Nasb-and-the-Nawasib

This clash had taken more than one form:
Firstly, the Abbasids had violated the Umayyads by burying their good and
spreading their evil, even if it be by way of lying and slandering which proved
to be the most instrumental tools in eliminating them. However, the approach
had to be a bit different with the Alawids due to them being two branches of
the same household, i.e. the Hashimid household. Hence impugning them would
be impugning the Abbasids themselves. Hence, they realised the importance of
devising another plan in order to defeat the Alawids, a plan which was suited
for them and which primarily revolved around the method of dealing with the
issue of Imāmah from a religious perspective. This was a plan which the leading
propagandists and campaigners could not deny at all, which explains why they
had exploited that misleading slogan. The matter, however, rapidly changed after
the Abbasids became firmly grounded in power and when they became the sole
rulers of the lands. The need for misleading the people no more remained, and
thus they moved on to the next phase, and that is to prove their deservingness
of the Khilāfah. 1
The Abbasids learnt that, despite their importance, military clashes were not
enough to put an end to the ambitions of the Alawids due to them having set
agendas which they deploy to win the support and interest of the people; hence,
it was important that their ideology be challenged with an ideology, and that the
claim of enjoying exclusive right to leadership be challenged with a similar claim
which expounds upon the Abbasids’ deservingness of the Khilāfah. This would
cause the Alawids to lose their influence because of them losing their central
and most core campaigning argument: inheritance. This is something that the
Umayyads did not do and they did not bother to do because they knew that they
had nothing to back it up had they gone down that route. 2
1 Al-ʿIlāqāt bayn al-ʿAlawiyyīn wa al-ʿAbbāsiyyīn 55, 74.
2 What makes this clear is that the poet Ibn Mayādah said the following poem in the presence of al-
Walīd ibn Yazīd: continued ...
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