The Abbasid Revolt That Ended Umayyad Rule

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Third Fitna was a wave of revolts and civil war that broke out across the Umayyad Caliphate after the assassination of the caliph al-Walid II in 744, as rival claimants including Yazid III, Ibrahim ibn al-Walid and finally Marwan II fought one another for the throne amid growing resentment among non-Arab Muslim converts and eastern provincial factions over the Umayyad dynasty's narrowly Arab aristocratic character and its systematic exclusion of converts from real political power.

The instability opened the way for the Abbasid movement, organized clandestinely in Khurasan under the da'wa led by Abu Muslim, to raise open revolt in 747 in the name of the Prophet's own family against Umayyad rule across the caliphate. Marwan II was defeated at the Battle of the Zab in January 750 and killed fleeing to Egypt only months later, and the Abbasid dynasty that replaced him promptly moved the caliphate's own capital eastward, eventually settling it at Baghdad. The speed of the Umayyad collapse, from al-Walid II's assassination in 744 to Marwan II's own death barely six years later, left later historians treating the Third Fitna as a genuinely swift dynastic collapse rather than a slowly building crisis, however long its underlying grievances had been building beneath the surface.