Umayyads of Córdoba

The Umayyads of Cordoba are the branch of the Umayyad house that established its rule in Cordoba after the Abbasids overcame the family in the East; Ibn Khaldun devotes to them in the Ibar a chapter headed "the account of the state of the Umayyads in al-Andalus among this class who contested the Abbasid call, the beginning of their affair, and the reports of the party kings after them" ¹.

When the calamity befell the Umayyads in the East and the Abbasids took the caliphate from them, Abd al-Rahman ibn Mu'awiya ibn Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik escaped; he reached the Maghreb and sent his freedman Badr to the Marwanid clients and partisans in al-Andalus, who spread his call. He crossed the sea in 138 AH in the caliphate of Abu Ja'far al-Mansur; the pledges rolled in from Seville to Cordoba, and its governor Yusuf ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Fihri was routed, so the affair settled for Abd al-Rahman, who built the palace and the congregational mosque ². He died in 172 AH, known as Abd al-Rahman al-Dakhil; al-Mansur used to call him "the falcon of the Umayyads" for the perils he braved until he mastered al-Andalus and its governor ².

This Abd al-Rahman bore the title amir, and his sons followed him in it without any of them claiming amir al-mu'minin — until Abd al-Rahman al-Nasir, the eighth of them, who took the title Commander of the Faithful, after which his sons inherited it one after another ².

• Text from the harvest copy of the Ibar (Heliopolis 1957), pp. 974-977; the end of the dynasty in 422 AH and the details of the Nasir and Hakam eras and their civilization await the chapter's later pages.