For decades Muslims used Byzantine and Sasanian coins; then Abd al-Malik issued gold dinars bearing only Arabic affirmations of God's unity. Founded by Mu'awiya after the civil war that killed Ali in 661, the Umayyad Caliphate ruled from Damascus and drove Arab-Muslim conquests across North Africa, into Iberia in 711, and toward Central Asia. They Arabized administration, built the Dome of the Rock, and struck the first distinctly Islamic coinage. Privileging Arabs over non-Arab converts bred resentment that, with Shia and Kharijite opposition, fueled the Abbasid Revolution ending the dynasty in 750.
In 691, a workforce of craftsmen finished a shrine on a rocky platform in Jerusalem, raising a golden dome over the bare rock long tied in Jewish tradition to the Temple Mount and in Islamic tradition to Muhammad's night journey. The men who paid for it had begun as desert chieftains. Sixty years earlier their people had ruled no empire, struck no coins, and held no capital. Now they governed lands from Spain to the mountains of Central Asia, and they wanted the world to see that a new faith had come to stay. The Dome of the Rock was their announcement, written in mosaic and gold. It still stands, and it still tells you that the men who built it meant to rule.