That same year al-Rashid executed al-Hayṣam the Yemeni. ʿĪsā ibn Jaʿfar set out to join the caliph but died on the road.

In that year the people’s pilgrimage was led by al-ʿAbbās ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Jaʿfar, great-grandson of Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr.

[In that year there also died] Ismāʿīl ibn Jāmiʿ (1) ibn Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muṭṭalib ibn Abī Wadāʿah, Abū al-Qāsim, one of the most celebrated singers of his age—indeed, a man who became proverbial for his art. He had first memorised the Quran, but later devoted himself to music and abandoned his recitation. Abū al-Faraj ibn ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn, author of Kitāb al-Aghānī, records a number of remarkable anecdotes about him (2), among them the following:

He said: “One day I was looking out from an upper room in Ḥarrān (3) when a black slave-girl appeared carrying a water-skin. She sat down, set the skin beside her, and began to sing:
To God I complain of her niggardliness, though I am so free-handed;
She takes from me honey, yet gives me bitter wormwood.
Return the stricken heart—you are the one who slew it;
Do not leave it wandering, lovesick and forlorn.

“I could not bear to let such a song escape me and hoped she would repeat it. She rose and walked away, so I came down, followed her, and asked her to sing it again. ‘I have to pay a daily tax of two dirhams,’ she answered. I gave her the two dirhams and she repeated the song, which I memorised and sang throughout that day. When morning came I had forgotten it. The same girl returned; I asked her once more to sing it, and again she would do so only for two dirhams.

“Then she said, ‘You begrudge four dirhams? I can already see you earning four thousand dinars from it!’

“I sang that piece before al-Rashid one night and he gave me one thousand dinars. He asked me to repeat it three more times and gave me a further three thousand. I smiled, and he asked, ‘Why are you smiling?’ I told him the story; he laughed, tossed me another purse containing a thousand dinars, and said, ‘I will not make the black girl a liar.’

He also related (4): “One morning in Medina I had only three dirhams. I saw a young girl with a jar on her shoulder hurrying to the well while singing in a plaintive voice:
We told our beloveds how long the night felt to us;
They answered, ‘How very short the night seems to us!’
That is because sleep swiftly closes their eyes,
While slumber will not visit our eyes at all.”