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The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hisham Ibn Abd Al-Malik and the Colla (Suny Series in Medieval Middle East History)

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While the many details present in this work will make it unpalatable for most non-specialists, this work nonetheless offers a highly cogent explanation of the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate. Against traditional arguments attributing the fall to inner conflicts such as provncial and factional unrest, Blankinship attributes the fall to the contradictions inherent in jihad, itself the impetus for the expansion of the political realm of Islam. Jihad proved, eventually, the be not only unsustainable but also deeply self-destructive in the end as it exhausted all of the states resources and tested the loyalty of the state's armies as it continually faced ever more wild and formidable enemies with diminishing returns and profits from bounty. Blankinship, in the end, gives a convincing argument that Hisham b. abd al-Malik's reign was not the height but was rather they beginning of the fatal decline of the Umayyad dynasty.