A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [118]
The man who issued the two coins I want to discuss was Abd al-Malik, who ruled as the ninth caliph, or leader of the faithful, in succession to the Prophet Muhammad. Both coins were issued in Damascus within twelve months, across the Hijri years 76 and 77 – that is, AD 696–7. They are both of gold and are the same size, the size of a British penny though a little bit heavier. But they are utterly different in design. One coin shows the caliph; the other has no image at all. The change reveals how, in these critical early years, Islam was defining itself not just as a religious but also as a political system.
On the front of the first coin, where a Byzantine coin would have had the emperor, is a full-length figure of the caliph Abd al-Malik. It’s the earliest known depiction of a Muslim. And on the back, where the Byzantines would have put a cross, there is a column with a sphere at the top.
Abd al-Malik is shown full-figure, standing and bearded, wearing Arab robes and a Bedouin scarf headdress, with his hand resting on a sword at his waist. It’s a fascinating image – a unique source for our knowledge of the dress and the regalia of the early caliphs. His pose is menacing, and he looks as though he’s about to draw his sword. The lines below his waist are almost certainly meant to represent a whip. It is an image to inspire fear and respect, an image that makes it clear that the eastern Mediterranean now has a new faith and a formidable new ruler.
A letter from one of his governors echoes the image’s implicit message:
It is Abd al-Malik, the commander of believers, a man with no weaknesses, from whom rebels can expect no indulgence! On the one who defies him falls his whip!
He cuts an impressive figure – although a less reverential source tells us that he had such appalling halitosis that he was nicknamed ‘the fly-killer’. But, bad breath or not, Abd al-Malik was the most important Muslim leader since Muhammad himself, because he transformed what might have been merely a string of ephemeral conquests into a state that would survive in one form or another until the end of the First World War.
Abd al-Malik was a new breed of Islamic leader. He had no personal memory of Muhammad, and he shrewdly saw how best to exploit the traditions of earlier empires – especially Rome and Byzantium – in order to establish his own, as Professor Hugh Kennedy, of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, explains:
In the years that followed the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, the caliphs were essentially the political and religious leaders of the Muslim community. All Arab Muslims in the first century of Islam realized that this was a new state – that what went on before wasn’t really relevant. These caliphs were not the successors of the Byzantine emperors or of the Sasanian king of kings. They might look to these people for solutions to administrative problems – how you collect money and indeed what sort of money you make – but they wouldn’t see themselves performing the same sort of role. This was a new dispensation.
One of the administrative solutions that Abd al-Malik borrowed from the Byzantine emperors was how to manage the currency. Until now, the new Islamic empire had used hand-me-down coins from the pre-conquest era, or imported gold coins, especially those from Byzantium. But Abd al-Malik quickly saw that there would be economic instability if the quantity and the quality of the money supply was not controlled. He understood that coins are literally the stamp of authority, announcing the dominant power in the society using them – and he knew that that power was now his. In the pre-modern world, coinage was usually the only mass-produced item in daily use, and it was therefore a supremely significant element in the visual culture