Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/179

 150 new-born zeal of the Faith had evaporated, the chivalry of the Arabs as a race wholly devoted to arms, was, owing mainly to ʿOmar’s foresight, maintained in full activity for two centuries and a half. The Nation was, and continued to be, an army mobilised; the camp, and not the city, their home; their business, arms;—a people whose calling it was to be ready for warlike expedition at a moment's notice.

To carry out this vast design, a Register was kept of every man, woman, and child entitled to a stipend from the State—in other words, of the whole Arab race employed in the interests of Islām. This was easy enough for the upper ranks, but a herculean task for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary families which kept streaming forth to war from the Peninsula, and which, by free indulgence in polygamy, were multiplying rapidly. The task, however, was simplified by the strictly tribal disposition of the forces. Men of a tribe fought together; and the several Corps and Brigades being thus territorially arranged in clans, the register assumed the same form. Every soul was entered under the tribe and clan whose lineage it claimed. And to this exhaustive classification we owe the elaborate, and to some extent artificial, genealogies and tribal traditions of Arabia before Islām.

The roll itself, as well as the office for its maintenance and for pensionary account, was called the Dīwān or Exchequer. The State had by this time an income swollen by tribute of conquered cities, poll-tax of subjugated peoples, land assessments, spoil of war, and tithes. ‘The first charge was for the revenue and civil administration; the next for military requirements, which soon assumed a sustained and permanent form; the surplus was for the support of the Nation. The entire revenues of Islam were thus expended as soon almost as received; and ʿOmar took special pride in seeing the treasury emptied to the last dirhem. The accounts of the various provinces were at the first kept by natives of the country in the character to which they were accustomed—in Syria by Greeks, and in Chaldæa by Persians. At Al-Kūfa this lasted till the time of Al-Hajjāj, when, an Arab assistant having learnt the art, the Arabic system of record and notation was introduced.