the kurr (1) for seven dinars.

The ruler of Mosul, Muʿtamad al-Dawla Abū al-Manīʿ (2), passed away. One year later relations between the Sunnis and the Shiʿites deteriorated. The Shiʿites built a rampart around Karkh and wrote on it in gold: “Muhammad and ʿAlī are the best of humankind; whoever denies it is an unbeliever.”

Fighting and looting then broke out. The Sunnis gained the upper hand and committed grave outrages: graves were opened, and the bones of al-ʿAwnī (3), al-Nāshī, and al-Jadhūʿī were burned; the Ḥanafī lecturer al-Sarakhsī was slain, and the authorities proved unable to restrain them. At the same time, Tughril Beg seized Isfahan and made it his capital.

The Maghribīs and the Egyptian army fought, and thirty thousand (4) Maghribīs were killed.

In 444 AH the Sunnis rose against the people of Karkh, burning and killing; in the crush a little over forty persons died, most of them women who had merely gathered to watch (5). Numerous battles also took place between the Khurasani army and the Ghuzz for mastery. Al-Malik al-Raḥīm and al-Basāsīrī besieged Basra and took it from the son of Abū Kālījār. Al-Malik al-Raḥīm’s forces then captured Shiraz after a lengthy siege, famine, and hardship, until it was said that only about a thousand souls remained within walls measuring twelve thousand cubits in circumference and pierced by eleven gates.

In 447 AH Tughril Beg arrested al-Malik al-Raḥīm, bringing the Buyid era to an end. That same year he entered Baghdad in a day long remembered: eighteen elephants preceded him as he proclaimed that he would perform the pilgrimage, wage jihad in Syria and Egypt, and abolish the ʿUbaydid (Fatimid) state. And he died.