The ‘Abbāsid Abnā’ and Sāsānid Cavalrymen

In a recent publication of great interest M. Zakeri has reopened the question of the identity of the Abnā' who appear in the early 'Abbāsid army. Once assumed to be the physical descendants of the 'Abbasid caliphs, or the 'Abbāsids and their adoptive members and clients, the abnā' al-dawla/al-da'wa/al-shī'a were shown by Ayalon in 1964 to be “in all probability, the descendants of the Khurāsānīs who brought the 'Abbāsids to the throne”. This has been generally accepted. In Zakeri's opinion, however, the Abnā' were not “Sons of the Revolution”, but rather sons of Sāsānid horsemen ( asbārān ): their ancestors had been members of the lower nobility that furnished the cavalry of the Sāsānid empire after Khusraw I's reforms. In Zakeri's opinion the revolutionary troops consisted primarily of such recruits, and so the conventional view is in one sense quite correct: the Abnā' did indeed end up as sons of revolutionaries. But the conventional view, according to him, obscures the fact that the Abnā' belonged to a distinct social group: it was by allying themselves with Sāsānid asbārān that the ‘Abbāsids came to power.