• Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq ibn Yasār, compiler of the Prophetic biography which he gathered into a corpus that serves as a guiding beacon and a dawn that dispels darkness; as al-Shāfiʿī and other leading scholars said, everyone who writes on the subject relies on him.

[Then the year 152 AH began]
In that year al-Manṣūr removed Yazīd ibn Ḥātim from the governorship of Egypt and appointed Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd in his place. He summoned the deputy of Ifrīqiyah—having been informed that the man had rebelled—and when the deputy was brought before him, he ordered his execution. He likewise dismissed Jābir ibn Zayd al-Kilābī from the governorship of Basrah and entrusted it to Yazīd ibn Manṣūr. During the same year the Khārijites killed Maʿn ibn Zāʾidah in Sijistān.

Deaths recorded in that year:
• ʿAbbād ibn Manṣūr
• Yūnus ibn Yazīd al-Aylī

[Then the year 153 AH began]
That year al-Manṣūr became angry with his secretary Abū Ayyūb al-Mūriyānī. He imprisoned him, his brother Khālid, and Khālid’s four sons—Saʿīd, Masʿūd, Mukhlid, and Muḥammad—demanding enormous sums of money from them. The reason, as Ibn ʿAsākir relates in the biography of Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr (1), was this:

In his youth al-Manṣūr once arrived in Mosul utterly destitute. He hired himself out to a boatman, earned a little money, and married a woman. He kept promising her that sovereignty would soon devolve upon his family. She became pregnant, but when the Umayyads began to hunt for him, he fled, leaving her while she was expecting. He left her a slip of paper on which he had written his lineage—ʿAbdullāh ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbbās—and instructed her that, should news of his rise reach her, she should come to him, and that if she bore a son she was to name him Jaʿfar. She did bear a boy and named him Jaʿfar.

The child grew up, learned handwriting, became enamoured of Arabic language and literature, and mastered them well. When power passed to the ʿAbbāsids the woman sought out al-Saffāḥ but discovered he was not her husband. Then al-Manṣūr assumed the caliphate, and the young man made his way to Baghdad. He mingled with the scribes of official correspondence, and Abū Ayyūb al-Mūriyānī—head of al-Manṣūr’s chancery—admired him, showed him favor, and advanced him above others. It happened that he attended a session with al-Mūriyānī in the caliph’s presence; the caliph kept observing him. On another day the caliph sent a servant to fetch a scribe, and the servant returned with the young man. He wrote a dispatch before al-Manṣūr, who watched him attentively, then asked his name. He replied, “Jaʿfar.”

“Son of—”