God's Armies
Page 4
Settlers in Kufa resented the requirement that funds from confiscated Sassanian lands should be sent to Medina, and an early Companion who protested about what was happening was beaten up in the mosque in Medina. Umar’s preference for the first Companions – the Emigrants from Mecca – against the Helpers had been disliked, and Uthman began redressing this. He was happy with a traditional clan leadership in the provinces, again setting aside Umar’s arrangements. Financial pressures emerged as, in Muhammad’s ruling, when slave concubines gave birth, they were automatically freed and had to be given support in terms of finance and food. In Kufa dissidents rejected a governor appointed by Uthman and marched on Medina to protest under the leadership of Malik al-Ashtar, a respected former leader in the conquest of Iraq. In Egypt, after Amr’s dismissal, his early followers were irritated at interference with their enjoyment of the rewards of conquest and the policies of Uthman’s appointee. Although Uthman had some vociferous support, notably from a controversial figure from Damascus, Muawiya, a capable organiser of the Muslim settlement in the former Byzantine cities in Syria, it was not enough. An Egyptian protest party set out for Medina and was met by Caliph Uthman, who spoke reassuringly to them but made the mistake of sending a letter to his man, Abi Sahr, telling him to punish the rebels when they got back. The fat was in the fire when knowledge of this emerged, and the Egyptians returned to Medina in anger.
Uthman was remarkably blind to the irritation caused by his naked appointment of relatives to office and his own wealth and ostentation. The austerity of Muhammad himself, who believed that wealth should always be devoted to the common good, and especially the poor, had gone by the board and Uthman built himself a fine palace on the edge of Medina, welcoming ambassadors and treating himself and his visitors to finely cooked food. Elsewhere grand residences were built by various magnates. When Uthman denounced rebels in the mosque, they attacked him with stones. Uthman’s house came under siege and the besiegers were further inflamed by the news that Muawiya was hurrying from Damascus to rescue him. Ali, knowing that Uthman’s house had no well, contrived to send an agent through the siege with goatskins of water. Uthman remained unmoved by demands for his departure, saying that the position of the caliph had been conferred on him and was not negotiable. He was killed with the Quran in front of him and blood dripping on its pages while his young wife had two fingers sliced off as she defended his body. Uthman insisted that no Muslim blood should be shed for him and came to be seen as a martyr.
Caliph Ali (656–61)
Ali now appeared as the only possible candidate and so at last became caliph, but in the worst possible circumstances. The population had been so divided and disturbed that Medina had become untenable, and Ali had to fear a backlash from the Quraysh, aware of his own predilection for the Helpers. He left for the garrison of Kufa to gather support. Aisha had long been an opponent of Ali and she was backed by al-Zubayr, an early Muslim supporter who had married another daughter of Abu Bakr, and by another notable supporter, Talha ibn Ubayd Allah – both members of the committee who had elected Uthman in 644. They went to seek support in the garrison town of Basra, but gained little. At the battle of the Camel, fought nearby in November 656 – so called because it swirled round the camel on which Aisha had stationed herself – the two former electors were killed and Aisha dispatched to seclusion in Medina. Ali made his own appointments, displacing those against him, but he faced a major opponent in Muawiya, of Uthman’s dynasty, who had a duty as his relative to avenge his murder. The young widow who had lost fingers at the death scene sent Muawiya the bloodstained shirt from the body of her husband, begging him to avenge his death. A man of peace, Ali, of course, had had no share in Uthman’s death, but among his supporters in Kufa was Malik al-Ashtar, who had led the Kufan protest delegation to Medina. He had not killed Uthman but still carried a heavy responsibility for the siege in Medina as a result of which Uthman was murdered. Muawiya stood firm on his duty as clan leader to avenge Uthman’s death and would not accept Ali as caliph until he had done so. As always, Ali stood for spiritual leadership above quarrels over family disputes and taxation, for equality among all believers and strict justice. But he had had to stand for office at a time which took him away from the Prophet’s town of Medina, the long-established base for campaigning, and forced him to immerse himself in complex Kufan politics to seek supporters.
There was now civil war within Islam. Ali felt compelled to oppose Muawiya, but he was also forced into a confrontation with the sect of the Kharijites – literally, ‘those who go out’. The term originated with the sect’s enemies, who felt that they had left Islam: i.e., abandoned all the norms of the Islamic community. Kharijites believed in an excessively rigid adherence to the Quran, had egalitarian views on the religious leaders of Islam and insisted on equal distribution of booty from the great conquests. Ali had much in common with them and persuaded many to drop their opposition. But there remained crosspatch extremists over-fond of fighting. At Nahrawan in Iraq, as some took to brigandage, he had to attack and kill them, so damaging his reputation.
Ali assembled his army at Kufa and marched north along the Euphrates to Siffin, a point near the frontier of Syria and Iraq, to confront Muawiya’s forces. The armies stood over against each other; there were skirmishes, individual duels, a long stand-off and, finally, a full-scale battle, in which Ali’s side were winning when a section of the Syrian cavalry came forward with leaves from the Quran on their lances. With this gesture the battle stopped and Ali accepted arbitration. But the arbiters were not in reality neutral and Ali’s cause began to unravel. The surviving Kharijites, impatient with the politicking, rejected Ali’s compromises, believing that he could not be the true caliph if he was accepting arbitration. ‘Only God has the right to decide’, they said. They yearned for the simplicities of Muhammad’s lifetime but, again, some turned to brigandage. Ali’s army had to react, and in another battle many were killed.
In 661 came full-scale tragedy. Kharijites decided to kill the leaders of the disputing parties but failed in the attack on Amr, who persisted in advancing his rights, and Muawiya. Only Ali, characteristically open and unprotected in the mosque at Kufa, fell to the assassin’s knife. His son renounced all claim to succession to the Prophet’s powers. With a general weariness of dissent and a fear that Islam’s enemies would take advantage of disunity, it was decided that Muawiya should take the caliphate. The Umayyads had won after all. But there was widespread distaste for Muawiya and because of this only the first four caliphs – Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali – were given the title of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. To the supporters of Ali, the Shiites, the whole idea of such a listing was complete nonsense. For them, there had only ever been one true caliph, Ali, unjustly forced out of his rightful inheritance designated by the Prophet at Ghadir Khumm and betrayed by deceitful manoeuvres.
* Islamic dating is based on the lunar year and cannot always be reconciled with the Western traditional solar year of 365 days; hence the convention of linking two Western years for some Islamic dates.
† A. Afsaruddin, Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (Oxford, 2013). This is a work of high scholarship to which I am indebted for reflections, Quranic quotations and the Muslim response to the Twin Towers atrocity (see Chapter 12); see also her introduction, note 3, on the dating of the Quranic text.
‡ From The Holy Qur’an, trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali (Birmingham, 1934; repr. 2000), sura 17, V.I, p. 768.
2
THE SEARCH FOR THE
JUST SOCIETY
Caliph Muawiya (661–80)
The new caliph ruled in the style of an Arab patriarch, with hilm, shrewdness, moderation, calm: managing, dealing, defusing crises, respecting wealth but avoiding the preferences for family which had been the undoing of Caliph Uthman. His relatives were left in wealthy seclusion. He was at pains to reconcile Kufa and Basra to the dominance of his power base in Damascus and his widespread support in Syria. To this en
d he employed individual Thagafi, from the elite in Taifa, the summer resort of wealthy Meccans, which in the early years had repudiated Muhammad’s Revelations and which came late to the acceptance of Islam. They were entirely independent of the deep tensions within Iraq. One of them, forgiven by the Prophet for a murder committed before he became a believer and by Caliph Umar for adultery after he had accepted the Faith, turned out to be an ideal manager for restive Kufans, overlooking minor transgressions and securing additional income for them from a site in the Zagros mountains. Later on another Thagafi, Zayid ibn Abihi, who had been a stout supporter of Ali, turned round, accepted Muawiya, became his blood brother and was appointed as a kind of informal viceroy to the caliph for both Kufa and Basra. Zayid concluded that those he ruled would become restless if not given prospects of war, booty and land, and with the assent of the caliph he dispatched many thousands of settlers to the oasis town of Merv, then lightly garrisoned, and beyond Merv into Khurasan. He made the region his own, with the greatest concentration of Muslim inhabitants anywhere outside Arabia.
Muawiya, too, thought it unwise to reject the attractions of war and conquest, and launched expeditions against Rhodes and Crete, extracting tribute from the Byzantines. Constantinople was kept under pressure as year by year his son Yazid blockaded the city, although the strength of the Byzantine navy prevented him from taking it. In the administering of his territories Muawiya continued to use Byzantine Christians working in Greek and the existing coinage remained legal tender. It was business as usual.
Muawiya was no idealist. He could justly claim to have acted as Muhammad’s secretary, but his thought-world was alien to the Prophet’s. The zeal for giving up riches and devoting resources to the care of the poor and to the central purposes of Islam in the style of Abu Bakr and Umar was an approach he did not share. He sought acknowledgement of his son Yazid’s right to rule after him and plainly intended to create a hereditary caliphate. The question had to be asked: what would become of the shura, the consideration of suitability for the task facing future caliphs, if the arbitrary chances of hereditary succession took over? There was disquiet over this, especially among the Helpers in Medina, as Muawiya set about developing farmland in the vicinity of the city solely to boost caliphal revenues.
The Second Civil War, 680–92
After Muawiya’s death and the succession of his son, who duly reigned as Yazid I (680–83), the peace was broken. When Ali’s second son, al-Husayn, who had been living in seclusion in Medina, heard of Yazid’s succession, he took his followers to travel across the desert towards Kufa, the former stronghold of Ali’s supporters. They never got there. Muawiya’s faithful viceroy, Zayid, had been succeeded by his son Ubayd Allah, who blocked their way forward, kept them in the desert, where they suffered from thirst, then massacred them, women and children included, at Karbala, north-east of Kufa, on 10 October 680, a date and place never forgotten by the Shiites. They erected a mosque there, and continue to commemorate the suffering of al-Husayn every year on the date of his death. The Kufans did not move to support al-Husayn, so, if he had hoped to raise an insurrection against Yazid, he failed.
Ali’s supporters elsewhere and subsequent Shiites saw it very differently. Al-Husayn, they believed, deliberately intended to sacrifice himself in order to raise the consciousness of all Muslim believers to Muhammad’s right and just order, which had been abandoned by Muawiya and Yazid. He was a martyr in a sense familiar to Christians: a passive, suffering victim of persecution. In his view Caliph Yazid I was taking Islam back to the cruelties and arbitrary behaviour of the Arabian desert in the jahiliyya, the time of ignorance before the Prophet. Political and military action alone would not do, for they would only end in toleration of a corrupt and debased caliphate. So al-Husayn gave himself, his devoted followers and his family up to a sacrificial death.
Al-Husayn’s pitiful end moved the Muslim world generally and not just Ali’s supporters, for al-Husayn had been in the household of the Prophet and had been dandled on his knee. A defenceless idealist had been done to death and reaction to his end stimulated opposition to the caliphate as a flawed institution. It also stirred up further disquiet over the adoption of the hereditary principle. Yazid was well liked personally, showed competence and might well have been a good caliph, but was swept into a maelstrom of conflict. In Mecca, ibn al-Zubayr, the son of the recalcitrant elector who had been defeated and killed by Ali at the battle of the Camel in 656, emerged as an opponent of the hereditary caliphate, insisting that the choice of a new caliph should be made from the ranks of the Quraysh; the elite of Mecca naturally backed him. The people of Medina, angry over their treatment at the hands of Muawiya, were also recalcitrant, refused mediation, drove out Umayyads and were finally suppressed by a Syrian army in the battle of the Harra in 683. Medina was sacked. Then Yazid I died of natural causes in his desert encampment, followed in a short time by his son.
There was no obvious candidate to succeed, and in the crisis for the Umayyad caliphate the dynasts turned to Marwan, an aged and reticent nephew of Uthman who had long lived quietly in Medina and had moved to Syria only because of the clash in his city. He was induced to reign as Caliph Marwan I (684–5). Under him yet another internecine battle took place as rival clans from southern and northern. Arabia struggled for mastery, with heavy loss of life at the battle of Marj Rahit in the summer of 684. Marwan died after a year and his son Abd al-Malik succeeded him as caliph: young, energetic, clear-sighted and one of the great figures of Islamic history.
There was a slow diminution of troubles. A revolt by Ali’s supporters in Kufa failed. Kharijites again emerged and were suppressed. Abd al-Malik in person led an army to take the submission of Kufa in 691 and in the following year, having cut off ibn al-Zubayr from his allies, sent troops to destroy his power base in Mecca, a melancholy episode for all believers in which Mecca was fired and the black stone at the Kaba broken into three: thereafter it had to be held together by silver threads. Agitation brought to light a long-standing clash between the interests of the traditional Arab chiefs and the mawali, new converts to the faith, who came over to the Muslims and ceased to pay the tax of the jizya. No doubt it was a compliment to the vitality of belief that they wished to become Muslims, but there were major financial drawbacks in the loss of the buffer jizya tax, and the chiefs preferred to leave dhimmis in a conveniently subordinate position. Karbala, the battle of the Harra, Marj Rahit, the sacking of Medina, fire in Mecca and damage to the Kaba ... this formidable list made the second civil war more grievous than the first, which had lasted from 655 to 661.
The talents of Abd al-Malik, his long reign and the will for peace after conflict ensured that the future lay with a hereditary caliphate: there would be no reversion to the choice of individual caliphs serving only for a lifetime. Abd al-Malik believed that Muawiya’s form of rule, which avoided the use of family ties in government, was not effective and proceeded to govern with the aid of members of his family, considering that the force of family loyalty, which gave caliphs security, was too great to be disregarded. For good or ill, this became the pattern for a hereditary caliphate. Mecca and Medina were both damaged and Damascus was now the undisputed caliphal capital. The hajj would continue without question, and repairs to the sacred sites would be made, but the days of political power based on the holy cities of the Hijaz were over. Abd al-Malik had at his service an excellent fighting general in the Thagafi al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf and made full use of him in establishing what was, in effect, an imperialist caliphate. Separatism in Kufa and Basra was to end, and a Syrian garrison was put into a new site between them at Wasit. Iraq was to remain subordinate to Syria. Investment was made in irrigation schemes and land reclamation but only for the benefit of the Syrian caliphate, not for local Muslims.
Another decision marked a sharp reaction against Muawiya’s laissez-faire approach, in which Arabic had not been requisite in government and in consequence Byzantine Christians had been free to use Greek for their Musl
im masters just as they had done for their own emperors. Abd al-Malik made Arabic the language of bureaucracy and court culture. Similarly, Arabic superseded Aramaic and Pahlavi, so everyone would now have to carry out their duties in Arabic. Coins in Byzantine style ceased to be used and were replaced by coins with Arabic inscriptions, including the anti-Trinitarian text from sura 112 of the Quran: in short, it became a caliphal coinage. A unity was established between the language of the Quran, of scholarship and that of the common people, in contrast to the West, where Latin continued to be the language of scholarship and of administration alone.
The Dome of the Rock is Abd al-Malik’s work. A masterpiece of Islamic architecture and a triumphal statement of Muslim command of Jerusalem, it dominates the skyline to this day, placed so as to overshadow the Christian sacred structures below.* Only a caliph with control of massive reserves of money could have commissioned a building of this size and complexity. It is a shrine designed to give solemn commemoration to the site of Mount Moriah and the abortive sacrifice of Abraham. Pilgrims were to pass through its corridors, appreciating the vistas of light, designed with ingenious use of the octagon and showing a high skill in geometry.