attract twenty-seven followers. The caliph had him flogged,
and compelled each of the twenty-seven to give him ten blows on the head
with his fist. The "prophet" expired under the blows (850).

One of the first acts of Motawakkil was the release of all those who had
been imprisoned for refusing to admit the dogma of the created Koran,
and the strict order to abstain from any litigation about the Book of
God. The upper cadi Ibn abi Da'ud, the leader of the movement against
orthodoxy, who had stood in great esteem with Mamun and had fulfilled
his high office under the reigns of Motasim and Wathiq, had a stroke of
paralysis in the year 848. His son Mahommed was put in his place till
851, when all the members of the family were arrested. They released
themselves by paying the enormous sum of 240,000 dinars and 16,000,000
dirhems, which constituted nearly their whole fortune, and were then
sent to Bagdad, where father and son died three years later. An orthodox
upper cadi was named instead, and the dogma of the created Koran was
declared heresy; therewith began a persecution of all the adherents of
that doctrine and other Motazilite tenets. Orthodoxy triumphed, never
again to lose its place as the state religion. Hand in hand with these
reactionary measures came two others, one against Jews and Christians,
one against the Shi'ites. The first caliph who imposed humiliating
conditions on the Dhimmis, or Covenanters, who, on condition of paying a
certain not over-heavy tribute, enjoyed the protection of the state and
the free exercise of their cult, was Omar II., but this policy was not
continued. A proposition by the cadi Abu Yusuf to Harun al-Rashid to
renew it had not been adopted. Motawakkil, in 850, formulated an edict
by which these sectaries were compelled to wear a distinctive dress and
to distinguish their houses by a figure of the devil nailed to the
door, excluding them at the same time from all public employments, and
forbidding them to send their children to Moslem schools. Nevertheless,
he kept his Christian medical men, some of whom were high in favour. He
showed his hatred for the Shi'ites by causing the mausoleum erected over
the tomb of Hosain at Kerbela, together with all the buildings
surrounding it, to be levelled to the ground and the site to be ploughed
up, and by forbidding any one to visit the spot. A year before, a
descendant of Hosain, Yahya b. Omar, had been arrested and flogged on
his orders. He esca