A literary history of Persia

THE TRIAL OF AFSH/N 331two others who bore him companyat that grim trysting-place. 1Of his trial a very interesting account isgiven by Tabari(iii, pp. 1308-1313), which is significant as showing how thin aveneer of IslAm sufficed for a high officer of the Commanderof the Faithful (until he fell into disgrace for purely politicalreasons) at this period.The substance of this narrative, whichis on the authority of an eye-witness, H&run b. *Isa h.Mansur,is as follows :Amongst those presentat the trial were Ahmad b. AbiDu'ad, Ishdq b. Ibrahim b. Mus'ab, Muhammad b. 'Abdu'l-Malik az-Zayyat, }Jwho acted as prosecutor,Trial of Afshin.. v , -j ,Mazyar (who had turned " King s evidence, but,as we have already seen, with no benefit to himself), theMubadh, or high-priest of the Magians, a prince of Sughd, andtwo men from the same province clad in tatters. These twolast were first examined. They uncovered their backs, whichwere seen to be raw from scourging." KnowestFi^ourafi?ehe t ^lou t ^lese men?"ofinquired Ibnu'z-Zayyat oticoSsm.'Afshin." Yes," replied he": this one is amuadhdhin, and that one an im&m ; they builta mosque at Ushrusna, and I inflicted on each of them athousand stripes, because I had covenanted with the princes ofSughd that I would leave all men unmolested in the religionwhich they professed, and these two fellupon a temple whereinwere idols worshipped by some of the people of Ushrusna, castthem forth, and made the place into a mosque ; wherefore Ipunished each of them with a thousand stripes, because theyhad acted aggressively and hindered the people in theirworship."1See especially, as illustrating his hatred of the Arabs, pp. 199-207 ofthe Tdrikh-i-Bayhaqi (Calcutta, 1862), and the translation of this remarkablepassage given by Kazimirski at pp. 149-154 of his edition of the Diwanof Mamichihri (Paris, 1886), and cf.de Slane's translation of Ibn Khallikan,vol. i, p. 63, and p. 72, n. 9, where, on the authority of Ibn Shakir, Afshinis said to have been descended from the old Persian kings, an assertionconfirmed by Bayhaqi (of. cit., p. 203, 11. 1-2 = Ka/imirski, op. cit. tp. 151, last five lines).