the people are reproaching you for the speed with which you shed blood.”
He replied, “By Allah, since the day I assumed authority I have spilled no unlawful blood except with due cause.”
I said, “Then why did you kill Ahmad ibn al-Tayyib (1), who had been your servant and had committed no offense that was apparent to you (2)?”
He answered, “Woe to you! The man urged me to ilḥād—outright disbelief in Allah—in a private meeting between the two of us. I said to him, ‘Fellow! I am a kinsman of the Law-giver and I occupy his station; shall I renounce faith and become one of those (3)?’ So I put him to death (4).”
I asked, “And what of the three men you executed over the cucumbers?”
He said, “By Allah, those were not the men who had taken the cucumbers. They were thieves whose execution (5) was already due. I had them brought from the prisons and killed them, claiming they were the culprits, in order to strike fear into the army so that they would not cause corruption in the land.
“After that I ordered the release of the men who had been jailed for the cucumbers; once they had repented, I freed them, clothed them in robes of honor, and restored the stipends that had been assigned to them.”
Ibn al-Jawzi (6) relates: Al-Muʿtaḍid once went out and camped at Bāb al-Shamāsiyyah. He forbade anyone to take so much as a single item from another’s orchard. A black slave was brought in for having plucked a cluster of unripe dates (7). Al-Muʿtaḍid gazed at him for a long while, then ordered that his neck be struck.
He turned to his companions and said, “Ordinary people will object to this and say that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ declared, ‘There is no ḥadd cutting for fruit still on the tree or for palm-shoots’ (8). Yet I did not kill this man for his theft.
“This black man has an extraordinary story: he is one of the Zanj who sought safe-conduct during my father’s reign. He once quarreled with a Muslim, struck him, and severed his hand; the man died from the wound. My father let the matter drop in order to win the Zanj over. I swore that if ever I gained power over him I would kill him. My eyes have not lighted on him until this very hour, so I killed him in retribution for that Muslim man (9).”