ABSTRACT
The decimation/dispersion of the aristocracy in the Arab conquests is simply a way of saying that the Muslim armies smashed the state in those territories. Maurice Lombard underlined the rapid economic development of the Muslim world as well as its resulting social tensions. Muwiya b. Abi Sufyn is thus the prototype of the kind of economic protagonism that was such a pronounced feature of the Marwnid period and associated with powerful elite figures such as Maslama b. Abd al-Malik, Khlid b. Abdallh al-Qasri, and Yazid b. al-Muhallab al-Azdi. Certainly, at the economic level, the single most enduring legacy of the Late Antique world was the continued use of money and its availability in substantial quantities. The fact remains that however one characterise the evolution that the first two centuries of Islamic economic growth had resulted in, it was sufficiently different from the past to represent a significant advance.
