THE ABBASID AGE 83son of a Muslim father, father of a Muslim son." As you can see, this man
was at pains to assert that he had no-doubt-about-it Muslim credentials.
In truth, Abu Muslim was a professional revolutionary, dispatched to
Merv by a secretive underground group based in Iraq, a group called the
Hashimites. This group was a cross between a cult and a political party,
whose core membership probably never exceeded thirty. Its name referred
to the Prophet's clan, the Banu Hashim, and its purpose, supposedly, was
to put a member of the Prophet's family at the head of the Muslim world.
This was just one of many angry little hard-core bands of antigovernment
conspirators active at this time, all preaching some version of the same
message: the community had fallen off the track, history had gone off
course, the Messenger's mission had been subverted, and toppling the
Umayyads and empowering a member of the Prophet's family in their
stead would set everything right again. Let me note that this narrative has
been reinvented again and again in the Muslim world over the course of
history, and some version of it is being recited even today, by revolution-
aries who have substituted "the West" for "the Umayyads."
Sadly for the Hashimites, they didn't have an actual member of the
Prophet's family to promote. They did, however, have Abu al-Abbas, a fel-
low who claimed descent from Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, one of
Prophet Mohammed's uncles, so he was at least related to the Prophet by
blood and, more important, was willing to lend his name to the Hashimite
enterprise.
The ancestral uncle in question, the original Abbas, was among the later
converts to Islam, and in his day, inconveniently enough, no one had even
considered him a candidate to succeed Mohammed, so he wasn't the ideal an-
cestor for a revolutionary purist. A direct descendant of Ali and Fatima would
certainly have been better, but none of the Alids-that is, Ali's real and puta-
tive descendants-would make common cause with the Hashimites, so Abu
al-Abbas would have to do. Sometimes you have to go into battle with the fig-
urehead you have, not the figurehead you wish you had.
Abu Muslim didn't have much trouble tapping into the Shi'ite and Per-
sian discontent seething in Khorasan, the province that stretched from
Iran through Afghanistan. At key points in his speeches, Abu Muslim be-
came a little vague about who exactly would become the khalifa once the
revolution succeeded. Those who longed for a descendant of Ali could