with their swords, shouting, “Hand over the money!” He kept saying, “What money? What money?!” until he died.

When the Zanj withdrew from Basra we entered the city. We passed by the quarter of Banū Māzin, the millers—where al-Riyāshī had been lodging—and went into his mosque. There we found him lying on the ground, facing the qiblah as though someone had deliberately turned him toward it. A cloak lay beside him, tattered and fluttering in the breeze, yet his whole body was sound and intact: his abdomen had not been split open and nothing else had changed, except that his skin had clung to his bones and become dry. That was two years after he had been killed (1).

I say: the Zanj rebellion was a colossal tribulation. One of those devilishly shrewd men—formerly a wandering tutor or pedagogue, with some knowledge of poetry and historical lore and whose conduct clearly betrayed zandaqa (heretical unbelief) and open defection—claimed he was an ʿAlid and called people to follow him. Highwaymen and the black slaves belonging to the households of Basra gathered around him until he commanded a sizeable force. By stratagem they procured swords and clubs, then rose up on the outskirts of the town, pillaging and murdering. Their power grew and every criminal joined them, so that evil became rampant through them. An army from Iraq marched out against them, but they routed that army, seized Basra, and plundered it. The calamity intensified. Their vile leader now stood at the head of a fully equipped host and resolved to take Baghdad; he even built a great city for himself. Caliph al-Muʿtamid was bewildered, and the affliction caused by that renegade wretch lasted 13 years. The armies feared him, and many fierce battles and engagements—too numerous to detail here, though the historians have recorded them—were fought against him until he was finally killed.

The “Zanj” were simply the slaves of Basra who rose up with him—may Allah deprive them of blessing (2).

Ayyūb ibn Ṭāriq told us, saying: “Faḍl Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Razzāq in Baghdad informed us…”