—of the righteous predecessors and their path. Yet when he assumed the caliphate, those men gathered around him, pressed the matter upon him, and embellished it in his sight. It happened that he marched to Tarsus for a campaign against the Byzantines, and from there he wrote to his deputy in Baghdad— Ishaq ibn Ibrahim ibn Musʿab—commanding him to summon the people to profess that the Qur’an is created. This occurred in the closing months of his life, in the year 218 AH.

When the letter arrived, as we have mentioned, the deputy called together a number of leading hadith scholars and urged them to accept the doctrine. They refused, so he threatened them with flogging and the loss of their stipends. Under compulsion most of them yielded, but Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Muhammad ibn Nuh al-Jundaysaburi remained steadfast in their refusal. The two were therefore mounted on a single camel, both shackled and balanced in one litter, and sent off to the caliph by his command.

As they drew near the caliphal army and halted one stage short of it, a servant came to them, wiping his tears with the edge of his garment. He said, “It grieves me, O Abu Abd Allah, that al-Ma’mun has unsheathed a sword he has never drawn before, and he swears by his kinship to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ that if you do not agree that the Qur’an is created he will kill you with that sword.”

Imam Ahmad knelt on his knees, lifted his eyes to the sky, and supplicated: “My Lord, Your forbearance has emboldened this evildoer so that he now dares to strike and kill Your friends. O Allah, if the Qur’an is Your speech, uncreated, then shield us from his harm.”

In the last third of that very night a herald arrived with news of al-Ma’mun’s death. “We rejoiced,” Ahmad said. But then word came that al-Muʿtasim had taken the caliphate and that Ahmad ibn Abi Duʾad had joined him, making the affair even more severe. They therefore sent us back to Baghdad by boat along with some prisoners, and I suffered much abuse from them. Fetters were still on my legs, and my companion Muhammad ibn Nuh died on the way; Ahmad performed the funeral prayer over him.

When Ahmad returned to Baghdad he entered the city in Ramadan and was confined in prison for about twenty-eight months—some say a little over thirty. He was then brought out to be whipped in the presence of al-Muʿtasim, and Ahmad, while in