Bensalem Himmich - The Theocrat

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 ghoul: 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.

Mas‘ud did not bother to seek explanations for what was going on all around him. Instead he focused his entire mental capacities on a single issue: since his reliance on the dead for protection was no longer working, how could he get away from these live human beings who had invaded the cemetery? Where could he go? Mas‘ud poured himself heart and soul into solving this knotty problem and explored every conceivable avenue; he thought of advantages and disadvantages and converted them into a kind of sustenance through which he could stave off his hunger and misery. On the third day of this grim period, he surrendered to a deep midday sleep, only to wake up to the sounds of a group of boys screaming because they had moved away all the branches and leaves he was using to cover himself and then discovered a living being underneath them. Elder folk arrived in droves to rescue the young children and surrounded Mas‘ud’s ditch in successive circles. “Look at this disgusting slave,” they were saying, “who’s pretending to be dead so he can run away from his master. We must tie him in chains and hand him over to the police chief!” This and other similarly brutal statements fell on Mas‘ud like a fatal lightning-strike. He could stand it no longer, stood up with a huge roar, and took off through the crowd, yelling for all he was worth. Anyone who tried to stand in his way found himself confronting a terrifying display of yelling and threats. As his voice became hoarse, people still only managed to grab hold of the rags and tatters he was wearing. No sooner had he managed to get clear of this mob of people than he found himself, naked and exhausted, on the city’s outskirts, confronting a platoon of armed guards. There are many reports about what happened next to Mas‘ud in this tricky situation. The most plausible is what was contained in the police chief’s report quoted below: