That same year, Sultan al-Dawlah arrived in Baghdad, had drums beaten at the stated hours of prayer—something for which no precedent existed—and contracted his marriage to the daughter of Qirwāsh, fixing the dowry at fifty thousand dinars.
Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī says in his book al-Muntaẓam (1): “Saʿd Allah ibn ʿAlī al-Bazzāz informed us; Abū Bakr al-Ṭuraythīthī informed us; Hibat Allah ibn al-Ḥasan al-Ṭabarī said: In the year 408 AH, the Caliph al-Qādir bi-Allah compelled the Muʿtazilite jurists of the Ḥanafī rite to repent. They openly recanted, disavowed Muʿtazilism, Rāfiḍism, and every doctrine contrary to Islam, and he took their written pledges that, should they relapse, he would exact a punishment so severe that others would take warning. Yamīn al-Dawlah Abū al-Qāsim Maḥmūd ibn Subuktakīn carried out the Caliph’s order in the provinces he ruled—Khurasan and elsewhere—by killing the Muʿtazilites, the Rāfiḍites, the Ismāʿīlīs, the Qarmaṭians, the Jahmites, and the Mushabbihah; crucifying them, imprisoning them, banishing them, and ordering that they be cursed from the pulpits. Every faction of the people of innovation was to be driven from its homeland, and this became an established sunnah in Islam.
No one from Iraq performed the pilgrimage that year because the country was in disorder, the Bedouins were marauding, and the state was too weak to restrain them.
[Among the notable deaths that year]
The chief chamberlain Shabāshī (2) Abū Naṣr, a freedman of Sharaf al-Dawlah, whom Bahāʾ al-Dawlah had styled al-Saʿīd. He gave abundant charity and founded many religious endowments. Among them was his dedication of the estate of Dabāhā (3) to the bīmāristān, an estate that produced large revenues of grain, fruit, and land tax. He built the Bridge over the Moat, the bīmāristān, the Yasarīyah (4), and other works. When he died he was buried in the cemetery of Imām Aḥmad, having stipulated that nothing be built over his grave; but people ignored this and erected a domed structure, which later collapsed. About seventy years after his death a group of women gathered at his grave to wail and weep. When they dispersed, one elderly woman who had led the lamentation dreamt that a Turk emerged from his grave with a mace, charged at her, and rebuked her; it was the fortunate chamberlain himself, and she awoke in terror.
[Then the year 409 AH began.]
On Thursday, the seventeenth of Muḥarram, a proclamation on the doctrines of Ahl al-Sunnah was read in the caliphal palace during the formal audience. It stated: “Whoever says, ‘The Qur’an is created,’ is an unbeliever whose blood is lawful.”