The Abbasid Revolution (part 3): The Blood-Shedder and the Falcon

In January of 750, the last Umayyad army broke on the banks of the Great Zab, and ninety years of Umayyad rule began to come apart in a matter of months. Part 3 of The Abbasid Revolution follows what victory actually looked like once the fighting stopped.

The revolution had made its move early, proclaiming Abu al-Abbas as the first Abbasid khalifa in the mosque at Kufa before the decisive battle had even been fought. He gave himself the name al-Saffah, a word Muslims have argued over for twelve hundred years, meaning either the generous one or the blood-shedder. By the end of that summer, only one of those readings still needed explaining. This episode traces the hunt for the defeated dynasty across Syria, the banquet on the river Abi Futrus where Umayyad princes were invited to safety and killed under their host's own guarantee, the opening of the Umayyad graves, and the flight and death of the last khalifa, Marwan, run to ground in an Egyptian village that August.

Against all of that runs a second story. One Umayyad prince, a grandson of the khalifa Hisham, was about nineteen when the nets closed. Abd al-Rahman ibn Muawiya swam a river as his brother was killed on the bank behind him, crossed three thousand miles of hostile country over five years, and reached al-Andalus, where he rebuilt his family's fallen house in Cordoba and founded a line that would outlast the men who thought they had erased it. Even the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur is said to have called him the Falcon of Quraysh, the greatest of them all. And behind both stories waits a third and darker one, the shadow beginning to fall on Abu Muslim al-Khurasani, the man who built the whole revolution and would be devoured by it.

This is an episode about the gap between a promise and what a cause becomes once it no longer needs to persuade anyone. It is about the mawali, the converts the revolution was supposedly for, and what they actually gained. And it is about homesickness, and a single palm tree in a garden in Spain.

Sources include al-Tabari's history, Ibn Kathir's al-Bidaya wa'l-Nihaya, al-Masudi's Muruj al-Dhahab, Ibn al-Athir, the Akhbar Majmua, and al-Maqqari, alongside modern historians of the early Abbasid period. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the House of the Prophet are referenced throughout.

Content Warning: this episode describes political violence in graphic terms, including a massacre of prisoners under a promise of safety and the desecration of the dead.

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