Abu Muslim and the Abbasid Revolution

The Abbasid revolution overthrew the Umayyad Caliphate in 747–750, and it began in Iran. Its leader in the field was Abu Muslim, a man of obscure, probably Iranian origin, who raised the black banners of the movement near Merv in Khorasan in June 747 and led the army that swept west and brought the Abbasid family to power in Iraq.

The secret mission for the Prophet’s family

By the 740s many Muslims believed that the caliphate belonged by right to the family of the Prophet rather than to the Umayyads. One group, later called the Hashimiyya, worked in secret for a leader from that family whose name would be revealed only after victory. Its slogan, al-rida min Al Muhammad, “the one who is acceptable from the family of Muhammad”, was deliberately vague and attracted supporters of the descendants of Ali as well as others. The movement’s real leaders were the descendants of the Prophet’s uncle al-Abbas, who lived quietly at Humayma in what is now Jordan.

The organisers chose Khorasan as the place to rise. The province was far from Damascus, full of Arab settlers who resented Syrian domination and of Iranian converts angered by unequal taxes, as described on Iran under the Umayyads and the mawali and the Shu’ubiyya. Agents had been at work there for years.

Who was Abu Muslim

Little is certain about Abu Muslim’s early life. The sources give him different names and origins: some make him a freedman or client of Iranian background from the region of Isfahan or Kufa, while later Persian legend gave him a noble Iranian ancestry. The name Abu Muslim al-Khorasani was itself adopted for the mission. What is clear is that around 745 the Abbasid leader Ibrahim, called the Imam, sent him to Khorasan as his personal representative, and that he proved a brilliant organiser.

The black banners

1. June 747 Abu Muslim raises the black banners at a village near Merv
2. Early 748 Merv falls; the Umayyad governor Nasr ibn Sayyar flees west and dies later that year
3. 748–749 Qahtaba ibn Shabib defeats Umayyad armies in Khorasan, at Gorgan and at Nahavand
4. Summer 749 Qahtaba drowns crossing the Euphrates; his son al-Hasan takes Kufa
5. Late 749 Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah proclaimed caliph in the mosque of Kufa
6. January 750 Marwan II defeated on the Great Zab river in northern Iraq

On 9 June 747, at a village in the Merv oasis, Abu Muslim’s followers raised black banners and wore black clothing, the colour that became the badge of the Abbasids. Supporters came in from the villages of the oasis. The Umayyad governor, Nasr ibn Sayyar, was trapped between the rebels and a feud between the Arab tribal factions, which Abu Muslim cleverly exploited. Merv fell early in 748. The army then marched west under Qahtaba ibn Shabib, an Arab commander, winning a string of battles across the Iranian plateau, including one at Nahavand, where the Arabs had defeated the Sasanians a century earlier.

When the army reached Iraq the leadership of the movement revealed its candidate. Ibrahim had been arrested and had died in Umayyad custody, so his brother Abu al-Abbas was proclaimed caliph at Kufa. The last Umayyad army was beaten on the Great Zab in January 750, and members of the Umayyad family were hunted down. One survivor, Abd al-Rahman, escaped to Spain.

A Persian revolution or a Muslim one

For a long time the revolution was seen as an Iranian revolt against Arab rule. Nineteenth-century scholars such as Gerlof van Vloten stressed the role of Iranian converts, and Iranian nationalist writing has often presented Abu Muslim as a hero who avenged the Sasanians. Arabic tradition also called his army “the people of Khorasan”, a phrase that could suggest a Persian army.

Modern research has complicated this picture. Studies of the names of the early revolutionaries, by historians such as Moshe Sharon and Saleh Said Agha, show that many of the leaders and a large part of the army were Arabs settled in Khorasan, and that Iranian converts were important but not the whole story. Elton Daniel and others see the revolution as a coalition of Khorasani Arabs and Iranians, with grievances about tax, status and distance from Syria, united by the religious appeal of the Prophet’s family. The new dynasty was still Arab, but it moved the centre of the caliphate east to Iraq and drew heavily on Persian officials and traditions.

Abu Muslim in power

Abu Muslim governed Khorasan for the new dynasty with great authority. He suppressed rivals and dissidents, among them the Zoroastrian reformer Behafarid, whose teaching the Zoroastrian priests themselves had denounced, as told on Zoroastrians after the Arab conquest. In 751 an army sent from his province defeated a Chinese Tang force at the river Talas in Central Asia. He also kept in contact with the Iranian princes of the Caspian, described on Tabaristan and the Dabuyids.

His power and popularity made the Abbasids uneasy. In 755 the caliph al-Mansur summoned him to his camp in Iraq and had him killed. His death set off a wave of revolts in Iran in his name, from Sunbadh in 755 to al-Muqanna in the 770s, told on the death of Abu Muslim and the Iranian revolts.

The legend of Abu Muslim

Abu Muslim lived on in popular memory far more vividly than in the chronicles. Some sects believed he had not died and would return. In later centuries the Persian Abu Moslem-nameh, a long popular romance, turned him into a champion of the Prophet’s family who fights the Umayyads in a series of adventures. Professional storytellers were still reciting these tales in the Safavid period. Historians treat them as evidence for his fame, not for his life.