Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/599

Rh OMAYYADS.] MOHAMMEDANISM 571 the Ka ba, passed the night there in prayer. At daybreak of the 14th of Jomadf I. in the year 73 (1st October 692), the Omayyad troops made their way into the mosque. Abdallah attacked them furiously, notwithstanding his advanced age, but at last fell, overwhelmed by numbers. His head was cut off, carried to Hajjaj, and sent by the victorious general to Damascus. 1 With Ibn Zobair perished the influence which the early companions of Mohammed had hitherto exercised over Islam. Medina and Mecca, though they continued to be the Holy Cities, had no longer the political importance which had enabled them to maintain a struggle with Damascus. Temporal interests, represented by Damascus, will hence forth have precedence over those of religion ; policy will outweigh fanaticism ; 2 and the centre of Islam, now per manently removed beyond the limits of Arabia, will be more easily affected by foreign influences, and assimilate more readily their civilizing elements. Damascus, Cufa, and Basra will attract the flower of all the Moslem provinces ; and thus that great intellectual, literary, and scientific movement which is to reach its apogee under the Abbasid Caliphs at Baghdad, will become daily more marked. By the death of the son of Zobair, Abd al-Melik remained sole Caliph ; for Mohammed b. Hanafiya reckoned for nothing since the death of Mokhtar, whose creature he had been. The only remaining danger was from the Kharijites, who, though incessantly repulsed, as incessantly returned to the charge. Hajjaj had remained after his victory at Mecca, where he was occupied in rebuilding the Ka ba, ruined for the second time by his engines of war. In the year 75, Abd al-Melik, alarmed at the news which reached him from Persia and Irak, named Hajjaj governor of that province, and gave him the most extensive powers for the re-establishment of order. The troops of Irak, who accompanied Mohallab in an expedition against the Kharijites, had abandoned their general and dispersed to their homes, and nothing could induce them to return to their duty. Hajjaj, arriving unexpectedly at Cufa, ascended the pulpit at the moment when the people were assembled for morning prayers, and delivered an energetic address to them, which depicts his character so well, that some passages from it may be cited : &quot;Men of Cufa, I see before me heads ripe for the harvest, and the reaper I am he ! I seem to myself already to see blood between turbans and shoulders. I am not one of those who can be frightened by an inflated bag of skin, nor need any one think to squeeze me like dried figs. I have been chosen on good grounds ; and it is because I have been seen at work that I have been picked out from among others. The Prince of the Believers has spread before him the arrows of his quiver, and has tried every one of them by biting its wood. It is my wood that he has found the hardest and the bitterest, and I am the arrow which he shoots against you.&quot; Thereupon Hajjaj ordered that every man capable of bearing arms should immediately join Mohallab in Susiana, and swore that all who made any delay should have their heads struck off. This threat produced its effect, and Hajjaj proceeded to Basra, where his presence was followed by the same result. Mohallab, reinforced by the army of IrAk, at last succeeded, after a struggle of eighteen months, in subjugating the Kharijites, and was able, at the beginning of A.H. 78, to return to Hajjaj at Basra. The latter loaded him with honours and made him Deatli Of 11)11 Zobair. Abd al- Melik sole Caliph. Hajjaj in Irak. 1 On these events, see Quatremere, Memoire historique sur la vie &amp;lt;T Aid-Allah b. Zolmlr. Paris, 1832. 2 It is said that the Caliph Abd al-Melik affected great piety before his elevation. At the moment when he was first saluted with the title of Caliph, he closed a copy of the Koran which was in his hands, say ing : &quot; We must now part.&quot;