At a glance
Era 3- Dates
- c. 721-754 CE; caliph 749-754 CE
- Who
- First caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, brought to power by the revolution from Khurasan
- Era
- The Abbasids & the Golden Age
ProfileAbu al-Abbas al-Saffah
Abu al-Abbas Abdullah was born around 721 at al-Humayma, a village in the south of what is now Jordan, where the Abbasid family lived quietly under Umayyad rule. The family descended from al-Abbas, the Prophet's ﷺ uncle, and for years its leaders had sent agents east to prepare a movement in the name of the Prophet's ﷺ household.
When the revolution broke out in Khurasan in 747, the family's leader was Abu al-Abbas's brother Ibrahim. The Umayyad caliph Marwan II had Ibrahim arrested, and he died in prison at Harran. Leadership passed to Abu al-Abbas, then in his twenties. In November 749, in the great mosque of Kufa, he received the pledge of allegiance as caliph and promised justice in the name of the Prophet's ﷺ family. Two months later his uncle Abdullah ibn Ali defeated Marwan at the Great Zab.
His short reign was spent making the new dynasty safe. His commanders hunted down the Umayyad family, and many of its members were killed. His title, al-Saffah, can mean both "the generous" and "the shedder of blood", and later memory settled on the second. In 751 an Abbasid army defeated a Tang Chinese force beside the Talas river in Central Asia.
He governed from Kufa and then from al-Anbar on the Euphrates, where he died of smallpox in June 754, aged about thirty-three. His brother Abu Ja'far, who took the title al-Mansur, succeeded him.
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Further reading
SourcesSources for this profile
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