Fitna, Second, or Second Islamic Civil War

The commercial empire of the Turkic Khazars, centered in the southeastern section of modern European Russia, adopts Judaism in about 740 and continues its alliance with Constantinople against the Muslim Arabs.

The Fragmentation of the Arab Caliphate and the Rise of Independent Muslim States

Throughout this period, the Arab Caliphate, predominantly ruled by the Umayyad dynasty, is fractured by a series of civil wars, one of which leads to the split of Islam into three major branches:

• Sunnites,
• Kharijites, and
• Shi'ites.

This internal strife ultimately shatters unified Islamic rule. In 750 CE, the Abbasids overthrow the Umayyads, seizing control of the Caliphate. However, a cadet branch of the Umayyads escapes to Muslim Spain, where they establish the Emirate of Córdoba, marking the beginning of an independent Islamic state in Al-Andalus.

Elsewhere, other independent Muslim states emerge, including:

• Idrisid Morocco, and
• Aghlabid Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia, eastern Algeria, and western Libya).

These developments mark the transition from a unified Arab Empire to a diverse Islamic world, ruled by multiple, competing dynasties.

The rapid expansion of Islam from the Middle East to Spain in the seventh and eighth centuries brings a significant portion of the Jewish people under Muslim rule.

Jews, tolerated by Muslims as People of the Book, with a common ancestor in Abraham, regain religious autonomy and, as long as they pay tribute to the rulers, see to the affairs of their communities.

Ali had made Al Kufah his capital during his caliphate.

The transfer of power to Syria and to its capital at Damascus arouses envy among Iraqis.

The desire to regain preeminence prompts numerous rebellions in Iraq against Umayyad rule.

As a consequence, only men of unusual ability are sent to be governors of Al Basrah and Al Kufah.

One of the most able is Ziyad ibn Abihi, who is initially governor of Al Basrah and later also of Al Kufah.

Ziyad divides the residents of Al Kufah into four groups (not based on tribal affiliation) and appoints a leader for each one.

He also sends  fifty thousand Bedouin to Khorasan (in northeastern Iran), the eastern-most province of the empire, which is within the jurisdiction of Al Basrah and Al Kufah.

Yazid I, Muawiyah's son and his successor in 680, is unable to contain the opposition that his strong father had vigorously quelled.

Husayn, Ali's second son, refuses to pay homage and flees to Mecca, where he is asked to lead the Shias—mostly Iraqis—in a revolt against Yazid I.

Ubayd Allah, governor of Al Kufah, discovers the plot and sends detachments to dissuade him.

At Karbala, in Iraq, Husayn's band of two hundred men and women refuse to surrender and finally are cut down by a force of perhaps fourth thousand Umayyad troops.

Yazid I receives Husayn's head, and Husayn's death on the tenth of Muharram (October 10, 680) continues to be observed as a day of mourning for all Shias.

Ali's burial place at An Najaf, about one hundred and thirty kilometers south of Baghdad, and ...

...Husayn's at Karbala, about eighty kilometers southwest of Baghdad, are holy places of pilgrimage for Shias, many of whom feel that a pilgrimage to both sites is equal to a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The importance of these events in the history of Islam cannot be overemphasized.

They create the greatest of the Islamic schisms, between the party of Ali (the Shiat Ali, known in the West as Shias or Shiites) and the upholders of Muawiyah (the Ahl as Sunna, the People of the Sunna—those who follow Muhammad's custom and example) or the Sunnis.

The Sunnis believe they are the followers of orthodoxy.

The ascendancy of the Umayyads and the events at Karbala, in contrast, leads to a Shia Islam which, although similar to Sunni Islam in its basic tenets, maintains important doctrinal differences that have pervasive effects on the Shia world view.

Most notably, Shias viewed themselves as the opposition in Islam, the opponents of privilege and power.

They believe that after the death of Ali and the ascension of the "usurper" Umayyads to the caliphate, Islam took the wrong path; therefore, obedience to existing temporal authority is not obligatory.

Furthermore, in sacrificing his own life for a just cause, Husayn becomes the archetypal role model who inspires generations of Shias to fight for social equality and for economic justice.

The Iraqis once again become restive when rival claimants for the Umayyad caliphate wage civil war between 687 and 692.

Ibn Yusuf ath Thaqafi al Aajjay, sent as provincial governor to restore order in Iraq in 694, pacifies Iraq and encourages both agriculture and education.

Many unsuccessful Iraqi and Iranian insurrectionists had fled to Khorasan, in addition to the fifty thousand Bedouin who had been sent there by Ziyad.

There, at the city of Merv, a faction that supported Abd al Abbas (a descendant of the Prophet's uncle), was able to organize the rebels under the battle cry, "the House of Hashim."

Hashim, the Prophet Muhammad's grandfather, was an ancestor of both the Shia line and the Abbas line, and the Shias therefore actively support the Hashimite leader, Abu Muslim.

In 711 CE, Muslim Arab and Berber forces launch an invasion of Visigothic Spain from North Africa, swiftly defeating the Visigothic kingdom. Within a few years, they conquer nearly all of the Iberian Peninsula, except for the northernmost regions, where Christian resistance endures.

Their expansion also extends into Septimania in southern Gaul, further consolidating Muslim rule in Western Europeand marking the beginning of Al-Andalus, a new Islamic domain in Iberia.