In 689, the Commander of the Believers, Abd al-Malik, had fixed a silver collar around the neck of a captured rebel and led him through the Damascus streets on a leash before straddling his chest and hacking off his head, which he then tossed to the crowd.
Abd al-Malik had long hair, gold teeth, a cleft lip and such vile breath that he was nicknamed the Fly Killer (though this might just be Shiite propaganda), but he was also the monarch who created an Islamic state out of the personal empire of Muawiya – and constructed the most beautiful religious building of his century. His coins show him as a warrior in a brocaded robe drawing a big bejewelled sword and holding a whip, with the inscription Commander of the Believers and Servant of God. ‘The only way I’ll cure this community is with the sword,’ he preached. ‘I won’t be the kind of caliph who’ll be duped or thought weak.’
In the meltdown after Yazid’s death, his family summoned his aged but experienced cousin Marwan to Damascus, where he ensured the succession of his able son, Abd al-Malik. Marrying Atika, widow of Yazid, one of many wives, the new Commander faced rebellions in Iraq and Arabia where Mecca was ruled by a rival caliph. The loss of Mecca was embarrassing. As a young man in that city, Abd al-Malik had been a ‘mosque dove’, learning to recite the entire Quran. But now he possessed the Syrian army, invincible confidence and the ability to choose gifted henchmen: his hatchetman was a schoolmaster turned warlord called al-Hajjaj who spouted exquisitely murderous poetry at Friday prayers in Kufa, Iraq – ‘I see hungry stares and straining necks; I see ripened heads ready to be picked; I am their master … By God, I’ll grind you down to dust’ – before slaughtering its mutinous people. The Commander encouraged Believers to take the pilgrimage to Jerusalem where, over the Foundation Stone of the Jewish Temple, he built the sublime Dome of the Rock, a shrine designed to emulate the Temples of Solomon and Herod but also to rival Mecca and outshine Hagia Sophia. It was completed in 691, Jews and Christians initially joining Muslims to pray on the Temple Mount. It took seven years to subdue his rivals and by the time the Dome was finished, he had retaken Mecca.
After making the
His sons dominated the caliphate – four of them ruled after him and then a nephew, Walid, who converted St John’s of Damascus into today’s Ummayad Mosque and built the al-Aqsa Mosque of Jerusalem. Then he restarted the world conquest on three fronts. He inherited as eastern viceroy the killer pedagogue al-Hajjaj, who encouraged the eastward march, and he offered the governorship of China to anyone who could conquer it.
In 1712, his armies took Samarkand. In 715 and 717, small Arab armies were defeated by Chinese and Turkish troops. Not all the Arab generals were brilliant. One whom the poets mocked was known as the Flirt: ‘You advanced on the enemy at night as if you were playing with your girl; your cock was drawn & your sword sheathed.’ To the west, Walid relaunched the jihad against the Romans, encouraged by the mayhem in Constantinople. In 695 Heraclius’ vindictive great-great-grandson Justinian II was overthrown and mutilated by having his nose sliced off, but he seized back the throne, wearing a golden proboscis and now nicknamed Slitnose. The vengeance he took on his enemies was savage but counter-productive, as it led to his assassination. In 716, Walid sent an army of 120,000 and 1,800 ships against Constantinople, commanded by his half-brother Maslama. The siege seemed perfectly timed as civil strife paralysed the Romans. Maslama negotiated with the
