Umayyad Caliphate

The first Islamic dynasty, which turned a community of believers into an empire and was hated by much of it for doing so. The Umayyads took power in 661 after the first civil war, moved the capital from Medina to Damascus, and made the caliphate hereditary - a change their opponents regarded as the substitution of kingship for the rightly guided succession, and the root of the Sunni and Shia division that survives today. Under them the conquests reached their furthest extent: North Africa, Spain, Sind and Central Asia within seventy years of the Prophet's death, producing the largest empire the world had yet seen. They ruled it as a small Arab military aristocracy over a mostly non-Muslim population, taxing conversion in effect by keeping the land-tax on converts, which caused resentment among non-Arab Muslims and eventually helped destroy them. Abd al-Malik made Arabic the language of administration, replacing Greek and Persian, and issued the first distinctively Islamic coinage without images. He built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the oldest surviving Islamic monument. The Great Mosque of Damascus dates from the same period. Two sieges of Constantinople failed. The killing of the Prophet's grandson Husayn at Karbala in 680 under Umayyad orders is still commemorated annually by Shia Muslims. The Abbasid revolution overthrew them in 750 and hunted the family down. One survivor escaped to Spain and founded a new state there. Umayyad rule lasted 89 years in the east. At its height the caliphate stretched from the Atlantic to the Indus. Damascus was its capital from 661. The Spanish branch it spawned lasted a further three centuries.

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