When his father died in 86 AH and the caliphate devolved upon his brother al-Walīd, Sulaymān stood before him as a minister and counsellor, and it was he who pressed for the construction of the Great Mosque of Damascus. When al-Walīd died on Saturday, the fifteenth of Jumādā al-Ākhirah, 96 AH, Sulaymān was in al-Ramla. As soon as he set out, the commanders and notables went out to meet him; some say they journeyed to him in Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem) and pledged allegiance to him there. He resolved to reside in that city, and delegations kept arriving at Jerusalem—never, they said, had they found a reception readier than the one they received from him (1). He would sit in a pavilion in the mosque courtyard, to the north of the Rock, while the dignitaries sat on chairs and sums of money were distributed among them. He then decided to proceed to Damascus, entered it, and completed the building of the mosque.

In his days the maqṣūrah (screened prayer enclosure) was renewed, and he appointed his cousin ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz as adviser and vizier. He told him, “We have been placed in charge of what you see, yet we have no knowledge of how to administer it; whatever you deem beneficial for the common good, command that it be written.” Among the measures that followed were the dismissal of al-Ḥajjāj’s deputies, the release of those held in his prisons, the freeing of captives, generous stipends in Iraq, and the restoration of the prayers to their earliest prescribed times after they had been habitually delayed to the end of their time, along with many other commendable matters that reached him from ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz—may Allah have mercy on them both (2).

He also ordered the campaign against Constantinople. By land he dispatched some one hundred and twenty thousand combatants from Syria, al-Jazīrah and Mosul, and by sea he sent from Egypt and Ifrīqiyah one thousand ships under ʿUmar ibn Hubayrah. Over the entire host he placed his brother Maslamah, accompanied by his son Dāwūd ibn Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik and a group of his household. All of this was done on the advice of Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr when he returned from the Maghrib—though the sounder view is that he arrived during the days of al-Walīd, as we have mentioned; Allah knows best.

Abū Bakr ibn Abī al-Dunyā said: Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl ibn Ibrāhīm al-Kūfī narrated to me, from Jābir ibn ʿAwn al-Asadī, who said: The first words spoken by Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik [upon assuming the caliphate] were: “Praise belongs to Allah; whatever He wills, He does; what He wills, He elevates, and what He wills, He abases; whom He wills, He gives, and whom He wills, He withholds. This world is an abode of deception, a transient station, a shifting ornament: it laughs at the one who weeps and weeps at the one who laughs; it terrifies the secure and secures the fearful; it impoverishes the wealthy and enriches the poor; it is capricious, toying with its people. O servants of Allah, take the Book of Allah as your leader, be content with it as your arbiter, and make it your guide, for it abrogates what came before it and no book after it will abrogate it. Know, servants of Allah, that this Qurʾān dispels Satan’s plots and rancour just as the light of dawn, when it breathes, banishes the darkness of night when it thickens” (3).

Yahyā ibn Maʿīn related, through Ḥajjāj ibn Muḥammad, from Abū Maʿshar, from Muḥammad ibn Qays, who said: I heard Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik say in his sermon: “The superiority of the Qurʾān over all other speech is like the superiority of Allah over His creation.”