The Final Negotiations
Tuesday, 01 April 2008
Written by Administrator
By the end of the fourth day of Safar, the eastern fences started to fall, with it, the Kaliph’s spirits were falling as well. His top adviser recommended that the calip should personally go out and meet with Holako to discuss the situation. And that’s what happened. Messengers went to Holako to tell him about the Caliph’s visit; Holako ordered his messengers to inform the caliphate that he’s not to come alone, but, to bring along his ministers, top advisers, Muslim scholars, rich merchants and heads of state, for these negotiations were to include everybody.
The caliphate agreed (he had to!) and went in a big crowd of the important people of his kingdom to Holako’s tent outside the eastern fences of Baghdad. The caliph was in such shame, he was not used to walking to meet anybody, he was the one to walk to; and his ancestors were the people who led the whole world from that same castle that he just left. The crowd that went along with him included 700 of the top heads of state. These people were stopped at the doors of Holako’s tent and ordered by his security people to let in only the caliph and seventeen of his advisors to meet Holako; the rest were to go with security personnel to undergo a security search!
Well, the rest did not undergo a security search, they were taken to be executed, all of them; immediately the caliph discovered what was clear to everybody except him, Holako was not there for negotiations, he was there for eradication and massive destruction. The caliph had discovered what the Qur’an told him centuries before: “In a believer they respect not the ties either of kinship or of covenant.” Qur’an 9:10 .He also discovered that we need power to protect our rights and if we don’t guard our rights, we’ll only have to blame ourselves for losing it.
Holako’s chilling orders came to the isolated Caliph and his top advisors:
The Caliph has to order his people to drop all their weapons and stop any form of resistance; that was easy, as most people did not carry arms and had no idea how to use them in the first place.
The Caliph was tied and taken back to Baghdad to tell the Mongol soldiers about the money, jewelry and other riches that he and his family owned.
The Caliph’s two older sons were killed in cold blood in front of him, the third son was taken in to custody (enslaved), along with the Caliph’s three sisters (Fatima, Khadija and Meriam).
Specific scholars were named and called to go out along with their wives and children to be slaughtered just like cows, in a spot the Mongols specified, close to the cemetery; what a tragedy…
The famous Islamic scholar, Bin Al-Jozy and his three sons were slaughtered that way. Mujahid and Soliman Shah (who were in favour of fighting the Mongols) were slaughtered as well, and the head Imam of the whole kingdom, the Imam who raised the Caliph himself and was responsible for his religious upbringing, Sadr El-Deen Bin Nayar, was slaughtered the same way. Then they called all Muslim leaders and all people who had memorized the Qur’an to be killed as well.
All of that happened while the Caliph was still alive to see and hear what was happening to his people. It is impossible to imagine the amount of sadness and regret that he must have suffered, along with the shame and horror that he lived through, but it was too late to change anything. He realized that the Prime Minister (the Mongol agent) was betraying him, but too late.
Desecration of Baghdad
Holako then ordered the desecration of Baghdad; his soldiers were free to do whatever their vicious nature might like to do. Everything was allowed: killing, torture, burning, looting, destroying, rape and enslaving. Everything was allowed! And the great city was violated; the Mongol monsters started doing what they do best. Neither power nor might but with Allah!
How many people came to learn Islam in this great city? How many armies headed towards the enemies of Islam from this great city? Where is Ibn Al-Waleed? Where is Al-Mouthana? Where is Al-Qa3quah Ibn Amro? Where is Al-Noamon? Where is our pride? Where is the love of Shahada and paradise? Nobody was there to defend the Islamic Kalipha, the city of Imam Abi-Hunifa, Iman Shafii, Iman Ibn-Hanbal, the city of Al-Rasheed, Al-Moutasem, the capital of Islam for more than five centuries was desecrated.
The Mongols started following Muslims everywhere, Muslims would run to hide at the top of their buildings, they followed them and killed them; even babies and infants were killed till blood started running down the streets like water. One day, another day, ten days passed and the killing did not stop; and the Caliph was still alive! The Caliph must have remembered these verses and wished he could change everything
“Ah! Would that I had died before this! Would that I had been a thing forgotten.” [ Qur’an 19:23 ] “Of no profit to me has been my wealth, my power has perished from me!” [Qur’an 69:28-29 ]
He probably thought “O my Lord, send me back (to life) in order that I may work righteousness in the things I neglected.” Qur’an 23:99-100
But, it was too late to correct what went wrong and it was time for the Caliph to be killed. The way that this Caliph was killed has never been heard of before or after, with Muslims or non-Muslims, with kings, presidents or even regular people. Holako’s advisors suggested that the caliph should not bleed or else Muslims might call for revenge!! So they suggested killing the Caliph by “kicking”, yes, by kicking! The Caliph was tied and thrown on the ground and was kicked by the Mongol soldiers till he died; what a death.
If you try to imagine the pain, the disgrace, the insult that he suffered till he died; it’s unimaginable. To Allah we return. That was ten days after the Mongols entered Baghdad, the 14th of Safar 656 of hijra. That was the end of the last Abassy Caliph and the fall of the great Abassy Kingdom. For forty days the Mongols kept on killing Muslims in Baghdad till they killed a million Muslims. In forty days, a million Muslims were killed; what a tragedy…
Try to imagine losing one million of the population of one nation in only 40 days. A real disaster. We mention that to realize that our troubles now as a Muslim nation are still of a smaller magnitude compared to other horrific disasters we went through; and we still see that, Allah willing, Muslims will recover and resume their civilization. Just for the record, only the Christian community survived the Mongolian Massacre.
And while the killing job was being taken care of, another group of Mongol soldiers headed to perform another disgusting duty, one that I could not find an excuse for. Only uncivilized criminals would think of burning Baghdad’s library. The Mongols felt a huge gap between themselves and Muslims.
Muslims had a long history of knowledge, research and literature. Tens of thousands of scholars in all branches of knowledge have spent their entire lives studying and enriching the Islamic civilization with millions of publications, while the Mongols had no civilization. It was an orphaned nation that was established in a desert in Northern China and adopted the law of the wild as its law and way of life. They lived and fought like animals, they never aimed for learning from other nations, or even improving this life for all nations. There is a huge gap between a nation that lived to spread goodness and knowledge and another that lived for destruction and killing.
The fall of Baghdad would never erase the long history of this great nation. What did the Mongols do? A group of them headed for this great library that contained the treasures that Muslim scholars spent their lives writing; Baghdad’s library was the greatest library on the face of the earth at that time. It contained books in every branch of knowledge, from religious knowledge like tafseer, hadith and fiqh, to other kinds of knowledge like medicine, astronomy, engineering, chemistry, physics, and geography. As well, social studies like history, literature, philosophy; plus millions of poems and novels and all that had been translated from other languages like Persian, Greek, and Indian or otherwise.
The library at Baghdad was a great library by all measure. Not one library at that time could be claimed as great as it, except for the library of Qurtoba in Andalusia, which, glory to Allah, was burned twenty years earlier when the Christians of Andalusia took control of it (in 636 hijra). One of their priests took charge of burning millions of books by himself (his name was Kambeese).
The Mongol invasion was not just a war to control a piece of land; it was a war to eradicate knowledge, civilization and even humanity. But, before we talk about what they did with the library, let’s talk about the library itself.
The Library of Baghdad
For five centuries this library was maintained to be the greatest house of knowledge. The Abassy Caliph Haroun Al-Rasheed, who governed from 170 to 193 hijra, established it. Then it bloomed at the time of Al-Mamoun from 198 to 218 hijra. Afterwards, Abassy Caliphs kept adding to it more and more books and rare publications. We are talking about millions of books in a time when there were no professional printers; all books were hand written. There are not accurate accounts of exactly how many books, but it was definitely many millions, it was a real miracle.
The library contained a huge number of rooms; each group of rooms was assigned for a branch of studies, for example, specific rooms for fiqh, others for medicine, and others for chemistry and so on. The library had hundreds of employees who took care of it, the printers who reprinted worn out books and the translators who translated from other languages. There were also employees to get books off the high shelves, and researchers who found books that contained the specific point someone was looking for. There were rooms for reading, rooms for lecturing and discussions, rooms for eating and even rooms for boarding students who came from long distances; it was more like a university.
Al-Mamoun used to put a condition in his treaties with the Roman kings after his repeated victories that allowed the Muslim translators to translate the books in Constantine. The Caliph had translators that went around the globe looking for valuable books to be translated, and then the Muslim scholars would study and analyze the content. This library had books translated from Greek, Latin, Persian, Indian and so on.
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