Another scion of the Abbasid family, Mahommed, a great-grandson of the caliph Mostansir, found at a later period a refuge in India, where the sultan of Delhi received him with the greatest respect, named him Makhdumzādeh, “the Master’s son,” and treated him as a prince. Ibn Batūta saw him when he visited India, and says that he was very avaricious. On his return to Bagdad the traveller found there a young man, son of this prince, who gained a single dirhem daily for serving as imām in a mosque, and did not get the least relief from his rich father. It seems that this Mahommed, or his son, emigrated later to Sumatra, where in the old Samūtra the graves of their descendants have been lately discovered.
(M. J. de G.)
[1] Throughout this article, well-known names of persons and places appear in their most familiar forms, generally without accents or other diacritical signs. For the sake of homogeneity the articles on these persons or places are also given under these forms, but in such cases, the exact forms, according to the system of transliteration adopted, are there given in addition.
[2] See Noldeke, Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Poesie der alten Araber (1864), pp. 89 seq.
[3] De Goeje, Mémoires d’hist. et de géog. orient. No. 2 (2nd ed., Leiden, 1864); Nöldeke, D.M.Z., 1875, p. 76 sqq.; Balādhurī 137.
[4] The accounts differ; see Balādhurī 305. The chronology of the conquests is in many points uncertain.
[5] Balādhurī 315 sq.; Tabarī. i. 1068.
[6] He sought to make the whole nation a great host of God; the Arabs were to be soldiers and nothing else. They were forbidden to acquire landed estates in the conquered countries; all land was either made state property or was restored to the old owners subject to a perpetual tribute which provided pay on a splendid scale for the army.
[7] Nöldeke, Tabari, 246. To Omar is due also the establishment of the Era of the Flight (Hegira).