Though they may have been necessary, these reforms to the tax system stoked resentment against the Umayyads and, together with the run of defeats experienced by the imperial armies in the 730s, added to the sentiment that the Umayyads were unjust and ungodly rulers. The Iraqi participants in Ibn al-Ash'ath’s revolt in 701 first demonstrated their animosity by burning the tax registers, a sure sign of the object of their fury. Many different groups felt that they had lost out, in particular, local elites and recent converts to Islam. The former had been acting as tax collectors for the Arabs: the taxes on many cities and regions were assessed as a lump sum, and these local notables were entrusted with the task of apportioning it among the local inhabitants, a job that gave them autonomy, status, and the means to work the system as best suited them. As a part of the reforms, however, there was a gradual shift from collective to individual assessment, with the actual collection carried out more and more by agents directly appointed by the state, diminishing the role of the local nobility.25
Recent and would-be converts to Islam, especially low-status individuals, often encountered hostility from the authorities and were frequently denied the exemption from poll tax that they had been promised when they converted. This situation worsened as the number of converts increased, which happened in the aftermath of the failed siege of Constantinople when military campaigns were often supplemented by missionary activities, presumably in the belief that converts would be more loyal to the regime. For example, 'Umar II dispatched a group of Muslim religious scholars to Africa and Mauritania to disseminate Islam there in 718. Over in the east, Ashras ibn 'Abdallah, the governor of Khurasan (727—30), advertised for “a man possessing piety and virtue whom I may send across the Oxus to call people there to Islam”; the man they hired preached in the environs of Samarkand, declaring that those who became Muslim would be freed of the poll tax, “and the people flocked to him.” New mosques were built and instructors taught the neophytes how to pray and recited Qur'anic verses with them in Persian. However, when Ashras realized that a consequence of his policy was a sharp drop in tax revenues, he ordered: “Take the tax from whomever you used to take it from,” and so they reimposed the poll tax on those who had become Muslim, prompting many to apostatize.26
These and other grievances drove many into the arms of various opposition movements. There were two broad umbrella groups, which came in many local varieties, but represented two very different attitudes toward government. At one end of the spectrum were the Kharijites, who argued that the office of caliph should go to the most qualified and suitable person, irrespective of his ethnicity or ancestry, and that the caliph should be a first among equals rather than an absolute ruler. Charisma and authority rested, they felt, principally with the community, which had a direct relationship with God and did not need a powerbroker to act on their behalf. At the other end of the spectrum were the Shi'ites. Instead of a charismatic community served by the leader, they supported the notion of a charismatic leader served by the community. 'Ali, by virtue of his marriage to the daughter of Muhammad, had inherited the prophet's religious charisma, and it continued to flow through his descendants, whom Shi'ites therefore strove to place at the helm of the Islamic world. Both views of the leadership contrasted with the position of the Umayyads, who stressed that the right to determine political and religious matters had passed from prophets to caliphs and that they were the clan best suited to discharge this office.
Protagonists of these two anti-government movements had already been flexing their muscle during the second Arab civil war, but by the 730s they had become more numerous, largely by winning over many non-Arabs to their cause, and more ambitious. This is apparent in the numismatic record, for many of them were minting their own coins across surprisingly large areas. In northwest Africa, as we have seen, there was a rash of Kharijite uprisings, some of which led to the installation of local rulers at places like Tripoli and Tlemcen (in modern west Algeria). In Yemen one rebel had himself proclaimed caliph in 746, taking the regnal title “seeker of truth” (talib al-haqq), and went so far as to seize control of Mecca and Medina, though this prompted a swift response from the Umayyad authorities, who assassinated the pretender in 748. Kharijite revolutionaries were endemic in the countryside of the Jazira, but the disorder of the 740s allowed them to expand their operations, and coins struck at Mosul and Kufa by a local Kharijite leader and scholar show that they had managed to extend their authority to cities.27
Shi'ite rebels did particularly well in the former Persian lands at least in part because the idea of a leader belonging to a sacred lineage and endowed with divine charisma gelled well with ancient Iranian ideas of kingship. Also Shi'ism’s belief that the gates of prophecy and divine inspiration were still open made it more receptive than other Islamic sects to tenets of the Persian religious tradition, such as messianism, dualism, cyclical time, and indwelling of the divine spirit. A good example is provided by the movement of the freedman Mughira ibn Sa'id, who supported the imamate of Muhammad al-Baqir (d. 743), a great-grandson of 'Ali, and portrayed him as a savior figure. Mughira preached that God was a man of light, with a crown of light on his head, and that His limbs corresponded to the letters of the Arabic alphabet, and he taught an elaborate Creation myth which rested on a strong contrast between light and dark:
God wrote with His finger on His palm men’s deeds of obedience and disobedience. The latter angered Him and He sweated, and two seas were formed from His sweat, one salt and dark and one sweet and bright. He gazed into the sea and saw His shadow. He went forth to seize it, but it flew away. He then plucked out the eye of His shadow and from it created a sun. He annihilated the shadow and said: “There should not be another god besides me.” He then made all creation from the two seas. He called forth the unbelievers from the salt, dark sea, and the believers from the sweet, bright sea; and he fashioned the shadows of men. The first shadows he created were those of Muhammad and ‘Ali.28
Shortly after Muhammad al-Baqir died, ‘Abdallah ibn Mu‘awiya, a grandson of ‘Ali's brother Ja‘far, rebelled in Kufa, in October 744. He traveled from Iraq to Iran and traversed that land in search of support for his claim to the caliphate on the basis of his kinship with ‘Ali and Muhammad, a message he substantiated by stamping on his coinage the Qur'anic verse “I ask of you no recompense except love of kin,” which was understood by Shi‘ites as an exhortation by Muhammad to honor his daughter Fatima, her husband ‘Ali, and their descendants (Figure 6.7). Among ‘Abdallah's most fervent followers were a loose-knit band known as the Janahiyya, who maintained that the spirit of God had first dwelt in Adam, and then passed to the prophets and imams, including ‘Ali, his son Muhammad, his son ‘Abdallah Abu Hashim, and then from him to ‘Abdallah ibn Mu‘awiya. Of course the latter may have
FIGURE 6.7 Coin of ‘Abdallah ibn Mu‘awiya (SICA 2/1370 = Shamma no. 1357). © Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
Been suspicious, if not downright dismissive, of such elements within the ranks of his supporters, and in general the more staid wing of the Shi'ites were wary of those among them whom they saw as extremists (ghula), but nevertheless Shi'ism did come to adopt a number of these Persian-influenced beliefs, especially the notion that their imams were divinely inspired.
Although very popular, these two religio-political movements by no means encapsulated the full range of opposition to the Umayyads and some uprisings had very local coloring. In the region around Balkh, in modern north Afghanistan, a rebel named Harith ibn Surayj managed to defy the authorities for twelve years (734-46) and won to his side a stunningly diverse array of supporters, including the khagan of the Turgesh. Muslim sources say that “he adhered to the doctrine of the Murji’ites,” who professed that faith alone was sufficient to be a Muslim without any necessity for virtuous behavior. This was directed against the Kharijites, who said that good deeds were an integral part of being a Muslim and that evil deeds could exclude one from the Muslim community, but it attracted support from those converts who had been told that their conversion was not valid unless accompanied by actions such as memorization of the Qur’an and circumcision.
This region of east Iran/Transoxania provided a majority of the troops who would overthrow the Umayyad dynasty in ad 750 and also many of the scholars who would play a leading role in creating a new Islamic civilization, breaking it away from the more narrow Judaeo-Christian focus that it had had in Damascus and suffusing it with elements from this culturally syncretic world. There were a number of reasons why this region was so pivotal. First, its terrain is difficult for conquerors, and by the time they had got this far east the Arabs were overstretched; so whereas in west Iran they had crushed the local elites, here they worked with them, which meant that the region’s culture was to some extent preserved. Second, many of the religions it harbored—Christianity, Buddhism, Manichaeism—placed a high value on literacy, and this was further strengthened by the strong mercantile credentials of the region as a major junction of trade routes between China, India, and the Mediterranean world. Third, the Arabs were commonly settled in cities among the population—at Merv, Balkh (after 726), Bukhara, and Samarkand, for example—rather than in separate garrisons, as happened in Iraq and Egypt. This, plus the missionary efforts initiated by some local governors, meant that there was much interaction and assimilation between the conquerors and conquered, and since the Arabs were relatively few and far from home they, or at least their descendants, took Persian wives, began to speak Persian, and attended Persian festivals like Nawruz. Ethnic and cultural allegiances became blurred and a Persianized Islam became the common idiom for a new elite. Tellingly, when the governor Nasr ibn Sayyar and the rebel Harith ibn Surayj decided to negotiate, they chose to represent them “men mindful of the Book of God,” namely, Muqatil ibn Hayyan, a lawyer resident in Balkh, and Jahm ibn Safwan, a theologian resident in Tirmidh, both sons of Persian captives turned Muslim. And the architect of the Abbasid revolution, Abu Muslim, who was also a native of this region, when asked who he was, replied: “I am a man from among the Muslims and I do not trace my descent to any one group to the exclusion of another. . . . My only ancestry is Islam.”29
People like Muqatil ibn Hayyan, Jahm ibn Safwan, and Abu Muslim are a good example of how quickly many of the conquered people became involved in the religious, cultural, and political life of the world of the conquerors. In the introduction to this book I pointed out how much Western scholars fixated on the speed of the Arab conquests, but what is much more remarkable is the rapid rate at which a new empire emerged from the ashes of the old. If one examines the family histories of some of the main actors of this new regime, both Arab and non-Arab, one can see that in only three generations their whole social situation and cultural orientation has changed beyond recognition. To some degree that is the exciting thing about all empires, and in any imperial capital in history one can find characters who have gone from rags to riches, from obscurity to fame, or from servitude to high office in a single lifetime. But this seems to have happened on a particularly grand scale and at an accelerated rate in the case of the Arab Empire, and it is to this question, of the rapid incubation of Islamic civilization, that we shall now turn.
World History
