alive or cruciɹed or slowly hacked to pieces, limb by
limb. Ziyad had a way of making himself understood,
even with the most unruly populace.
“Spare me your hands and your tongues,” he told the
Kufans on taking oɽce, “and I shall spare you my hand
and my arm. I swear by God I have many potential
victims among you, so let every man of you beware lest
he be among them.”
The Kufans responded at ɹrst with a certain cowed
respect. After the civil unrest of Ali’s rule, Ziyad at least
provided security. In fact he enforced it. “He compelled
the people to obey,” one Kufan remembered. “If a man or
a woman dropped something, none would touch it until
its owner came back and picked it up. Women spent the
night without locking their doors. And if so much as a
rope should be stolen in his realm, he would know who
had taken it.” Just as Italians reconciled themselves to
Mussolini’s dictatorship in the 1930s by saying that he
“made the trains run on time,” so the seventh-century
Iraqis accommodated themselves to Ziyad’s regime. Even
the Rejectionists hunkered down, wary of retaliation.
The price of such security was dread. Ziyad
established a secret police network to keep track not only
of stolen ropes but also of any emergent opposition. He
was as uncompromising as he had promised in response.
Collective punishment—uprooting orchards,
conɹscating land, demolishing houses of relatives of