He held the festival in the Palace of al-Khuld on the bank of the Tigris.

He held the festival in the Palace of al-Khuld on the bank of the Tigris. He invited the people from all the cities before some months. They hurried to him and indulged in the hope of attaining enormous properties. They stopped at al-Mehdi as guests. Al-Mehdi had ordered various kinds of furniture to be brought. Examples of that are gold and silver containers, Armenia excellent carpets and rugs the 'Abbasids took from the Umayyad government.

Those carpets and rugs were of the possessions of al-Walid b. Yazid, who was fond of them, for he decorated the floor and the walls of his palace; they were the most excellent things given as presents to the caliphs. Concerning them, Marco Polo, the explorer, has said: "The eye has seen nothing more beautiful and better than them." Al-Mehdi also ordered clothes brocaded with gold, perfume of different kinds, boxes full of jewels, precious ornaments, maids, retainers, and boys to be brought.

On the night of the wedding, Zubayda was clothed in a shirt brocaded with great pearls the like of which none had ever seen and whose value none could estimate, for it was very precious. He ordered her to be clothed in the budna of the wife of Hisham b. 'Abd al-Malik; the budna is a shirt; most of it is made of gold; it consists of only two Awkeias (127 gram); and the rest of it is gold.

Then he ordered her to be adorned with ornaments, to the extent that she was unable to walk due to the many jewels she wore. Mitz says: "Neither the Persian kings, nor the Roman Caesar, nor the western kings had practiced such a thing." The Hashimite women came, and they were given a garment brocaded with gold, a bag full of dinars, and a vessel full of silver.

The retainers filled the gold containers with dirhams and the silver containers with dinars and gave them to the notables; they added to that perfume of musk and ambergris.[1] In his book al-Diyarat, al-Shabishty has mentioned: "When al-Mehdi married his son to his niece Um Ja'far, he prepared for her furniture, boxes full of jewels, ornaments, crowns, wreaths, gold and silver domes, and perfumes.

Then he ordered the budna of 'Abda, Hisham's wife to be given to her." He (al-Shabishty) added: "The like of the budna and of the beads that were in it had never been seen in Islam.