Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/279

Rh HISTORY.] A E A B I A 259 head of the family of Hnshem, from old time the hereditary enemies of the no less noble family of Abd-esh-Shems and Omeyyah, and consequently the legitimate claimant of sovereign power. His cause was upheld by the terrible Abu-Muslim, a gloomy but talented fanatic, native of Khorassan, who raised on Ibrahim s behalf the standard of revolt in Kerman. Soon Persia and its adjoining provinces, despairing of finding to themselves a worthy leader among the frivolous descendants of Ali, joined the kindred ranks of the children of Abbas. Ibrahim, indeed, perished ; but his younger brother, Abd Allah Abu-Abbas, more known in history as &quot; Es Saffah,&quot; or &quot;the Bloodshedder,&quot; took his place, and was proclaimed caliph everywhere to the west of the Euphrates. Syria, Arabia, and Egypt still held out for Menvan, the last of the Ommiade caliphs ; but the great military talents, stained by remorseless cruelty, of Abu-Muslim, turned the scale. The decisive battle was fought on the banks of the river Zab, near Irbeel (the Arbela of classic history), 749 A.D., and the whole of Syria, was soon after overrun by the black-turbaned armies of Persia. Merwan himself, after much unavailing display of personal courage, fled to Damascus, and thence to Egypt, where he was overtaken and killed by his pursuers, 750 A.D. ite of the Urged on by the pitiless Abu-Muslim, who shortly after himself neyyah fell a victim to the suspicions of his own equally cruel but more mil y. treacherous master, the victorious Saffah sought out everywhere the members, however remote, of the Omeyyah family, and put them to death under circumstances of the most infamous barbarity. The very tombs of the dead were broken open, and the bones of the great Muawwiyah aud his noble successors dispersed. One youth of the doomed house alone, Abd-er-Rahman by name, effected his escape to the still friendly provinces of Africa, and thence to Spain, where he founded the illustrious dynasty that reigned in Cordova over the Iberian peninsula for two centuries and a half, ecline of But with the fall of the Benoo-Omcyyah dynasty and the rabia. caliphate of Damascus fell the prosperity of Arabia herself, never again to rise. Arabs of the noblest, wealthiest, and most gifted stock, descendants of the princely Abd-Shems, the head of Koreysh in pre-Islamitic times, the Ommiade princes had established the centre of their government in a city intimately connected by land and by sea, by commerce and by nationality, with Arabia proper and the Hejaz, and in steady adherence alike to the feelings and policy of their race, they always regarded their native country as the choicest jewel in their own imperial crown. They were Arabs first and caliphs afterwards. Hence it was from Arabia that they drew almost exclusively the officials of their world-wide administra tion, both for peace and war ; the provincial governors, generals, collectors, judges, administrators of their nomination were all, or nearly all, of Arab blood ; and the improvement or enrichment of Arabia herself, the facilitation and extension of Arab trade and commerce, and the encouragement of Arab talent, literary and artistic, were the foremost of their cares. Meanwhile the peninsula, obedient indeed to the caliph as to its supreme head, but retaining in great measure the local institutions of its hereditary government by chiefs and in tribes, enjoyed a degree of general tranquillity, and even of comparative unity, that it had never realised before, nor has ever since. Even the hereditary rivalry between the northern or &quot; Mustareb &quot; Arabs, who about this time assumed the title, which they still bear, of &quot; Keysee,&quot; a title derived from the numerous and influential stock of &quot; Keys-Eylan, &quot; and thence communicated to the rest and the southern or &quot; Yemenee &quot; Arabs, a rivalry founded in diversity of race, fostered by long and bloody wars, and con tinued, though under certain modifications, to our own time, might, stnd often indeed did disquiet, but could not overthrow, the beneficial order of prevailing tranquillity, olicy of With the accession, however, of the Abbaside caliphs, 750 A.D., Abba- the good days, of Arabia came to an end. Though they also were, de like their Ommiade predecessors, Arabs by origin, and indeed of the ynasty. purest Arab blood, they owed their place on the throne, not to Arab partisans, but to the influence and the arms of the anti-Arab nnd eastern provinces, Persian, Tatar, and Turkoman, beyond the Tigris ; whilst the Arab half of the empire had almost unanimously declared for their supplanted rivals. Hence the Abbasido policy rested on a non-Arab base ; and its representatives, although de scendants of Koreysh and Hashim, systematically neglected or even depressed the Arab element of their rule, while they strengthened and elevated the Irano-Turanian or central Asiatic. Their throne, at first transferred from Damascus to Hashimeeyah, the newly- founded residence of Abd-Allah Es Saffah, on the Euphrates, was soon after removed further east to the banks of the Tigris. Here, close to the ruins of the old Persian capital of Madain, the second Abbaside caliph, Almansur, laid, 760 A.D., the foundations of that great city which, under the Persian name of Baghdad, still remains a monument of his personal energy and of the policy of his race. ecline of AVithin its walls, surrounded by Persian ministers or slaves, ic Abba- amongst whom the family of Barmek has attained a tragical cle celebrity, and by an armed body of Turkish or Turkoman guards, liphs. at first their servants, but before long their masters the descend ants of Abbas held for a century the substance, and for four centuries more the shadow of a sceptre. Some of their names, and that of Haroon-el-Rasheed, 70S to 809 A.D., in particular, are con nected with great events and famous memories, but the records of their reigns belong to Perso-Asiatic rather than to Arab history. Indeed, Irom the death of the eighth caliph of the race, El-Mosta- sim, 842 A.D., to the accession of the last of their dynasty, El- Mostasim, 1242 A.D., these princes were mere puppets in the hands of the Persian, Koord, Turkoman, or Turkish mercenaries, by whom they surrounded themselves as a protection against their own Arab subjects. Meanwhile province after province separated itself from their empire, and reasserted its own native character and in dependence, till in 1258 A.D. the pagan and Tatar chief Holagoo, grandson of Genghis-Khan, stormed Bagdad, and extinguished the decrepit dynasty of Abbas in the blood of the last caliph. Yet Arab genius, though deprived of political support, maintained by its philosophical and literary vigour through all those dreary cen turies, nor has even in our own time wholly lost, a certain intel lectual ascendancy in Baghdad and its vicinity. Meanwhile the Arabian peninsula itself, neglected or despoiled Kar- by the Abbaside caliphs, had sunk year by year more deeply into mathian clannish disorganisation, till the revolt of the Karmathians, about revolt, the end of the 10th and the beginning of the llth cenfciry, de tached Arabia definitely from the overgrovn empire that she herself had founded. This revolt had been, long preparing. Hatred of cen tralised rule, a strong attachment to local, tribal, and even in some places semi-municipal organisation, both joined to a deep under lying scepticism, had from the veiy first originated and fostered throughout Arabia a wide-spread, though covert opposition to the establishment of Islamitic despotism, and jealousy of the pre dominance conferred by Mahomet and his successors on their kins men of the northern and western tribes, and on Koreysh in par ticular, had united in secret antagonism to Islam and the caliphate the other tribes of the peninsula, but especially those of the centre, east, and south. Hence the Karmathian outbreak soon took the form of an Arab reaction against foreign and uncongenial in fluences and institutions, and being such, could hardly fail of substantial success. As to the special tenets professed by the Karmathians so called from Karmath, their mystic founder, circ. 890 A.D. they were, in their ultimate expression, pantheistic in theory and socialist in practice. From the sea-coast provinces of Bahreyn and Katar, its first Dis avowed centre, the uprising, headed by its terrible leader Sulcyman organisa- Abu-Jahir, spread rapidly over the rest of Arabia ; and in the year tion of 929 of our era Mecca itself was stormed, and the Kaabeh ruined by Arabia, his troops, while the sacred black stone itself was carried off to Hasa, where it remained twelve years. The feeble attempts of the Abbaside caliphs to check the movement proved utterly ineffectiial ; all was confusion, and for two centuries more a bloody partisan war, or rather an ever-recurring series of petty wars, devastated the peninsula. AVhen this at last gave place to the quiet, not of peace but of exhaustion, Arabia, from Syria to Aden, was, with the sole exception of the narrow Hejaz coast-strip, detached in fact as in name from the pseudo-Arab empire of Baghdad, and had returned to its primitive independence. But by the same process the land had relapsed, hopelessly this time, into the semi-barbarism that in variably follows a prolonged vicissitude of petty tyrants, vicinal wars, interrupted communications, waste of life and property, and the fatal insecurity of universal lawlessness. Ease, wealth, trade, science, literature, all had perished from Arabia, till after a long anarchy, of which little memory is preserved, and that little of less interest, the country subdivided itself into the provincial sections that, with slight modifications, it has retained ever since. Oman, Rearrange- with the adjoining regions of Katar and Hasa, was organised into a ment of the semi-elective monarchy of a limited character, under the leadership provinces, of the Nebhan and subsequently of the Yaarebah clan ; while its rulers, in opposition to the orthodox head of Islam at Baghdad or elsewhere, assumed the half spiritual title of Imam, and have since retained it. Yemen, the wealthiest and most populous territory of Arabia, split up into an infinity of petty provinces, governed each by a distinct prince, while some one or other would from time to time assert a transient sovereignty over the rest. The barbarous districts of Mahrah and Hadramaut on the south-east, with the mountain fastnesses of Nejd and Shomer, were abandoned to the anarchy of clannish alliances or feuds. The Hejaz alone, with the sacred territory or Haram of Mecca, under the headship of the &quot;shereefs&quot; or &quot;nobles,&quot; the lineal descendants of Koreysh, re tained some kind of constituted authority connected with the outer world, and paid a respectful but distant allegiance, sometimes to the government of Baghdad, more often to that of Egypt arisen, 909 A.D., a new kingdom, that of the Fatimites, so designated from one Obeyd-Allah, its originator, a real or pretended descend ant of Ali and Fatimah. These Fatimites, able but tyrannical mvstics, having united under their rule the whole of the north