A prospect fit to give the Umayyads apoplexy, of course. It was bad enough that jumped-up pen-pushers—Turks, and Persians, and who knew what—should presume to dispute with the Khalifat Allah his right to determine the law of Islam; but it was beyond insufferable to have them prescribe for him the correct way to “fight in the way of God.”79 No dynasty in history had presided over a more staggering array of conquests than the Umayyads. It was under their rule that the faithful had witnessed the fall of Carthage and Merv, the conquest of Spain and Transoxiana, the reaching of the Loire and the Hindu Kush. Clearly, then, the approval of God for their rule was something beyond dispute. And yet, like rodents burrowing and gnawing their way beneath some particularly glorious citadel, the ulama did dispute it. In their portrayal of Muhammad as the archetype of what they themselves felt a warrior of Islam should be, there was a peculiarly insidious threat to Umayyad authority. Any failure on the part of a Caliph to measure up to it could immediately be cast by them as a sinister deviation from true Islam—as defined, of course, by themselves. Even the proud assertion first made by Abd al-Malik—that to rule the Muslim people was to serve as the “Deputy of God”—might be turned against his dynasty. The earliest Commanders of the Faithful, so the ulama began to point out, had never thought to arrogate to themselves such a haughty title. Any notion of posing as God’s deputy, to a man as austere and devout as Umar, would surely have been beyond the pale. Accordingly, in the version of history written by the ulama, he came to be endowed with a far more modest title: not “Deputy of God” but “Deputy of the Prophet of God.” The Umayyads, when set against such a paragon, could hardly help but appear a gang of impious upstarts: arrogant gate-crashers squatting in the House of Islam.
Propaganda both brilliant and black. Indeed, such a travesty was it of all the many achievements wrought by the dynasty of Abd al-Malik on behalf of the Muslim people that the Umayyads, under more favourable circumstances, might well have laughed it to scorn. Circumstances, however, during the lengthy reign of the last of Abd al-Malik’s sons to ascend the caliphal throne—a squinting skinflint by the name of Hisham—were anything but favourable. Able and innovative a statesman though Hisham was, and especially when screwing his subjects out of their money, the seeming brilliance of his administration was in truth possessed of a mere surface glitter. His own personal lack of courage, which saw him palpitate violently whenever he received news of some reverse, did not prevent him from being guided by one fundamental conviction: that it was the prime and proper responsibility of a Caliph to secure the expansion of the House of Islam. Neither defeats at the hands of the Franks and the Romans nor a widespread revolt in North Africa in 739 could persuade him to reconsider this core presumption. As a result, by the time of his death in 743, his coffers were seriously depleted, and the Syrian army, which had served as the cutting edge of Umayyad power ever since the time of Mu’awiya, had been perilously blunted. Worn down by endless campaigning, the professionals who constituted its units were now scattered far and wide—from the Pyrenees to the Indus. In Syria itself, almost none remained.
And this, for Hisham’s successors, was to spell mortal danger. Even prior to his death, unrest was spreading fast. In Syria, it took the form of increasingly tribal-based factionalism; but in Iraq, it had an even more ominous source. Ghosts still unexorcised despite almost a century of Umayyad rule were re-emerging from the often blood-boltered mists of the past. In 740, the Shi’a demonstrated that they had lost none of their appetite for doomed uprisings when some two hundred Kufans, rallying in support of one of Ali’s great-grandsons and confident that they still enjoyed the favour of God, hurled themselves against an Umayyad attack squad ten times their size. The rebels were duly wiped out beneath a hail of arrows, and the headless trunk of Ali’s heir was nailed to a cross. At the same time, less flamboyantly but more effectively, agents for another family with a claim on the name of the Prophet were also at work, damning the Umayyads as false Muslims and usurpers. Despite their seeming obscurity, the Abbasids—a Qurayshi dynasty based in a remote farmstead in Nabataea—could lay claim to a truly priceless ancestor: none other than Abbas, the uncle of Muhammad. In the years that followed Hisham’s death, this was enough to pique the interest of a growing number of Muslims—and not only among those inveterate malcontents, the ulama. With the times seemingly fractured, speculation over the possible cause of God’s anger was rife. The answers given were rarely favourable to the ancien régime. Consequently, as Abbasid propagandists murmured their honeyed promises of a new dawn, the faithful began to listen to such whisperings with ever more attention. Perhaps, at such an excruciating moment of crisis, the appearance on the political scene of such living links with the Prophet might indeed be a part of God’s plan?
Umayyad loyalists were hardly alone in snorting at this notion. It was almost inevitable, with factionalism rife across the Caliphate, that Islam’s most fanatical insurgents would seize the opportunity to launch an uprising of their own; and sure enough, in 745, it was the turn of the Kharijites to raise the banner of revolt. Rather than martyr themselves needlessly—as the Shi’a had such a taste for doing—they brought to the business of revolution their customary attributes of ruthless efficiency and savagery. A few weeks after proclaiming their own Caliph, they had already gnawed off a major chunk of Iraq. Yet in truth, the Kharijites would never have had the opportunity to establish this breakaway state had it not been provided them by the most lethal of all the various outbreaks of fitna: a faction fight among the Umayyads themselves. In 744, Hisham’s heir, a dashing poseur by the name of Walid, had been assassinated in one of his desert pleasure palaces—a murder that had served to unleash an unparalleled bout of blood-letting among his relatives. The man who eventually emerged victorious from this carnivorous feuding was a grizzled but curly-headed warlord ostensibly well suited to power: a nephew of Abd al-Malik’s named Marwan. By 747, he had decisively trampled down his Umayyad and Kharijite rivals, and amply demonstrated both the kick and the stubbornness of the beast to which he was most often compared: a mule. Yet his triumph had come at a terrible cost. Iraq and Syria both lay in ruins, and Marwan was so despised in Damascus that he decamped from Syria altogether and established his court in Harran. An astounding development, to be sure: even with the Caliphate in a state of near collapse, a city still “ulcerous with idolatry”80 had come to be established as the capital of the Deputy of God.
Many Muslims would doubtless have been shocked to learn that the moon continued to be worshipped anywhere in the House of Islam. The cult of Sin might almost have been designed to provoke their horror. Yet the pagans of Harran—who had suffered brutal persecution in the final years of Roman rule—had found their new masters, if not exactly more tolerant, then more laissez-faire, at least. Christians would snidely attribute this to the gullibility of the Muslim authorities, who were supposed to have been tricked into accepting that the moon worshippers were in fact the enigmatic “Sabaeans” mentioned in the Qur’an—and therefore, according to the Prophet, one of the three “Peoples of the Book.”81 Whatever the truth of such a tall-sounding story, Harranians were certainly still studying the future by sacrificing animals and then “examining their livers,”82 directly under Marwan’s nose. The persistence of such ancient practices within a capital of the Caliphate serves as a vivid reminder that Muslims were not alone, amid the evils of the age, in attempting to fathom the purposes of the heavens. In 745, for instance, during Marwan’s devastating campaign in Syria, a stylite had presumed to warn the passing warlord that he would be dealt with by God even as he had dealt with his subjects. “When Marwan heard this, he commanded that the pillar should be overthrown; and he brought down the old man, and burned him alive in the fire.”83 Caliphs, of course, might treat Christian saints with a brutality and dismissiveness that would have appalled a Caesar—and yet even as Marwan hunkered down in Harran, he neglected the sensibilities of his non-Muslim subjects at his peril. Floodtides were swirling around him older by far than Islam. These were rising, however, not in the traditional heartlands of the Caliphate, in Syria or Iraq, but far to the east: in Khorasan.