Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/370

336 and middle classes of the people were still profoundly and fanatically attached to the Faith of the Unity of God; nor were examples of Mohammedan fervour and zealotry wanting that would not have misbeseemed the strictest epochs of religious enthusiasm. Er Reshid himself was completely under ecclesiastical control, especially that of the Chief Imam of his reign, the Sheikh Abou Yousuf, who seems to have been more of a courtier than a priest and to have ingratiated himself with the Khalif by his audacious adroitness (of which at least one instance finds mention in The Thousand and One Nights) in twisting the interminable subtleties of Mohammedan ritual and dogma to suit the monarch’s varying caprices and inclinations; and one of the most salient examples of ascetic devotion that mark the history of Islam is recorded in the person of the Khalif’s own son, who, no doubt impelled by disgust at his father’s cruelty and rapacity, as well as at the licence of his luxurious court, became a hermit, saint or “friend of God” (as the Muslims have it), under the circumstances detailed in the story of.

Under Haroun er Reshid, Baghdad was undoubtedly the metropolis of Muslim civilisation. It is said to have been as populous as modern Paris, and the rapid