IV. PERSIAN FIGURES OF THE EARLY CALIPHAL PERIOD
The governor of Madāʾen under ʿOmar was the ascetic Salmān Fāresi, who wore wool and ate barley bread. On his deathbed, he expressed his fear that he would be punished for owning too much, even though his house contained nothing but a few utensils (Moruj III, sec. 1527).
‘Omar forbade non-Arabs (‘ajam) to enter Medina, but made an exception for Abu Loʾloʾa, a Zoroastrian carpenter, painter, and blacksmith from Nehāvand recommended by Moḡira b. Šoʿba. Abu Loʾloʾa asked ʿOmar to reduce his tax assessment (ḵarāj) of two dirhams a day, but the caliph refused. Infuriated, Abu Loʾloʾa stabbed him to death and then killed himself (Moruj III, secs. 1559-60).
During the struggle between ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb and Moʿāwia, three Ḵāreji dissidents swore to execute the two contenders, along with ʿAmr b. ʿĀṣ, governor of Egypt. According to one account, the assassin sent against ʿAmr was Zādawayh, a mawlā of the Banu ʿAnbar. He killed Ḵāreja, judge of Egypt, mistaking him for ʿAmr, and was executed (Moruj III, secs. 1730, 1740).
The Barmaki family of viziers was descended from a custodian of the fire-temple in Balkh (see BARMAKIDS). The family had some connection with the king of the Turks, and with the Umayyad caliph Hešām. Yaḥyā b. Ḵāledb. Barmak and his sons Jaʿfar and Fażl managed the government under Rashid. Yaḥyā convened scholars and sectarians to discuss such matters as “latency and manifestation, eternity and createdness, negation and affirmation, motion and rest, contiguity and separation, existence and non-existence, particles and the ṭafra (the “leap” postulated to solve Zeno’s paradox), bodies and accidents, the confirmation and denial of reliability (of transmitters), denial and affirmation of (divine) attributes, capacity to act and responsibility for actions, essence, quantity, quiddity, attribution, generation and corruption, whether the imamate is conferred by decree or by election, and all the rest of the topics covered in dialectical theology” (Moruj IV, sec. 2564). In 187/803, Rašid deposed the Barmakis, executing Jaʿfar and imprisoning Yaḥyā and Fażl. One account has it that they denied him access to money, another that they secretly released an Alid prisoner, and yet another that Jaʿfar consummated his marriage to Rašid’s sister ʿAbbāsa against the caliph’s orders (Moruj IV, secs. 2559-618).
Two ʿAbbasid caliphs were born to slave mothers identified as coming from regions associated with Iran: al-Maʾmun (r. 198-218/813-33), born to Marājel, from Bādḡis; and al-Motawakkel (r. 232-47/847-61) born to Šojāʿ, from Ṭoḵārestān (Masʿudi, 1894, pp. 349, 361). Other caliphal mothers may have been Iranian but are not identified as such.
Several Persian physicians were active at the caliphal court. Jebril b. Boḵtišuʿ, physician to al-Rašid, conducted an experiment to demonstrate the effect of eating a certain fish along with wine and cold water (Moruj IV, sec. 2511). A “Persian practitioner” (motaṭabbeb fāresi) from Ṭus predicted Rašid’s death on the basis of a urine sample (Moruj IV, sec. 2554). Ebn Māsawayh or Māsuya attended al-Maʾmun on his deathbed and advised al-Mo‘taṣem on a sauce for fish (Moruj IV, secs. 2783, 2789-90). The physicians Boḵtišuʿ, Ebn Māsawayh, and Miḵāʾil participated in a discussion with the caliph al-Wāṯeq on “how medical knowledge is attained and its principles acquired, whether by sense perception, inference, first principles, or tradition” (Moruj IV, secs 2857-869).
In a jocular speech, the buffoon ʿAli b. Jonayd Eskāfi compared caliphal protocol with “the conditions set by Jassās Šāši and Ḵalawayh the Mimic” (Moruj IV, secs. 2791-92).
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