Hugh Kennedy in Great Arab Conquests says that there’s one more ethnic footnote to the Muslim conquest of Sind. It may be the origin of some of Europe’s gypsies.
The Zutt tribesmen, who joined Muhammad ibn Qasim’s upriver invasion, also moved westward into Iraq. They were farmers who favored water buffalos for riding and plowing. Umayyad governors of Iraq decided to move some of them into Syria, water buffalo and all. The water buffalo were supposed to scare away Asian lions who preyed on travel. So we know the Zutt farmers, speaking their Sindhi language, at least came into Syria.
But a Byzantine raid aimed at taking back part of Syria took some of these farmers as captives. The captives, including water buffaloes, were taken into Byzantine lands. They disappear from written history, though some gypsies called Atsinganoi are recorded in the 11th century. “Atsinganoi” might be a Greek way of designating people from Sind. It was the hypothesis of a 19th century Dutch scholar that these displaced Zutts became gypsies in Eastern Europe.
In 710, the Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, heard that some Muslim women had been captured by pirates in Sind (modern Pakistan). He sent word to its Brahman Hindu king demanding their release, but when the king disavowed any control over the pirates, Hajjaj decided to send an army led by one of his cousins, Muhammad ibn Qasim. The army was raised from Syrian and Iraqi forces around Shiraz, a garrison city founded in 693 to control Iran.
The army of 6000 marched through coastal Iran, capturing any cities along the way, while supply ships sailed to meet them. This was the most organized, professional invasion yet. When they set up a siege of Daybul (whose name meant “temple” in Sanskrit), they used a giant catapult. It was the kind that needed a lot of men to pull on a rope all at once, lifting and flinging the arm, and it was so large that it needed 500 men. The catapult targeted the tallest building that had a dome and banner; it may have been a Buddhist stupa.
Daybul’s walls were scaled by ladders. The invading Muslims tore down Hindu and Buddhist temples and killed priests. Muhammad ibn Qasim ordered the building of a mosque and a new garrison town for 4000 Muslims.
But at the next fortified town on the Indus River, Buddhist monks came out to meet the army. They argued that war was against their religious principles and negotiated peace terms. This happened repeatedly, so that only one city, where the Hindu governor refused to cooperate with Buddhist peace efforts, was actually destroyed. A nomadic-agricultural tribe, the Zutts, chose to join the Muslims both in arms and as converts, so the army only grew as it went.
Finally, there was a full-scale battle across the Indus River. The Hindu regional king Dahir rode an elephant, one of sixty. His litter also contained female slaves to hand him arrows and betel nuts. His large army stood ready to deny the Muslim army its crossing.
But Muhammad ibn Qasim ordered his men to build a pontoon bridge of boats and swing it into the current while arrows covered them by keeping the men on the far bank under attack. It worked, the Muslim army crossed the river. The king’s litter caught fire from a flaming arrow, and his maddened elephant ran into the river. After the king’s death, Hindu resistance in Sind was over. Captured women were sent back to Iraq and Damascus, although a number of women at court burned themselves together in a house.
Muhammad ibn Qasim set about governing his new province, and gradually the Brahmin caste put out feelers to cooperate with him. The Hindu king’s widow became Muhammad ibn Qasim’s wife. Brahmins began working for the Muslim regime as tax collectors. Buddhist temples were falling into disrepair because the conquered people were afraid to bring donations to the old religion. But after Hajjaj told his cousin that it was all right to leave the Buddhists alone, their temple customs returned to normal.
The Brahmins convinced Muhammad ibn Qasim not only to restore them to elite status but to continue the old custom of treating the poor peasants called Jats in a discriminatory way. This is interesting because in earlier invasions, the poor tended to convert to Islam quickly in order to be part of the more powerful class for once. That didn’t happen here. The social status that predated Islam just continued, which made Sind much easier to govern.
The military expedition ended far up the Indus River. All the way up the river, cities were sending people out to meet the Muslims with music and dancing. But in the city of Aror, the people first thought that the dead king was still alive and would save them, but Muhammad ibn Qasim showed them the widow, now his wife, and at last they believed. As the city surrendered, many residents gathered at a Buddhist shrine, where Muhammad ibn Qasim took a bracelet from the statue to show its powerlessness. The widow, Ladi, asked Muhammad not to execute the people of the city, not even the soldiers.
These Indus River cities were extremely wealthy, especially in gold. Destroying their social systems would decrease their tribute-paying ability by a lot and bring order into chaos. But Buddhists and Hindus were so obviously idol-worshippers, it was clear that strict application of Islam would require mass destruction. In Iran, they had decided to treat Zoroastrians as if they were Jews or Christians. Muhammad ibn Qasim now decided Buddhist and Hindu temples were just churches. Even unconverted, they could pay the jizya tax and become protected minorities, or dhimmis. Muslims didn’t destroy statues.
Muhammad ibn Qasim’s extremely successful time in Sind came to an end when Caliph Walid and Emir al-Hajjaj both died in 714. By 715, he was back in Iraq being imprisoned and tortured to death. It’s not clear why, except that he was closely associated with Hajjaj, and now the political wheel turned. He was remembered fondly in Sind, where they even grieved over his recall and disgrace. The Muslim government in Sind had been among the mildest and most tolerant.
Hugh Kennedy in his book The Great Arab Conquests notes that it’s at this point that we start to have real contemporary history that we can trust. Two Abbasid-era historians collected everything they could find from this wave of invasion, including biographies and accounts of battles and sieges. The History of Prophets and Kings of al-Tabari, published in 915, preserves what they found. Dates become reliable, not legendary.
The Oxus River is one of the world’s great boundary rivers like the Mississippi or the Danube. Oxus is its western, Greek name; in Arabic it was Jaihoun, and locally it is the Amu Darya River (darya means river). It flowed from Afghanistan’s mountains into the Aral Sea. It is easily seen from space. The area Americans call “the ‘Stans” lies beyond it (except for Turkmenistan and Afghanistan itself). Our mental world maps tend to be blank in this area, so I want to take a little time to fill in the blank before telling what happened there.
In ancient times, the area west of the Oxus River was Iran, while across the river to the east was called Turan. Greeks just called it Transoxiana. It was unknown, wild territory, though rich with possibility. Iran/Persia had always been part of the western world, but Transoxiana was just Other. Its people mostly spoke Turkic languages in 700, not Indo-Iranian ones. They were still very nomadic and the wave of Turks crossing from east to west, out of Central Asia to Anatolia, had just begun.
Transoxiana had the major, ancient city of Balkh, capital of the kingdom of Bactria. In the map below, it’s called “Bactres,” its Greek name.
Balkh was the last outpost of Hellenic culture, built to look Greek and minting Greek-style coins. But by 700, it was a center of Buddhist culture. Balkh had been conquered by Arabs in 653, but Nezak Tarkhan, a Buddhist prince, had driven them out. The Buddhist statues of Bamiyan were already carved out in the mountains. Balkh also had a longstanding population of Jews, probably moved there after Assyrian or Babylonian conquest.
The plain where the river slowed down and moved toward the Aral Sea was called Khwarazm or some version of that during most of the Middle Ages, so I’ll call it that now. It had rich farmlands as well as gem mining: rubies and lapis lazuli. Khwarazm will be featured in later history events, especially as it bore the brunt of early Mongol assault.
To the east, there was another kingdom known as Sogdia, roughly where Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are now. Sogdians were the last link on the Silk Road as it went into China, so their main income was in trade, shuttling silk from China to the Oxus River, where it could be handed over to merchants working in Persia. In the century before Muslim conquest, the silk trade was booming. Silk’s value per pound was much better than the bronze coins China used.
Samarkand and Bukhara were Sogdia’s biggest cities. Both Khwarazm and Sogdia were literate, using a form of Aramaic writing for their Iranian-related languages. We know a lot about the Arab conquest of Bukhara because a native Sogdian wrote a history in Arabic, in the mid-900s.
North of Sogdia, across the Jaxartes River (modern Syr Darya), the land became the wide sea of grass, the steppe.
The only major city here was Shash, now Tashkent. The steppe seems to be the homeland of the Turkic tribes. It stretched through Kazakhstan into Siberia and Mongolia. The Turks were not a unified people, but they spoke dialects of the same Turkic language from Lake Baykal to the Amu Darya river and shared cultural traits, chiefly being nomadic. Turkic tribes were moving into the easier lands of Sogdia and Khwarazm, and from there into Persia. Their rulers were called Khagans, or Khans (the middle “g” fading into a “w” or just a long vowel).
The Turkic people were horse warriors even more than the Arabs were. As nomads, they lived with their horses, drinking mare’s milk or even horse’s blood. They were very tough, since they had been surviving on the steppe. Their culture meted out harsh punishments and valued high pain tolerance. They were the opposite of chivalrous—ironically, a later European value system also derived from horses—because in a difficult climate, you can’t afford to be noble. If deceit will save your life and spare some calories, do it.
They put armor on the chests of their horses and trained to shoot bows on horseback. They didn’t form battle lines like Romans or Persians, so the Arabs, having adjusted to these tactics, now had to adjust again. On horseback, the Turks preferred to encircle the enemy as though they were encircling a herd of deer. They chased down escaped enemies, running them off their feet, again as though they were herds of deer. They liked to hide an ambush, feint an attack, retreat, and then spring the ambush. Their greatest vulnerability was the need to feed vast herds of horses, which was fine on the steppe but could be an issue in farmland. Eventually, all this will describe the Mongol invasion, too, but that’s because the Mongols were Siberian people who adopted an essentially Turkic way of life and ran armies that were mostly Turks.
The conquest of this vast land was not accomplished in one big push. Big military excursions were made, and they duly besieged cities and fought battles. But overall, it happened because the Arabs found it impossible to govern the territory (that is, receive tribute) while living in Merv, at the border of Iran and Afghanistan. They really wanted to control Sogdia so they could tax the Silk Road trade. It simply couldn’t be done without making farther-east Samarkand the new Muslim capital.
The battle for Sogdia entailed first contact with the Chinese empire. Both the Muslims and the Sogdians sent embassies asking for Chinese support. The Chinese response was to encourage some Turks on the border to move west in support of the old Sogdian princes, against the Arabs. The battles between Turks and Arabs were many and bloody, with Samarkand ended up as an Arab city because they had to fall back and defend themselves from there so many times.
There are a few notable points in the story. Around 740 Nasr, a new governor for Khurasan and Transoxiana was sent east from Damascus. He reformed the tax system to stop favoring Arabs as much; instead, taxing favored Muslims of whatever ethnicity. No Muslim had to pay the jizya, the poll tax, but all infidels must. It was a way to shore up Damascene support among eastern Muslim converts; 30,000 of them were suddenly off the tax roll. The region became much easier to govern.
The tax policy had two unforeseen long-term results. The newly privileged Khurasani Muslims invested politically in the new system, embracing it rather than tacitly (or openly) resisting. With so much wealth in the east, they quickly became politically powerful and fueled the overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty only ten years later. Oops.
The other result, of course, was to encourage wholesale conversion. Only the cynical and worldly people convert to a new religion just for money, but others need the nudge of special circumstances and hard times. If the jizya tax is going to sink you this year, conversion looks good. Over time, the region became solidly Muslim, but consequently, the jizya tax income fell. The region could no longer be governed as a conquered land paying tribute, which had always been its purpose in the imperial economy. It still brought in taxes from the Silk Road trade, but that wealth more and more stayed local, going to Samarkand instead of Merv or Damascus. This sets up a ripe situation for regional rebellion and independence, and that’s exactly what began to happen, but not yet in the 8th century.
Nasr began only one major military campaign that went into Azerbaijan. He forced the city of Quba to surrender terms, and that pretty much ended the power of the region’s Turks. This marked the eastern extent of the Muslim empire, give or take a few towns. Kazakhstan and Kyrgizstan went on with nomadic Turkic lifestyles, undisturbed, until later Turkic migrations—and eventually the Mongols—changed them.
But there was one more military encounter that is worth noting for its cultural exchange. A Chinese force occupied Shash (Tashkent) and its prince sent for help to Samarkand. In 751, there was a battle at Taraz, the only one in which Arabs and Chinese directly fought. The Arabs won, and prisoners taken from the Chinese at Taraz are credited with bringing the paper-making craft into the Muslim lands. We know it came from China into the Muslim empire around this time, because the availability of paper fueled the next dynasty’s massive translation and publishing project.
Abd al-Malik handed off power to his son without difficulty. Walid (or al-Walid) had been leading military campaigns against the eastern Romans for some years while his father’s brother was the designated heir. But Abd al-Aziz died in Egypt around the time Musa was fattening his treasury with massive slave income. Walid became the heir, and in 705, his father died.
The three generations of Caliphs Marwan, Abd al-Malik, and Walid shared a genius for administration. Perhaps the key to being good at administration was to be interested in it, rather than in piety (or even conquest). They set up a postal system, which in those days meant literally hiring messengers, horses, and stables, like the short-lived American Pony Express. Ordinary people were asking merchants to carry letters for them, with uncertain results. The Caliphs wanted to send messages to any part of the empire and be reasonably sure of a reply, so that they could maintain authority and guard against breakaway regions.
They also paid attention to coins, the symbol of government authority that people handle every day. During these years, they standardized the way Islamic coins are designed, refusing to put a king’s head or any human representation on them. They minted not only silver dirham coins (as typical in the region), but also gold dinars. Some of these coins have survived to our time, highly prized by collectors. The coins were strictly controlled by the government so that nobody else mined coins and the same coins were accepted from one end of the empire to the other. This was very unusual compared to Europe, even to later medieval Europe, where coins were regional and even local.
Walid’s coins are decorated only with Arabic script. He decided to make Arabic the only language of government in Egypt, which threw native Egyptians into disarray. They had been using Greek since Alexander the Great, and of course many still spoke Coptic, descended from the language of the Pharaohs, at home. Now in order to keep their jobs they had to get serious about learning Arabic. Arabs who had not succeeded in getting good administrative jobs in Egypt suddenly had a leg up. 705 was the beginning of the long conquest of Egypt by the Arabic language.
The flood of wealth from new conquests in North Africa and the far East (which we’ll look at next) made Caliph Walid a very rich man. He built some of the greatest Umayyad buildings, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque next to his father’s Dome of the Rock. He also built the Great Mosque in Damascus — on the site of the demolished cathedral — and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Money for craftsmen from around the empire was lavished on all of these projects, not least the one in Medina. Only the Great Mosque in Damascus, now called the Umayyad Mosque, is still pretty much the same as he built it.
Umayyads were still winning back support in Medina, after its sack in 683. Medinans hated Walid’s building project because he enlarged the mosque—which meant demolishing the old houses of the Prophet and his Companions. He rebuilt it with a larger courtyard, a shrine around the graves, four minarets, and a grand entrance. We today love these beautiful buildings, but Muhammad had considered money spent on buildings to be the greatest waste possible. Medina was the place where the most pious, least ambitious men had stayed on as scholars. Walid may have thought to please them, but it didn’t work. Later, the scholars — the ulama — became powerful in the Muslim community, but for now, the Caliph had his way.
Hajjaj continued as Governor of Iraq during the Caliphates of Abd al-Malik and Walid. He died only in 714, a year before Walid died too. His policies were pro-Arab and brutal. He didn’t hesitate to order executions even on large scale. He decided that more farmers should be out there working, as they used to be prior to the conquest, so he expelled non-Arabs from the garrison cities. They had to pay the tribute tax, jizya, even if they had converted to Islam. Before this, taxation had been on Muslim, not ethnic, identity. He rebuilt canals to help the farmers, but only after forcing them to farm. It wasn’t only in Iraq that this was a problem. In Syria, too, they were having to find native farmers who had fled the land and force them to go back to work.
Hajjaj had to put down both mutinies and Kharijite/Rejectionist rebellions during Abd al-Malik’s reign. He eliminated the Rejectionists as a political threat and got his troops under control, even with pay cuts, but of course he became hated. His response to this was always more brutal repression. In 699, an expedition force from Kufa, sent to fight at the eastern frontier, mutinied. They seized Basra, in addition to their home of Kufa. Syrian troops eventually reinforced Hajjaj and conquered the rebels. The losing fighters fled south into Arabia and Egypt.
Hajjaj founded a new city between Kufa and Basra that would be the seat of Umayyad government, separate from the garrison cities. This town of Wasit was staffed only by Syrians, and across the territory, Iraqis were booted out of power in favor of Syrians. He set up a coin mint in Wasit so he could control the currency. Iraq became a land of Syrian Arab aristocracy, with anyone of part-native descent pushed out of center of power.
In the time of Walid and Hajjaj, they began to see a need to mark vowels in the Quran. Like Hebrew and Aramaic, Arabic had been written only with consonants. In an oral-transmission culture, it makes sense that the consonants would be enough to prompt memory of what it said. Vowels are predictable by grammar and context. But as more non-native speakers were reading the Quran in public, they began to hear simple errors that changed the meaning. Hajjaj is credited with sponsoring an effort to create a regular system of dots and dashes that showed vowels. Eventually, of course, this became a standard part of Arabic writing.
Caliph Walid’s rule is considered the high-water mark of the Umayyads. Politically and in history, that’s good. Morally in human terms, not so good: among other brutalities, he had Husayn’s son poisoned in Medina. We’ll look separately at the conquests of the far East and Spain, which happened during his reign. By Walid’s death in 714, the Islamic empire had reached its greatest size.
After Abd al-Malik was secure in Damascus, he had fighting men to spare. Foreign expeditions rewarded soldiers with booty, so he offered his men the opportunity to launch another invasion of North Africa. The general this time would be Hassan ibn Numan al-Ghassani, a descendent of the formerly Christian Ghassanid Arabs in Syria. Hassan ibn Numan was able in every way, like his Caliph. The invasion began with an expeditionary force of 40,000, the largest force sent to North Africa yet.
In the previous invasion of North Africa, the Muslims had steered around the Roman-held city of Carthage. In 698, Carthage was a shadow of its former self. It had been the Phoenician capital for 700 years, then famously defeated and plundered by Rome in 146 BC. It had been a regional capital run by Romans since then, so another 700 years. Some of its buildings were ruined or disused but still impressive. By 698, its population had dwindled, perhaps because the Mediterranean Sea had much less commerce in the early Muslim years. Eventually, commercial trade built up again, but the loss of the sea as a “Roman lake” at first drove trade down and prices up.
It wasn’t hard to conquer Carthage. The remaining Romans may have taken a few ships out when they saw the army coming. The Muslims basically just walked into Carthage. They didn’t set up a garrison or even build a mosque, because their garrison city Kairouan, which had been retaken a few years before, was their real focus. Arabs did hold the city until the Roman navy took it back briefly in 697, but when Hassan ibn Numan reconquered it in 698, he ordered its value as a city and harbor to be destroyed.
The next major resistance leader was a Berber woman. Her real name was Dihya or Damya, but in Arabic she is known as Kahina, “the Priestess” or “Prophetess.” She was a leader of the Zanata Berbers, a Christian or perhaps even a convert to Judaism (this idea comes from Ibn Khaldun, the later North African historian). Her people lived in the Aures Mountains of Algeria, where it was hard for the horseback Arabs to prevail. Apparently, rebellion against French colonialism also began in the Aures Mountains.
Hassan’s army met her in the foothills, where the Berbers defeated and chased the Arabs. Hassan had to withdraw to the coastal city of Cyrenaica. At least according to legend, Kahina advised the Berbers to destroy the civilized parts of North Africa, so that the Arabs would not want it. And so they did: they burned vineyards and orchards and tore down city walls. The nomadic Berbers of the mountains didn’t care about these things, but the farming people of the coastal plain were shocked to see their heritage destroyed. So it probably wasn’t good advice, since the Zanata Berbers might otherwise have unified the region to stand against the Arabs.
The Christian farmers abandoned the area, going to Spain or Sicily, and the region’s increasing depopulation made it all the simpler for the Arabs to conquer on their next try. Here we see also a reason why Christianity in North Africa disappeared so thoroughly, while in nearby Egypt, it didn’t. It was based along the coast and in the cities, while Egypt’s Christianity reached up the Nile and into rural farming towns.
Some time around the turn of century (history accounting was still very uncertain), Hassan ibn Numan had received more troops to replace those killed by Berbers. Some other Berber tribes allied with the Muslims and joined them. They invaded the Aures Mountains, and this time Kahina was defeated. She died in battle, and her sons who survived became Muslims. Libya and Algeria were effectively conquered for Islam.
Hassan founded the town of Tunis near the ruins of Carthage, and he sent for Coptic artisans to come from Egypt and help build and settle it. Abd al-Malik’s brother, Abd al-Aziz, was governor of Egypt. He was happy to send Egyptians to build this new garrison city (misr), but he wanted it to be under his rule. His own right-hand man, named Musa, came to Tunis to take over.
Meanwhile, Abd al-Malik died, and although his son took over smoothly, any change in power structure makes it easier for other changes to go forward. The new man, Musa ibn Nusayr, began the nuts and bolts stage of conquering Libya and Algeria. He conquered the major Berber tribes: the Kutama, Zanata, and Huwwara. He focused on captives who were sent off as slaves. The numbers may be greatly exaggerated, but as recorded, they were on the order of tens and even hundreds of thousands. 60,000 were sent to the governor of Egypt alone.
Musa conquered the city of Tangier, installing Berber converts as new governor and garrison. Some Arabs were placed among them to instruct them in the Quran. It was probably a pretty good plan, since these Berbers owed all of their importance to Musa and the new religion. He built up Tangier with new Muslims, instructing them to build a larger settlement. Tangier was across from Spain; Musa’s son successfully invaded the Balearic Islands.
Musa crossed into Morocco, taking hostages and captives. He was probably finished with this by 708, when he returned to Kairouan. Inland areas of Morocco and Algeria were unconquered, but the Muslim hold on the coast and cities was permanent.
In 689, Caliph Abd al-Malik was ready to take on the Meccan Caliph Abdallah ibn Zubayr. He started with Iraq, which was shaky but technically loyal to Mecca, through Abdallah’s brother Musab. As you know, everything happened slowly then; it took months to mobilize an army on the frontier of Syria and Iraq. During these months, Abd al-Malik sent messengers to cities in Iraq, especially the garrison city, Basra. He promised rewards to anyone who came over to the Umayyad side. There were enough favorable replies that one of his Umayyad cousins went to Basra to take up governing in his name.
By 691, after many smaller battles between tribes of different loyalties, Abd al-Malik was camped right in the Jazira, the “island” between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Musab’s army was weakened daily by more and more tribes and individuals who realized that they were on the losing side. Their loyalty to Ibn Zubayr was not very strong; they wanted amnesty and rewards. When the Battle of Maskin began, most of Musab’s army would not fight. One general who stayed loyal to his death was the son of Ali’s cousin who had also been loyal to the death (the guy who was poisoned on the Red Sea coast). Musab was left nearly alone, in the end, though his son chose to die with him.
There’s a somewhat funny though grim story about the central hall in Kufa. When Musab’s head was presented to the Caliph, another man said, “I was here when Husayn’s head was presented to Ibn Ziyad, then Ibn Ziyad’s head to al-Mukhtar, then al-Mukhtar’s head to Musab, and now Musab’s head to you.” Abd al-Malik saw the pattern, so to prevent another iteration, he had the roof torn down from the hall.
With Kufa secure, the Caliph sent Hajjaj ibn Yusuf to put down the rival Caliph in Mecca. Hajjaj ibn Yusuf had been the chief of the Caliph’s shurta, his personal security force in Damascus, but he had lived his early life in Ta’if, the town nearest to Mecca. With his army of 2000, he quickly secured his hometown Ta’if, which controlled the pass through the dry hills to the coastal plain of Mecca. From there he demanded surrender, but Ibn Zubayr refused.
Hajjaj moved to besiege Mecca in 692, after gaining Abd al-Malik’s permission. He and everyone in his army had to realize the bitter irony of what they were doing, assaulting the holy city. On the other hand, it was not their first assault on Mecca. After sacking Medina in 683, Umayyad forces had besieged Mecca. Although ultimately they went away after hearing of Yazid’s death, they too had bombarded the Ka’aba, and for some reason it had gone up in flames. This is when the Black Stone broke in pieces from the heat of the fire. Ibn Zubayr had renovated the Ka’aba, changing its shape to include a round courtyard.
We should remember, too, that the Umayyads had probably been downplaying the importance of Mecca during the rival Caliphate. The Dome was newly built in Jerusalem. Abd al-Malik may have calculated that he could always fix the Ka’aba and life would go on.
Hajjaj in Ta’if was at a higher altitude, looking down on Mecca from the hills, so he was in a good position to enforce a siege and then, after a few months, to bombard the city with catapults. The month for the Hajj, the great pilgrimage, came around. Abdallah ibn Umar, in Mecca, persuaded Hajjaj to stop bombardment for the Hajj (ironies piled on thick here). But Hajjaj had a bright idea: as long as he had stopped bombardment, he could enter Mecca as a pilgrim and circle the Ka’aba. Abdallah ibn Zubayr knew that it was Meccan tradition that any and all pilgrims could freely enter during the Hajj, but he refused.
Hajjah was furious. He ordered the catapults to aim right at the Ka’aba, terrorizing pilgrims. He may have specially targeted Ibn Zubayr’s renovations. At one point, a thunderstorm suddenly blew up, and the men were afraid that it was Allah’s wrath against what they were doing. Hajjaj convinced them that it wasn’t, the storm ended, and the bombardment continued.
The siege did what a siege is supposed to do: thousands of Meccans, including two of Ibn Zubayr’s sons, personally surrendered. Ibn Zubayr agonized over surrendering, himself. His mother was still alive; she told him to honor those who had died in his cause by dying in battle. He and a small band of supporters came out of Mecca to attack Hajjaj, and of course they were quickly defeated. Ibn Zubayr’s body was hung on a gibbet for public show.
Caliph Abd al-Malik ordered Hajjaj to rebuild the Ka’aba. Hajjaj chose to rebuild it exactly as it had been in Muhammad’s day, so that the round courtyard is now outside the cube. Umayyad supporters could comfort themselves by saying that the wicked innovations of the false Caliph had been purged from the holy building, but many Muslims around the empire held it against Abd al-Malik that he had ever authorized an assault on the holy city.
Abd al-Malik had focused his main attention on consolidating power in Syria, leaving his rival Caliph Abdallah ibn Zubayr to battle against Kharijites in Iraq and Arabia. This allowed almost a decade in which Mecca was ruled by a power hostile to the Umayyads in general and Abd al-Malik in particular. If Muslims in his territories decided to journey there for the Hajj, they were likely to hear sedition against him. They might have their loyalty shaken by going to the Prophet’s birthplace, the city built by Abraham, only to hear propaganda in favor of Ibn Zubayr or even the family of Ali.
One of his early projects for showing off his wealth was to build a new shrine in Jerusalem. A new shrine would draw Muslim pilgrims away from Mecca, and it would compete with the continuing Christian presence in Jerusalem. He chose to build over a piece of exposed bedrock that legend claimed was the site of Abraham’s near-offering of Isaac (or Ishmael, as Muslims said).
Nearby, there was a church that sheltered another rock. This was the Church of the Kathisma, that is, the Sitting-down. Legend said that Mary grew tired as she journeyed from Jerusalem (where she had been staying with Elizabeth and Zachariah) to Bethlehem. She sat on this rock. The church was not built for congregations to fill; it was small and just sheltered the exact rock, with space for pilgrims to walk around it. It was octagonal so that pilgrims could walk in the eight-sided hallway, with chapels off to the side, and doorways opening into the central area with the rock. (It has long since fallen down, but it is currently exposed as an inactive archeological site in Israel, owned by the Greek Orthodox Church.)
Circumambulating a rock? That idea came straight out of traditional Arab religion, only this time, the rocks were not standing for a deity but marking a place where something holy had happened. Abd al-Malik wanted to build something very much like the church around Mary’s rock.
Either legend had already worked a Muhammad connection into the rock that Abd al-Malik chose, or legend followed the choice. Muslim legend is that this rock, where Abraham stood, was also the rock on which Muhammad stood when he was lifted into the heavens for a tour of its levels. This event is called the Night Journey, told in Surah 17. Muhammad journeyed at night from the Sacred Masjid/Mosque, to the Farther Mosque. There, he was taken into heaven on a flying horse. In order to connect Muhammad to Jerusalem, the Farther Mosque was taken to mean this place in Jerusalem.
Muslims today assume that this is what the text means, and now there is a mosque next to the Dome of the Rock that is literally named The Farther (al-Aqsa) Mosque. It seems obvious that it must be what the text refers to, but contrarian scholars point out that actually the Quran never says “Jerusalem”. “The Farther Mosque” could have been a shrine in Arabia that Muhammad believed was also connected to Abraham. We don’t know if Muslims in 690 believed that Jerusalem was “al-Aqsa,” because there is no reference to the Night Journey in the Quranic inscriptions inside the building. Lack of reference seems to suggest that it wasn’t a prime consideration at the time. The Abrahamic connection may have been enough.
Caliph Abd al-Malik may have begun with a Byzantine church that stood on the site, or his architects may have started from scratch. The Dome of the Rock shrine was eight-sided, like the nearby church, and decorated with mosaics inside and perhaps outside. It had a walkway that encircled the rock, as in the nearby church. Above the rock, there was a dome, which was not an Arabian type of architecture. The shrine needed a dome to compete with the Christian basilicas, especially the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Some of the inscriptions inside offered a direct rebuke to Christians, reminding them that Allah had no associate and no begotten son.
The appearance of the Dome now is entirely modern; the gold facing was added in 1964. In earlier times, the wooden domed roof was covered with lead to make it weatherproof. We think that some of the current interior is original, but the building has been rebuilt many times. The current blue tile exterior was added in the 1800s.
Before the Syrian army could push farther into rebellious Arabia, it was called back to Damascus. Yazid had suddenly died. His son was a young man who died soon after him. (Shi’ite history records that he criticized his family for persecution of the Prophet’s family—and may have been helped to an early death?) Ironically, after Mu’awiya had worked so hard to make the Caliphate into a hereditary kingdom for his family, his line had died out. The only Umayyad strong enough to take over was Marwan, Mu’awiya’s cousin. We know he had the same street smarts and had been part of Mu’awiya’s ruling structure. Just looking at administrative continuity, Marwan was a good choice.
…But the Caliph was not a king! He was supposed to be the successor to the Prophet, who could lead the faithful and preach in the mosque. Marwan wasn’t that guy. Muhammad had envisioned a sort of egalitarian regime ruled by God-fearing judges, though he had never spelled it out. His Companions knew this, and their sons, now the leaders of the rebellion, were determined not to let the Caliph become just another king handing on power to his spoiled sons.
Abdallah ibn Zubayr acted quickly. He and the Quraysh in Mecca proclaimed him to be the new Caliph ruling in the Holy City, the Prophet’s birthplace, and on the Prophet’s principles. As Umayyad power in Damascus collapsed in chaos (it took a while for Marwan to seize power), Ibn Zubayr was recognized as Caliph by governors in many provinces, including Egypt and Iraq. He appointed his brother to govern Basra.
At least for a time, Ibn Zubayr became the first and only Caliph ruling from Mecca. While he controlled Medina too, he was hostile to the Prophet’s clan. He may have sought alliance with Hassan and Husayn previously, but now as Caliph in Mecca, he declared that he had never liked any of them. The surviving son of Husayn lived in Medina and did his best to shun all rebellions and conspiracies, staying strictly apolitical and focused on scholarship.
In 684, Marwan was declared Caliph in Damascus. The armies in Syria were loyal to the Umayyads and began fighting battles against tribes who had not submitted to Marwan. By 685, Marwan had taken back control of Egypt. And then—he died. His son Abd al-Malik now inherited the Caliphate as a king, exactly as the Umayyads wanted, so the rebellion against them continued.
It’s worth noting that the oldest biographical notes about Muhammad came from a series of letters exchanged between Abd al-Malik and Ibn Zubayr’s brother Urwa, who stayed neutral. Abd al-Malik wrote letters to Urwa asking him to clarify some of the events in the Prophet’s life. Urwa lived in Medina, where he and a handful of other scholars established fiqh, the methods by which Quranic principles could be applied to legal decisions.
In Kufa, some men were filled with regret that they had not fought for Husayn at Karbala. Their conspiracy was called the Tawwabin Rebellion, and at one point it numbered as many as 4000 men. But then a competing movement began when an old man named al-Mukhtar rejected both Marwan and Ibn Zubayr, in favor of Husayn’s half-brother, Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya. Mukhtar proclaimed him the new Caliph and Imam, adding the title “Mahdi,” and he executed men who had been involved in killing Husayn. The Kharijites (Rejectionists) who had survived in the countryside joined Mukhtar’s cause.
On the 6th anniversary of Karbala, they won a battle against Umayyad forces, killing the Umayyad governor who had kicked Husayn’s head. Shi’ite historians say that after this, the women of Husayn’s family finally stopped wearing black.
However, al-Muhktar did not live long, himself; he was defeated by Ibn Zubayr’s brother, and eventually Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya swore allegiance to Abd al-Malik. The whole episode would just be a blip, except that the first insular sect within Islam, the Kaysanites, came from this movement. They believed that al-Hanafiya, who had been proclaimed the “Mahdi,” really was the fourth Imam after his father Ali and half-brothers Hassan and Husayn. They promoted a legend that he did not die but rather was in supernatural hiding on a mountain near Medina. He was cared for by animals and he would return someday. Their Islamic beliefs mixed in some other religious beliefs prevailing in Iraq and Iran at the time. In one form or another, they stayed on in Iran and became an important force in early Shi’a Islam.
There were still more Kharijite Rejectionists in central Arabia, and they now fought against Ibn Zubayr’s rule in Mecca. They succeeded in conquering Yemen and even occupied Ta’if, the nearest town to Mecca. Caliph Abdallah ibn Zubayr in Mecca still had control of Iraq through his brother Musab, who had defeated Mukhtar. But Iraq was unruly; one of Musab’s allies had turned into an independent warlord ruling from of all places Tikrit, later famous as Saddam’s birthplace. This warlord took more and more territory and then became loyal to the Caliph in Damascus. Now it was really down to just Caliph Abd al-Malik v. Caliph Ibn Zubayr—-Damascus v. Mecca.
Don’t imagine that Medina and Mecca took the news of Husayn’s head on a lance quietly. They may have imagined that Yazid’s men would not dare to hurt the Prophet’s grandson, or they may have been prepared for news of his life lost in a battle. The actual series of events, the brutality with which his family and tents had been destroyed, shocked them to the core and ended any chances Yazid had.
In Medina, the leader of the Ansar was Abdallah ibn Hanzala, whose father had died in the Battle of Uhud just before his birth. (This will be a story with far too many Abdallahs in it; clearly it was the baby name of choice for new converts.) The original emigrants who came to Medina with Muhammad also opposed Yazid; they were not Umayyads, but they were of the Quraysh tribe with ties to Mecca. They had an additional reason to oppose the Umayyads, since recent “fiscal reforms” had threatened the loss of their pensions. The Umayyad power in Damascus had bigger fish to fry than just paying out tax money to the children of Muhammad’s companions.
Together, the Ansar and Quraysh of Medina turned against the Umayyad governing apparatus; about a thousand Umayyads fled to the large house of Marwan, just outside the city. It was probably defensible; Marwan was no fool. Marwan sent messages to Yazid asking for an army to deliver them, and Yazid did send one. It was drawn from the tribes in Syria and Palestine, led by the tribe that Yazid’s mother came from, so none of these invaders had personal memories of Medina or Mecca.
The Medinans let the Umayyads go north to Syria, on condition of taking an oath not to assist the invading army. Marwan’s son, Abd al-Malik, broke his oath to assist them with inside knowledge of the city’s defensives. (Abd al-Malik later became Caliph himself.) Father and son turned back to ride with the Syrian army to their former home. In the most ironic event of this rebellion, the Ansar and Quraysh of Medina re-dug the trench that had defended Medina from attacking Umayyads back when they were still Meccan pagans. The lines were drawn for the Battle of al-Harrah.
Muhammad’s defense of Medina in the Battle of the Trench had depended on unity among all residents, since a disloyal tribe could allow enemies to enter the oasis through their lands, elsewhere. And that’s what happened now. After three days of fighting, Marwan’s battalion entered from the back, and Medina was lost. The Quraysh leaders fled to Mecca, as once they had fled from Mecca to Medina.
Medina was probably sacked by the Syrians. I say “probably” because some historians think reports of the destruction were exaggerated, the way claims about wars often are. But it was a rich city by now, and it looked like the biggest obstacle to establishing a stable Umayyad rule in Damascus. The commanders let their men overrun the city, destroying, taking, and raping. On Yazid’s orders, Ali ibn Husayn was not harmed: they had enough trouble with martyrs already. The greatest claims are that thousands of Medinans died; the smallest claim is that there were public executions of their leaders. But “Medinat al-Nabi,” the City of the Prophet, was now reduced to a much lesser town, its riches carried away. It remained a center of Islamic scholarship where Ali ibn Husayn lived quietly.
Mu’awiya had promised Ali’s son Hassan that he would set up a council to choose a ruler after his death, but he didn’t keep his word. His son Yazid, whose mother was a Syrian Arab princess, just took over in Damascus and called for loyalty oaths all around.
Some key men refused to swear loyalty to him. Abdallah ibn Zubayr was the grandson of Abu Bakr and son of a close Companion of Muhammad. He was in Medina at the time, with Abdallah ibn Umar (whose sister had been a wife of the Prophet) and Husayn, Ali’s second son. The Ansar, the early believers in Medina, were 100% against the way the Umayyads were now turning the Muslim community into a hereditary kingdom. They had been against the way the clan of Abu Sufyan flipped from enemies to rulers, suspecting that their faith was a front. Now Medina itself was ruled by a grandson of Abu Sufyan, instead of by a Medinan.
Yazid sent a command to Medina for these men to swear loyalty immediately. Abdallah ibn Zubayr went to Mecca. He and the others urged Husayn to make Mecca his base and begin an opposition movement. But Husayn’s cousin in Kufa urged him to come back to Ali’s most loyal city and begin an insurrection there. In his letters, he said he had 12,000 men who would follow them into battle.
Husayn decided to go to Kufa. The story is odd from the start, because he didn’t ride fast with only some fighting men, rather he took his entire household, women and children and babies and servants. They rode slowly north. Tribes who lived along the way came out in enthusiasm, joining ranks with the Prophet’s grandson. But as they went, they started receiving messengers telling them to turn back. Some were from his friends in Mecca, who had heard rumors that his mission would fail.
The last messenger was from Kufa, where the cousin’s last act before being executed by Yazid’s men was to send this messenger. Don’t come to Kufa! Go back to Mecca. The Arabs who had joined along the way deserted their caravan, but Husayn didn’t turn back. He said, “Man journeys in darkness to meet his destiny.”
What did this mean? Shi’ites believe that he knew he was going to die in Iraq; certainly the outcome was obvious by this point. The only reason to go forward was to make a point by dying. They also believe that more esoteric knowledge about Allah had been handed down to Ali, to his sons, and that Husayn knew more of the spiritual dimension and the future than ordinary men. He knew that the worldly takeover of Muhammad’s ideal spiritual society was so far gone that no worldly actions could stop it. So he was going to do an other-worldly action.
Husayn didn’t go right into the city of Kufa, but rather to a nearby camping site that is now the city of Karbala. His family set up their tents. It wasn’t long until Yazid’s new governor of Kufa came with a large army. By now, the family and friends camped at Karbala were down to their original number who followed Husayn from Mecca. There was no need for a large army to defeat them.
The first action of Yazid’s governor was to put guards all around the family’s tents to blockade them from going to get water from the river. Water deprivation was a tried and true method of war in Arabia. History refers to “The Battle of Karbala,” but really there was no battle. The family could be picked off one by one.
Husayn’s half-brother Abbas went bravely out at night to get water, but he was killed on the way back. One of Husayn’s nephews announced that he was going to be married that day, so he married Husayn’s daughter. His wedding gift was permission to go out alone to the surrounding army. Of course, he was cut down by arrows. Husayn’s oldest son went out to challenge the entire army to single combat, rather than die of thirst. Husayn himself carried his youngest son, a baby wailing from thirst, out to the besiegers to shame them, but someone shot an arrow into the baby.
The tenth day of Muharram, also the tenth day of the siege, was to be the last; the family prayed all night and were anointed as if already dead. Then, one by one, the men walked out to the besiegers and were shot down. Husayn was last. Enemies beheaded him and put his head on a lance. Then they found all seventy-two male corpses and beheaded them, too. They left the bodies unburied, but later the local people buried them.
One of Husayn’s younger sons survived because he was sick inside one of the tents, and his aunt, Husayn’s sister Zaynab, put her body between the swords and him. He was the only male to survive. They didn’t kill the women and girls but took them captive in chains to be displayed in Kufa and then brought to Damascus.
Husayn’s head was tossed onto the floor in the governor’s room in Kufa, and Yazid’s governor poked at the head with a stick. A very old man who had come to Kufa with the first conquerors, and who had known Muhammad, cried out in disgust and fury that he had seen the Prophet himself kiss that head. He went out to speak to the people of Kufa, saying they had chosen the degradation of killing Fatimah’s son and would now suffer.
When the party of captives reached Damascus, Yazid was shocked. Things had gone much farther than he had planned—as they so often do. He wanted a living Husayn to swear loyalty, not Husayn’s head on a lance and his women in chains. Yazid freed the survivors and the surviving son, Ali ibn Husayn, preached a sermon at the mosque. Husayn’s head received a shrine in Damascus, but there are other shrines that claim to be where his head came to rest. Shi’ites believe his family got it back and buried it at Karbala with his body.
Ali ibn Husayn became the fourth Imam. His mother was probably a Persian princess brought back after one of the major defeats of the last dynasty. Islam had no princes to marry such girls to, so they were given to sons of prominent Companions. He lived in Medina, teaching and passing on stories of his great-grandfather as the transmission of these hadiths began in earnest. He never sought political power.
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