The most prominent enemies of the Umayyads were the Khārijites, also known as Ḥarūrīs and Muḥakkima. Their origins are quite obscure. They are identified as those who seceded from ‘Alī at Ṣiffīn in protest against his acceptance of the Syrian call for arbitration, but the story does not offer a satisfactory explanation of the issues between them and ‘Alī, and contrary to what is often said, it was not with reference to their departure from ‘Alī's camp that they were known as Khārijites (‘those who go out’). It may have been because they assembled at Ḥarūrā˒that they came to be known as Ḥarūrīs, but this does not tell us much, and though they were indeed known as Muḥakkima because they were given to shouting ‘judgement belongs to God alone’ (lā ḥukma illā li'llāh), nobody knows what they meant by it. To the Ibāḍīs, who are the only Khārijite sect to survive to this day, they merely meant that any rule laid down in the Qur˒ān must be applied: humans cannot make their own decisions on questions settled by God. But this is too banal to explain the programmatic nature of the slogan. It was so obviously right that the Khārijites must have meant something special by it, as ‘Alīis said to have observed; in his view they meant that they did not want any government. But this does not appear to be correct either, except later in the case of the Najdiyya.

The ‘Abbāsids forced the Shī‘ites to put their own house in order. The imamate had been restored to the Prophet's house, the new caliphs said, but what if one disagreed? A clear alternative to the shī‘at banī ‘l-‘Abbās was needed, and the Zaydīs were the first to develop it.

The Zaydīs were named after Zayd b. ‘Alī (d. 740), a great grandson of ‘Alī who mounted an unsuccessful revolt against the Umayyads in Kufa in 740. For the first hundred years or so after Zayd's death, and to some extent even thereafter, the Zaydīs should be envisaged as a multiplicity of small circles formed around teachers whose doctrines were sufficiently similar on certain points to constitute a trend, not as a party defined by a single set of shared beliefs. In the broadest possible sense, the term ‘Zaydīs’ may have included soft Shi‘ites, that is people who accepted ‘Alī rather than ‘Uthmān as caliph in the past without deeming the Hashimites to have an exclusive right to the caliphate thereafter (though they might well have a preference for them). Such people were rapidly being absorbed into the great majority, however, be it thanks to what one might call the ‘Abbāsid version of Zaydism or to the attractions of the four-caliphs thesis. Zaydīs are usually envisaged as Shī‘ites of a somewhat harder variety.

As such they had in common the fact that they vested the caliphate after ‘Alī's death in the Ṭālibid branch of the Hāshimites to which ‘Alī belonged (see chart 3), but that still left room for a variety of stances.

As the Roman expansion had undermined the Roman republic, so the Muslim conquest of the Middle East destroyed the patriarchal regime in Medina. In both cases, civil war was followed by the emergence of an increasingly authoritarian monarchy. The Muslim counterpart to Augustus was Mu‘āwiya (661–80), who moved the capital to Syria and founded the Umayyad dynasty (661–750), under whom the embryonic state founded by the Prophet acquired a more developed form. But the developments unleashed by the conquests continued to transform Muslim society, rapidly making the political organization of the Umayyads obsolete, their orientation outmoded, and the dynasty itself heartily disliked. Within three generations they had come to be denounced as impious survivors from the pagan past who had somehow managed to hijack the Islamic enterprise. They were ousted in the third civil war, more precisely that part of it known as the ‘Abbāsid revolution. But contrary to what many had hoped, the trend towards more authoritarian government was not reversed. A fully-fledged, if shortlived, empire emerged under the ‘Abbāsids (effectively 750–861; fainéance 861–1258). All the fundamental questions first raised under the Umayyads continued to be debated down to the effective end of the ‘Abbāsid empire some hundred years after the revolution.

To the Arab conquerors, people were first and foremost members of descent groups such as tribes and nations rather than of social strata or classes. The key distinction was between Arabs and the rest, that is, the ‘ajam or barbarians (especially Iranians). Arabs were free, autonomous tribesmen chosen by God to be the carriers of His last revelation and rulers of the world. Everyone else was misguided and (already or soon to be) defeated. There was no room in this simple view of things for non-Arab Muslims, yet converts soon appeared in significant numbers, introducing new ways and ideas which the Arabs not unnaturally felt to be wrong. “This community will take to innovation when three things come together: perfect prosperity, the attainment of adulthood by the children of captives, and both Arabs and non-Arabs reciting the Qur˒ān,” ‘Uthmān is said to have predicted. The children of captives (abnā˒ al-sabāyā) whose dire influence is here being deplored were the offspring of Arabs by non- Arab concubines, a by-product of Arab domination; the non-Arabs reciting the Qur˒ān were mostly slaves and freedmen, also a product of Arab might, and both undermined the very order on which Arab power rested. Could mawālī (clients), as non-Arab Muslims were known, hold positions of authority over Arab Muslims? Most Arabs were outraged by the idea. Did they have the same chances of salvation as the people who had brought them the truth?

Among the neighbours of the Khārijites in Basra were devotees of rationalizing theology (kalām) known as Mu‘tazilites. They are said to have appeared in 720s, and at least one of their doctrines (regarding the status of the sinner) plainly has its roots in the Umayyad period. But they remain shadowy down to about 800, when they emerge as a loose association of diverse people and principles in Basra and Baghdad. Their school was systematized from the late ninth century onwards and flourished, above all in Iran, down to the mid-eleventh century. It suffered in the so-called ‘Sunni revival’ and disappeared altogether as a school in its own right after the Mongol invasion.

Unlike the Khārijites, the Mu‘tazilites had neither a communal genealogy nor a law of their own, meaning that they did not form a complete saving vehicle. Some Mu‘tazilites were ‘Uthmānīs, as one would expect of Basrans who were not Khārijites; but most of them were fond of ‘Alī, and in Baghdad they were often Zaydīs (Shi‘ites of the type described below, ch. 9). All eventually accepted either the four-caliphs thesis or Shi‘ite affiliation, probably in the course of the ninth century. This finalized their status as a mere school of thought rather than a sect of their own.

As Basrans by origin, if not always domicile, the early Mu‘tazilites generally shared the libertarian outlook of the Khārijites.

The Persian tradition was deeply alien to the early Muslim thought world. In religious terms it took the form of Zoroastrianism, a dualist or indeed polytheist religion which had no prophet or scripture (it took a while for Zoroaster and the Avesta to be adapted to those roles), which expressed itself in mythology and priestly ritual, and which endorsed the oddest of marriage rules and burial customs. Manichaeism struck the Muslims as much more intelligible, for although it used Zoroastrian names, its conceptual world was Judeo-Christian and its message Gnostic. Thus it was usually against Manichaeism rather than Zoroastrianism that Muslim polemics against dualist religions were directed. In political terms, the Iranians glorified the very kingship that the early Muslims regarded as offensive to God, calling their emperor by the blasphemous title of King of Kings (shāhānshāh) and taking pride in their deeply inegalitarian socio-political organization. Even their language was unintelligible, being Indo-European rather than Semitic.

For all that, the Persian tradition rapidly became a key component in Islamic culture. The Arabs conquered the Sasanid empire in its entirety, and eventually subdued the independent principalities of eastern Iran as well, so that the Iranians had no Iranian refuges to flee to. They formed the single largest ethnic group in the caliphate. They were also the only conquered people to have possessed an imperial polity and culture of their own, and they were subdued complete with their aristocracy, the main bearers of their political ideals.

Like Zaydīsm, Imamism crystallized in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, but it only acquired its classical form of Twelver Shī‘ism in the tenth and early eleventh. (It could to that extent have been covered in part III of this book rather than here.) Unlike Zaydism, it was not a doctrine for export to the tribal world. It developed in Kufa, Qumm and Baghdad, and to a lesser extent in Medina, where its imams resided until 848, and it reflected the spiritual needs of townsmen who had come to terms with their own exclusion from politics; indeed, it could almost be defined as de-politicized Shi‘īsm. All in all, it differed from Zaydism in four major ways.

First, it was uniformly Rāfiḍī. All Imamis believed ‘Alī to be the Prophet's legatee (waṣī), claiming that the Prophet had publicly designated him as his successor and branding the first three caliphs as usurpers. They would routinely vilify these caliphs (especially the first two) as well as the many Companions who had followed them, branding all of them as infidels or hypocrites. Secondly, where the Zaydīs held all ‘Alī's offspring by Fāṭima to be eligible for the imamate, the Imamis narrowed down the candidates to a single line of Ḥusaynids within which the office was passed down by bequest (waṣiyya), also known as designation (naṣṣ), from father to son, except that al-Ḥasan had been succeeded by his brother al-Ḥusayn.

Of all the visions developed in the first two centuries it can be said that their starting point is monotheism in combination with the tribal conceptions of the Arab conquerors. By the tenth century, this was no longer the case. Back in the early days the Arabs were conquerors who set the cultural tone, and as it happened, the cultural traditions of the Syriac and Aramaic-speaking Jews and Christians who were their neighbours in Syria and Iraq blended imperceptibly with their own. The other native traditions, above all the Greek and the Persian, were not absent, but it was only after the ‘Abbāsid revolution that they began to influence high cultural thinking on a major scale, and it was only in the tenth century that they acquired a dominant role.

The main topics of debate also changed. In the first two centuries, the key issue in political thought was tyranny and how to avoid it, whether by reducing the imam's power or on the contrary by sanctifying it. The debate reflected the relentless transformation of autonomous tribesmen into miserable subjects, which was all the more painful in that the victims were acutely conscious of what was happening to them and resisted with all the means at their disposal. By the end of the ninth century the transformation was a fait accompli. To most people, the ruler was now a remote figure, as inevitable, tyrannical, and uncontrollable as the weather with which he was sometimes compared.

In practice, government was more often than not both weak and oppressive: weak in the sense that it could not get much done, oppressive in the sense that rulers would freely sacrifice the lives and property of their subjects in order to stay in power and keep some semblance of order. It was normal for members of the elite, scholars included, to spend time in jail; most high-ranking governors and generals died violent deaths; and torture, assassination, poisoning, confiscation, and extortion were matters of routine. Yet the desire for freedom remained. Not that medieval Muslims used that term. They did speak of political oppression as enslavement, but they did not call the opposite freedom, for the choice as they saw it was not between slavery and freedom, but rather between slavery to other human beings and slavery to God. No humans had the right to impose obligations on other humans, whether they were rulers, masters, fathers or husbands, or for that matter prophets; only God could do so. To be governed in accordance with God's rules was to be protected from other people's arbitrary desires (hawā). In other words, it was to live as an autonomous person under the law, which is also how political freedom has traditionally been understood in the West. Living in accordance with God's rules was what most Muslims desired. In practice, however, this freedom only obtained in the sphere of life untouched by the state.

INFIDELS

Human beings were divided into Muslims and infidels (kuffār, sing. kāfir). A Muslim was someone who surrendered to God and lived as His servant (‘abd allāh, pl. ‘ibād allāh) in a society based on His law. Infidels were rebels against God whose societies could never be more than the robbers’ nests with which St Augustine had compared kingdoms devoid of justice. Since they did not live by God's law, nothing they did had any moral basis. Relationships established by them were not legally valid, compacts made with them did not have to be honoured, they themselves could be freely killed, “like wild animals before the arrows and spears”, as a famous thirteenth-century poet put it; their property could be taken as booty, and “all their wives and children are free spoil”, as the poet said, meaning that they could be taken as slaves. Bereft of divine guidance, infidels were not what we would call truly human.

Some infidels came closer to true humanity than others. Unlike pagans, indiscriminately known as polytheists (mushrikūn) and idolaters (‘abadat alawthān), the Jews and the Christians had received revelations from God, the Pentateuch (al-tawrāt) in the case of the Jews, the Gospels (al-injīl) in that of the Christians. They were ahl al-kitāb, People of the Book. But they were still infidels, for they denied that Muḥammad had brought a new revelation from God, and they had perverted their scriptures and their original faith: their monotheism was no longer pure. Those of them who had not been brought under Muslim sovereignty were outlaws on a par with the pagans.

The Umayyads fell in 750 to rebel troops from eastern Iran, more precisely Khurāsān. The troops had been recruited by Iraqi dissidents who named themselves and their Khurāsānī followers Hāshimiyya, adherents of Hashim's descendants, and who called for allegiance to the riḍā of the Prophet's family. The sources claim that the term al-riḍā was a mere cover for an ‘Abbāsid, but it seems more likely that it stood for a Hāshimite to be elected by shūrā. (For the Hāshimite clan, the reader may consult chart 3; for its ‘Abbāsid branch, chart 5.) The main candidate of the Hāshimiyya seems to have been the ‘Abbāsid known as Ibrāhīm al-imām, whose election they may indeed have regarded as a foregone conclusion: to that extent, the sources may be right when they claim that al-riḍā was a mere cover name. Ibrāhīm died in the jail of the last Umayyad caliph, and attempts to get a shūrā of Hāshimites together after the conquest of Iraq came to nothing when the ‘Alīds refused to participate. It was impatient generals who elected Abū ‘l-‘Abbās (750–4), the first ‘Abbāsid caliph. The revolution had raised strong messianic expectations of the apocalyptic type in Khurāsān. Like al-Mukhtār, the Hāshimiyya saw the Mahdi as an avenger, and they too associated him with a vizier who organized the movement on his behalf. The first caliph, Abū ‘l-‘Abbās, duly styled himself al-mahdī to indicate that the world had now been filled with justice.

Political thought may be broadly identified as thought about power formulated in a prescriptive rather than a descriptive vein: how should power be distributed, to what uses should it be put? Of power there are innumerable types, but political thought is primarily concerned with just one: that exercised by the governmental agency above the level of family, village, and tribe that we know as the state. It is however difficult to think about the state without attention to the social order on which it rests, and it is quite impossible to do so without considering its relationship with other organizations coordinating human activities above the domestic and local levels. Of such organizations there are many today, some nationwide and others international or global, but in a medieval context they were few and far between. Most associations in those days were local, and usually kin-based. Coordinating people's activities above the level of village or kin was difficult due to slow means of communication, poverty, local diversity, and lack of trust. It could be done by force: this was the typical manner in which the state established itself. But it could also be done, or assisted, by religion, which offered a common idiom, shared ideals and trust, and which was accordingly the main source of organization transcending locality and kin apart from the state. In the Islamic world it was originally the source of the state itself.

On 14 July 1789 the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt gave Louis XVI the news of the fall of the Bastille. ‘C’est une révolte’, cried the King. ‘Non, Sire,’ Rochefoucauld-Liancourt corrected him, ‘c’est une révolution.’ Debates in the two centuries since have focused on the nature of the event to which the King and the Duke were referring, the place of the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution and, following that, the place of the French Revolution in modern history. This focus has obscured the fact that in describing the event in this way the Duke was using the word ‘revolution’ in a very modern sense. The King thought that the fall of the Bastille was part of a revolt, requiring only a reassertion of his authority as king to quash it. The Duke was informing the King that what had happened was irreversible and thus beyond the power of the King. In describing the event as a revolution Rochefoucauld-Liancourt was implying that reversal of the event was impossible: it had a forward movement rather than a cyclical one.

The point is crucial for understanding the way Marx and Engels use the concept of revolution and, concomitantly, the concept of reaction in the Manifesto. Relatedly, the point is also important in getting to grips with the way the word ‘revolution’ has been used to describe events which we might also wish to describe as reactionary, namely fascism.

Fascism presents itself as a revolutionary doctrine and its seizure of power as a revolution. Mussolini and Gentile insisted that fascism is revolutionary, and leading Nazis referred to their movement as revolutionary and the regime itself as constituting a national or national socialist revolution. Many commentators have taken these claims at face value, although there is little agreement about the actual nature of the revolution: in some cases it refers to fascist ideology, in others to the seizure of power, while in yet others it is taken to refer to a social revolution said to have occurred in Italy and Germany once power had been seized. Nazism, for example, has been variously described a ‘revolution of nihilism’, a social revolution and a revolution of destruction.