Mosul in the company of Zangī. The judges, witnesses, and scholars were thereupon summoned to the vizier Abū l-Qāsim ʿAlī; they drew up an official record in which upright witnesses testified to the wrongs perpetrated by al-Rāshid—his confiscation of wealth, shedding of blood, and consumption of wine. The jurists were then consulted: does the imamate of one who commits such acts remain valid, and, once his depravity is established, may the reigning sultan depose him and put another in his place? They issued a fatwa allowing his removal and replacement. Accordingly, on the following morning, in the presence of Masʿūd and his emirs, the choice made in the Palace of the Caliphate settled on his uncle, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn al-Mustazhir bi-Llāh, whom they titled al-Muqtafī. He was forty years old, streaked with grey, dark-complexioned, and his mother was a fair-skinned concubine named Sitt al-Sādah. ⦗1⦘

He went on: We later learned that al-Rāshid left Mosul for the lands of Azerbaijan, making for Marāgha with a band of followers. They extorted its people and wrought havoc; then they proceeded to Hamadhān, where they killed inhabitants, shaved the beards of a number of jurists, and behaved tyrannically. Moving on to the environs of Isfahān, they plundered the villages and laid siege to the city together with troops belonging to Dāwud ibn Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad. Al-Rāshid was stricken with an illness that brought him to the brink of death. We were informed that a group of Persian attendants in his service conspired against him; they entered his pavilion on the twenty-seventh of Ramadan in the year thirty-two (532 AH) and killed him.