Now that we’ve covered Haroon al Rashid’s foreign wars, we can get started with the messy conflicts which took place within the umma, and within his administration itself. The caliphate’s distant west slowly broke away during his reign, but his armies faced off and defeated various challengers across the rest of his lands. The Abbasid state was still powerful and quite capable of fending for itself, but a close look at how it responded to these threats reveals a more daunting problem within the administration: an intense competition between the factions closest to the caliph that was raging unchecked.