an elephant; he gave them a handsome present, sent the beast back, and said, “We do not wish to be the People of the Elephant.”

Taj then dilates upon the ruler’s justice and generosity. Yaʿqūb would himself collect the zakat and distribute it with his own hand. He founded an orphan school that housed nearly one thousand boys supervised by ten teachers.

One of his officials told me that on one ʿĪd he distributed a little over seventy thousand sheep.

ʿAbd al-Wāḥid (1) relates: “He was passionate about construction; at any given time he was refurbishing a palace or even an entire city. Those who had embraced Islam under duress he ordered to wear dark-blue garments, sleeves of excessive length, and huge, ungainly culottes; later his son made them don yellow turbans. Yaʿqūb did this because he doubted the sincerity of their Islam. Since the Masmūda assumed power, no protected-citizen pact (dhimma) has been concluded in our dominions with either a Jew or a Christian, nor is there a single church anywhere in the whole Maghrib. The Jews among us merely profess Islam, perform the prayers, and teach their children the Qur’an, outwardly following our religion (2).”

I say: such people are Muslims—peace.

Ibn Rushd the Younger (3) had prepared for him a revised version of Aristotle’s “On Animals” (4) and wrote in it: “The giraffe—I have seen it in the possession of the King of the Berbers.” He penned this remark casually, but it enraged his opponents. They informed against him to Yaʿqūb and showed the ruler, in Ibn Rushd’s own hand, a passage citing the philosophers’ claim that Venus is one of the gods. He was summoned and asked, “Is this your handwriting?” He denied it, whereupon Yaʿqūb said, “May Allah curse the one who wrote it,” and ordered all those present to repeat the curse. He then made him stand in disgrace and burned the books of philosophy, sparing only those on medicine and geometry.

It is also said that when he returned to Marrakesh he developed a desire to study philosophy and sought