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 Marwan I. Later Sufi tradition recast him as a figure of piety, a caliph who walked away.