as governor of Iraq. And just as natural that Ubaydallah
prove himself very much his father’s son.
With Iraq thoroughly subdued and all overt signs of
Shia sympathy quashed, with the trade routes safe and
secure, and taxes coming in from as far away as Algeria
to the west and Pakistan to the east, life was good for
Muawiya. Only one cloud threatened his horizon: his
commitment to appoint Hasan his successor as Caliph. It
had been necessary at the time, one of those concessions
a wise politician makes, but always in the awareness
that things change with time. A great leader’s worth,
after all, was measured by his legacy, and history made
it clear that such a legacy was best ensured by founding
a dynasty. An Umayyad dynasty, that is, with
Muawiya’s son Yazid to become Caliph after him.
Muawiya’s dynastic ambition was to utterly change
the caliphate. On this, both Sunnis and Shia are in
agreement. The protodemocratic impulse that had driven
the earliest years of Islam—the messy business of the
shura, with the principle, if not quite the practice, of
consensus—would become a thing of the past. As
Byzantine despotism had appropriated Christianity, so
now Umayyad despotism would appropriate Islam.
Muawiya had already had himself crowned Caliph in
a coup de théâtre staged in Jerusalem, where he assumed
the former role of the Byzantine emperor as guardian of