Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series
Ummahāt al-Khulafā’: Mothers of the Marwanid and Abbasid Caliphate
- Leone Goodall
- Date
- Thursday 13 March 2025
- Time
- Serie
- What's New?! Spring Lecture Series 2025
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
Following Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān’s (d. 60/680) nomination of his son Yazīd as heir (walī al-ʿahd), caliphal succession became a dynastic and patrilineal enterprise adopted by the Umayyad and Abbasids alike and even by other pretendants such as the Alids. A significant break from precedent, the caliphate was forced to justify and legitimize the patrilineal turn in succession, resulting in over two-hundred years of patrilineal legitimsing rhetoric that can be found in Abbasid era sources, they are thus not invested in representing the role of matrilineal kinship ties.
However, studying the mothers of the first two dynasties of Islam reveals the importance of matrilineality and a clear shift in succession practice in the middle of the eighth century. Whereas caliphs up until 125/743 were born exclusively to free women from outside the family, following the onset of the third fitna (126-136/744-54), caliphs took power who were born almost invariably to enslaved concubines and where free mothers are found, they were invariably cousins.
This lecture will provide an overview of the mothers of Marwanid and Abbasid caliphs, discussing their genealogies, the role of maternal relatives and the type of sources available to the historian interested in the topic, arguing for the importance of using poetry alongside ansāb (genealogical) sources. Overall, Leone Goodall will demonstrate that we should not attempt to understand a succession system in which a pool of heirs can only be selected from the descendants of one man without factoring in their most fundamental distinguishing feature, who their mothers were.
About the speaker
Leone is a postdoctoral researcher on the Embodied Imamate ERC project, exploring kinship ties of the Imami family – both amongst themselves, with local powerbrokers and even the caliphal family in Damascus and Baghdad. He primarily makes use of prosopography, classical Arabic poetry, and historiography in Greek, Armenian and Arabic. His other research interests include the role of Armenia and Armenians in early Islam and inter-cultural transmission in Late Antiquity. In 2024 he completed his PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Dr. Marie Legendre.
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