The vizier ʿAmīd al-Dawlah Ibn Jahīr (1)
Muḥammad ibn Abī Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Jahīr, the distinguished vizier, Abū Manṣūr, surnamed ʿAmīd al-Dawlah.
He ranked among the foremost of viziers and the nobility’s elite. He served three caliphs and held the vizierate for two of them. Forbearing and slow to react, he was nonetheless criticized for his pride. He assumed the vizierate several times, being dismissed and then reinstated, until this last occasion, when he was imprisoned in the Caliphal Palace and left it only as a corpse in Shawwāl of the present year.
Ibn Jazlah (2)
Yaḥyā ibn ʿĪsā ibn Jazlah, the physician, author of Al-Minhāj (3) in medicine.
Originally a Christian, he used to frequent Shaykh Abū ʿAlī ibn al-Walīd the Muʿtazilī (4) to study logic under him. The shaykh persistently invited him to Islam and explained its proofs until he embraced the faith and did so soundly. Thereafter the chief judge Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Dāmaghānī appointed him to draw up the legal registers. He then treated people free of charge, sometimes even preparing their medicines at his own expense as an act of charity. In his will he stipulated that his books be made an endowment for the shrine of Imām Abū Ḥanīfah—may Allah have mercy on him.
[Then the year 494 AH began.]
Events of the year:
The peril posed by the Bāṭiniyyah in Isfahan and its environs grew severe; the sultan killed great numbers of them and declared their blood and property licit to the common folk, [and it was proclaimed concerning them: “Whoever of them you are able to seize, kill him and take his wealth.”] (5)
They had already taken control of many fortresses; the first they captured was in 483 AH, and the one who seized it was Ḥasan ibn al-Ṣabbāḥ, one of their propagandists. He had travelled to Egypt and learned from the heretics there, after which he came to those districts in the land of Isfahan. He would invite only the dull-witted [ignorant] who could not tell their right hand from their left; then he would feed them honey mixed with walnuts and black cumin until their temperaments overheated and their minds were ruined. After that he would relate to them certain reports about the Prophet’s family and spin for them some of the deviant Rāfiḍī fabrications—that they had been oppressed and deprived of the rights [which Allah and His Messenger had supposedly guaranteed them]. Then he would say to one of them: “If the Khārijites fought alongside the Umayyads for ʿAlī, you are even more entitled to fight in support of your Imām, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, and do not…"