This work is an attempt to understand and correctly interpret the commentaries of the early Muslim historians on the Umayyad caliph Mu wiya ibn Ab Sufy n. Mu wiya's depiction in the early Muslim narratives is very much dependent on the period in which these accounts take place and reflects the attitudes of narrators to the events of those periods. Thus one finds that pre-civil war Mu wiya is quite different from civil war Mu wiya and the same goes for post-civil war Mu wiya. There is no evolution or devolution of the character it is simply the period in which this particular character finds...