The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  But in Damascus Muawiya raised another rebel force. He was a man of the world, who privately put little stock in Mohammed’s revelation; religion seemed to him an economical substitute for policemen, but no aristocrat would let it interfere with his enjoyment of the world. In effect his war against Ali sought to restore the Quraish oligarchy to the power and leadership that had been taken from them by Mohammed. Ali’s reorganized forces met Muawiya’s army at Siffin on the Euphrates (657); Ali was prevailing when Muawiya’s general Amr ibn al-As raised copies of the Koran on the points of his soldiers’ lances, and demanded arbitration “according to the word of Allah”—presumably by rules laid down in the sacred book. Yielding to the insistence of his troops, Ali agreed; arbitrators were chosen, and were allowed six months to decide the issue, while the armies returned to their homes.

  Part of Ali’s men now turned against him, and formed a separate army and sect as Khariji or Seceders; they argued that the caliph should be elected and removable by the people; some of them were religious anarchists who rejected all government except that of God;9 all of them denounced the worldliness and luxury of the new ruling classes in Islam. Ali tried to win them back by suasion, but failed; their piety became fanaticism, and issued in acts of disorder and violence; finally Ali declared war upon them and suppressed them. In due time the arbitrators agreed that both Ali and Muawiya should withdraw their claims to the caliphate. Ali’s representative announced the deposition of Ali; Amr, however, instead of making a similar withdrawal for Muawiya, proclaimed him Caliph. Amid this chaos a Kharijite came upon Ali near Kufa, and pierced his brain with a poisoned sword (661). The spot where Ali died became a holy place to the Shia sect, which worshiped him as the Wali or vicar of Allah, and made his grave a goal of pilgrimage as sacred as Mecca itself.

  The Moslems of Iraq chose Ali’s son Hasan to succeed him; Muawiya marched upon Kufa; Hasan submitted, received a pension from Muawiya, retired to Mecca, married a hundred times, and died at forty-five (669), poisoned by the Caliph or a jealous wife. Muawiya received the reluctant allegiance of all Islam; but for his own security, and because Medina was now too far from the center of Moslem population and power, he made Damascus his capital. The Quraish aristocracy, through Abu Sufyan’s son, had won their war against Mohammed; the theocratic “republic” of the Successors became a secular hereditary monarchy. Semitic rule replaced the dominance of Persians and Greeks in western Asia, expelled from Asia a European control that had lasted a thousand years, and gave to the Near East, Egypt, and North Africa the form that in essence they would keep for thirteen centuries.

  II. THE UMAYYAD CALIPHATE: 661–750

  Let us do Muawiya justice. He had won his power first through appointment as governor of Syria by the virtuous Omar; then by leading the reaction against the murder of Othman; then by intrigues so subtle that force had seldom to be used. “I apply not my sword,” he said, “where my lash suffices, nor my lash where my tongue is enough. And even if there be one hair binding me to my fellow men I do not let it break; when they pull I loosen, and if they loosen I pull.”10 His path to power was less incarnadined than most of those that have opened new dynasties.

  Like other usurpers, he felt the need to hedge his throne with splendor and ceremony. He took as his model the Byzantine emperors, who had taken as their model the Persian King of Kings; the persistence of that monarchical pattern from Cyrus to our time suggests its serviceability in the government and exploitation of an unlettered population. Muawiya felt his methods justified by the prosperity that came under his rule, the quieting of tribal strife, and the consolidation of Arab power from the Oxus to the Nile. Thinking the hereditary principle the sole alternative to chaotic struggles for an elective caliphate, he declared his son Yezid heir apparent, and exacted an oath of fealty to him from all the realm.

  Nevertheless, when Muawiya died (680), a war of succession repeated the early history of his reign. The Moslems of Kufa sent word to Husein, son of Ali, that if he would come to them and make their city his capital, they would fight for his elevation to the caliphate. Husein set out from Mecca with his family and seventy devoted followers. Twenty-five miles north of Kufa the caravan was intercepted by a force of Yezid’s troops under Obeidallah. Husein offered to submit, but his band chose to fight. Husein’s nephew Qasim, ten years old, was struck by one of the first arrows, and died in his uncle’s arms; one by one Husein’s brothers, sons, cousins, and nephews fell; every man in the group was killed, while the women and children looked on in horror and terror. When Husein’s severed head was brought to Obeidallah he carelessly turned it over with his staff. “Gently,” one of his officers protested; “he was the grandson of the Prophet. By Allah! I have seen those lips kissed by the blessed mouth of Mohammed!” (680).11 At Kerbela, where Husein fell, the Shia Moslems built a shrine to his memory; yearly they reenact there the tragedy in a passion play, worshiping the memory of Ali, Hasan, and Husein.

  Abdallah, son of Zobeir, continued the revolt. Yezid’s Syrian troops defeated him, and besieged him in Mecca; rocks from their catapults fell upon the sacred enclosure and split the Black Stone into three pieces; the Kaaba caught fire, and was burned to the ground (683). Suddenly the siege was lifted; Yezid had died, and the army was needed in Damascus. In two years of royal chaos three caliphs held the throne; finally Abd-al-Malik, son of a cousin of Muawiya, ended the disorder with ruthless courage, and then governed with relative mildness, wisdom, and justice. His general Hajjaj ibn Yusuf subdued the Kufans, and renewed the siege of Mecca. Abdallah, now seventy-two, fought bravely, urged on by his centenarian mother; he was defeated and killed; his head was sent as a certified check to Damascus; his body, after hanging for some time on a gibbet, was presented to his mother (692). During the ensuing peace Abd-al-Malik wrote poetry, patronized letters, attended to eight wives, and reared fifteen sons, of whom four succeeded to his throne; his cognomen meant Father of Kings.

  His reign of twenty years paved the way for the accomplishments of his son Walid I (705–15). The march of Arab conquest was now resumed: Balkh was taken in 705, Bokhara in 709, Spain in 711, Samarkand in 712. In the eastern provinces Hajjaj governed with a creative energy that equaled his barbarities: marshes were drained, arid tracts were irrigated, and the canal system was restored and improved; not content with which the general, once a schoolmaster, revolutionized Arabic orthography by introducing diacritical marks. Walid himself was a model king, far more interested in administration than in war. He encouraged industry and trade with new markets and better roads; built schools and hospitals—including the first lazar houses known—and homes for the aged, the crippled, and the blind; enlarged and beautified the mosques of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and raised at Damascus a still greater one, which still exists. Amid these labors he composed verses, wrote music, played the lute, listened patiently to other poets and musicians, and caroused every second day.12

  His brother and successor Suleiman (715–17) wasted lives and wealth in a vain attempt upon Constantinople, solaced himself with good food and bad women, and received the praise of posterity only for bequeathing his power to his cousin. Omar II (717–20) was resolved to atone in one reign for all the impiety and liberality of his Umayyad predecessors. The practice and propagation of the faith were the consuming interests of his life. He dressed so simply, wore so many patches, that no stranger took him for a king. He bade his wife surrender to the public treasury the costly jewels that her father had given her, and she obeyed. He informed his harem that the duties of government would absorb him to their neglect, and gave them leave to depart. He ignored the poets, orators, and scholars who had depended on the court, but drew to his counsel and companionship the most devout among the learned in his realm. He made peace with other countries, withdrew the army that had besieged Constantinople, and called in the garrisons that had guarded Moslem cities hostile to Umayyad rule. Whereas his predecessors had discouraged conversions to Islam on the ground that less poll taxes would come to t
he state, Omar speeded the acceptance of Islam by Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews; and when his fiscal agents complained that his policy was ruining the treasury, he replied: “Glad would I be, by Allah, to see everybody become Moslem, so that you and I would have to till the soil with our own hands to earn a living.”13 Clever councilors thought to stay the tide of conversions by requiring circumcision; Omar, another Paul, bade them dispense with it. Upon those who still refused conversion he laid severe restrictions, excluded them from governmental employment, and forbade them to build new shrines. After a reign of less than three years he sickened and died.

  Another side of Moslem character and custom appears in Yezid II (717–24), last of the royal sons of Abd-al-Malik. Yezid loved a slave girl Habiba as Omar II had loved Islam. While still a youth he had bought her for 4000 pieces of gold; his brother Suleiman, then caliph, had compelled him to return her to the seller; but Yezid had never forgotten her beauty and her tenderness. When he came to power his wife asked him, “Is there, my love, anything in the world left you to desire?” “Yes,” he said, “Habiba.” The dutiful wife sent for Habiba, presented her to Yezid, and retired into the obscurity of the harem. One day, feasting with Habiba, Yezid playfully threw a grape pit into her mouth; it choked her, and she died in his arms. A week later Yezid died of grief.

  Hisham (724–43) governed the realm for nineteen years in justice and peace, improved administration, reduced expenses, and left the treasury full at his death. But the virtues of a saint may be the ruin of a ruler. Hisham’s armies were repeatedly defeated, rebellion simmered in the provinces, disaffection spread in a capital that longed for a spendthrift king. His successors disgraced a hitherto competent dynasty by luxurious living and negligent rule. Walid II (743–4) was a skeptic libertine and candid epicurean. He read with delight the news of his uncle Hisham’s death; imprisoned Hisham’s son, seized the property of the late Caliph’s relatives, and emptied the treasury with careless government and extravagant largesse. His enemies reported that he swam in a pool of wine and slaked his thirst as he swam; that he used the Koran as a target for his archery; that he sent his mistresses to preside in his place at the public prayer.14 Yezid, son of Walid I, slew the wastrel, ruled for six months, and died (744). His brother Ibrahim took the throne but could not defend it; an able general deposed him, and reigned for six tragic years as Merwan II, the last caliph of the Umayyad line.

  From a worldly point of view the Umayyad caliphs had done well for Islam. They had extended its political boundaries farther than these would ever reach again; and, barring some illucid intervals, they had given the new empire an orderly and liberal government. But the lottery of hereditary monarchy placed on the throne, in the eighth century, incompetents who exhausted the treasury, surrendered administration to eunuchs, and lost control over that Arab individualism which has nearly always prevented a united Moslem power. The old tribal enmities persisted as political factions; Hashimites and Umayyads hated one another as if they were more closely related than they really were. Arabia, Egypt, and Persia resented the authority of Damascus; and the proud Persians, from contending that they were as good as the Arabs, passed to claiming superiority, and could no longer brook Syrian rule. The descendants of Mohammed were scandalized to see at the head of Islam an Umayyad clan that had included the most unyielding and last converted of the Prophet’s enemies; they were shocked by the easy morals, perhaps by the religious tolerance, of the Umayyad caliphs; they prayed for the day when Allah would send some savior to redeem them from this humiliating rule.

  All that these hostile forces needed was some initiative personality to give them unity and voice. Abu al-Abbas, great-great-grandson of an uncle of Mohammed, provided the leadership from a hiding place in Palestine, organized the revolt in the provinces, and won the ardent support of the Shia Persian nationalists. In 749 he proclaimed himself caliph at Kufa. Merwan II met the rebel forces under Abu al-Abbas’ uncle Abdallah on the river Zab; he was defeated; and a year later Damascus yielded to siege. Merwan was caught and killed, and his head was sent to Abu al-Abbas. The new Caliph was not satisfied. “Had they quaffed my blood,” he said, “it would not have quenched their thirst; neither is my wrath slaked by this man’s blood.” He named himself al-Saffah, the Bloodthirsty, and directed that all princes of the Umayyad line should be hunted out and slain, to forestall any resurrection of the fallen dynasty. Abdallah, made governor of Syria, managed the matter with humor and dispatch. He announced an amnesty to the Umayyads, and to confirm it he invited eighty of their leaders to dinner. While they ate, his hidden soldiers, at his signal, put them all to the sword. Carpets were spread over the fallen men, and the feast was resumed by the Abbasid diners over the bodies of their foes, and to the music of dying groans. The corpses of several Umayyad caliphs were exhumed, the almost fleshless skeletons were scourged, hanged, and burned, and the ashes were scattered to the winds.15

  III. THE ABBASID CALIPHATE: 750–1058

  1. Harun al-Rashid

  Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah found himself ruler of an empire extending from the Indus to the Atlantic: Sind (northwest India), Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Turkestan, Persia, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, and North Africa. Moslem Spain, however, rejected his authority, and in the twelfth year of his reign Sind threw off his rule. Hated in Damascus, uncomfortable in turbulent Kufa, al-Saffah made Anbar, north of Kufa, his capital. The men who had helped him to power, and now administered the state, were predominantly Persian in origin or culture; after al-Saffah had drunk his fill of blood, a certain Iranian refinement and urbanity entered into the manners of the court; and a succession of enlightened caliphs dignified the growth of wealth by promoting a brilliant flowering of art and literature, science and philosophy. After a century of humiliation, Persia conquered her conquerors.

  Al-Saffah died of smallpox in 754. His half brother Abu Jafar succeeded him under the name of al-Mansur, “the Victorious.” Mansur’s mother was a Berber slave; of the thirty-seven Abbasid caliphs, slaves mothered all but three through the institution of concubinage and the legitimation of its progeny; in this way the Moslem aristocracy was perpetually recruited by the democracy of chance and the fortunes of love and war. The new Caliph was forty, tall, slender, bearded, dark, austere; no slave to woman’s beauty, no friend of wine or song, but a generous patron of letters, sciences, and arts. A man of great ability and little scruple, by his firm statesmanship he established a dynasty that might else have died at al-Saffah’s death. He gave himself sedulously to administration, built a splendid new capital at Baghdad, reorganized the government and the army into their lasting form, kept a keen eye on every department and almost every transaction, periodically forced corrupt officials—including his brother—to disgorge their peculations into the treasury, and dispensed the funds of the state with a conscientious parsimony that won him no friends, but the title of “Father of Farthings.”16 At the outset of his reign he established on a Persian model an institution—the vizierate—which was to play a major role in Abbasid history. As his first vizier he appointed Khalid, son of Barmak; this family of Barmakids was cast for a heavy part in the Abbasid drama. Al-Mansur and Khalid created the order and prosperity whose full fruits were to fall into the lap of Harun al-Rashid.

  After a beneficent reign of twenty-two years al-Mansur died on a pilgrimage to Mecca. His son al-Mahdi (775–85) could now afford to be benevolent. He pardoned all but the most dangerous offenders, spent lavishly to beautify the cities, supported music and literature, and administered the empire with reasonable competence. Byzantium having seized the opportunity of the Abbasid revolution to recover Arab-conquered territory in Asia Minor, al-Mahdi sent an army under his son Harun to renew a theft long sanctified by time. Harun drove the Greeks back to Constantinople, and so threatened that capital that the Empress Irene made peace on terms that pledged a yearly payment of 70,000 dinars ($332,500) to the caliphs (784). From that time onward al-Mahdi called the youth Harun al-Ra
shid—Aaron the Upright. He had previously named another son heir apparent; now, seeing the far superior capacity of Harun, he asked al-Hadi to waive his claim in favor of his younger brother. Al-Hadi, commanding an army in the east, refused, and disobeyed a summons to Baghdad; al-Mahdi and Harun set out to capture him, but al-Mahdi, aged forty-three, died on the way. Harun—so counseled by the Barmakid Yahya, son of Khalid—recognized Hadi as Caliph, and himself as heir apparent. But, as Sa‘di was to say, “Ten dervishes can sleep on one rug, but two kings cannot be accommodated in an entire kingdom.”17 Al-Hadi soon set Harun aside, imprisoned Yahya, and proclaimed his own son as successor. Shortly thereafter (786) al-Hadi died; rumor said that his own mother, favoring Harun, had had him smothered with pillows. Harun ascended the throne, made Yahya his vizier, and began the most famous reign in Moslem history.