Rightly Guided: Zaid ibn Haritha and his Rashidun Caliphate
- Thread starter GoulashComrade
- Start date
I think OTL territory efforts were as far as the caliphate could go, TBH. I know that people are eying Anatolia a bit, but I don't think the capacity was there to keep it in the long term, given that the region was much less divided than the Levant and Mesopotamia both ethnically and religiously. What the Arabs can offer to a Maronite is much more than they can a Greek Orthodox, IMO.
I think what should be considered is more effective management of the OTL territories and how they would influence a more agreeable caliphate.
I think what should be considered is more effective management of the OTL territories and how they would influence a more agreeable caliphate.
Info Post 5: Theories on the Assasination of Uthman (by John7755)
Mu’awiyah Ibn Abi Sufyan was simply a very powerful magnate, if you will, in Syria and de jure head of the Syrian-Umayyad factions in the Caliphate. His goals were simple, during the Uthmanite reign, assist Uthman in maintaining power, increase Umayyad-Syrian land claims, promote a naval retinue (opposed by the Iraqi faction of Ali) and Mu’awiyah sought to diminish the power of Ali and Amr al-As, the powerful magnate of Egypt.
His position was no different than Ali Ibn Abi Talib or Ayesha, in terms of fault. They simply had power grabs and misunderstandings. However, Mu’awiyah is typically reviled by those of the Shi’i persuasion for engaging Ali in battle, the same as Ayesha who raised an army and engaged Ali in battle after she became convinced that Ali’s faction murdered Uthman. Which is possible. The circumstances around Uthman’s murder is difficult fully piece together.
The options or solutions I can come up with are as follows.
In both solutions, Uthman is murdered after being besieged in his home. Those who murdered him, were of a group of radical hardliners who would become the Khawarij. These men, were and would be present in the forces of Ali in the coming Fitnah/civil war and all the perpetrators were from Iraq or eastern Arabia, lands under influence of Ali.
1. The first option and the one levied by Mu’awiyah, was that these assassins were of Ali’s group. Now, this could mean that Ali had hired them or it could simply be circumstances that caused these men to be in Ali’s camp. Regardless, Mu’awiyah demanded that those of this group be killed or at least captured and sent to Damascus, so that Mu’awiyah could vent his anger. Ali refused Mu’awiyah’s demands and urged caution. This thus, led to the civil war between the factions. In the end, these hardliners, would rebel in the camp of Ali after Ali made peace with Mu’awiyah. These became the Khawarij, because they separated from the camp of Ali.
2. The other option is that Amr al-As was the architect and issued of the order. Amr was the one whose position was embattled by Uthman and whose rivalry with Uthman was most hot. Uthman had failed to act quick enough to purge Amr from his Egyptian post and thus Egypt was in virtual rebellion with Makkah and Amr al-As was minting coins in his own name. Thus, the idea is that Amr hired these hardliners in the camp of Ali to commit the attack on Uthman, creating a war between Mu’awiyah and Ali, while Amr sides with Mu’awiyah and attempts to make his own gains.
Both have merits and I am not sure which is true. The case was never truly solved, to any satisfaction.
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Well, first of all, really excellent timeline so far! Well written, and for someone like me whose knowledge of early Islamic history is somewhat elementary, easy to follow.
The prospect of avoiding to some extent the huge internal rifts that developed in the Rashidun Caliphate and beyond is an interesting one indeed. I really do wish that I knew more about the details of the era to have a few suggestions, but for now consider me a very interested reader.
The prospect of avoiding to some extent the huge internal rifts that developed in the Rashidun Caliphate and beyond is an interesting one indeed. I really do wish that I knew more about the details of the era to have a few suggestions, but for now consider me a very interested reader.
Nice update! And best hopes for your sister's recovery.
On another note, will there be any Byzantine-Sassanian cooperation against the Arabs ITTL? I dimly remember there being a battle between a combined Byzantine and Sassanian force against... I think it was Khalid, but I'm not sure.
You may very well be right, but off the top of my head, the only situation I can remember where Byzantines and Sassanids coordinated attacks was during the Muslim conquest of Armenia. Both the Sassanids and the Romans had a presence there and tried to work together, though they kept their command systems separate. It doesn't work anyways, the invading Umayyads split their armies and take down both (with the Sassanids being the ones to hold out longer for a change.)
@John7755 يوحنا did a great job explaining why the assasination of Uthman is so murky and controversial, I even went ahead and added it to the threadmarked informational posts (unless he'd rather I not, of course) to help readers who are sorta new to this get a hold on what's happening.
Even the most charitable biographer for Mu'awiya would have to admit that the man was almost Machiavellian in dealing with people who were his brothers just a few years ago, but he's also been thoroughly demonized to an outlandish extent in later Shi'a propaganda. His son Yazeed (not Mu'awiya's brother Yazeed), though, was such a colossal bastard that he got basically every Muslim to agree that he shouldn't have been anywhere near power. Sorta happens when you off the Prophet's grandson and sack Madinah itself.
Also, effectively turning a growing split into a full blown schism in the process....
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Soldiers of the Eagle Standard Part I - Abu Bakr begins the Ghazwah Al-Hira
Soldiers of the Eagle Standard - Part I
“We march with our brothers,
We march with our brothers;
To the delight of Heaven
And the sorrow of the Persians
We march with our brothers!”
--- war chant of the Christian Arab defectors at Ullais
“God is great! I was given the keys of Persia. I swear by God that I see the city of the Kisra and his shining white manors now!”
--- Prophet Muhammad, prophesizing during the Battle of the Trench that a Muslim army would take Ctesiphon
A Call to Arms
"Proceed to Iraq. Start operations in the region of Uballa. Fight the Persians and the people who inhabit their land. Your objective is Hira."
With that terse four sentence letter to Commander of the Army Khalid ibn al Walid, still stationed with a portion of his troops at Jawh al-Yamamah a few months after his bloody victory there over Musaylimah’s apostates, Caliph Abu Bakr launched one of history's most spectacular campaigns of conquest. The task that the Steward of God had set before Khalid was daunting: Persia was an ancient power, almost mythically grand and terrible in the collective imaginations of the Arabs. In stories and poems, the successive golden ages of their great neighbors to the northeast deeply influenced the maturation of Arab culture, even as they resented the haughty imperialism of the Persians and their callous yoking of their Iraqi brethren. The Hanging Poems, the famed collection of ancient epics and odes which were once draped from the Kaaba in the days before Islam, said about the Persians that ‘setbacks they faced, but glory was always waiting for them again, for greatness is the birthright of the Persian.’ [1]
Anushirvan the Just to Kavadh II the Mad
The most recent and, unbeknownst to the Persians themselves, the last golden age of the Shahenshahs was during the forty-eight year reign of Khosrow I Anushirvan, known to his people as Anushirvan the Just. Emerging victorious from a civil war with his older brother, Anushirvan oversaw military victories against both the Byzantine Empire and steppe nomads, a flourishing of art and literature under his patronage, sweeping reforms to the Sassanid law codes, and the redistribution of noble land to the middling classes. Arabs knew him for the gentle hand he used when dealing with his non-Persian subjects and the rich rewards he lavished on his loyal Mesenian Arab [2] troops, calling him “The One who Gives with Both Hands.” So resplendent was his court that upon the wise king’s death that, like the great Qaysar of old Rûm, his name became the title for all following rulers of the empire. As the star of the Sassanids fell in Ctesiphon, another star was on the rise in far away Makkah; only three years after the death of Khosrow I Anushirvan the Just in his opulent palace, a Qurayshi boy named Muhammad was born to a recently widowed mother in a cramped townhouse.
The next rulers were successively worse, running the empire ineffectively and leading the Sassanid army to defeat after defeat against strong Byzantine emperors before being overthrown by a sibling or satrap. This trend of degeneration following the glory of old Anushirvan reached its nadir in the short and violent rule of Khosrow Kavadh II. The grandson of Anushirvan, Kavadh killed his father to take power, then killed his infant half-siblings to secure his throne. Humbled on the battlefield by the sharp-witted Caesar Heraclius, the Butcher Prince took out his wrath on his provincial subjects: the torching of Arab, Caucasian, and Aramean villages by Persian soldiers became a commonplace occurrence. The rule of the Shahenshah remembered by the Arabs as “The Mad Kisra" was ended by disease only seven months into his reign, seen by many in the Empire as punishment from above for his bloodlust. Much is unclear about who ruled what when during the chaotic period following the death of Kavadh II, but the facts become clearer upon the ascension of the youthful Khosrow Yazdgerd II of the House of Sasan. This young man, who was augured by royal diviners to be the ruler that would usher in the return of Anushirvan’s glory, was actually doomed by fate to oversee the end of an imperial legacy that stretched back to the Achaemenids.
The Green Fields of Iraq
Iraq stood as a land where the towns of the Christian Arab Lakhmid client-kings [3], who had just been subjugated and put under the rule of military governors for rebelling against the Mad Kisra, simmered with rebellion when the Caliph unsheathed the Sword of God Khalid on it. It was a land lived in by Persians and both settled as well as nomadic Arabs, run directly by the Persian court. The empire of the Shahenshahs was already beginning to fall apart administratively, but only a reductionist would claim that it was anything but a first-rate power in terms of warfighting capabilities. The military effectiveness of an empire may remain at a high level for decades after its political disintegration has already been set in motion, and so it was with the Persians in the year 633. The imperial troops were the most well-equipped of their day, if their training did sometimes lag behind that of the Roman heirs in Constantinople. Commanded by a meritocracy of fierce and loyal Persian generals, the Persian Army was the best in the world at the set-piece battle and the frontal attack. With their troops coated in mail with steel chestpieces and wielding the dreaded Iranian mace, concentrated drives by Persian troops could break any infantry line on earth...or at least this was the common wisdom until the zealous soldiers of the Rashidun Caliphate shattered perceptions held by both Persians and Byzantines about ‘barbarian’ armies.
The entrance of the Caliphate into Iraq began somewhat innocuously, with small-scale raiding lead by the Muslim chieftain of the Eastern Banu Bakr: a hot-blooded poet and warrior of 24 named Muthanna ibn Haritha [4]. He served as a soldier in the army of Khalid during the Ridda Wars, earning the respect of the Sword of God by slaying the apostate prophet Tulayha’s greatest guardsman Abbas ibn Jund in a ferocious duel that saw both men shatter three swords. Shortly after the Battle of Yamamah, Muthanna turned his searching gaze towards his homeland of Iraq. Seeking glory and spoils, and encouraged by the disarray which was apparent in the political affairs of the Persian Empire, Muthanna took a warband and initiated a series of raids into Iraq. At first he adhered to the fringe of the desert so he could pull back quickly into the security of the sands when pursued, but step by step, his attacks became bolder as he realized just how disorganized the Persians were. He varied his target locations, striking in both the east and the west, but the greater part of his attacks were in the area of Uballa, and he came back from these strikes with jewels, gold, carpets, horses, and other treasures that astonished the relatively poor faithful of the Ummah. The Persian armies were powerless against Muthanna's ghostlike riders, who vanished as quickly as they struck.
Muhammad's Heirs vs The Sons of Sasan
Delighted by his numerous triumphs, Muthanna rode toward Madinah to speak to Abu Bakr, who received visitors in his small unornamented house or as he worked in the markets (for the ruler of all Arabia refused to use government money for his own upkeep.) Muthanna painted a gleaming picture - the weakened province of Iraq, the rebellious agitation of the Christian Arab client-princes, the untold wealth that was there to be looted, the political emergency which beset the Persian court, the powerlessness of the heavily-armored and slow-moving Persian armies to battle in rapid cavalry engagements. "Delegate me to be the administrator and commander of my kin", said the eager Muthanna, "and, if God wills, I shall strike the Persians with the power of spring thunder and the speed of the northerly winds.” The Caliph agreed and gave him a letter designating him administrator over every one of the Muslims of the Bani Bakr as well as the Eagle Standard, the patched all-black banner of the Prophet Muhammad that was made from one of Ayesha’s hijabs. With both a letter of Caliphal authority and a powerful symbol of Islam in hand, Muthanna came back to Northeastern Arabia. He converted droves of his Christian tribesmen to Islam, drilled them in the cavalry maneuvers he'd learned from Khalid. collected a small armed force of 2,000 men and continued his strikes with considerably increased excitement and ferocity.
Muthanna was gone from Madinah, however his words left a deep impact on the Caliph and the Ummah. He had inserted a thought into the minds of Abu Bakr and his shura council which blossomed into the decision to invade Iraq. At home there was peace again, for with the vanquishing of the last apostate rebels in Bahrain by Amr ibn Al As, Islam and the Caliphate was firmly secured in Arabia, yet the Caliph still would not battle for the whole Persian imperium. Abu Bakr rightly guessed that such an undertaking would be too massive a goal in current conditions, but he would settle for nothing less than the total capture of the rich, productive and heavily garrisoned province of Arab Iraq. Letters were sent to the army of Khalid at Jawh al-Yamamah and soon the northeastern border shook with the sounds of marching feet and thundering hooves. The Companions of the Prophet Muhammad were racing towards a showdown with the vast power that haunted the dreams and nightmares of Arabia for generations uncounted, pushed to confront the imperial might of Persia in the name of a new faith.
1. This talk about how cool Persia is goes on for pages. Part of this admiration comes from the fact that most Arabs deeply misundersood Zoroastrianism and thought that they were polytheists who worshipped a variety of fire gods. This view only gets corrected in Umar's reign, who realizes that there's a lot more to this whole Ahura Mazda thing and adds them in as People of the Book since they had a prophet, a scripture, and kinda-monotheism. Since Arabs at this time thought of them as pagans, the polytheist old Makkans saw Persians with the same mix of fannish awe and competitive disdain that the Rashidun Caliphate reserved for the Byzantine Empire.
2. This is just a word used to refer to settled Arabs.
3. The Lakhmids were a venerable dynasty of Christian Arab vassal princes living in Iraq and NE Arabia. They provided powerful cavalry units to the Persian Army, despite having a fraught relationship with their imperial masters. They were ancestrally from Yemen and were the builders of the grand city of Al-Hira, but at this time in the story, they have been thrown out of their city by the Persian troops of the military governor. Their leader, Prince Ukayd, is very angry about this because his warriors suffered horribly during the recent spate of conflicts with the Byzantines and he feels like his loyalty is being repaid with affronts. This is something to remember.
4. No relation to our buddy Zaid ibn Haritha. It was just a popular name in the preceding generation.
Afternotes
The update is on the brief side tonight, but we've set the stage nicely for a fully military post next time detailing the journey of Zaid, Muthanna, and Khalid as they incite Christian revolt and fight Persians. There's only one butterfly here: the capture of Al-Hira. In OTL, the Persians attacked the city to remove it from the control of their rebellion-happy Lakhmid vassals, but fail due to the reinforcement of exiled Al-Nusay tribesmen from Arabia proper who fled to Iraq after Khalid killed their leader Malik and many of their soldiers during the Ridda Wars. Since ITTL, Malik and his troops are co-opted rather than killed thanks to a surviving Zaid ibn Haritha, the relief forces that save the Lakhmid garrison in Al-Hira IOTL never arrive and the city falls to the Imperial troops. The Lakhmid prince Ukayd flees to his lands near the border with his remaining soldiers and rebuilds his forces to await a chance at revenge. This outcome, while nice in the short term for Persia, is really gonna hurt later on when the Sassanids realize that having almost all of their soldiers native to Iraq hate them is a bad move when the Rashidun offer the Christians a better deal.
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Very interesting update. I look forward to seeing the Arabs go on the offensive in full. I find it fascinating how interconnected events in Arabia are to Iraq and Syria, usually I have seen a lot of narratives where the only real mention of the Arabs beyond talk of the Ghassinids and Lakhmids, and they usually only in the context of being rival clients of Sassanid Persia and the ERE, comes with the actual invasion of Iraq and Syria.
In several narratives I have read they appear seemingly out of thin air and tear through the region - much in the way that the Vikings and Huns are often depicted.
Getting this extra understanding of how the peninsula was impacted by, and impacted in turn, the wider Middle East is really interesting.
In several narratives I have read they appear seemingly out of thin air and tear through the region - much in the way that the Vikings and Huns are often depicted.
Getting this extra understanding of how the peninsula was impacted by, and impacted in turn, the wider Middle East is really interesting.
Thanks for replying, mate! I can't stress how much I agree with your complaint about how common the "sudden wave of foreign soldiers" view is. The Arabs weren't operating in a vacuum before Abu Bakr: their economies depended on caravan trade with the empires and many luxury goods valued in markets abroad (like dragon's blood resin or frankincense) were only available for purchase from Arabian merchants. If nothing else, the Lakhmids and Ghassanids were still Arabs despite their vassal status; Arabs who remained deeply connected to Arabia and brought Byzantine/Sassanid ideas to the Peninsula during the Hajj season.
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That's a big butterfly.
Without bad blood coming from the exiled Ridda rebels - and that hatred to Persia, would the Lakhmid convert - or at least, submit to the Rashidun and therefore making al-Hira the centre of Rashidun Iraq with no Kufa?
Loved the Chapter, though I'm personally looking forward to how you handle the conquests of Syria and Palestine. Also how large was Aishah (RA)'s Hijab for it to be flown as a banner? Subhanallah the Miracles of Allah extend even to clothing...
Not all banners are huge
Al-Hira/Hirta/Herat isn't exactly as centrally located as I'd like if I was the ruler of Iraq. It's a good location for a secondary or adminkstradmin center but if I was running Iraq I'd set myself up near Tikrit/Tagrit, depending on how fast the Iranian plateau falls, and establish a secondary administrative center in the South, and maybe another near Mesan. Personally I think Tisifon and Veh-Ardashir are already too prominent. Baghdad's OTL site is a great location but I think like in OTL it would be overlooked at first. Tikrit also has the benefit of an already extant Arab population, which I don't think is true of Tisifon.
Edit: Still very much enjoying this timeline, btw!
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Loved the Chapter, though I'm personally looking forward to how you handle the conquests of Syria and Palestine. Also how large was Aishah (RA)'s Hijab for it to be flown as a banner? Subhanallah the Miracles of Allah extend even to clothing...
Not all banners are huge
Clearly, the Muslims were waving around black articles of clothing to intimidate their opponents by showing off how goth they were
Abu Ubaidah's invasion of Syria and the Levant will actually begin while the Iraqi Ghazwah is going on. For the sake of narrative flow, we'll follow Khalid, Zaid, and Muthanna until they take(?) Al-Hira and get re-deployed to Syria by Abu Bakr.
Thanks for commenting, y'all. IMO, Kufa would be built even in TTL's scenario of Lakhmid cooperation. Kufa was a garrison town made to keep the army from taking up the space belonging to dhimmis in Al-Hira and causing trouble with the Caliphate's new subjects. However, if the Lakhmid princes become Muslim, settlers from Arabia proper won't be redirected to living in Kufa and Al-Hira could remain a prominent civilian city. Kufa would still exist as a military town and would probably still be the seat of the Iraqi governor, since the provinces were under light military control until Caliph Uthman, but Al-Hira remain populous and prosperous. Although this is more of a long shot with the Lakhmids since they practiced the more imperial style of rule that the early Rashidun disliked, co-opted and converted Ghassanid chiefs might even become governors in the Levant. That would really jumpstart the Romanization of the Rashidun Caliphate, for one thing.
In this TL, Moscow isn't Third Rome...Damascus is.
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If I understand it correctly, then it is referring to the way that Rome and Constantinople are referred to as the first and second Rome, with the Muscovites having claimed Moscow as the Third Rome IOTL.
It was just a joke about how TTL's Rashidun Caliphate could become so Romanized that future caliphs would make the claim that the Caliphate is the real heir to the Roman and Byzantine empires.
On a more serious note, what would the art and culture of a later Rashidun Caliphate that is more Romanate than Persianate look like? Would Islamic art never lose its early comfortability with figural representation? Byzantine-style mosaics of Musa and Isa in mosques? Ivory diptyches of Caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar on display?
That does seem like a possible direction. I do think that you would still eventually see the move away from figurative representation given the role of iconoclasm in the ERE a century or two later. I think you will see relics play a larger role than IOTL given the Christian obsession with the things. I do wonder about how written Arabic might develop with a more Greek inspiration and influence, maybe even experiencing shifts in script. Given that you seem to be building towards Islam being spread in tounges other than Arabic, you could well see the much more widely used Greek script become if not dominant, then at the very least very significant.
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
Wait, wasn’t said OTL iconoclasm effectively the result of Islam’s massive success? If the faith that spreads at the expense of “Rome” is not itself iconoclastic, wouldn’t this then be averted?
I think it would likely follow the route of Persian (Farsi) and Urdu. Each gets its language take on an Arabic form with minor alterations to accommodate for different sounds and syllables.
I am under the impression that Islam itself if is iconoclastic (conquest of Mecca and destruction of its idols) at this point in time in TTL. However, I've heard that such representations would be tolerated from religious minorities. It could potentially be an interesting scene where iconoclasm rises, but the Caliphate later on has to deal with being a moderate hand between proponents who want to push iconoclasm on others and those who strongly venerate figures.
An interesting idea that I haven't seen a TL explore yet (to my knowledge) is the creation of a Maltese-esque Latin alphabet for the Arabic language. With Ghassanid Arabs, who have extensive experience with the Latin alphabet, becoming Muslim more quickly and in greater numbers than OTL, there could even be Qur'an manuscripts written in the new Latin alphabet for Arabic.
Now, it's very clear that while Islam promotes the use of Qur'an translations to help non-Arabs understand the Qur'an, a translation is not the same thing as an actual Qur'an. With the creation of a Latin alphabet for Arabic, though, I could see the case being made that Qur'ans written in this Latinate script are just as valid as any Qur'an written using the old Arabic script. There's nothing holy or even important in Islam about the OTL Arabic alphabet itself. The Qur'an was primarily an oral tradition anyways, so as long as the manuscript accurately transmits the Arabic language text of the Qur'an, I could see Muslims spreading Latinate Qur'an manuscripts widely as they conquer more regions.
Edit: Apparently, a fully-fledged Latin Arabic is already a thing and damn it's cool.
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