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360 compelled to undertake a campaign against the holy cities, which earned for him the hate of later generations. The matter was however not so bad as it has been represented, and was moreover a political necessity. His military commander broke up the resistance of the Medina party in the battle on the Ḥarra (26 Aug. 683), subsequently besieging the opposition Caliph in Mecca. Just at this time Yazīd died (11 Nov. 683), and now the succession became a difficult question. Ibn az-Zubair had the best chance of being universally recognised, as Yazīd's youthful son and successor, Mu'āwiya II, a man of no authority, died only a few months after his father. In Syria too large groups of the people, especially the members of the Ḳais race, sided with the Zubair party, whilst the Kalb race, who had been long resident in Syria, and with whom Mu'āwiya had become related by marriage, allied themselves unreservedly with the Umayyads. The Kalb knew only too well that the Umayyad rule meant the supremacy of Syria. And now the question arose, which branch of the family should rule. Practical necessities and traditional claims led to the Umayyad party finally selecting on the principle of seniority a man already known to us, Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam, to be Caliph. The decisive battle against the Zubair faction took place at Marj Rāhiṭ in the beginning of 684. The Umayyads were victorious, and Marwān was proclaimed Caliph in Syria.

The Umayyads had however to pay dearly for this victory, for it destroyed the fundamental principles of the Arabian Empire. Hate once generated at Marj Rāhiṭ, the blood-feud there arising was so bitter that even the ever-growing religious spirit of Islam was unable to make headway against it. The Arabs had previously been divided into numerous factions warring against each other, but now the battle of Marj Rāhiṭ created that ineradicable race hatred between the Ḳais and Kalb tribes, which spread to other older racial opponents. The Ḳais were distributed throughout the entire kingdom; the opposition towards them drove their opponents into the ranks of the Kalb. The political parties became genealogical branches according to the theory of the Arabs, which regarded all political relationship from an ethnical standpoint. And now for the first time, not in the remote past, arose that opposition between the Northern and Southern Arabians which permeated public life, and which only in part coincided with actual racial descent. Here it was the Ḳais, there the Kalb, and under these party cries the Arabs tore at each other henceforward throughout the whole empire, and this purely political and particularist tribal feud undermined the rule of the Arabs at least as much as their religious political opposition to the authority of the State, for it was just the authority of the State itself which was thereby ruined; the governors could no longer permanently hold aloof from the parties, and finally the Caliphs themselves were unable to do so. But for the time being the actual zenith of the dynasty followed these disorders.