Religion and Religious Communities under the Umayyads

A caliph was a ruler claiming leadership of the Muslim community; an emir governed as a regional ruler. From 661 to 750, the Umayyad caliphs ruled the eastern empire from Damascus in present-day Syria. After 756, a separate Umayyad state ruled al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled part of the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain and Portugal), from Córdoba in present-day Spain: first as an emirate and, from 929 to 1031, as a caliphate. In the east, Muslim institutions met Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian communities across Syria, Iraq and Iran. Khorasan, an eastern frontier region that included northeastern Iran and parts of Central Asia, supplies one provincial example.

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Mosques and public Islamic authority

Umayyad rulers marked their capital with major religious buildings. In 706, Caliph al-Walid I (705–715) commissioned the congregational mosque in Damascus on a site that had held a Roman temple and a fourth-century Byzantine church dedicated to John the Baptist. The mosque served as the capital’s principal Muslim worship space; the weekly service of Friday prayer brought worshippers together there.

In Jerusalem, Caliph Abd al-Malik completed the Dome of the Rock in 691. The contemporary inscription above its inner octagonal arcade runs about 240 meters. Art historian Oleg Grabar notes that the text states God’s oneness and Muhammad’s mission, then quotes passages calling Jesus a messenger and rejecting divine sonship. Its wording addresses the People of the Book in a city with long-standing Jewish and Christian sacred sites.

Disputes over Muslim leadership

At Karbala, in present-day Iraq, Husayn ibn Ali and his party were surrounded by an Umayyad force in 680. Husayn was travelling from Medina toward Kufa after the city’s inhabitants invited him to lead a revolt. The force demanded that he pledge allegiance to Caliph Yazid; Husayn sought to return to Medina without making the pledge, but battle followed and he was killed. Shi’a Muslims, who trace religious leadership to Ali and his family, made Karbala a defining event in their history.

Kharijites formed another opposition movement. They began when an element of Ali’s army withdrew its allegiance after he accepted arbitration with Muawiya at Siffin in 657. They argued that judgment belonged to God alone. During the Umayyad period, their activity centered at different times in lower Iraq and, later, Upper Mesopotamia, including northern Iraq and the Jazira, the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates. Their campaigns made religious dissent a challenge to caliphal control in several eastern provinces.

Conversion and taxation in Khorasan

Khorasan, the eastern frontier region that included parts of present-day northeastern Iran and lands beyond the Oxus in Central Asia, shows how taxation could shape conversion. The jizya was a poll tax assessed on people rather than land and associated with protected non-Muslim status. In later fiscal usage, kharaj meant land tax on owners, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.

During Caliph Umar II’s reign, 717–720, a delegation from Khorasan reported that non-Arab Muslim clients serving in campaigns received no salary, while converts to Islam still paid jizya. Umar II abolished jizya for new converts, prompting many conversions. Officials soon restored the levy on many of them, and some converts renounced Islam. In 727–730, governor Ashras sponsored another conversion campaign through the preacher Abu’l-Sayda, who promised that converts would pay kharaj on land but not jizya. When revenues fell, officials again used circumcision and Qur’an-recitation tests to assess conversion claims, then reimposed jizya on some converts. The episodes show how tax rules and religious status could shape conversion in a frontier province.

Zoroastrians in former Sasanian Iran

Zoroastrians remained a substantial religious community in the former Sasanian lands after the seventh-century conquest. The Sasanian Empire was the pre-Islamic Iranian state. Encyclopaedia Iranica scholar Jamsheed K. Choksy notes that the Umayyad caliphate recognized Zoroastrians as ahl al-dhimma, a protected non-Muslim community. Choksy also describes Zoroastrian priests, or magi, copying the Avesta, their sacred scripture, and its Zand commentary to preserve religious learning and support the community’s claim to protected status.

Christian churches and monasteries in Iraq

In northern Iraq, Christian worship and leadership also rested on churches and monasteries inherited from the Sasanian period. Historian Philip Wood summarizes a Syriac hagiographic story set around 660: a local notable named Hugair tried to found a monastery, but Aha, the metropolitan (senior bishop) of Marga and a former monastery leader, refused to consecrate it or send monks and scribes. The story presents monastic leaders as able to regulate new foundations and the clergy serving them. Wood also describes seventh-century monastic missions in which monks of Beth Abhe converted nearby villages and built churches.

Maliki law and legal learning in Córdoba

By the mid-ninth century, Córdoba had a judiciary for its settled Muslim population, including a qadi, or judge. In 824–825, Emir Abd al-Rahman II appointed a jurist from Seville to that office. Historian Janina Safran explains that the emir also selected jurists for a shura, an advisory council to the judge. Scholars traveled to Medina and Egypt to study the opinions of Malik ibn Anas and his students. They memorized, taught and applied masāʾil, question-and-answer legal opinions, which the Cordoban jurist Muhammad al-Utbi compiled as a written reference. This helped develop the Maliki school, a tradition of Islamic law associated with Malik’s teachings.

Safran gives a concrete example from this legal literature: al-Utbi transmits Malik’s view that a Muslim could perform ablution, the ritual washing before prayer, with water left after a Christian had drunk from it. Sahnun, another jurist, allowed Muslims to use water if they were confident the Christian had avoided wine and pork.

Christians and Jews in Córdoba

Between 850 and 859, forty-eight Christians were executed in Córdoba for offences against Islam. Historian Ariana Patey explains that most had deliberately made derogatory comments about Muhammad. The bishop of Córdoba and the metropolitan of Seville worked with the emirs to stop the movement, while the priest Eulogius and his friend Paul Alvar wrote accounts defending it. These actions show a dispute among Christian leaders over public opposition and the risks it brought under Muslim rule.

In the tenth century, the Jewish diplomat and patron Hasdai ibn Shaprut advised Caliph Abd al-Rahman III. The Treccani encyclopedia credits him with protecting Jewish writers and scholars and supporting Córdoba’s Talmudic academy, a center of Jewish study. His court ties helped sustain a prominent scholarly institution within the Cordoban state.