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Updated: June 4, 2025
The successor of this monarch was his eldest son, Aboul-Abbas El Hakkam, who assumed, like his father, the title of Emir-al-Mumenim. The coronation of El Hakkam was celebrated with great pomp in the city of Zahra. The new caliph there received the oath of fidelity from the chiefs of the scythe guard, a numerous and redoubtable corps, composed of strangers, which Abderamus III. had formed.
"Zahra!" he repeated; but his voice was strange, and he tore at the cloth that bound his throat, stumbling after her, guided only by her voice. Always she was just beyond his reach; always she eluded him; yet never did he lose the perfume of her presence nor the rustle of her silken garments.
"And do you love me, then?" she queried, in a tone that set him all ablaze. "Zahra," he repeated, "I shall perish for want of you." "How do you measure this devotion?" she insisted, softly. "Will it cool with the dawn, or are you mine in truth forever and all time?" "I have no thought save that of you. Come, Light of my Soul, or I shall die."
We may yet escape." He let the writhing Abul Malek slip from out his grasp and peered at her through the smother. "Thou knowest me not?" she queried. "I am Zahra."
She had once played before the Caliph under amazing circumstances. The Prince of True Believers, so ran the story, had quarreled with his favorite wife, and in consequence had fallen into a state of melancholy so deep as to threaten his health and to alarm his ministers. Do what they would, he still declined, until in despair the Hadjeb sent for Zahra, daughter of Abul Malek.
The writers from whom are derived the details that have been given concerning the court of the Spanish Mussulmans, mention also the sums expended in the erection of the palace and city of Zahra. The cost amounted annually to three hundred thousand dinars of gold, and twenty-five years hardly sufficed for the completion of this princely monument of chivalrous devotion.
Abderamus III., though unceasingly occupied either by war or politics, was all his life enamoured of one of his wives named Zahra. He built a city for her two miles distant from Cordova, which he named Zahra. This place is now destroyed.
There, in the gloom, for one brief instant, her yielding body met his, her hands reached upward and drew his face down to her own; then out from his hungry arms she glided, and with rippling laughter fled into the blackness. "Zahra!" he cried. "Come!" she whispered, and when he hesitated, "Do you fear to follow?"
Zahra was in her fourteenth year when Abul Malek beheld, one day, a new figure among those in the courtyard of the monastery below. Even from his eminence the Saracen could see that this late-comer was a giant man, for the fellow towered head and shoulders above his brethren. Inquiry taught him that the monk's name was Joseph.
Its supremacy over the remainder of the starry host is recognized in the name given it by the Arabs, those nomad watchers of the skies, for while they term the moon "El Azhar," "the Brighter One," and the sun and moon together "El Azharan," "the Brighter Pair," they call Venus "Ez Zahra," the bright or shining one par excellence, in which sense the same word is used to describe a flower.
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