become so submerged into the cosmopolitan empire that they were
indistinguishable from their neighbors.”
This dominant Arab nationalism was that of the Umayyad (661-750 CE),
Islam's first political dynasty which was a black Arab dynasty. It was toppled in
750 by what has been called, erroneously, the "Abbasid revolution.
It is true that the Banu 'Abbas, after which the second dynasty took its name,
was a black Arab tribal family like its rival the Banu Umayya.
But as Saleh Saeed Agha has clearly demonstrated, the "revolution which
toppled the Umayyad was neither Arab nor 'Abbasid, it was Persian.’’
He further goes on to say;
“the Abbasid revolution in 750 was, to a large extent, the final revolt of the non'Arab Muslims against the 'Arab and their taking power. This revolt was
dominated by the Iranian 'ajam (non-Arabs), and the outcome was the
establishment of at least formal equality between the two groups.”
The Persians, who were a collection of very proud Indo-Aryan groups, resented
the black Arabs who conquered their land in 651 CE and brought to a close
their eleven-hundred-year-old civilization. These resentful Persian masses were
the mainstay of the revolution, whose conversion to Islam, according to Agha,
was only, a revolutionary expedient.
The 'Abbasid or better ‘Persian’ Revolution was much more than a political
revolution, but a cultural, ideological and spiritual one as well
As Asma Afsaruddin (a Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Cultures at Indiana University in Bloomington ) observes:
“The third generation of Muslims, called the 'Successors to the Successors' (atba'
al-tabi'in) inherited a changed world after the 'Abbasid revolution ... Important
ideological, administrative, cultural, political, and socio-economic developments
and changes were ushered in after the overthrow of the Umayyad in 750 ...The
group that benefitted the most from this sea change were the Persians, a
significant number of whom assumed important official positions in various
'Abbasid administrations and who wielded significant political as well as
cultural influence