Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan (647–705)

Fifth caliph of the Umayyad dynasty, who reigned 685–705, based in Damascus. He waged military campaigns to unite Muslim groups and battled against the Greeks. He instituted a purely Arab coinage and replaced Syriac, Coptic, and Greek with Arabic as the language for his lands. His reign was turbulent but succeeded in extending and strengthening the power of the dynasty. He was also a patron of the arts.

Abd al-Malik succeeded to the caliphate after a civil war, in the face of widespread opposition, and spent the early years of his reign restoring order to his realm. To this end he established peace with the Muslim state's traditional enemy on its northern frontier, Byzantium. It was during his reign that the ‘Arabization’ of the Islamic empire took place. Previously the Muslims had retained the old Byzantine and Sassanian administrations in the conquered provinces for convenience, but now they were rationalized into a centralized system with Arabic as the official language. His introduction 696 of a native Arab coinage, to replace the imitations of Persian and Byzantine coins which had previously been in circulation, gave a strong boost to the Muslim economy. Abd al-Malik's work of pacification and consolidation helped to make his son Suleiman (reigned 715–17) powerful enough to lay siege to Byzantium itself 717, and to carry Muslim arms into India and North Africa.