Zubayrid Caliphate

The man who would not swear

Drafted from Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000)formation

Mu'awiya's arrangement for his son required oaths, and the oaths were taken almost everywhere. Two men in the Hijaz refused: Husayn ibn Ali, who set out for Kufa and was killed at Karbala in 680, and Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, who went to Mecca and stayed there.

His standing was as good as anyone's outside the Prophet's own line. His father was one of the earliest Companions; his mother was a daughter of Abu Bakr; he was born in Medina in the first years of the emigration and was said to be the first child born to the Emigrants there. What he objected to was specific and constitutional: not that the Umayyads ruled but that the office was being handed from father to son, when the precedent of the first four successions was that Quraysh consulted and chose.

He did not proclaim himself caliph for three years. He sat in the sanctuary, where killing him was politically expensive, and let the Umayyads decide how much they wanted him. In September 683 they decided, and the army sent to extract him besieged Mecca and wrecked the Ka'ba in the process. Then Yazid died, the siege was lifted, and the besieging general offered to take Ibn al-Zubayr back to Syria and have him acclaimed there. He refused that too.

Instead he took the title amir al-mu'minin at Mecca, and within months most of the Islamic world had acknowledged him: Egypt, Kufa and Basra, the Yemen, the Qaysi tribes of northern Syria, and eastward into Fars, Kerman and Khurasan, where coins were struck in his name. For a stretch of the mid-680s the Umayyad house held Damascus and its immediate hinterland and this man held the rest.

That is not a rebellion. It is the shorter-lived of two caliphates, and the next chapter is about why the language has never settled that way.

The caliph recognised everywhere else

Drafted from Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall (1927)expansion

Ibn al-Zubayr never left Mecca and never commanded an army in the field, and in 684 he was very close to being caliph of the entire Islamic world. The way that happened has nothing to do with conquest, which is why it is easy to miss.

Yazid died in 683 with the siege of Mecca still under way. His son Muawiya II reigned briefly and died, leaving no arrangement and a ruling family that could not agree which of its branches should succeed. In the gap, the provinces started choosing, and they mostly chose the man in the sanctuary.

Syria goes over

Iraq went first, and that was expected. What was not expected was Syria — the Umayyad home province, garrisoned by the tribes the dynasty had been paying for a generation.

Emesa declared for Ibn al-Zubayr under its governor Numan ibn Bashir. Palestine followed under Natil ibn Qays, who took the province over as soon as the Kalbite governor left it. Qinnasrin went the same way. In Damascus itself Dahhak ibn Qays, holding the capital, manoeuvred between the two sides for as long as he could and was finally forced to declare — for Ibn al-Zubayr. Even the Qaysi tribes of the north, whose quarrel with the Kalb was really about who was paid first, found their way to the Zubayrid side behind Zufar ibn al-Harith.

What was left to the Umayyads at that moment was one man's loyalty. Hassan ibn Malik ibn Bahdal, Yazid's maternal uncle and the head of the Kalb, stayed with his sister's descendants and moved from Palestine to the Jordan district to be nearer Damascus. That was the Umayyad party: a tribal bloc and a family that could not decide on a candidate.

What the argument sounded like

The best evidence for how far the recognition ran is an argument recorded between Dahhak and the Qaysites of his own camp, at the moment he was about to go over to a conference that would have elected an Umayyad instead.

They stopped him with one sentence. Wellhausen's rendering:

Thou hast summoned us to do homage to Ibn Zubair, the Khalifa recognised everywhere else, and wilt thou now follow this Kalbite to do homage to his nephew?

The caliph recognised everywhere else. Said in Damascus, by Syrians, about a man in Mecca, against the dynasty that had built the city into a capital. It worked; Dahhak turned round, declared openly, and pitched his camp at Marj Rahit.

A caliphate of oaths

This is what expansion looked like for this polity, and it explains both its size and its fragility.

Nothing had been taken. No Zubayrid army marched into Syria, and Ibn al-Zubayr never set foot in the province that had gone over to him. What spread was the oath — the bayah — passing from province to province as each set of local notables calculated which claimant was going to be able to pay them and punish them.

An empire assembled that way can be assembled the other way just as fast. The governors who declared for Mecca in 684 had nothing invested in Mecca beyond the judgement of the moment, and the judgement of the moment was about to be corrected in a field outside Damascus.

Governing from a sanctuary

Drafted from Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000)peak

For nine years the capital of most of the Islamic world was Mecca. Nobody, before or since, has governed an empire from there.

The choice was not administrative. Mecca is a valley town in the Hijaz with no agriculture worth the name, no river, no manufacture and no strategic position; it lives on the pilgrimage and on what the pilgrimage brings. Every other seat the caliphate ever had — Medina, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba — was chosen because it could feed an army and administer a revenue. This one was chosen because killing a man inside the sanctuary is a sacrilege, and because whoever holds it controls the hajj.

That second point is the one the sources dwell on and it is the machinery of the whole caliphate. The pilgrimage was the annual assembly of the community: the one occasion when men came from every province, heard whose name was invoked, and went home having seen who was in charge. Ibn al-Zubayr led it. His governor led it where he did not. The Umayyads, holding Syria, were for several years in the position of being unable to send their own pilgrims safely, which is a public statement about who the caliph was, made once a year, in front of everyone.

The corollary is what the Umayyads did about it. Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem during exactly these years — completed in 691, the year before Mecca fell — and hostile later sources say plainly that he intended it as an alternative object of pilgrimage while his rival held the real one. Modern scholarship mostly does not accept that reading, on the grounds that the sources saying it are Abbasid-era and hostile to the Umayyads, and that the building's own inscriptions are addressed to Christians rather than to pilgrims. The charge is not going to be settled. What is certain is that it was made, and that it was made about a building put up during a war over who held Mecca.

The other consequence of Mecca is the shape of the reign. A caliph in a sanctuary is hard to remove and hard to expand from. Ibn al-Zubayr's brother governed Iraq for him, his agents held Egypt and Khurasan, and he himself almost never left the Hijaz in nine years — which meant that when his provinces began to go, he had no army in the field and no way of getting one there.

Twenty days at Marj Rahit

Drafted from Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall (1927)contraction

The Zubayrid caliphate lost Syria in 684 in a battle its caliph did not attend, did not order and probably could not have prevented. He was in Mecca, eight hundred miles away.

How the Umayyads found a candidate

The Umayyad recovery began with a meeting at Jabiya, where the family and the tribes that still supported it had to settle who they were actually fighting for. They could not agree. The Sufyanids — Muawiya's line, which had held the caliphate throughout — were opposed by the rest of a very numerous clan, most of which backed its old chief Marwan ibn al-Hakam.

Ibn Bahdal, who was acting for Yazid's young sons and whose Kalbite bloc was the only real Umayyad asset, was eventually talked round. He declared for Marwan — on terms. Khalid ibn Yazid would follow Marwan, and then Amr ibn Said, whose family had claims of its own and had to be bought off.

A dynasty in the middle of losing a civil war stopped to negotiate a three-deep order of succession among its own branches. That it did so and still won says most of what needs saying about the opposition.

The field

Marwan marched on Marj Rahit outside Damascus with the Kalb of the Jordan district and the Sakasik, Sakun and Ghassan behind him. Dahhak was already camped there, reinforced by the Zubayrid governors of Emesa, Qinnasrin and Palestine.

While the two armies faced each other, a Ghassanid named Ibn Abi Nims took possession of the city of Damascus and supplied Marwan with money and weapons. The battle that followed lasted twenty days. At the end the Qays broke and fled with terrible loss.

Wellhausen records who died with a precision that says what the defeat cost: Dahhak fell, and with him eighty nobles who wore the robe of honour and drew a pension of two thousand dirhams. That is not a casualty list, it is a payroll — the eighty best-paid men of the Syrian establishment, killed in one place, on the losing side.

What it decided

Everything, and not in the way the fighting suggests.

Syria was recovered for the Umayyads in twenty days, and with Syria went the army that had made them and would now make Abd al-Malik. Ibn al-Zubayr was still recognised in Iraq, Arabia and Egypt, and would be for years; he lost none of that at Marj Rahit. What he lost was the possibility of ever taking the province that mattered, and with it the initiative.

The other legacy was longer. The battle set Qays against Kalb as a permanent enmity rather than a quarrel, with a blood debt attached that both sides recorded in verse and neither forgot. The Umayyad dynasty had to manage that feud in every province it held for the next sixty years, and it never fully managed it. Winning Syria back cost them the ability to govern it quietly.

The letters to Kufa

Drafted from Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall (1927)contraction

The caliphate was decided in Iraq, and the man who lost it there was not the caliph. Ibn al-Zubayr stayed in Mecca throughout. Iraq was held for him by his brother Mus'ab, and Iraq meant Kufa, and Kufa was for sale.

Abd al-Malik did not begin with an army. He began with correspondence. He wrote to the Kufan commanders in Mus'ab's camp, and to more than one of them he promised the district of Isfahan — a Kufan assignment, administered by Kufans — as the price of changing sides. Verses from the period survive expressing plain apprehension about the treachery of the men of Kufa, and every leader named as having been worked on is a Kufan.

The unopened letter

One man brought his letter to Mus'ab with the seal unbroken.

Ibrahim ibn al-Ashtar had won the battle on the Khazir; his father had been the formidable commander at Siffin. He handed the letter over and said what the handing-over implied, which was that all the other commanders had presumably received theirs too, and had kept them quiet. He advised Mus'ab to put the traitors to death.

Mus'ab could not bring himself to do it. He was warned and he left them in their posts.

The battle where nobody fought

The armies met at the monastery of the Catholicus, and what happened is intelligible without any knowledge of tactics, because there were almost none.

Ibrahim ibn al-Ashtar — the one loyal man, and by a distance the most distinguished — fell at the very start, and his death settled the day. The cavalry commander gave way. The rest of the chiefs simply refused to obey the general and did not bring their tribesmen into the fight at all.

Mus'ab was left standing almost alone on the field, which is the thing the battle is remembered for. He was thirty-six. His son, still a boy, was killed in front of him. Then, bleeding from many arrow wounds, he was cut down by a Kufan of the Thaqif with the shout that this was vengeance for Mukhtar — a man Mus'ab himself had defeated and killed four years earlier, with an army largely of these same Kufans.

Another Kufan took his head off.

What victory looked like

Abd al-Malik entered Kufa, received the homage of the tribes, and appointed his governors over the provinces that had just changed hands. He camped forty days at Nukhayla, on the exact spot where Mu'awiya had camped with the Syrian army after winning the first civil war.

Then, in the same month or the month after, he sent al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf south with two thousand Syrians, to Mecca.

The caliph in the sanctuary had lost the war before the siege of his capital began, and he had lost it to letters.

What the winners called it

Drafted from al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Volume XXI: The Victory of the Marwanids (1990)end

The end was quick once Syria was consolidated. Abd al-Malik dealt with the Qaysi opposition in the north, then took Iraq: Mus'ab ibn al-Zubayr, his brother's governor there, was defeated and killed at Maskin in 691. The following year al-Hajjaj brought an army to Mecca and besieged it for months — Tabari's own sources cannot agree whether it was seven or eight.

The thunderbolts of Tihamah

Stones went into the sanctuary from the Syrian trebuchets, and then, one morning, the sky did something the siege had not: a thunderbolt struck and killed twelve of al-Hajjaj's men. His Syrians, who took this as an omen and began to hold back, watched their commander pick up a trebuchet stone himself and load it. Men of Syria, do not consider this extraordinary. I am a native of Tihamah: these are the thunderbolts of Tihamah. Behold, victory has come! The next day lightning struck several of Ibn al-Zubayr's men instead, and al-Hajjaj had his answer ready: You are in a state of obedience; they are in a state of disobedience.

What his mother told him

Ibn al-Zubayr's men went out to the Syrians by the thousand, and among them, with a promise of safety, were two of his own sons. When he saw how far the defection had run, he went to his mother Asma, daughter of Abu Bakr, and asked her advice: he had almost nobody left to fight with, and the enemy would grant him anything he wanted of this world if he came out. She told him plainly. If you know you are right, persevere, for your companions have been killed while in the right... how long is your stay in this world? Death is better. He kissed her hand and put on his mail coat to say goodbye. She felt it through the embrace — she was blind, and had not seen it — and told him to take it off: this is not the action of someone who intends what you intend. He did.

The last morning

He led the dawn prayer, recited the whole of the Sura of the Pen, then told his men to uncover their faces so he could look at them once before the fighting. He went out reciting his own verse, that a free man bears his day with patience where others find fault in theirs, and fought until a brick struck him in the face. He kept fighting with the blood running into his beard. In the end it was not a soldier who finished him but a madwoman of the camp, who saw him fall and cried out Alas for the Commander of the Faithful! — pointing him out to men who had not been able to find him in the crowd. He was killed there, aged about seventy, on a Tuesday in 692; the sources cannot agree which one.

When word reached al-Hajjaj he prostrated himself, then went with the officer Tariq ibn Amr to stand over the body. Women have borne none manlier than he, Tariq said. Will you praise one who disobeyed the Commander of the Faithful? al-Hajjaj answered — and Tariq did not back down: he has freed us from blame; were it not for this, we would have no excuse. We have besieged him seven months. He had no fortress, no stronghold, and he held his own against us as an equal. Abd al-Malik, told of the exchange, said Tariq was right.

The historiographical point is the one worth carrying away. For nine years this caliphate was acknowledged by more of the Islamic world than the Umayyads were, struck coin in its own name from Egypt to Khurasan, and held the two holy cities. It is nonetheless called the second fitna, and its head is called a rebel or a counter-caliph, because the other side won and the account that reached us was written under the dynasty that beat him and then under the dynasty that beat them — the same filter that colours everything written about the Umayyads themselves, operating one stage earlier.

The judgement historians do make is narrower and more interesting than legitimacy. Ibn al-Zubayr sponsored no doctrine and no programme — unlike the Alids, and unlike the Kharijites who were fighting their own war at the same time — and Wellhausen's verdict that the struggle turned around him nominally while he took little part in it has stuck. A claim to the caliphate on procedural grounds, held by a man of impeccable standing who offered nothing else, turned out to be a thing many people would recognise and few would fight for.

The community restored

Drafted from al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Volume XXII: The Marwanid Restoration (1989)afterlife

What al-Hajjaj was given for taking Mecca was Iraq, and Iraq did not consider the war over. Within a few years he was fighting a Kharijite named Shabib ibn Yazid, who held out for the better part of two years with a following that never grew past a few hundred men — and who did something no rebel is supposed to be able to do to the governor who has just conquered a caliphate: he rode into al-Hajjaj's own capital, twice, and left again.

Ghazalah's vow

The second time, Shabib brought a woman named Ghazalah with him. She had sworn an oath that she would pray two prostrations in the great mosque of al-Kufah itself, reciting in them the second and third suras of the Qur'an — al-Baqarah and Al Imran, by a wide margin the two longest in the book, chosen so that there could be no doubt she had actually stood there and finished. She did it. Shabib had huts built for his men in the square outside while she prayed.

Al-Hajjaj stood in that same mosque afterward and told the men of Iraq, in front of everyone, that he had written to Damascus for Syrian reinforcements because their own commitment to the fight could not be trusted.

The young officer who answered back

One of the men who heard that speech pulled his chair out of the line and asked permission to reply. Al-Hajjaj gave it. The amir, by God, has neither feared God nor defended the Commander of the Faithful nor shown any commitment toward his subjects, the man said, and sat back down. Al-Hajjaj, furious, swung his legs off the bed where he had been resting and demanded to know who had spoken. The man repeated it to his face. Asked what he proposed instead, he said: that al-Hajjaj go out and fight Shabib himself.

The man was Qutaybah ibn Muslim — the same officer who would spend the next decade taking Bukhara, Khwarazm and Samarkand for this dynasty, on the far side of an empire nobody in that mosque could have pictured yet. He turned up the next morning in a yellow silk robe from Herat and a red turban, his sword slung so it looked tucked under his arm, and mounted a horse with a saddle so oversized that a witness said he looked like a pomegranate sitting in it. Al-Hajjaj, in armour on a mule, led the army out behind him. They held their ground the first day, gave battle the second, and by the third had routed Shabib's camp.

How Shabib actually died

Not in that battle, or the next one. Shabib survived for months afterward, withdrew as far as Kirman to recover his forces, and was finally cornered by a Syrian commander named Sufyan ibn al-Abrad at a pontoon bridge over the Dujayl. The two sides fought all day and into the dark, and when night finally separated them, Shabib's own men crossed the bridge ahead of him while he covered their retreat. As he started across last, his horse — mid-bridge, among the lashed-together boats — lunged to mount a mare standing in front of it, and put a hoof over the side of one of the boats. Shabib went into the river in his armour, saying as he fell, that God might determine a matter that was done. He came up once more, said a second line — that is the ordaining of the Almighty, the All-Knowing — and did not come up again. No Syrian blade ever touched him.

What the word covered

Jama'a — the community — is what contemporaries said had been restored when Mecca fell in 692, the same word used for the settlement after the first civil war: one caliph again, and the argument over. It covered a war against a few hundred Kharijites that ran on for years after that, fought by a governor who had to publicly shame his own garrison and be publicly corrected by a junior officer to keep his own men in the field. It covered a woman finishing a vow in the conqueror's own mosque while his soldiers watched. The caliphate that came out the other side of Ibn al-Zubayr's war did not arrive at peace. It arrived at twenty more years of exactly the kind of fighting the word was supposed to mean was finished.

The Ka'ba, twice

Drafted from Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000)aside?What aside means

The building at the centre of this polity was demolished and rebuilt twice in thirteen years, both times for political reasons, and the second rebuilding undid the first. It is as clear a demonstration as the period offers of what winning actually decides.

In 683 the Umayyad army besieging Mecca bombarded the city, and the Ka'ba caught fire and was badly damaged — the covering burned and the structure cracked. The siege lifted when Yazid died. Ibn al-Zubayr then pulled the remains down and rebuilt it, and he did not rebuild it as it had been. On the argument, attributed to a report from the Prophet's wife A'isha, that Quraysh had run short of funds when they last rebuilt it and had therefore left part of the original foundation outside the walls, he extended the building to enclose the semicircular area on its north-west side, and he put in two doors at ground level so that people could walk through.

Al-Hajjaj took Mecca in 692, killed him, and wrote to Abd al-Malik for instructions. The answer was to put it back. The extension was demolished, the enclosed ground was excluded again, one door was blocked and the other raised above the ground where it had been. The building has been in that shape since.

Two things are worth saying about it.

The first is what it demonstrates. Ibn al-Zubayr's rebuilding was an act of authority of the most fundamental kind available in that religion — deciding the form of the house — and it lasted nine years, exactly as long as his caliphate. The reversal was not vandalism and was not, on the Umayyad account, even a rejection: al-Hajjaj's stated reason was that the building should be as the Prophet had known it and that a rebel's alteration had no standing. A physical object was returned to its previous state because the political question above it had been settled, and it stayed that way.

The second is about the record. Almost everything here comes from Abbasid-era compilers with reasons to think poorly of both parties, and the A'isha report that justifies the extension is exactly the kind of tradition whose date is impossible to establish. The problem has a particular shape here: the building is standing and can be seen, and the argument each man made about it cannot be checked against anything else.