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

Political and Cultural History of Islam

hand, any sudden increase in the circulation of the precious metals must have raised prices and brought about a financial crisis; the defeat of the expedition against Constantinople and the cessation of conquests in the West must have seriously depleted the treasury, and the vast inequalities of personal wealth, which were now becoming obvious, fostered social discontent and often led the poor Arabs” to throw in their lot with the Mawali against the dominant aristocracy.
The first attempt to tackle the Mawali problem was made by Umar II. who succeeded his cousin Sulayman in 717 A.D. This man, a grandson of the first Umar (Rad.A), made an extraordinary impression on his age, despite the brevity of his reign. Of austere morals and deep piety, he recognized no distinction of race or party. He stopped the public cursing of Ali (Rad.A), relieved the Berbers of the harsh tribute of children which had been imposed on them, discouraged r?ids and wars against peaceful nations, and boldly set out to remove the economic grievances of the Mawali. This involved something like a fiscal revolution; hitherto Muslim landowners had paid only Ushr or tithe on their estates, and non-Muslims a much heavier impost, at first indifferently called Kharaj or Jizya, both words signifying tribute. If the owner of tribute-paying land turned Muslim, he was in future liable only for Ushr. To prevent a diminution of State revenue, the Umayyads had discouraged conversion and often continued to exact payment of Kharaj and Jizya from the Mawali, notwithstanding that as Muslims they should have been exempt from taxation.
In Khurasan Mawali who had fought against the unbelievers were placed on the pension-list as well as being freed from these imposts. Umar decreed that after the hundredth year of the Hijra (718-719) no Kharaj-paying land should be purchased by a Muslim, though he could rent it and continue paying the tax, and that should a non-Arab embrace Islam, his land was to revert to the village community, he himself staying on, if he desired, as the tenant. To complaints from his advisers that conversions would reduce the treasury’s receipts, the Caliph replied scornful: The Holy Prophet was sent by God as a missionary not a tax-gatherer!’.
The pious Umar was not destined to live to see the result of his experiment: he died in 720, at the age of thirty-nine, leaving behind him a reputation as the best of the Umayyads, so that the chroniclers of the Abbasid age specially exempt him from the general censure they pass on his house, and regret that the reformer
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of the world was snatched away before his time. The Caliphate passed to his cousin Yazid II, a brother of Walid, a frivolous done who had none of his predecessor’s devotion to religion and who by favouring the Kaisites, re-opened a slumbering feud. Fortunately, his reign was short, and on his death in 724, his younger brother Hisham was chosen Caliph, the fourth of the sons of Abdul Malik to mount the throne. The long reign of Hisham (724-743) was the Indian summer of the Umayyads. An able and moderate man, he preserved the outward decorum of the correct Muslim without displaying the ardent piety of Umar; of reserved disposition, he hated the noise and bustle of cities, and passed most of his time at his hunting- lodges far out in the Syrian desert, while the financial straits in which the State was involved in consequence of Umar’s reforms obliged him to restrict expenditure and exposed him to charges of meanness and avarice.
He faced a highly critical situation. The war against the Byzantines was pursued with some success, and a brilliant Muslim commander nicknamed ’al-Battal’, the hero, who was killed in the fighting in Asia Minor in 740, acquired legendary fame as a valorous champion of the faith and figured in later ages in a Turkish romance of chivalry. But the disastrous defeat in Gaul in 732, followed by the great Berber revolt of 739-742, which at one time threatened the loss of the entire Maghrib and was marked by an Arab reverse involving the death of so many leaders of distinguished lineage as to be called ’ the battle of the nobles,’ clouded the scene and added to the unpopularity of the regime. Hishun’s energetic measures restored order in North Africa, but Berber unrest, fomented by Kharijite propaganda, could never be completely quelled. After a long period of quiescence, Shi’ism raised its head again, though ’the party of Ali (Rad.A) had ceased to be a unity, one group supporting the claims of the descendants of Ali (Rad A) and Fatima (Rad.A), another those of the descendants of Ali (Rad.A) and Khawla the Hanafite woman, and a third those of the descendants of Ali’s brother Ja’far.
All these factions recruited the bulk of their following in southern Iraq, and strange messianic and millenarian ideas were now entering and transforming what had been originally a protest of political legitimism. In 737 the Umayyad army caught and executed a number of Shi’ite agents in Kufa, and in 740 Husain’s grandson Zaid led an abortive rising in the same city. Hisham’s response was to cultivate the religious leaders and institute proceedings against

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