This book studies the careers of the descendants of five important religious élite families of the Ḥijāz for the Umayyad and early ‘Abbāsid periods (40–218 AH). The eponym of each family was among the earliest and most celebrated converts to Islam and each was a viable candidate for the caliphate after the murder of ‘Umar I (d. 23 AH). Yet, though two among them did rule as caliphs in a highly volatile milieu, no direct descendant of theirs was ever able to assume the supreme rule of the Muslim polity after them. What happened to these highly prominent families? This book presents the sociopolitical trajectories of these élite families.

The Arabo-Islamic historiographical tradition not only ignores the sociopolitical history of the early Islamic Ḥijāz, but it also confronts the historian with many insurmountable technical challenges. The problems of the paucity of the desired narrative historiography and the notoriously unwieldy sources can be overcome if provincial history is made to depend on prosopography, ie if it is taken to be a history of individuals belonging to identifiable groups. Insofar as they belong to increasingly wider categories—family branch, family, clan, tribe, etc.—that have a diachronic presence, a detailed and reliable sociopolitical history of the Ḥijāz can be reconstructed. This is what this book aims to do in a preliminary way on the basis of the five families.