In the famous sermon, al-Shiqshiqiyya, he says that he accepted power as an unavoidable duty: Had God not taken from the learned [a promise] that they would not acquiesce in the rapacity of the tyrant nor in the hunger of the oppressed ... I would truly have flung its reins [that of the caliphate] back upon its withers ... and you would indeed have discovered that this world of yours is as insignificant to me as that which drips from the nose of a goat.78 In this, we see a striking exemplification of Plato’s ideal attitude to power, that possessed by the true ‘philosopher’, he who acts as
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