Marwan I

One piece of background.

In Sahih al-Bukhari, Zayd ibn Thabit asks Marwan ibn al-Hakam why he recites short surahs in Maghrib.

He himself had heard the Prophet ﷺ recite the longer of the two long surahs there.

That narration does not name the surah.

So his reign was very short and led predictably to a crisis of succession, which added to the chaos.

After some kerfuffle, which need not concern us, a guy named Marwan ibn al-Hakam from a different branch of the Umayyad clan succeeded in solidifying his Syrian power base.

And that is the foundation of what is known to scholars as the Marwanid sub-dynasty of the Umayyad dynasty.

So there's been a lot of very, very intense civil warfare going on, but the last man standing in Damascus, the last man with a standing army, is this fellow Marwan, and his son is...

This Islamic superstate, or Islamicate superstate, which is in fact what ended up happening, might easily not have happened.

That's important to remember.

But a few capable Umayyad leaders, beginning with Marwan ibn al-Hakam at the end of the 7th century, managed to impose imperial hegemony on all this radical religious and social ferment, and a centralized superstate or empire or caliphate is indeed what ended up happening.

Okay, so covering that territory again, here we have our summary by Robert Hoyland.