In 683 Umayyad troops took Medina, but lifted their siege of Mecca in the confusion that followed the premature death of Yazid I and his infant son Muawiyyah II that year. Yet again the ummah was ripped apart by civil war. Ibn al-Zubayr achieved widespread recognition as caliph, but he was isolated in the Hijaz when Kharajite rebels established an independent state in central Arabia in 684; there were other Kharajite uprisings in Iraq and Iran;
Shiis rose up in Kufah to avenge the death of Husain, and to promote the candidature of another of Ali's sons. The rebels all asserted the egalitarian ideals of the Quran, but it was the Syrian forces who carried the day in the name of Manvan, an Umayyad cousin of Muawiyyah I, and his son Abd al-Malik. By 691 they had disposed of all their rivals, and the following year had defeated and killed Ibn al-Zubayr himself.
Abd al-Malik (685-705) was able to reassert Umayyad rule, and the last twelve years of his reign were peaceful and prosperous. He was not yet an absolute monarch, but after the second fitnah he was clearly tending that way. He upheld the solidarity of the ummah against the local Arab chiefiains, brought rebels to heel and pursued a determined policy of centralization. Arabic replaced Persian as the official language of the empire; for the first time there was an Islamic coinage, decorated with Quranic phrases. In Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock was completed in 691, the first major Islamic monument, which proudly asserted the supremacy of Islam in this holy city which had a large Christian majority.
It announced that Islam had come to stay. The Dome also laid the foundations of the unique architectural and artistic style of Islam. There was to be no figurative art, which might distract worshippers from the transcendence that cannot adequately be expressed in human imagery. Instead, the inside of the dome was decorated with Quranic verses, the Word of God. The dome itself, which would become so characteristic of Muslim architecture, is a towering symbol of the spiritual ascent to heaven to which all believers aspire, but it also reflects the perfect balance of tawhid.
Its exterior, which reaches towards the infinity of the sky, is a perfect replica of its internal dimension. It illustrates the way in which the human and the divine, the inner and the outer worlds complement one another as two halves of a single whole. Muslims were becoming more confident, and were beginning to express their own unique spiritual vision.
Power Wars: Divided Territories and Growing Gaps
