Muawiya II

Mu'awiya II took power in 683 during the Second Fitna, a civil war that had already reduced Umayyad control to Damascus and patches of southern Syria while a rival claimed the caliphate from Mecca. He was chronically sick, did little, and reportedly kept his father Yazid I's tax cuts in place. Then came the sermon recorded by Al-Ya'qubi: a public denunciation of his predecessors and an abdication — though historians treat the account as possibly sectarian fiction. He died without children, ending the Sufyanid line and triggering the succession crisis that brought the Marwanids to power under M…