Dirham - Anonymous Arab

The fully epigraphic silver dirham introduced under Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan around 696–698 AD marked a deliberate break from the Sasanian-derived coinage that had preceded it — the first purely Islamic coin type, stripped of all figural imagery at a moment when the caliphate was asserting ideological distance from both Byzantine and Persian monetary traditions. The reform was also fiscal: standardizing weight across a vast territory stretching from Iberia to Central Asia required a type that mints from Damascus to Merv could reproduce without variation in design competence.

The term "anonymous" is something of a misnomer. Most issues carry mint name and date in the Hijri calendar — it is the absence of a caliph's personal name that defines the type.