Heirs to the Caliphate: Continuity, territoriality and gender in the accession of the late Umayyads and early Abbasids.

The caliphate as an Islamic institution is often perceived as evolving in its form from one dynasty to another and defined by men such as the caliph and the elite of the caliphal capital. This research project will reveal how the study of the earliest dynasties of Islamic history demonstrates that polycentric dynamics were crucial in the choice of the caliph. Heirs apparent will be examined, their claims to caliphal succession, the role of their mothers and wives and the territorial power base they acquired prior to their accession at the periphery of the empire or even at the frontier.

The transition from the Umayyads (661-750) to the Abbasids (750-1258) is presented in early Abbasid historiography as a watershed moment in the history of Islamic polities, with a fixed and clear-cut date: 750, which witnessed the success of the so-called 'revolution'. However, perusal of a wider variety of source material demonstrates that the late Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphs were not significantly different from one another when looking at dynamics of succession. New caliphs often supplanted brothers, half-brothers and cousins following the appointment of two or more heirs. This system initiated by the Umayyad caliph Marwan (d. 685) didn't only provide a title (wali al ahd, heir apparent) to the princes but allowed the different heirs to capitalize on a distinct power base separate from the capital of the empire. This territorial repartition was a key trigger to the fourth civil war (811-813), once the capital had shifted to Baghdad under the Abbasids. During this war, two heirs opposed each other, al Amin (d.813) in Baghdad and alMa'mun (d. 833) in Khurasan (nowadays Afghanistan). This was a turning point after which the appointment of potential heirs to provincial positions came to an end, marking a clear shift in legitimation strategy. This poly-centric dynamic to caliphal succession was therefore a unique feature of the long 8th century, however it has been overlooked so to adhere to the centrist narrative presented in the Arabic sources. This will be the fundamental issue explored in this PhD dissertation.

The proposed PhD research will focus on the means through which caliphal heirs assumed territorial power in the late Umayyad and early Abbasid period to generate a counter-narrative to the traditional perception of early Islamic monarchic succession. The generation of a support base in the provinces by the heir apparent demonstrates that the path to succession lay not in the centre of the empire but at the periphery. The role of the heirs during their predecessors' reign in generating religious and political legitimacy is also visible through their leadership of military campaigns and of the pilgrimage (hajj), both also occurring far from the capital.
The originality of this topic will be to look at new actors. Not restricted merely to how heirs rose to power and became caliphs, this research will tie in the previously under-studied heirs who didn't become caliphs. A second focus will be the mothers and wives of heirs apparent. All heirs had the same father, the caliphs, but they often all had different mothers. As most of them were elite Arab women, they provided the heirs with genealogical prestige and allowed for profitable tribal alliances either ensuring military support or a regional connection.
For the source material, a comparative approach will be adopted, making use of local histories in Arabic, Greek and Armenian as well as documentary sources in comparison to the traditional corpus of Abbasid literature. In that sense, this work will draw on the methodology that has proved so successful for the earlier period of Islamic history where historians had to make use of local non-Muslim and multilingual sources.