Early Islamic Coins

"For a while, the Arabs continued to strike coins of the Byzantine and Sasanian types. Thus the coin on the left depicts Khusraw II (590-628) on the obverse and a Zoroastrian fire-temple with attendants on the reverse, and one would have assumed it to be a Sasanian coin if it had not been dated, in Pahlawi, to 'year one of Yazid' (presumably Yazid I, 680-83). But the caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705) experimented with ways of redesigning the coinage, and it was he who came up with the classical solution, illustrated on the right. This coin has no images, only writing; the writing is in Arabic, not in Pahlawi or Greek; and its message is aggressively Islamic: it proclaims that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is His messenger 'who He sent with guidance and the religion of truth to make it supreme over all others whether the polytheists like it or not' (Quran, 9:33). Within fifty years of the conquests the Muslims had thus reshaped the medium of exchange. They changed the Middle East as much as it did them."

Photos and captions are from The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World, edited by Francis Robinson (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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