THE ABBASID AGE 87from the Umayyads, but in this supposition you would be dead wrong.
The Abbasids quickly embraced the orthodox approach to Islam, probably
because the orthodox religious establishment, all those scholars, had se-
cured so much social power in Islam that embracing their doctrines was
the politic thing to do. Indeed, it was only in Abbasid times (as we shall see
in the next chapter) that the mainstream approach to Islam acquired the
label Sunnism, since only now did it congeal into a distinct sect with a
name of its own.
In the first days of the Abbasid takeover, many naive Shi'i thought that
Saffah and his family were going to put the recognized Shi'ite imam on the
throne, thereby inaugurating the millennial peace predicted in Hashimite
propaganda. Instead, the hunt for Alids intensified. In fact, when the third
khalifa of this dynasty died, according to one of his maids, his successor
found a secret room in his palace, which led to an underground vault
where he had collected the corpses of all the Alids he had captured and
killed. (They weren't necessarily Fatima's descendants, since Ali had other
wives after Fatima died).
Yet the Abbasids also maximized everything that was good about
Umayyad rule. The Umayyads had presided over a flowering of prosperity,
art, thought, culture, and civilization. All this splendor and dynamism ac-
celerated to a crescendo during the Abbasid dynasty, making the first two
centuries or so of their rule the one that Western history (and many con-
temporary Muslims) remember as the Golden Age of Islam.
One of Mansur's first moves, for example, was to build himself a brand
new capital, a city called Baghdad, completed in 143 AH (765 CE). The
city he built has survived into the present day, though it has been de-
stroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries, and is in the process of
being destroyed again.
Mansur toured his territories for several years before he found the per-
fect site for his city: a place between the Tigris and Euphrates where the
rivers came so dose together that a city could be stretched from the banks
of one to the banks of the other. Smack dab in the middle of this space,
Mansur planted a perfectly circular ring of wall, one mile in circumfer-
ence, 98 feet high, and 145 feet thick at the base. The "city" within this
huge doughnut was really just a single enormous palace complex, the new
nerve center for the world's biggest empire.^1