Lands, Peoples and Languages under Umayyad Rule

The Umayyads ruled a caliphate, a state headed by a caliph as sovereign of the Muslim community, from Damascus between 661 and 750. In al-Andalus they later governed an emirate, a state led by a Muslim ruler bearing the title emir, from 756 to 929 and a caliphate from 929 to 1031. Al-Andalus occupied much of the Iberian Peninsula, in modern Spain and Portugal. The two Umayyad states governed regions with different institutions: Syrian cities and Christian communities, Iraq’s garrison towns, Egypt’s Nile farming districts, North Africa’s coastal cities and Amazigh-speaking hinterlands, and Iberian towns and countryside. Coptic tax officials, Persian-speaking clerks, Amazigh soldiers and local converts all shaped how Umayyad rule worked.

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Damascus, clerks and the languages of government

The Damascus court governed through specialized offices. The dīwān al-kharāj assessed and recorded tax revenue; the dīwān al-rasāʾil drafted official correspondence; the dīwān al-jund maintained military affairs and pay registers; and the dīwān al-khātam sealed documents and kept copies to guard against alteration. These offices needed local expertise as well as officials attached to the ruling court.

The languages of this paperwork changed at different rates. Greek continued to be used by state secretaries in Syria and Egypt for decades after the conquests. Persian continued in the chanceries and financial offices of Iraq and the former Sasanian Empire, the Persian state conquered by Arab armies in the seventh century, while correspondence from the court to provincial officials was written in Arabic. In Iraq, the governor al-Ḥajjāj’s Arabic-language reform of the tax bureau is associated with 697. One of its technical officials, Ṣāliḥ ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, was himself Persian and had worked under the earlier Persian secretary Zādān-Farrukh.

Christian communities in Syria and Palestine also maintained their own writing and worship. In the Syrian hinterlands and Mesopotamia, Syriac, a Christian literary language in Aramaic, was a major church language; Christian writers also used Greek and Christian Palestinian Aramaic. From the late eighth into the early ninth century, some Greek Orthodox communities, known as Melkites, in Syria and Palestine adopted Arabic for public and church writing, adding it to older Christian traditions.

Iraq and the eastern frontier

Kūfa and Basra became Arab garrison towns and bases for campaigns eastward. Khorasan, the eastern frontier province extending from northeastern Iran toward modern Afghanistan and Central Asia, was first entered by Arab armies in the 640s. In the early decades, they negotiated treaties and annual tribute with individual town rulers, who remained in office, collected payment in cash or kind, and kept local tax arrangements and social hierarchies. The armies often returned to Basra rather than staying in each town. During political upheavals, local rulers withheld tribute or rebelled. Caliph Muʿāwiya (661–680) renewed efforts to centralize control, and by the early 670s garrisons were established at Marv and other towns. A later phase of expansion under Qutayba ibn Muslim (705–715) pushed into Sogdia and across the Oxus, the Amu Darya river.

In Transoxiana, the region beyond the Oxus in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, Qutayba ibn Muslim’s campaigns of 705–715 combined conquest with attempts to establish Islamic practice. Accounts describe destroyed local religious monuments, new mosques, Qur’an recitation in Persian and payments to encourage attendance at Friday prayer. The same accounts report that some inhabitants returned to earlier practices when Muslim forces left. Here conversion, political control and the use of Persian or Arabic were related but separate changes: local communities might encounter Islam through military occupation while continuing to speak Iranian languages and negotiating their own rulers’ obligations.

The status of mawālī also linked conversion to service and patronage. A mawlā was a client or affiliate attached to a patron or group; the word described a social relationship, not a language or a single ancestry. In the eastern provinces, some converts sought entry to the army or protection for property through Muslim affiliation. Access to stipends and tax treatment then became part of local political disputes.

Egypt and the work of tax collection

Egypt’s Umayyad administration centered on Fusṭāṭ, the garrison settlement that developed beside the older cities of the Nile Valley. Its officials drew on Greek, Coptic and Arabic paperwork. Coptic was the indigenous Egyptian language, Greek remained an administrative and legal language, and Arabic was the language of the new rulers. Duke University’s catalogue identifies a seventh- or eighth-century Coptic papyrus as a tax receipt issued by Phoibammon to Kosma; its recto also carries a private letter in Coptic. The catalogue dates it only to a broad period, not to a specific Umayyad year.

From about 715 to 740, the government began assessing peasant farmers individually and making them directly liable to its local tax official. Before this change, Arab officials set a gross assessment for each district; a local Egyptian notable, often a churchman, then assessed individual villagers, collected their taxes and remitted the total to the state. The new arrangement bypassed that intermediary. Efforts to replace Coptic administrative personnel with Muslim appointees began around 717, but documents show Coptic officials still working well into the eighth century. Adult non-Muslim men also faced a religious poll tax.

North Africa: settlement, service and revolt

Umayyad North Africa joined different environments. The coastal province of Byzantine Africa, including much of modern Tunisia, had cities and fertile farming plains where Latin was widely used. Farther west, the Maghreb (western North Africa) and the Sahara’s edge included settled and mobile Amazigh peoples (called Berbers in medieval Arabic sources) alongside Christians, Jews and other religious groups. Pastoralism and subsistence farming mattered more in some of these hinterlands than in the urban tax districts.

After Umayyad conquest in the late seventh century, Arab garrisons and new cities such as Kairouan in modern Tunisia became bases for rule in Ifriqiya, the central North African province. Amazigh soldiers were essential to expansion: some crossed to al-Andalus with Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād and settled there, while others received land in Ifriqiya and served in its armies. Conversion could bring access to military service, land or a patron relationship, yet those gains did not guarantee equal treatment. Under ʿUmar II (717–720), policies described by historian Corisande Fenwick included removing the poll tax from non-Arab Muslims and granting mawālī soldiers stipends comparable to Arab troops. In Kairouan in 720, a Berber guard rebelled after a governor ordered their hands tattooed with their names and the words “Guard of Yazid,” marks associated with enslaved people.

Fiscal and military grievances widened under later governors. In 739–740 an uprising that began in western Morocco spread across North Africa. Berber soldiers objected to unequal booty, frontline assignments and governors’ demands; Muslim Berber populations also faced renewed poll and land taxes and slave levies. The revolt drew in rural and urban communities as well as soldiers. The rebels were Muslims resisting Umayyad rule, so shared religious affiliation did not erase disputes over tax and military status.

Iberia and the rise of Andalusi Arabic

In 711 an army that included Arab and Berber forces entered Iberia, where a large Christian population remained under Muslim government. Córdoba served first as the provincial capital of al-Andalus, then as the seat of an independent emirate from 756 and a caliphate from 929 to 1031. Some Berber troops settled in the peninsula, while further Arabic-speaking migration from the east accompanied the later caliphate.

Arabic developed in contact with the Romance varieties spoken by local communities and Berber languages brought by migrants. Linguist Ángeles Vicente describes Andalusi Arabic as a spoken variety shaped by these contacts. She argues that Arabic gradually became the first language of a majority between the conquest of 711 and the caliphate’s establishment in 929, partly because Arabic carried social prestige in an Islamic society. Andalusi Arabic came to be used by people of different religions, while Romance remained the first language of many rural communities and lower-status urban groups into the twelfth century.

The Upper March along the Ebro in northeastern Iberia offers a political example of conversion and local power. The Banū Qāsī, a local family that converted to Islam, collaborated with Córdoba and held regional power. In Córdoba itself, the Christian layman Paulus Alvarus wrote a Latin religious treatise in 854 during disputes over Christian public identity. Arabic’s growing use among Christians and the continued production of Latin Christian writing belonged to the same changing society. See Arabic expanded through government, settlement, religion and learning for the role of language in education and written culture.