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

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Nasr b. Sayyar, the veteran governor of Khurasan, saw the danger, but he misinterpreted the affair as an anti-Arab rising, and sent alarming reports to Harran warning Marwan that a general massacre of Arabs in the province was intended. This was not so: Abu Muslim’s movement was directed, not against the Arabs as such, but against Arab political and social domination as represented by the Umayyad officials and ruling class, and his army was commanded by Kabtaba b. Shabib, an Arab of the Tayyi tribe. Unable to conciliate the Kalb, who either went over to the enemy or stood sullenly aside, Nasr was driven out of Merv and fled westwards, while Kahtaba made a brilliant and rapid march across Persia from Khurasan to Iraq. Here the Umayyad governor was shut up in Wasit, and though Basra was held for the government, Kufa opened its gates without resistance, and in its mosque, in November 749, Abu’l- Abbas, the brother of Ibrahim (who had died in an Umayyad prison), was enthroned as Commander of the Faithful. Thus the political centre of Islam swung back from Syria to Iraq, and the new dynasty arose in the city where Ali (Rad.A) had ruled and died nearly a century before.
The last hope of the falling regime reposed on the Syrian army, now a small and demoralized force. To late, Marwan led these troops across the Tigris, and in January 750 they encountered the victorious Khurasanians on the banks of the Great Zab. The iast Umayyad field army was routed; Marwan retreated on Harran, but the pursuers were at his heels, in the cities of Syria, once so loyal to his house, not a hand was raised in his support, and he fled through Palestine into Egypt, where at Busir he was overtaken and killed by a Kalbite Arab who gave orders to his men in Persian. His head was cut off, and dispatched with the caliphal staff and ring to Abu’! Abbas, who ascended the throne in an atmosphere of cowardice, treachery and bloody terror almost unsurpassed even in the history of Asia.
The towns and fortresses of Syria, including Damascus, surrendered with scarcely a struggle; Wasit, protected by the Tigris marshes, held out until the news of Marwan’s death and then capitulated on terms which were promptly and brutally violated; the graves of the Umayyad Caliphs, with the single exception of that of the pious Umar, were broken open and the corpses torn out and burnt, and the new Caliph’s uncle Abdullah b. Ali perpetrated a deed of outstanding infamy. Trusting to his solemn promises, eighty

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princes of the fallen house accepted his invitation to a banquet at a given signal a band of executioners entered the room and clubbed them all to death; leather covers were spread over the bodies, and the host and his friends feasted upon them to the sound of their victims’ dying groans. From this savage holocaust, which may be compared with the extermination by Jehu of the line of Omri, few escaped save Abdur Rahman, the young grandson of the Caliph Hisham, who after being hunted through the deserts of Egypt and Barbary, found refuge in Spain, where the writ of the Abbasids did not yet run and where he became the father of a new dynasty of Umayyads, who reigned in the peninsula for upwards of three hundred years.
The Abbasid Revolution, like the displacement of the Merovingians in Gaul by the Carolinians about the same time, was something more than a change of dynasty. The Abbasids themselves proclaimed that they had brought to Islam and dawa, a turn or change, a new order their government, they averred, would, unlike that of their godless predecessors, be based on the true principles of Muslim piety religion not race was to be the foundation of the State, and the Caliphs henceforth styled themselves shadows of God on earth and added to their personal names titles expressive moral or religious qualities such as ’al-Mahdi’, the guided one, and ’alRashid’, the orthodox. The revolution preserved the Caliphate as an institution, but altered its character and spirit. The removal of the seat of government from Syria to Iraq accentuated the tend towards monarchical despotism which was already noticeable under the Umayyads. The political tradition of Persia had long been exerting an influence on Arab governmental practice.
Under Hisham the secretariat became increasingly Persianized, and Marwan had foreshadowed the downgrading of Syria by moving the capital to Harran. With the coming of the Abbasids, Persians streamed into the public services; a new office, that Wa/ir or vizier, was created whose holder exercised the authority of a Vice Caliph, the sovereign himself retreating, like the old Sassanid Shahs, into the depths of his palace, hidden from his people behind a crowd of officials, ministers and eunuchs, and when al- Mansur, the second Abbasid, resolved to build himself a new capital, he selected a site near the ruins of ancient Ctesiphon which bore the old Persian name of Baghdad, signifying probably ’gift of God’. If some trace of Arab tribal democracy survived among the Umayyads, it was totally eliminated under the Abbasids, who
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seemed to have inherited the sacred absolutism of the kings of Nineveh, Babylon and Persia. The executioner with his leather carpet stood beside the throne as the symbol of his royal master’s power of life and death over his subjects, whose rights were unprotected by any law or senate or constitution.2
Yet it would be highly misleading to interpret the revolution of 750, as some have done, as simple triumph of Persian over Arab. The supremacy of the Arab race in the East was indeed destroyed; the Mawali were raised to a status of equality with the Arab Muslims the army ceased to be dominated by Bedouin tribesmen and became largely Persianized for founding of Baghdad reduced the power and influence of the camp-cities of Kufa and Basra, and the Bedouin warriors who had conquered half the civilized world tended to withdraw back into the Arabian deserts from which their fathers had emerged more than a century before. Yet in the powerful sphere of religion, the Arab maintained his primacy: his was the nation to whom Allah had first vouchsafed his revelation, his was the tongue in which Gabriel had delivered the divine oracles to the Holy Prophet, nor could Arabic, the holy language of the Quran, ever be displaced by the profane idioms of the convert peoples.
Whatever success the Persians could claim had been won within the framework of Islam; a national Iranian revival implied no return to Magianis; the mosque had supplanted the fire-temple; Abu Muslim and his henchmen professed the fevour of pious Muslims eager to restore the purity of the faith, and for three centuries the scholars of Persia, who founded the literature and science of Islam, published their works in Arabic, as though their native speech were unworthy of the study and attention of the true believer. Moreover, the dynasty was still Arab, the Abbasids being as proud as the Umayyads of their membership of the Quraysh they were unable to appeal to Persian race-feeling, and unlike the Sassanids, they could not rely on the loyalty of a native priesthood and feudal class. The Abbasids were driven to seek a delicate balance between Arab and Persian, which was difficult to attain; the pride and superiority felt by Muslims of Arab descent provoked, in early Abbasid times, the movement known as the Shbiyya, peoples and disharmony may be accounted one of the principal causes of the disintegration of the
’ Saunders. History of Medieval Islam, P

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Caliphate which followed swiftly on the over throw of the Umayyads.3