—one of the Salafis.
The king of the Khazars advanced from Darband, captured the city of Dwin (1), and there put thirty thousand Muslims to the sword.
In Damascus a Moroccan impostor—an utter devil—appeared, claiming divinity; he was slain.
In the year 67 (2) the vizier Ibn Raʾīs al-Ruʾasāʾ was arrested.
Ibn al-Jawzī (3) said: “I preached at al-Halbah in Ramadan, and the hair of one hundred and twenty people was shorn.”
That same year al-ʿĀḍid, the last of the ʿUbaydid (Fatimid) caliphs in Egypt, died. Three Fridays before his death the Friday sermon had already been pronounced in the name of al-Mustaḍīʾ the Abbasid—praise be to Allah—so Baghdad was festooned with decorations. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn held mourning ceremonies for al-ʿĀḍid, displaying extreme grief and weeping; he then took possession of the palace with all it contained, placed the palace household under guard, confined them to a single location, and barred them from women so that they would not produce offspring.
Sandal the chamberlain, the ustādh al-dār (4) of al-Mustaḍīʾ, arrived as an envoy bearing the caliph’s congratulations. Nūr al-Dīn donned the robes of honor: a farjiyyah, a jubba, a qabāʾ, a collar worth one thousand dinars, a horse with an ornamented saddle, two swords, a banner, and another horse alongside. He was girded with the two swords in token of the union of Egypt and Syria under his authority.
A comparable, though somewhat lesser, investiture was dispatched to Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, together with black robes for the preachers of Egypt. Nūr al-Dīn also kept carrier pigeons and trained them to fly.