Sudan Archive

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Revolted against the injustice that prevailed in society during the Abbasid era, making some people live lives of luxury and extravagance, while others lived lives of misery and poverty. It is narrated that a relative of Harun al-Rashid had a daily income of one hundred thousand dirhams. A poor man approached him and said: Is it just for you to earn one hundred thousand dirhams a day while I cannot obtain half a dirham a day? Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi narrated to us the wealth left behind by some rich people, which was an amount beyond description, just as others narrated about others who were learned and virtuous scholars who could not earn their daily bread, like what is narrated about Al-Khatib al-Tabrizi that he used to travel from one town to another on foot, carrying a bundle of books on his back, so much so that some of his books would be damaged by the sweat that came out of him, and like what we read in the book "Al-Falakah wal-Mafalukin" from the verses of a man with vast knowledge and virtuous morals. Whatever the Qarmatian movement was, its aim was these differences between people, but it was not socialist like that laid down by Karl Marx. Rather, it was a call for material reform through a spiritual means of belief in the Imam and belief in the awaited Mahdi, because people at that time

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