Umayyad & Abbasid Caliphates 

 

After the death of Mohammed in 632 AD, the leadership of the new religion, and of the newly united Arab tribes, was taken over by Mohammed's upper-class father-in-law. Mohammed left no sons, and in any case there was no tradition of sons taking over in the Arab world. Abu Bakr only lived for two years after becoming Caliph, but he managed to unite the whole Arabian Peninsula under Islam.

 

There was a rebellion of the Arab tribes after Mohammed's death, which is called the Ridda. With their leader gone, they wanted to go back to being independent. Abu Bakr took an army and succeeded in destroying the Ridda and bringing those Arab tribes back under Islamic control.

 

Almost immediately after becoming the Caliph, or ruler, in 634 AD, the second Caliph Umar led Arab raids into both the Roman and the Sassanid empires. Both raids were very successful. The Arabs, who had been doing most of the fighting for the Romans and the Sassanians, knew that neither the Romans nor the Sassanians had good armies anymore. Umar was assassinated in 644 AD, and succeeded by Uthman. Encouraged by these early victories, Uthman and his army organized a real campaign, and by 651 AD they took over most of Western Asia, from the Mediterranean coast to eastern Iran.

 

Uthman was assassinated in 656, and succeeded by Ali, who had a somewhat more radical view of the Islamic faith. Under Ali, the soldiers of the Islamic Empire fought their way through Egypt and North Africa, and although Ali was assassinated in 661, the armies continued and then crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to attack Spain in 710 AD.

 

As the Arabs made their way through North Africa, they built small forts to guard against attack, especially along the coast. These forts are called Ribats. Many of them are still there today.

 

After the death of Ali, there was a bitter religious and political struggle between the followers of a more traditional Islamic faith, who were called Sunnis, and the more radical followers of Ali, who were called Shiites (SHE-eye-ts). The Sunnis won, and established the Umayyad dynasty, with its capital at Damascus in Syria.

 

The Umayyad advance was eventually stopped in several places. In the West, the Romans stopped Islamic attacks against Constantinople in 674-678 and again in 717 AD. The Frank Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, turned back a series of Islamic raids into France in 732 AD. In the East, the Islamic Empire came up against the Tang Dynasty Chinese, who were also expanding their empire at this time. Though the Arabs won a great battle against the Chinese in 751, near Samarkand in Central Asia, the border stayed about the same from then on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 750 AD, the Umayyad caliphs were replaced by the Abbasid caliphs. The Umayyads had been more interested in conquering the Mediterranean coast (Israel, Syria, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt) and the Abbasids were interested more on the plains of Iraq and Iran. The Umayyad's capital was in Damascus, Syria.  In 762 AD the Abbasids moved the capital to the new city of Baghdad in Iraq (which is still the capital of Iraq today).   The Umayyads preferred using the sea whereas the Abbasids prefered to be more in-land.

 

Baghdad was soon a big international city, where people spoke Aramaic, Arabic, and Persian. Many different groups of people lived there: Arabs, Persians, Jews, and Greeks. Many different gods were worshipped: there were Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, in addition to the Islamic majority. By the 800s Baghdad probably had nearly half a million people (that is half as big as Rome during the Roman Empire), and was the largest city in the world outside of China.

 

The one surviving Umayyad man fled from Damascus around the Mediterranean to Spain, where he founded the Umayyad Caliphate of Spain, and he and his successors ruled Spain for many years.

 

The Abbasids ruled all of West Asia and North Africa from 750 AD until about 1000, when they began to weaken. First North Africa broke away and formed independent kingdoms under the Fatimids. Then gradually the governors of each province began to act more and more independently. The successes of the First Crusade in 1096 in taking over Jerusalem and much of Israel and Lebanon are due largely to the gradual decline of Abbasid power. In 1258 AD the Abbasid dynasty ended.