Governors and Provincial Elites in Umayyad Egypt

Abstract

This article focuses on the confrontation that broke out sometime in 709 or 710 CE between a hundred men led by members of the Banū Fahm and the Umayyad governor of Egypt, Qurra b. Sharīk. After presenting the case in question, the article explains who participated in the conflict, what their motives and expectations were, and how the failure of these expectations resulted in the confrontation with the governor and his troops. I suggest that although early Muslim historians depicted the conflict in religious terms, it was also a result of the specific power dynamics between the governor and provincial Arab elites and of competition over the material and social privileges of elite families in Egypt.