St Cross College, Oxford

the Public Face of the Early Islamic Community

College Seminar given on 10 May 2001

The history of early Islam is one that depends largely on a textual record, the reliability of which is the subject of much debate. The material evidence for the period is very slight indeed, consisting of some scraps of papyrus, a mile-stone or two, as well as other inscriptions on stone. The coinage of the period is plentiful but has never been examined as a complete sequence, due to the lack of adequate catalogues and the historian's traditional fear of numismatics. When we do put the coinage in order, it tells a story which illuminates the process of the formation of a public identity for the nascent Muslim community in unexpected ways. For a culture which is often perceived as fundamentally averse to figural representation, early Islamic coinage provides an array of images of kingship and religious symbolism which is absolutely unique.

The numismatic imagery of this early period is drawn ultimately from that of the two great empires which ruled the Middle East before the advent of Islam, Byzantium and Sasanian Iran. The Umayyad caliphs who were responsible for the first Islamic coinage appear to have gone through three distinct stages in their treatment of coinage design: first imitation, followed by adaptation, and finally innovation. Imitative coinage followed the Late Antique models closely and dominated the local precious metal currency of Islam for the first seventy years. With the advent of Abdal-Malik b.Marwan, the great reforming caliph of the last quarter of the 7th century AD, we encounter a series of exceptional images (including a praying figure and a sword-girt caliph) which reveal a drive towards the formation of a numismatic imagery that reflects the emerging identity of the Muslim state. This adaptive phase came to an abrupt halt five years after its inception, with the introduction of a form of coinage that contravened all the traditional rules: it abandoned imagery entirely in favour of coins which bore religious inscriptions affirming the oneness of God and the Prophetic mission of the Prohet Muhammad. At a single stroke this innovation transformed Islamic coinage from a regalian emblem into a testament to Muslim faith. It provided a prototype for Islamic coinage that was to endure for five hundred years and it leaves the historian with a difficult question - what prompted Abdal-Malik to substitute aniconic coins for figural coins? Did he do it for monetary reasons alone, in other words because it was the only way in which he could create a uniform coinage for both Syria and Iran, or was he persuaded to take this step because his Muslim subjects refused to accept the caliph's image on their coinage? In the answer to this question lies an important clue to understanding why it was that Islam developed a religious iconograpy of a completely different order to that of its antecedents.

Luke Treadwell