Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
Religious writers agree in condemning Mawiyeh for his revolt; and while his succession to Ali is accepted as legal, they place him on quite a different level from the four Caliphs who preceded him. In Mawiyeh they see fulfilled that prediction of their Prophet which announced that Islam should be ruled for thirty years by an Imam, and ever after by a King.
Mawiyeh therefore refused to accept Ali's election at Medina as valid, and finding himself supported by a rival Ahl el agde at Damascus, made that appeal to the sword which Arabian usage sanctions as the ultimate right of all pretenders.
"The above was written in the presence of the under-signed persons, dictated by the Apostle of God, and written down by Mawiyeh Ibn Abu Sofian, on Monday, at the end of the fourth month, of the fourth year, of the Hejira, in Medina, peace be upon its Lord. And thirty-one other signatures. "God be witness of what hath been said in this treaty. Praised be God the Lord of the Earth."
Mawiyeh is, indeed, the type of all the later Mohammedan Emperors. According to canon law, the head of the State is also head of the religion; but Mawiyeh ceased to exercise religious functions in person.
They begin with Mawiyeh ibn Ommiyah, founder of the Ommiad dynasty, and end with Mostasem Billah, the last Sultan of the Abbasides. The third period is a phase of temporal inter-regnum during which for nearly three hundred years the Khalifeh exercised no sovereign rights, and resided as a spiritual chief only, or as we should now say Sheykh el Islam, at Cairo.
The national party, then, had been reinforced, at the expense of the religious, among the Koreysh, who were still at the head of all the affairs of State. Their leader was Mawiyeh Ibn Ommiyeh, a man of distinguished ability and of that charm of manner which high-born Arabs know so well how to use to their political ends.
The Ommiad dynasty, founded by Mawiyeh, reigned at Damascus eighty-five years, and was then succeeded on a new appeal to the sword in A.D. 750 by the descendants of another branch of the Koreysh the Beni Abbas who transferred the capital of Islam to Bagdad, and survived as temporal sovereigns there for five hundred years.
In support of the proposition that the sword could give a title they cited the examples of Mawiyeh, who thus established his right against the family of Ali, and of Abu el Abbas, who had thus established his against that of Mawiyeh. Election, that is the sanction of a legal body of Elders.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking