and found him seated, wrapped in nothing but a lower cloth. With him were Muzaffar ibn al-Kalbi, the intelligence officer, and a group of men. The officer read aloud al-Mutawakkil’s letter:

“It has reached the Commander of the Believers that you are hiding an Alid, having kept him in readiness so that you might secure allegiance for him and bring him out…,” and the letter continued at length.

Muzaffar then asked, “What do you say to this?”

He replied, “I know nothing at all about it. I hold that hearing and obeying him are binding on me in hardship and in ease, when eager or reluctant, even when others are preferred over me; I pray Allah to guide and aid him, night and day…”—and he spoke further in this vein.

Muzaffar said, “The Commander of the Believers has ordered me to place you under oath.”

So he made him swear, invoking triple divorce, that he was not concealing anything the Commander of the Believers was seeking.

Next they searched Abū ʿAbd Allāh’s house, the underground passage, the rooms, and the roof; they examined the chest of books, the womenfolk, and the neighboring quarters, but they saw nothing and detected nothing. Thus Allah repelled those who disbelieved, frustrated in their rage. A report of this was sent to al-Mutawakkil, and it pleased him; he realized that Abū ʿAbd Allāh had been slandered.

The man who had framed him was an innovator, and he did not die before Allah exposed his affair to the Muslims—he was Ibn al-Thaljī. (1)

A few days later, while we were sitting at the gate of the house, Yaʿqūb—one of al-Mutawakkil’s chamberlains—arrived. He asked permission to see Abū ʿAbd Allāh, entered, and my father and I went in with him. Some of his attendants brought a sealed money-bag (2) on a mule, together with a letter from al-Mutawakkil, which he read to Abū ʿAbd Allāh:

“It has been established with the Commander of the Believers that you are entirely innocent, and he has dispatched this money to you—”