KAREN ARMSTRONG ISLAM A Short History
CONTENTS
1 BEGINNINGS
- The Prophet (570-632)
- The Rashidun (632-661)
- The First Fitnah
2 DEVELOPMENT
- The Umayyads and the Second Fitnah
- The Religious Movement
- The Last Years of the Umayyads (705-750)
- The Abbasids: The High Caliphal Period (750-935)
- The Esoteric Movements 65
3 CULMINATION
- A New Order (935-1258) 81
- The Crusades Expansion
- The Mongols 96-115
4 ISLAM TRIUMPHANT
- Imperial Islam (1500-1 700)
- The Safavid Empire 220-1 500) 3 3
- The Moghul Empire
- The Ottoman Empire
5 ISLAM AGONISTES
- The Arrival of the West (1 750-2000)
- What is a Modern Muslim State?
- Fundamentalism
- Muslims in a Minority
- The Way Forward
- Key Figures in the History of Islam
Glossary of Arabic Terms
Pronunciation Guide
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading Index
Discussion Questions
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1] BEGINNINGS
T H E PROPHE T (570.632 )
During the month of Ramadan in 610 C.E.,an Arab business- man had an experience that changed the history of the world. Every year at this time, Muhammad ibn Abdallah used to re- tire to a cave on the summit of Mount Hira, just outside Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz, where he prayed, fasted and gave alms to the poor. He had long been worried by what he per- ceived to be a crisis in Arab society. In recent decades his tribe, the Quraysh, had become rich by trading in the sur- rounding countries. Mecca had become a thriving mercantile city, but in the aggressive stampede for wealth some of the old tribal values had been lost. Instead of looking after the weaker members of the tribe, as the nomadic code prescribed, the Quraysh were now intent on making money at the expense of some of the tribe's poorer family groupings, or clans. There was also spiritual restlessness in Mecca and throughout the peninsula. Arabs knew that Judaism and Christianity, which were practised in the Byzantine and Persian empires, were more sophisticated than their own pagan traditions. Some had come to believe that the High God of their pantheon, al-Lah (whose name simply meant "the God"), was the deity wor- shipped by the Jews and the Christians, but he had sent the Arabs no prophet and no scripture in their own language. In- deed, the Jews and Christians whom they met often taunted the Arabs for being left out of the divine plan. Throughout Arabia one tribe fought another, in a murderous cycle of vendetta and counter-vendetta. It seemed to many of the more thoughtful people in Arabia that the Arabs were a lost people, exiled forever from the civilized world and ignored by God himself. But that changed on the night of 17 Ram-
adan, when Muhammad woke to find himself overpowered by a devastating presence, which squeezed him tightly until he heard the first words of a new Arab's scripture pouring from his lips.
For the first two years, Muhammad kept quiet about his experience. He had new revelations, but confided only in his wife Khadija and her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a Christian. Both were convinced that these revelations came from God, but it was only in 612 that Muhammad felt empowered to preach, and gradually gained converts: his young cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib, his friend Abu Bakr, and the young merchant Uthman ibn Affan from the powerful Umayyad family. Many of the converts, including a significant number of women, were from the poorer clans; others were unhappy about the new inequity in Mecca, which they felt was alien to the Arab spirit. Muhammad's message was simple. He taught the Arabs no new doctrines about God: most of the Quraysh were al- ready convinced that Allah had created the world and would judge humanity in the Last Days, as Jews and Christians be- lieved. Muhammad did not think that he was founding a new religion, but that he was merely bringing the old faith in the One God to the Arabs, who had never had a prophet before. It was wrong, he insisted, to build a private fortune, but good to share wealth and create a society where the weak and vulner- able were treated with respect. If the Quraysh did not mend their ways, their society would collapse (as had other unjust societies in the past) because they were violating the funda- mental laws of existence.
This was the core teaching of the new scripture, called the guran (recitation) because believers, most of whom, including Muhammad himself, were illiterate, imbibed its teachings by listening to public readings of its chapters (surahs). The Quran was revealed to Muhammad verse by verse, surah by surah during the next twenty-one years, often in response to a
crisis or a question that had arisen in the little community of the faithful. The revelations were painful to Muhammad, who used to say: "Never once did I receive a revelation, without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me."' In the early days, the impact was so frightening that his whole body was convulsed; he would often sweat profusely, even on a cool day, experience a great heaviness, or hear strange sounds and voices. In purely secular terms, we could say that Muhammad had perceived the great problems confronting his people at a deeper level than most of his contemporaries, and that as he "listened" to events, he had to delve deeply and painfully into his inner being to find a solution that was not only politically viable but spiritually illuminating. He was also creating a new literary form and a masterpiece of Arab prose and poetry. Many of the first believers were converted by the sheer beauty of the Quran, which resonated with their deepest as- pirations, cutting through their intellectual preconceptions in the manner of great art, and inspiring them, at a level more profound than the cerebral, to alter their whole way of life. One of the most dramatic of these conversions was that of Umar ibn al-Khattab, who was devoted to the old paganism, passionately opposed to Muhammad's message, and was de- termined to wipe out the new sect. But he was also an expert in Arabian poetry, and the first time he heard the words of the Quran he was overcome by their extraordinary eloquence. As he said, the language broke through all his reservations about its message: "When I heard the Quran my heart was softened and I wept, and Islam entered into me."2
The new sect would eventually be called islam (surrender); a muslim was a man or a woman who had made this submission of their entire being to Allah and his demand that human be- ings behave to one another with justice, equity and compas- sion. It was an attitude expressed in the prostrations of the ritual prayer (salat) which Muslims were required to make
three times a day. (Later this prayer would be increased to five times daily.) The old tribal ethic had been egalitarian; Arabs did not approve of the idea of monarchy, and it was abhorrent to them to grovel on the ground like slaves. But the prostra- tions were designed to counter the hard arrogance and self- sufficiency that was growing apace in Mecca. The postures of their bodies would re-educate the Muslims, teaching them to lay aside their pride and selfishness, and recall that before God they were nothing. In order to comply with the stern teaching of the Quran, Muslims were also required to give a regular proportion of their income to the poor in alms (zakat). They would also fast during Ramadan to remind themselves of the privations of the poor, who could not eat or drink whenever they chose.
Social justice was, therefore, the crucial virtue of Islam. Muslims were commanded as their first duty to build a com- munity (ummah) characterized by practical compassion, in which there was a fair distribution of wealth. This was far more important than any doctrinal teaching about God. In fact the Quran has a negative view of theological speculation, which it calls zannah, self-indulgent whimsy about ineffable matters that nobody can ascertain one way or the other. It seemed pointless to argue about such abstruse dogmas; far more crucial was the effort (jihad) to live in the way that God had intended for human beings. The political and social welfare of the ummah would have sacramental value for Muslims. If the u m m a h prospered, it was a sign that Muslims were living ac- cording to Gods will, and the experience of living in a truly is- lamic community, which made this existential surrender to the divine, would give Muslims intimations of sacred transcen- dence. Consequently, they would be affected as profoundly by
any misfortune or humiliation suffered b y the u m m a h a s Chris- tians by the spectacle of somebody blasphemously trampling on the Bible or ripping the Eucharistic host apart.
This social concern had always been an essential part of the visions of the great world religions, which had developed during what historians have called the Axial Age (c. 700 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E.), when civilization, as we know it, developed, to- gether with the confessional faiths which have continued to nourish humanity: Taoism and Confucianism in China; Hin- duism and Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent; monothe- ism in the Middle East; and rationalism in Europe. These faiths all reformed the old paganism, which was no longer ad- equate in the larger and more complex societies that evolved once people had created a mercantile economy capable of supporting this cultural effort. In the larger states, people ac- quired broader horizons, and the old local cults ceased to be appropriate; increasingly, the Axial Age faiths focused on a single deity or supreme symbol of transcendence. Each was concerned about the fundamental injustice of their society. All pre-modern civilizations were based economically upon a surplus of agricultural produce; they therefore depended upon the labour of peasants who could not enjoy their high culture, which was only for an elite. To counter this, the new faiths stressed the importance of compassion. Arabia had re- mained outside the civilized world. Its intractable climate meant that the Arabs lived on the brink of starvation; there seemed no way that they could acquire an agrarian surplus that would put them on a footing with Sassanid Persia or Byzantium. But when the Quraysh began to develop a market economy their perspective began to change. Many were still happy with the old paganism, but there was a growing ten- dency to worship only one God; and there was, as we have seen, a growing unease about the inequity of the new civiliza- tion that was developing in Mecca. The Arabs were now ready for an Axial Age faith of their own.
But that did not mean a wholesale rejection of tradition. The Axial Age prophets and reformers all built on the old
pagan rites of their region, and Muhammad would do the same. He did demand that they ignore the cult of such popu- lar Arabian goddesses as Manat, al-Lat and al-Uzzah, how- ever, and worship Allah alone. The pagan deities are said in the Quran to be like weak tribal chiefs, who were a liability for their people, because they could not give them adequate protection. The Quran did not put forward any philosophical arguments for monotheism; its approach was practical, and, as such, it appealed to the pragmatic Arabs. The old religion, the Quran claimed, was simply not working3 There was spiritual malaise, chronic and destructive warfare, and an injustice that violated the best Arab traditions and tribal codes. The way forward lay in a single God and a unified ummah, which was governed by justice and equity.
Radical as this sounded, the Quran insisted that its mes- sage was simply a "reminder" of truths that everybody knew? This was the primordial faith that had been preached to the whole of humanity by the prophets of the past. God had not left human beings in ignorance about the way they should live: he had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth. Islamic tradition would later assert that there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinity. All had brought their people a divinely inspired scripture; they might express the truths of God's religion differently, but essentially the message was always the same. Now at last God had sent the Quraysh a prophet and a scripture. Con- stantly the Quran points out that Muhammad had not come to cancel the older religions, to contradict their prophets or to start a new faith. His message is the same as that of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, or Jesus.' The Quran mentions only those prophets who were known to the Arabs, but today Mus- lim scholars argue that had Muhammad known about the Buddhists or the Hindus, the Australian Aborigines or the Native Americans, the Quran would have endorsed their
ABYSSINIA
sages too, because all rightly guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man-made deities and preached that justice and equality came from the same divine source. Hence Muhammad never asked Jews or Christians to accept Islam, unless they particularly wished to do so, be- cause they had received perfectly valid revelations of their own. The Quran insists strongly that "there shall be no coer- cion in matters of faith,"6 and commands Muslims to respect the beliefs of Jews and Christians, whom the Quran calls ahl al-kitab, a phrase usually translated "People of the Book" but which is more accurately rendered "people of an earlier rev- elation:"
Do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in a most kindly manner-unless it be such of them as are bent on evil-doing-and say: "We believe in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon you; for our God and your God is one and the same, and it is unto Him that we [all] surrender ourselves." 7
It is only our more modern culture that can afford to prize originality and jettison tradition wholesale. In pre-modern society, continuity was crucial. Muhammad did not envisage a violent rupture with the past or with other faith communi- ties. He wanted to root the new scripture in the spiritual land- scape of Arabia.
Hence Muslims continued to perform the customary ritu- als at the Kabah, the cube-shaped shrine in the heart of Mecca, the most important centre of worship in Arabia. It was extremely ancient even in Muhammad's time, and the origi- nal meaning of the cult associated with it had been forgotten, but it was still loved by the Arabs, who assembled each year for the hajj' pilgrimage from all over the peninsula. They would circle the shrine seven times, following the direction of the sun around the earth; kiss the Black Stone embedded in
Islam . I I
the wall of the Kabah, which was probably a meteorite that had once hurtled to the ground, linking the site to the heav- enly world. These rites (known as the umrah) could be per- formed at any time, but during the hajj pilgrims would also run from the steps of al-Safa beside the Kabah across the val- ley to al-Marwah, where they prayed. They then moved to the environs of Mecca: on the plain of Arafat, they stood all night in vigil; they rushed in a body to the hollow of Muzdalifah; hurled pebbles at a rock in Mina, shaved their heads, and on the Id al-Adha, the final day of the pilgrimage, they per- formed an animal sacrifice.
The ideal of community was central to the cult of the Kabah. All violence was forbidden in Mecca and the sur- rounding countryside at all times. This had been a key fac- tor in the commercial success of the Quraysh, since it enabled Arabs to trade there without fearing the reprisals of vendetta warfare. During the hajj pilgrims were forbidden to carry arms, to argue, to kill game or even to kill an insect or speak a cross word. All this was clearly congenial to Muhammad's ideal for the ummah, and he was himself de- voted to the shrine, often made the umrah and liked to recite the Quran beside the Kabah. Officially, the shrine was dedi- cated to Hubal, a Nabatean deity, and there were 360 idols arranged around the Kabah, probably representing the days of the year. But by Muhammad's day, it seems that the Kabah was venerated as the shrine of Allah, the High God, and it is a mark of the widespread conviction that Allah was the same as the deity worshipped by monotheists that those Arabs in the northern tribes on the borders of the Byzantine Empire who had converted to Christianity used to make the hajj alongside the pagans. Yet for all this, in the early days of his mission, Muhammad still made the Muslims perform the salat prayer facing Jerusalem, the holy city of the ahlal- kitab, turning their backs on the pagan associations of the
Kabah. This expressed his longing to bring the Arabs into the monotheistic family.
Muhammad acquired a small following and eventually some seventy families had converted to Islam. At first, the most powerful men in Mecca ignored the Muslims, but by 616 they had become extremely angry with Muhammad who, they said, reviled the faith of their fathers, and was obviously a charlatan, who only pretended to be a prophet. They were particularly incensed by the Quran's description of the Last Judgement, which they dismissed as primitive and irrational. Arabs did not believe in the after life and should give no cre- dence to such "fairy tales."' But they were especially con- cerned that in the Quran this Judaeo-Christian belief struck at the heart of their cut-throat capitalism. On the Last Day, Arabs were warned that the wealth and power of their tribe would not help them; each individual would be tried on his or her own merits: why had they not taken care of the poor? Why had they accumulated fortunes instead of sharing their money? Those Quraysh who were doing very well in the new Mecca were not likely to look kindly on this kind of talk, and the opposition grew, led by Abu al-Hakam (who is called Abu Jahl, "Father of Lies," in the Quran), Abu Sufyan, an ex- tremely intelligent man, who had once been a personal friend of Muhammad, and Suhayl ibn Amr, a devout pagan. They were all disturbed by the idea of abandoning the faith of their ancestors; all had relatives who had converted to Islam; and all feared that Muhammad was plotting to take over the lead- ership of Mecca. The Quran insisted that Muhammad had no
political function but that he was simply a nadhir, a "warner,"9 but how long would a man who claimed to receive instruc- tions from Allah accept the rulings of more ordinary mortals like themselves?
Relations deteriorated sharply. Abu Jahl imposed a boycott on Muhammad's clan, forbidding the Quraysh to marry or
Islam • 13
trade with the Muslims. This meant that nobody could sell them any food. The ban lasted for two years, and the food shortages may well have been responsible for the death of Muhammad's beloved wife Khadija, and it certainly ruined some of the Muslims financially. Slaves who had converted to Islam were particularly badly treated, tied up, and left to burn in the blazing sun. Most seriously, in 619, after the ban had been lifted, Muhammad's uncle and protector (wali) Abu Talib died. Muhammad was an orphan; his parents had died in his infancy. Without a protector who would avenge his death, according to the harsh vendetta lore of Arabia, a man could be killed with impunity, and Muhammad had great dif- ficulty finding a Meccan chieftain who would become his pa- tron. The position of the ummah was becoming untenable in Mecca, and a new solution clearly had to be found.
Muhammad was, therefore, ready to listen to a delegation of chiefs from Yathrib, an agricultural settlement some 250 miles north of Mecca. A number of tribes had abandoned the nomadic way of life and settled there, but after centuries of warfare on the steppes found it impossible to live together peacefully. The whole settlement was caught up in one deadly feud after another. Some of these tribes had either converted to Judaism or were of Jewish descent, and so the people of Yathrib were accustomed to monotheistic ideas, were not in thrall to the old paganism and were desperate to find a new so- lution that would enable their people to live together in a sin- gle community. The envoys from Yathrib, who approached Muhammad during the hajj in 620, converted to Islam and made a pledge with the Muslims: each vowed that they would not fight each other, and would defend each other from com- mon enemies. Eventually, in 622, the Muslim families slipped away, one by one, and made the migration (hijrah)to Yathrib. Muhammad, whose new protector had recently died, was al- most assassinated before he and Abu Bakr were able to escape.
The hijrah marks the start of the Muslim era, because it was at this point that Muhammad was able to implement the Quranic ideal fully and that Islam became a factor in history. It was a revolutionary step. The hijrah was no mere change of address. In pre-Islamic Arabia the tribe was a sacred value. To turn your back on your blood-group and join another was un- heard of; it was essentially blasphemous, and the Quraysh could not condone this defection. They vowed to exterminate the ummah in Yathrib. Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society. Nobody was forced to convert to the religion of the Quran, but Muslims, pagans and Jews all belonged to one ummah, could not attack one another, and vowed to give one another protection. News of this extraordinary new "su¬ pertribe" spread, and though at the outset nobody thought that it had a chance of survival, it proved to be an inspiration that would bring peace to Arabia before the death of the Prophet in 632, just ten years after the hijrah.
Yathrib would become known as al-Medinah (the City), because it became the pattern of the perfect Muslim society. When Muhammad arrived in Medina one of his first actions was to build a simple mosque ( masjid : literally, place of pros- tration). It was a rough building, which expressed the auster- ity of the early Islamic ideal. Tree trunks supported the roof, a stone marked the qiblah (the direction of prayer) and the Prophet stood on a tree trunk to preach. All future mosques would, as far as possible, be built according to this model. There was also a courtyard, where Muslims met to discuss all the concerns of the ummah — social, political and military as well as religious. Muhammad and his wives lived in small huts around the edge of the courtyard. Unlike a Christian church, which is separated from mundane activities and devoted only to worship, no activity was excluded from the mosque. In the
Quranic vision there is no dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the political, sexuality and wor- ship. The whole of life was potentially holy and had to be brought into the ambit of the divine. The aim was tawhid (making one), the integration of the whole of life in a unified community, which would give Muslims intimations of the Unity which is God.
Muhammad's numerous wives have occasioned a good deal of prurient interest in the West, but it would be a mistake to imagine the Prophet basking decadently in sensual delight, like some of the later Islamic rulers. In Mecca, Muhammad had remained monogamous, married only to Khadija, even though polygamy was common in Arabia. Khadija was a good deal older than he, but bore him at least six children, of whom only four daughters survived. In Medina, Muhammad became a great sayyid (chief), and was expected to have a large harem, but most of these marriages were politically motivated. As he formed his new supertribe, he was eager to forge marriage ties with some of his closest companions, to bind them closer to- gether. His favourite new wife was Aisha, the daughter of Abu Bakr, and he also married Hafsah, the daughter of Umar ibn al-Khattab. He married two of his daughters to Uthman ibn Affan and Ali ibn Abi Talib. Many of his other wives were older women, who were without protectors or were related to the chiefs of those tribes who became the allies of the ummah. None of them bore the Prophet any children.'' His wives were sometimes more of a hindrance than a pleasure. On one occasion, when they were squabbling about the division of booty after a raid, the Prophet threatened to divorce them all unless they lived more strictly in accordance with Islamic val- ues." But it is still true that Muhammad was one of those rare men who truly enjoy the company of women. Some of his male companions were astonished by his leniency towards his wives and the way they stood up to him and answered him
back. Muhammad scrupulously helped with the chores, mended his own clothes and sought out the companionship of his wives. He often liked to take one of them on an expedi- tion, and would consult them and take their advice seriously. On one occasion his most intelligent wife, Umm Salamah, helped to prevent a mutiny.
The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet's heart. The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The Quran prescribes some degree of segrega- tion and veiling for the Prophet's wives, but there is nothing in the Quran that requires the veiling of all women or their seclusion in a separate part of the house. These customs were adopted some three or four generations after the Prophet's death. Muslims at that time were copying the Greek Chris- tians of Byzantium, who had long veiled and segregated their women in this manner; they also appropriated some of their Christian misogyny. The Quran makes men and women part- ners before God, with identical duties and responsibilities.12 The Quran also came to permit polygamy; at a time when Muslims were being killed in the wars against Mecca, and women were left without protectors, men were permitted to have up to four wives provided that they treat them all with absolute equality and show no signs of favouring one rather than the others.13 The women of the first ummah in Medina took full part in its public life, and some, according to Arab custom, fought alongside the men in battle. They did not seem to have experienced Islam as an oppressive religion, though later, as happened in Christianity, men would hijack the faith and bring it into line with the prevailing patriarchy.
In the early years at Medina there were two important de- velopments. Muhammad had been greatly excited by the prospect of working closely with the Jewish tribes, and had even, shortly before the hijrah, introduced some practices
(such as communal prayer on Friday afternoons, when Jews would be preparing for the Sabbath, and a fast on the Jewish Day of Atonement) to align Islam more closely with Judaism. His disappointment, when the Jews of Medina refused to ac- cept him as an authentic prophet, was one of the greatest of his life. For Jews, the era of prophecy was over, so it was not surprising that they could not accept Muhammad, but the polemic with the Jews of Medina occupies a significant pro- portion of the Quran and shows that it troubled Muhammad. Some of the Quranic stories about such prophets as Noah or Moses were different from those of the Bible. Many of the Jews used to scoff when these were recited in the mosque. The three main Jewish tribes also resented Muhammad's as- cendancy; they had formed a powerful bloc before his arrival in the settlement, and now felt demoted and determined to get rid of him.
But some of the Jews in the smaller clans were friendly and enhanced Muhammad's knowledge of Jewish scripture. He was especially delighted to hear that in the Book of Genesis Abraham had two sons: Isaac and Ishmael (who became Ismail in Arabic), the child of his concubine Hagar. Abraham had been forced to cast Hagar and Ismail out into the wilderness, but God had saved them and promised that Ismail too would be the father of a great nation, the Arabs.14Local tradition had it that Hagar and Ismail had settled in Mecca, that Abraham had visited them there and that together Abraham and Ismail had rebuilt the Kabah (which had originally been erected by Adam but had fallen into disrepair).15 This was music to Muhammad's ears. It seemed that the Arabs had not been left out of the divine plan after all, and that the Kabah had vener- able monotheistic credentials.
By 624 it was clear that most of the Jews of Medina would never be reconciled with the Prophet. Muhammad had also been shocked to learn that the Jews and Christians (whom he
had assumed to belong to a single faith) actually had serious theological differences, even though he appears to have thought that not all the ahl al-kitab condoned this disgraceful sectarianism. In January 624 he made what must have been one of his most creative gestures. During the salat prayer, he told the congregation to turn around, so that they prayed in the direction of Mecca rather than Jerusalem. This change of qiblah was a declaration of independence. By turning away from Jerusalem towards the Kabah, which had no connection with Judaism or Christianity, Muslims tacitly demonstrated that they were reverting to the original pure monotheism of Abraham, who had lived before the revelation of either the Torah or the Gospel and, therefore, before the religion of the one God had been split into warring sects.16Muslims would direct themselves to God alone: it was idolatrous to bow be- fore a human system or an established religion rather than before God himself:
Verily, as for those who have broken the unity of their faith and become sects-thou has nothing to do with them.. . Say: "Be- hold, my Sustainer has guided me to a straight way through an ever-true faith- in the way of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false, and was not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside Him." Say: "Behold, my prayer, and [all] my acts of wor- ship, and my living and dying are for God alone.""
The change of qiblah appealed to all Arab Muslims, especially to the emigrants who had made the hijrah from Mecca. Mus- lims would no longer tag lamely behind those Jews and Chris- tians who ridiculed their aspirations, but would take their own direct route to God.
The second major development occurred shortly after the change of the qiblah. Muhammad and the emigrants from Mecca had no means of earning a living in Medina; there was not enough land for them to farm, and, in any case, they were
Islam • 19
merchants and businessmen not agriculturalists. The Medi- nese, who were known as the ansar (the helpers), could not af- ford to keep them gratis, so the emigrants resorted to the ghazu, the "raid," which was a sort of national sport in Arabia, as well as being a rough-and-ready means of redistributing resources in a land where there was simply not enough to go round. Raiding parties would attack a caravan or contingent from a rival tribe and carry off booty and livestock, taking care to avoid killing people since this would mean a vendetta. It was forbidden to conduct a raid against a tribe that had be- come an ally or "client" (a weaker tribal group who had sought protection from one of the more powerful tribes). The emigrants, who had been persecuted by the Quraysh and forced to leave their homes, began to conduct ghazu against the rich Meccan caravans, which brought them an income, but to conduct a ghazu against one's own tribe was a serious breach in precedent. The raiding parties enjoyed some initial success, but in March 624 Muhammad led a large band of mi- grants to the coast to intercept the largest Meccan caravan of the year. When they heard of this outrage, the Quraysh dis- patched an army to defend the caravan, but, against the odds, the Muslims inflicted a stunning defeat on the Meccans at the well of Badr. Even though the Meccans were superior in terms of numbers, they fought in the old Arab style with care- less bravado, each chief leading his own men. Muhammad's troops, however, were carefully drilled and fought under his unified command. It was a rout that impressed the Bedouin tribes, some of whom enjoyed the spectacle of seeing the mighty Quraysh brought low.
There then ensued desperate days for the ummah. Muham- mad had to contend with the hostility of some of the pagans in Medina, who resented the power of the Muslim newcom- ers and were determined to expel them from the settlement. He also had to deal with Mecca, where Abu Sufyan now di-
rected the campaign against him, and had launched two major offensives against the Muslims in Medina. His object was not simply to defeat the ummah in battle, but to annihilate all the Muslims. The harsh ethic of the desert meant that there were no half-measures in warfare: if possible, a victorious chief was expected to exterminate the enemy, so the ummah faced the threat of total extinction. In 625 Mecca inflicted a severe de- feat on the ummah at the Battle of Uhud, but two years later the Muslims trounced the Meccans at the Battle of the Trench, so called because Muhammad protected the settle- ment by digging a ditch around Medina, which threw the Quraysh, who still regarded war rather as a chivalric game and had never heard of such an unsporting trick, into confu- sion, and rendered their cavalry useless. Muhammad's second victory over the numerically superior Quraysh (there had been ten thousand Meccans to three thousand Muslims) was a turning point. It convinced the nomadic tribes that Muham- mad was the coming man, and made the Quraysh look decid- edly passe' The gods in whose name they fought were clearly not working on their behalf. Many of the tribes wanted to be- come the allies of the ummah, and Muhammad began to build a powerful tribal confederacy, whose members swore not to attack one another and to fight each other's enemies. Some of the Meccans also began to defect and made the hijrah to Med- ina; at last, after five years of deadly peril, Muhammad could be confident that the ummah would survive.
In Medina, the chief casualties of this Muslim success were the three Jewish tribes of Qaynuqah, Nadir and Qurayzah, who were determined to destroy Muhammad and who all independently formed alliances with Mecca. They had powerful armies, and obviously posed a threat to the Muslims, since their territory was so situated that they could easily join a besieging Meccan army or attack the ummah from the rear. When the Qaynuqah staged an unsuccessful rebel- lion against Muhammad in 625, they were expelled from
Islam . 21
Medina, in accordance with Arab custom. Muhammad tried to reassure the Nadir, and made a special treaty with them, but when he discovered that they had been plotting to assas- sinate him they too were sent into exile, where they joined the nearby Jewish settlement of Khaybar, and drummed up sup- port for Abu Sufyan among the northern Arab tribes. The Nadir proved to be even more of a danger outside Medina, so when the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah sided with Mecca during the Battle of the Trench, when for a time it seemed that the Muslims faced certain defeat, Muhammad showed no mercy. The seven hundred men of the Qurayzah were killed, and their women and children sold as slaves.
The massacre of the Qurayzah was a horrible incident, but it would be a mistake to judge it by the standards of our own time. This was a very primitive society: the Muslims them- selves had just narrowly escaped extermination, and had Muhammad simply exiled the Qurayzah they would have swelled the Jewish opposition in Khaybar and brought an- other war upon the ummah. In seventh-century Arabia an Arab chief was not expected to show mercy to traitors like the Qurayzah. The executions sent a grim message to Khaybar and helped to quell the pagan opposition in Medina, since the pagan leaders had been the allies of the rebellious Jews. This was a fight to the death, and everybody had always known that the stakes were high. The struggle did not indicate any hostil- ity towards Jews in general, but only towards the three rebel tribes. The Quran continued to revere Jewish prophets and to urge Muslims to respect the People of the Book. SmallerJew¬ ish groups continued to live in Medina, and later Jews, like Christians, enjoyed full religious liberty in the Islamic em- pires. Anti-semitism is a Christian vice. Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim world only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent loss of Arab Palestine. It is significant that Muslims were compelled to import anti-Jewish myths from Europe, and translate into
22 • Karen Armstrong
Arabic such virulently anti-semitic texts a s the P r o t o c o l s o f t h e E l d e r s o f Zion, because they had no such traditions of their
own. Because of this new hostility towards the Jewish people, some Muslims now quote the passages in the Quran that refer to Muhammad's struggle with the three rebellious Jewish tribes to justify their prejudice. By taking these verses out of context, they have distorted both the message of the Quran and the attitude of the Prophet, who himself felt no such ha- tred of Judaism.
Muhammad's intransigence towards the Qurayzah had been designed to bring hostilities to an end as soon as possi- ble. The Quran teaches that war is such a catastrophe that Muslims must use every method in their power to restore peace and normality in the shortest possible time.18 Arabia was a chronically violent society, and the ummah had to fight its way to peace. Major social change of the type that Muhammad was attempting in the peninsula is rarely achieved without bloodshed. But after the Battle of the Trench, when Muhammad had humiliated Mecca and quashed the opposition in Medina, he felt that it was time to abandon the jihad and begin a peace offensive. In March 628 he set in train a daring and imaginative initiative that brought the conflict to a close. He announced that he was going to make the hajj to Mecca, and asked for volunteers to accom- pany him. Since pilgrims were forbidden to carry arms, the Muslims would be walking directly into the lions' den and putting themselves at the mercy of the hostile and resentful Quraysh. Nevertheless, about a thousand Muslims agreed to join the Prophet and set out for Mecca, dressed in the tradi- tional white robes of the hajji. If the Quraysh forbade Arabs to approach the Kabah or attacked bona fide pilgrims they would betray their sacred duty as the guardians of the shrine. The Quraysh did, however, dispatch troops to attack the pil- grims before they reached the area outside the city where vi- olence was forbidden, but the Prophet evaded them and, with
the help of some of his Bedouin allies, managed to reach the edge of the sanctuary, camped at Hudaybiyyah and awaited developments. Eventually the Quraysh were pressured by this peaceful demonstration to sign a treaty with the u m m a h . It was an unpopular move on both sides. Many of the Muslims were eager for action, and felt that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammad was determined to achieve victory by peace- ful means.
Hudaybiyyah was another turning point. It impressed still more of the Bedouin, and conversion to Islam became even more of an irreversible trend. Eventually in 630, when the Quraysh violated the treaty by attacking one of the Prophet's tribal allies, Muhammad marched upon Mecca with an army of ten thousand men. Faced with this overwhelming force and, as pragmatists, realizing what it signified, the Quraysh conceded defeat, opened the city gates, and Muhammad took Mecca without shedding a drop of blood. He destroyed the idols around the Kabah, rededicated it to Allah, the one God, and gave the old pagan rites of the hajj'an Islamic significance by linking them to the story of Abraham, Hagar and Ismail. None of the Quraysh was forced to become Muslim, but Muhammad's victory convinced some of his most principled opponents, such as Abu Sufyan, that the old religion had failed. When Muhammad died in 632, in the arms of his beloved wife Aisha, almost all the tribes of Arabia had joined the ummah as Confederates or as converted Muslims. Since members of the ummah could not, of course, attack one an- other, the ghastly cycle of tribal warfare, of vendetta and counter-vendetta, had ended. Single-handedly, Muhammad had brought peace to war-torn Arabia.
T H E R A S H I D U N (632-661 )
The life and achievements of Muhammad would affect the spiritual, political and ethical vision of Muslims forever.
They expressed the Islamic experience of "salvation," which does not consist in the redemption of an "original sin" com- mitted by Adam and the admittance to eternal life, but in the achievement of a society which puts into practice God's de- sires for the human race. This not only redeemed Muslims from the sort of political and social hell that existed in pre- Islamic Arabia, but also provided them with a context within which they could more easily make that wholehearted sur- render to God which alone can fulfil them. Muhammad be- came the archetypal example of that perfect submission to the divine, and Muslims, as we shall see, would attempt to conform to this standard in their spiritual and social lives. Muhammad was never venerated as a divine figure, but he was held to be the Perfect Man. His surrender to God had been so complete that he had transformed society and en- abled the Arabs to live together in harmony. The word islam is etymologically related to salam (peace), and in these early years Islam did promote cohesion and concord.
But Muhammad had achieved this success by being the re- cipient of a divine revelation. Throughout his career, God had sent down the oracles that formed the Quran. When faced with a crisis or dilemma, Muhammad had entered deeply into himself and heard a divinely inspired solution. His life had thus represented a constant dialogue between transcendent reality and the violent, puzzling and disturbing happenings of the mundane world. The Quran had, there- fore, followed public and current events, bringing divine guidance and illumination to politics. Muhammad's succes- sors, however, were not prophets, but would have to rely on their own human insights. How would they ensure that Mus- lims continued to respond creatively and directly to this sa- cred imperative? The ummah that they ruled would be much larger and increasingly more complex than the little commu- nity of Medina, where everybody knew everybody else and
there had been no need for officialdom and a bureaucracy. How would the new deputy (khalifah) of Muhammad pre- serve the essence of the first u m m a h in very different circum- stances?
The first four caliphs to succeed Muhammad grappled with these difficult questions. They were all men who had been among the Prophet's closest companions, and had played a leading role in Mecca and Medina. They are known as the rashidun, the "rightly guided" caliphs, and their period of rule would be just as formative as that of the Prophet him- self. Muslims would define themselves and their theology ac- cording to the way they assessed the turbulent, glorious and tragic events of these years.
After the Prophet's death, the leading Muslims had to de- cide what form the ummah should take. Some may not have believed that there ought to be a "state," a polity which had no precedent in Arabia. Some seemed to think that each tribal group should elect its own i m a m (leader). But the Prophet's companions Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab argued that the ummah must be a united community, and should have a single ruler, as it had under the Prophet. Some believed that Muhammad would have wanted to be succeeded by Ali ibn Abi Talib, his closest male relative. In Arabia, where the blood-tie was sacred, it was thought that a chief's special qualities were passed down the line of his descendants, and some Muslims believed that Ali had inherited something of Muhammad's special charisma. But although Ali's piety was beyond question, he was still young and inexperienced, and therefore Abu Bakr was elected the first khalifah of the Prophet by a majority of votes.
Abu Bakr's reign (632-34) was short but crucial. He was chiefly preoccupied by the so-called wars of riddah (apostasy) when various tribes tried to break away from the ummah and reassert their former independence. It would, however, be a
mistake to regard this as a widespread religious defection. The revolts were entirely political and economic. Most of the Bedouin tribes who had entered the Islamic Confederacy had little interest in the details of Muhammad's religion. The Prophet, a realist, had recognized that many of the alliances he had formed were purely political, a matter of one chief joining forces with another, as was customary in the Arabian steppes. Some chiefs may have believed that their pact had been only with Muhammad and not with his successor, and that after his death they were free to raid tribes in the ummah, thus calling upon themselves a Muslim riposte.
It was, however, significant that many of the rebels felt im- pelled to give their revolts a religious justification; the leaders after claimed to be prophets, and produced Quranic-style "revelations." The Arabs had been through a profound experi- ence. It was not "religious" in our modern sense of the word, since for many it was not a private faith, following an interior conversion. The Prophet had broken the old mould, and suddenly-if momentarily-the Arabs had found themselves for the first time members of a united community, free from the burden of constant, debilitating warfare. For the brief years of Muhammad's career they had glimpsed the possibil- ity of an entirely different way of life, bound up with a reli- gious change. What had happened had been so astounding that even those who wanted to break away from the ummah could only think in prophetic terms. It was probably during the riddah wars that Muslims began to assert that Muhammad had been the last and greatest of the prophets, a claim that is not made explicitly in the Quran, as Muslims countered the challenge of these riddah prophets.
Abu Bakr quelled the uprisings with wisdom and clemency, and thus completed the unification of Arabia. He dealt cre- atively with the complaints of the rebels, and there were no reprisals taken against those who returned to the fold. Some
were enticed back by the prospect of taking part in the lucra- tive ghazu raids in the neighbouring lands, which gained dra- matic momentum under the rule of the second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab (634-44). These raids were a response to a problem that had arisen from the new Islamic peace in the peninsula. For centuries, the Arabs had eked out their inade- quate resources by means of the ghazu, but Islam had put a stop to this because the tribes of the u m m a h were not permit- ted to attack one another. What would replace the ghazu, which had enabled Muslims to scratch out a meagre liveli- hood? Umar realized that the u m m a h needed order. Lawless el- ements had to be brought under control, and energies which had previously been expended in raiding and feuding now had to be channelled into a common activity. The obvious answer was a series of ghazu raids against the non-Muslim communi- ties in the neighbouring countries. T h e unity of the u m m a h would be preserved by an outwardly directed offensive. This would also enhance the caliph's authority. The Arabs tradi- tionally disliked kingship and would be leery of any ruler who assumed the style of a monarch. But they would accept the authority of a chief during a military campaign or while they were journeying to new pastures. Umar therefore called him- self amir al-muminim (the commander of the faithful), and Muslims accepted his rulings in matters that concerned the
u m m a h a s a whole, but not on matters that individuals could decide for themselves.
Under Umar's leadership, therefore, the Arabs burst into Iraq, Syria and Egypt, achieving a series of astonishing victo- ries. They overcame the Persian army at the Battle of Qa- disiyyah (637), which led to the fall of the capital of the Persian Sassanids at Ctesiphon. As soon as they had the man- power, Muslims would thus be able to occupy the whole of the Persian Empire. They encountered stiffer resistance in the Byzantine Empire, and conquered no territory in the
Byzantine heartlands in Anatolia. Nevertheless, the Muslims were victorious at the Battle of Yarmuk (636) in northern Palestine, conquered Jerusalem in 638, and controlled the whole of Syria, Palestine and Egypt by 641. The Muslim armies went on to seize the North African coast as far as Cyrenaica. Just twenty years after the Battle of Badr, the Arabs found themselves in possession of a sizeable empire. This expansion continued. A century after the Prophet's death, the Islamic Empire extended from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas. It seemed yet another miracle and sign of God's favour. Before the coming of Islam, the Arabs had been a de- spised outgroup; but in a remarkably short space of time they had inflicted major defeats upon two world empires. The ex- perience of conquest enhanced their sense that something tremendous had happened to them. Membership of the ummah was thus a transcendent experience, because it went beyond anything they had known or could have imagined in the old tribal days. Their success also endorsed the message of the Quran, which had asserted that a correctly guided so- ciety must prosper because it was in tune with God's laws. Look what had happened once they had surrendered to God's will! Where Christians discerned God's hand in apparent fail- ure and defeat, when Jesus died on the cross, Muslims experi- enced political success as sacramental and as a revelation of the divine presence in their lives.
It is important, however, to be clear that when the Arabs burst out of Arabia they were not impelled by the ferocious power of "Islam." Western people often assume that Islam is a violent, militaristic faith which imposed itself on its subject peoples at sword-point. This is an inaccurate interpretation of the Muslim wars of expansion. There was nothing religious about these campaigns, and Umar did not believe that he had a divine mandate to conquer the world. The objective of Umar and his warriors was entirely pragmatic: they wanted
plunder and a common activity that would preserve the unity of the ummah. For centuries the Arabs had tried to raid the richer settled lands beyond the peninsula; the difference was that this time they had encountered a power vacuum. Persia and Byzantium had both been engaged for decades in a long and debilitating series of wars with one another. Both were exhausted. In Persia, there was factional strife, and flooding had destroyed the country's agriculture. Most of the Sassa- nian troops were of Arab origin and went over to the in- vaders during the campaign. In the Syrian and North African provinces of Byzantium, the local population had been alien- ated by the religious intolerance of the Greek Orthodox es- tablishment, and were not disposed to come to their aid when the Arabs attacked, though Muslims could make no headway in the Byzantine heartlands of Anatolia.
Later, when the Muslims had established their great em- pire, Islamic law would give a religious interpretation of this conquest, dividing the world into the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam), which was in perpetual conflict with the Dar al- Harb (the House of War). But in practice the Muslims ac- cepted that they had reached the limits of their expansion by this date, and coexisted amicably with the non-Muslim world. The Quran does not sanctify warfare. It develops the notion of a just war of self-defence to protect decent values, but con- demns killing and aggression.19 Furthermore, once the Arabs had left the peninsula, they found that nearly everybody be- longed to the ahl al-kitab, the People of the Book, who had received authentic scriptures from God. They were not, therefore, forced to convert to Islam; indeed, until the middle of the eighth century, conversion was not encouraged. The Muslims assumed that Islam was a religion for the descen- dants of Ismail, as Judaism was the faith of the sons of Isaac. Arab tribesmen had always extended protection to weaker clients (mawali). Once the Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians
in their new empire had become dhimmis (protected subjects), they could not be raided or attacked in any way. It had always been a point of honour among Arabs to treat their clients well, to come to their aid, or to avenge an injury done to them. Dhimmis paid a poll tax in return for military protection, and were permitted to practise their own faith, as the Quran en- joined. Indeed some of the Roman Christians, who had been persecuted by the Greek Orthodox for their heretical opin- ions, greatly preferred Muslim to Byzantine rule.
Umar was determined to maintain good discipline. The Arab soldiers were not to enjoy the fruits of victory; the con- quered lands were not to be divided among the generals, but left to the existing cultivators, who paid rent to the Muslim state. Muslims were not allowed to settle in the cities. Instead, new "garrison towns" (amsar) were built for them at strategic locations: Kufah in Iraq, Basrah in Iraq, Qum in Iran, and Fustat at the head of the Nile. Damascus was the only old city to become a Muslim centre. A mosque was built in each of the amsar where the Muslim troops attended Friday prayers. In these garrison towns, the soldiers were taught to live an Is- lamic life. Umar stressed the importance of family values, was hard on drunkenness, and promoted the ascetic virtues of the Prophet, who, like the caliph himself, had always lived frugally. But the garrison towns were also Arab enclaves, where those traditions that could be accommodated with the Quranic world-view were continued on foreign soil. At this point, Islam was an essentially Arab religion. Any dhimmi who did convert had to become a "client" of one of the tribes and be absorbed into the Arab system.
But this period of triumph came to an abrupt end in November 644, when Umar was stabbed in the mosque of Medina by a Persian prisoner-of-war who had a personal grievance against him. The last years of the rashidun were characterized by violence. Uthman ibn Affan was elected as
the third caliph by six of the Prophet's companions. He was a weaker character than his predecessors, but for the first six years of his reign the umma h continued to prosper. Uthman governed well and the Muslims conquered new territory. They seized Cyprus from the Byzantines, thus finally ejecting them from the eastern Mediterranean, and in North Africa the armies reached Tripoli in what is now Libya. In the East, the Muslim troops took much of Armenia, penetrated the Caucasus and established Muslim rule as far as the River Oxus in Iran, Herat in Afghanistan, and Sind in the Indian subcontinent.
But, despite these victories, the soldiers were becoming dis- contented. They had undergone a massive change. In just over a decade they had exchanged a harsh nomadic existence for the very different lifestyle of the professional army. They spent the summer fighting and winter far from home in the garrison towns. The distances were now so vast that the campaigns were more exhausting, and they were taking less plunder than be- fore. Uthman still refused to allow the commanders and the richest Meccan families to establish private estates in such countries as what is now Iraq, and this made him unpopular, es- pecially in Kufah and Fustat. Uthman also alienated the Mus- lims of Medina by giving the most prestigious posts to members of his own Umayyad family. They accused him of nepotism, even though many of the Umayyad officials were men of great ability. Uthman had, for example, appointed Muawiyyah, the son of Muhammad's old enemy Abu Sufyan, governor of Syria. He was a good Muslim, and a skilled admin- istrator, known for his steadiness of character and his measured assessment of circumstances. But it seemed wrong to the Mus- lims of Medina, who still boasted of being the ansar(helpers) of the Prophet, that they should be passed over in favour of Abu Sufyan's offspring. The Quran-reciters, who knew the scripture by heart and had become the chief religious authorities, were
Islam . 33
also incensed when Uthman insisted that only one version of the sacred text be used in the garrison towns, and suppressed variants, which many of them preferred, but which differed in minor details. Increasingly, the malcontents looked to Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's cousin, who, it seems, had opposed the policies of both Umar and Uthman, standing for "soldiers' rights" against the power of the central authority.
In 656 the discontent culminated in outright mutiny. A group of Arab soldiers from Fustat returned to Medina to claim their due, and when fobbed off they besieged Uthman's simple house, broke in, and assassinated him. The mutineers acclaimed Ali as the new caliph.
T H E FIRST FITNAH
Ali seemed an obvious choice. He had grown up in the Prophet's household and was imbued with the ideals pro- moted by Muhammad. He was a good soldier and wrote in- spiring letters to his officers, which are still classic Muslim texts, preaching the necessity of justice and the importance of dealing compassionately with the subject peoples. But despite his intimacy with the Prophet, his rule was not universally ac- cepted. Ali was supported by the ansar of Medina and those Meccans who resented the rise of the Umayyads. He also en- joyed the support of Muslims who still lived the traditional nomadic life, especially in Iraq, whose garrison town Kufah was an Alid stronghold. But the assassination of Uthman, who, like Ali himself, had been Muhammad's son-in-law, and had been one of the earliest converts to Islam, was a shocking event which inspired a five-year civil war within the ummah, which is known as the fitnah, the time of temptation.
After a brief delay, Muhammad's favourite wife Aisha, to- gether with her kinsman Talhah and Zubayr, one of the Prophet's Meccan companions, attacked Ali for not punishing
Uthman's murderers. Since the army was in the provinces, the rebels marched from Medina to Basrah. Ali was in a difficult position. He must himself have been shocked by Uthman's
murder, which, as a devout man, he could not condone.0B0uTt c (y) Tj 2.65 his supporters insisted thatposition. He must himself have been shocked
to conquer Constantinople, which had not only failed but led to heavy loss of manpower and equipment. Umar was the first caliph to encourage the dhimmis to convert to Islam, and they were eager to join this dynamic new faith, but since they no longer had to pay the poll tax (jizyah), the new policy resulted in a drastic loss of revenue. Umar was a devout man, who had been brought up in Medina and had been influenced by the religious movement there. He tried to model his behaviour on that of the rashidun, stressed the ideal of Islamic unity, treated all the provinces on an equal basis (instead of favour- ing Syria) and was humane towards the dhimmis. He was very popular, but his Islamic policies, which endeared him to the pious, were not good for the economy of the ailing empire. The reigns of his successors were punctuated with revolts and rumbling discontent. It made little difference whether the caliphs were dissolute, like Yazid II (720-24), or devout, like Hisham I (724-43). Hisham was a strong and effective caliph, who was able to put the empire back on a more sound economic basis, but he achieved this by making the state more rigidly centralized and his own rule more autocratic. He was becoming more like a conventional absolute monarch, and the empire benefited from this politically. The problem was that this type of autocracy was abhorrent to the devout, and fundamentally un-Islamic. Was it not possible to run a state on principles after all? Shiis became increasingly active. Their leaders claimed descent from Ali, believing that the i l m that would enable Muslims to inaugurate a just society had been preserved most fully in Muhammad's family and that they alone should rule. The more radical Shiis blamed all the pre- sent problems of the u m m a h on the first three rashidun (Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman), who should have allowed Ali to take the leadership in the first place. Many of the more ex- treme Shiis (known as the ghulat. exaggerators) were converts and brought some of their old beliefs into Islam with them.
They saw Ali as an incarnation of the divine (like Jesus), be- lieved that Shii leaders who had been killed in an insurrection were in temporary "occultation" and would return to inaugu- rate a utopian realm of justice and peace in the Last Days.
But the religious were not the only people who felt alien- ated from Umayyad rule. The converts to Islam (mawalis: clients) objected to their second-class status. There were tribal divisions among the Arab Muslims, some of whom wanted to settle down and integrate with the subject peoples and others who wanted to continue the old expansionist wars. But the Islamic sentiment had become so widespread that the various revolts and uprisings nearly all adopted a religious ideology. This was certainly true of the revolt that finally top- pled the Umayyad dynasty. The Abbasid faction capitalized on the widespread desire to see a member of Muhammad's family on the throne, and emphasized the descent of their leader from the Prophet's uncle Abbas and his son Abdallah, one of the most eminent of the early Quran reciters. They began to muster support in the Iranian provinces in 743, oc- cupied Kufah in August 749, and defeated the last Umayyad caliph, Mansur II, in Iraq the following year. When they had finally subdued the empire, the Abbasid caliphs would inau- gurate a very different kind of society.
