IN 750, when the first Abbasid caliph ordered a wholesale massacre of the family that had ruled before him, hardly any of the Omayyads came out alive. One who did was a twenty-year-old youth named Abd-al-Rahman, a grandson of the tenth Omayyad caliph. Fleeing from a Bedouin camp on the Euphrates, he wandered in disguise through Palestine, Egypt and North Africa. Again and again he barely escaped being discovered and seized by Abbasid spies. His desperate flight lasted, altogether, five years. Finally he came to the town of Ceuta, on the northwest coast of Africa, where some Berber chieftains, who were uncles of his on his mother’s side, gave him shelter.
The young man sent word across the Strait of Gibraltar to the chiefs of the Moslem divisions in southern Spain. Being Syrians, and therefore loyal to the Omayyads, the officers were overjoyed. They sent a ship to fetch him. Soon, he commanded a sizable army of Arabs and Berbers. When he led his soldiers through the countryside, the cities opened .their gates to him, one after another. The worried Abbasid governor tried to bribe him with rich presents‚ but he refused them. In May, 756, he captured the Spanish capital, Cordova. Within a few years be held all but the northern part of the Spanish peninsula.
CONQUEST OF SPAIN
Not long after this, the new Omayyad regime successfully defied the two most powerful rulers in the world. In 763, a governor of Spain appointed by al-Mansur was assassinated on Abd-al-Rahman’s orders. Abd-al-Rahman had the governor’s head sent to the caliph wrapped in a black Abbasid flag. Al-Mansur was beside himself with rage‚ but he was too busy fighting his enemies at home to answer the insult with force. In 778, Abd-al-Rahman and his Arab-Berber army defeated an army of Franks and Arab allies led by Harun’s friend Charlemagne, and sent it hurrying back across the Pyrenees Mountains into France.
Thus‚ only a few years after the family had been almost completely wiped out, the Omayyads returned to power as the rulers of Western Islam. Abd-al-Rahman and his successors used the title of amir, or prince. The ablest member of the dynasty was Abd-al-Rahman III, who in 929 had himself proclaimed caliph. Under him and the caliphs who followed, Spain was the leading country in European and North African affairs. Its capital, Cordova, was the wealthiest and most learned city in Europe and was almost as magnificent as Baghdad or Constantinople.
ISLAM DIVIDED
After the last strong Omayyad died in 1002, the caliphate’s authority weakened. A four-way struggle for power broke out among Arabs, Berbers‚ Spaniards and the Slavs who had originally been brought from eastern Europe as slaves. In 1031, the citizens of Cordova, disgusted with the constant fighting‚ did away with the caliphate altogether. In its place rose a number of small Moslem states. For centuries these states warred among themselves, only occasionally combining against the Christian states in the north of the peninsula. Little by little, the Christian states gained the upper hand, especially after 1469, when the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon to Queen Isabella of Castile united their two kingdoms. The doom of Moslem power in Spain came in 1492, the same year that Ferdinand and Isabella sent Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic on his historic voyage of discovery. That year, Ferdinand and Isabella captured Granada, in the south, the last Moslem stronghold in southwest Europe. Now Spain was entirely Christian.
For several hundred years after 755, Islam was divided. Omayyads and their successors held Spain, while Abbasids ruled, strongly at first and later weakly, in the east. Neither Caliphate controlled the lands between. These lands stretched across North Africa. From east to west –that is, in the order of their conquest by the Arabs — they were Egypt, Ifriqiyah and the Maghreb. Ifriqiyah took in modern Libya and Tunisia; its name was the Arabic form of the Latin word Africa, which the Romans used to describe the northern part of the continent only. Maghreb means “land where the sun sets” and the Maghreb included modern Algeria and Morocco.
From the middle of the eighth century on, a number of dynasties governed these lands. One dynasty, the Aghlabids of Ifriqiyah, conquered the Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Malta for Islam. Then, in 909, the Aghlabids were overthrown and a man named Ubaydullah was set up as caliph. Ubaydullah claimed to be a descendant of Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed and wife of Ali. For this reason his dynasty was called the Fatimid dynasty and was Shiite by religion. In 914, Ubaydullah took Alexandria and two years later laid waste the delta of the River Nile. The caliphs who followed him on the throne raided the coasts of Italy, France and Spain, and pushed westward across the Maghreb.
In 969, a Fatimid general conquered Egypt and built a new city, which he named al-Qahirah. Al-Qahirah, known outside the Moslem world as Cairo, became the Fatimids’ capital. For a time, Fatimid power reached all the way from the Atlantic to western Arabia, including Mecca, Medina and Yemen. The Shiite caliphate of Cairo completely outshone the Sunnite caliphate of Baghdad. To keep themselves in luxury, the Fatimid caliphs taxed their subjects without mercy. The people became poor and hungry. Hundreds of thousands died of plague and famine and the state steadily weakened. Finally, in 1171, the last Fatimid caliph was forced from his throne by Saladin, the famous Moslem hero of the holy wars against the Christians known in Europe as the Crusades.
Saladin thus restored the Sunnite creed to Egypt. His family name was Ayyub and his dynasty, the Ayyubids, was to rule until 1250, when it gave way to a strange dynasty of slaves, the Mamelukes.
