82 DESTINY DISRUPTED
As time went on, however, Kharijites fizzled out because they were such
extreme purists at a time when more and more people were acquiring a
stake in the new prosperity. Society's losers might have been discontented,
but they were even less ready to trade in the little they had for the joyless
nothing the Kharijites offered. It was the Shi'i who remained the real
threat to the established order, and after the death of Hussein and his fol-
lowers at Karbala, this threat picked up force.
The Shi'ite imams no longer directly challenged the throne very much;
they began to separate the meaning of imam from the meaning of khalifa,
defining themselves ever more purely in religious terms. But Shi'ite rebels
kept organizing trouble in the name of the imams, kept sparking rebellions
aimed at bringing one or another of Ali's descendents to power, kept nur-
turing the notion that the khalifate did not belong to the Umayyads, kept
undermining the legitimacy of Islam's secular rulers.
The Shi'ite threat metastasized because of an ominous synchronicity
that developed in Umayyad times. It was this:
The Shi'i were the suppressed religious underdogs of Islam.
The Persians were the suppressed ethnic underdogs of Islam.
The Shi'i chaffed against the orthodox religious establishment.
The Persians chaffed against the Arab political establishment.Inevitably, the one mapped onto the other. Persians began to embrace
Shi'ism, and Shi'ite agitators began looking to the Persian east for recruits.
When the two currents mingled, rebellion began to bubble. It bubbled ever
harder the further east one traveled, for Umayyad police power ran ever thin-
ner in that direction, while anti-Arab sentiment mounted ever higher.
One day, around 120 AH, a mysterious man blew into the city of
Merv. This distant outpost of the empire lay almost fifteen hundred miles
east of Damascus. Here in the wild, wild east, this stranger began to agi-
tate against the Umayyads by promulgating a millennia! religious narra-
tive that spoke of an impending apocalyptic showdown between good
and evil.
No one knew much about this fellow, not even his real name. He went
by the handle Abu Muslim, but that was obviously a pseudonym, since it
was short for Muslim abu Muslim bin Muslim, which means "Muslim man,