Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf ibn al-Ḥakam ibn ʿAqīl al-Thaqafī (Arabic: أبو محمد الحجاج بن يوسف بن الحكم بن عقيل الثقفي; Ta'if 661 - Wasit, 714 (40-95 AH)), known simply as al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (Arabic: الحجاج بن يوسف, romanized: al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf), was probably the most notable governor who served the Umayyad Caliphate. He began his service with the Umayyads under Caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705), who successively promoted him as the head of the caliph's shurta (security forces), the governor of the Hejaz (western Arabia) in 692-694, and the practical viceroy of a unified Iraqi province and the eastern parts of the Caliphate in 694. Al-Hajjaj retained the last post under Abd al-Malik's son and successor al-Walid I (r. 705-715), whose decision-making was highly influenced by al-Hajjaj, until his death in 714.
As governor of Iraq and the east, al-Hajjaj instituted key reforms. Among these were the minting of silver dirhams with strictly Muslim religious formulas instead of the coins' traditional, pre-Islamic Sasanian design; changing the language of the dīwān (bureaucracy) of Iraq from Persian to Arabic; and the introduction of a uniform version of the Quran. To revive agricultural production and increase tax revenue, al-Hajjaj expelled non-Arab Muslim converts from the garrison cities of Kufa and Basra to their rural villages of origin and collected from them the jizya (poll tax) nominally reserved for non-Muslim subjects and oversaw large-scale canal digging projects. In 701, al-Hajjaj, with reinforcements from Syria, crushed a mass rebellion led by the Kufan Arab nobleman Ibn al-Ash'ath whose ranks spanned the Arab troops, Muslim converts and religious elites of Iraq. Consequently, al-Hajjaj further tightened control over the province, founding the city of Wasit to house the loyalist Syrian troops whom he thereafter relied on to enforce his rule.
Al-Hajjaj was a highly capable though ruthless statesman, strict in character, and a harsh and demanding master. Widely feared by his contemporaries, he became a deeply controversial figure and an object of deep-seated enmity among later, pro-Abbasid writers, who ascribed to him persecutions and mass executions.
In this series you will know all the details about his Origin early life career Relations with the caliphs & his Death and legacy.
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