Umayyad Dinar

The Umayyad dinar was the gold coin of the Umayyad Caliphate, introduced in AH 77 (696–697 CE) as part of the monetary reform of the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. It carried no images at all, only Arabic inscriptions of religious formulas and the year of striking, and it was struck to a standard of about 4.25 g, the weight later known as the mithqal.

The reformed dinar replaced the Byzantine-derived gold then circulating in the caliphate's western provinces. Its design and weight became the model for gold coins across much of the Islamic world for several centuries, and the dinar remained a fixed point in Islamic law and accounting long after the Umayyad dynasty fell in 750.

When the Arab conquests reached Syria, Egypt and Iran in the 630s and 640s, the new rulers did not create a currency of their own. In former Byzantine lands they used the gold solidus and local copper, and in former Persian lands the silver Sasanian drachm. Over the following decades local mints produced imitations and adaptations of these coins, a series now grouped as Arab-Byzantine coinage in the west and Arab-Sasanian coinage in the east.

In the early 690s Abd al-Malik experimented with gold coins showing a standing figure, generally identified as the caliph himself, in place of the Byzantine emperor. These "standing caliph" pieces were short-lived. Within a few years the caliphate abandoned figural designs on its gold entirely.

The new dinar, first dated AH 77, was purely epigraphic. The central field of one side bore the Muslim declaration of faith that there is no god but God, who has no partner, with a Qur'anic verse describing Muhammad as the messenger sent with the religion of truth around the margin. The other side carried a passage from Sura 112, which states that God is one and neither begets nor is begotten, surrounded by a marginal legend recording that the dinar was struck in the name of God in the year seventy-seven.

Most Umayyad gold names no mint. Damascus is generally assumed to have been the main source, although some issues from North Africa and al-Andalus name their place of origin, and the early coins of those regions include unusual bilingual Latin and Arabic types. Half and third dinars were also struck.

The reform of gold was followed in AH 79 (698–699 CE) by a matching silver dirham, struck on the broad, thin flan inherited from the Sasanian drachm but with similar inscriptions, and copper fals coins were reformed in the same spirit. Together these formed a three-metal system that the Abbasid dirham and dinar would later continue.

The reformed dinar was struck to about 4.25 g, somewhat lighter than the Byzantine solidus of roughly 4.5 g. Analyses of surviving specimens show very high gold content, generally well above 95 per cent, and remarkably consistent weights over the Umayyad period. That stability contrasts with the debasement seen in many later medieval coinages.

The name itself descends, through Greek and Aramaic, from the Roman denarius, a reminder that the coin emerged from late Roman and Byzantine monetary practice even as its design broke with it.

Because Islamic law expressed many obligations in gold and silver, the dinar served as a legal unit of account as well as a coin. Classical jurists set the threshold for zakat on gold at twenty mithqals, and rules on exchanging gold for gold, discussed under riba al-fadl, presupposed coins of known weight and fineness. These questions remain part of Islamic finance scholarship today.

Taxes, stipends and large commercial payments were reckoned in dinars, while silver dirhams served for most everyday transactions. The exchange rate between the two was not fixed in practice and varied with the supply of each metal.

After the Abbasid revolution of 750 the new dynasty kept the epigraphic gold type, changing details of the inscriptions rather than the overall design. The Umayyad emirate of Córdoba struck little or no gold until Abd al-Rahman III proclaimed a caliphate in 929. Islamic gold coins reached Christian Europe through trade and tribute, where they were known as mancuses and circulated alongside the Byzantine bezant.

The Umayyad reform is regarded by historians as a decisive step in the formation of a distinct Islamic visual and administrative identity, and the dinar's name survives in several modern currencies.

• British Museum – Collection online
• American Numismatic Society
• Encyclopaedia Britannica – Dinar