52
The Second Civil War
support too of the
ashraf
of Kufa. In this he had some success, but
the relationship between Mukhtar and the Arabs seems to have been
an uneasy one. Towards the end of the period of his dominance in
Kufa many of the
ashraf
rebelled against him, we are told because of
his too favourable attitude to the
mawali,
and after he had
suppressed
the revolt many of the
ashraf
fled to Basra which was
still in Zubayrid hands.
Secondly, Mukhtar’s movement is of religious interest, although
the significance of some of the information we have about this
aspect of it is unclear. Generally his movement is shown to have
been coloured by religious ideas and practices of non-Arab and non-
Islamic origin and dubious legitimacy. One of the most striking
instances is the practice ascribed to his followers of carrying a chair
which they called the chair of ‘Ali and which they took into battle
and walked around like the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant. It is in
connection with Mukhtar’s movement
too that the idea of the
mahdi,
the messianic figure who is expected at the end of time to restore the
world to a state of justice and righteousness, occurs apparently for
the first time. He is said to have proclaimed Ibn al-Hanafiyya as the
mahdi
while he himself was his
wazir,
or helper. The idea of the
mahdi
was to become characteristic of Islam, especially in its Shi‘ite
forms, but it is not attested before the time of Mukhtar. The
appearance of ideas like these in Mukhtar’s movement has
sometimes been connected with the importance of the
mawali
in his
following, the suggestion being that these non-Arabs brought with
them into Islam religious concepts derived
from their pre-Islamic
backgrounds, such as the idea of the messiah or that of the
transmigration of souls. These concepts would then have been
grafted on to what was an original pure Arab Islam. The difficulty, of
course, would lie in isolating the content of this alleged pure form of
Islam before it became ‘contaminated’ by foreign ‘borrowings’.
Thirdly, Mukhtar’s movement looks to the future. There seems to
be a thread running from Mukhtar to the movement which
eventually overthrew the Umayyads, that of the Hashimiyya. The
crushing of Mukhtar’s revolt did not, it seems, end support for Ibn
al-Hanafiyya
as the rightful imam, and when he too died some of his
followers transferred their hopes to his son Abu Hashim. This Abu
Hashim then, according to early ‘Abbasid tradition, transferred on
his deathbed his rights to the imamate to the ‘Abbasid family. Thus
the ‘Abbasids claimed to be the rightful leaders of the movement
which had originally supported Muhammad b. al-Hanafiyya, and
The Second Civil War
53
this seems to have been one of the ‘Abbasids’ main claims to
legitimacy in the early part of their caliphate. From one point of
view, therefore, the triumph of the Hashimiyya in 749 and 750 can
be seen as the ultimate victory of the movement which had begun
with Mukhtar’s revolt. It was only after the accession of the
‘Abbasids that the line of descent from ‘Ali and Fatima again
became the main focus of Shi‘ite hopes.
Eventually, in the spring of 687, Mukhtar’s
revolt was crushed by
the Zubayrid governor of Basra with the support of those Kufan
ashraf
who had fled from Mukhtar’s rule. Before that happened,
however, he, or rather his general, the Arab Ibrahim al-Ashtar,
whose father had been one of ‘Ali’s chief supporters, had achieved a
striking victory over the Umayyads. That was in the summer of 686
at the battle on the river Khazir near Mosul. The Umayyad army was
led by ‘Ubayd Allah b. Ziyad, who, after being driven out of Iraq in
the period following the death of Yazid, had made his way to Syria
and given his support to the Marwanids. ‘Abd
al-Malik now sent him
to restore Umayyad authority in Mesopotamia, but his defeat and
death at the hands of Mukhtar’s men meant that ‘Abd al-Malik had
to postpone his planned reconquest of Iraq for some years more. The
death of ‘Ubayd Allah in this battle at the hands of the supporters of
Mukhtar came to be portrayed as justice for his involvement in the
events of Karbala’. One of Mukhtar’s slogans had demanded
vengeance for Husayn and the battle on the Khazir was seen as
obtaining it. Some sources go so far as to say that ‘Ubayd Allah, like
Husayn, was killed on the 10 Muharram, but a different day of the
month seems more likely.
10
In addition to the attempts by Zubayrids and Shi‘ites to overthrow
the
established order, the final theme of the second civil war is the
development of polarised factionalism among the Arab tribesmen.
For the first time we hear of the appearance among the Arab tribes of
two extensive and mutually hostile alliances, based generally on the
‘northern’ and ‘southern’ genealogical groupings. This occurs at
almost the same time in Syria and in Basra, and the immediate cause
in each case was the crisis in Umayyad authority which encouraged
discontented elements to look for better fortunes under non-
Umayyad leaders.
In Syria, the factionalism developed around,
on the one side, the
Quda‘a, led by the tribe of Kalb, and on the other the confederation
of Qays. Quda‘a were strong in the central and southern regions of
Syria, while Qays predominated in the north and in Mesopotamia.
