bewildered by all this (1)—what could it be?—until word reached us (2) that it was a fire.
I say: Abū Shāmah had already dated the incident before any letters about this fire arrived, and he wrote (3): “That same year, on the night of Monday, the sixteenth of Jumādā al-Ākhirah, the moon was eclipsed at the beginning of the night; it was intensely red and then cleared. On the following day the sun was eclipsed (4); it reddened at its rising and its setting and remained so for several days, its hue altered and its light faint. Allah is capable of all things (5).”
He then added (6): “This made manifest what al-Shāfiʿī had envisaged about an eclipse coinciding with a festival, something the discerning had deemed unlikely.”
Abū Shāmah went on (7): “In another letter from one of the Banū al-Fāshānī in Madinah it says: Couriers arrived to us in Jumādā al-Ākhirah from Iraq and reported that Baghdad had been struck by a tremendous flood, so that water poured through the city walls into the town. Much of the city was submerged; the water reached the caliph’s palace (8) in the very center, the vizier’s residence collapsed along with three hundred and eighty houses, the caliph’s storehouse fell, a great quantity from the arsenal was lost, the people were on the brink of destruction, and boats once again sailed into the middle of the city (9), passing through the alleyways of Baghdad (10).”
He said: “As for us, something momentous occurred here. On Wednesday, the third of Jumādā al-Ākhirah—and for two days before that—people kept hearing a sound (11) like thunder. [Hour after hour, with not a cloud in the sky, so we thought little of it from two days earlier until the night before Wednesday; then the sound became audible to everyone, and the earth shook beneath us with a roar like pealing thunder.] All the people were alarmed; they sprang from their beds, cried out seeking Allah’s forgiveness, hurried to the mosque and prayed there. The ground went on trembling beneath the people hour after hour until dawn, and throughout that entire Wednesday, the whole night of Thursday, [and Thursday itself], the night of Friday, and the morning of Friday (12)…"