al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf al-Thaqafi

الحجاج بن يوسف الثقفي

Abd al-Malik's governor ¹. He was army commander at the battle of Dayr al-Jamajim, the battle with Ibn al-Ash'ath, in which Ibn al-Ash'ath was routed ^{2 3}. Al-Tabari reports that when a captive said the strife had struck both the righteous and the wicked, he answered that it had struck the wicked and spared the righteous ⁴. When Abd al-Malik wrote asking him to describe the strife, he replied that strife is kindled by secret talk, reaped by complaint and produced by sermons ⁵. In his famous address on taking over Iraq he unveiled his face and said: 'By God, I see glancing eyes, stretched necks and heads ripe for picking, and I am the one who will pick them; it is as though I see blood welling between turbans and beards. The Commander of the Faithful has emptied his quiver, and found me its most bitter in taste, its sharpest in point and its strongest shaft.' He said: 'O people of Iraq, people of discord, hypocrisy and bad character! I will strip you as a stick is stripped, bind you as the salama is bound, beat you as stray camels are beaten, and strike you as the flint is struck.' When the Commander of the Faithful's letter of greeting reached them and they did not answer, he said: 'This is the discipline of the son of Sumayya' ⁶. Umayr ibn Dabi' was killed so that al-Muhallab's dispatch against the Azariqa would stand, and he ordered two bridges over the Euphrates for their going out ⁷. He wrote to Abd al-Malik about Ibn al-Ash'ath, 'Help, O God!', and was sent armies; the reply came, 'At your service, at your service!' ⁸. When Ibn al-Ash'ath's head was brought to him, he mounted the pulpit of Kufa and said: 'Satan has lodged among you and filled the place with schism, discord and hypocrisy; he settled, nested and laid eggs, which hatched, and you have taken him as a guide to follow' ⁹. Ibn al-Qarya was killed in 82 for going out with Ibn al-Ash'ath and drafting letters for him, and he never showed his boon companions the gladness of the day Layla al-Akhyaliyya came in to him ¹⁰. When he went to perform the pilgrimage he preached: 'O people of Iraq, I have set Muhammad over you, and my wish is to turn away from you; I have charged him concerning you the opposite of the charge concerning the Ansar, for he was charged to accept their good-doers and overlook their wrongdoers, whereas I have charged him not to accept your good-doers nor overlook your wrongdoers' ¹¹. He imprisoned al-Ghadban ibn al-Qab'thari for three years; then, when Abd al-Malik's letter asked for descriptions of slave-girls, he summoned him, questioned him and released him after the affair of the Green Dome at Wasit ¹². He died in 95 at Wasit aged fifty-four, after a governorship of twenty years. The number of those he executed in cold blood, apart from those who fell in his wars, was counted at one hundred and twenty thousand; at his death fifty thousand men and thirty thousand women were in his prisons, sixteen thousand of them stripped, and the prison had no shelter from sun or rain. Once, riding out to Friday prayer, he heard the clamour of the prisoners and told them to keep silent and not speak; it is said that he died that same Friday ¹³. Al-Mas'udi relates an anecdote of his dealings with the people of Syria: he favoured men of Iraq whom he found more capable than his Syrian intimates, and the Syrians spoke against them. He pushed on with them into the desert until a line of camels came into view; he sent a Syrian to identify them, who came back saying, 'Camels; I cannot tell whether they are loaded.' He had sent an Iraqi on the same errand after him, who came back counting thirty of them carrying oil, leaving such-and-such a place for such-and-such a place, belonging to a man named so-and-so. He turned to the Syrians and said: 'Do I grieve for Amr? Even if he died or went away, few would sing your song as he does, O Amr.' It was also said, in the same sense, that the worst of two envoys is the one whose sender must send him back again, and that the two are alike ¹⁴. The cited book reports that Abd al-Malik charged al-Walid on his deathbed to honour al-Hajjaj, because he had pacified the lands for him, subdued his enemies and scattered the Kharijites, and that al-Hajjaj built Wasit as a military base midway between al-Ahwaz, Basra and Kufa ¹⁵. The same book reports that al-Walid put al-Hajjaj in charge of the pilgrimage in 92 AH; Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz wrote asking al-Walid to spare him Hajjaj's passage through Medina, and al-Walid granted this and ordered him to withdraw from Medina ¹⁶.