• Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Daqīqī (1).
[The year 267 AH]
In this year Abū Aḥmad al-Muwaffaq sent his son Abū al-ʿAbbās at the head of some ten thousand cavalry and infantry, splendidly equipped and superbly arrayed, to fight the Zanj. They advanced against them, and between the two sides there occurred, on several occasions, many engagements and celebrated battles whose full description would be too long to relate. Imām Abū Jaʿfar ibn Jarīr (may Allah have mercy on him) has set them forth in detail in his History (2).
In sum, matters reached the point where Abū al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Muwaffaq regained all the territory the Zanj had occupied in the region of Wāsiṭ and along the Tigris. He was still a young man with no experience of war, yet Allah kept him safe, granted him spoil, raised his word high, guided his aim, answered his prayer, granted victory at his hands, and showered His favors upon him. This same youth later assumed the caliphate after his uncle al-Muʿtamid and was given the title al-Muʿtaḍid, as will be mentioned.
Thereafter, in Ṣafar of that same year, Abū Aḥmad al-Muwaffaq, Nāṣir Dīn Allah, set out from Baghdad with a vast army. He entered Wāsiṭ in Rabīʿ al-Awwal, where his son met him and informed him about the troops (3) under his command and the burdens of jihād they had borne. Al-Muwaffaq bestowed magnificent robes of honor upon him and the other commanders, then marched with all the forces toward the leader of the Zanj, who was in the city he had built and named al-Manīʿah. A fierce battle was fought in its defense (4); al-Muwaffaq overpowered them, stormed the city by force, and they fled. He (5) dispatched troops in pursuit; they overtook them in the marshes, killing and capturing. Al-Muwaffaq seized abundant booty from the city and rescued five thousand Muslim women, ordering that they be sent back to their families (6) in Wāsiṭ. He then commanded that the city’s walls be demolished, its moat filled in, and that it be left a desolation (7) after it had been (8) a gathering-place for people, laid waste (9) after it had been a refuge for the wicked.