Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

5. Discrimination with Mawalis
Nasr b. Sayyar had been made governor of the province by Hisham in 738, and, in spite of some difficulties, he had been able to maintain his position during the vicissitudes of the third civil war and was confirmed in office by Marwan II. This frontier district of the Caliphate maintained an army drawn mainly from the local fighting men (muqatila) enrolled in the diwan and paid by the government, but including also from time to time troops from Syria. There was too, however, a significant non-military Arab population, earning a living in trade and agriculture, and more assimilated with the local non-Arab population than were the soldiers. Given the size of the province, the Arab layer of the population was spread relatively thinly, particularly outside the garrison towns, and this largely accounts for the lack of barriers between the civilian Arab settlers and the local Iranians. On the one side, significant numbers of the local population had accepted Islam, probably more than in the western regions of Iran, becoming Mawali and taking Arab names indicating their tribal attachments. On the other, the Arabs intermarried with the locals, adopted their forms of dress, observed their festivals and probably used the local Persian dialect in everyday speech.
As time went on, therefore, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between the descendants of the Arab settlers and those of the Mawali, and, although awareness of tribal origins and loyalties persisted, changed social conditions brought about a weakening of
Muhammad Arshad. History ot Persia (Urdu), P 105

454 Political and Cultural History of Mam
the tribal way of life and a consequent widening gap between the local mixed population and the muqatila bearing the same tribal names. The factionalism which split the Khurasani muqatila as it did elsewhere seems to have left the civilian population relatively unaffected.
Apart from the opposition of the Yamani faction in the army towards the governor, there seem to have been number of reason for the development in Khurasan of opposition to the Umayyads. The province had been conquered and settled from Iraq, and there are some indications that the Iraqi opposition to Umayyad Syrian domination had been carried over to the frontier province. Shi’ism seems to have been strong there independently of the rise of the Hashimiyya, and this too might be explained as part of the Iraqi legacy-although not so important as Basra, Kufa had supplied some of the Arab colonisers in the province. Following the futile revolt of ”Ali’s great-grandson Zayd b. ’’Ali in Kufa in 740, his son Yahya fled to Khurasan in the expectation of finding support there, and a few years later he was followed by his relative ”Abdullah b. Mu’awiya after his defeat at the hands of the forces of Marwan II. The close association of Arabs and non-Arabs in the civilian population seems to have inclined many of the Arabs to support the claims of the Mawali and universalist view of Islam, and to have increased the opposition to what were seen as the dynastic and unIslamic policies of the Umayyads.4
The main grievance of the civilian Muslim population, however, probably resulted from the fact that they were subject to the authority of non-Muslim officials, and, particularly in the matter of taxation, felt themselves to be discriminated against to the advantage of non-Muslims. At the time of the province’s conquest, the Arabs had made agreements with the local non-Muslim notables on a piecemeal basis enabling the latter to collect the taxes themselves so long as they handed over to the Arabs a regular fixed tribute. Under such a system it was natural that the non-Muslim notables would favour their own class or religious community, and it appears that this system continued almost to the end of the Umayyad period.
At any rate, it is likely that the measure came too late to defuse anti-Ummayad feeling in the province, and the question of
4 Halting. P 105
Decline & Fall of the Umayyad Dynasty 455
taxation in any case has to be seen in the wider context of the development of Muslim opposition to Umayyad rule.5