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.
4
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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