Another man brought him a lock of hair and said, “This is from the Prophet’s blessed hair, peace and blessings be upon him.”
For this very reason, it was said, al-Manṣūr kept people from meeting with him. Others claimed instead that the Mahdī strangled him and had his body carried out, as we have already noted—Allah knows best. In any case, the calamities that befell the people of al-Andalus at the hands of their Berber troops cannot be measured or described. They did what the pagan Turks are accused of—and worse. They burned Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ, together with its congregational mosque and palaces, though it had been the finest and most splendid city on earth. Ibn Nabīṭ remarked:
Three things are innately given to corruption:
The mouse, the Berbers, and the locusts.
Muḥyīʾl-Dīn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid ibn ʿAlī al-Tamīmī al-Marrākushī says in al-Muʿjib: “The Berbers entered Córdoba under Sulaymān al-Mustaʿīn in Shawwāl of the year 403 AH. They killed al-Muʾayyad bi-Allah, and in that incident a little over twenty-one thousand of Córdoba’s inhabitants were slain.”
- Sulaymān al-Mustaʿīn bi-Allah ibn al-Ḥakam ibn Sulaymān al-Umayyad*—
son of al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allah ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad al-Umayyad, of the Marwānid line.
Al-Andalus acknowledged his rule in 403 AH, as we have mentioned. He roamed with the Berbers, ravaging and plundering the land, committing every abomination and sparing no one. Among the soldiers under his command were al-Qāsim and ʿAlī, the two sons of Ḥammūd ibn Maymūn al-ʿAlawī al-Idrīsī, whom he appointed as commanders over