Second Fitna

Start Date and End Date of the Second Fitna

Historians are divided on how to date the Second Fitna:

Historian Fred Donner dates the end of the civil war with Caliph Abd al-Malik's victory over al-Zubayr in 692:

Causes of the Second Fitna

There were three main causes of the Second Fitna, which we will explore in this section.

Unresolved issues from the First Fitna (656-661 C.E.)

The First Fitna broke out as there was no clear leader to take over the caliphate after the assassination of Caliph Uthman.

• Some, the forerunners of the Shias, believed that leadership should remain within the Prophet's family. They were particularly angry about the potential for the Quraysh Umayyads to become caliphs because this family had originally fought against Muhammad and only converted when Muhammad took their hometown of Mecca.

• Others, the forerunners of the Sunnis, thought that any faithful Muslim should be able to be elected caliph.

At the end of the First Fitna, Caliph Ali (the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law) was assassinated. Leadership would have passed straight to Ali's son, Hasan. However, Muawiya, who was governor of Syria, negotiated with Hasan that he would abdicate to allow Muawiya to become caliph in exchange for a large payment. Thus, leadership was removed from the descendants of Muhammad. Some Muslims were content to see this transfer of leadership, but others thought that leadership was forcibly removed from the rightful heir.

When Caliph Muawiya died, these tensions erupted once more. The contest about whether leadership should pass through the Umayyad family, or whether it should revert to Caliph Ali's descendants to keep leadership within the Prophet's family, was reborn.

Caliph Muawiya's succession policy to elect his son, Yazid, as his successor

This was an unprecedented move within the Islamic caliphate - previously, caliphs had always been chosen for either their closeness to the Prophet or because of their political and military merit.

This was perceived by a significant number of Muslims as a corruption of the community of faith into a self-serving monarchy that was more interested in political power than religious concerns.

Social and economic tensions within the Empire

One of the biggest issues the empire faced was the division between Arabs and non-Arabs. This created social issues when the Arab aristocracy treated non-Arabs badly. Grievances against Arabs grew into a full-scale political movement in the region of Kufa when a man called Mukhtar argued that the empire needed a Mahdi to solve this problem. Many non-Arabs backed Mukhtar's rebellion because they were so upset with the prevailing social system.

Period of the Second Fitna

This civil war was messy and complex, with lots of different claimants and factions with different goals. To simplify matters, this section starts with an overview of the main figures, before looking at a timeline of the period.

Fig. 2 - Map showing the different areas controlled by different factions in the civil war.

Key Figures

Below are the key figures of the Second Fitna.

Fig. 3 - Umayyad Family tree.

Second Fitna Timeline

Below shows a timeline of the events of the Second Fitna.

Winner of the Second Fitna: Caliph Abd al-Malik

Abd al-Malik was the most pious caliph that the Umayyad dynasty had yet seen. He spent time in Medina in his youth, and therefore his religious lifestyle caused many who had previously been critical of the Umayyads to respect and acknowledge him as their leader. Among Abd al-Malik's greatest achievements was the creation of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

One of the most influential things Abd al-Malik did as caliph was to centralise the Umayyad administration to be done in Arabic rather than the local languages of the different lands of the Caliphate. This enabled Arab Muslims to gain more power. In the long run, this only meant that the issues of non-Arab Muslims grew, which was to become a significant threat to Umayyad rule in later years.

The other significant change of Abd al-Malik's rule was that he created a new Muslim currency. This was part of a wave of Islamisation under his rule.

Second Fitna: Meaning and Significance

There were three significant outcomes of the Second Fitna.

Restoration of Umayyad rule

At the end of the civil war, the Umayyads were triumphant. They would continue to rule until 750 C.E. when the Abbasid dynasty took over.

Arabisation of the Caliphate

Abd al-Malik's victory meant that Arab Muslims were even more privileged than before the civil war compared to non-Arab Muslims. In particular, the fact that administration had changed from a variety of local languages to the sole use of Arabic concentrated power further in the hands of the Arab Muslims.

The Sunni-Shia divide in Islam

The question of who should lead the Islamic community erupted into two fiercely opposing sects during the Second Fitna.

Pro-Alids (who became Shias during the civil war) supported the idea that only those who were related to the Prophet should become leaders.

The rest of the community (who became Sunnis during the civil war) believed in a more democratic form of government, in which leaders should be elected from the entire community of believers.

Although these tensions had been present during the First Fitna, it was during the Second Fitna that the factions divided into separate religious and cultural entities rather than simply being rival political groups.

Fig. 4 - Battle of Karbala by Persian Painter Abbas Al-Musavi.

The defining moment of this conflict occurred at the Battle of Karbala when Yazid forces killed the Prophet's grandson Husayn. Many Muslims, even those who were pro-Umayyad, were traumatised by the fact that the Islamic government had killed a member of the Prophet's family.

What made Husayn's death so different from the assassinations of Uthman and Ali was that those murders had been carried out by small insurrectionist forces against the Islamic government's leaders. Husayn's death represented the Islamic government itself spilling the blood of the Prophet.

This shifted the Pro-Alid faction from being a purely political group focused on the question of leadership into a unique religious community with its own rituals and collective memory - Shia Islam. For example, Shia Muslims commemorate Husayn and the Battle of Karbala every year in a ritual known as the Day of Ashura. Professor of Islamic Studies Heinz Halm argues:

The significance of Husayn's murder continues in Shia Islam to this day. When Saddam Hussein launched an invasion of Sunni Iran in 1980, he presented the war as the:

In some ways, one could argue that in the long-term, the Second Fitna did not end with Abd al-Malik's victory over al-Zubayr, but continues to the present day.