Islam was not safe; it would be a
godly work to extirpate them from the earth. When the Abbasids had
occupied the throne, they pursued this policy to its logical conclusion.
But not content with having exterminated the hated rulers themselves,
they carried their hostility to a further point. The official history of
the Omayyads, as it has been handed down to us, is coloured by Abbasid
feeling to such an extent that we can scarcely distinguish the true from
the false. An example of this occurs at the outset in the assertion that
Moawiya deliberately refrained from marching to the help of Othman, and
indeed that it was with secret joy that he heard of the fatal result of
the plot. The facts seem to contradict this view. When, ten weeks before
the murder, some hundreds of men came to Medina from Egypt and Irak,
pretending that they were on their pilgrimage to Mecca, but wanted to
bring before the caliph their complaints against his vicegerents, nobody
could have the slightest suspicion that the life of the caliph was in
danger; indeed it was only during the few days that Othman was besieged
in his house that the danger became obvious. If the caliph then, as the
chroniclers tell, sent a message to Moawiya for help, his messenger
could not have accomplished half the journey to Damascus when the
catastrophe took place. There is no real reason to doubt that the
painful news fell on Moawiya unexpectedly, and that he, as mightiest
representative of the Omayyad house, regarded as his own the duty of
avenging the crime. He could not but view Ali in the light of an
accomplice, because if, as he protested, he did not abet the murderers,
yet he took them under his protection. An acknowledgment of Ali as
caliph by Moawiya before he had cleared himself from suspicion was
therefore quite impossible.

1. _The Reign of Moawiya._--Moawiya, son of the well-known Meccan chief
Abu Sofian, embraced Islam together with his father and his brother
Yazid, when the Prophet conquered Mecca, and was, like them, treated
with the greatest distinction. He was even chosen to be one of the
secretaries of Mahomet. When Abu Bekr sent his troops for the conquest
of Syria, Yazid, the eldest son of Abu Sofian, held one of the chief
commands, with Moawiya as his lieutenant. In the year 639 Omar named him
governor of Damascus and Palestine; Othman added to this province the
north of Syria and Mesopotamia. To him was committed the conduct of the
war against the