[18] Formerly the capital of the homonymous province of Syria; it lies a day’s march west from Haleb (Aleppo).
[19] This account of the conquest is based partly on the researches of Dozy, but mainly on those of Saavedra in his Estudio sobre la Invasion de los Arabes en España (Madrid, 1892). Some of the details, however, e.g. the battle near Tamames and the part played by the sons of Witiza, are based, not on documentary evidence, but on probable inferences. For other accounts of the deaths of Musa and Abdalaziz see Sir Wm. Muir, Caliphate (London, 1891), pp. 368-9.
[20] Solaiman is the Arabic form of Solomon. The prophecy is to be found in the Kitāb al-Oyūn, p. 24; cf. Tabari ii. p. 1138.
[21] Seyid Ameer Ali, A Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Mahomet, pp. 341-343.
[22] Cf. Van Vloten, Recherches sur la domination arabe, le Chiitisme et les croyances messianiques sous le Khalifat des Omayades (Amsterdam, 1894), p. 63 seq.
[23] Cf. Wellhausen, Die Kampfe der Araber mit den Rom. in der Zeit der Umaijiden (Göttingen, 1901), p. 31.
[24] Bayān i. p. 42; Dozy, Histoire des musulmans d’Espagne, i. p. 246, names the place Bacdoura or Nafdoura, the Spanish chronist Nauam.
[25] Dozy i. p. 268.
[26] Merwan has been nicknamed al-Ja‘di and al-Ḥimār (the Ass). As more than one false interpretation of these names has been given, it is not superfluous to cite here Qaisarānī (ed. de Jong, p. 31), who says on good authority that a certain al-Ja‘d b. Durham, killed under the reign of Hishām for heretical opinions, had followers in Mesopotamia, and that, when Merwan became caliph, the Khorasanians called him a Ja‘d, pretending that all’Ja‘d had been his teacher. As to al-Ḥimār this was substituted also by the Khorasanians for his usual title, al-Faras, “the race-horse.”
[27] The Arabic word for “shedder of blood,” as-Saffāh, which by that speech became a name of the caliph, designates the liberal host who slaughters his camels for his guests. European scholars have taken it unjustly in the sense of the bloodthirsty, and found in it an allusion to the slaughter of the Omayyads and many others. At the same time, it was not without much bloodshed that Abū‘l-Abbas finally established his power.