JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

JAIS
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Jocelyn Sharlet
the family was marginalized but not destroyed. The “gift exchange”
story of the Barmakids is not really about gift exchange, and the series of
notices with poetry that leads up to it is not really story. However, the
Khālidī brothers weave the story and the poetry notices together to forge
a gift exchange story, and to offer a perspective on the ubiquitous topic
of the fall of the Barmakids.
We do not know anything with this exact meaning––[that it is forbidden for
the servant to keep what is suitable for the master instead of giving it to
him as a gift]—aside from what we’ve mentioned, other than a verse in
some verses that we deem sound in an anecdote told to us by Jaḥẓā al-
Barmakī. Jaḥẓā l-Barmakī related to us, saying: “The most certain of causes
for the killing of my uncle Jaʿfar b. Yaḥyā l-Barmakī and the cease of
benefit for his family is some verses that a poet composed when Jaʿfar built
his house at the Shāmisiyya Gate, and threw in the pile of scrap paper, and
that ended up in the hands of al-Rashīd when he had sat down to preside
over court. When he read it, his face changed, and he looked at it again,
over and over, then stamped it and gave it to one of his servants and
ordered him to keep it, and he would call for it every day and look at it and
stamp it again and give it to the servant until he deposed the Barmakids,
and then he showed what was in it, and it was:
“Say to the one who is trustworthy for God among His creation, who is
given the power to loose and bind,
This Ibn Yaḥyā Jaʿfar has become like you with no boundary between
(the two of) you;
Your command depends on his, and his does not depend on anything.
And we fear that he will inherit your kingdom when you disappear into
the grave;
For he has built the residence that has no semblance or peer on earth
The likes of which the Persians did not build, nor the Greeks or the
Indians;
And your grandfather al-Manṣūr, if he had visited it, would not have
called it—his own castle—‘paradise’.
Pearls and rubies are its pebbles, and its dust is ambergris
He has equaled you in property, for his doors are crowded with visitors
And the servant does not vie with his lords unless the servant is
insolent’.”
The final verse of these verses is an inversion of what al-Ḥarīrī said
[with his gift of a horse to the caliph al-Mutawakkil in the series of
verses that lead up to the Barmakid story], “Ownership of what is
appropriate for the commander is forbidden to the servant”. 52
52 Al-Khālidiyyān, Tuḥaf, pp. 13–8.
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