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

Political and Cultural History of Islam
heresy, in the hope of convincing the faithful that the Umayyads were loyal defenders of Islamic orthodoxy and to strengthen the State by introducing Persian administrative methods into the Calipha! secretariat.
Had the house of Umayyad remained united and resolute in face of these mounting troubles, they might have divided their enemies and kept their throne. But the reigning family was becoming riddled with feuds and jealousies, and the successors of Hisham came to blows over his inheritance. His son Mu’awiya, the ancestor of the Spanish Umayyads, was killed in the hunting-field in his father’s lifetime, and Hisham reluctantly recognized as his heir his nephew Walid, a son of Yazid II, a handsome and dissolute rake, whose blasphemies and drunken debaucheries are detailed by the chroniclers with shocked horror.
While Walid neglected his duties and amused himself in his desert retreats, a conspiracy was set on foot by Yazid, a son of Walid I, who received the backing of the Marwanid clan; Damascus was seized by a sudden coup, and the Caliph was slain near Palmyra (April 744), the first of his house since Usman (Rad.A) to meet a violent death. In the capital his rival was invested with the caliphal insignia of ring and staff as Yazid in, but he failed to win the acceptance of the Empire; Marwan, the governor of Armenia and a grandson of the first Caliph of that name, espoused the cause of the sons of the murdered Walid II, and set his army in motion for Syria. Before any fighting took place, Yazid in died suddenly in November

744 after a reign of only six months; his brother Ibrahim was proclaimed Caliph, but was recognized nowhere outside southern Syria; Marwan crossed the Euphrates and occupied Damascus, and on finding that Walid II’s children had been put to death, himself took possession of the throne.1

If the Umayyad regime could have been rescued by courage and energy, Marwan II would have been its saviour. An able soldier, he had distinguished himself in campaigns against the Byzantines and the Khazars, and he had improved the quality of the army b\ breaking up the old tribal frame work and forming regular regiments under the command of trained professional officers. But he came too late, for the troubles that followed the death of Hisham had irretrievably wrecked the unity of the Umayyad house. Marwan’s
M.A. Shaban, The Abbasid Revolution, P. 140.
The Abbasid Revolution title was irregular, his mother was a Kurdish slave; the family of Hisham treated him as a usurper; he had the support of the Kais and therefore, the enmity of the Kalb, and his impolitic move in transferring the government 10 Harran, the ancient Carrhae in northern Mesopotamia, was bitterly resented in Damascus, which was thus robbed of its status as the seat of empire. He was forced from the beginning to fight for his throne. A son of Hisham’s Sulayman, rebelled against him; the Kharijites rose in Mosul under one Dahhak, while a Shi’ite in Kufa led by Abdullah b Mu’awiya, a great disturbance were put down, and by 747 Marwan could congratulate himself on the apparent restoration of peace and order. At this point, however, a new peril arose in an unexpected quarter, not in anti-Umayyad Iraq, but in the distant and hitherto loyal province of Khurasan.
A new element had entered into the situation: the Persians were reassuming a decisive role in the politics of Western Asia. By the mid-eighth century no Persian alive could recall the days of Sassanid rule: any political restoration could obviously take place only within the framework of Islam. Of the process and speed of Islamization we are ill- informed. Despite the fact that the Holy Prophet almost certainly contemplated toleration only for Jews and Christians, the Arabs had been forced to recognize the Persian Zoroastrians as ’People of the Book’, liable to tribute but no extermination. The Magian faith survived, though deprived of the support of the State: as late as the tenth century there were still firetemples in every big Persian city, and in the hill country of Tabaristan and Dailam, Islam did not gain an entrance till the age of the Buyids. But over the greater part of Persia conversions to Islam may have begun soon after the conquest, when the coercive power of the Magian priesthood was destroyed; exemption from the payment of the tribute was doubtless a strong inducement, and if Hisham decreed the fiscal equality of Arab and non-Arab Muslims, as is likely, the trend must have been greatly hastened. In some regions like Khurasan the new religion was embraced by large numbers of dihkans, hereditary small proprietors who under both the Sassanids and Caliphs acted as tax-collectors for the central government, and whose conversion was often followed by that of the villages in which they resided. These Mawali were frequently exposed to the scorn of race conscious Arabs, Bedouin tribesmen from Kufa and Basra, who garrisoned the towns and forts along the eastern border. Yet some Arabs married Persian wives and adopted Persian customs such as

502 Political and Cultural History of Islam

the wearing of trousers and observance of the old Iranian ”New Year” festival, and the children of these unions tended to be Persian rather than Arab in spirit and education. This situation was turned to the advantage of a new enemy of the reigning dynasty, descendants ’of the Holy Prophet’s uncle Abbas, whence they obtain the name Abbasids. According to tradition, Abu Hashim, the son of the and claimant Muhammad b.al-Hanafiya (Ali’s descendant through the Hanafite wife) was poisoned by the Caliph Sulayman, but before he died in Palestine in 716 he bequeathed his claims to Muhammad b. Ali, a great grandson of Abbas, in whose dwelling he had found shelter. The Abbasid party thereby took over the organization of one of the principal and sects, and from its headquarters in Kufa it started a viogorus propaganda campaign in Khurassan.
Though its earliest missionary Khidash was caught and executed in 736, his work was continued more circumspectly by Sulayman b. Kathir, who on the death of Muhammad b. Ali in 743 espoused the cause of his son Ibrahim. The latter, anxious to turn to account the troubles which followed the death of Hisham, entrusted the management of his affairs to Abu Muslim, a Persian slave of obscure origin, who was recommended to him as a man of extraordinary capacity. A leader of genius who changed the history of the East, Abu Muslim (his Arabic name was a privilege sometimes granted to non-Arab Mawali) combined the hard and somber ruthlessness of the fanatic with the skill and adroitness of the politician; he succeeded in being all things to all men, and he inspired in his followers a passionate attachment.
The disaffected Mawali were eager to enlist under the standard of one of their own race, but though the Persians were his chief hope, his designs could be accomplished only by splitting the Arab colonists and fomenting the endemic quarrel between the Kais and the Kalb. As soon as he had won over the bulk of the Kalb, he struck the blow he had long been maturing. In June 747 two black flags, emblerrs it seems of messianic significance, sent by the Imam Ibrahim were unfurled at a village near Merv, in the presence of two thousand armed rebels, and the Friday service the name of the Abbasid chief was publicly inserted in place of the reigning Caliph.
The Umayyad Government was slow to grasp the gravity of this event. The suppression of the Kharijite and Shi’ite revolts had given it a false sense of security, nor did it realize that this had simply removed two dangerous rivals from the path of Abbasids.