Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/247

218 defeasible rights of Ḳoreish. Subdued by several weeks of such treatment, they were sent on to Ḥimṣ, where the Governor subjected them for a month to like indignities. Whenever he rode forth, he showered invectives on them as traitors working to undermine the empire. Their spirit at last was broken, and they were released; but, ashamed to return to Al-Kūfa, they remained in Syria, excepting Al-Ashtar, who made his way secretly to Medīna.

Months passed, and things did not mend at Al-Kūfa. Most of the leading men, whose influence could have kept the populace in check, were away on military command in Persia; and the malcontents, in treasonable correspondence with the Egyptian faction, gained head daily. In an unlucky moment, Saʿīd planned a visit to Medīna, there to lay his troubles before the Caliph. No sooner had he gone than the conspirators came to the front, and recalled the exiles from Syria. Al-Ashtar, too, was soon upon the scene. Taking his stand at the door of the Mosque, he stirred up the people against Saʿīd. "He had himself just left that despot," he said, "at Medīna, plotting their ruin, counselling the Caliph to cut down their stipends, even the women's; and calling the broad fields which they had conquered The Garden of Ḳoreish." The deputy of Saʿīd, with the better class of the inhabitants, sought in vain to still the rising storm. He enjoined patience. "Patience!" cried the warrior Al-Ḳaʿḳāʿ, in scorn; "ye might as well roll back the great river when in flood, as quell the people's uproar till they have the thing they want." Yezīd, brother of one of the exiles, then raised a standard, and called upon the enemies of the tyrant, who was then on his way back, to bar his entry into Al-Kūfa. So they marched out as far as Al-Ḳādisiya, and sent forward to tell Saʿīd that "they did not need him any more." Little anticipating such reception, Saʿīd remonstrated with them. "It had sufficed," he said, "to have sent a delegate with your complaint to the Caliph; but now ye come forth a thousand strong against a single man!" They were deaf to his expostulations. His servant, endeavouring to push on, was slain by Al-Ashtar; and Saʿīd himself fled back to Medīna, where he found ʿOthmān terrified by tidings of the outbreak, and prepared to yield whatever the insurgents might demand. At their desire he appointed Abu Mūsa, late Governor of