Muawiya, who received the governorship of this area from the caliph Uthman, stabilised his power by forming an alliance with a nomadic group, which had been established in the Syrian Arab buffer zone of Palmyra: the association of the Yaman tribes (under the leadership of the Kalb, its most powerful tribe). When Muawiya had gained the caliphate (661) Damascus became the natural centre of the empire and the tribes which had made an alliance with him became the mainstay of the Umayyad dynasty.
Tensions emerged in places where a struggle for land erupted in the pastures and settled territories of the tribes, a struggle between the early followers of Islam and the incoming armies of conquest of the second generation, above all in the fertile Jazira, the upper part of Mesopotamia. Thus hostility erupted between the Qays, who had fought in the Jazira against Byzantium and demanded their own pasture lands (having used up the booty obtained in war) and the Kalb. This conflict was viewed (and established in tradition) as a struggle between the ‘North Arabian’ genealogy of the Qays and the ‘South Arabian’ of the Kalb. As bitter opponents of the Umayyads, the Qays joined up with Abdallah ibn al-Zubayr, the anti-caliph in Mecca, in the second civil war. They were, however, defeated in the battle of Marj Rahit against the allied forces of the caliph Marwan and the Kalb. In any case, this victory was only the first stage towards the re-establishment of Umayyad supreme power.
The foundation of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem marked a bold attempt by Abd al-Malik (685–705) to establish a counterbalance against Mecca in this city, which was also sacred to the Muslims. In any case it took a further eight years to pacify Iraq, which was subjected to the struggles of different parties of opposition. Abd al-Malik, the most eminent of Marwan’s sons, managed to bring about a compromise between Qays and Yaman and to make the tribal troops the means of promoting order in this great empire. With the decline of the Umayyad caliphate the struggle between the tribes once again became a cause of unrest, weakening political control and jeopardising the strategy against the increasing opposition in Iraq and the eastern provinces. Integration in a permanent way could not be achieved by simple policies of expansionism and occupation.
After the Abbasid revolution in 749 the geographical centre of the multiracial empire, Iraq with its new capital of Baghdad, became the political centre too. Syria became a province. The South (with Palestine) remained closely linked with the political destiny of Egypt; the North (the JazÈra around Mosul and Aleppo) was controlled until the middle of the eleventh century by confederations of North Arabian tribes, until 991 under the leadership of the ÓamdÅnid dynasty. When the ÓamdÅnids, towards the middle of the tenth century, became embroiled in the internal confusion of Iraq and by offering protection to the caliphate gained the office of chief amir, they were pushed back by the Iranian power of the BËyids. Nevertheless they maintained the Islamic western frontier in tedious wars against Byzantium and the great Sayf al-Dawla made the court at Aleppo a centre of literary and scholarly life.
In the second half of the eleventh century the Turkish military dynasty of the Seljuqs, having taken Iraq, also captured Syria and Palestine. During the twelfth century several vassals of the Seljuqs ruled there. They were known as the Atabegs (‘tutors of princes’, a term which was at first a high position at court). The Zangids, the Atabegs of northern Syria (Aleppo) and the Jazira (Mosul and Diyarbakr) began the war against the Christian Crusaders, a war which was to last 200 years; their Kurdish general Saladin, who had set himself up as ruler in Cairo and Damascus after the fall of the Egyptian Fatimids and had cut loose from Aleppo, won the decisive victory of Hattin, which led to the reconquest of Jerusalem (1187). The successes of the Zangids and of the dynasty of Saladin, the Ayyubids, not only freed Islam from a serious threat; they gave political importance to the Fertile Crescent, while the Baghdad caliphate was recognised only for legal purposes and fell to the status of a provincial power. The rise of the Ayyubids ushered in a century-long dependence of Syria on Cairo; this ended when in the year 1517 Selim I incorporated the territories of the decadent Mamluk state into the Ottoman empire.
Syria invites Iranian firms to invest in post-war reconstruction
