Best Books on the Umayyad Caliphate and Early Islam

The Umayyad Caliphate ruled for less than a century, from 661 to 750 CE, but the territory it controlled stretched from Spain to Central Asia. It was the first dynasty to treat the caliphate as hereditary rather than elective, the first to mint Arabic coins and adopt Arabic as the official language of government, and the first to build the infrastructure of an Islamic state. It also ended in civil war and massacre when the Abbasids overthrew it in 750, hunting down most of the Umayyad family and throwing a banquet on top of the bodies of those they had executed. These books explain both the achievement and the fall. ## The Challenge of Writing Umayyad History Historians of the Umayyad period face a specific problem: most of the surviving written sources come from the Abbasid era that followed, and the Abbasids had every political reason to portray the Umayyads as impious usurpers. The picture of Umayyad caliphs as wine-drinking worldly rulers who neglected religion comes largely from sources written by their enemies and successors. Recent scholarship has tried to get past this problem using archaeology, non-Arabic sources from the subject populations (Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Persian) and a more careful reading of the Arabic sources themselves. The result is a more complicated and more interesting picture than the traditional one. ## The Books ### Hugh Kennedy, *The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates* Kennedy's survey covers the period from Muhammad's death in 632 through the end of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, with substantial attention to the Umayyad period. As an introduction to early Islamic history for general readers, it is the most reliable and readable option available. Kennedy is particularly good on the mechanics of conquest: how Arab armies sustained themselves in the field, how they negotiated with conquered populations, how the early Islamic state extracted revenue. He is also honest about where the sources are thin or tendentious. If you are new to this period, start here. ### Patricia Crone, *Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity* Crone was one of the most provocative historians of early Islam, and this book, though more specialized than Kennedy's, raises questions that stay with you. Her argument is that the early Islamic state relied on a distinctive kind of military slave, men who owed their position entirely to the ruler and had no independent power base, to build imperial power in ways that Mediterranean empires had not. The Umayyad reliance on Syrian Arab troops and its eventual vulnerability when those troops were no longer enough is part of her larger argument about why Islamic polities evolved differently from their Byzantine and Sassanid predecessors. It is a scholar's book but not inaccessible. The first two chapters, which lay out her comparative framework, are especially worth reading. ### Robert Hoyland, *In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire* Hoyland's book is the most recent and in some ways the most useful of the three because it makes the fullest use of non-Arabic sources. Greek chronicles, Coptic papyri and Syriac ecclesiastical records give a view of the Arab conquests from the perspective of those being conquered, and that view is often startlingly different from the Arabic accounts. What Hoyland finds is that the conquests were experienced by subject populations less as a religious transformation than as a change of ruling class. Christians in Syria and Egypt continued practicing their faith largely undisturbed for decades after the conquest. The Islamization of the conquered territories was a slow process that the Umayyads only partially controlled. ## Reading These Together The three books above work at different levels of granularity. Kennedy gives you the political and military narrative. Hoyland gives you the view from below, from the people who were conquered. Crone gives you the structural analysis of what kind of state the early caliphate actually was. Together they produce a picture of the Umayyad period that is more complicated, and more interesting, than either the traditional Islamic hagiography or the traditional Western dismissal of the period as simple conquest. --- **Further reading:** [Browse all history books on Skriuwer](/category/history)