The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hisham Ibn Abd al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads.

• Author: Gordon, Matthew S.

Studies on the Umayyad period are rare and for this reason alone this new work is welcome. Its real value, however, lies in the questions raised by its author regarding the collapse of Hisham Ibn Abd al-Malik's caliphate (105-25/724-43), and, shortly thereafter, the Umayyad polity. Blankinship argues co-gently for a reevaluation of current views on these key events in early Islamic political history. He is to be commended for urging such a reexamination. Indeed, his challenge to prevailing wisdom may be no less valuable for its invitation to other historians of the Umayyad period to search for a synthesis between his approach and those which the author finds wanting.

Blankinship opens with a discussion of jihad, joining it to a helpful survey of the growth of the early empire over four waves of expansion. Citing the Qur an, standard Hadith collections, and modern scholarship, he describes jihad as a central organizing idea for the early community, a "highly motivated mass-ideology directed toward a single goal, [one that] anticipated modern ideologies in its mass appeal and means of creating enthusiasm" (p. 15). The picture he paints is of a society in arms, one in which everything from a key function of the masjid jami to the spatial organization of the amsar had its place in the establishment of God's rule.

Three chapters then set the stage for the author's central discussion concerning the "fourth great wave of Islamic forward movement" (p. 34), that is, the campaigns initiated by Yazid II (r. 101-5/720-24) and continued by Hisham to the great detriment of his regime. The first of these chapters surveys the challenges facing the caliphate as it administered its vast territories and responded to the demands of its large Syrian army. Blankinship appears to suggest that such demands were met only to the extent that tribal and supra-tribal rivalries within the army were successfully negotiated (when not exploited) by the Umayyad authorities. Blankinship notes the difficulty of tracing the roots and variety of Arabian tribal identity. Expressing disagreement with a widely held view regarding the origins and persistence of the Mudar/Yaman divide, he argues that the polarization of the two groupings did much to sour later Umayyad rule. In the two subsequent chapters he details the geographical organization and fiscal policies of the late Umayyad empire, and sets out his views on the politics of Hisham's reign. In response to "domestic"...