User:Al Ameer son/Yazid II

Yazid ibn Abd al-Malik, commonly known as Yazid II, (c. 691–26 January 724) was the ninth Umayyad caliph, ruling between 9 February 720 and 28 January 724.

Origins, early life and family
Yazid was born in Damascus, the center of the Umayyad Caliphate, c. 690/91. He was the son of Caliph Abd al-Malik ((r. 685 – 705)) and his influential wife Atika, the daughter of Yazid II's namesake, Caliph Yazid I ((r. 680 – 683)). Yazid II's pedigree united his father's Marwanid branch of the Umayyad dynasty, in power since 684, and the Sufyanid branch of Yazid I and the latter's father Mu'awiya I ((r. 661 – 680)), founder of the Umayyad Caliphate.

Yazid did not possess military or administrative experience before his reign. He rarely left Syria except for a number of visits to the Hejaz (western Arabia), home of the Islamic holy cities Mecca and Medina, including once for the annual Hajj pilgrimage sometime between 715 and 717. He was possibly granted control of the region around Amman by Abd al-Malik.

Yazid established marital ties to the family of the powerful viceroy of Iraq for his father and brother Caliph al-Walid I ((r. 705 – 715)), al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (d. 714), marrying the latter's niece Umm al-Hajjaj, the daughter of Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Thaqafi. During the lifetime of al-Hajjaj, she gave birth to Yazid's sons al-Hajjaj, who died young, and al-Walid II, who became caliph in 743. Yazid was also married to Sa'da bint Abd Allah ibn Amr, a great-granddaughter of Caliph Uthman ((r. 644 – 656)), who mothered Yazid's son and daughter Abd Allah and A'isha, respectively. Yazid's other sons were al-Nu'man, Yahya, Muhammad, al-Ghamr, Sulayman, Abd al-Jabbar, Dawud, Abu Sulayman, al-Awwam and Hashim. Yazid's kunya (patronmyic) was Abu Khalid and he was nicknamed al-Fata (the Youth).

Accession
By dint of his descent, Yazid was a natural candidate for the succession. A noble Arab maternal lineage held political weight during this period in the Caliphate's history, and Yazid took pride in his maternal Sufyanid descent, viewing himself superior to his Marwanid brothers. He was chosen by his paternal half-brother Caliph Sulayman ((r. 715 – 717)) as the second-in-line for the caliphate after their paternal first cousin Umar II, who ruled from 717 to 720. Yazid acceded at the age of 29 following the death of Umar II on 9 February 720. For much of his reign, he resided in Damascus or his estates in Jund al-Urdunn (the military district of Jordan), which was centered in Tiberias and roughly corresponded with the Byzantine province of Palaestina Secunda.

Suppression of Muhallabids and escalation of factionalism
Shortly before or immediately after Yazid's accession, the veteran commander and disgraced governor of Iraq and the vast eastern province of Khurasan, Yazid ibn al-Muhallab, escaped from the fortress of Aleppo where Umar II had him imprisoned. During Sulayman's reign, Ibn al-Muhallab, an enemy of al-Hajjaj, had been responsible for the torture and deaths of members of al-Hajjaj's family, Yazid's in-laws, and feared retaliatory maltreatment when Yazid's accession became apparent. Yazid had long held suspicions, nurtured by al-Hajjaj, of Ibn al-Muhallab's and the Muhallabid family's influence and ambitions in Iraq and the eastern Caliphate.

Evading the pursuit of Umar's or Yazid's commanders, Ibn al-Muhallab made his way to Basra, the center of his family and Azd Uman tribe. On Yazid's orders Basra's governor Adi ibn Artat al-Fazari arrested many of Ibn al-Muhallab's brothers and cousins before his arrival to the city. Ibn Artat was unable to stop Ibn al-Muhallab's entry and the latter, with support from his Yamani tribal allies in the Basra garrison, besieged Ibn Artat in the city's citadel. The Qays–Mudar factions of the garrison, though traditional rivals of the Yaman and unsympathetic to Ibn al-Muhallab, did not actively or effectively oppose him. Ibn al-Muhallab seized the citadel, captured the governor and established control over Basra. Yazid granted him a pardon, but Ibn al-Muhallab persisted in his opposition, declaring a holy war (jihād) against the caliph and the Syrian troops who effectively served as the enforcers of Umayyad authority in Iraq. Umar II had likely withdrawn most of the Syrians from Wasit, their main Iraqi garrison, and Ibn al-Muhallab was able to capture the city with relative ease. Most of the pious Qur'an readers and the mawālī (non-Arab Muslim converts) of Basra supported Ibn al-Muhallab's cause, with the exception of the prominent scholar al-Hasan al-Basri. The districts administratively and militarily dependent on Basra, namely Ahwaz, Fars and Kerman, joined the revolt, though not Khurasan, where Qays–Mudar troops counterbalanced the pro-Muhallabid Yamani faction in the province's garrisons.

Ibn al-Muhallab advanced toward Kufa, the other main garrison center of Iraq, where he attracted support across the tribal spectrum and among many of its noble Arab households. In the meantime, Yazid dispatched his kinsmen, the veteran commanders Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik and al-Abbas ibn al-Walid, to suppress the revolt. They killed Ibn al-Muhallab and routed his army near Kufa on 24 August 720. Yazid ordered the executions of the roughly two hundred prisoners-of-war captured from Ibn al-Muhallab's camp, while Ibn al-Muhallab's son Mu'awiya ordered the execution of Ibn Artat and his thirty supporters incarcerated in Wasit. Afterward, the Muhallabid family was specifically targeted by the Umayyad authorities and dozens of members were pursued and executed, including nine to fourteen boys who were sent to Yazid and executed by his order.

The Muhallabid revolt's suppression marked the last of the great anti-Umayyad uprisings in Iraq. The defeat of the Muhallabids and Yazid's successive appointments to the governorship of Iraq of Maslama—who was shortly dismissed for not forwarding the provincial tax surplus to the caliph's treasury—and Maslama's lieutenant Umar ibn Hubayra al-Fazari signaled a triumph for the Qays–Mudar faction in the province and its eastern dependencies. According to the historian Julius Wellhausen, "the proscription of the whole of the prominent and powerful [Muhallabid] family, a measure hitherto unheard of in the history of the Umaiyids [sic], came like a declaration of war against the Yemen [faction] in general, and the corollary was that the government was degenerating into a Qaisite party-rule". Wellhausen blames the caliph for the escalation of factionalism and attributed the appointment of Ibn Hubayra to his own desire for revenge against the Muhallabids' Yamani backers. The Yamani-affiliated tribes of Khurasan viewed the events as a humiliation and during the Abbasid Revolution which toppled the Umayyads in 750 they adopted as one of their slogans "revenge for the Banu Muhallab [Muhallabids]".

The orientalist Henri Lammens considers Yazid's portrayal as "a pro-Mudar and anti-Yaman extremist" as "unfair, as he actually tried to balance the conflicting groups, just as other Umayyad rulers did". In Syria, Yazid did not champion the Qays over the Quda'a, a major component of the Yaman confederation in Syria. Indeed, members of the Quda'a's principal tribe, the Banu Kalb, had formed the core of the caliph's army during the suppression, pursuit and elimination of the Muhallabids. He appointed Yamani governors to the large provinces of Ifriqiya (North Africa west of Egypt) and the Jazira (Upper Mesopotamia) and its dependent districts of Adharbayjan and Armenia.

Reinstatement of the poll tax on non-Arab Muslims
Yazid attempted to reverse, with limited success, the fiscal policies of Umar II which had abolished the jizya (poll tax traditionally exacted on non-Muslim subjects) imposed on the mawālī in Khurasan, Sind, Ifriqiya and the Iberian Peninsula. Yazid's move alienated the mawālī in these provinces. In Ifriqiya, the governor Yazid ibn Abi Muslim was assassinated by his Berber guard in 720, shortly after his appointment by Yazid for attempting to reinstate the jizya. The Berbers reinstalled Ibn Abi Muslim's predecessor Ismail ibn Abd Allah ibn Abi al-Muhajir and notified Yazid, who approved the change. The incident in Ifriqiya was a blow to the Caliphate's prestige in North Africa and served as a harbinger for the Berber Revolt in 740–743. The reinstatement of the jizya in Khurasan in 721/22 by Ibn Hubayra's deputy Sa'id ibn Amr al-Harashi led to revolts and wars in the province that continued for twenty years and partly contributed to the Abbasid Revolution.

Construction of desert palaces near Amman
Yazid built the Umayyad desert palaces of al-Qastal and al-Muwaqqar, both in the general vicinity of Amman. The palaces are conventionally held to have been built during his caliphate, though a number of archaeologists suggest Yazid began their construction before 720.

Death
Yazid died in Irbid in the Balqa (e. g. Transjordan) subdistrict of Jund Dimashq (military district of Damascus) on 26 Sha'ban 105 AH (28 January 724 CE).