Damascus Becomes the Umayyad Capital

In 41 AH (661 CE) the Muslim community, after the turmoil of the first civil strife (al-fitna al-ula), was reunited under a single caliph, and the seat of the caliphate moved for the first time out of Arabia and Iraq to the Roman city of Damascus. After the assassination of Ali ibn Abi Talib (radiyallahu anhu), his son al-Hasan ibn Ali (radiyallahu anhu) concluded a peace with Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan (radiyallahu anhu), the governor of Syria, and ceded the caliphate to him to spare Muslim blood, an act the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) had foretold and praised, calling al-Hasan (RA) a sayyid (a leader) through whom God would reconcile two great parties of the Muslims (Sahih al-Bukhari). The year is remembered in the Sunni tradition as Am al-Jama'a, the Year of Unity, the year the community was made one again. The Sunni position toward the disputes of this period is one of kaff, restraint: the Companions are honoured and the quarrel is not relived. With this settlement the Umayyad house, descended from Umayya of Quraysh, became the first ruling dynasty of Islam, and Damascus, Mu'awiya's (RA) base for some twenty years as governor of Syria, became its capital. Damascus in 661 was still overwhelmingly a late-Roman and Christian city set in the Ghuta, the green oasis watered by the river Barada. Its grid kept the Roman colonnaded streets; at its heart stood the vast temenos of the former temple of Jupiter, within whose Roman peribolos rose the Cathedral of St John the Baptist, still roofed and in Christian use. The Muslims at first prayed in a part of the precinct alongside the standing church; the great Umayyad congregational mosque that would eventually replace the cathedral was not built until the reign of al-Walid I (705-715), half a century later. The administration too remained Greek: the financial diwan of Syria kept its Byzantine secretaries and its Greek registers until the Arabisation under Abd al-Malik a generation on. The Umayyad banner was white, distinguishing the new dynasty from the black that the Abbasids would much later raise against them. Ordinary clerks work around a rectangular table with papers. This imagined administrative scene does not portray the pledge of allegiance or any Companion. A church-like building, cross, stone porticoes and columns evoke the late-antique city inherited by the Umayyads. Their exact seventh-century arrangement is uncertain. The later monumental Umayyad Mosque had not yet been built. Earlier Muslim prayer use of the precinct is a separate historical question from the surviving monument.