Only the son of an adulteress—or some worthless scoundrel, whoever he may be—would buy her. (1)

Thumāma ibn Ashras relates: “I spent a night with Jaʿfar ibn Yaḥyā ibn Khālid. He suddenly awoke from sleep, weeping in terror. I asked, ‘What is the matter with you?’ He answered, ‘An old man appeared to me, grasped the two doorposts of this very doorway and recited:

As though between al-Ḥajūn and al-Ṣafā
No friend had ever dwelt, no night-time storyteller kept watch in Mecca.

I replied to him:

Indeed, we were its people, but the turns of the nights
And the stumbling blows of fate have wiped us out. (2)’

Thumāma continues: “On the following night al-Rashīd executed him and fixed his head upon the bridge. The Caliph then came out, gazed at it long, and recited:

Time has exacted payment for your earlier deeds,
And after peace, your life has turned turbid.
So marvel not, for this world is ever bound
To scatter whatever it once had joined.

“I looked at Jaʿfar and said, ‘Though you have become a warning to all today, you were once the very summit of generosity and munificence.’ He glared at me like a charging camel and declaimed:

Why should the world be amazed at Jaʿfar?
Whatever they saw of him was through us.
Who is Jaʿfar, or who his father? And what
Would the Barmakids have been without us?

“He then turned his horse’s head and rode away.”

Jaʿfar was killed on Saturday night, the first of Ṣafar in 187 AH. He was thirty-seven years old and had served as vizier for seventeen years.

Jaʿfar’s mother ʿUbādah once entered a household on the Day of Sacrifice, asking them for a ram skin to warm herself. They asked her about the luxury she had formerly enjoyed. She said, “On a day like this I would awaken with four hundred maidservants standing over me—yet I would say, ‘My son Jaʿfar is undutiful to me.’ ”

Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī reports with his chain of transmission that when Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah heard that al-Rashīd had put Jaʿfar to death and what he had unleashed