118 DESTINY DISRUPTED
deeply and rippled far. Even the Hindus of the Indian heartland were
weakening. Even sub-Saharan Africa had Muslim converts now. Only
Cathay and darkest Europe remained fully outside the realm. It seemed
only a matter of time before Islam fulfilled its destiny and bathed even
those regions with light.
But the dream of the universal community of piety and justice re-
mained elusively out of reach and then began to slip away. At the very
height of its power and glory, the khalifate began to crack. Indeed, looking
back, historians could plausibly say the cracking began before the heights
were achieved. It began when the Abbasids took power.
In that cataclysmic transition, the new rulers lured all the Umayyads
into a room and clubbed them to death. Well, not quite all. One Umayyad
nobleman skipped the party. This man, the last of the Umayyads, a young
fellow by the name of Abdul Rahman, fled Damascus in disguise and
headed across North Africa, and he didn't stop running until he got to the
furthest tip of the Muslim world: Andalusian Spain. Any further and he
would have been in the primitive wilderness of Christian Europe.
Abdul Rahman impressed the locals in Spain. A few hard-core Kharijite
insurgent types skulking about there at the ends of the Earth pledged their
swords to the youngster. There in Spain, so far from the Muslim heartland,
no one knew much about the new regime in Baghdad and certainly felt no
loyalty to them. Andalusians were accustomed to thinking of the
Umayyads as rulers, and here was a real-life Umayyad asking to be their
ruler. In a less tumultuous time, Abdul Rahman might simply have been
posted here as governor and the people would have accepted him. There-
fore, they accepted him as their leader now, and Andalusian Spain became
an independent state, separate from the rest of the khalifate. So the Mus-
lim story was now unfolding from two centers.
At first, this was only a political fissure, but as the Abbasids weakened,
the Andalusian Umayyads announced that they were not merely indepen-
dent of Baghdad but were, in fact, still the khalifas. Everyone within a few
hundred miles said, "Oh, yes, sir, you're definitely the khalifa of Islam; we
could tell from the very look of you." So the khalifate itself, this quasi-
mystical idea of a single worldwide community of faith, was broken in two.
The Umayyad claim had some resonance because their Andalusian cap-
ital of Cordoba was far and away the greatest city in Europe. At its height it