The Abbasid Revolution (part 4): The Faceless Man Must Die

This is the fourth and final part of the story of the Abbasid Revolution, and it begins where a triumph is supposed to end. In January of 750, the Abbasid armies broke the last Umayyad field force at the Great Zab, and the most powerful dynasty on earth began to fall. What happened next was not a victory parade. It was a reckoning, and it fell on enemies and friends alike.

The episode follows the winners past the moment of victory. It tracks the last Umayyad khalifa, Marwan, fleeing the length of his own empire to a lonely death in Egypt, and it tells the darkest scene in the whole story, the killing of the Umayyad notables at a banquet by the river Abu Futrus, recorded by al-Mas'udi in a detail no listener forgets. It follows the one Umayyad who got away, the young prince Abd al-Rahman, across a continent to found a new state in Spain, the man a rival khalifa would call the Falcon of Quraysh.

And it arrives, finally, at the hero of the revolution himself. Abu Muslim al-Khurasani was the faceless genius who welded the empire's angriest province into the movement that won the war. His reward, from the dynasty he raised, was a summons to court and a signal, a clap of two hands, and a death behind a curtain. This is the story of why a new regime so often destroys the very people who built it, and of the promise, a member of the House of the Prophet (peace be upon him) pleasing to everyone, that was kept to the letter and broken in the spirit, along with the founding of a round city on the Tigris called Baghdad.

The account draws on the classical Islamic sources, al-Tabari, al-Mas'udi, al-Baladhuri, and Ibn Kathir, alongside modern historians of the period, to hold to what the record actually says, including where the record disagrees with itself.

Content Warning: this episode describes graphic historical violence, including a massacre of prisoners under a false promise of safety, an execution, and the desecration of the dead.

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