Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/79

 suffered the complete secularising of the Islamic state. When, in 35 A.H., he fell a victim to the assassin, he was succeeded by 'Ali, one of the older Muslims and the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law. But at 'Ali's accession the internal division appears as an accomplished fact. The purely secular Arabs, led by the 'Umayyad Mu'awiya, who was governor of Syria, entirely refused to recognise 'Ali, affecting to regard him as implicated in the murder of 'Uthman, or at least as protecting his murderers. On the other hand, the Kharijite sect, claiming to represent the older Muslim type, but in reality mainly composed of the Arabs of Arabia and of the military colonies, who were envious of the power and wealth of the Umayyad faction, at first supported him, then turned against him, and in 41 were responsible for his assassination.

At 'Ali's death Mu'awiya became Khalif and founded the Umayyad dynasty which ruled from 41 to 132 A.H. During the whole of this period the official Khalifate was Arab first and Muslim only in the second place. This forms the second period of the history of Islam when the religion of the Prophet was allowed to sink into the background and the Arab regarded himself as the conqueror ruling over a subject population. There was no forcible conversion of a subject population, indeed, save in the reign of 'Umar II (A.H. 99–101) conversions were rather discouraged as detrimental to the poll tax levied on non-Muslims. There was no attempt to force the Arabic language: until the reign of 'Abdu l-Mâlik