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The Muslims of Khurasan
Although we do not have as much information as we should like
about the situation in Khurasan, it seems clear that the reasons why a
successful revolt against the Umayyads could begin there were that
there was a large Muslim civilian population with grievances against
the government, and that the Hashimiyya was first able to win
support among these civilians and then to take advantage of the
renewed factionalism in the army there following the third civil war.
Distance from Syria and the problems of Marwan II in Iraq meant
that, even if the caliph had been aware of the dangers, he would have
been able to do little about them.
Nasr b. Sayyar had been made governor of the province by
Hisham in 738, and, in spite of some difficulties, he had been able to
maintain his position during the vicissitudes of the third civil war
and was confirmed in office by Marwan II. This frontier district of
the caliphate maintained an army drawn mainly from the local
fighting men
(muqatila)
enrolled in the
diwan
and paid by the
government, but including also from time to time troops from Syria.
There was too, however, a significant non-military Arab population,
earning a living in trade and agriculture, and more assimilated with
the local non-Arab population than were the soldiers. Given the size
of the province, the Arab layer of the population was spread
relatively thinly, particularly outside the garrison towns, and this
largely accounts for the lack of barriers between the civilian Arab
settlers and the local Iranians. On the one side, significant numbers
of the local population had accepted Islam, probably more than in
the western regions of Iran, becoming
mawali
and taking Arab
names indicating their tribal attachments. On the other, the Arabs
intermarried with the locals, adopted their forms of dress, observed
their festivals and probably used the local Persian dialect in
everyday speech. As time went on, therefore, it became increasingly
difficult to distinguish between the descendants of the Arab settlers
and those of the
mawali,
and, although awareness of tribal origins
and loyalties persisted, changed social conditions brought about a
weakening of the tribal way of life and a consequent widening gap
between the local mixed population and the
muqatila
bearing the
same tribal names. The factionalism which split the Khurasani
muqatila
as it did elsewhere seems to have left the civilian
population relatively unaffected.
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106
The Overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate
Apart from the opposition of the Yemeni faction in the army
towards the governor, there seem to have been a number of reasons
for the development in Khurasan of opposition to the Umayyads.
The province had been conquered and settled from Iraq, and there
are some indications that the Iraqi opposition to Umayyad Syrian
domination had been carried over to the frontier province. Shi‘ism
seems to have been strong there independently of the rise of the
Hashimiyya, and this too might be explained as part of the Iraqi
legacy—although not so important as Basra, Kufa had supplied
some of the Arab colonisers in the province. Following the futile
revolt of ‘Ali’s great-grandson Zayd b. ‘Ali in Kufa in 740, his son
Yahya fled to Khurasan in the expectation of finding support there,
and a few years later he was followed by his relative ‘Abd Allah b.
Mu‘awiya after his defeat at the hands of the forces of Marwan II.
The close association of Arabs and non-Arabs in the civilian
population seems to have inclined many of the Arabs to support the
claims of the
mawali
and a universalist view of Islam, and to have
increased the opposition to what were seen as the dynastic and
unislamic policies of the Umayyads.
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The main grievance of the civilian Muslim population, however,
probably resulted from the fact that they were subject to the
authority of non-Muslim officials, and, particularly in the matter of
taxation, felt themselves to be discriminated against to the
advantage of non-Muslims. At the time of the province’s conquest,
the Arabs had made agreements with the local non-Muslim notables
on a piecemeal basis enabling the latter to collect the taxes
themselves so long as they handed over to the Arabs a regular fixed
tribute. Under such a system it was natural that the non-Muslim
notables would favour their own class or religious community, and it
appears that this system continued almost to the end of the Umayyad
period. The difficulties caused for the Umayyads in Transoxania
have already been noted, and it seems that the situation was similar
in Khurasan for it is against this background that the celebrated tax
reform introduced by Nasr b. Sayyar is to be explained. The spread
of Islam in Khurasan had made the old system obsolete, and, finding
that many Muslims were paying taxes while a smaller number of
non-Muslims were avoiding them, Nasr introduced into the province
the system which was becoming established as the basis of Islamic
taxation theory: all cultivators of taxable land, whether Muslim or
non-Muslim, would pay the requisite land tax, while non-Muslims
would additionally pay a poll tax from which Muslims would be
The Overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate
107
free. This reform was made by Nasr at the beginning of his period of
office in 738, although we have no idea how effective it was or how
long it took to be enforced. At any rate, it is likely that the measure
came too late to defuse anti-Umayyad feeling in the province, and
the question of taxation in any case has to be seen in the wider
context of the development of Muslim opposition to Umayyad rule.
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