A Comparative Study of the Legitimate Foundations of the Umayyads and the Abbasids (The First Era)

The Umayyads and the Abbasids (the first Era) made many attempts to gain legitimacy. To this end, the Umayyads tried to put forward some fundamentals such as their attribution to Quraysh, Uthman's vengeance, Omar’s and Uthman’s representativeness, and the party spirit of the Arabs. The Abbasids posed some other fundamentals such as their attribution to Quraysh, Hussein’s (AS) vengeance, Abu Hashim’s representativeness and inheritance. In this way, they tried to convince the majority of the society to accept their caliphates. However, despite all these measures that they made to legitimize their caliphates, since their caliphates were not based on the religious doctrines, they never gained legitimacy. The fundamentals posed by these two groups in acquiring legitimacy have similarities and differences, which are studied in full and in an integrated and comparative way in this research. This paper, by implementing a descriptive-analytical method, examines the legitimacy fundamentals of the Umayyad and the Abbasid governments and compares their fundamentals with each other.