Hāshimīyah

Hāshimīyah, Islamic religiopolitical sect of the 8th–9th century ad, instrumental in the ʿAbbāsid overthrow of the Umayyad caliphate. The movement appeared in the Iraqi city of Kūfah in the early 700s among supporters (called Shīʿites) of the fourth caliph ʿAlī, who believed that succession to ʿAlī’s position of imam, or leader, of the Muslim community had devolved on Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥanafīyah (d. c. 700), one of his sons, and Abū Hāshim, a grandson. The Hāshimīyah thus did not recognize, for religious reasons, the legitimacy of Umayyad rule, and when Abū Hāshim died in 716, without heirs, a majority of the sect acknowledged Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī (died between 731 and 743) of the ʿAbbāsid family as imam.

In the hands of Muḥammad and his successor Ibrāhīm al-Imām (c. 701–749), the Hāshimīyah became a political instrument for stirring up anti-Umayyad sentiment among moderate Shīʿite and non-Arab, especially Iranian, converts to Islam. The sect’s missionary branch, developed by Abū Hāshim, was sent into the Iranian province of Khorāsān, where it met with huge success under the leadership of Abū Muslim from about 745 on. By 747 the Hāshimīyah had assumed a military character, and Abū Muslim and his general Qaḥṭabah were able to take the city of Merv, then all of Khorāsān, proceeding southwest to Rayy, Nahāvand, and finally Kūfah in 749. The Hāshimīyah armies installed Ibrāhīm’s brother Abū al-ʿAbbās as-Saffāḥ (d. 754) as ʿAbbāsid caliph in Kūfah (749), and, with the defeat of the last Umayyad, Marwān II, at the Battle of the Great Zāb River in 750, ʿAbbāsid victory was complete.

During ʿAbbāsid rule, the original sense of the term Hāshimīyah was obscured, and it became confused with Hāshimīyūn, the descendants of Hāshim ibn ʿAbd Manāf, an ancestor shared by the Prophet Muhammad, ʿAlī, and al-ʿAbbās, Muḥammad’s uncle and eponym of the dynasty; the ʿAbbāsids thus appeared to be kinsmen of the Prophet, with legal right to the caliphate.