THE EARLY MUSLIM COMMUNITY was deeply concerned with questions of political and religious leadership. Ḥadīth literature is full of traditions about what constitutes good and bad leadership, according to what principles this leadership should be exercised and what were the political, administrative, legal and moral prerogatives of the leaders.This paper aims to uncover Arab-Muslim depictions of Byzantine leadership during the early Islamic and Umayyad periods. It is based on a variety of texts composed roughly between the ninth and mid-eleventh century. Although relying on material derived from earlier collections, the interpretative goals of the later compilers render the compilations the products of their own times, reflecting their own contemporary preoccupations. The problematic nature of these later Islamic sources in dealing with the formative period of the history of the Islamic community includes the fact that they are not contemporary with the events they purport to discuss; that they contain internal complexities, anachronisms, discrepancies and contradictions; and that many accounts provide evidence of embellishment and invention to serve the purposes of political or religious apologetic. One of their strengths, however, lies in the fact that the Arabic-Muslim narrative texts describe events of the conquest , and relations between early Muslims and Byzantines in terms of personalities. Responsibility for decisions, confrontations and outcomes lies heavily with military leaders and heads of state. Although, in the words of Walter Kaegi, this unsophisticated and incomplete view of historical reality gives insufficient attention to other long-term causal explanations, this direction taken by the sources is valuable for answering questions concerning the image of the Byzantine leaders during the early Islamic and Umayyad periods.

The information, selected from these later texts, pertains to Byzantine emperors living in the period contemporaneous with the prophet Muḥammad in the first part of the seventh century and until the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in 750. The texts also include information on a Byzantine regional military elite. The t exts, moreover, point to an ecclesiastical elite, personified, so to speak, by the patriarch of Constantinople who exercised both a religious and political power.