Few events have transformed the course of human history more swiftly and profoundly than the expansion of early Islam and its conquest of much of the ancient world. Within twelve years of Muhammad’s death in June 632, Iran’s long-reigning Sasanid Empire had been reduced to a tributary, and Egypt and Syria had been wrested from Byzantine rule. By the early eighth century, the Muslims had extended their domination over Central Asia and much of the Indian subcontinent all the way to the Chinese frontier, had laid siege to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantines, and had overrun North Africa and Spain. Had they not been contained in northwest France by the nobleman Charles Martel at the battle of Poitiers (732), they might well have swept deep into Europe. “A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland,” wrote the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon contemplating the possible consequences of a Christian defeat in Poitiers. “The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Qur’an would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.”1
What were the causes of this extraordinary burst of energy and the sources of its success? To traditional Islamic historians the answer is clear and straightforward: religious zeal and selfless exertion “in the path of Allah.” The problem with this view is that the Arab conquerors were far less interested in the mass conversion of the vanquished peoples than in securing their tribute. Not until the second and the third Islamic centuries did the bulk of these populations embrace the religion of their latest imperial masters, and even this process emanated from below in an attempt to escape paying tribute and
To remove social barriers, with the conquering ruling classes doing their utmost to slow it down.
Nor were the early conquests the result of dire economic necessity, let alone “the final stage in the age-long process of gradual infiltration from the barren desert to the adjacent Fertile Crescent, the last great Semitic migration.”2 Far from a mass migration of barbarian hordes in desperate search of subsistence, the Arab invasions were centrally organized military expeditions on a strikingly small scale. The celebrated battle of Qadisiyya (637), which broke the backbone of the Iranian Empire, involved between six and twelve thousand fighters, while the number of Arab fighters active in southern Iraq was estimated at between two and four thousand men. There is no evidence of whole tribes migrating into the Fertile Crescent during this period, or of the poorer segments of Arabian society, the natural candidates for migration, accompanying the invading forces, or of warriors taking their own families and herds with them (apart from a few isolated cases). It was only after the consolidation of the initial conquests that substantial numbers of Arab colonists arrived in the newly acquired territories.3
This makes the conquests first and foremost a quintessential expansionist feat by a rising imperial power, in which Islam provided a moral sanction and a unifying battle cry rather than a driving force. In the words of the eminent German historian Theodor Noeldeke (d. 1930):
It was certainly good policy to turn the recently subdued tribes of the wilderness towards an external aim in which they might at once satisfy their lust for booty on a grand scale, maintain their warlike feeling, and strengthen themselves in their attachment to the new faith. . . . Mohammed himself had already sent expeditions across the Roman frontier, and thereby had pointed out the way to his successors. To follow in his footsteps was in accordance with the innermost being of the youthful Islam, already grown great amid the tumult of arms.4
Throughout history all imperial powers and aspirants have professed some kind of universal ideology as both a justification of expansion and a means of ensuring the subservience of the conquered peoples: in the case of the Greeks and the Romans it was that of “civilization” vs. “barbarity,” in the case of the Mongols it was the conviction in their predestination to inherit the earth. For the seventh-century Arabs it was Islam’s universal vision of conquest as epitomized in the Prophet’s summons to fight the unbelievers wherever they might be found.
This vision, together with Islam’s unwavering feeling of supremacy and buoyant conviction in its ultimate triumph, imbued the early believers with the necessary sense of purpose, self-confidence, and revolutionary zeal to take on the region’s established empires. “We have seen a people who love death more than life, and to whom this world holds not the slightest attraction,” a group of Byzantine officials in Egypt said of the invading Arabs.5 The great Muslim historian and sociologist Abdel Rahman Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) expressed the same idea in a somewhat more elaborate form: “When people possess the [right] insight into their affairs, nothing can withstand them, because their outlook is one and they share a unity of purpose for which they are willing to die.”6
Whether the conquests were an opportunistic magnified offshoot of small raiding parties or a product of a preconceived expansionist plan is immaterial. Empires are born of chance as well as design. What counts is that the Arab conquerors acted in a typically imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.
Already Muhammad had skillfully couched his worldly objectives in divine terms, as illustrated by such sayings as “Stick to jihad and you will be in good health and get sufficient means of livelihood.”7 This fusion of the sacred and the profitable was endorsed by future generations of Islamic leaders. Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law and immediate successor (khalifa, or caliph), sought to lure the Arabs to his campaigns of conquest by linking the call for jihad with the promise of “the booty to be won from the Byzantines.”8 So did Umar ibn al-Khattab, who in 634 succeeded Abu Bakr in the caliphate, as well as Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet’s son-in-law and the fourth caliph (656-61). “Sacrifice yourselves!” he told his troops on the eve of a crucial battle against a contender to the caliphate. “You are under Allah’s watchful eye and with the Prophet’s cousin. Resume your charge and abhor flight, for it will disgrace your descendants and buy you the fire [of hell] in the Day of Reckoning.” And as if this religious prodding was not enough, Ali added a substantial carrot: “Before you lie these great sawad [the fertile lands of Iraq] and those large tents!”9
Abu Bakr and Umar apparently made no personal profit by the conquests (both were said to have lived in modest households and on a humble subsistence).10 Yet their immediate successor, Uthman ibn Affan, another son-in-law of the Prophet and the third caliph, exploited expansion for unabashed selfenrichment. By the time of his assassination in June 656, he had netted himself a fortune of 150,000 dinars and one million dirhams in cash, and the value of his estates amounted to 200,000 dinars, aside from a vast herd of camels and horses.11 This fortune paled in comparison with the fabulous wealth amassed by some of Muhammad’s closest companions. The invested capital of Zubair ibn Awam amounted to some fifty million dirhams and 400,000 dinars, and he owned countless properties in Medina, Iraq, and Egypt. Talha ibn Ubaidallah, one of the earliest converts to Islam to whom Muhammad had promised a place in Paradise, was similarly a proprietor of numerous estates in Iraq and Transjordan. He left, according to some authorities, 200,000 dinars and 2.2 million dirhams in cash, and his estates were valued at thirty million dirhams. His investments in Iraq alone yielded him one thousand dinars per day. “I will reserve comment on what is in the city I have captured,” Amr ibn al-As, the conqueror of Egypt, reported to Umar upon the occupation of the port town of Alexandria, “aside from saying that I have seized therein four thousand villas with four thousand baths, forty thousand poll tax-paying Jews and four hundred places of entertainment for the royalty.” He was peremptorily ordered to ship a year’s supply of food to Medina for the upkeep of the Muslim community, which he dutifully did.12
It was during the caliphate of Umar (634-44) that the Arabs made their greatest conquests and institutionalized their absolute domination of the nascent Islamic empire. In a move that was to have a profound and lasting impact on the course of Middle Eastern history, Umar forbade the invading forces from settling on the conquered lands, placing the whole empire in trust for the Muslim community. “Allah has made those who will come after you partners in these spoils,” the caliph is reported to have said when asked to divide the Iraqi and Syrian lands among the conquering Arabs. “Were I to divide these lands among you, nothing will be left for them. Even a shepherd boy in San’a [Yemen] is entitled to his share.”13
Whether Umar actually justified his action in these particular words or whether they were a later attempt to legitimize an existing situation (it is common in Muslim tradition to represent rules established after Muhammad’s death as ordinances of Umar), the decision effectively extended Muhammad’s designation of Islam as the cornerstone of the political order to the entire Middle East. This principle would be maintained for over a millennium until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I and the subsequent abolition of the caliphate.
On a more immediate level, Umar’s decision enabled the continuation of the conquests: had the vast majority of the Arabs settled on the conquered lands, fighting would have ground to a halt. According to numerous traditions about Muhammad’s life, this fear had preoccupied the Prophet, who had reputedly warned that “the survival of my Community rests on the hoofs of its horses and the points of its lances; as long as they keep from tilling the fields; once they begin to do that they will become as other men.”14 Umar resolved this problem by devising a register (Diwan), which remunerated the fighters out of the proceeds from the conquered lands and thus allowed them to continue prosecuting war operations without worrying about their subsistence.15
Last but not least, since the umma at the time consisted almost exclusively of the conquering Arabs, by proclaiming the empire an Islamic trust Umar institutionalized their position as the new imperial ruling class. Viewing Arabs as superior to all other peoples and creeds, the caliph went to great lengths to make Islam synonymous with Arabism. He achieved this goal in the Arabian Peninsula by summarily expelling its Christian and Jewish communities, in flagrant violation of the treaties they had signed with the Prophet.16 Yet this option was hardly available in the vast territories conquered by the Arabs, both because the populations involved were far too large to make their expulsion practicable and because their tribute was indispensable in enabling the Arabs to enjoy fully their privileges as conquerors.
In these circumstances, Umar contented himself with perpetuating complete Arab domination of the empire. For him, there was only one ethnic group destined to rule while all others were fated to serve and to toil as subject peoples. By way of preventing assimilation and ensuring Arab racial purity he forbade non-Arab converts to marry Arab women, sought to dissuade the Prophet’s companions from marrying Jewish women, though this was not prohibited by the Qur’an, and pressured the many companions who did so to annul their marriages. He also settled the Arabs in garrison cities (Amsar), in total segregation from the indigenous population, from where they administered their newly conquered territories in a kind of inverted colonial rule similar to that of the coastal outposts of the British Empire. Two large Amsar were established in Iraq, by far the largest site of Arab colonization: Kufa, on the Euphrates River southwest of the site that was to become the city of Baghdad, and Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf. In Syria the southern city of Djabiya, home to the Ghassanid dynasty that had ruled the area under Byzantine suzerainty, was chosen as the main camp of the Arab army, while in Egypt the garrison city of Fustat was established to become the province’s capital until the foundation of Cairo in the late tenth century.17
To be an Arab in Umar’s empire was to be at the pinnacle of society. It meant paying a modest religious tithe, which was more than compensated by the booty received in accordance with the Diwan. No Arab, Umar insisted, could be a slave, either by sale or capture; on his deathbed he ordered that all Arab slaves held by the state be freed. Even those Arabs outside the peninsula who did not embrace Islam were considered by Umar his primary subjects, as illustrated by his readiness to incorporate the north Iraqi Banu Taghlib tribe into the Arab army and to place it on a similar tax footing to that of the Muslims, despite its refusal to give up its Christian faith.18 This stood in stark contrast to the heavy taxation levied on the rest of the non-Muslim populations, or Dhimmis as they were commonly known. These “protected communities” (the term was originally applied to Christians and Jews, but was subsequently expanded to other non-Muslim groups) were allowed to keep their properties and to practice their religions in return for a distinctly inferior status that was institutionalized over time. They had to pay special taxes (regularized at a later stage as land tax, kharaj, and the more humiliating poll tax, jizya) and suffered from social indignities and at times open persecution. Their religious activities outside the churches and synagogues were curtailed, the ringing of bells was forbidden, the construction of new church buildings prohibited, and the proselytizing of Muslims was made a capital offense punishable by death. Jews and Christians had to wear distinctive clothes to distinguish them from their Muslim lords, could ride only donkeys, not horses, could not marry Muslim women, had to vacate their seats whenever Muslims wanted to sit, were excluded from positions of power, and so on and so forth.19
Yet while this institutionalized discrimination secured the Arabs’ shortterm pre-eminence, it also contained the seeds of their eventual decline and assimilation into the wider regional environment. Unlike Muhammad’s umma, where Dhimmis constituted a negligible minority, in Umar’s empire the Arab colonizers were themselves a small island surrounded by a nonMuslim and non-Arab ocean, something that condemned their apartheid policy to assured failure.
The staggering magnitude of the conquests, together with Arab bureaucratic and administrative inexperience, forced the victors to rely on the existing Byzantine and Iranian systems for the running of their nascent empire, thus leading to greater mingling with the indigenous populations. In their capacity as the centers of government the Amsar quickly became hubs of vibrant economic and commercial activity, while the growing numbers of Arab colonists allotted plots of state lands (qata’i) during the caliphate of Uthman, and in its aftermath relied by and large on the indigenous population for their cultivation. With the intensification of interaction between conqueror and conquered, the Arabs adopted indigenous—especially Iranian—habits, manners, and ways of life. They embraced the refined Iranian cuisine and wore Iranian clothes. Meanwhile the early prohibition on Muslims from using foreign languages, as well as the prevention of Christians from learning the Arabic language and using the Arabic script, gave way to a growing sense of linguistic and cultural unity as the second generation of Amsar residents tended to be of mixed parentage and bilingual. On the other hand, Arabic penetrated the conquered peoples to such an extent that at the beginning of the eighth century it had evolved into the official imperial language.
The implications of this move cannot be overstated. For one thing, by adopting the Arabic language, the conquered peoples—Iranians, Syrians, Greeks, Copts, Berbers, Jews, and Christians—placed their abundant talents and learning at the service of their conquerors, thus leading to the development of a distinct Islamic civilization. For another, the Arabization of the imperial administration unleashed a process that blurred the distinctions between the Arab imperial elite and the indigenous non-Arab populations and culminated in the creation of a new Arabic-speaking imperial persona, a reincarnation of sorts of the old Roman subject. The term “Arab” itself in Arabic usage was subsequently restricted to the nomads.20
This development, however, was something that would take a century or two to materialize. In the meantime, the Arabs frowned upon the growing numbers of non-Muslims knocking at the gates of Islam in an attempt to improve their socio-economic conditions. As far as they were concerned the vanquished masses had only one role in life: to provide a lasting and lucrative source of revenue for their imperial masters, and, since religion constituted the sole criterion for social mobility, they were determined to perpetuate this state of affairs by keeping Islam a purely Arab religion. Non-Arabs were thus allowed to enter the faith only through the humiliating channel of becoming clients (Mawali, sing. Mawla) of the persons at whose hands they had converted. A vestige of the legacy of pagan Arabia, where clients were lesser members of an Arab clan (e. g., slaves and freed slaves promoted to a position of clientage),21 this mode of conversion placed the new Muslims in a position
In many cases the Mawali failed to escape their excessive tributes or even ended up paying higher taxes than before. They could not inherit equally, were denied the material benefits of Islam, and were treated with such contempt that in certain neighborhoods an Arab risked social ostracism merely by virtue of walking down the street in the company of a Mawla. Even the pious caliph Umar II (717-20), who attempted to equalize the Mawali’s standing, was reputed to have taken a dim view of Muslims and Mawali intermarrying, and forbade Mawali from selling their lands to Muslims. Little wonder that this state of affairs turned the Mawali into an embittered and disgruntled group whose actions were to shake the empire to its core before too long.22
The Mawali were by no means the only disaffected group. From the start, the Islamic order had been beset by the perennial tension between center and periphery that has plagued imperial powers from antiquity to the present day. Muhammad’s success in unifying most of the peninsula under a single authority may have been without parallel in Arabian history, but it was still far from complete. Many tribes regarded their inclusion in the umma as a personal bond with the Prophet that expired upon his death, not least since Muhammad had refrained from designating a successor and had emphasized time and again his irreplaceable historical role as the Seal of the Prophets. They therefore refused to acknowledge Abu Bakr’s position as caliph and suspended their tribute payments and treaty relations with the umma in what came to be known in Muslim tradition as the ridda, “the apostasy.”
This, however, is something of a misnomer. The urge for secession was predominantly political and economic rather than religious: some of the rebels failed to repudiate their Islamic faith while others had joined the umma as tributaries without embracing Islam. Some of the rebellious tribes were headed by self-styled prophets offering their own brand of religious belief, but for most the revolt represented an atavistic attempt to exploit the sudden weakening of the central government in order to free themselves from the less savory aspects of their subjugation (notably the payment of taxes), if not to end this status altogether.23
Abu Bakr’s suppression of the revolt and his successful extension of Muslim control to the entire peninsula thus signified the first triumph of the imperial order over the centrifugal forces of tribal separatism. This was not achieved, though, without the massacre of the foremost rebellious faction—the central Arabian confederates of Banu Hanifa headed by the self-styled prophet Masalma ibn Habib—in a grim foretaste of countless such violent confrontations between the center and periphery throughout Islamic history.24 Indeed, no sooner had the umma weathered the storm attending the demise of its creator than it experienced yet another peripheral backlash that culminated in the murder of its supreme ruler: the caliph Uthman, who in 644 had succeeded Umar.
Enforcing central authority over disparate provinces has been an intractable problem for most empires even in modern times, let alone for classical and medieval empires with their far less advanced means of communication and control. The stability of these early empires depended to a large extent on the existence of powerful governors capable of maintaining law and order within their domains while deferring to their imperial masters. This was especially pertinent for the nascent Arab-Muslim empire, where the age-old Arab traits of particularism and individualism had been suppressed but not totally extinguished and where clans and tribes not only remained the real units of social activity but paradoxically grew in weight and importance. Unlike pre-Islamic times, where tribes were relatively small units and their perennial squabbles were of a localized nature, the post-conquest migration and colonization in garrison cities brought many tribes into close contact with each other and created far larger leagues and alliances. The best known of these were the Qays and the Yemen, whose bitter enmity was to plague the region for centuries.25
Umar, who was keenly aware of this reality, sought to foster an overarching imperial unity that would transcend the traditional tribal system and ensure Medina’s continued domination. He did this by cultivating a strong provincial leadership comprising the Prophet’s companions and prominent commanders of the early conquests, and by encouraging the nomadic tribes that participated in the campaigns to settle in the Amsar where they could more easily be monitored by the central government. But this system, which worked reasonably well initially, began to falter after Umar’s death as Uthman attempted to tighten his grip on the empire and to catapult his Umayyad clan, and the Quraish tribe more generally, into a position of imperial pre-eminence.
Unlike Umar, who had allowed the conquering commanders to govern the territories they had occupied, Uthman vested all key posts in the hands of his family members, many of whom abused their appointments for selfenrichment. This nepotism earned the new caliph hostility from all quarters. The Medinese elite resented its growing marginalization in the running of the empire, while the provincial leadership was incensed by Uthman’s efforts to increase the central government’s share in the distribution of local revenues, most of which had hitherto been retained in the provinces. These grievances were further exacerbated by the temporary halt of the conquests in the early 650s and the attendant reduction in the spoils of war on the one hand, and the continued influx of Arab colonists into the provinces on the other, which further strained their economic and financial resources.
Things came to a head in January 656 when disgruntled elements in Egypt seized Fustat, prevented the governor from returning from Medina, and issued a call for the removal of Uthman. A few months later, several hundred malcontents left Egypt for Medina, converging on the way with similarly disaffected groups from the Iraqi garrison cities of Kufa and Basra. The startled caliph accepted most of the demands put to him, including the dismissal of his Egyptian governor, and the group set out to return to Egypt, only to intercept a message sent in Uthman’s name ordering the governor to deal harshly with the rebels. Viewing this as a blatant act of betrayal, the enraged Egyptians returned to Medina, where they laid siege to Uthman’s residence. Ignoring the caliph’s emphatic denials of having anything to do with the secret message, they murdered him on June 17, 656.26
Uthman’s murder was much more than a tactical victory of provincial strongmen over their lawful ruler. It signified the periphery’s ultimate triumph by heralding the permanent shift of the imperial center of gravity away from Medina, indeed from the Arabian Peninsula, to the Fertile Crescent. Within months of his election, Uthman’s successor to the caliphate, Ali ibn Abi Talib, decided to make Kufa the center of his operations. This was apparently an ad hoc decision, deriving from the need to suppress an uprising in Basra by a group of distinguished Meccans who blamed the new caliph for his predecessor’s murder. Yet what was conceived as a temporary move was to acquire permanence. Having defeated the renegades, Ali encountered a further and far greater challenge to his authority which forced him to stay in Kufa. Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufian, the long-reigning governor of Syria and Uthman’s cousin, refused to recognize the validity of Ali’s appointment and demanded vengeance for the slain caliph. In late July or early August 657, after a few months of intermittent skirmishes, Ali confronted his challenger at the site of Siffin, on the right bank of the Euphrates near the Syrian border. As the battle went the caliph’s way, the Syrians hoisted copies of the Qur’an on the points of their lances to demand that the dispute be decided through arbitration rather than war. Under tremendous pressure from his followers to give peace a chance, Ali, who suspected a trick, begrudgingly accepted the proposal, and the two armies departed for home.27
This proved to be a mistake. Not only were the arbitrators to rule against Ali, putting him on a par with his challenger and thus implicitly rejecting the validity of his claim to the caliphate, but he was also confronted with widespread desertions by his followers. Foremost among these was a group that came to be known as Kharijites (those who “went out” or “seceded”), who opposed the arbitration on the ground that “decision is with Allah alone” and claimed that in accepting this process the caliph had not only forfeited his right to the title but had effectively excluded himself from the community of believers. Ali managed to reduce them in a bloody engagement in July 658,28 but was unable to arrest the steady disintegration of his authority and was forced to watch from the sidelines as Mu’awiya added Egypt to his possessions and made repeated incursions into Iraq. Shortly afterward the Syrian governor openly staked his claim to the caliphate, and there is little doubt that Ali would have suffered the ultimate ignominy of the loss of supreme office had he not first been murdered by a Kharijite on January 24, 661. His eldest son, Hassan, quickly renounced his right to the throne in favor of Mu’awiya, who was now hailed as caliph and the empire’s new master.
From his newly proclaimed capital of Damascus Mu’awiya presided over the foundation of Islam’s first imperial dynasty by having his son, Yazid, succeed him to the throne. This proved a shrewd move that allowed Mu’awiya’s Umayyad family to retain power for the next ninety years and established the principle that was to dominate Middle Eastern political life up to the early twentieth century, and in some parts of the region to the present day.
In one fell swoop the umma was transformed from “Allah’s Community” into an ordinary empire. Although Islam retained its position as the empire’s pre-eminent organizing principle and its rallying point for further expansion, with the Umayyad monarchs styling themselves as “Allah’s caliphs” and portraying their constant wars of expansion as a “jihad in the path of Allah,”29 this was largely a facade that concealed what was effectively a secular and increasingly absolutist rule. The Umayyad caliphs adopted a lax attitude toward Islamic practices and mores. They were said to have set aside special days for drinking, specifically forbidden by the Prophet, and some of them had no inhibitions about appearing completely nude before their boon companions and female singers.30 Little wonder that Islamic tradition tends to decry the Umayyads for having perverted the caliphate into a “kingdom” (mulk), with the implicit connotation of religious digression or even disbelief.
Moreover, the murder of Uthman had irrevocably changed the rules of the game. Three decades after the creation of the umma as a divinely ordained community answerable directly to Allah, the seemingly inextricable link between religious and temporal power was abruptly severed. So long as Muhammad was alive, this was inconceivable. He was Allah’s Apostle, the true theocratic ruler. To defy him was to defy Allah Himself. Abu Bakr and Umar could claim no such religious prowess, yet by basking in the Prophet’s reflected glow they managed to sustain the umma as a working theocracy, although Umar took care to emphasize the temporal aspects of his post by assuming the title “Commander of the Believers” (Amir al-Mu’minin).31 Once the sanctity of the caliphate had been violated, its uninterrupted retention and natural transition could no longer be taken for granted. During the
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Map 2 Islam’s First Empire
Next millennium this coveted post would incessantly be contested by force of arms, making a mockery of the categorical prohibition of internecine fighting among Muslims underlying Muhammad’s universal vision of the umma.
The Umayyads themselves succeeded in maintaining their position mainly through reliance on physical force, and were consumed for most of their reign with preventing or quelling revolts in the diverse corners of their empire. Mu’awiya had attempted to wrest the caliphate from Ali, and while his nineteen years on the throne (661-80) were characterized by relative calm and stability owing to his formidable political and administrative skills, his son and heir, Yazid I, faced widespread disobedience on several fronts. Particularly threatening was the revolt by Abdallah ibn Zubair, son of a prominent companion of Muhammad, who refused to acknowledge the validity of the Umayyad line of succession and sought to establish himself as caliph. Ibn Zubair was supported in his endeavor by the people of Medina, who withdrew their allegiance from the caliph and circulated damning stories about his alleged religious and personal indiscretions, including his propensity for wine and singing girls and his obsession with his pet monkey, which was constantly by his side and to which he gave the dignified title of Abu Qays. When Abu Qays was accidentally killed, the caliph was inconsolable. He gave the monkey a state funeral and had him buried in accordance with Muslim rites.32
These tales were but the tip of a huge iceberg of resentment within the traditional Islamic ruling elite over the shift of the imperial center to Damascus. This elite consisted initially of the small circle of Muhajirun who migrated with the Prophet to Medina and the local Ansar. These were the people who spread Muhammad’s message and enforced his authority throughout the peninsula, whose opinion he sought on matters of import, and who enjoyed the material benefits of the umma’s steady expansion. Following the conquest of Mecca in 630 this group was dramatically and swiftly expanded through the incorporation of Muhammad’s Quraish tribe, as the Prophet sought to harness the organizational and administrative skills of his kinsmen to the service of his continued expansion. Much to the resentment of Muhammad’s companions, this process gained considerable momentum during the wars of the ridda attending the Prophet’s death, when Abu Bakr was forced to rely on the alignment between the Quraish and the Taif-based tribe of Thaqif as a springboard for reasserting Islamic domination over the rebellious tribes.
Umar restored the political pre-eminence of the early believers by appointing some of them to key positions in his nascent empire and, more importantly, by using precedence in Islam as the chief criterion for remuneration from the proceeds of the conquests. Yet during the caliphate of Uthman the Quraishis regained their predominant position to the detriment of the Ansar and the Muhajirun. These early believers (and their descendants) were particularly incensed by the meteoric rise of the Umayyads, who had long been at the forefront of the Meccan opposition to Muhammad and who joined Islam only after its ultimate triumph. They therefore sided with Ali in his confrontation with Mu’awiya, and quickly challenged the legitimacy of Umayyad dynastical claims upon the demise of its founding father.
The traditional Islamic aristocracy was fighting a rearguard action. Its commanding position in the imperial order of things had irrevocably been lost. An expeditionary force sent by Yazid routed the rebels and sacked Medina for three full days.33 It then proceeded to lay siege to Mecca, where Abdallah ibn Zubair and his supporters had barricaded themselves in, but failed to take the city, and in November 683 was forced to return to Syria following the caliph’s death. As Yazid’s youthful and sickly successor Mu’awiya II proved to be a nonentity, Ibn Zubair quickly proclaimed himself caliph and asserted his authority throughout much of the empire. It was only after the accession of another branch of the Umayyads, headed by Marwan ibn Hakam, that the dynasty managed to reclaim its lost territories. In July 684 the Yemen tribe, associated with the new Umayyad caliph, defeated the rival Qays, aligned with Ibn Zubair, in a particularly bloody battle near Damascus. Shortly afterward Marwan recaptured Egypt, only to die a few months later in April 685. It thus fell to Marwan’s able son and designated successor, Abdel Malik (685-705), to complete the suppression of the revolt. This was achieved in November 692, with the occupation of Mecca and the killing of Ibn Zubair.34
Iraq constituted the hard core of violent anti-Umayyad opposition. It was there that most Arab colonists had settled during the conquests, especially in the large garrison cities of Kufa and Basra, where they subsisted mostly on government stipends from the war spoils. Having enjoyed unprecedented pre-eminence as the imperial center during Ali’s brief tenure, Iraqis resented the shift of the caliphate to Damascus and their attendant relegation to a position of subservience to Syria, which, they feared, would deprive them of their fair share of the spoils. This sentiment was further exacerbated by such factors as intertribal rivalries, personal and dynastical ambitions, and religious radicalism. The substantial numbers of Syrian forces permanently deployed in Iraq to enforce the regime’s authority only served to sharpen anti-Syrian sentiments and to reinforce Iraqis’ distinct sense of local patriotism. Especially powerful and astute governors were required to keep the Iraqi province in check and even then matters often necessitated mass physical repression. Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, who ruled the area for twenty years (694-714), was the epitome of such single-minded ruthlessness. “I see heads that are ripe for plucking, and I am the man to do it; and I see blood between the turbans and the beards,” he famously told the people of Kufa upon his arrival in the city.35 He made good on his threat. When many Iraqi Arabs, who had become accustomed to settled life, refused to participate in the campaigns of expansion, Hajjaj summarily beheaded the draft dodgers. When the number of Mawali and Dhimmis flocking to the towns in search of socio-economic advancement rose so high as to threaten a substantial drop in government revenues from agricultural produce, Hajjaj took draconian measures to discourage conversion and to drive the new converts back to their villages, including having the names of their villages branded on people’s hands to prevent them from returning to the towns. One of his favorite modes of torture was to apply hot wax to his victims’ naked bodies. This was then pulled off till the flesh was all lacerated, following which vinegar and salt were poured on the wounds until death ensued.36
Hajjaj’s heavy-handed policy failed to prevent the Iraqi cauldron from repeatedly boiling over. The appalling conditions of the East African black slaves known as Zanj sparked a protracted revolt in Basra, while the weakening of the local Iraqi dignitaries (Ashraf) resulted in a number of uprisings, some of which were suppressed only with great difficulty.37 Yet it was the activities of two radical religious movements—the Kharijite and the Shiite— that constituted the most dangerous and intractable source of turbulence. Both viewed the Umayyads as opportunistic latecomers to Islam who had unlawfully usurped and perverted its most cherished institution. But while the Shiites advocated the vesting of the caliphate in the Prophet’s family, or more specifically in the house of the slain caliph Ali (their name originated in the designation Shiat Ali—the faction of Ali), the Kharijites acknowledged no authority but that of the Islamic community, which could elect or disown any caliph who went astray. Foreshadowing radical twentieth-century Islamic thinkers, they considered themselves the only true Muslims and had no scruples about shedding the blood of fellow co-religionists, for it was against these “heretics” alone that they waged the holy war. In the late 680s and early 690s one of their sects managed to occupy parts of Arabia (Bahrain, Yemen, Hadramawt) from where it harassed the caravan trade in the peninsula. Another sect controlled the former Iranian provinces of Khuzistan, Fars, and Kirman, using them as a springboard for repeated attacks on the city of Basra. They were eventually suppressed, but as late as the mid-740s Kharijite uprisings throughout Iraq were still causing the authorities a real headache. Their influence reached as far as the Maghreb, where in the 740s the indigenous Berber population temporarily drove the Arabs out of the area, raised the Kharijite banner, and even chose its own local Amir al-Mu’minin. “They strove most openly and decisively for the Kingdom of God, and also most fiercely for a pitiless Utopia,” wrote a prominent student of Islam.
They renounced success; their only wish was to save their souls. They were content to meet death on the battlefield, and with it pardon in the sight of God; they sold their lives for the price of Paradise. In spite of this, perhaps because of it, they often overcame great armies, and for a time were the terror of the Muslim world, and although they always were only a small sect, still they could not be extirpated.38
The Shiites might not have been as fanatic as their Kharijite counterparts, but they had a far more profound and lasting impact, not least since they could stake a real claim to the caliphate based on descent from the prophet’s family. As they saw it, the umma should be headed by a prodigious spiritual leader, or imam, possessing superhuman religious knowledge and interpretative powers, who would also act as the community’s political leader, or Amir al-Mu’minin. The caliph Ali was the last person to have held both titles, while Mu’awiya and subsequent Umayyad rulers were (unlawful) secular practitioners of power rather than religious authorities, and it was for the restoration of this dual power to the Alid family that the Shiites pined.39
As early as 671 Mu’awiya was confronted with a pro-Alid revolt in Kufa. This was summarily suppressed, but nine years later Hussein, son of Ali and the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, was lured by his Kufan supporters to stake a claim to the caliphate. The Umayyad governor uncovered the plot and intercepted Hussein’s party. After a short battle, in which he received no support from the Kufans, Hussein fled to the small town of Karbala where he soon found himself under siege. The governor called upon him to surrender but Hussein, believing in his inviolability as the Prophet’s favorite grandson, remained defiant. He was killed in the ensuing battle, on October 10,680, and his head was sent on a platter to Damascus after being paraded in Kufa.40
Hussein’s death was to prove a watershed in the history of Islam. It helped cement the small group of Ali’s followers into a significant and cohesive religious movement; Hussein’s grave in Karbala was to become the most revered site of pilgrimage for all Shiites. His day of martyrdom (Ashura, the tenth day of the Arabic month of Muharram) is commemorated every year in the most emotional way. More immediately, the Karbala massacre led to a revolt by Mukhtar ibn Abi Ubaid, scion of a distinguished Thaqifite family, under the slogan “Vengeance for Hussein.”
Notwithstanding its short duration and limited geographical scope, Mukhtar’s revolt had far-reaching historical consequences. By demanding the restoration of the caliphate to the Prophet’s family and equating such a move with a return to “the Book of Allah and the Sunna [practice] of his Prophet,” Mukhtar introduced a powerful political and religious concept that was to become the main rallying cry of the anti-Umayyad revolution. By endorsing
Ibn Hanafiyya as head of the Muslim community Mukhtar extended the range of potential Hashemite contenders to the caliphate who had hitherto been confined to descendants of Ali by his wife Fatima (or Fatimids as they are often called). This opened the door to other members of the House of Muhammad, such as the Abbasids, descendants of the Prophet’s paternal uncle Abbas, to style themselves as the rightful caliphs.42
No less important, after the suppression of the revolt a group of surviving veterans reconstituted themselves into a small clandestine movement that maintained close contact with Ibn Hanafiyya, and after his death (sometime between 700 and 705) passed their loyalty to his son Abu Hashem. Widely known as the Hashemiyya, this group was to initiate the revolution that would sweep the Umayyads from power.
Precisely when and how the Abbasids managed to harness the Hashemiyya to their cause is not entirely clear. According to the traditional Arabic version, shortly before he died in 716 or 717, Abu Hashem transferred his right to the imamate, which he had inherited from his father, to Muhammad ibn Ali, then head of the Abbasid family. The two had allegedly grown close to each other while living in Damascus, where the sonless Abu Hashem came to regard the younger Muhammad as a son and groomed him for his future role as imam.43 Yet recent research shows that it was not until the early 740s that the Abbasids, who resided at the time in the small village of Humayma in southern Transjordan, managed to gain control over the activities of the Hashemiyya. It has even been suggested that such control was never achieved and that the Abbasids rode to power on the back of the Hashemiyya’s successful revolution.44
By this time, the Hashemiyya had established a firm foothold in the vast frontier province of Khurasan, at the northeastern tip of the empire in Central Asia (comprising territories that are today parts of Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan). The province was uniquely suited for this revolutionary endeavor, and not only because of the widespread sympathy felt there for the unfortunate Mukhtar and for the Alid family more generally. It was in Khurasan that the apartheid wall built by the Arabs was being most comprehensively demolished and a mixing of colonizer and colonized was taking place. Unlike Iraq, where they had been settled in garrison towns, in Khurasan the Arabs were dispersed among the local population as a small and assimilating minority. They used Iranian servants, married local women, embraced Iranian habits and forms of dress, observed local festivals, and even adopted the Persian language for everyday use. In short, the Arabs developed a Khurasani identity that largely obliterated ethnic and tribal distinctions and made them feel at one with the indigenous population and sympathize with its cause. Moreover, these colonists, who had mostly arrived from Iraq, brought with them a deeply entrenched hostility toward the Umayyad dynasty, which they did not fail to spread among their Iranian neighbors.
Nor were the local Iranians hostile to the Arab colonists. Their daily lives were hardly affected by the nominal change of imperial masters since the existing Iranian rulers were left in place in return for the payment of tribute. There was no pressure to convert to Islam and the physical safety of the general population was significantly enhanced since the Arabs provided a better defense against external attacks by the neighboring Turkish tribes than had the declining Sasanid Empire. Paradoxically, the most intractable grievances emerged among the Iranian converts, disillusioned with the lack of improvement in their lot, and among the assimilated Arab colonists, who had lost their privileges as members of the ruling class and were forced to accept the authority of non-Arab, non-Muslim local rulers to whom they had to pay taxes. This created an explosive alliance of underdogs, both Iranians and Arabs, expressed in largely Shiite terms and aimed against the discriminatory imperial order.45
The timing of the revolution could not have been more opportune. By the early 740s the empire was clearly in the throes of over-extension. From their first days on the throne the Umayyads had relied on constant campaigning in order to keep the restless Arab tribes preoccupied and to ensure a steady flow of booty, on which the imperial economy was heavily dependent. It was during their reign that the empire reached the farthest frontiers of its expansion: the western lands of the Maghreb and Spain were conquered, together with vast territories in Central Asia and India, and the Muslims knocked at the gates of Constantinople and burst deep into France.
With the passage of time this policy of expansion increasingly taxed the empire’s human and financial resources. Umar II, who recognized this reality, made preparations to relinquish the Arab conquests in Central Asia, which he deemed unworthy of the heavy expenditure of men and resources required to hold them against the Turks and the Chinese.46 But his premature death prevented the implementation of this dramatic shift in thinking, and Hisham ibn Abdel Malik, who ascended the throne in 724, spent his nineteen-year reign in constant, and mostly futile, campaigning throughout his empire. This shattered the professional Syrian-Yemeni army, which had served as the mainstay of Umayyad rule since Mu’awiya’s days. By the time of the Abbasid revolution, the once-formidable military district of Damascus had been reduced to a few thousand troops, and the situation in the neighboring Syrian provinces was not much better. To make things worse, the depleted Syrian army was spread thin across the empire, which further reduced its ability to protect the regime. At the time of Hisham’s accession, there were Syrian troops only in Syria, Iraq, the Caucasus, and probably to a very limited extent in northern India. By the end of his reign, Syrian troops had almost completely disappeared from Syria itself and had instead been deployed in virtually every single province, from the Chinese frontier to Spain.47
Alarmed by the decline of their military might, especially in view of the ability of their Qaysi arch-enemies to preserve their strength owing to their far more limited involvement in imperial campaigning, the Yemenis sought to goad Walid II, who in February 743 succeeded Hisham, into far-reaching reforms that would equalize the position of the Mawali in the imperial order. As the caliph refused to do anything of the sort, they had him murdered only fourteen months after he took office and installed Yazid III in his place. This turned out to be a catastrophic move, which led in short order to the collapse of the Umayyad dynasty. Yazid died after a mere six months on the throne and was succeeded in December 744 by Marwan II, who peremptorily expelled the Yemeni leaders from Syria. This reopened the Pandora’s box of Yemeni-Qaysi rivalry. In no time Syria was rocked by a string of uprisings while in Iraq the Yemenis collaborated for the first time with Shiite and Kharijite insurrections. These were all suppressed with great brutality, yet left the regime extremely vulnerable to the brewing revolution in the east, which now enjoyed the support of Khurasan’s Yemeni tribes. In June 747 a young and obscure Mawla by the name of Abu Muslim, sent to Khurasan a year earlier to organize the revolution, raised the Abbasid black banner. By February 748 he had occupied the Khurasani capital city of Merv. Some ten months later, on November 28, 749, Abul Abbas, son of Muhammad ibn Ali, was proclaimed the first Abbasid caliph in Kufa’s great mosque.
In a last-ditch attempt to save his throne, Marwan summoned his loyalists for the final battle, only to suffer a crushing defeat by the vastly outnumbered Abbasid armies on the left bank of the Greater Zab, a tributary of the Tigris, on January 25,750. Vanquished but not broken, the indefatigable Marwan fled from place to place in a vain effort to rally support. He eventually surfaced in Upper Egypt and in early August 750 made his last stand. His head was sent to Abul Abbas and his tongue was reportedly fed to a cat.48 The Umayyad dynasty was no more.
World History
