Astonishing among mankind is our ordeal; all our lives we swallow it, stifling our pain.
All these people exult in their festivals—every last one of them—whereas our feast-days (1) are but mourning rites. (2)

Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī relates in al-Yatīma: I heard Shaykh Abū al-Ṭayyib recount that the Umayyad ruler of al-Andalus once received a letter from Nizār, the ruler of Egypt, in which he abused and lampooned him. The Umayyad replied: “To proceed: you became acquainted with us, and so you satirized us; had we known you, we would have answered you.” (3)
This stung al-ʿAzīz deeply and left him speechless, for the remark implied, “You are a man of doubtful birth—your tribe is unknown to us.”

Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī says: Al-ʿAzīz had appointed ʿĪsā ibn Nustūris, a Christian, over the affairs of Egypt, and had deputized Munashshaʾ, a Jew, in Syria. A woman wrote to him, saying, “By the One who has exalted the Jews and Christians through Munashshaʾ and Ibn Nustūris and has humiliated the Muslims through you—unless you look into my case….” So he arrested the two men and took from ʿĪsā three hundred thousand dinars. (5)

Ibn Khallikān and others report: The majority of scholars do not accept the genealogy of al-Mahdī ʿUbayd Allah, the ancestor of the Egyptian caliphs. Indeed, at the very start of his reign al-ʿAzīz mounted the pulpit on a Friday and found there a slip of paper that read:
“If ever we hear a dubious lineage,
We weep upon the pulpit and in the congregational mosque.” (6)