doubt remained that God had shown kindness to al-Qaʾim for the sake of His religion.⦗1⦘

The traditionist Abū al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAbd al-Salām related: I heard the scholar Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn ʿĀmir say, “I once entered the treasury; they handed me several petitions until my sleeve was filled. I remarked, ‘If the Caliph were my own brother he would grow weary of me,’ and I threw them into the basin. Al-Qaʾim was watching, though I did not know it.

“He ordered the slips to be retrieved, spread out in the sun, and then he signed every one of them. He said, ‘My good man, why did you do that?’ I offered an excuse, and he replied, ‘We have not released any of their wealth; we are merely its custodians.’⦗2⦘

Indeed, al-Basāsīrī governed well: he treated the jurists generously, showed no sectarian bias toward the Shīʿah, and even assigned a stipend to the Caliph’s mother.

Yet a few days later the vizier was led out in fetters, a cone-shaped cap on his head and a collar of rawhide round his neck, reciting: “Say: O Allah, Lord of Sovereignty…” (Āl ʿImrān 3:26). The sectarians spat in his face—God’s decree prevails—then he was crucified; two hooks were fixed into his jaws and he died that very day.⦗3⦘ They also killed al-ʿAmīd, the man who built the Ribāṭ of Shaykh al-Shuyūkh.⦗4⦘

Al-Basāsīrī then marched on, took control of Basra and Wāsiṭ, and had the sermon there delivered in the name of al-Mustanṣir. The latter, however, broke off correspondence with him after his minister Abū al-Faraj—nephew of the Maghribī vizier and himself a fugitive from al-Basāsīrī—filled him with alarm, censured al-Basāsīrī’s conduct, and warned of its consequences.⦗5⦘

All the same, he still received from the Egyptians roughly one million dinars.