THE ARAB CONQUEST l47relatives with military commands and governorships of the newly
conquered provinces. He is also said in the later, anti-Umayyad,
Islamic tradition to have offended Muslim opinion by laxness in en-
forcing the legal injunctions of the Qu'ran. Mui).ammad's cousin and
son-in-law 'Ali, thrice disappointed of the caliphate, was suspected
of complicity in the murder and during his rule (656-661) civil war
ensued between his partisans and the Umayyads, the powerful family
to which 'Uthman had belonged. When 'Ali was in turn murdered by
a fanatic, the leader of the latter, Mu'awiya, governor of Syria, was
elected caliph (661-680) and, despite subsequent civil wars in the
680s, inaugurated a dynastic rule that was retained by two branches
of his family until 750. Territorial expansion continued. In the course
of the next eighty years Arab armies moved progressively further
eastward over the former lands of the Sassanian empire, reaching as
far as the river Indus and the Punjab in the time of the caliph Hisham
(724-743).
Similarly, earlier tentative expeditions into North Africa in the
late 640s were followed by more determined expansion under the
Umayyads. A permanent military base was established at Quayrawan
(Kairouan in modern Tunisia) in 670, and in 681 an army under
'Uqba ibn Nafi' marched across the whole of the region and arrived
on the Atlantic coast; though they were ambushed by Berber tribes
on their return and 'Uqba killed. It was these Berbers, rather than
the residual Byzantine administration, that provided the principal
resistance to the ensuing Arab conquest. In 698 Carthage, the head-
quarters of the Byzantine governor or Exarch, fell and the imperial
government abandoned its North African holdings. However, the
Berbers continued to resist under tribal leaders, often with consider-
able if short-lived success, until forced to submit by the governor
(wall) l;Iasan ibn al-Nu'man.^9 But by 711 the Arabs' new province of
Ifrlqiya was sufficiently pacified for an expedition to be launched into
Spain, with the results that will soon be seen.
There are obviously a number of difficulties in the way of accepting
all of this account of events as it stands, for it is largely an interpreted
version of that given in the Islamic sources, many of which date from
considerably later periods. Detailed consideration of the problems
of source criticism relating to the history of one region, Arab Spain
or Al-Andalus, will be given in the next section. Many questions are
clearly also raised by the traditional texts relating of the life of
Mui).ammad, but for present purposes only some general queries