—exceedingly so. He ordered two men who were with him to accompany her until they had delivered her to whatever house she wished. She locked her own door, handed the key to her neighbor, and went off with them until she reached the house of her beloved. She knocked, entered, and said to the two escorts, “Go in peace; this is his house.”

It was indeed the dwelling of a man she loved and who loved her. He asked, “How did you manage to reach me?” She told him of the stratagem she had used with the judge, and he admired her resourcefulness.

Toward day’s end her husband returned to find his door locked and no one inside. He asked the neighbors about her, and that same neighbor told him what had happened. He hurried to the judge and cried, “I want my wife back from you—this very moment, or I will inform al-Ḥākim. She has no brother at all; she has gone to her lover.”

The judge feared the scandal that might ensue, so he rode to al-Ḥākim and wept before him. When al-Ḥākim asked what had occurred, he related the whole affair. Al-Ḥākim thereupon dispatched, together with the two men who had escorted her, officers to bring both the man and the woman—whatever state they might be in. They found the pair embracing, drunk. Al-Ḥākim questioned them, and they offered excuses that availed nothing. He ordered that the woman be burned to death in the wilderness and that the man be scourged so brutally that it killed him. Thereafter al-Ḥākim tightened his control over women still further, confining them more narrowly than a lizard in its burrow, and he continued in that manner until his death. Ibn al-Jawzī records the incident (1).

In Rajab of that same year, Abū al-Ḥasan Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Abī al-Shawārib assumed the judiciary of the capital after the death of Abū Muḥammad ibn al-Akfānī.

Also in that year Fakhr al-Mulk (2) built a mosque in the Eastern Quarter and fitted it with iron gratings.

Among the notable people who died that year were:

• Bakr ibn Shādhān ibn Bakr (3), Abū al-Qāsim, the Qur’an-reciter and preacher. He had received ḥadith from Abū Bakr al-Shāfiʿī and Jaʿfar al-Khuldī (4), while al-Azharī and al-Khallāl transmitted from him. He was trustworthy, reliable, righteous, devout, ascetic, steadfast in night prayer, and possessed of noble character. He died this year, having passed the age of eighty, and was buried at Bāb Ḥarb.

• Badr ibn Ḥasnuwayh ibn al-Ḥusayn (5), Abū al-Najm al-Kurdi, one of the finest princes of the Dīnavar and Hamadhān region, renowned for wise governance and abundant charity. The caliph al-Qādir billāh addressed him as Abū al-Najm, bestowed upon him the honorific Nāṣir al-Dawla, and sent him a banner of investiture.