The Historians' Mua A Wiya

This work is an attempt to understand and correctly interpret the commentaries of the early Muslim historians on the Umayyad caliph Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan. Muawiya's depiction in the early Muslim narratives is very much dependent on the period in which these accounts take place and reflects the attitudes of narrators to the events of those periods. Thus one finds that pre-civil war Muawiya is quite different from civil war Muawiya and the same goes for post-civil war Muawiya. There is no evolution or devolution of the character it is simply the period in which this particular character finds himself in that colors the depiction. This work has uncovered the paradigms utilized by the early historians in their depictions of Muawiya. It also shows that although the personality of Muawiya has been manipulated by the early Islamic sources, the essential building blocks of his history remains uniform throughout even within the most hostile of these sources towards Muawiya. Khaled Keshk is Assitant Professor of Islamic Studies at the Religious Studies Department at DePaul University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.