until al-Basāsirī put him to death, after parading him in public and then crucifying him, hanging him by his cheeks, as we have already related. ⦗He was fifty-two years and five months old.⦘
(1) ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad ibn Shiṭṭā. (2) A senior musnid of hadith, he was deemed reliable, well-versed in Arabic, the various Qur’anic readings, and the methodologies of the reciters. He lived to the age of eighty and authored a treatise on tajwīd (proper Qur’anic intonation). May Allah Most High have mercy on him.
Manṣūr ibn al-Ḥusayn, Abū al-Fawāris al-Asadī, (3) lord of al-Jazīrah. He died this year, whereupon the tribe agreed to install his son Ṣadaqah after him. Allah knows best what is correct.
⦗Then the year 451 AH began.⦘
The year opened ⦗this year⦘ while Baghdad was in the hands of al-Basāsirī, who had the Friday sermon delivered there in the name of the Fatimid caliph al-Mustanṣir ⦗ruler of Egypt⦘, while al-Qāʾim ⦗the Abbasid caliph⦘ was staying at Ḥadīthah ʿĀnah. On Monday, the twelfth of Ṣafar, al-Basāsirī summoned the Chief Judge Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Dāmghānī together with a group of notable ʿAlids and ʿAbbāsids and obliged them to pledge allegiance to the Fatimid caliph al-Mustanṣir ⦗ruler of Egypt⦘. He then entered the Palace of the Caliphate with those men and ordered that the crown atop the palace be dismantled, so several of the battlements were pulled down. Someone told him, “The ugliness of that outweighs any benefit,” whereupon he desisted.
He next rode to visit the shrine in Kūfa (4) and resolved to dig a canal that would bring water to the Ḥāʾir (5) in fulfillment of a vow he had undertaken. He also ordered that the body of Ibn al-Musallama be moved to a place near the Ṭāhirid ḥarīm and that it be displayed on the bank of the Tigris. The caliph’s mother—an old woman of about seventy (6) who was hiding in some corner—wrote to al-Basāsirī complaining of her need, poverty, and straitened circumstances. He sent for her, brought her into the ḥarīm, assigned her two maidservants, and allotted her each day twelve ratls (roughly twelve pounds) of bread and four ratls of meat—a mere trifle compared with what he had done to her son and to the Sunnis.