Hazhir Teimourian
Mummies In The Closet
The Court of the Caliphs: The Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty
By Hugh Kennedy
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 326pp £20
Whenever I think of the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, one story about them elbows aside all others in my mind. In the early 840s, Caliph Mutawakkil badly wanted to see a wondrous cedar in the hills of Nishapur that was said to have been planted 1,400 years earlier by Zarathustra to commemorate the conversion of the local king to his creed. But Nishapur was months away by caravan in north-east Iran, and the caliph had no time to go there. So he decreed that the tree be brought to him. Writing about it some 200 years later, the Iranian courtier and historian Beyhaqqi the Elder was clearly appalled by the barbarity of this decision, even though he was a committed Muslim himself. He wrote:
Mutawakkil ordered the [Arab] governor of Nishapur that all the branches of the tree be wrapped in felt so that carpenters in Baghdad could erect them again for him to see, before he used the timber to build a new mansion. So the Zoroastrians of Khorasan gathered and told the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’
@rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool.
Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
literaryreview.co.uk
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner