We now go back to the overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus, to pick up the first thread of the Andalusian Golden Age. There were three main factions united behind the descendants of Abbas, Mohammed’s uncle: Shi’ites who wanted a closer relative of Mohammed in power, Persians who were tired of second-class status, and egalitarian nomads, both Bedouin and Berber.
The Berbers had been problematic for some time. Their preferred strain of Islam was the earliest kind of fundamentalism, Kharijism. “Kharij” means “one who walks out,” that is, a dissident against the mainstream rule. Kharijites believed that all other forms of Islam were corrupt and worthy of death. We could sum up their view as, “Give me pious justice or give me (or preferably you) death!” They were also fiercely egalitarian and believed that the elites of Damascus had deviated from the true way.
A Berber uprising in the Mahgreb (literally, the place of the setting sun) in 740 led to a massive Syrian defeat in Morocco. Berbers had formed the shock troops for invading Spain; now they were a restive, rebellious pestilence. The emirs resorted to segregating different strains of Muslims from each other in various Spanish cities, to keep peace.
The last great Umayyad Caliph, Hisham I, chose to marry his son Muawiya to a Berber woman from an influential family. So his grandsons in that line grew up speaking Berber fluently. The oldest was Abd al-Rahman, who was himself given a wife at the young age of 15. By the time he was 19, he had a four-year-old son named Sulayman.
They lived in a palace complex northeast of Damascus. It was called Rusafa and has vanished from the record; perhaps its cut stones were re-used in Syrian villages. Unlike Abbasid Baghdad, which displayed its luxury openly, Damascus kept its “soft” sins out of public view in Rusafa. It was a place of wine, palm trees, and gardens.
As soon as the Abbasid army had conquered Marwan II near the Tigris River, accomplices raced to Rusafa to execute the rest of Marwan’s relatives. Seeing the black flag, the families at Rusafa scrambled to save themselves. Abd al-Rahman grabbed some money and ran with a brother and his son. They were pursued hotly, but only al-Rahman (with a faithful servant) completed his escape. His brother was cut down when he could not swim a river, and his little son had to be left behind. Rahman was hunted all over the Ummah but succeeded in escaping pursuit and arrest through Egypt and into North Africa.
Finding his way to his mother’s Nafza tribe, he was welcomed. This prince, half Arab and half Berber, changed the focus of Berber rebellion. Al-Rahman settled in Morocco for a while, studying the situation. When he was 25, he decided to use Berber support to take over the disorganized territory across Gibraltar. Taking advantage of factional hatred among Muslim factions in Spain, he gathered an army and by 756, “al-Dakhil” (the Immigrant, or perhaps we might say, the Carpetbagger) controlled most of Andalusia.
Abd al-Rahman did not declare himself a Caliph, though his great-great-grandson did. For now, he was an Emir, just a governor under the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, al-Mansur. But he was an upstart Emir, not an appointed one, and he ruled a land that was still very dangerous. Abbasid agents must be defeated, and all warring factions brought under control. Abd al-Rahman I created a non-tribal modern state, rewarding anyone who supported him.
In 759, the Franks successfully besieged Muslim Narbonne; Abd al-Rahman was not yet powerful enough to protect a place so far to the north. And in 763, al-Mansur sent an appointed Emir to Sevilla to take back central power. Now there had to be a final military showdown. al-Rahman trained a slave army, perhaps the first Muslim ruler to create such a thing. He chose imported Slavs, blond and blue-eyed, to be his shock troops; he also had a personal bodyguard of Africans. The slave army had no tribal ties to Yemenis, Berbers, Syrians, or anyone; they would live or die only as they helped him win.
At the fortress of Carmona, near Sevilla, the slave army defeated the Abbasid envoy’s army. Abd al-Rahman took no prisoners; all were executed. He had a special fate for the top officials. Cutting off their hands first, then their heads, he pickled all of these in brine and mailed them to Mecca. Caliph al-Mansur, hearing of it, said, “Praise Allah, He placed a sea between me and him!” Later, when asked who he considered to be the bravest (the falcon) of Mohammed’s clan, he named Abd al-Rahman “the Falcon of the Quraysh.” Because, he said, he rose to power without any support, against all odds, by his cleverness and ferocity.