Islam. 53They saw Ali as an incarnation of the divine (like Jesus), be-
lieved that Shii leaders who had been killed in an insurrection
were in temporary "occultation" and would return to inaugu-
rate a utopian realm of justice and peace in the Last Days.
But the religious were not the only people who felt alien-
ated from Umayyad rule. The converts to Islam (mawalis:
clients) objected to their second-class status. There were
tribal divisions among the Arab Muslims, some of whom
wanted to settle down and integrate with the subject peoples
and others who wanted to continue the old expansionist wars.
But the Islamic sentiment had become so widespread that the
various revolts and uprisings nearly all adopted a religious
ideology. This was certainly true of the revolt that finally top-
pled the Umayyad dynasty. The Abbasid faction capitalized
on the widespread desire to see a member of Muhammad's
family on the throne, and emphasized the descent of their
leader from the Prophet's uncle Abbas and his son Abdallah,
one of the most eminent of the early Quran reciters. They
began to muster support in the Iranian provinces in 743, oc-
cupied Kufah in August 749, and defeated the last Umayyad
caliph, Mansur II, in Iraq the following year. When they had
finally subdued the empire, the Abbasid caliphs would inau-
gurate a very different kind of society.
T H E ABBASIDS: T H E H I G H
C A L I P H A L P E R I O D (750.935)
The Abbasids had won support by carefully presenting them-
selves in a Shii light, but once in power they shed this reli-
gious camouflage and showed that they were determined to
make the caliphate an absolute monarchy in the traditional
agrarian way. Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah (750-54), the first Ab-
basid caliph, massacred all the Umayyads he could lay his
hands upon. Hitherto the indiscriminate slaughter of a noble