Yet pleasure had its limits. Haroun made the
BRING ME THE HEAD OF JAFAR, MOTHERFUCKER
One night in early 803, Haroun partied into the night as usual with Jafar al-Barmaki. But when they went their separate ways the caliph established himself on a boat in the Euphrates and ordered his African eunuch Musr to take his trusted guards and bring back the head of Jafar.
The Barmaki, vizier Yahya and son Jafar, had overreached. Jafar sometimes entered Haroun’s rooms without being announced. Haroun had executed the head of House Ali, yet may have discovered that the Barmaki were in contact with the rival dynasty. Their taxes had provoked revolts; their grandeur alienated the army. Distrusting many of his courtiers Haroun prepared their destruction.
Jafar tried to play for time. ‘He only ordered this while drunk,’ he told Musr. ‘Don’t do anything till morning, or at least discuss it with him again.’ Musr double-checked the order. Haroun’s reply? ‘Bring me Jafar’s head, motherfucker!’
Simultaneously he summoned Sindi, a devoted freedman, who was sent with guards to arrest all the other Barmaki. Yahya died in prison. Jafar’s head was brought to Haroun, who spat at it and sent it to Sindi: the head was then displayed on the bridges of Baghdad. The Barmakis’ downfall astonished everyone.
In February 808, Haroun left Baghdad with his favourite son al-Mamun to put down unrest in Khorasan where the boy was governor. Haroun agonized over the succession. ‘If I choose Amin, my people will be unhappy, if Mamun, my family will be.’ The caliph compromised: al-Amin, son of Zubaida, was to be senior monarch while al-Mamun would rule the east. In March Haroun, then forty-seven, suddenly died; al-Amin succeeded, supported by Zubaida. Al-Mamun respected the arrangement, basing himself in Merv (Turkmenistan).
One of the few who were happy with this was Abu Nuwas, al-Amin’s lover, though even the poet was careful what he wrote about this friend: ‘I am in love but can’t say with whom; I fear him who fears no one; I feel for my head and wonder if it is still attached to my body!’ Yet al-Amin’s feckless incompetence and homosexual preferences destroyed him.*
By 810, the caliphal brothers were estranged; both raised armies. Al-Mamun’s Khorasani army defeated al-Amin and laid siege to Baghdad, where a tragedy began to unfold. Street youths known as Naked Ones fought the invaders in the streets; mangonels (stone-throwing artillery) bombarded the city: ‘Here lies a stranger far from home; headless in the midst of the road; caught in the middle of the fighting; and no one knows which side he was on.’
Al-Amin tried to escape, but his boat capsized and he was captured: ‘Zubaida’s brat’ was thrown into prison, where he found himself with a former courtier. ‘Come closer and hold me tight in your arms,’ said al-Amin shaking. ‘What will my brother do? Kill me or forgive me?’
After midnight, armed Persians erupted into the cell. Al-Amin stood up: ‘We are from God and to Him we return.’ The Persians beheaded him and sent the head to al-Mamun, who wept, then told his advisers: ‘What’s done is done. So start thinking how to explain it.’ Facing Shiite revolts, al-Mamun appeased the House of Ali, promising to make Ali al-Rida his heir. But once the danger had passed, he ordered the poisoning of Imam Ali (known later as Ali Reza, a saint of Shiite Iran). In 819 he arrived in devastated Baghdad and started to restore the city.
Good-looking, talented and curious, al-Mamun was an original. He was kind to al-Amin’s mother Zubaida, calling her the ‘best of mothers’ – and she forgave him. The court was different, more Persian than Arab, but al-Mamun commissioned translations of Greek and Indian works, which were stored in his House of Wisdom, an old institution – library-cum-academy – dating from the Sasanians.* Meanwhile he oversaw a flowering of science, medicine, astronomy and geography, all of which fascinated the poetry-writing caliph: ‘If I flew up to the starry vault; / And joined heaven’s westward flow,’ he wrote, ‘I’d learn as I traversed the sky, / The fate of all things below.’*
