The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c28.10

v3.c28.10

‘Alā-ud-dīn, though generally pious and benevolent, gradually overcame his repugnance to taking life. He used wine himself, but prohibited its use by his subjects, and gamblers and wine-bibbers had iron collars riveted on their necks and were compelled to work as scavengers or set to hard labour on the public works; and those who persisted, despite this discipline, in the use of wine, had molten lead poured down their throats. A grandson of the saint Gīsū Darāz, convicted of brawling with a woman of the town, received the bastinado in the market place, and his companion was expelled from the city. The king’s benevolence was displayed in the establishment and endowment at Bīdar of a hospital where food, drugs, and medical treatment were supplied free of charge, and his piety in his love of long sermons and the destruction of idol-temples, from the materials of which mosques were built. He prided himself also on his love of justice, and added *al-‘Ādil* (‘the Just’) to his titles. At the end of his reign an Arab merchant who had been unable to obtain payment for some horses sold to officers of the court, and had also been scandalised by the massacre of the Sayyids and other Foreigners at Chākan, sprang up on hearing the king thus described, and cried, ‘No, by God! Thou art not just, generous, clement, or compassionate. O tyrant and liar! Thou hast slain the pure seed of the prophet and in the pulpit of the Muslims takest to thyself such titles as these!’ The king, weeping bitterly, replied, ‘They will hardly escape from the fire of God’s wrath who give me, in this world and the next, a name as ill as Yazīd’s.’ He then retired to his chamber and left it no more until he was borne forth to the grave. Against his virtues must be set that gross sensuality which his religion permitted, and which he carried to such excess that most of his time was spent among the thousand women collected in his harem, and he so neglected business as to hold a public audience no oftener than once in four or five months.