Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/238

651–5] flood you with his harpies!" And so it turned out; for he soon filled the local offices and the commands in Persia with creatures of his own. In other respects, however, he proved an able ruler; his signal victories in the East have been already noticed, and in the struggle now close at hand he took a leading part.

The government of Al-Kūfa, vacated by the deposition of Al-Welīd, was conferred by ʿOthmān, together with that of Mesopotamia, upon another young and untried kinsman, Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ. His father was killed fighting against the Prophet at Bedr; and the boy, thus left an orphan had been brought up by ʿOmar, who eventually sent him to the wars in Syria. Receiving a good account of his breeding and prowess, ʿOmar summoned him to his court, and gave him two Arab maidens to wife. This youth, now promoted to the most critical post in the empire, was not only without experience in the art of governing, but, vainly inflated with the pretensions of Ḳoreish, made no account of the powerful Bedawi faction. Accustomed in Syria to the strong discipline of Muʿāwiya, he wrote to ʿOthmān, on reaching Al-Kūfa, that licence reigned in the city, that noble birth passed for nothing, and that the Bedawīn were altogether out of hand. His first address as Governor was a blustering harangue, in which he glibly talked of crushing the sedition and arrogance of the men of Al-Kūfa with a rod of iron. Countenanced in his over-bearing course by the Caliph, he fomented discontent by invidious advancement of the Ḳoreishite nobility, and by treating with contumely the great body of the Citizens. "One Ḳoreishite succeedeth another as our governor," they said; "the last no better than the first. It is but out of the frying-pan into the fire." The under-current of faction daily gained strength and volume. But the vigorous campaigns of Saʿīd in northern Persia, for he was an active soldier, served for a time to occupy men's minds, and to stay the open exhibition of a rebellious spirit.

Meanwhile other causes were at work—some apparently insignificant in themselves, but turned adroitly to account