All musical instruments were collected and burned. No one was allowed to ride boats to the Canal; all gates leading to it and all balconies and windows looking out on it were closed.
Decree concerning the proper cloistering of women:
By Fatima the radiant, what I have to say about women is nothing but good!
How can I possibly despise them or defame them when beneath the feet of my mother lies my own paradise. My own state gets its name and its foundation from a blessed woman, Fatima, daughter of the Prophet and wife of Ali, His own trustee and legatee of their secrets?
I have indeed commanded that all cloistered women should remain inside their houses. They are to be prevented from going outside or looking out of windows or balconies. I have given orders that any cobbler who makes them shoes, any bath-owner who opens his doors to them, is to be punished. This is not a cruel act on my part, but is meant to prevent the anti-Christ from involving himself in a war of sexual provocation. Such a conflict will be futile and accursed, since it only serves to make men and women alike forget the real war that we have all to fight against that enemy who is ever on the watch for our foibles and slips.
In this same year the chancellery was inundated with requests from women for special dispensations: maidservants, women with grievances, midwives, washers of corpses, widows, yarn-sellers, and those who needed to travel.
Some women were locked up inside public baths and suffocated.
That year a pregnant sheep was sacrificed, and, when the inside was opened up, historians are prepared to swear on the most solemn of oaths that the foetus inside had human features.
In this year, and, some say, the year before as well, “Al-Hakim sent a letter to Sultan Mahmud ibn Subuktakin, the ruler of Ghazna, inviting him to submit to his authority. The latter ripped it up, spat on it, and then forwarded it to al-Qadir, the Abbasid Caliph.”12
In the twenty-first — some people say, the twenty-second — year of al-Hakim’s quarter century, the caliph was afflicted with bouts of melancholia that were sometimes severe. He secluded himself and wandered around a great deal. He started wearing sackcloth and stopped bathing. He used to spend the night observing the stars and searching in them for divine inspiration. These habits of his were accentuated by a group of devotees who made their appearance at this time. They called him “the buttress of time and most eloquent of speakers,” and used books and epistles to record behavior traits and segments from his extraordinary and incredible decrees as proofs and signs of his infallibility and divinity. They demanded that he be sanctified and worshiped and secretly won his affection and his support. They started touring Egypt and Syria attracting followers to his cadre of “sages” and establishing pacts, agreements, and obligations of confidentiality and pledge. A series of intrigues and bloody conflicts broke out between this group of Sunnis. As a consequence, the devotee named Akhram was killed. Thereafter Hamzah al-Druzi took their cause with him and fled to the mountains of Syria, shortly before or after the murder of al-Hakim himself. His own followers spoke in terms of his disappearance three nights before the end of the month of Shawal in the year A.H. 411, an event to which we will refer later on.
2. The slave Mas‘ud, or the Agent for Sodomite Punishment
He used to take charge of the public order for himself, riding around the markets on a donkey (he never rode anything else). When he found anyone cheating, he ordered a slave whom he always took with him, named Mas‘ud, to sodomise the offender. This is a dire, indeed unprecedented, circumstance.
Ibn Kathir,
The Beginning and the Ending
Al-Hakim used to put on a white woolen garment and ride a tall, blond-colored donkey named Moon. He would make circuits of the markets in Cairo and the old city and take care of matters of public order himself. He always took along with him a tall, bulky slave named Mas‘ud. Whenever he came across anyone cheating people, he ordered Mas‘ud to sodomize the merchant on the spot in his shop, with al-Hakim standing close by and everyone watching till the slave had finished. For this reason Mas‘ud became the butt of jokes in Cairo. People would say: Mas‘ud, go and get him! A poet of the time composed these lines:
Mas‘ud has a tool that is mighty.
Long as a papyrus scroll.
One that cleaves the arses of sinners
Harder than a pearl on a nail.
Ibn lyas, Bright Flowers Concerning the Events of the Ages
This Mas‘ud had been one of the vast number of slaves that made the slave market on the outskirts of Cairo resound with noise. His most recent slave master, Abu Sulayman al-Za‘farani, had categorized him as a tough sell, someone that needed oils and creams to make him attractive to gullible buyers. Mas‘ud’s face was as black as could be and incredibly ugly, so much so that, if we are to believe rumors of the time, it was impossible to entertain any positive thoughts about him even with his white teeth. In all three dimensions his body was as powerful and tall as any ghouclass="underline" if he made up his mind to kill his slave master by kicking and punching him, it would have been no harder than banging a nail.
Like everyone so endowed, Mas‘ud wore his inner soul through the color of his skin and eyes, People saw his temperament as molded by sheer evil and darkness; the very purchase of him was regarded as a loss, since, like many other slaves, he was always running away. “If he’s hungry, he sleeps; if he’s sated, he fucks.” went the popular saying, but actually it did not apply to Mas‘ud. When he was hungry, he waited; if he was sated, he belched and started work again. As regards running away, he did indeed do it a lot; for that very reason, he never stayed with a single owner or slave master any longer than demanded by the limits of surveillance and daylight. He would wait instinctively for those moments of distraction at dead of night when he could speed away like an arrow in pursuit of careening specters.
The root cause of such behavior was not poor training or corrupt character, but rather a terrible fear of his own image as others saw him and of his smell that others termed foul. He had managed to run away more times than any other slave, so at one point he was declared legally killable inside Egypt. That particular episode forced him to spend a frantic period on the run, and he was forced to look for a hiding place. For a while he lived a life that swung between total panic and sorrow, anticipating his own downfall and the oblivion that would follow; if not that, then a mountain where he could stay clear of hunters and the blind. The last place Mas‘ud stayed during this period was a deserted cemetery shrouded in silence and full of wild herbs. There he eked out a living among the rocks and tree roots. Each night he envisioned legions of the dead rising up and handing him cold and poison to drink; the angel of the dead would arrive in a black cloak of infinite length and depart with the elements. In spite of the difficulties of living in such a place and the terrifying company at night, Mas‘ud came to appreciate that life among the dead was much preferable to falling once more into the clutches of the living. The eyes of the latter were hellfire, their expressions were deadly arrows, whereas the former had no eyes but merely sockets that were forever empty, neither pursuing anyone nor loading someone down with investigations and matters of conscience.
Mas‘ud spent several days with no alternative but living amid the cold and mud, nourished only by the thought of his own coffin or else by looking at the women’s underwear hung up to dry far away on the roofs of the houses that overlooked the cemetery. Then came the day when Mas‘ud felt his guts being torn apart by an incredible hunger. He got up and walked around the city perimeter searching for food amid the garbage. He had not gone very far before he noticed that everyone around him was running away in sheer fright, making even domestic animals and fowl do likewise. When he reached a square, he realized that his body was uncovered and exposed to the army elite, so he pulled himself together and rushed back to his ditch in the cemetery. Once there he stretched out, feeling defeated and overwhelmed, someone for whom nature’s only succor would be in the form of whatever herbs and grasses might feed his body and keep him concealed from the rest of humanity. He spent a few more days in this state, hovering between imminent death and labored breathing, but then all of a sudden he became aware of increased movement and the sound of human voices all around him, as though a whole group of tribes had arrived all at once to bury their dead en masse. Mas‘ud was shocked and frightened. When he raised his head to take a look, he was amazed to see a peculiar, indeed bewildering, scene right in front of him: people setting up tents and lighting fires on the cemetery grounds. Only a few days passed till the entire cemetery was crammed with people and animals. These people, he discovered, were not migrant bedouin but people who no longer had homes in the city or its suburbs. The cost of living inside the city was now so high that its quarters and districts had vomited them out to the city perimeter.