al-Hajjaj ibn Yūsuf
Al-Hajjaj ibn Yūsuf (الحجاج بن يوسف, DMG al-Ḥaǧǧāǧ ibn Yūsuf * 661 ; † June 14, 714 ) was an important general and one of the most influential political figures in the Umayyad Empire . In 692 he defeated ʿAbdallāh ibn az-Zubair , the most important opponent of the Umayyad caliphate, from 694 until his death he served the caliphs ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān and al-Walid I as governor in Iraq , from 697 he was also governor of Khorasan and Sistan and thus quasi ruler over the entire eastern part of the empire.
Ascent
Al-Hajjaj came from the Arab tribe of the Thaqīf and initially worked as a teacher in Taif . Little is known from the early years of his life: he appears to have participated in the battles in the Harra of Medina in 682 and in ar-Rabadha in 684, but not to have distinguished himself.
The turning point came when al-Hajjaj was transferred from Taif to Damascus , the then capital of the Umayyad Empire , during the first years of the rule of ʿAbd al-Malik . He served under Aba Zura Rauh ibn Zinbāʿ al-Judhamī in the police ( šurta ) of the caliph. He caught the attention of the Umayyad ʿAbd al-Malik because he very quickly succeeded in restoring discipline among the rebellious forces with which the caliph went to Iraq against the rebel Musʿab ibn az-Zubair . With the drastic means with which he carried out this task, he would later become famous and infamous.
Fight against the Zubairids and governors in the Hijaz
In the campaign against Musʿab ibn az-Zubair, al-Hajjaj seems to have led the rearguard. After the victory over Musʿab in Maskin near Dujail in 72/691, he went out on the orders of the Caliph of Kufa at the head of about 2000 Syrian troops against ʿAbdallāh ibn az-Zubair , the caliph of Mecca . He advanced without resistance to his birthplace Taif , which he captured without a fight and used as a base. The caliph had initially instructed him to negotiate with ʿAbdallāh ibn az-Zubair and to assure him of impunity if he surrendered. Should the fighting continue, the city of Mecca should be besieged, but under no circumstances should there be any bloody conflict immediately in the holy city. Negotiations failed and al-Hajjaj lost patience. He sent a courier to ʿAbd al-Malik with the request for reinforcements and permission to take the city of Mecca by force. He received approval and then began to bombard the holy city from Mount Abū Qubais with stone catapults.
The bombardment continued even during the pilgrimage month. Full of anger against Ibn az-Zubair and his followers, al-Hajjaj had no qualms about having the pilgrims present there and even the Kaaba shot at. When a sudden storm came up, his soldiers feared God's punishment. Al-Hajjaj, however, interpreted this as a divine sign that victory would be imminent.
During the siege, which lasted more than seven months, nearly 10,000 men, including two of Ibn az-Zubair's sons, defected to al-Hajjaj. The counter-caliph was killed with a few loyal followers, including his youngest son, during the battle for the Kaaba ( Jumada I 73 / October 692). Al-Hajjaj's siege resulted in the deaths of thousands of Mecca residents.
After taking the city, al-Hajjaj remained governor of Mecca. In May 693 ʿAbd al-Malik appointed him additionally as governor of Medina. However, he stayed only a month there and then made a umra -Wallfahrt to Mecca. On this occasion, he reversed autenAbdallāh ibn az-Zubair's modifications to the Kaaba. After his return to Medina, his harshness and arbitrariness created an atmosphere of terror there. He treated the companions of the Prophets with contempt and hung lead seals around their necks to humiliate them. In the spring of 694, al-Hajjaj acted as commander of the pilgrim caravan for the Hajj .
Governor in Iraq
Discipline the troops and fight against the Kharijites
In 694 al-Hajjaj was sent to Iraq as governor; he probably arrived in Kufa in October / November of that year. As soon as he moved into the city, he made it clear in a speech that he was ready to use violence against all opponents of his policy: "I see that heads have ripe and that their harvest is near. And I see the blood between the turbans and the beards. "
After a short time he moved on to Basra in order to mobilize the Arab troops there for a campaign against the Azraqites , a militant faction of the Kharijites . However, there was great dissatisfaction within the Arab troops because al-Hajjaj had reduced the wages approved by ʿAbd al-Malik. A group of fighters, led by ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Jārūd, revolted when al-Hajjāj did not accept these demands. Only after al-Hajjaj Ibn al-Jārūd and his followers had defeated Rustaqubādh, the later ʿAskar Mukram, the campaign against the Azraqites could be started.
Al-Muhallab ibn Abi Sufra and Ibn Michnaf, who led the Arab troops, were able to drive the Azraqites out of the city of Rāmhurmuz in the winter of 694/95 . But it took almost two years before the Azraqites were completely destroyed. In 696, another Kharijite leader, Shabīb ibn Yazīd, advanced from Mosul into Iraq. Only with the help of additional Syrian troops, which al-Hajjaj requested from the caliph, he was able to defeat Shabīb in the spring of 697 on the Dujail River in Khuzestan . For his success against the Kharijites, al-Hajjaj was also appointed governor of the provinces of Khorasan and Sistan in 697 .
Policy towards the Mawālī
In order to escape the taxes that the Arab conquerors had imposed on the local population, many residents of the Sawād, the fertile land in Iraq, converted to Islam, because the conversion had a tax-exempt effect. These non-Arab converts had left their country, emigrated to Arab cities and joined Arab tribes as mawālī ("clients"). Some of these Mawālī reached high offices under al-Hajjaj such as Sālih ibn ʿAbd ar-Rahmān, who acted as his finance minister.
Since the Mawālī were denied full social equality with their patrons, especially with regard to state pensions, they represented an element of unrest in the state. Many of them sympathized with the Kharijites and Shiites . In order to eliminate the political danger they pose, al-Hajjaj banned them from the cities and forced them to resettle in the villages. In order to prevent a decline in state revenues, he also re- imposed the jizya on them, illegally equating them with non-Muslims. He also collected the property tax ( ḫarāǧ ) from them .
Social polarization
Through his strict and sometimes cruel rule, al-Hajjaj turned many people against him in Iraq. For example, his able governor in al-Madāʾin , al-Mutarrif ibn al-Mughīra, who was known for his sincerity and loyalty, withdrew from him in 696 after speaking with emissaries of Shabīb's similarities between his own political views and that of the Kharijites had discovered. Expecting that al-Hajjaj would punish him for his contacts with the Kharijites anyway, al-Mutarrif left the city, moved with his troops towards Iran and occupied the cities of Qom and Kashan . It took a whole army to bring down his troops.
Tensions also increased because al-Hajjaj tried to break the power of the Arab tribal leaders in Kufa and Basra and rigorously persecuted those who did not submit to him. Also, al-Hajjaj mocked popular in Kufa Koran reading of Abdullah ibn Masud and threatened the population of the city with a massacre if they did not stop reciting the Koran after his reading.
In addition, the rule of al-Hajjaj's brother Muhammad ibn Yusuf, whom ʿAbd al-Malik had appointed governor in Yemen, was extremely unpopular. Like al-Hajjaj, he was notorious for his cruelty and arbitrary taxes. The Kufic prosopographer Abū l-Hasan al-ʿIdschlī (st. 875) narrates in his work on the trustworthy traders, according to which Muhammad once called the Yemeni pious Hudschr al-Madarī and commissioned him on behalf of his brother to publicly öffentlichAlī ibn To curse Abī Tālib . However, the man duped the governor by having him call the people together and then shouting in front of the assembled crowd: "Muhammad ibn Yūsuf has ordered me to curse ʿAlī ibn Abī Tālib. So you curse him, God curse him!".
The revolt of Ibn al-Ash Aath
The pent-up anger against al-Hajjaj broke out in the rebellion of Ibn al-Ashʿath. ʿAbd ar-Rahmān ibn Muhammad Ibn al-Aschʿath was the grandson of the Kinditic tribal king al-Aschʿath ibn Qais . In 699 al-Hajjaj sent him to the east at the head of a large army to repel attacks from the Kabul area on Sistan. Ibn al-Ashʿath was at first loyal to al-Hajjaj and carried out all his orders. After conquering the area of Kabul, he retired to Sistan in the winter of 699/700. Al-Hajjaj, however, expressed his displeasure with the delay in letters. Thereupon Ibn al-Ashʿath and his officers, who were tired of the harsh demeanor of al-Hajjaj and the eternal warfare, dismissed him. With an army estimated at 100,000 men, they moved to Iraq and occupied Kufa and Basra there.
Many respected personalities also joined the uprising, such as a son of the Prophet's companion Anas ibn Mālik . The historian Chalīfa ibn Chaiyāt (d. 854) gives a list of a total of 54 Koran readers ( Qurrā teil ) who took part in this uprising. Saʿīd ibn Jubair took a leading role in mobilizing the readers of the Koran. He was a student of ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbbās and belonged to the Mawālī. During the reign of Ibn al-Ashʿath in Iraq, he was responsible for collecting the zakāt .
Al-Hajjaj, who had evaded into the area around Basra, was forced to call for help from Syrian troops. ʿAbd al-Malik, who sent two of his sons to Iraq at the head of an army, initially initiated negotiations with Ibn al-Ashʿath and offered him the dismissal of the hated al-Hajjaj. However, after Ibn al-Ashʿath had stubbornly rejected these attempts at reconciliation, the Syrians attacked his troops and prepared him a crushing defeat at Dair al-Jamādschim in 701. Many of the Koran readers were executed, other personalities such as Saʿīd ibn Jubair and al-Shabī fled to the holy district of Mecca and Khorasan . Ibn al-Ashʿath himself fled to the east and took his own life three years later when he was to be handed over to al-Hajjaj.
Since many Mawālī had also participated in the uprising, al-Hajjaj tried to avert the political and military danger they posed by keeping them out of the cities and relocating them to remote areas. To prevent them from returning to the cities, the names of their villages were burned on their hands. In this context, al-Hajajaj said that the Mawālī are "peasant louts" ( ulūǧ ) and should therefore stay in their villages.
Al-Hajjaj as ruler of the eastern part of the empire
702 put al-Hajjaj in the middle between Kufa and Basra as his new residence, the fortress city Wāsiṭ ("the middle one"). Here he withdrew with his Syrian troops. Al-Hajjaj also made an outstanding contribution to promoting agriculture in Iraq. The new caliph al-Walid I (705–715) allowed al-Hajjaj to rule freely in the east of the empire. So he was able to drive the conquests there on his own. Among his generals was the young Muhammad ibn al-Qasim (* 695; † 715), who moved to Sindh in India (now Pakistan) in 711 and conquered the Indus Valley. Qutaiba ibn Muslim was sent to Transoxania in 712 to conquer it. In doing so, he even penetrated the outskirts of China and obtained jizya (tribute payments) from the Chinese emperor.
As part of Abd al-Malik's coin reform, al-Hajjaj set up his own mint in Kufa, where he had coins minted with Pahlawi and Arabic inscriptions. Before that, all important administrative texts and documents were written down by Persian scribes in Middle Persian and in Pahlavi script.
The implementation of the uthmanic text of the Koran
In 703, al-Hajjaj took an initiative to promote the implementation of the Koran text prepared by Uthman ibn Affan . So that all ambiguities were eliminated, the letters with a similar appearance were given diacritical points from now on. In this way he made a significant contribution to the further development of the Arabic script . The head of the commission was al-Hasan al-Basri . A tradition by Ibn Abī Dāwūd in his "Book of Koran Codes" ( Kitāb al-Maṣāḥif ) says that al-Hajjāj changed eleven passages in ʿUthmān's Koran code ( muṣḥaf ). Omar Hamdan has shown that the changes mentioned were of an orthographical nature and in fact represented changes to the Koran code of ʿAbdallāh ibn Masʿūd. After the project work was completed, al-Hajjaj hired a group of three men to inspect all Koran codes that were in the people's possession and to tear up any code that deviated from the Uthmanic text. In compensation, the owner received 60 dirhams.
The pious milieus thus remained alienated from al-Hajjaj. This also contributed to the fact that he had 712 Saʿīd ibn Jubair, who fled to Mecca after the uprising of Ibn al-Aschʿath, arrested by the local governor Chālid al-Qasrī and brought to Iraq for execution. There are a number of legends about his questioning by al-Hajjaj before his execution.
death
Al-Hajjaj died in Wasit , Iraq, in 714 . He is said to have only owned his sword as personal property. A year later, the caliph al-Walid also died; and his brother Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik became the new caliph. Sulayman doubted the loyalty of al-Hajjaj's generals. He had all the generals arrested and tortured to death. The scholar al-Mubarrad (d. 898) reports that Sulayman also issued a general amnesty for all the people whom al-Hajjaj had imprisoned. 80,000 people were released in one day.
literature
- A. Dietrich: Art. "Al-Ḥadjdjādj b. Yūsuf" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition Vol. III, pp. 39b-43a.
- Omar Hamdan: Studies on the canonization of the Koran text. Al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrīs contributions to the history of the Koran . Wiesbaden 2006.
- Jean Périer: Vie d'al-Hadjdjâdj Ibn Yousof (41-95 de l'hégire = 661 - 714 de J.-C.) d'après les sources arabes . Paris 1904. Digitized
- Redwan Sayed: The revolt of Ibn al-Ašʿaṯ and the Koran readers. A contribution to the religious and social history of the early Umayyad period . Freiburg / Br. 1977. Digitized
- At-Tabarī : The history of al-Ṭabarī . Vol. 22: The Marwānid restoration . Translated and annotated by Everett Rowson. Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press 1989.
- Julius Wellhausen : The Arab Empire and its fall. Reimer, Berlin, 1902.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Martin Hinds: An early Islamic Family from Oman: al-ʿAwtabī's Account of the Muhallabids . Manchester, Univ. of Manchester, 1991. p. 63.
- ↑ See Dietrich 40a.
- ↑ Cf. at-Tabarī 1.
- ↑ Cf. at-Tabarī 11.
- ↑ See Rowson's explanations on the text of at-Tabarī 22.
- ↑ Quoted from at-Tabarī 13.
- ↑ Cf. at-Tabarī 23f.
- ↑ Cf. at-Tabarī 25f.
- ↑ See Dietrich 40b.
- ↑ See Daniel C. Dennett, Jr .: Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam . Harvard Univ. Pr. U. a., Cambridge, Mass. u. a. 1950. Reprint Idarah-i Adabyat-i Delli, Delhi, 2000. pp. 4, 39.
- ↑ See Sayed 341.
- ↑ See Dennett 4, 38–41.
- ↑ See Périer 148–153.
- ↑ See Sayed 135.
- ↑ See Hamdan 138.
- ↑ See Périer 276f.
- ↑ Cf. Ahmad ibn ʿAbdallāh al-ʿIǧlī: Tārīḫ aṯ-ṯiqāt bi-tartīb [...] al-Haiṯamī wa-taḍmīnāt Ibn Ḥaǧar al-ʿAsqalānī . Ed. ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī Qalʿaǧī. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿilmīya 1984. p. 110.
- ↑ It is reproduced in Sayed 350–363.
- ↑ See Sayed 352f.
- ↑ See H. Motzki: Art. "Saʿīd ibn Djubayr" in Encyclopaedia of Islam . Second edition. Vol. XII, pp. 697-698.
- ↑ See Steven C. Judd: Religious Scholars and the Umayyads. Piety-minded supporters of the Marwānid caliphate . Routledge, Abingdon 2014. p. 42.
- ↑ Quoted in al-Mubarrad: al-Kāmil . Ed. Muḥmmad Abu l-Faḍl Ibrāhīm. 4 vol. Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-ʿArabī approx. 1985. Vol. II, p. 97. Cf. also Wellhausen 153.
- ↑ M. Ali Kettani: Muslim minorities in the world today , Mansell 1986, p 84
- ↑ See Hamdan 141.
- ↑ See Hamdan 166.
- ↑ See Hamdan 170.
- ↑ Cf. Motzki 697.
- ↑ Cf. al-Mubarrad: al-Kāmil . Ed. Muḥmmad Abu l-Faḍl Ibrāhīm. 4 vol. Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-ʿArabī approx. 1985. Vol. II, p. 97.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hajjaj ibn Yūsuf, al- |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Al-Hajjaj (English spelling) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Umayyad governor in Iraq (694-714) |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 661 |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 14, 714 |