Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/368

 692–705] In this year the military station of Wāsiṭ was founded, so called, as midway (wāsiṭ) between Al-Kūfa and Al-Baṣra, Al-Medāin and Al-Ahwāz. The main object was, no doubt, to have an independent cantonment holding in check the restless cities. The pretext, however, assigned by Al-Ḥajjāj was the desire to check the license of the Syrian soldiers quartered in the country. Conveniently situated in the well-watered plain betwixt the Tigris and Euphrates, Wāsiṭ became the chief military centre of the Empire, and so continued as long as the Caliphate itself; but it was a confession that the Syrians felt that they were occupying a hostile country, and so widened the breach between the two.

While these events were passing in the east, ʿAbd al-Melik was able after the fall of Ibn az-Zubeir, to throw aside the humiliating treaty concluded with the Emperor; and, from the year 73, his generals, some of them his own sons, prosecuted with vigour, but not always with success, yearly campaigns in Asia Minor, Armenia, and the coast of Africa. Up to 76, the relations between the two Courts were friendly; but then, after an interval of fifteen years, a singular incident broke ‘the peace. The Greeks imported their papyrus from Egypt and exported dinars to the Arabs. Before ʿAbd al-Melik the papyrus was stamped with a cross and Christian sentences, but now the words of the Ḳorʾān "Say, He alone is God" were used for a water-mark. The Emperor threatened that if such affront were repeated, he would strike coins with words respecting Moḥammad grievous to his followers. Heretofore the Arabs had used gold and copper Byzantine coins and silver coins copied from the Sasanian, with the addition of the three letters b s m (In the name of [God]) on the margin. Muʿāwiya had indeed instituted an independent coinage, but the coins were rejected, having no cross, and so withdrawn. Now ʿAbd al-Melik issued a purely Muslim coinage, gold, silver, and copper, called by the Byzantine names dīnār (denarius aureus), dirhem (drachma), and fals (follis). The dīnār was about the size of a half-sovereign, the dirhem rather less than a sixpence; but the words came to mean gold and silver coins of whatever weight. They bore, besides the mint and date, sentences from the Ḳorʾān, generally, "There is no god but God; He has no