Mu'awiya I

Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan founded the Umayyad Caliphate, ruling the Muslim empire from Damascus between 661 and 680. A long-serving governor of Syria, he fought the caliph Ali to a standstill in the first Muslim civil war, reunited the empire under his own rule, and then made the caliphate hereditary by naming his son as heir. He remains one of the most divisive figures in Islamic history: Sunni tradition honours him as a companion of the Prophet but not as a "rightly guided" caliph, while Shia Muslims revile him.

Early Muslim sources give his birth year variously as 597, 603 or 605. His father, Abu Sufyan, was a leading merchant of Mecca and for years led the Quraysh opposition to Muhammad; Mu'awiya fought on the Meccan side at Uhud in 625. The family accepted Islam only when Muhammad took Mecca in 630, though some later accounts say Mu'awiya had converted secretly earlier. As one of the few literate Qurayshites, he then served as one of Muhammad's scribes. His sister Umm Habiba had already married the Prophet.

Under the first caliph, Abu Bakr, Mu'awiya commanded the vanguard of his brother Yazid's army in the conquest of Byzantine Syria. After plague killed Yazid in 639, the caliph Umar made Mu'awiya governor of Damascus, and he went on to take Caesarea, completing the conquest of Palestine. Under his kinsman Uthman his governorship grew to cover all of Syria. He built his power on an alliance with the Kalb, the dominant Arab tribe of the Syrian steppe, marrying into its ruling family, and he kept the Christian Byzantine-era bureaucracy. He also created the first Muslim fleet, which raided Cyprus around 648–650 and helped defeat the Byzantine navy at the Battle of the Masts in 654 or 655.

When rebels murdered Uthman in 656, Mu'awiya refused to recognise the new caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib, and demanded that the killers be punished. In this First Fitna the two armies met at Siffin, near Raqqa, in 657. After heavy fighting, Mu'awiya's soldiers raised leaves of the Quran on their lances to call for arbitration. Ali accepted, which split his own camp. The arbitration talks failed, but in 658 the Syrians acclaimed Mu'awiya as caliph, and his ally Amr ibn al-As took Egypt. After Ali was murdered by a Kharijite in January 661, Ali's son Hasan gave up his claim in return for a financial settlement, and Mu'awiya was recognised across the empire.

Mu'awiya governed largely through deals with powerful men rather than force. He relied on his Syrian tribal army and gave wide powers to provincial governors such as al-Mughira and Ziyad ibn Abihi in Iraq; to secure Ziyad's loyalty he controversially recognised him as his half-brother. The execution of the pro-Ali leader Hujr ibn Adi on his orders is often called the first political execution in Islam. Early sources credit him with founding government departments for correspondence, the chancellery and the postal service, and his name was the first of any caliph to appear on coins and inscriptions.

Mu'awiya sent raids into Byzantine Anatolia almost every year. Arab forces attacked Constantinople itself, probably in the late 660s or the 670s, though the dates, and even whether a full siege took place, are debated by modern historians. In North Africa his commander Uqba ibn Nafi founded Kairouan in what is now Tunisia, after setting out in 670.

In the second half of his reign Mu'awiya had his son Yazid recognised as his heir, a step without precedent. Opponents such as Husayn, son of Ali, and Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr refused, and after Mu'awiya died in Damascus in April 680 their resistance led to the Battle of Karbala and a second civil war. Later historians, mostly writing under the hostile Abbasids, accused him of turning the caliphate into a kingship; others, including several modern scholars, credit him with holding the empire together.

Our 700 map shows the Umayyad Caliphate, the realm he founded, a generation after his death.