And in that same year Khumārtakīn led the people in the pilgrimage, as was customary.
Among the notables who died in that year was the vizier Abū Nasr ibn Jahīr ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Jahīr (1), known as ʿAmīd al-Mulk (2). A famed minister, he served as vizier to al-Qāʾim and subsequently to his son al-Muqtadī, until Sultan Malikshāh removed him. The Sultan then appointed his own son Fakhr al-Dawla over Diyār Bakr and other territories. Abū Nasr died this year in Mosul, the town in which he had been born.
That same year also witnessed the killing of the Ṣulayḥid ruler of Yemen, already mentioned above (3).
Then came the year 484 AH.
In Muḥarram of that year, the astrologer who had burned Basra wrote to the people of Wāsiṭ, calling them to obey him. In his letter he declared: “I am the Mahdī, Lord of the Age, the one who enjoins what is right and forbids what is wrong, guiding mankind to the truth. If you obey, you will be safe from punishment; if you deviate from the truth, the earth will swallow you. Believe, therefore, in Allah and in the Imām al-Mahdī.”
During the same year the dhimmīs were required to wear distinctive clothing and to fasten the zunnār belt; the same rule applied to their women in the bathhouses and elsewhere.
In Jumādā al-Ūlā Shaykh Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī al-Ṭūsī arrived from Isfahan in Baghdad to take up the professorship at the Niẓāmiyya. Niẓām al-Mulk granted him the honorifics “Zayn al-Dīn” and “Sharaf al-Aʾimmah.”
Ibn al-Jawzī (4) said of him, “His speech was honey-sweet and his intellect exceedingly sharp.”
In Ramaḍān of that year the vizier Abū Shujāʿ was dismissed from the vizierate of the caliphate, and on his removal he recited by way of allusion:
He assumed the post when he had not an enemy,
and left it when he had not a friend.
Thereafter a letter from Niẓām al-Mulk arrived ordering him to leave Baghdad, so he departed for several places, yet none pleased him. He therefore resolved to perform the pilgrimage; later Niẓām’s disposition toward him improved, and he sent to ask that Abū Shujāʿ accompany him on the journey (5) and the son of—