CIVIL WARS AMONG THE MOSLEMS
This career of conquest was interrupted by the great civil wars. The Arabs knew of nothing between entire liberty and absolute monarchy. The latter was the form which the caliphate first took, but it was universally assumed that the ruler was bound to abide strictly by the laws of religion. When Othman, grown old and feeble, was led by excessive nepotism and other causes into a breach of the latter, the result was a rebellion, in which he ultimately perished (656). The murder was followed by years of civil broils, and some decades later the whole thing was enacted afresh. The war was waged under religious pretexts, and to some extent from religious motives; but it was in the main a struggle for sovereignty between various members of the Koreish. Tribal animosities old and new were brought into play, and induced the tribes to throw in their lot with one or other of the leading parties. The outcome of the two great civil wars was that in each case the ablest man placed himself at the head of the empire; the first to do so, after the murder of Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, being the Omayyad Moawiya, son of Abu Sufyan, the leader of the heathen of Mecca against Mohammed. In his reign Damascus, where he had lived as governor for many years before, became the capital in place of Medina. The victor in the second instance was Abd al-Melik, of another branch of the Omayyad family. They were both men of great capacity but essentially worldly-minded. One of the prophet’s grandsons, a son of Ali, had made his peace, while another, Husain by name, fell in a foolish attempt at rebellion (680); though he was thenceforth regarded as a martyr, and much blood was shed to avenge his death on the rulers de facto. The pious stood aloof, sorrowful or indignant, but the sovereignty remained in the hands of the Omayyads. To Europe these civil wars were nothing short of salvation. Had they not checked the career of Arab conquest, Islam might even then have subjugated Asia Minor, the Balkan peninsula, and the whole of Spain, and spread beyond it to Gaul and remoter lands.
The Arabs of that period knew how to conquer and to hold fast what they had won; for organisation they had less aptitude. Wherever they could they left administration, and taxation more especially, as they found it. At first the register of taxes was kept in Greek in the former dominions of Rome, and in Persian in those of Persia; and not until after more than half a century did the Arabic language become predominant in official book-keeping. The Omayyads had gained the mastery by the loyalty of the Arabs of Syria; they were tied to Syria, and the great tracts of territory to the east were hard to rule from thence. Moreover the Moslems of Babylonia, in many respects a more important province, were on the whole hostile to them. And, what was worse, the old lack of discipline among the Arabs had manifested itself strongly in a new form. Instead of small clans being at feud with one another, as had usually been the case in former days, they had ranged themselves in large and mutually hostile groups. One of these was composed of the Arabs of Yemen (real or reputed), two others of the tribes which claimed descent from Ishmael, the Mudhar and Rabia. If a caliph or a caliph’s vicegerent sided with the Yemen he had the Mudhar against him; if he favoured the Rabia the Mudhar were likewise hostile, etc. In the remoter provinces the hostile Arabs sometimes waged regular wars with one another on their own account. To add to this, there were risings of fanatics of various kinds. None but the ablest of the Omayyads (and on the whole they were an able dynasty) could maintain even tolerable order in the vast empire which extended its borders farther and farther when once the civil wars were over. The brief reign of a weakling or a libertine was enough to spoil everything. The purely Arab empire lacked the elements of stability.
Meanwhile, however, great masses of the conquered peoples had gone over to Islam. Temporal advantages on the one hand, and on the other the suitability of this coarse-grained religion to the Semites, and probably to the less educated Egyptians too, led steadily to the abandonment of a Christianity which in these parts was but little superior to Islam. But in Iran also the new religion soon made great advances on its own merits, though in some places (it must be admitted) very much at the expense of the purity of its pristine character. The national pride of the Arabs could not endure the practical application of the theoretical precept of Islam that all believers should be on an absolutely equal footing. The new converts remained Moslems of the second class, and, in certain districts at least, they felt the distinction bitterly. Even at the time of the second great civil war these so-called “clients” (mawali) had on one occasion played a prominent part, though only as the tools of an ambitious Arab.
The action of a “client” population of this sort was fraught with far greater consequences when another Koreishite family—the Abbasids, descendants of an uncle of Mohammed—rose up against the Omayyads. One of their great emissaries placed himself at the head of the Moslem natives of eastern Persia (Khorasan) and by the help of these Iranians the Abbasids secured the throne (750). The change must be regarded as in great measure a strong reaction of the Persian element against the Arab. The long succession of great oriental empires had been interrupted by an empire purely Arab, and the sequence was now renewed. The seat of government was once more transferred to Babylonia; Baghdad took the place of Babylon and Ctesiphon. The great offices of state were already largely filled by persons of other than Arab descent. The old Arab pride of birth was outraged by the fact that no weight was now attached to the consideration of whether the mother of the ruler had been a free woman or a slave, and that thus the Arab strain of the reigning dynasty became more and more interfused with foreign blood as time went on. A second Persian reaction is signalised by the victory won, after a protracted struggle, by the caliph Mamun, the son of a Persian woman, over his brother Amin, whose mother was of the stock of the Abbasids (813). Mamun’s troops were nearly all of them Persians. Their leader, the Persian Tahir, founded the first semi-independent sovereignty on Iranian soil. The forms of government remained Arab to a great extent, and Arabic likewise remained the official language, but genuine Arabdom receded more and more into the background. Above all, professional troops recruited from the peoples of the East, or even of the far West, had almost wholly superseded the Arab levies.
The process of Arabisation went on apace, in the north Semitic countries, Egypt, and even in great tracts of the “Occident” (Maghreb),[22] but this Arab-speaking population, with its profession of Islam and its preponderance of non-Arabic elements, differed widely in thought and feeling from the Arabs of pure blood, who from that time forward were represented (much as they were before the days of Islam) almost entirely by the Bedouins and dwellers in the oases of Arabia and a few places in Africa. The great historic rôle of the pure Arab was played out. But this neo-Arabic nationality gave more or less of the same character to all Islamite countries. This holds good in great measure of Iran and the countries that bordered on it to the northeast, south and southeast, in so far as they fell under the influence of the Arab religion.[23] Nevertheless the eastern provinces of the caliphate no more adopted the Arab tongue (which gained the mastery in the principal countries of the western half and even in a great part of the Maghreb) than the eastern half of the Roman Empire had adopted the Latin tongue at the time that the west was almost completely Romanised. The Arab tongue exercised a profound influence none the less upon the Persians and all such nations as drew their culture from Persia. It was not for nothing that even in the last-named country Arabic was long the language of government, religion, erudition, and poetry, and so remained to some extent even after the native language had reasserted itself. Persian (and Hindustani, Kurdish, etc., likewise) had borrowed largely from Arabic, especially in the department of abstract terms—a thing we should not have expected in view of the antiquity of Persian civilisation and the newness of that of Arabia. The influence of Arabic is apparent even in the remotest branches of modern Persian literature, just as all Teutonic languages bear traces of the profound influence of Latin, which formerly occupied a position in Europe analogous in many respects to that of Arabic in Islamite countries.