Due to his father al Mahdi’s arrangement, Haroon al Rashid endured a traumatic year during which his brother tried to have him removed from the line of succession. Having barely survived the experience, he put a great deal of thought and effort into the matter of his own succession in order to avoid inflicting the same dangers upon his own heirs and the umma at large. This careful planning unfortunately yielded devastating results, something which ironically only further improved the caliph’s gilded reputation.