Muʻāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān

Muʻāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān (d. 60 AH/680 CE) was a companion of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, one of the scribes who recorded the revelation, and a member of the clan of Banū Umayyah of Quraysh. The son of Abū Sufyān ibn Ḥarb and Hind bint ʻUtba, he embraced Islam about the time of the conquest of Makkah and entered the service of the Prophet ﷺ, who employed him in the writing of the revelation and of his letters. After the Prophet ﷺ he rose to prominence in the conquests and the administration of Syria, and he became in time the founder of the Umayyad caliphate; but within the sīrah properly he belongs to the company of the Companions of the later Madinan period and the scribes of the Prophet ﷺ.

Muʻāwiyah was of the house of ʻAbd Shams, a leading clan of Quraysh, and his father Abū Sufyān had been among the chief men of Makkah and a leader of its opposition to the Prophet ﷺ before his own submission. When Makkah was conquered in the year 8 AH and the Quraysh entered Islam, Muʻāwiyah embraced the faith with his family; some reports hold that he had become a Muslim somewhat earlier, at the time of the truce, but concealed it. He was then a young man, and he attached himself to the Prophet ﷺ, who drew him near and entrusted him, among others, with the writing of what was revealed and of the Prophet’s ﷺ correspondence, so that he is counted among the scribes of the revelation (kuttāb al-waḥy).

In the brief period between his Islam and the death of the Prophet ﷺ, Muʻāwiyah was among the new Muslims of Quraysh whom the Prophet ﷺ conciliated and honored, as he did others of the muʼallafa qulūbuhum, those whose hearts were drawn to the faith. The sources record his presence with the Prophet ﷺ and his employment in the writing, and a ḥadīth is transmitted in which the Prophet ﷺ prayed for him that God might make him one who guides and is guided. His standing as a Companion and a scribe of the revelation is the substance of his place in the sīrah, the remainder of his career belonging to the history of the period after the Prophet ﷺ.

After the death of the Prophet ﷺ, Muʻāwiyah took part in the conquest of Syria under the caliphs Abū Bakr and ʻUmar, and he was appointed governor of Damascus and then of the whole of Syria, which he administered for some twenty years with conspicuous ability, building it into a strong and well-ordered province and the foundation of his later power. Upon the killing of the caliph ʻUthmān ibn ʻAffān, his kinsman, and the accession of ʻAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, there arose between Muʻāwiyah and ʻAlī the conflict that issued in the Battle of Ṣiffīn and the long division of the community, a matter of grave and lasting dispute in the tradition.

This period of strife (fitnah) between Muʻāwiyah and ʻAlī, and the events that followed, are among the most painful and contested in the early history of Islam, and the community has differed deeply in its judgment of them. The Sunnī tradition, while holding ʻAlī to have been in the right in the dispute, counts Muʻāwiyah among the Companions and forbears from condemning him, regarding the matter as one in which the judgment is left to God; the Shīʻī tradition views him far more critically, as the opponent of the rightful imām. A reference work concerned with the sīrah records these later developments but properly leaves their full treatment and their adjudication to the works of history and of doctrine.

After the abdication of al-Ḥasan ibn ʻAlī in the year 41 AH, an event the tradition calls the Year of Unity (ʻām al-jamāʻa) for the reconciliation it brought, Muʻāwiyah became the sole ruler of the Muslims and the first caliph of the Umayyad line, reigning from Damascus until his death in 60 AH. His reign saw the further extension of the conquests and the consolidation of the administration of the state. These matters belong to the history of the caliphate; within the sīrah, Muʻāwiyah is remembered for his Islam at the conquest of Makkah, his service as a scribe of the revelation, and his place among the Companions of the Prophet ﷺ.

In the sīrah tradition, Muʻāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān is remembered as the companion of Quraysh who entered Islam at the conquest of Makkah and served the Prophet ﷺ as one of the scribes of the revelation, the son of Abū Sufyān and Hind whose house came late to the faith and then rose to eminence within it. His later career as governor and caliph, and the grave disputes of the fitnah, belong to the history that followed the age of the Prophet ﷺ and are variously judged in the tradition; but his place in the sīrah itself rests upon his companionship and his writing of the revelation in the closing years of the Prophet’s ﷺ life.

## References

1 Ibn Hishām, al-Sīrah al-nabawiyyah, trans. Alfred Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 530–31, 553. 2 Ibn Saʻd, Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968), 7:406–10. 3 Abū al-Ḥusayn Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, “Kitāb faḍāʼil al-ṣaḥāba,” bāb fī Muʻāwiya, no. 2501. 4 Ibn Ḥajar al-ʻAsqalānī, al-Iṣābah fī tamyīz al-ṣaḥāba (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʻIlmiyya, 1995), 6:151–56. 5 al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʻlām al-nubalāʼ (Beirut: Muʼassasat al-Risāla, 1985), 3:119–163. 6 al-Ṭabarī, Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulūk, trans. as The History of al-Ṭabarī (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985–99), vols. 17–18. 7 M. Hinds, “Muʻāwiya I,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 7:263–68.