ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlī

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ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlī ( Arabic عبد الله بن علي; * 721 ; † 764 ) was a member of the Abbasid family who played an important role in the overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty in the middle of the 8th century and was later murdered by his nephew, the caliph al-Mansūr .

At the Battle of the Great Zāb in January 750, in which the Abbasids inflicted the crushing defeat on the last Umayyad caliph Marwan II , ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlī held the supreme command. He then pursued Marwān through Syria and Palestine, taking Damascus in between . During his stay in Palestine, he had 80 members of the Umayyad house executed at once. This led to the first anti-Abbasid uprising in Syria, which ʿAbdallāh himself suppressed in the year 750 at Marj Achram.

In the following years he worked for the first Abbasid caliph Abu l-Abbas as-Saffah as governor in Syria. In the spring of 754 Abū l-ʿAbbās commissioned him to lead a campaign against the Byzantine Empire, in which men from Syria, Khorasan , from the Jazīra and Mosul took part. After he had left with the army, the news of the death of the caliph reached him at Doliche . ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlī thereupon asked his soldiers to swear allegiance to him as the new caliph , claiming that as-Saffāh had promised to succeed to the throne to the person who would defeat Marwan II when the Abbasid seizure of power. Most of his fighters complied and paid homage to him. When ʿAbdallāh heard that the late caliph had appointed his nephew al-Mansūr as heir to the throne and that he had sent an army against him, headed by Abu Muslim , the powerful governor of Khorasan, he let a large number of Khorasans (the Arab Sources speak of 17,000) from his army, for fear that they would overflow to Abū Muslim. In November 754 ʿAbdallāh was defeated with his remaining army by Abū Muslim in Nisibis .

After the defeat, ʿAbdallāh fled to his brother Sulaimān, who was governor in Basra , and there he swore allegiance to the caliph in 755. After Sulaimān had been removed from the office of governor in 756, he handed his brother over to the caliph on the basis of a security promise ( amān ), but the caliph did not keep this security promise and had ʿAbdallāh thrown in prison. In 764, the caliph had his uncle murdered by placing him in a house that had previously been tampered with so that it collapsed on him a little later.

literature

  • Franz-Christoph Muth: The caliph al-Manṣūr in the beginning of his caliphate (136/754 to 145/762). Translated from the Arabic chronicle by aṭ-Ṭabarī and provided with historical and prosopographical notes (= Heidelberg orientalist studies. Vol. 8). Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a 1987, ISBN 3-8204-9966-0 , pp. 3–12 (also: Heidelberg, Universität, Dissertation, 1987).
  • Karl V. Zettersteen, Sabatino Moscati : ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAlī. In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition Vol. I, p. 43.
  • Jacob Lassner: Did the caliph Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣur murder his uncle ʿAbdallah b. "Ali and other problems within the ruling hous of the Abbasids. In: Myriam Rosen-Ayalon (Ed.): Studies in memory of Gaston Wiet. Institute of Asian and African Studies, Jerusalem 1977, pp. 69-99.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Muth: The caliph al-Manṣūr in the beginning of his caliphate (136/754 to 145/762). 1987, p. 4.
  2. ↑ Cf. Muth: The caliph al-Manṣūr in the beginning of his caliphate (136/754 to 145/762). 1987, p. 16.
  3. ↑ Cf. Muth: The caliph al-Manṣūr in the beginning of his caliphate (136/754 to 145/762). 1987, pp. 3-12.
  4. ↑ Cf. Muth: The caliph al-Manṣūr in the beginning of his caliphate (136/754 to 145/762). 1987, p. 38.
  5. ↑ Cf. Muth: The caliph al-Manṣūr in the beginning of his caliphate (136/754 to 145/762). 1987, pp. 42-44.
personal data
SURNAME ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlī
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Member of the Abbasid family
DATE OF BIRTH 721
DATE OF DEATH 764