don't know what went on on this platform between the destruction of the old Jewish temple and the coming of Muslim buildings on on the of the on on the site of the harama Sharif the har Sharif acquires its own reputation for sanctity in the omay period the idea particularly this was the place from which the prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven at the time of the Mirage The Voyage to the journey to see the heavens and there is of course that old tradition that the original of the Muslim Community Traditions reflected in Hadith and other early that the basic the the original kibla was indeed the let's look at what what was indeed Jerusalem not Mecca so there is long tradition of the Islamic sanctity of of of Jerusalem here we see view from the side again taken some time ago lots more as we all know for whatever reason lots of more building here now but here we see the Dome of the Rock at the summit of the rock there and the other main building on the harama Sharif the AXA mosque let me see what else can do and here it is just all right okay here we are again from the south looking at the axam MOs so for whatever reason the the colors are curiously faded here it's the Mount of Olives which is in this Photograph still sort of Open Country almost on on the top right there and the AXA mosque in the foreground and here in the area in front of the old walls here there has been excavated in the late 60s beginning of the 70s an OM Palace just of where you'd expect palace to be up against the South the Kibler wall of of the got different presentation here it's all very exciting this and bit and bit unpredictable but but actually this is rather helpful way of looking at it here is the South Wall of the the Haram and there is the of the ax MOS and here is the what we must think of as the governor's Palace of of my Jerusalem excavated not not it must be said very well published but excavated revealing why Jerusalem is is was political Center as well as religious one but it's clearly the religious architecture what happens here this is better and just lot of the the with the rock but let's have another look here at here's another view showing the relationship between these two buildings now the Dome of the Rock the exterior of the Dome of the Rock was decorated with tiles under the reign of sulan The Magnificent sulan koni in the 16th century so the exterior but the basic architectural Form and Function of this building is dates from the reign of Abdul Malik the axam moscas had much more difficult history the basic form of it is certainly dates from the omide period but at various stages it's been altered and it's been reduced in width the Dome was put on in in the FID period in the 990s 200 years after the original construction but the faing outline Remains the Same let me see what can do here in terms of General views the outside of the of of the Dome of the Rock there with the 16th Century Tiles but let's see if we can go inside here and it's because it's an octagonal building around center it's actually very difficult to photograph in in in an intelligent way but let's have look at this aerial photograph of the Interior here and this is the rock from which the prophet Muhammad is supposed to ascended and it was rock which seems to have been the center of the old Jewish temple as well around it there are circular arcades and arches with pillars here all the way around you can actually many of must know you can go down these stairs underneath the rock or you could when visiting was easier let's see what else can can do as said these photographs are not the most brilliant photographs in the entire world but do want to talk about what's going on here and once again the color is not as good as it should be but what want to talk about particular is is to look at the architecture here and especially we have the pillars which are probably reused Roman pillars here but chosen for the Excellence of their marble around the corner there in the outer ambulatory we have the arch the pillars the peers here peers are basically Square supports and pillars are basically round supports but the peers here are clad in marble coverings thin sheets of marble chosen for their decorative quality put up against the walls there and we can see the Arches around here yeah The Arches around here are alternately what's technically known as the vas that's the sections of the Arches that go around are alternative of made of white Limestone and black Bassel so you get this very characteristic what the Arabs call ablak which is the sort of way you describe horse which is partly black and partly white in English you get this this alternating thing here and then and I'll show you bit more inshah of think photograph of the gold Mosaic up there and the Dome itself the actual wooden Dome itself seems to be quite modern and doesn't have any ancient decoration on it so what are we looking at here and why we're looking firstly at obviously very high status building this is decorated with expensive materials very carefully put together and all the materials in in sense have their own color their own intrinsic yes their own intrinsic color their own that say you're you're not dealing with painting or bits of plaster you're dealing with solid materials you're dealing with solid marble panels you're dealing with glass mosaics and so on with the result that the colors of these things don't basically fade or alter through the centuries the these pillars are still the same got the same marble patterns as they had when they were put up and we're looking here at building that is very much in the Byzantine tradition all the elements of decoration with the possible exception of the ab the black and white parallels there relate to bantine work most famously of course iOS Sophia and Istanbul but lots of bantine churches but this is Byzantine technology ology reused for an Islamic purpose this is not church it's never been church it's not got the same plans as church it is designed to be an Islamic building using the sort of the Technologies of the defeated Byzantine regime and it must be said that it's of much higher standard more elegant standard than any bantine building of its of of its period so it somehow in way encapsulate what's going on in in in the period just as we've seen old taxation systems are reused for an Islamic purpose and things like Milestones the ideas OB reused for an Islamic purpose so we've got the AR architectural Technologies reused for new Islamic purpose but what is this purpose this is not mosque in any conventional sense of the word it has no it is in sense its own it's its own Kibler in sort of way and it looks from the architecture as if it's clearly designed for tawa because you have these these galleries that go round here and so on it's not designed for classic Muslim worship with lines of worshippers in the direction of the that doesn't make sense in terms the AXA mosque for sure the AXA mosque is it has exactly that and I'm not going to go inside the so so what's going on on here what sort of building is this now there is an old Islamic tradition dates back at least to the works of aaki writing in the 9th century that the background to the construction of the Dome of the Rock is that this was period when the har Mak and Medina this context Mecca were in the hands of Zu and therefore the om kff Abdul Malik who' just come to the throne was extremely anxious that his followers should not be obliged to go on the Hajj to the haramain which were controlled by his political enemy and so he it's possible that he devised an alternative hjj Center in Jerusalem which as was explaining before has this Muslim has this Charisma in Islam this is prestige in Islam now this as say is is tradition that goes way back in the Arab sources we don't need to imagine think that Abdul Malik was suggesting that the Caba and and and and Mecca should be replaced on any sort of permanent basis think he was trying to create another while you know until Mecca and Medina were were reconquered or brought back under aay rule he was maybe trying to choose an find an alternative holy site which is which his followers could could visit and perform the taah and and possibly the rights pration now this is this is by no means clear it's the source is much later but it does go some way to explaining the form of the building let's see if can find any more nice interesting photograph let's look here this gives you some idea again of the decoration of the abblock pillars here and you can see up there some of the Mosaic work now the Mosaic works of the of the Dome of the Rock are of course there are no living creatures in in in no that's not true there are living things but there are all plants there are no there are no people and there are no animals as the would have been in bantine context but you can see the black and white things there and the Mosaic there and the think one of the fascinating things if we look around what the spandrel of the Arches here what we see is exactly because they're all made of marble and stone is exactly what we see not just the form but the color of what we saw at the beginning of what they would have seen in in the OM period And in the time of abdon Malik just wonder whe I've got yeah when we see the mosaics these this is what we see they're beautifully done they're technically extremely competent and we get the these sort of vases with their handles and growing out of them sort of tree of life or what look like sort of giant cactuses really but the these plants so we got plants growing out of Earth burs and vases and so on reflecting the luxury perhaps of the production and so think the Dome of the Rock which miraculously has survived for 1500 years almost completely in the form that it was built gives us really clear indication of the wealth of the omad Cal right but also the determination of Abdul Malik in particular to create an Islamic Monument which would be as good or better than any of the Christian churches which were still very prominent and today anyway very prominent feature of the Palestinian landscape it's deliberate statement in the inscription that I've already talked about the inscription that that this very monotheistic inscription but also in the Splendor of the building and it possibly is no accident that the size of the Dome of the Dome of the Rock is just that little bit bigger than the size of the Dome of the Church of the Holy sepa and the two buildings as it were confront each other across the Central Central Valley of the old city of Jerusalem there they're almost like having debate and and certainly that Abdul Malik's building is bigger and more the Muslim building is bigger and more impressive than its Christian counterpart think we should see this as very is Islamic statement here and it as say it's the oldest standing building of Islamic architecture and still to to this day one of the most magnificent so let's look now to the like to get more Beady with this technology and so on but let's look where we came into the omad mosque in Damascus and when you come in to the great Courtyard there the omad mosque in Damascus was built on the site of of very ancient holy place it seems to have been Damascus has been inhabited for millennia and it's probable that this was the site of the first temple of the the Semitic God Hadad it then becomes Roman Temple it then becomes Christian cathedral in the name of dedicated St John and then we're told that after the Muslim Conquest that the holy Precinct if you like the holy enclosure was divided between Christians and Muslims and and it's not until the reign of Abdul Malik's son aled from 705 to 7:15 that the whole of the area is taken over by the Muslims and there is whole discussion in the sources about how this was done how the the kif Abdul Malik tried to persuade the Christians to leave or persuade the Christians to sell it to them they all refused and then his son aled was more determined and he allowed the the Christians or obliged the Christians to move to the Church of St Mary which is very close and which Still Remains the center of melai Christianity down to the present day that's Greek Orthodox Christianity Greek Orthodox arabic speaking Christianity so to speak in in in in the center of Damascus the church itself is is much newer let's look around little bit little bit around the courtyard here with these combination of pillars and arches with the two extra pillars and arches here and here above them this Wing this this Wing is purely Amir this is exactly the building that alw built this has been altered in various ways but that Wing is completely as as we see at the time little bit more here there again this is one of the gates with again the The Arches with two little arches above and you can just see in in in the spandrels that's this bit of the arch here you can see some of the Mosaic work which I'm going to say bit more about later on yep now I'm looking for and this is view taken of the what the Eastern Gate and take this View and it's it's the cover photograph one very like it is cover photograph of the book of the my book of the prophet in the age of the caliphates and because this is one of the areas of the mosque where the original decoration survives you've not just got the pillars and the and the Arches and so on and you can see how the use of marble panels here these are all this is it looks as if this might be painted decoration it isn't at all it's all marble cut very thin and put on the on the stonework and here we can see the as it were the magnificence of omay architecture and the rich the scale of it the rich effects that they were striving for the Dome of the Rock sorry the mosque the omad mosque in Damascus is certainly the biggest and most important architectural Monument of the Mediterranean world in the 8th Century there's nothing anywhere else not you know not in Rome not in Constantinople not in cover from this period that compares in in the sense the scale and the finess of the building and decoration nothing else that compares with the with the mosque in Damascus now I'm looking for I'm sorry not to be more adep at these things what we got here we've already sorry we've already looked at that damn it I've lost it now sorry I've gone back one too far haven't can we get back on yeah and then we go down to Jerusalem Damascus yes wonder if we can display these as images yes perfect large icons are just perfect let me try to lead you inside here now this is interior looking down inside the great mosque in Damascus and it is the most stupendous interior in 8th Century building anyway except that it isn't quite for the the prayer Hall of the mosque was burnt out in an accidental fire in 1893 it probably wasn't the first far but unfortunately at that stage the ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II wanted to make grand gesture and instead of repairing ing what was there with and and using the old pillars and so on to create new mosque the ottoman government decided to sweep it all away and build mosque on the same scale and the same plan but with entirely new materials so what this Photograph shows you while it shows you the Grandeur and the overall planning of the building the actual fabric that you're seeing dates from the late 19th early 20th century there are existing photographs of both the the interior before the fire and the interior immediately after the fire which reveal what it looked like but this photograph is still important and interesting because as say it gives you some idea of the scale of the ambition of the OM building here you see this fun little structure with the dome which you can see sort of partly that this is sanctuary that claims to contain the head of St John the Baptist which when you think about it seems slightly contraindicated in in the middle of the mosque here but it reflects the continuities that we find between late antique Christianity in in some the cathedral that stood on this site before contained shrine to St John the Baptist it was dedicated to St John what is it's clear though the building the actual Dome building which you can't really see is late 19th century along with the rest of it it clearly perpetuates the memory of the way John the Baptist of course as the predecessor of Jesus has certain holy status within at least some Islamic traditions and it's clear that the early Muslims preserve the memory of this holy place and in some way the cult of this this this holy place in in their own time now want to move on from the from the interior here to the mosaics that survive not in the interior of the building but around the courtyard and you can see here for example on one of the outside arches the the the mosaics of these trees and so on up there on the outside damn it sorry I'm going to have to ask you to get back I'm so sorry I'm not really want to get back to the images yeah this this this this will do yes yeah yeah can can work from this sorry about that and let's have look at some more of these one of these this is one of the Arches here with an architectural decoration there no let's try large miraculously it's come back for me when we get inside the the the cloer there we find Mosaic panels and as say these are in the outside around the cler which have survived from period And they're they're very remarkable indeed they portray fantasy landscape or whole series of fantasy Landscapes there is at the bottom of this one it doesn't quite show on this but there is river running by here and there are these big trees and these big trees frame what is clearly village some possibly modeled on some Village in the The Garden of of Damascus with the pointed roofs and so on and the trees behind not very not Grand architectural palaces or anything but scene of course there are no people inhabiting this Village but nonetheless it's that's clearly what it is some other panels This slightly damaged here portray much more elaborate architecture it all looks like Greek and Roman architecture it looks like classical architecture is what you expect because the building itself looks like that but it it's very complicated and what's going on here is difficult always to tell but it's got bit like some of those who have been to Petra in Jordan will have seen great facades like this particularly these little turret bits in the corner here and the whole thing framed in trees let's see what others we can come up with here no that's another view of the of the village it don't how to get it stop on large icons but we'll get there in the end and molish because we he more fantasy architecture and so on again you seen this little bit but it's difficult to know what's going on here you look through the arch to this little building that's there and and the trees and so so what is what on Earth is going on here what is this fantasy landscape it's and there have been lot of interpretations but mean think the most obvious one is this is intended to be paradise landscape it's got the trees the Palaces the rivers running through and so on but it may not be as complicated as that it may or not not as meaningful as that it may just be decoration beautiful thing to rest the eye on while you're in the courtyard of the while you're preparing to pray or whatever and you're surrounded by this vision of this these green and wonderful Gardens and so on whatever it is it shows an extraordinary degree of well one of the most basic level Financial investment but also of extraordinary degree of technical competence in the mosaics and again there's nothing like this anywhere else in the Mediterranean world of its period it's much more refined it's much larger scale and it's much more imaginative now there is an story that again comes in in the early Arab sources that the emperor Constantinople sent Mosaic artists to Damascus from Constantinople to work on these things it's not explain quite why this should have happened or why he should have done it but it does look very much as if this technique of glass mosaics because the glass mosaics they're not Stone mosaics on the walls here is technique that was perfected in Constantinople it was not one that was used in pre-islamic Syria or least not very much where the lots of stone mosaics on Floors but not these glass wall mosaics so it looks as if The the first in this case imported and probably recruited and paid for Mosaic Craftsman from damasc from Constantinople to come to Damascus and create specifically Islamic landscape and form of decoration for if this had been in Constantinople the walls would have had figures of the Virgin figures of Christ figures of the Saints and the apostles and so on it would have been fully populated by human beings and yet and this is said there are no human beings here at all but what we're thinking what I'm thinking when look at this again as in so many other ways the omad ABD Malik anded are appropriating taking over the Royal architecture and symbols of the Byzantine world and using them to create new Islamic iconography new Islamic series of images and to create basically an Islamic Cal style an Islamic Imperial style if you like and there conscious decision so often not to keep mosque not just have mosques that are very simple mud brick things with simple decoration and so on but to create something that's really Grand and impressive and demonstrates for everyone who comes by the Triumph of Islam and the the fact that this was new religion new dominant religion that had come to stay and that its buildings and decorations were as Grand and important and wonderful as anything preceded it think it's very clear statement very clear claim here to establish an Islamic High art repertoire if let's see where there any other bits of of decoration we should know don't think think we we we've seen most of these think that's that's another one of these visions of architecture and so what I've done in this this time this afternoon is is is to try to show how the physical architectural remains make the same sort of point point is what we're talking about the administration and the the the use of writing and so on the way in which particularly Abdul Malik and aled were determined to establish this caiul government this new Islamic government as replacement for and something that was just as Grand and impressive as any of the regimes that have preceded it except of course with the obvious thing that it was now dedicated to the new and true religion of Islam rather than the Pagan religions that supported it and if there's the preious that what came before it and if there's one thing common feature think of of of was one thing that we should remember about the the califate is how much of the establishment of Islamic political structures Islam and Arabic writing and Islamic architecture and so on ultimately goes back to the umats and there is sense in which pretty much all the mosques that were built in southern subsequent centuries for example look back to the mosques of Damascus and and the Dome of the Rock and if you go to the mosan Cora and built of course by another branch of the OM family during the first three or four centuries of Islam you will see the mosque in the interior in the mosque in cordiva these around the tops of the Arches there are these ablak these little these vas have these what is in in of mostly red brick and white alternate arches and this is clearly interpreted in local materials clear echo of the arches of the Dome of the Rock right the way at the other end of the Mediterranean and from the mosque in cordiva because it's it's the building that it is these sorts of decorative techniques pass to mosques in North Africa to other parts of Spain and so on or myed Style again spreading throughout the Mediterranean area and think that's something that is an important part of their achievement so I'm going to finish there but hope that what I've been saying today has in sense given you rough outline of the om califate its history and its and its its eventual collapse but also hope that it's given you some idea of the impact of the omay Dynasty and its policies on much wider areas of the development of Islamic culture and Islamic government and so on and if different decisions had been made at different times then things might by the omad rulers then things might have turned out very differently as it was they established Islamic government and Islamic architectural style and so on in way that was to dominate for centuries to come and that's good reason for looking at them thank you very much