Assignment #3: Understanding Some Umayyad Dilemmas (due 9/30 before class)
Read posted on Blackboard under Course Materials excerpts 3, 4, 5 and 6 (to the end of p.99) from the texts presented in Gerald Hawting, “Umar II and the Treatment of the Mawali,” in Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age: A Sourcebook, edited by Nimrod Hurvitz et al., 94-100, Oakland: California University Press, 2020.
Two of the excerpts come from Al-Tabari, one from Ibn Abd al-Hakam, and one from Al-Baladhuri, all historians of the early Abbasid period. The events they were describing occurred about a century before their birth, at the time of the eighth Umayyad caliph Umar Ibn Abd al-Aziz (d. 720) and the Governor of Iraq, Hajjaj Ibn Yusuf (d. 714).
Based on a careful reading of the excerpts and on the readings, podcast, and class discussion about the Umayyads, write a short piece addressing all or some of these questions: (1) What do the excerpts tell us about the dilemmas the mawali posed for the Umayyads? (2) What kinds of burdens were the mawali subjected to? (3) What kinds of visions of Islam we see competing, according to these excerpts, and what kinds of arguments were the proponents of these visions making? (4) Does it matter that the authors of these accounts were writing a century and more after the events they describe?
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