Rightly Guided: Zaid ibn Haritha and his Rashidun Caliphate

[Death's Little Helper]

Awesome work!

 

[GoulashComrade]

First things first, y'all are way too kind. Thanks for reading and commenting!

I honestly didn't expect this much interest in a Rashidun-on-steroids TL, but since it seems like there's enough commenters in this thread to make it feasible, I wanted to make the rest of the story from here on out more collaborative. There's a pretty deep pool of historical expertise here on AH.com and I'm sure anything that we come up with together will be better than what I could write alone. Plus, this TL is all about that shura council. I've gotta practice what I preach at some point.


To kick things off, let's see where we're at currently. Abu Bakr's OTL death is supposed to come within the year. It was an illness that did him IOTL, but I'm pretty ambivalent about changing that in TTL. He could theoretically recover and he may have simply never caught the sickness in this timeline, but he was never the healthiest person and the Ridda Wars took a toll on him. As a middle ground, we could see him voluntarily retire and hand the office off; if any caliph was uneasy with power, it was Abu Bakr.


If he does die/retire, though, I think TTL's Abu Bakr will be confident enough in the Ummah’s stability to leave the choice of Caliph up to a Second Great Consultation instead of appointing Umar straight up. He'd most likely get elected anyways; Umar was definitely seen as the Prophet's second-in-command and the other big contenders as of Now (Zaid and Ali for now, but Uthman, Abdurahman ibn Awf, Amr ibn al As, Az-Zubayr are all talented people who will be waiting in the wings) are young enough to not press their candidacy very hard this time. What do y'all think a TTL-version of Caliph Umar's Caliphate would look like? To provide some background, his big successes OTL were:

• Building the administrative framework of the Caliphate by dividing up territory into governed provinces.
• The creation of a well-paid civil service and records system.
• The institution of a zakat-funded welfare state, with something akin to a medieval UBI involved (giving everyone enough wealth to stay above the too-poor-to-pay-zakat line)
• The formation of an organized treasury bureau.
• Heavy investment in building/expanding roads and canals.
• The creation of a unified justice system with regional and local jurists employed and a police department created.
• The conversion of the Rashidun Army from a disorganized militialike force into a well-equipped, well-organized (under relatively autonomous generals though), and highly paid professional army.
• The creation of a messenger corps stationed in major cities and military camps to deliver letters quickly.

How might this change in the wake of something like Noor-ul-Ikhlas influencing the popular mindset? I feel like TTL's mindset would inspire him to push more reforms than anything else, especially since Noor-ul-Ikhlas stresses democracy in council but centralized authority once the leader is elected. It's like a 7th century Islamic version of Lenin's democratic centralism

 

[agisXIV]

About Muhammad's prophecy that the Rashidun Caliphate would only last 30 years, then be followed by a kingship: Is this gone from your TL or are you ignoring it for now?

 

[Al-numbers]

I had to admit it, seeing the title alone made me a tad apprehensive of this TL. But your hand is really stellar, and I really like the unveiling of Rashidun Madinah and the interaction of the Companions. Subscribed!

 

[GoulashComrade]

About Muhammad's prophecy that the Rashidun Caliphate would only last 30 years, then be followed by a kingship: Is this gone from your TL or are you ignoring it for now?

For anyone who isn't familiar with the hadith agisXIV is referring to, this is the text it is as presented in Sunan Abu Dawood:

"The Prophetic Caliphate will last for thirty years. Then God will give the kingship to whomever He wills."


Here's the thing: the Sunan Abu Dawood is a very fine and substantiated collection of Prophetic traditions, but many of the hadith concerning political matters recorded are profoundly kerygmatic and any historian would have enormous difficulties in trying to prove that the early Muslims ever heard this version of the hadith. In fact, nobody who lived in same century as Prophet Muhammad makes note of this version of the prophecy, even though Muhammad's predictions were probably behind only hadith qudsi (where Muhammad relates a message from God in his own words, considered a form of revelation, but since it's not in God's own words, beneath Qur'an in importance) for being the earliest hadith to be written down or collected. The version recorded in the more authentic Sahih Muslim features notable differences that are both more in line with Muhammad's style of prophecy and were definitely recorded in the Rashidun Caliphate - early Umayyad period:

“The Prophet of God, peace and blessings be upon him, once said 'There will be Prophethood for as long as Allah wills it to be, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be a Caliphate on the Prophetic method and it will be for as long as Allah wills, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be a biting Kingship for as long as Allah Wills, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be an oppressive kingship for as long as Allah wills, then he will remove it when He wills, and then there will be Caliphate again upon the Prophetic method' and then he remained silent."


I talked a bit about this in the discussion on Qur'an, but I think it bears expanding (not because of you or anything, agisXIV, this is just a convienent example.) I don't believe Abu Dawood was sloppy in his methods of authenticating chains of narration, there's a reason he's one of the big names in usool-ul-hadith, after all. I do believe, however, that the Companions themselves were human beings; fallible flesh and blood people who quarreled with each other and failed as much as they triumphed. I'm not saying they were bad Muslims, I'm just saying that they were people who had clashing visions of the Caliphate that Prophet Muhammad would have wanted and sometimes passed down politically charged spins of Muhammad's traditions that fit those visions. This isn't just a hit at the Shi'a side of my family either; Sunni scholarship past has often scoffed at the Shi'a claims of imamate while implicitly treating every confirmed narration from the supporters of Abu Bakr, Uthman, and Umar as correct on the virtue of who reported it. I said that I didn't want to step on any toes, but if we're gonna have a TL that deals with religion as closely as we do here, I'm going to be clear on this from the outset: we're writing alternate history, not alternate hagiography. Some of the stances on events that this TL has taken and will take are outside of orthodoxy of both mainstream Sunni and Twelver Shi'a traditions. I'm certain that there's a large number of ulema that would consider me outside of the fold of Islam for these views, I firmly believe that intellectual honesty is a core Islamic virtue. People sometimes forget that the Qur'an openly mocks those who solely appeal to tradition:

"But when they are told, 'Follow what God has bestowed from on high,' some answer, 'Nay, we shall follow only that which we found our forefathers believing in and doing.' Why, if their forefathers did not use their reason at all and were devoid of all clarity?"
--- The Qur'an, Surah Al-Baqarah (2:170)

I had to admit it, seeing the title alone made me a tad apprehensive of this TL. But your hand is really stellar, and I really like the unveiling of Rashidun Madinah and the interaction of the Companions. Subscribed!

Thanks, mate! We'll get to see other cities in detail soon enough, but as the current political heart of the Caliphate, it's gonna remain a frequent setting for a while.

 

[Pesterfield]

at least seven Qur'an dialects were both memorized and recorded in personal manuscripts

How different are these dialects, minor or basically different languages?
Was the content different between the Qur'ans?

 

[GoulashComrade]

How different are these dialects, minor or basically different languages?

Relatively minor; there's a good deal of debate on exactly which dialects were used even among historians who take the "synthesis Qur'an" position, but a majority of the seven dialects would probably have been Hijazi-related offshoots. There's certainly nothing close to the linguistic drift present in later Arabic, if that's what you're wondering.

Was the content different between the Qur'ans?

The consensus opinion of traditional Sunni scholars, most Shia traditions, and the current majority of academic historians is no. There was a lot of scholarship written in the 60s and 70s that advanced a "revisionist" look at the Qur'an, but archeological discoveries of variant manuscripts have given weight to the idea that even the pre-orthodox texts were the same in meaning, if different in grammar or word choice.

 

[Pesterfield]

If they were so alike what was the reason for burning them OTL, and what will not burning them mean here?

 

[GoulashComrade]

If they were so alike what was the reason for burning them OTL, and what will not burning them mean here?

Once again, it depends on who you ask, but a plurality (if not a majority) of historians and Sunni chroniclers agree that the main reason for collecting and burning Qur'ans OTL wasn't because they were variant, it was because copies that hadn't gone through the extreme authentication process that the single manuscript compiled by Caliphal scribes during Abu Bakr's time had gone through. Uthman and many other people were worried that these personally-written manuscripts would be full of errors, so they collected them, burned them (the respectful way to dispose of a Qur'an), and sent out a bunch of copies of the authenticated manuscript. Since the only version of the Qur’an to get an authenticated manuscript IOTL was the Qurayshi Qur'an, the other variants slipped into disuse.

ITTL, there will probably be another Qur'an burning, because the problem of wildcat manuscripts still needs to be dealt with. The difference is that instead of only one variant of the Qur'an having an authenticated manuscript to copy and distribute, they all have a manuscript. When the replacement copies are made and sent out around the Caliphate, the other variants will still be read and memorized, unlike OTL.

 

[GoulashComrade]

Marching Towards Hira - A Preview

“Women will no longer be able to give birth to the likes of Khalid bin Al-Waleed.”
--- Caliph Abu Bakr

“I know more about Khalid than anyone else, no man is luckier than he. No man is his equal in war. No people face Khalid in battle, be they strong or weak, but are defeated. Take my advice and make peace with him.”
--- Arab client-prince Ukayd to his Sassanid commander



2 miles from Walaja, 633 AD

“They can’t hold out much longer, keep pressing! Show these barbarians what happens when they defy their better! ” Captain Varsken shouted as he rode back and forth on his horse to rally his troops. His commander and uncle Andarzaghar followed behind him on his own mount, trying to persuade his young kinsman to return to the safer areas behind the raging front lines. “Varsken, please just stay away! We're not yet triumphant and I've never seen Arabs fight like these men are fighting.” Varsken laughed and slowed his pace to allow Andarzaghar to catch up with him. “Look around, Honored Uncle...”, he said with a wave of his hand, “..and you'll see that your plan is working as intended! Already they tire and we have three men for every one of theirs. Now that we are on the offensive, they will crack in minutes. Fools that these Arabs are, they have boxed themselves in for the slaughter! We have succeeded where Hormuz and Qarin have failed!” The old general frowned at his nephew, but the youth was right this time. Soon the line of Arabs would break, and trapped as they were by a ridge and a river, there would be nowhere for them to flee to.


Andarzaghar had been the military governor of Iraq for years and had even grown up there. Unlike many of his colleagues, he actually rather liked Arabs and knew much of their language and customs. His regard for the Christian Arabs amongst his troops made him the only Persian commander that the Iraqi Arab conscripts respected. When word came to the Imperial Capital of Ctesiphon that an Arab army of a scant fifteen thousand flying black banners had obliterated two seperate forces led by highly ranked commanders, the Shahenshah was beside himself with rage and ordered Andarzaghar to muster his army of forty thousand and link up with General Bahman to destroy them. Had he been given the choice, he would have preferred to wait for Bahman’s forces to arrive before fighting a decisive battle with these Arabs, but Andarzaghar was not given the luxury of waiting for reinforcement. A few days before Bahman was expected, an army flying that same unusual black banner he had been told of appeared over the horizon and camped a short distance from his soldiers tents. He was a little surprised; reports from the broken remnants of Hormuz’s and Qarin’s armies had said that the Arab interlopers numbered around fifteen thousand. There was at most ten thousand men arrayed against him now, and without even a single horseman amongst them. Though it was strange for an Arab army to lack cavalry, at which they were the equal of any Empire on earth, Andarzaghar assumed that the defeated soldiers from the other armies had made up tales to explain their ignoble defeat. Cautious and crafty, General Andarzaghar waited for the Arabs to attack him first, letting them grind themselves to dust against his hardened infantry, then he would counterattack and finish them off.


The Arabs on both sides clamoured for a duel before the battle and the general obliged them. It would be good for morale for them to see one of their enemies butchered. He called up a champion warrior from his army, a heavily armored Persian soldier with a bejeweled sword. An Arab met him in challenge, a tall and handsome man with a thick black beard and a shaved head in chainmail. After around ten minutes of intense battle, the Arab champion found the right opening and ran his opponent through with his sword. The Black Banner troops cheered and to mock the Persian, the Arab champion ordered his rations brought to him there on the field. Using the body of his felled opponent as a table, the warrior ate his meal on the dueling space, staring all the while at the two well-dressed Persian commanders.


As much as the spectacle of the battle unnerved him, Andarzagar still felt like he was in control of the situation. Just as the old Persian had planned, the barbarian general ordered his men to advance and the battle began. The foreign army struck at the well-armored Persians, but the Persians stood their ground like only Imperial soldiers could, repulsing all attacks. The black banner army fought ferociously, but there was far less of them than there were Persians. An old hand at the art of war, Andarzaghar could see clear signs of weakness and fatigue amongst the soldiers of the opposing force and cried out for his men to begin the counter-attack. Imperial troops screamed battle cries as they smashed into the lines of the Arabs; through what must have been will alone the Black Banners were able to hold them for some time, but the almost-inhuman stress they were under was impossible to maintain and they began to fall back. Andarzaghar launched assaults again and again, but instead of breaking like he had guessed they would, the Black Banners continued to fight with strength born of utter desperation. The general would have admired this level of discipline even in his own troops or in Roman legionaries, but to see this from barbarians was nothing less than astounding. He almost wished that the battle wasn’t going to end as decisively as it looked it would; he would have offered the Arabs who remained a place inside his own forces. This didn't seem likely though: the Black Banners seemed to have met the upper limits of stamina already and discipline wasn't enough to stop an onslaught like this. His nephew Varsken, raised in the imperial heartland and much less of an expert commander, shared none of Andarzaghar’s respect for his opponents. In fact, he thought his Honored Uncle was much too soft on the barbarians in his own command and cursed Andarzaghar’s name every time the court ladies back home gossiped about how his family was more Arab than Persian. No, he was only thinking about the promotions and riches that awaited him.


Varsken was snapped out of his daydreams about the marriage to a well-bred noble girl and lavish palaces that would soon be granted to him by his pleased Imperial master by General Andarzaghar rapping on his shoulder with the flat of his blade. “Ow, what is it, Honored Uncle?” he said in barely concealed annoyance. “Look…”, the older man said as he pointed to where one of the Arab soldiers was waving a red scrap of cloth high with a spear, “...what is he doing?” “I don't know, Uncle, maybe he's praying to his god for a quick death. I've heard that these Black Banner troublemakers are all some bizarre kind of Jew. I thought you were the….” Varsken’s words trailed off as the answer to his uncle's query revealed itself. From the ridge opposite the one that the barbarian army was being slowly pressed up against emerged two long lines of Arab cavalrymen coated in gleaming scale armor with lances and swords, their horses fresh and pawing at the ground in excitement. Bearing their own black war banners, the horsemen screamed a warcry in their tongue, some nonsense syllables that sounded like “Alevu Akabir” to Varsken’s ears, and charged the Persian rear. He turned to his uncle in fear as his troops panicked and the emboldened Arab infantry turned the tide of the Imperial attack. “What's happening?! Where did they come from! UNCLE!”


Andarzaghar didn't respond, he was a talented enough general to see that he had been outwitted. The initial Arab attack was only a lure to give the hidden cavalrymen enough space to charge the Persian rear and savage their lines. The positioning of the two Black Banner forces in relation to the opposite ridges meant that there was no escape from the circle of spears and swords closing around the panicking Persians who trampled and stabbed each other in the chaotic slaughter; he thought he had the Arabs trapped when all the while they had been trapping him. He quickly gathered the few Persian cavalrymen still alive and tried to fight his way through the reinvigorated Arab infantry to no avail. He locked eyes briefly with the swordsman who had raised the red signal flag, a man he now realized was the same one who had slain the Persian champion during the duel. A brief look of understanding passed between them, a momentary acknowledgment of the other's skill shared by men who had both devoted their lives to the craft of slaughter. Then the cavalryman battling next to Andarzaghar was gutted by an Arab rider and the general threw himself into the fray for the last time.

Afternotes
​

The pace of updates for a while will be a little slowed because my kid sister is recuperating from a surgery, but I thought I'd give you a look at some of the things I'm writing up. Abu Bakr's reign saw Khalid grab quite a bit of land in some spectacular battles, both in Iraq against the Persians and in Syria against the Byzantines, even though the big-name matches happened under Umar. Another not-so-secret goal of this TL is to showcase some of the quality generalship on both sides of the expansions. There's a tendency to regard the Muslim conquests as fait accompli due to the crippling of the Byzantines and the Sassanids after their wars, but I feel like that's a bit unfair to the Rashidun Army. Even with the weakened state of the Imperial war machines, Khalid's troops were still fighting much larger and better equipped armies of hardened veterans while far away from their home base. Any defeat in the early stages of the Syria or Iraq campaigns would have been disastrous for the Caliphate and perhaps given their opponents precious time to regroup. This doesn't happen because Khalid, Abu Ubaidah, and Al-Muthanna consistently outsmart their opposition and use their mobility in some dazzling ways. The explosive nature of the Rashidun conquests is due to a perfect storm of many factors, but one of those lucky factors was having intelligent commanders who could exploit the opening.

 

[alcibiades]

Nice update, very good battle descriptions and I hope your sister feels better.

 

[Roger II]

This is a very good update! Best wishes to your kid sister!

 

[Zulfurium]

Lovely update, and best wishes to your sister.

 

[GoulashComrade]

Nice update, very good battle descriptions and I hope your sister feels better.

This is a very good update! Best wishes to your kid sister!

Lovely update, and best wishes to your sister.

Thanks for the praise and concern for my sister, y'all. She's alright; she had a partial splenectomy but as far as she's concerned, it's just an excuse to watch cartoons free from the oppressive yoke of homework

 

[Death's Little Helper]

Thanks for the praise and concern for my sister, y'all. She's alright; she had a partial splenectomy but as far as she's concerned, it's just an excuse to watch cartoons free from the oppressive yoke of homework

She sounds like the right kind of kid

Great update. Looks like the Rashidun conquests are continuing apace with OTL. I imagine the POD will start to have greater effects after the wars are done. Though my knowledge of the period is pretty spotty so maybe not. Great update all the same.

 

[GoulashComrade]

She sounds like the right kind of kid

Great update. Looks like the Rashidun conquests are continuing apace with OTL. I imagine the POD will start to have greater effects after the wars are done. Though my knowledge of the period is pretty spotty so maybe not. Great update all the same.

Thanks! You're about right as far as the military aspect of the war, but remember that Zaid ibn Haritha is traveling in Khalid's army as a sub-commander ITTL. The "Compassion of the Faith", as Muhammad called him, is not really changing much militarily as Khalid is definitely calling the shots, but the way the Muslim army deals with the new non-Muslim territories it owns before official Caliphal government will be different. Much more outreach will be made to heterodox Christians that disliked the Byzantines or Sassanids themselves, like the Jacobites/others in Syria, the Copts in Egypt, and the monophysite Arab communities of Iraq. IOTL, the Caliphate loosely and unofficially did this and many of these Christians themselves came to the conclusion that dhimmitude was preferable to outright suppression, but with Zaid heading decision-making, the Rashidun will make a far more explicit pitch to marginalized Christians and include co-opted communities even more heavily in the Caliphal bureaucratic machine.

 

[EmperorBuaya]

Great to hear your sister is alright.

I'm not really familiar with the history of the caliphates. How would this Caliphate be any different from the OTL, especially their conquests of the Middle-East?

 

[Al-numbers]

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.

 

[GoulashComrade]

Great to hear your sister is alright.

I'm not really familiar with the history of the caliphates. How would this Caliphate be any different from the OTL, especially their conquests of the Middle-East?

So far, there are three big differences between TTL's Rashidun Caliphate and OTL's Rashidun Caliphate: Zaid ibn Haritha is alive, the variant Qur'ans have been collected into authenticated manuscripts, and Zaid ibn Thabit has written a book detailing his vision for Majlis reform and pushing a kind of soft religious pluralism.


The butterflies from these three things are important, if still quite subtle.

The biggest butterfly so far is that the earliest part of the factionalization of the Ummah has been dampened. IOTL, the Ummah splits into roughly four factions that ally with or contest each other in various ways.

• The Banu Umayya faction: Technically led by Uthman until his death, but advanced mostly by Yazeed ibn Abu Sufyan and later his more skillful younger brother after his death, Mu'awiya, the Banu Umayya want to see their clan ascendant in politics generally. Uthman becoming Caliph was a big shot in the arm for them and they shifted their goal from keeping plum jobs and powerful ministries to outright keeping the Caliph as their hereditary position. Their power base was in Damascus, where Yazeed and later Mu'awiya governed.
• The Banu Hashim Faction: The clan of the Prophet Muhammad, they were also theoretically led by Ali. This one is weird, because what Ali wanted and what the rest of Banu Hashim wanted were not actually the same thing. Ali was just miffed that he got continuously screwed as far as the Majlis-as-Shura (which was a fair compliant tbh) and didn't seem interested in restructuring the system of government to make the Caliphate remain within Banu Hashim, like the rest of his clan did. Their power base is in Kufa, where Ali governed Iraq.
• The Shura Faction: This is the faction led by Abu Bakr, then Umar, then Ayesha following Umar's death. Their goal is to preserve the institution of the shura council and keep power outside of the hands of any one clan. At this point in the story, the Shura faction is the only one with a fully developed agenda and power base. The Shura faction's power base lies mostly in the two Holy Cities of Makkah and Madinah.
• Amr's Faction: I didn't know what else to call this faction, tbh, because it seems like Amr ibn Al As' only clear goal was to make himself Caliph. As far as policy, he had much of the same centralizing administrative goals as Umar, but without the leniency of Umar towards incorporated minorities. There would certainly be no reopening of Jerusalem to Jewish worshippers under Amr, but to his credit, he did support Umar's decision to give dhimmis equal access to Bayt-al-Mal welfare benefits. Amr's faction is strongest in Egypt.

IOTL, Abu Bakr and Umar were so overwhelmingly strong candidates and powerful Caliphs that the fissures aren't very apparent. The factionalizing really explodes after Umar's assassination: Banu Umayya starts getting really ambitious after nabbing the Caliphate, Ali is decides that he's tired of being pushed around and actively courts the more radical members of his faction to form his support, Ayesha's political dislike for the Banu Umayya is outweighed by her personal antipathy for Ali, Amr sees his chance and starts creating his own political base in Egypt, and the whole thing goes to hell.


ITTL, Zaid acts as a unifying force in the midst of all these rising tensions. Part of it is due to his famous personal charisma and friendly nature, but if we're being honest, an equal part of it is that he has no real kinship group since he's not really a Najdi and he's not really Banu Hashim. Depending on how much they like him, the factions will either see him as an honest dealer without any clan-based ulterior motives (Ali and Ayesha think this way) or as an easily-controlled puppet (Mu'awiya and Amr are varyingly on this side.) He's already done some big stuff, specifically his arranging for Ali to be present at the first Majlis-as-Shura. Because of this, Ali has much less of a grievance against the Shura Faction and might even consider himself one of them, since he personally agreed with the institution of shura. He'll be stamping down the Banu Hashim hereditary monarchy advocates in his own clan, now that he isn't backed against a wall with no allies and has a communication line to Ayesha in the form of Zaid.


I won't spoil the rest of the political shifts or military campaigns for y'all (I know that military stuff is what you asked for, but we'll get there soon, I promise), but here's something interesting to think about. The OTL Rashidun/early Umayyad expansions, IMO, couldn't get very much bigger than they did. This, I think, is because of two problems in particular. One is that the Rashidun Army, which was almost entirely Arab, was simply stretched too thin as there weren't enough young male Arabs to go around. Another, more pointing to the Umayyads, was that the Arabizing and re-marginalization of minority groups killed a lot of the goodwill the Rashidun had cultivated amongst the dhimmis of their empire. This is bad, because they relied on dhimmis to do most of their sailing for them, which really bites them in the ass when dhimmi sailors revolt during what could have been a successful attack on Constantinople.


Looking at the trend of this TL, here’s an interesting question: if the longer-lived *Rashidun Caliphate loses much less veteran manpower to civil war and continues beyond its lifespan, with its favorable treatment of Christian dhimmis intact, how far could they press their borders?

 

[I'tikaf]

The Banu Umayya faction: Technically led by Uthman until his death, but advanced mostly by Yazeed ibn Abu Sufyan and later his more skillful younger brother after his death, Mu'awiya, the Banu Umayya want to see their clan ascendant in politics generally. Uthman becoming Caliph was a big shot in the arm for them and they shifted their goal from keeping plum jobs and powerful ministries to outright keeping the Caliph as their hereditary position. Their power base was in Damascus, where Yazeed and later Mu'awiya governed.

I've always had a low opinion of Mu'awiya and his son. Mu'awiya supposedly bribed one of Hassan's (RA) wives to poison him. Admittedly my knowledge of the Fitnas is rather lacking so I might be wrong... Though if this is true then Mu'awiya is definitely getting up to some shady shit ITTL.