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Updated: June 19, 2025
The Caliph's letter was as follows: "Greeting, in the name of the Sovereign Guide of the Right Way, from the Servant of God, Haroun Al-Raschid, whom God hath set in the place of viceregent to his Prophet, after his ancestors of happy memory, to the potent and esteemed king of Serendib. "We received your letter with joy, and send you this from our imperial residence, the garden of superior wits.
It was the "Kalah" at which the Arabians, in the reign of the great Haroun Al-Raschid, met the trading junks of the people of the Celestial Empire, and returned with their spices, gems, and silks to Bassora. It was visited by the Greeks and Romans, and by the mariners of Egypt under the Ptolemies.
Both he and his father practised medicine with great success in Bagdad, and his son became the body-physician to Harun al-Raschid either after or in conjunction with Gabriel Bachtischua. Like his colleague or predecessor in official position, he, too, made translations from the Greek into Arabic. Another distinguished Arabian Christian physician was Serapion the elder.
A century later, in the reign of Haroun- al-Raschid, the best and most enlightened of all the caliphs, the town was at its highest pitch of prosperity; but at the end of another century, it was destroyed by the Turks.
Here lived and reigned the Caliph Haroun al-Raschid, or Haroun 'the Orthodox, who is more famous in story than in history, though he was a wise ruler, a poet, and a scholar, and built up his domain. I have disposed of the two principal empires of this region, pictured on the map; and the next in order is Persia."
What indignation then was kindled by the pathetic narrative of the insults and blows which they had endured from the infidels who profaned the holy places with their hateful domination! In the ninth century, under caliphs of the temper of Haroun Al-Raschid, Christians had been well treated. About the middle of the tenth century the Fatimite caliphs of Egypt were the rulers at Jerusalem.
Thus started, the observer would have bent himself to study of the face; and immediately something would have suggested that while the stranger was of this period of the world he did not belong to it. Such were the magicians of the story-loving Al-Raschid. Or he was of the type Rabbinical that sat with Caiphas in judgment upon the gentle Nazarene.
Being now alone in the capital, he apparently abandoned himself to a life of shameless debauch, going nightly to the haunts of pleasure and becoming a notorious figure in the great district in the Outer City of Peking which is filled with adventure and adventuresses and which is the locality from which Haroun al-Raschid obtained through the medium of Arab travellers his great story of "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp."
Bathed in the hard light of modern realities, the poetic China which Haroun al-Raschid painted in his Aladdin, and which still lives in the beautiful art of the country, has vanished for ever and its place has been taken by a China of prose. To those who have always pictured Asia in terms of poetry this has no doubt been a very terrible thing a thing synonymous with political death.
Pictures of Damascus. Damascus from the Anti-Lebanon Entering the City A Diorama of Bazaars An Oriental Hotel Our Chamber The Bazaars Pipes and Coffee The Rivers of Damascus Palaces of the Jews Jewish Ladies A Christian Gentleman The Sacred Localities Damascus Blades The Sword of Haroun Al-Raschid An Arrival from Palmyra.
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