Toward the end of his tenure al-Nāṣir’s feelings toward him changed; the scorpions of intrigue crept between them, and he was stripped of his property and imprisoned in Alexandria, where he died—some said by strangulation, others by poison, and still others by another cause—in Muḥarram 741 AH. The people grieved for him profoundly, and their mourning lasted a long time (1).

[2 – Social Life]

After the victory over the Tatars at Marj al-Ṣuffar, south of Damascus, in 702 AH, the populace felt secure from danger coming from the east or the north. Their eyes, however, remained fixed on the western coast, where the specter of Crusader aggression lingered. The scars of Mongol devastation and Crusader ruin were still visible; the limbs of the Muslim community lay severed, and communication was cut—especially in this eighth century. A reader of Ibn Kathīr’s history, for example, will find no news of Baghdad or the lands of the Maghrib, as though the world had shrunk to Damascus and Cairo.

The growing distance from the Prophet’s Hijrah and the blessed first generations produced disagreement, division, and a waning of practical adherence to the principles of Islam. The sultan and his deputies grew ever more inventive in imposing taxes and expanding the grant of iqṭāʿāt in order to secure the greatest possible revenue; this accelerated the decline of agriculture, the backwardness of industry, the bankruptcy of trade, rampant unemployment, and soaring prices.

Women’s role in building the family and fostering social rectitude regressed: a wife would press to have her husband jailed if he failed to provide maintenance or delayed payment of her deferred mahr. She wore garments with broad sleeves and silk buttons, and ornamented shoes that aroused desire or revealed her charms, prompting the sultan (2) to intervene and forbid such attire. Poverty may also have contributed to the spread of prostitution and to the emergence of influential women who guaranteed the operation of brothels, until the sultan abolished the practice. Indecent songs spread, together with the licentiousness and wine that accompanied them, despite the jurists’ fatwas declaring such singers “the wailers of Hell” and warning that their listeners would be tormented in their graves and called to account on the Day of Resurrection.

Conditions worsened still further as the country was struck by frequent calamities and natural disasters—floods, earthquakes, and locust swarms—alongside famines and epidemics; the plague, for instance, cut people down like ripe grain, carrying off hundreds and sometimes thousands in a single day. The poor and the idle became numb in their collective conscience and resigned themselves to the bitter reality and the crushing injustice surrounding them.