Governing by inheritance
The conquests of the seventh century gave the early caliphs control of lands that already had long-established governments. Syria and Egypt had been part of the Byzantine Empire, while Iraq and Iran had belonged to the Sasanian state. The Umayyad caliphs (661 to 750) did not begin with a blank page. They kept much of the existing bureaucracy, its tax systems and many of its officials, and over time reshaped them into a more unified Islamic administration. The focus here is on how the empire was run rather than how it was won.
In the early decades the system was loose. Garrison cities such as Basra and Kufa in Iraq and Fustat in Egypt held Arab troops, who were paid from state revenues, while local officials in the countryside continued to keep records in Greek, Coptic, Aramaic and Middle Persian. The papyri that survive from Egypt show that tax demands and receipts in the first decades were written in Greek, sometimes with a short Arabic phrase, and some bilingual documents survive.
Arabic becomes the language of government
A decisive change came under the caliph Abd al-Malik (685 to 705) and his son al-Walid I (705 to 715). Later Arabic sources describe a systematic switch of the administrative registers, the diwans, to Arabic. The reports say that in Syria the Greek of the tax offices was replaced, and that in Iraq the Persian-language records were replaced around 700 under the powerful governor al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. Egypt followed, and surviving papyri show Arabic increasingly used in official documents in the early eighth century. Modern historians treat the exact dates and the neat tradition with some caution, but the broad trend is secure.
The change had practical reasons. A government that wanted central control needed officials who could read the records, and the caliph’s court wanted to be understood by its own officers. It also made a statement of identity. Arabic, which had been the language of the conquering tribes, became the language of an empire, and it began to spread among local people who sought government posts. Because Arabic is written in a consonantal alphabet script that was then being refined with dots to distinguish letters, standardised spelling and writing were themselves part of the effort. Over the following centuries, Arabic replaced Greek, Coptic and Syriac as the main spoken language in many regions, though this was gradual and not forced.
Coinage and money
The same reign brought one of the most visible reforms: a distinctively Islamic coinage. In the first decades after the conquests, the Muslim authorities had continued to strike coins copied from Byzantine gold and Sasanian silver models, with images of rulers and sometimes a few Arabic words added. Around 696 to 698 Abd al-Malik introduced new gold dinars and silver dirhams, which carried only Arabic inscriptions, including the declaration of faith, and no portraits. Experiments with a standing figure of the caliph appeared briefly before this and were abandoned.
The new coins did several jobs. They standardised the weight and purity of money across the empire, simplified tax collection and trade, and expressed the religious character of the state. The reform is also reported to have prompted a dispute with the Byzantine emperor, because of the inscriptions that replaced Christian imagery on goods exchanged between the two states, though the details come from later accounts. Striking such coins used the same hand-hammered coin minting methods that had been standard in the region for many centuries.
Provincial rule and communication
The empire was divided into large provinces, each under a governor, often called an amir or wali, appointed by the caliph. Major provinces included Syria, Egypt, Ifriqiya (roughly Tunisia and eastern Algeria), al-Andalus after 711, Iraq and the east, and Khurasan. Iraq was sometimes put under a single powerful governor with authority over the east, as with al-Hajjaj under Abd al-Malik. Governors collected revenue, sent part of it to Damascus, maintained local armies and appointed subordinates. The arrangement echoed the satrapy system of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in that each regional ruler served the centre but had wide discretion.
Caliphs also tried to keep control through other tools. A postal and intelligence service, the barid, used relay stations on the roads in the manner of the Roman road travel system and the Persian royal roads that came before it. Judges, or qadis, were appointed in cities, and the state relied on tribal leaders and local elites to deliver loyalty. The caliphs also built up a professional secretarial class, largely drawn from families with experience in the old Byzantine or Sasanian bureaucracies.
Tax, conversion and the tensions that ended the dynasty
The empire’s financial system caused much of its trouble. Non-Muslims paid a poll tax (jizya) and a land tax (kharaj). Muslims paid religious alms and, in principle, did not pay the poll tax. As more people converted, especially in Iraq, Iran and Egypt, the number of taxpayers fell, and the status of converts, the mawali, became a political issue. Many non-Arab converts were still treated as inferior, required to attach themselves to an Arab tribe as clients, and sometimes still charged taxes. The caliph Umar II (717 to 720) is remembered for trying to apply fairer rules, but accounts of his policy are shaped by later pious tradition, and fiscal pressures under his successors reversed many of his measures.
Other tensions piled up. Arab tribal factions, especially northern and southern groups, quarrelled over military posts and spoils. When conquests slowed after about 740, the soldiers’ incomes fell. A Berber revolt in North Africa from 740 challenged the privileges of Arab rulers. In Khurasan, many Arab settlers had intermarried locally and had little loyalty to Damascus. The caliph Hisham (724 to 743) kept order with considerable skill, but after his death a series of short reigns and a civil war between rival Umayyad princes weakened the dynasty. When the Abbasid revolution began in 747, it found support among Arabs and converts alike, and in 750 it ended Umayyad rule in the east.
What the Umayyads left behind
The practices set during this period lasted. Arabic as a language of state, a standard Islamic coinage, provincial governors with fiscal duties and an expanding corps of secretaries all passed to the Abbasids and later states. The Umayyad system was therefore less an experiment that failed than a template that the successor dynasty modified.