with four thousand clean-shaven, beardless youths, each arrayed in silk brocade cloaks, swords at their sides, and gold-worked belts.

Al-Manṣūr ordered his uncles to go out and receive him; on that day only three of them were still alive: Ṣāliḥ, Sulaymān, and Dāwūd.

When they reached the open plain, Ṣāliḥ rode alongside him, looked over the ranks of pages, and beheld a sight the like of which he had never seen. He thereupon recited:
What wiped out the generations that have passed will fall on you yet,
What struck the realms of ʿĀd and Jurhum.
Men mightier than you in honor and grander in renown,
And subtler than you in leading clamorous, massed hosts—were laid low all the same.

Abū Muslim wept and could find no reply; he did not utter a word until he entered the presence of al-Manṣūr. The caliph seated him before him and began to reproach him, saying, “Do you recall the day of such-and-such when you did such-and-such, and wrote to me about this and that?” Then he recited:
You claimed that no debt would ever come due—
Then settle that debt with Abā Mujrim,
And drink from the very cup you once made others drink,
More bitter in the throat than colocynth. (1)

He then ordered the men of Khurasan, and they hacked him to pieces, limb by limb.

With this same chain down to Manjawayh: Abū Aḥmad ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Anmāṭī related to us; Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAlī ibn Ismāʿīl related to us; Ḥusayn ibn Fahm related to us; Muḥammad ibn Sallām related to us; Muḥammad ibn ʿUmārah related to us:
“I heard Abū Muslim, the champion of the dawlah, recite, ‘So do not go to excess in killing’ (al-Isrāʾ 17:33) with the verb in the second person.” (2)

Ibn Manjawayh said: A reliable authority told me, from Abū Aḥmad, who informed us—the Imām—that ʿAbd Allāh ibn