His recruits could be recognized by the black clothes they wore and the black banners they carried. They even dyed their weapons black. The Umayyad army, incidentally, adopted white as its color. Lest you think this color coding strange for a cult that preached an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil, you should know that in Persia white was regarded as the color of mourning, the color of death. (The recent revolutionary Afghan Muslims called the Taliban favored black clothing as a uniform.)
