Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  But most people, I think, in the world Muslims came to rule, converted to Islam because it looked like the Truth. Certainly, no other force or movement in the Middle World at this time had the muscular self-confidence and the aura of inexorable success of Islam. Who would not want to join the Umma if they could?

  And they could. It was easy! All a person had to do was say “La illaha il-Allah wa Muhammad ur-Rasulillah”: “There is no god but God and Mohammed is his messenger.” That’s all it took to gain membership in this triumphant club.

  But the core creed was much more loaded than it may have looked at first blush.

  “No god but God”—that phrase alone has engendered countless thousands of volumes of commentary, and no one has yet come to the end of what it means.

  And on top of that: “Mohammed is his messenger!” Sign on to that one, and you’ve accepted everything Mohammed prescribed as Messenger. You’ve committed yourself to five daily prayers; to avoidance of pork; to the Ramadan fast; to sobriety; and to much, much more.

  6

  The Abbasid Age

  120-350 AH

  737-961 CE

  THE DESCENDANTS OF Yazid ruled for a number of generations. They wove a skein of entrenched power over the Muslim world, extended their suzerainty to Spain in the west and India in the east. Under their administration, the doctrines of Islam were elaborated, written down, and sealed into codebooks. A body of religious scholars came to own those codebooks, the way lawyers in America own the constitution and the laws spun from it, and those religious scholars worked in tandem with the politicians and bureaucrats of the Umayyad court to forge a distinctly Islamic society.

  Mainstream Western histories usually praise this process. The Umayyads introduced that wonderful quality called stability to the civilized world. Stability enabled farmers to plan next year’s crop. It enabled businessmen to invest in long-term projects. It encouraged students to enter upon long courses of study with confidence that what they learned would still apply by the time they had graduated. Stability gave scholars the freedom to lose themselves in study and dig deep into the mysteries of nature without having to worry that their families were meanwhile getting killed by thugs.

  All this came at a price however, the usual price of stability, which ensures that whatever is the case one day is even more the case the next day. The rich got richer. The poor increased in numbers. Cities with magnificent architecture sprang up, but so did vast slums sunk in squalid poverty. Justice became a commodity that only the rich could afford.

  Other problems bubbled up too. The rapid expansion of Islamic rule brought many different ethnicities under the Muslim umbrella, and there was some question about how to make the Muslim promise of brotherhood and equality work for all of them.

  Umayyad policies may have promoted Arabization and Islamification but not both of them equally everywhere. In North Africa, Arabization proceeded rapidly, perhaps because the patchwork of indigenous cultures had long ago been fragmented by Phoenician colonization—the Romans had deposited a Latin layer, the Vandals had come in with a Germanic glaze, and finally Christianity had permeated the region. North Africa had no single language or culture to bind it together; when the Arabs arrived with their powerful conviction, no correspondingly unified and powerful indigenous conviction was there to resist them. So the Arabs thoroughly dissolved and absorbed whatever was there before.

  Egypt and the Levant were somewhat easily digested too, because many of these peoples shared a historical narrative with the Arabs, harking back to common traditional ancestors such as Abraham, Noah, and Adam himself. Most of the inhabitants had already subscribed to the idea of monotheism. Hebrew and Aramaic were Semitic languages, like Arabic.

  Persia, however—ah, that was quite a different matter! The Persians were an Indo-European people, not Semitic. They had an ancient civilization of their own, a proud history, and a language that would not be subdued. Many Persians accepted Islam, but they would not be Arabized. Those who did convert to Islam presented the society with a challenging religious contradiction. Islam claimed to make every Muslim equal to every other. Join the Umma and you join an egalitarian brotherhood—such was the promise of this new religion, this powerful movement. But the Arab-dominated society forged by the Umayyads couldn’t deliver on the promise. Arabs were the rulers now; they were the aristocrats. Far from making even a show of equal status for all, Umayyad society spawned formal institutions to discriminate among various gradations of folk in society and to keep them layered: pure-blooded Arab Muslims at the top; below them, Muslims with one Arab and one non-Arab parent; then non-Arab Muslims; then non-Arab Muslims with non-Muslim parents; then non-Muslims who at least belonged to one of the monotheistic faiths; and so on down to the lowest of the low, rank polytheists born of polytheistic parents, who had virtually no legal rights.

  Friction among all these designated social gradients, and especially the friction between the Arab nouveau aristocrats and the Persian former aristocrats, kept a sense of grievance smoldering beneath the surface in this portion of the Muslim realm.

  Another shadow haunted the conscience of the Islamic world as well. Muslim sacred history was problematically rich with anecdotes about the simple, rugged lifestyle of the founders. Their simplicity and humbleness went to the very essence of their appeal as religious figures. Inevitably, therefore, a feeling started percolating in the lower reaches of this new society that something about all this splendor wasn’t right. This prosperous, pleasure-plump society could not be what Allah had meant when he charged Mohammed with establishing a just community devoted to worship of the one God. Of course, the richer you were, the less likely that such considerations would trouble your dreams. For the poor, however, tales of luxury at court and the sight of perfumed Arab noblemen riding through the streets clad in silk had to evoke comparisons with Mohammed’s simple blanket folded four times to provide both mattress and cover and Khalifa Omar at his cobbler’s bench, mending his own shoes. Add to all this the odor left by the way in which the Umayyads came to power, a process that had generated two enduring opposition movements, the Shi’i and the Kharijites.

  The Kharijites were the less numerous, but their movement was more radical. Their theology had come to focus on extravagant demands for purity. They said the leadership of the Muslim world belonged to the person who most assiduously practiced what the religion preached. No secular ruler could ever meet the standards of the Kharijites. In fact, quite probably, no ruler anywhere could ever meet their standards, period, so the Kharijites could preach revolution no matter what the circumstances. As long as anyone was in power, someone would feel oppressed, and as long as anyone felt oppressed, Kharijite agitators could use their doctrines to fuel insurgencies.

  As time went on, however, Kharijites fizzled out because they were such extreme purists at a time when more and more people were acquiring a stake in the new prosperity. Society’s losers might have been discontented, but they were even less ready to trade in the little they had for the joyless nothing the Kharijites offered. It was the Shi’i who remained the real threat to the established order, and after the death of Hussein and his followers at Karbala, this threat picked up force.

  The Shi’ite imams no longer directly challenged the throne very much; they began to separate the meaning of imam from the meaning of khalifa, defining themselves ever more purely in religious terms. But Shi’ite rebels kept organizing trouble in the name of the imams, kept sparking rebellions aimed at bringing one or another of Ali’s descendents to power, kept nurturing the notion that the khalifate did not belong to the Umayyads, kept undermining the legitimacy of Islam’s secular rulers.

  The Shi’ite threat metastasized because of an ominous synchronicity that developed in Umayyad times. It was this:The Shi’i were the suppressed religious underdogs of Islam.

  The Persians were the suppressed ethnic underdogs of Islam.

  The Shi’i chaffed against the orthodox religious establishment.


  The Persians chaffed against the Arab political establishment.

  Inevitably, the one mapped onto the other. Persians began to embrace Shi’ism, and Shi’ite agitators began looking to the Persian east for recruits. When the two currents mingled, rebellion began to bubble. It bubbled ever harder the further east one traveled, for Umayyad police power ran ever thinner in that direction, while anti-Arab sentiment mounted ever higher.

  One day, around 120 AH, a mysterious man blew into the city of Merv. This distant outpost of the empire lay almost fifteen hundred miles east of Damascus. Here in the wild, wild east, this stranger began to agitate against the Umayyads by promulgating a millennial religious narrative that spoke of an impending apocalyptic showdown between good and evil.

  No one knew much about this fellow, not even his real name. He went by the handle Abu Muslim, but that was obviously a pseudonym, since it was short for Muslim abu Muslim bin Muslim, which means “Muslim man, son of a Muslim father, father of a Muslim son.” As you can see, this man was at pains to assert that he had no-doubt-about-it Muslim credentials.

  In truth, Abu Muslim was a professional revolutionary, dispatched to Merv by a secretive underground group based in Iraq, a group called the Hashimites. This group was a cross between a cult and a political party, whose core membership probably never exceeded thirty. Its name referred to the Prophet’s clan, the Banu Hashim, and its purpose, supposedly, was to put a member of the Prophet’s family at the head of the Muslim world. This was just one of many angry little hard-core bands of antigovernment conspirators active at this time, all preaching some version of the same message: the community had fallen off the track, history had gone off course, the Messenger’s mission had been subverted, and toppling the Umayyads and empowering a member of the Prophet’s family in their stead would set everything right again. Let me note that this narrative has been reinvented again and again in the Muslim world over the course of history, and some version of it is being recited even today, by revolutionaries who have substituted “the West” for “the Umayyads.”

  Sadly for the Hashimites, they didn’t have an actual member of the Prophet’s family to promote. They did, however, have Abu al-Abbas, a fellow who claimed descent from Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, one of Prophet Mohammed’s uncles, so he was at least related to the Prophet by blood and, more important, was willing to lend his name to the Hashimite enterprise.

  The ancestral uncle in question, the original Abbas, was among the later converts to Islam, and in his day, inconveniently enough, no one had even considered him a candidate to succeed Mohammed, so he wasn’t the ideal ancestor for a revolutionary purist. A direct descendant of Ali and Fatima would certainly have been better, but none of the Alids—that is, Ali’s real and putative descendants—would make common cause with the Hashimites, so Abu al-Abbas would have to do. Sometimes you have to go into battle with the figurehead you have, not the figurehead you wish you had.

  Abu Muslim didn’t have much trouble tapping into the Shi’ite and Persian discontent seething in Khorasan, the province that stretched from Iran through Afghanistan. At key points in his speeches, Abu Muslim became a little vague about who exactly would become the khalifa once the revolution succeeded. Those who longed for a descendant of Ali could imagine that such a figure was waiting in the wings, anonymous for the moment only for security reasons.

  Daring, ruthless, and charismatic, Abu Muslim quickly outgrew his role as anybody’s agent and emerged as the leader of the Abbasid revolution (so named for its putative leader, Abu al-Abbas.) There in Khorasan, Abu Muslim recruited a revolutionary cadre, trained them to fight, and steeped them in Hashimite doctrines. His recruits could be recognized by the black clothes they wore and the black banners they carried. They even dyed their weapons black. The Umayyad army, incidentally, adopted white as its color. Lest you think this color coding strange for a cult that preached an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil, you should know that in Persia white was regarded as the color of mourning, the color of death. (The recent revolutionary Afghan Muslims called the Taliban favored black clothing as a uniform.)

  In the year 125 AH (747 CE) Abu Muslim and his black-suited warriors began moving west. They encountered little resistance passing through Persian territory, where most people were eager to help topple the arrogant Umayyads. In fact, they gained recruits and momentum as they marched along.

  In 750 CE, the armies of white and black clashed on the banks of the Great Zab River in Iraq. Although outnumbered, the men in black routed the emperor’s forces, and the last Umayyad khalifa had to run for his life, south into Egypt; within the year, Abbasid agents hunted him down there and killed him.

  The Hashimites proclaimed Abbas the new khalifa of Islam. Nobody really commented on the process that had just taken place: it wasn’t an inevitable God-shaped outcome, nor an election, nor even a decision made by a council of wise men. No, the new khalifa was placed in power by one man with a tightly organized gang of enforcers. It didn’t matter. Leadership was (phew!) back where it belonged at last, in the hands of a member of the Prophet’s family. Now, finally, the Muslim social project could get back on course.

  That was probably the happiest year of Abu Muslim’s life, the year his life’s work came to fruition at last! Perhaps he really thought that toppling the Umayyads would restore the quest for the lost community. Disillusionment soon set in, however. For one thing, the puppet did not, it turned out, consider himself a puppet. Over the years, Abbas had built a real base within the movement that had chosen him as its figurehead, and now that Abu Muslim had done the donkey work, he said thank you very much and took the throne.

  ABU MUSLIM AND THE ABBASID REVOLUTION

  The new khalifa remembered that Mu’awiya had consolidated his power by slipping a velvet glove over his iron fist and winning over former foes with courtesy and charm. Accordingly, the new ruler invited leading members of the Umayyad clan to break bread with him, just to show that there were no hard feelings.

  Well, I shouldn’t say “break bread.” That makes it sound like he was going to serve his guests a simple meal of barley bread and soup, such as the Prophet might have shared with Omar. That sort of thing was now out of fashion. No, the Umayyad survivors found themselves lolling on cushions while servants pranced in with lovely trays piled high with gourmet delicacies. The laughter rang out, the conversation turned spirited, and a sense of camaraderie swelled. Just as everyone was getting ready to tie into the meal, however, the waiters threw off their robes to reveal armor underneath. They weren’t waiters, it turned out, but executioners. The Umayyads jumped to their feet, but too late: the doors had all been locked. The soldiers proceeded to club the Umayyads to death. From that time on, Abbas went by a new title, al-Saffah, which means “the slaughterer.” Apparently, he took some pride in what he had done.

  Little good it did him, however, for he soon died of smallpox and his brother al-Mansur took over. Mansur had to tussle with rivals a bit, but Abu Muslim stepped in and secured the throne for him, then returned to Khorasan. Abu Muslim made no bid for the khalifate on his own behalf, even though he had the military power to take what he wanted. He seemed to accept the legitimacy of Abbasid rule. Perhaps he really was a principled idealist.

  And yet there was something Mansur just didn’t like about this man, Abu Muslim. Well, perhaps it was one particular thing: Abu Muslim was popular. All right, two things: he was popular, and he had soldiers of his own. A ruler can never trust a popular man with soldiers of his own. One day, Mansur invited Abu Muslim to come visit him and share a hearty meal. What happened next illustrates the maxim that when an Abbasid ruler invites you to dinner, you should arrange to be busy that night. The men got together at a pleasant riverside campsite and Mansur spent the first day lavishly thanking Abu Muslim for all his selfless services; the next night he had his bodyguards cut Abu Muslim’s throat and dump his body in the river.

  Thus began the second dynasty of the Muslim khalifate.

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nbsp; Abbasid propagandists got busy creating a narrative about the meaning of this transition. They called it a revolutionary new direction for the Umma. Everything would be different now, they said. In fact, everything remained pretty much the same, only more so, both for better and for worse.

  The Umayyads had steeped themselves in pomp and luxury, but the Abbasids made them seem by comparison like rugged yeomen living the simple life. Under the Umayyads, the Muslim realm had grown quite prosperous. Well, under the Abbasids, the economy virtually exploded with vigor. And like the Umayyads, the Abbasids were secular rulers who used spies, police power, and professional armies to maintain their grip.

  Since the Abbasids had risen to power on a surge of Shi’ite discontent, you might suppose that in this regard at least they would have differed from the Umayyads, but in this supposition you would be dead wrong. The Abbasids quickly embraced the orthodox approach to Islam, probably because the orthodox religious establishment, all those scholars, had secured so much social power in Islam that embracing their doctrines was the politic thing to do. Indeed, it was only in Abbasid times (as we shall see in the next chapter) that the mainstream approach to Islam acquired the label Sunnism, since only now did it congeal into a distinct sect with a name of its own.

  In the first days of the Abbasid takeover, many naïve Shi’i thought that Saffah and his family were going to put the recognized Shi’ite imam on the throne, thereby inaugurating the millennial peace predicted in Hashimite propaganda. Instead, the hunt for Alids intensified. In fact, when the third khalifa of this dynasty died, according to one of his maids, his successor found a secret room in his palace, which led to an underground vault where he had collected the corpses of all the Alids he had captured and killed. (They weren’t necessarily Fatima’s descendants, since Ali had other wives after Fatima died).