His enormous powers of endurance earned him the nickname of al-Himar...

His enormous powers of endurance earned him the nickname of al-Himar, the ass, not as an insult but as an acknowledgement of his great physical strength. His life was simple and spent mostly with his soldiers. Though quite advanced in age - he was over sixty - he still possessed the physical powers found rarely in soldiers of his age. However, as Amir Ali rightly observes, much more than mere soldiets qualities were required to save the Ommeyad power from destruction.

His obstinacy, his bad temper, and above all, his hatred for the Yemenites paved his downfall. No sooner had he taken over the Caliphate, then they were uprisings in Hems and Palestine. In Iraq, the Kharijis were rebelling against the government.

Rather than focus on fixing the damages done by his predecessors, Merwan had to spend his time and energy putting down rebellions at, Hems, Palestine, Iraq and Hijaz, thereby not only arousing more hatred in the hearts of people against the Ummayed regime, but also weakening his abilities to deal with "the enemies of the State" in the garb of the Abbasides.

In the following chapter, we shall look in some details those people or a group of people who constituted "the enemies of the state" and the steps that they took to benefit out of the state of anarchy that had discended upon the I Smmayde rulership at the time when Merwan al Himar had come to power. It was at this time that in Khurasan there was an open war declared in the name of "AHLUl -BAY'P to replace the Ummayade regime.

This outcry was raised by a man by the name of Abu Muslim, who was none other than a military agent of Ibrahim Bin Muhammad Bin Ali Bin Ibne Abbas. We shall learn more about their personalities in chapter 4. The main motto of Abu Muslim was that the Ummayades were oppressors and usurpers.

The right to rule belonged to "Ahlul Bayt,'" the immediate family of the Prophet Not only were the Ummayades usurpers, they were heinous as shown by the way they spilled the blood of the grandchildren of the Prophet. They cited the examples of the martyrs of Kerbala and more recent murders of Zaid Bin AH and his son Yahya. People were urged to rise and march to overthrow the usurpers.

To win the confidence of the people, the dress code used by Abu Muslim was that used to mourn the martyrs - black.