Amr ibn Uthman

Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr ibn ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān was the eldest or one of the eldest sons of Caliph Uthman and played political and military roles during the caliphates of Mu'awiya I, Yazid I and Marwan I. Life Amr was a son of Caliph Uthman from the Umayyad clan of the Quraysh tribe and his wife Umm Amr bint Jundab ibn Amr of the Daws clan of the Azd tribe. He was born during the rule of Uthman's predecessor, Caliph Umar. Biographical details about Amr are often confused in the traditional Islamic sources with Amr's full brother Umar. The historian al-Baladhuri (d. 892) asserts that Amr was Uthman's eldest son to have survived the caliph, who was killed in 656, and the historian Mus'ab al-Zubayri (d. 851) holds that Amr was the eldest of Uthman's sons to leave descendants, while the historians Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d. 1492) and al-Qalqashandi (d. 1418) attribute both facts to Umar. Al-Zubayri further relates that Uthman privately named Amr as the second-in-line to succeed him as caliph after the leading companion of Muhammad, al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam. Amr was relegated to second-in-line because of his young age at the time. According to the modern historian Wilferd Madelung, this testament by Uthman most likely occurred during his illness in the year 644/45 and was discarded as soon as Uthman regained his health. During the rule of the Damascus-based Caliph Mu'awiya I, founder of the Umayyad Caliphate, Amr married his daughter Ramla and they lived in Medina, the former capital of Amr's father. Amr and Mu'awiya likely maintained friendly ties for much of the caliph's reign, but latent tension may have developed between them due to Mu'awiya's suspicions of Amr's ambitions for the caliphate and the influence of their Umayyad kinsman Marwan ibn al-Hakam over Amr to pursue the caliphate. The modern historian Asad Q. Ahmed views these claims as difficult to "verify or refute".