What 'Isa ibn Hisham Told Us. Muhammad al-Muwaylihi
well aware of how you spent your lives collecting ephemeral objects. You plied power and authority as your trade, using them to gain riches. The only point you could see in having authority was in order to amass money, to deprive people of their rights, and to snatch food out of the mouths of widows and orphans. It didn’t matter whether you obtained the money by fair means or foul; it was all the same to you. You showed no concern for the wretched weakling and felt no pity for the humble disabled person. Instead you wronged the innocent and set guilty people free. As a result, you amassed for yourselves whatever bounty God had apportioned to His servants and whatever nourishment He had divided among them. You condoned all kinds of sin and took the burden of guilt on yourselves. Afterwards, you deprived yourselves of any enjoyment of what you had collected and acted like misers. You did not number among those people to whose wealth beggars and the needy have an acknowledged right. You failed to carry out the duties which God has enjoined regarding your wealth or to render it pure by giving alms and charity.60 It was the ringing of dirham against dirham and the hushed sound of dinars clinking against each other that thrilled you.
8.5
In order to rob, despoil, and hoard as you did, you devised all sorts of ways abhorred by God and utterly condemned by mankind. In so doing, you acted in sin and willfully disobeyed the Prophet’s injunctions. You dared to flout the commands and prohibitions of God Almighty and forced religious scholars to interpret His authority as you fancied. They fulfilled that role for you because you had exclusive control over their salaries; they needed the surplus from your way of life to provide food for themselves. So the burden of guilt is on you and on them, but it is greater and heavier on you. Eventually when your life came to an end when the moment of death arrived, you bequeathed what you had left behind to your young sons and daughters who had grown up in your midst in a state of deprivation. You didn’t enlighten them with any kind of education, nor did you allow them to be taught and instructed by the inexorable passing of days and nights. In their eyes, you were like a watchdog in front of the door of a treasure chamber, and they were forever making schemes to get rid of it by killing it—as the saying goes. When death or murder finally relieved them of your presence, they tore your wealth apart out of vengeance on it and you. So it happened that worms and inheritors had a race over your buried remains as well as over your hoarded ones, and the inheritors beat the worms coming and going. More and more money disappeared, estate after estate, mansion after mansion, till only the house in which they were living was left. Then they started selling off the furniture, and pawning the jewels and necklaces off the girls’ very necks. They kept working on the house, room by room, and creditors entered step by step until all vestiges of it and every detail about it disappeared. The name of the original builder who had committed so many crimes in order to keep it standing was forever lost, and all that remained was a separate curse for each of two circumstances: the first for being rid of him by committing him to the grave; the second for their regret that he’d failed to teach them anything when they were still young that would help them live useful lives.
8.6
This then was the way, you amirs, that your money and property came to nought after your death. If only your children and grandchildren had mitigated the crime you had committed in amassing this wealth from the blood of Egyptians by spending and squandering it in their midst. That at least would have been akin to restoring some rights to the proper owner. But the worst misfortune of all is that all this wealth has fallen into the hands of foreigners and aliens. It seems as if fate put the Mamluks in authority over the Egyptians in order to rob them of their wealth and deprive them of their properties, then God put other people in command in order to rob the Mamluks of what they had collected. He then put their descendants in control, and they’ve proceeded to hand it all over to foreigners to enjoy in front of the very eyes of Egyptians who have more right to at least part of it. The only thing which has led your descendants to submit like this is their reverence for foreigners and the utter contempt for the Egyptian people which they’ve inherited from you. You weren’t satisfied just to be masters of the Egyptians! You had to bring in foreigners as your partners in this domination. The result was that they beat you at your own game and forced you to join the Egyptians in their subjection.
8.7
You need to know, Amir, that the mansions of your wealthy friends and companions from your era whom you used to count in the thousands are all in ruins. Their descendants just stare at them. If you want to find out about your wealth and estates today, then inquire under the surface of that millstone. Oh the sheer futility of those who collect and hoard with such relish! You had no need to indulge in such avarice, depriving yourselves in this world and earning hellfire in the next.
Man says: “I have invested my wealth,” and to the heir alone
belongs the money which the earner has invested.
He holds himself to account for it in his lifetime, then bequeaths it
as booty for those whom he cannot hold to account.61
PĀSHĀ In my opinion you’ve exceeded all reasonable bounds in your opprobrium and hypercritical comments. I have thought of you as a friend; ever since we have been together, I have never made such a series of rash and deceitful statements. How am I supposed to earn a living now that all the money has disappeared and, as you point out, we no longer have any authority? The only way out of my difficulties which I can see is to allow my soul to return to the grave and rest in deathly peace again. How serene everything felt just yesterday, how soothing to the soul! How fair is the shadow of the tomb, and how foul the light of this sun!
8.8
ʿĪsā Someone in your circumstances can only expect sorrow and pity from us. You members of the ruling class have come to believe that the power to exert authority which you happened to have at one time is a general phenomenon on which to base existence, in that it provides an instrument for earning a living wage, just like any other craft or job. But, once authority falls from your grasp, you lose the means of earning a living, just as a craftsman becomes unemployed when his hand is paralyzed. He can no longer function and becomes a weight on everyone’s shoulders. Like you, his only wish is to die. It’s as though you members of the ruling class are a group apart, with a guaranteed share of some form of livelihood to the exclusion of everyone else. You have to be on top, either of a golden throne or a bier. A poor chap who was one of the leaders in your profession wrote the following line while he was in low spirits in prison:
We are a people for whom there’s no middle course:
For us it is either the forefront over others or the grave.62
In the profession of authority and order, you know full well how little is raised to prominence and how much is left to be contained in the grave. It would be more appropriate if you were to behave like other people by earning a living. Everyone has a particular method, trade, profession, and machine which enables him to earn a decent living wage. If you step down from your thrones, you can join the other members of our society doing something useful and also gaining some rewards.
PĀSHĀ By God, all the harm I have suffered at the hands of the police, Parquet, the two courts, and the Committee is far less worrying and distressing than this bitter advice of yours. What’s to be done? My life has long since passed, save for a very little. I’ve no time left for crafts and hard work. The moral you draw may be sound enough, but it’s meant for somebody who’s on the way up rather than passing on.
8.9
ʿĪsā ibn Hishām said: The Pāshā’s mood saddened me, and I started feeling sorry for him. I tried to think of ways he could earn a living. Every time an idea occurred to me that might work, my hopes were dashed when I thought about it more carefully. Sometimes the Pāshā stared at me as I was thinking, at others he thought for himself. We stayed like that, but then he suddenly leapt to his feet and grabbed my coat.
PĀSHĀ I’ve come up with a way to ward off poverty and suffice for my old age.
ʿĪSĀ What have you thought of?
PĀSHĀ In former times rulers used to save their necks from