century was then suddenly destroyed by the attack of Islam. In its political beginnings Islam was strictly aristocratic; the handful of Arabian families[1] who everywhere kept the leading in their hands, very soon formed in the conquered territories a new higher nobility of strong breed and immense self-sufficingness which thrust the dynasty down to the same level as its English "contemporaries" thrust theirs. The Civil War between Othman and Ali (656-661) was the expression of a true Fronde, and its movements were all in the interests of two clans and their respective adherents. The Islamic Whigs and Tories of the eighth century, like the English of the eighteenth, alone practised high politics, and their coteries and family quarrels are more important to the history of the time than any events in the reigning house of the Ommaiyads (661-750).
But with the fall of the gay and enlightened dynasty that has resided in Damascus — that is, West-Aramæan and Monophysite Syria — the natural centre of gravity of the Arabian Culture reappeared; it was the East-Aramæan region. Once the basis of Sassanid and now of Abbassid power, but always — irrespective of whether its shaping was Persian or Arabian, or its religion Mazdaist, Nestorian, or Islamic — it expressed one and the same grand line of development and was the exemplar for Syria as for Byzantium alike. From Kufa the movement started which led to the downfall of the Ommaiyads and their ancien régime, and the character of this movement — of which the whole extent has never to this day been observed — was that of asocial revolution directed against the primary orders of society and the aristocratic tradition.[2] It began among the Mavali, the small bourgeoisie in the East, and directed itself with bitter hostility against the Arabs, not qua champions of Islam but qua new nobility. The recently converted Mavali, almost all former Mazdaists, took Islam more seriously than the Arabs themselves, who represented also a class-ideal. Even in the army of Ali the wholly democratic and Puritan Qaraites had split off,[3] and in their ranks we see for the first time the combination of fanatic sectarianism and Jacobinism. Here and now there emerged not only the Shiite tendency, but also the first impulses towards the Communistic Karramiyya movement, which can be traced to Mazdak[4] and later produced the vast outbreaks under Babek. The Abbassids were anything but favourites with the insurgents of Kufa, and it was only owing to their great diplomatic skill that they were first allowed a footing as officers and then — almost like Napoleon — were able to enter into the heritage of a Revolution that had spread over the whole
- ↑ It was a few thousands only that accompanied the first conquerors and spread themselves from Tunis to Turkestan, and these everywhere constituted themselves a self-contained and close Estate in the entourage of the new potentates. An "Arabian Völkerwanderung" is out of the question.
- ↑ J. Wellhausen, Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902), pp. 309, et seq.
- ↑ Compare the inner divisions of the English Parliamentary army in and after the Civil Wars. — Tr.
- ↑ See p. 261.
