Then the year 323 AH began.

In that year Ibn Shannabūdh, the Qur’an reciter, was summoned. A number of jurists and fellow reciters objected to certain readings that he alone upheld. He admitted to some of them and denied others, whereupon he was ordered to repent. He wrote out with his own hand a formal retraction of the views for which he had been reproached, was given seven lashes by order of the vizier Abū ʿAlī ibn Muqla, and was banished to Basra or elsewhere. He thereupon invoked against the vizier that his hand be cut off and his affairs scattered—and not long thereafter, both came to pass.

Also in this year, during Jumādā al-Ākhirah, Badr al-Khars̱hanī (1), the police commander of both banks of Baghdad, proclaimed that no two followers of Abū Muḥammad al-Barbahārī, the Ḥanbalī preacher, were to assemble together. He imprisoned a number of them, while al-Barbahārī himself went into hiding and remained concealed for a time.

Ibn al-Jawzī states in al-Muntaẓam: “In the month of Ayyār the clouds thickened and the heat grew extremely intense. On its final day—corresponding to the twenty-fifth of Jumādā al-Ākhirah of this same year—a very violent wind arose; darkness fell and the sky turned black until after the ʿAsr prayer, then it abated (2), only to return until after the last ʿIshāʾ prayer (3).”

During the same year (4) the troops found their stipends long delayed, so they went to the house of the vizier Abū ʿAlī ibn Muqla, broke into it, and carried off whatever was inside.

A great fire broke out in the Bazaar of the Cloth-Merchants, burning much of the people’s property. al-Rāḍī billāh compensated them for part of what they had lost.

In Ramaḍān a group of amirs met to swear allegiance to Jaʿfar ibn al-Muʿtafi. When the vizier learned of their plan he overpowered them, imprisoned Jaʿfar, plundered his house, jailed a number of those who had pledged allegiance to him, and his uprising was extinguished.

The pilgrims set out under the protection of the commander Luʾluʾ, but they were ambushed by Abū Ṭāhir Sulaymān ibn Abī Saʿīd al-Jannābī—may Allah curse him—who killed most of them. Those who escaped fled back to Baghdad, and the pilgrimage from the Iraqi route was suspended that year. The massacre occurred on the night of Wednesday, twelve days into Dhū al-Qaʿdah.