i62 THE PROGRESS THROUGH EGYPT ii. 2. xi.

Abu el 'Abbas el Saffah, "The Shedder of Blood." His policy was one of ruthless repression and the extermination by wholesale massacre of all possible rivals among the Ommayyads and the partizans of the Imam 'Ali.

Such of the Beni Ommayya as escaped from the slaughter fled to the more distant parts of the Islamic world. Some found a home in Spain, some in Egypt, and some within the borders of India.

Other parties are said to have fled direct to the Sudan, and it is from one of these that the Sudanese traditions derive the Arab element among the Fung dynasty who at the beginning of the sixteenth century founded the kingdom of Sennar in the Gezira-. Stripped of obvious inaccuracies and inconsistencies the tradition relates that one Sulayman ibn 'Abd el MaUk ibn Marwan fled before el Saffah to Abyssinia and thence to the Sudan, where he married the daughter of a local king. The congeries of tribes known at present as the Ga'aliyyun ("Ga'aliin") are said in contradistinction to be of 'Abbasid origin. Again el Mas'udi speaks of 'AbduUa, the son of Marwan the last of the Ommayyads, as taking temporary refuge in the Sudan and leaving it by way of Bada' {i.e. " Airi," or el Rih*) after losing his brother 'ObayduUa and many followers. Ibn Seli'm, as quoted by el Makn'zi, also refers to this event and there is no reason to doubt that it constitutes a historical fact*.

XII 'In Egypt and the neighbouring countries, meanwhile, a period of widespread revolt naturally followed the change of dynasties and the numerous religious controversies that had arisen.

The Khawarig sect of puritans caused serious trouble and bloodshed in Egypt in 754, and in Barka, in 759, in common with recalcitrant Ommayyads and Berbers, and in Abyssinia in 765. The Copts rose periodically during the same period, and the Beni Kays round Balbays took the chance offered by the general confusion of affairs to brigandize freely along the trade routes.

E.g. 'Abd el Rahman ibn Mu'awia in 756 a.d. founded there an Ommayyad dynasty.

2 See BA ccxiii, A 2 xxx, A 11 vii and liii, D 2 i, etc. in Part IV.

' " Kitdb el Tanbih," in Bibliotheca Geographorian Arabicorum, Part VIII, p. 330. The sons of Marwan entered the Sudan via Aswan with their families, dependents and Arab adherents and some Beni Ommayya from Khorasan.

* So identified by Crowfoot: Red Sea Ports..., pp. 542 ff. Bada'—Airi lies near Akik, just north of the eighteenth parallel. The variant Basa' ("Base") in Makrizi {Khetdt, II, 553) is clearly a misprint for Bada'.

Khetdt, II, 553. Cp. Quatremere, II, 16.

* Tombs have actually been found on the old site of Bada' by Crowfoot which are dated about the end of the tenth century and prove that members of the Beni Ommayya settled there. See Crowfoot, Some Lacunae..., p. 3.

' Lane-Poole, Hist. pp. 31-34.