In them, Muhammad reiterated his claim to leading the Muslims, and stressed his descent from Ali and Fatimah, Muhammad's daughter, as well as his typically Shi'a ideals of rejecting the absolutist monarchical traditions of the Umayyads—now adopted by the Abbasids—in favour of returning to the simpler practices of early Islam. Al-Mansur countered by invoking the pre-Islamic tradition of inheritance, which gave priority to a man's male relatives over his daughters—implying that the Caliphate had passed to the Abbasid line by right.[7]