- Karen Armstrong
to conquer Constantinople, which had not only failed but led
to heavy loss of manpower and equipment. Umar was the first
caliph to encourage the dhimmis to convert to Islam, and they
were eager to join this dynamic new faith, but since they no
longer had to pay the poll tax (jizyah), the new policy resulted
in a drastic loss of revenue. Umar was a devout man, who had
been brought up in Medina and had been influenced by the
religious movement there. He tried to model his behaviour
on that of the rashidun, stressed the ideal of Islamic unity,
treated all the provinces on an equal basis (instead of favour-
ing Syria) and was humane towards the dhimmis. He was very
popular, but his Islamic policies, which endeared him to the
pious, were not good for the economy of the ailing empire.
The reigns of his successors were punctuated with revolts
and rumbling discontent. It made little difference whether
the caliphs were dissolute, like Yazid II (720-24), or devout,
like Hisham I (724-43). Hisham was a strong and effective
caliph, who was able to put the empire back on a more sound
economic basis, but he achieved this by making the state more
rigidly centralized and his own rule more autocratic. He was
becoming more like a conventional absolute monarch, and
the empire benefited from this politically. The problem was
that this type of autocracy was abhorrent to the devout, and
fundamentally un-Islamic. Was it not possible to run a state
on principles after all? Shiis became increasingly active. Their
leaders claimed descent from Ali, believing that the i l m that
would enable Muslims to inaugurate a just society had been
preserved most fully in Muhammad's family and that they
alone should rule. The more radical Shiis blamed all the pre-
sent problems of the u m m a h on the first three rashidun (Abu
Bakr, Umar and Uthman), who should have allowed Ali to
take the leadership in the first place. Many of the more ex-
treme Shiis (known as the ghulat. exaggerators) were converts
and brought some of their old beliefs into Islam with them.