Damascus Becomes the Umayyad Capital

The scene is set inside a vast walled and paved courtyard ringed by a standing Roman colonnade: this is the temenos of the old temple of Jupiter, the great enclosed precinct at the heart of Damascus, not the open mudbrick lanes of Madinah or Kufa.

On the left rises a high late-antique basilica of dressed stone, its gable crowned with a Christian cross and its facade pierced by round-arched windows: the Cathedral of St John the Baptist, still roofed and in Christian use inside the precinct, with no mosque, no dome and no mihrab anywhere in view.

A single white banner is raised on a tall pole over the gathering, the dynastic colour of the house of Umayya and deliberately not the black that a later dynasty will one day raise against them; a player who knows the colours can date the scene to before the Abbasid revolution.

Robed men stand and sit around a large round table strewn with scrolls and documents in the centre of the precinct: a delegation gathered to settle and witness the bay'a, the pledge of allegiance to one reunited caliph, the assemblies of the Year of the Jama'a rather than a market or a triumph.

A square late-Roman tower stands behind the colonnade among cypress trees, a plain ashlar campanile-like shaft with no balcony, gallery or crescent: the kind of corner tower the precinct already carried, centuries before any minaret, and not an Islamic one.

The whole skyline is Greco-Roman and Christian: a continuous arcaded portico, classical column shafts with carved capitals, basilica gables and the cross on the church roof. There is nothing Islamic in the masonry; the great Umayyad congregational mosque that will replace the cathedral lies half a century in the future.

The papers spread on the table are the registers and letters of a chancery still kept in Greek by inherited Byzantine secretaries: the administration of Syria runs on in the language of the empire it replaced, before the Arabisation of the diwan a generation later.

The bright, well-watered plain and the cypress and poplar trees mark the Ghuta, the green oasis fed by the river Barada that rings Damascus, the fertile Syrian setting to which the centre of Muslim power has now shifted, north from Arabia and Iraq toward the edge of the old Roman lands.

al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa-al-Muluk (early 10th c.): Principal Sunni narrative history. Supports the settlement of 41 AH: al-Hasan's (RA) peace with Mu'awiya (RA), the reunification of the community, and the consolidation of Umayyad rule from Syria. Confidence high for the political sequence.

al-Baladhuri, Ansab al-Ashraf and Futuh al-Buldan (9th c.): Standard Sunni genealogical-historical compilation and conquest-history. Used for the rise of the Umayyad house and the administration of Syria under Mu'awiya (RA). Confidence high.

Ibn Kathir, al-Bidaya wa al-Nihaya (14th c.): Standard Sunni history. Gathers the reports on Am al-Jama'a, the cession of al-Hasan (RA) and the accession of Mu'awiya (RA), and frames them within the Sunni position of restraint toward the Companions. Confidence high.

Sahih al-Bukhari, hadith on al-Hasan ibn Ali (RA): The sound report in which the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) calls al-Hasan (RA) a sayyid through whom God would reconcile two great parties of the Muslims, the prophetic frame for the Year of the Jama'a. Confidence high.