فتن المئات

فتن المئات

The 'century calamity' pattern al-Suyuti sets at his book's close, from Abd Allah ibn Amr's saying that each century's head brings an affair: the first, al-Hajjaj's strife; the second, al-Ma'mun's civil war and the mihna — 'the greatest of this umma's trials'; the third, the Qarmati, al-Muqtadir's deposition-day slaughter and the Ubaydi state's dawn; the fourth, al-Hakim's strife; the fifth, the Franks' taking of Syria and Jerusalem; the sixth, the unprecedented famine and the Tatars' beginning; the seventh, the great Tatar calamity 'that poured seas of Muslim blood'; the eighth, Timur's, which dwarfed it. His prayer to be taken before the ninth was answered, his student Jaramard writes — for that fitna was Selim Shah's conquest of Egypt ¹.