by John McHugo
At first, the attackers shot arrows at Hussein’s men and individual combats took place. One co-ordinated attack was repulsed; but in the afternoon the little party was encircled and the end could only be a matter of time. One by one, Hussein’s close relatives and supporters were killed. Eventually, Hussein tried to break through to the Euphrates to drink, but was wounded in the mouth and chin. Then he was hit in the head, and began to bleed copiously. He wrapped his head up with a cloth as a turban and continued to fight, suffering other wounds to his hand and his shoulder. Finally, he collapsed on the ground and a soldier decapitated him. His head was taken first to Kufa to show that he was dead, and then to Yazid in Damascus. His body was buried where he had fallen.
The death of Hussein was as traumatic for Muslims as the murder of Uthman or the assassination of Ali. But there was a key difference. Unlike Uthman and Ali, Hussein was killed by agents of a body claiming to be the lawful government of the Muslim community. Nor was it just the Umayyads who were involved. The army that surrounded him was led by the grandson of a distinguished Companion of the Prophet, S‘ad ibn Abi Waqqas, the general who had done more than anyone else to conquer the Persian Empire and who had been a member of the Shura that had elected Uthman. In fact, it was not inconceivable that Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqas might have been chosen as caliph himself at some point. Now his son had commanded the men who had unsheathed their swords to fight and kill the Prophet’s own grandson. Ubaydullah, the governor who had despatched Umar to bar Hussein from the Euphrates, was the son of Mu‘awiya’s right-hand man in Iraq, Ziyad bin Abihi. He was the son of a prostitute whose father had been unknown, and whom Mu‘awiya had proclaimed to be his half-brother, thereby making Ziyad a member of his own family and ensuring his loyalty.
Hussein’s cause had been to support those excluded from the elite, an elite that now governed the empire. The support of that elite for Yazid, and the length to which they had shown they were prepared to go when their interests were threatened, were now apparent for all to see. The killing of Hussein had removed a grave threat to the Umayyad dynasty, but it would gnaw away at their legitimacy.
II
The other figure of concern to the Umayyads after Mu‘awiya’s death was Abd Allah bin al-Zubair. His father had been one of the Shura that had elected Uthman and Ali, and thus had also been a potential candidate for the caliphate himself, while his mother was a daughter of Abu Bakr and sister of Aisha. Ibn al-Zubair himself had been a hero of the wars of conquest in Ifriqiya (roughly equivalent to modern Tunisia and the eastern part of Algeria) where he was said to have killed the Byzantine governor in combat. He had also taken part in the campaigns in northern Persia. In addition, he had been appointed by Uthman to the commission he had set up to produce the definitive text of the Qur’an. He thus had impeccable claims to be a candidate to lead the community at the time of Mu‘awiya’s death. If Hussein was the figure behind whom it was natural for supporters of rule by a member of the Prophet’s family to rally, Ibn al-Zubair was a potential candidate for those who did not necessarily believe the caliph need be a member of the Prophet’s family, but rejected Umayyad dynastic rule.
After the death of Hussein, a secret following began to grow around Ibn al-Zubair. He began a revolt by declaring that Yazid was deposed. He soon found himself besieged in Mecca by an Umayyad army, but this army withdrew when news reached it of Yazid’s death from natural causes. Ibn al-Zubair proclaimed himself the Commander of the Faithful and received support from those opposed to the Umayyads in Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Yemen. These rebellions were all put down, and Ibn al-Zubair was finally killed in 692 on the battlefield outside Mecca, which had been besieged for a second time. The Umayyad dynasty had survived its second major challenge. Ibn al Zubair’s revolt had proved far harder to crush than Hussein’s, but Ibn al-Zubair is now remembered only by historians of the period. By contrast, the story of Hussein’s doomed attempt to reach Kufa had a poignancy and moral impact that would always resonate among Muslims. He lit a lamp that would burn brightly throughout the period of the Umayyad dynasty and beyond. It is still burning very brightly today.
III
After Yazid’s death, the caliph chosen by the Umayyad family was Marwan bin al-Hakam, the very same Marwan who had once advised his cousin Uthman to take a hard line in defence of his rights as caliph. He carried as much responsibility for the strife that had torn apart the Muslim community as any other individual –if not more. It will be remembered that he had been behind the letter that Uthman denied sending to the governor of Egypt, asking the governor to have the discontented soldiers who had come to Medina imprisoned and flogged. His freedman, it will also be recalled, had precipitated the first violence between Muslims by dropping a stone from the balcony of Uthman’s house, which killed a Companion of the Prophet. This had been the spark that started the riot in which Uthman was murdered. The now elderly Marwan was the strongman of the Umayyad family, but was scarcely a figure likely to appeal to the devout.
Marwan’s able son Abdul Malik succeeded him in 685, and it was he who finally triumphed over Ibn al-Zubair and other rebels, and reunited the empire. He also instituted some very important reforms. The old Arab ways of doing business in the Hejaz (the Islamic Holy Land, corresponding to the western region of present-day Saudi Arabia) had become inadequate for such a vast empire. Government needed to become much more formal than hitherto. From now on records were kept in Arabic rather than in Greek and Persian, the old languages of administration of the Byzantine and Persian Empires, which had still been used for that purpose during the first half-century after the conquests. Coins were minted containing inscriptions attesting that Muhammad was the Prophet of God. The first great edifice of Muslim architecture was built. Abdul Malik commissioned the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which was fringed with Qur’anic verses deliberately chosen because they pointedly denied the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Imperial Islam was starting to accentuate the differences between the teaching of the Qur’an and Christianity, rather than the similarities.
Abdul Malik died in 705, and the Umayyad Caliphate remained in place until 750. The empire continued to expand – all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and north into Spain and what is now France, as well as eastwards to Bukhara, Samarkand, Kabul and Sind. But its internal problems had not gone away. There were disputes over the revenues of the conquered territories, as well as tribal rivalries almost everywhere, and intermittently simmering disquiet in the rich garrison cities of Iraq. A discontented but important group were the Arab tribes who did not belong to the Quraysh and whose aristocracies from pre-Islamic times inevitably felt excluded from the kind of leading roles they would instinctively have expected for themselves. This group would provide leaders for insurrections.
The Umayyads faced other problems, too. They had to play a skilful game balancing the competing Qaysi and Yamani tribal groupings, the representative names for the northern and southern Arabs, whose rivalry always risked erupting into civil war and had many local variants. The Umayyad power base was largely confined to Greater Syria and the Jazeera – the large steppe area between the Tigris and Euphrates to the north east of Damascus. This left other areas, especially the wealthy province of Iraq, ripe for subversion.
There were also complications caused by the empire’s success. The number of converts to Islam grew. Initially, they continued to be taxed as though they were non-Muslims. A compromise was reached under which they were given the same more favourable tax treatment as other Muslims, but land continued to be taxed at the rate applying to non-Muslims, even if the owners had converted to Islam. A sense of exclusion and discontent remained. The converts aspired to treatment equal to that given to other Muslims because they had adopted the faith of their overlords; but it was not granted to them, or only very grudgingly. Because they tended to adopt Muslim names which were also Arab (and because they often needed to attach themselves as clients to an Arab tribe), it can be hard to tell them apart from native Arab Muslims in
the source material that has come down to us. For instance, large numbers of Arab tribesmen were sent to settle in the Khorasan area of eastern Iran. Many of them intermarried with the local, Persian-speaking population, some of whom also converted to Islam. By the 740s, there may well have been many tribal fighters in that region whose paternal grandfather was their only source of Arab blood, and who spoke Persian at home. They would have been hard to distinguish – by, say, Arabs in the Hejaz or Syria – from a Khorasani convert to Islam.
The Umayyad caliphs claimed religious authority, but many of them had a reputation for religious laxity and luxurious living, and there were frequently bitter quarrels within the family over the succession. We have already seen how they had difficulty appealing to the devout. Mu‘awiya’s moral claim of justice for the murder of Uthman might have been a good rallying cry in Syria in the late 650s, but it lost its force with Ali’s death. Ali’s son Hasan, after all, had stood guard at Uthman’s house, and Hasan’s reason for not having pressed his claim to the caliphate against that of Mu‘awiya was commendable: he had wished to preserve the peace and stability of the community. From that time onwards, it was hard to find any justification, other than the stability of the empire, behind the dynastic rule of the Umayyads. Nevertheless, the desire – or the need – for stability was a very powerful impulse that led many to support or acquiesce in Umayyad rule. Stability was needed for the sake of Islam, but there were plenty of people who might be tempted to back a rival to the Umayyads if only such a rival could gain sufficient traction to stand a chance of replacing the dynasty.
IV
The remorse felt among the men of Kufa for the failure to go to Hussein’s aid on that fateful day, the 10th of Muharram, led to the appearance there of a movement known as ‘the Penitents’ very soon after his death. Seeking revenge, its members first spent a day and a night weeping at the grave where Hussein’s decapitated corpse was buried; then they set out for Greater Syria to dethrone the Umayyads. They were intercepted by Syrian troops and easily wiped out in January 685. After this, the call for the replacement of the Umayyad dynasty by a caliph from the Prophet’s family increasingly became the rallying cry for rebels, although there were also rebellions that took their inspiration from Kharijism (founded by those who had come to reject Ali’s authority). Two of the rebellions in favour of a descendant of Ali need to be mentioned here in passing, although their full historical significance will only become apparent at a later point.
The first took place later in 685. Mukhtar al-Thaqafi, a member of the old, non-Qurayshi tribal aristocracy, took control of Kufa and held it against all-comers for some eighteen months. His revolt was in the name of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah, Hussein’s half-brother born to Ali by his wife from the Hanafi tribe, not the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. Mukhtar al-Thaqafi proclaimed Muhammad, who was now Ali’s only surviving son, as the Mahdi, or ‘rightly-guided one’. Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah was living in Medina at the time and wisely had nothing to do with the revolt. After it had been suppressed, he even travelled to Damascus and paid homage to the Caliph Abdul Malik.
The second revolt occurred only four years later, in 739. Zayd bin Ali, a grandson of Hussein whose father had survived the massacre at Karbala, arrived in Kufa. He unsuccessfully tried to instigate another rebellion but was killed fighting against government troops in the city’s streets. His son Yahya fled to Khorasan and thence to Herat, where he raised the standard of revolt but died in battle in 743.
These two revolts were in the name of a specific descendant of Ali. Yet from the 730s onwards, a new idea took shape. The previous concept involved rallying behind a descendant of Ali who claimed the caliphate for himself or whose name was used as the banner behind which opposition to the Umayyads could rally. Now, opponents of the dynasty suggested that the identity of the true caliph was still secret – or might not even have been decided. The leader of the community should be ‘the Accepted One from the House of Muhammad’ (al-rida min al-Muhammad). The only certain thing about him was that he came from the Prophet’s family. This preaching became increasingly systematic and effective. Like the three earlier revolts by the Penitents, Mukhtar al-Thaqafi and Zayd bin Ali, it started in Kufa. It soon extended to the garrisons of eastern Iran and beyond, especially to the important city of Marv in what is now Turkmenistan.
Its public face was a mysterious figure known as Abu Muslim. His full name (or at least the name he used – he was evasive about his origins and early life) was Abu Muslim Abdurrahman bin Muslim al-Khurasani. ‘Al-Khurasani’ means ‘from Khorasan’, so we know where he claimed his family came from. Abu Muslim means ‘father of a Muslim’ and therefore tells us very little. It might just mean he had a son whom he called Muslim. Yet when put together with ‘ibn Muslim’, the patronymic meaning ‘son of a Muslim’, one suspects the possibility of a coded reference that he was the son or grandson of a convert. Abdurrahman, literally ‘worshipper of the merciful’ is a common Arab name – but it would not have been an unusual one for a convert to adopt or to give his own son. What does seem certain is that Abu Muslim recognised that the non-Arab converts to Islam and the Arab tribal fighters excluded from the Umayyad establishment were powerful constituencies that he could rally behind his own choice of the Accepted One. And the identity of his Accepted One was a closely guarded secret.
But who was eligible to be chosen as an ‘Accepted One’? Questions of succession to the headship of a clan in Arab society were generally decided by consultation among its senior male members, rather than by any automatic right of the first-born. Such was the case with the Umayyad dynasty itself, as happened with the passing of the caliphate from the line of Mu‘awiya, after the death of his son Yazid, to that of Marwan. The Arab conception of a family was more of a clan descended from a common male ancestor than what we now call a nuclear family. In a similar way, Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah, the figure who had been put forward by a group of rebels at a slightly earlier stage, was a descendant of Ali but not of the Prophet. Thus, somebody in the line of Ali who did not carry the genes of Fatima was still a member of the al-Muhammad, the family of Muhammad, through their common descent from Muhammad’s grandfather, and could be seen as a potential candidate to lead the community.
V
In 747 Abu Muslim took control of Marv. He sent armies westwards. They were victorious against the Umayyad forces sent to quell the uprising, and within eighteen months had taken most of Iraq. Although Ibrahim, the first person whom he declared to be the designated Accepted One, was caught and executed by the Umayyads, Ibrahim’s brother Abu al-‘Abbas was proclaimed as the first caliph of the new Abbasid dynasty. He took the regnal name Saffah in Kufa after it opened its gates to the armies from Khorasan in October 749. The last Umayyad caliph’s army was decisively defeated at the Battle of the Zab River after it entered Iraq to evict him, and soon the new movement had swept all before it.
Saffah claimed descent from the Prophet’s uncle Abbas, whose name now became that taken by the new dynasty. He was not a descendant of the Prophet through Fatima. The important point was that he was a descendant of Hashim, the male ancestor he shared with the Prophet and who was the founder of the clan to which the three cousins, the Prophet Muhammad, al-Abbas and Abu Talib, the father of Ali, belonged. To many Muslims, descendants of Abbas were equally eligible for consideration as members of the Prophet’s family from whom the Accepted One might be chosen, alongside the Prophet’s direct descendants through Ali and Fatima. Indeed, according to the norms of pre-Islamic Arab tribal custom, it could be (and was) argued that the uncle and his male offspring should take priority over direct descendants through the daughter of a man who had left no male heir. This explains how an insurgency could be raised in the name of a figure like Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah.
An even more shadowy figure in the overthrow of the Umayyads than Abu Muslim was Abu Salama, the man who originally persuaded Abu Muslim to leave Kufa and travel to Khorasan in order to spark the rebellion. It appears
(although we cannot be certain about this) that, before Abu Salama made the initial approaches to the descendants of the Prophet’s uncle Abbas, he had also tried to find a descendant of Ali to be the new caliph.
The head of the house of Ali at that time was Ja‘far, a great-grandson of Hussein who is known as Ja‘far al-Sadiq, ‘the faithful’ or ‘the truthful’. His own grandfather, Ali Zayn al-Abidin, saw Hussein, his own father, killed at Karbala, but he himself had survived the battle because he had been ill and unable to take part. A man known for his intense religious devotion, Ali Zayn al-Abidin had kept well out of politics and was not associated with the revolts connected with his cousin Zayd or Mukhtar al-Thaqafi’s revolt in the name of his uncle, Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah. His own son, Muhammad al-Baqir, followed the same pious and careful path. His mother had been a daughter of Hussein’s elder brother Hasan. The parentage of Muhammad al-Baqir had thus united the bloodline of the two sons of Ali and, of course, of the Prophet.
Muhammad al-Baqir’s son Ja‘far al-Sadiq would thus have had an impeccable lineage as the Accepted One if he had become caliph. Like his father and grandfather, he had kept well away from political activity and had spent his life in study and prayer. He also carried immense respect as an authority on the traditions of the Prophet. His pupils included many of the key figures in the early Abbasid period who would go on to formulate the precepts and rules which constitute the religious law of Islam, and which we know as the Sharia. But, if it is indeed true that Ja‘far al-Sadiq was invited to become the Accepted One, he declined. He is reported to have read the letter containing the invitation and then burned it without writing a reply.2 During the preaching in the name of the ‘Accepted One’, many expected the new caliph to be a descendant of Ali. Despite the definition of the family of the Prophet to include the descendants of his cousins, prestige was attached by all Muslims to the line of the Prophet itself. Many felt disappointment that the new dynasty was not descended from Ali and Fatima. This was a factor behind rebellions during the Abbasid period in which a descendant of Ali provided a focal point, just as had been the case during the Umayyad period. As Tayeb El-Hibri (a specialist in Arabic historiography) has put it, the descendants of Ali were ‘in full command of the rhetoric of opposition and sentimental memory’.3 Yet well before the end of the Abbasid Caliphate, those who preached that the leader of the Muslim community should be a lineal descendant of Ali and Fatima had themselves split into sects.