Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/395



succeeded at once to the throne. It went as a saying at Damascus that Al-Welīd's turn was for art; Suleimān's for the ḥarīm and good living; ʿOmar's (the next to follow) for devotion. The fashion of the Court changed accordingly. With the first, the talk was of culture; with the second, of slave-girls, marriage, and divorce; with the third, of austerity, and recitation of the Ḳorʾān by night. The prowess of the Empire waned under Suleimān. He was called, indeed, the Key of Blessing,—but only because he nominated ʿOmar for his successor.

Suleimān weakened the administration of Spain by conniving at,—if indeed he did not actually order,—the murder of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, the able follower of his father Mūsa; the Christians, profiting by the neglect that followed, rose upon their conquerors in the Asturias, and the mountainous region in the north, Moḥammad ibn al-Ḳāsim, the successful invader of India, recalled as a follower of the hated Al-Ḥajjāj, came to an evil end. And under one of the sons of Al-Muhallab the Azdi (now the favoured house) who succeeded, the progress of Islām in the far East slackened, and its prestige declined.

With Ḳoteiba, the death of Al-Welīd caused the utmost consternation, Appointed by Al-Ḥajjāj, he well knew the bitterness of Suleimān towards all his adherents, and the danger in which they stood from the enmity of Yezīd, the favourite of the day. In an evil hour he set up for himself, and called on the army to join him against the Government. But miscounting his influence, he fatally overshot the mark. 364