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and middle classes of the people were still profoundly and fanatically attached to the Faith of the Unity of God; nor were examples of Mohammedan fervour and zealotry wanting that would not have misbeseemed the strictest epochs of religious enthusiasm. Er Reshid himself was completely under ecclesiastical control, especially that of the Chief Imam of his reign, the Sheikh Abou Yousuf, who seems to have been more of a courtier than a priest and to have ingratiated himself with the Khalif by his audacious adroitness (of which at least one instance finds mention in The Thousand and One Nights) in twisting the interminable subtleties of Mohammedan ritual and dogma to suit the monarch’s varying caprices and inclinations; and one of the most salient examples of ascetic devotion that mark the history of Islam is recorded in the person of the Khalif’s own son, who, no doubt impelled by disgust at his father’s cruelty and rapacity, as well as at the licence of his luxurious court, became a hermit, saint or “friend of God” (as the Muslims have it), under the circumstances detailed in the story of The Devout Prince.
Under Haroun er Reshid, Baghdad was undoubtedly the metropolis of Muslim civilisation.[1] It is said to have been as populous as modern Paris,[2] and the rapid
- ↑ Cordova and Grenada, which the brilliant culture of the Khalifs of Spain afterwards raised to the first place, were as yet in their infancy.
- ↑ According to some historians, the Tartar conqueror Hulagou slew no less than eighteen hundred thousand of the inhabitants on the capture of the city in 1258. This number is possibly exaggerated, but no chronicler puts the number of the victims at less than eight hundred thousand.
