The remaining six...

The remaining six, three of whom were sons of slave mothers, were incompetent, some dissolute if not degenerate. The brother-successor of al-Walid was more interested in drinking, hunting, and listening to song and music than in conducting state affairs. His son excelled the father. He spent more time in his pleasure houses in the desert, where their ruins are still visible, than in the capital.

He is said to have indulged himself in swimming in a pool of wine and gulping enough of it to lower its surface. More than an incorrigible libertine, this caliph once committed an act of unusual sacrilege; making a target of Koran copy for the arrows of his bow.

Clearly, the sudden increase of wealth, the super-abundance of slaves and concubines, the multiplied facilities for indulgence in luxury, and other characteristic vices of an affluent urban civilization - against which sons of the desert had developed no measure of immunity - were beginning to sap Arab vitality. (Capital Cities of Arab Islam, pp. 78-79, 1973) Arnold J. Toynbee One of the greatest ironies of all history is the fate of the house that Mohammed built. Mohammed had a great fall.

The unsuccessful prophet succumbed to the temptation to succeed as a statesman and a strategist. Yet, in seeking and winning worldly success in Medina, Mohammed was unwittingly working for his adversaries in Mecca. When it came to a competition in Realpolitik, the merchant princes of Mecca were more than a match for their queer fellow-townsman, and far more than a match for Mohammed's gallant but incompetent cousin and son-in-law, Ali.

After Mohammed had successfully cut Mecca's trade route to Syria, the Meccans capitulated on the easy terms that the sentimental Meccan exile offered them; but in outwardly submitting to Mohammed and to Islam, the Beni Umayya had their tongues in their cheeks. They had no intention of being permanently deposed from power.

Now that they had failed first to suppress Islam and then to repel it, their only alternative was to run away with it after capturing it by the stratagem of a nominal conversion. They bided their time till in Ali they found their victim and in Muawiya their man of destiny. Muawiya was one of the greatest masters, known to history, of the artful, patient type of statesmanship. He ranks with Augustus, Philip of Macedon, Liu Pang, and Cavour. Poor Ali was utterly outmaneuvered by him.