Download PDF | William Granara - Narrating Muslim Sicily_ War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World-I.B. Tauris (2019).
245 Pages
Notes on Transliteration and Translation
For the transliteration of Arabic names, terms and bibliographical citations, I follow the Library of Congress system with some modifications; I omit both macrons for long vowels and diacritics for ‘emphatic consonants. I use the apostrophe for the hamza and the inverted apostrophe for the ayn.
All translations from Arabic, French and Italian are my own unless otherwise indicated.
Acknowledgements
This book has been in the making for a long time. It was conceived in my graduate school days at the University of Pennsylvania, where I began to take an interest in medieval Sicily, especially Islamic Sicily. My professor and mentor, George Makdisi (RIP), immediately pointed me in the direction of Michele Amari, and his Biblioteca Arabo-Siciula and Storia dei Musulmani di Sicila became my scholarly scriptures. Professor Makdisi’s guidance throughout my early years of research and writing was invaluable.
I thank my colleague and friend, Professor Roy Mottahedeh, for his mentoring, wise counsel and encouragement to bring this book to fruition. To Thomas Stottor, Rory Gormley, and the staff at I. B. Tauris, I extend my gratitude. I thank my copy editor Kate Rouhana for her exceptional skills and guidance, and to Eric Edstam for his skill and patience in helping me through the final editing. I also thank the Office of the Divisional Dean of Arts and Humanities at Harvard for its generous support for this project.
A special round of thanks as well goes to Robert Wisnovsky and Wilfred Rollman who took the time to read my completed manuscript and offer important suggestions.
Since joining the faculty in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard in 1993, I have had the privilege of working with a bright constellation of scholarly luminaries. The late Wolfhart P. Heinrichs (RIP) was the first to nudge me to publish a lecture I delivered at Harvard's Humanities Center on Ibn Hamdis. He spent many hours with me working through some of the more obscure verses of Ibn Hamdis. His vast knowledge and erudition and his passion for Arabic poetry continue until now to be most infectious. I also thank my colleagues Khaled Al-Masri and Shady Nasser, who sat patiently with me reading and rereading literally hundreds of lines of Ibn Hamdis and arguing convincingly over variant interpretations. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my dear friends, former Shawwaf visiting professors at Harvard, Gaber Asfour and Ridwan Al-Sayyid, who shared my interest in Sicily and imparted their knowledge of Arabic literature and Islamic law onto me. I have been honoured to work and supervise a number of graduate students, and I cite Nicola Carpentieri and Ali Asghar Alibhai, whose work on medieval Sicily has enriched me tremendously.
I express my gratitude and respect as well to two eminent scholars of medieval Sicily, Jeremy Johns and Alex Metcalf, whose magnificent work has been indispensable to my own research.
My hearty thanks and affection as well go to my ‘gang’ of friends and scholars who, over the many years, have patiently listened to me go on and on about Sicily, Palermo, Ibn Hamdis and the Normans - more often than not ‘as exuberant topers grasping the silver cup of grape-induced intoxication; as Ibn Hamdis would put it. I toast Laila Parsons, Rob Wisnovsky, Ilham KhuriMakdisi, Eve Troutt Powell, Sahar Bazzaz, Ayman El-Desouky and Sinan Antoon.
Finally, I thank my parents, Eugene J. and Irene Pellegrini Granara for encouraging me and supporting the many years of my education, and to whom I dedicate this book.
Preface
This book is a collection of essays about Sicily, from the early ninth until the late twelfth century of our Middle Ages, during the period ranging from Arab political sovereignty to Islam's final years of lingering cultural and socio-economic influence. More precisely, it is a book about writing about Sicily. It considers how Arabs and Muslims viewed the island from historical hindsight or memory, including eyewitnesses from the high years of Sicily’s Islamic period, to later Muslim historians who worked through the archives to resurrect or to reimagine its history. Most of what we know today of medieval Sicily comes to us from the pens of these later scholars who, ploughing through the increasingly disappearing historical records and collating snippets of information and marginalia from ‘history books, attempted to weave a cohesive narrative about a discrete history of a time and place that, like most nations, experienced a rise and fall. Even back then, writing about Sicily was about writing the past or the soon-to-be past. Writing ‘Sicily’ entailed memory, conjecture and heeding history’s lessons about why nations and people rose and fell. My goal in this book is to focus on Muslim Sicily as historical subject and literary trope.
My book will, presumably, take its place among a relatively small library of modern scholarship on medieval Arab Muslim Sicily. It does not deal primarily with Romans, Byzantines or Normans, although the informed reader will be able to detect and locate their peripheral presence. It takes a close look at Arabic writing in its various genres, from historiography, geography, biography, jurisprudence and poetry, and considers how these generic domains explained and preserved the memory of a ‘state’ that burst onto history’s radar screen in a flash and left it in a comparable hurry.
This book follows in succession a corpus of scholarship to which I refer especially the newcomers to this field: Michele Amari (1806-1889), Sicilian historian and Italian patriot, the ‘father’ of modern scholarship on Muslim Sicily, authored, among others, two monumental works that are indispensable to our subject: Biblioteca Arabo-Sicula (1859) is a massive compendium of all Arabic sources extant during the nineteenth century that deal in any way, shape or manner with medieval Arab and Muslim Sicily; and Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia (completed in 1879, edited and reissued posthumously in 1933 by Amari’s disciple Carlo Alfonso Nallino) is an extensive five-volume history of Sicily in the Muslim era. It is to Amari’s disciples and to the Italian school of Orientalism - notably Celestino Schiaparelli (d.1919), Francesco Gabrieli (d.1996), Umberto Rizzitano (d.1991), Adalgisa De Simone and Antonino Pellitteri - that we are indebted for continuing and building on Amari’s foundational work and expanding the small field of Sicilian Islamic studies throughout the twentieth century. Historians of the medieval Mediterranean — Henri Bresc, Jeremy Johns and Alex Metcalfe, to name a few of the most outstanding — have added richly to our knowledge of Sicily in the Middle Ages. Mohamed Talbi and Farhat Dachraoui, both modern Tunisian historians who wrote on the Aghlabid and Fatimid periods of North African history, both produced groundbreaking works indispensable to our subject. Finally, throughout the Arab world, new generations of Arabic readers continue to be informed about the Sicilian chapter of their history and literary heritage by way of the works of Ihsan ‘Abbas. All of the above have made significant contributions to Siculo-Arabic scholarship in their own specialized ways.
In 973, the traveller-geographer Ibn Hawgqal spent a brief period in Sicily and logged his shocking and shocked impressions of Arab Sicilians and their society into his journal, which eventually morphed into his magnum opus, Surat al-Ard. His Sicilian chapter, although not the first sample of writing Sicily within the Arabic Sicilian biblioteca, nonetheless provides us with a kind of first primary source of note, marking a new beginning in writing about Arab Sicily. He was an eyewitness above all, and the information he provides remains unmatched. After Ibn Hawgal, travellers, chroniclers, biographers and poets added their voices to describing, documenting, analysing, critiquing and remembering that relatively brief period in history when the largest island in the Mediterranean was securely ensconced within Dar al-Islam (the Muslim world).
Chapter 1 of this volume deals with historiography as a discursive mode of writing. It looks at the master chroniclers, the recorders of world or universal history of their day, who, in their meticulous accounts of people and events, year by year, government by government, create in unison a master narrative or grand récit of Muslim Sicily. The histories of Ibn al-Athir (d.1233), al-Nuwayri (d.1333) and Ibn Khaldun (d.1406), as Amari long ago pointed out, provide the major bulk of the political or dynastic history of the Arabs in Sicily. In my own reconstruction of a chronologically cohesive narrative, I highlight some of the hallmark features of Muslim Sicilian history: the dominant role of jihad in the conquest of the island and the formation of a ghazi (warrior) society; the rise of civilian and intellectual institutions that parallel the evolution of Palermo from a garrison town to a grand metropolis; the formation of a Sicilian-Arab specificity and its affinities with the North African (Ifriqiya) motherland; and the persistent complicated and codependent political, social and economic relationship with it.
Chapter 2 follows a single trope: that of betrayal or treason - one that punctuates the historical and literary sources and disturbs any imagining of a united or monolithic Muslim Sicily. As a frontier society (thaghr), Sicily has often lived between and on the edges of imperial empires, with conquering peoples presiding over conquered majorities. Since large swathes of the new population included men of war (conscripted and mercenary), slaves and captives, political exiles and refugees, travelling merchants, pirates and fortune seekers, heretics and tricksters, and generally men and women living on the margins of an unstable and fluid society, loyalties were not always fixed and reliable but rather quite often fickle and negotiable. In war and in conquest, institutions that bound people to networks of loyalty were being destroyed and replaced by new ones. Betrayal as petit récit challenges both medieval and modern preconceptions of a world neatly divided between Islam and Christianity, where actors and actions under the rubric of jihad and crusade happened in accordance with logical patterns and conformed to familiar expectations of behaviour, belief and bonding.
Chapter 3 offers a rereading of a series of fatwas (solicited legal opinions) to questions pertaining to the status of Sicilian land and other properties seized, confiscated or distributed as booty by the Muslim governors at the time of the Islamic invasions. In a jihadist society such as Muslim Sicily, land was of paramount military, economic and social importance. Because Islamic law requires the equitable distribution of property (including land) among the participants in a battle, allotting conquered land or granting conditional rights to unmovable properties was not only essential in motivating Muslim soldiers to fight effectively in battle but also a highly effective incentive for retiring soldiers to settle down and cultivate the land in the new “Muslim” province. Abu Ja‘far al-Dawudi (d.1011), (Sunni) Maliki jurist and anti-(Shi‘ite) Fatimid polemicist, provides us with a series of questions and responses that shed precious light on the contemporaneous contentious politics of land distribution that bear resemblance to modern political practices and concepts, such as ‘eminent domain, political favouritism and nepotism, and loopholes and tax evasion. Al-Dawudi’s chapter, ‘Spain, Sicily and North Africa, also provides us with glimpses and insights into the complex of military, political and economic dependencies between the (rural) province and the (urban) major centre of power.
Chapter 4 is a study of ‘Abd al-Jabbar ibn Hamdis (c.1055-1133), itinerant court poet, perennial exile and Muslim Sicily’s most famous native son. He left the island at the tender age of twenty-four, during the first stirrings of the Norman Conquest, to enhance his career as a professional poet. But he was fated never to return to the island, although he lived to be eighty years old. However, Ibn Hamdis never stopped thinking about, longing for and writing about his beloved homeland. Although precious little is known about his personal life, the powerful autobiographical voice that resonates throughout his extensive diwan (his edited anthology contains roughly 370 poems) tells us much about his life and the times in which he lived.
Ibn Hamdis is best known for a small number of poems that address the anguish of exile and longing for his homeland, referred to by literary historians as his siqilliyat or Sicilian poems, and it is these pieces to which later scholars and critics devoted their attention. In Chapter 4, I trace the topos or theme of jihad as a way of understanding how Ibn Hamdis used his literary craft to write about and memorialize his falling homeland. I argue that, contrary to critical consensus, his evocation of jihad was less a matter of religious conviction and belief than it was a strategy to rally the Muslim population to the Sicilian cause and to assign to his beloved homeland a secure place in the Arabic literary canon.
Chapter 5 surveys the twelfth-century political and cultural landscape of Christian-Muslim relations in Sicily in the post-Norman conquest, by way of (re)reading Arabic panegyrics towards the Norman kings Roger II (r.1105-54) and William II (r.1166-89). My intention is to read in equal measure the philology of the texts (i.e. introductions to encyclopaedic works (al-Idrisi), travel accounts (Ibn Jubayr) and poems (al-Atrabanshi, Abu al-Daw’ Siraj, Ibn Qalaqis, et al.), against the political, social and religious contexts reconstructed from historical accounts. In considering contemporary notions of la convivencia and myths of inter-faith utopia, I read these texts against a Sicilian Arabic poetics vilifying the Norman Conquest (Ibn Hamdis) as well as accounts of oppression and abuse that pepper Ibn Jubayr’s travelogue.
I argue for a ‘zone of contradiction’ that lies at the subtexts of all of my proof-texts. Key to understanding the complexities of contradiction is the persistent presence of fitna, especially as pronounced by Ibn Jubayr, which spans the lexical range from ‘civil-strife’ to ‘seduction. I aim to show how we might expand the contexts of reading Arabic panegyrics to the Norman kings between the fading glory of Norman royal patronage and the emergence of a belligerent post-Norman hostility towards the Muslim community percolating throughout the island.
A recurring theme that lies subtly throughout the subtexts of the works under discussion here is the tension or challenge of writing Muslim Sicily between war and peace. These texts reflect and bear witness to a world that does not fit neatly into the folds of the Dar al-Islam (the Muslim world) versus Dar al-Harb (the non-Muslim world) dichotomy that has dominated so much of Arabo-Sicilian literature. All of the authors of the above-cited and soonto-be treated works are writing, at least on the surface, within the established boundaries of classical Arabic canons, accepting and adhering to the legitimacy of orthodox Sunni Islam, the primacy of classical Arabic literary and cultural tradition, and the allegiance to Islam’s religious and political ascendancy. But beneath the lines lurks the strong sense that both divisive relationships with fellow Muslims and peaceful coexistence with the Christian ‘other’ disturb a facile but comfortable world view of a united jihadist society in constant struggle with the non-Muslim world.
A quick look to Ibn Hawgqal, whom many suspect to have been a Fatimid Shi‘ite sympathizer, gives us perhaps the most dramatic example of writing Sicily with this sense of disturbance at not finding this jihadist frontier according to normative Muslim expectations. His visit to the outer peripheries of Palermo around 973 exposed him to Muslim Sicilians married to Christian women who raised their daughters as Christians. He refers to the majority of Sicilians as ‘tricksters’ (musha‘midhiin),' negligent in their religious obligations and cavalier in the ways they lived their lives as Muslims. The description, even if we assume its exaggeration, nonetheless reflects the substantial degree of peaceful coexistence that evolved in one of Dar al-Islam’s holy war provinces. Writing Sicily in all its complexities and contradictions seems to me to have been a challenge to Ibn Hawaal and other historians of the Middle Ages far greater than encountering and reaffirming a united and homogeneous Sicilian Islam.
Finally, I evoke a passage from the ninth-century Sahnun Ibn Sa‘id (d.855), in which he defined four different kinds of jihad: jihad of the heart, of the tongue, of the hand and of the sword.* Sahnun was the legal scholar and jurist who presided over the instillation and maintenance of orthodox Islam according to the teachings of Malik ibn Anas (d.795) throughout North Africa, Sicily and Spain. His thesis of the various kinds of jihad allows for a broader conceptual approach in understanding how a predominantly military campaign and a band of soldiers could transform a garrison town and a handful of military outposts into a highly sophisticated and fully developed ‘state’ where military interests gave way to aspects of civil society. His notion of a jihad of the tongue - the use of speech as a weapon to combat, appeal and persuade people and events to one’s cause - perhaps best captures the desire or impulse to write historical accounts, journals and anecdotes, geographical descriptions, legal treatises, biographies, and polite prose and poetry while struggling to find an equilibrium between war and peace, the religious and the secular, and Islam and Christianity.
William E. Granara Harvard University 30 January 2018
Sicilian Islamic History as Grand Récit
Looking back: Framing Muslim Sicily’s history in a rise and fall dialectic
The eminently renowned Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), historian, sociologist and philosopher, bequeathed to human civilization a corpus of writing and ideas on the nature and evolution of human societies. Paramount in his thought was the idea of civilizational decline or, in other words, the study of the rise and fall of nations.
Ibn Khaldun lived in the most interesting of times. His world, spanning the late medieval Islamic West and the Islamic East, was moving at a frenetic pace, and many and much of who and what surrounded him succumbed to wars, rebellions, famine (he lived through the Black Plague), and the political machinations and ambitions of men who make history. His elite classical education and his pursuit of scholarship, on the other hand, allowed him to observe, study, analyse and explicate the problems and complexities of his own times against the lessons of human history.
‘Abd al-Rahman bin Muhammad Ibn Khaldun was born in the city of Tunis in 1332, the scion of an Arab family who had settled in the city of Seville during the early years of the Islamic conquest of Spain (al-Andalus). His family (the generation of his great-grandfather) resettled in North Africa at the onslaught of the Spanish Christian Reconquista, and both great-grandfather and grandfather, religious and legal scholars, became actively involved in the political intrigues of their times. His own father, Muhammad, followed the family’s scholarly traditions but eschewed political life, while the young ‘Abd al-Rahman was destined to follow in his grandfathers’ footsteps.
In thinking about, reflecting on and postulating theories about rises and falls of nations great and small, Ibn Khaldun had much to work with in his own time and place(s). His parents died from the Black Plague when he was just an adolescent, and he witnessed the Marinid invasion of his Hafsid Tunis in the same period of his life. He spent time in prison for being on the wrong side of power, and in 1362 he was warmly received in Granada by its emir, Muhammad ibn Ahmar, and his controversial vizier, Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (1313-1374), with whom Ibn Khaldun enjoyed a long but cautious friendship. Ibn al-Khatib’s many political ups and downs and his ultimate murder while in prison exemplify the mercurial nature of public life at that time. Ibn Khaldun’s diplomatic mission to negotiate with the Christian enemy Pedro the Cruel in 1364 would be replicated later in his life with a similar mission in 1400 to the camp of the Mongol Tamerlane. The many government and teaching posts he occupied from Fez to Damascus made him privy to all that was happening throughout the inner sanctums and corridors of power and provided him with insights, information and perspectives - all the raw material he needed to analyse the processes of history.
As a fully educated scholar in the classical Arab Muslim tradition, Ibn Khaldun had even much more to rely on in his formation as a world historian: literally thousands of pages and centuries of Arabic historiographical writing that bear witness to a long and dynamic process of historical consciousness. From the earliest Bedouin oral narratives of recounting a glorious past (akhbar al-arab) to the many references to names, places and events evoked in preIslamic poetry, the Arabs succeeded in expanding their historical consciousness by way of understanding and explaining a new Muslim world view as reflected in the genres of sira (biographies of the Prophet), maghazi (accounts of his campaigns) and hadith (records of his saying and deeds). Local and universal chronicles and histories, biographical dictionaries and works of expansive encyclopaedic breadth were penned throughout the Arab Muslim world, addressing questions from the nature of power and the Sunni-Shiiite divide to the shift from an Arab, Levantine Ummayad caliphate to a multi-ethnic Mesopotamian Abbasid caliphate. Monumental events and changes, such as the conquest of lands far beyond the borders of the Arabian peninsula, the intellectual interface with classical Greek and Persian learning, the Crusades, the demolition of Baghdad by the Mongol hordes and the emergence of mystical Islamic practices (Sufism) that came to threaten the hold of the oldguard religious elite over large swathes of the populace, were all inscribed in the pages of the many genres of Arabic historiography, contributing in varying ways and degrees to an ever-changing and expansive historical consciousness that forced Arabs to think and rethink their past and present.
In sum, Ibn Khadun’s theories and scholarship were not produced ex nihilo. The combination of his very public and professional life and his erudition in the school of Arab Islamic letters gave him insights and knowledge of historical processes that culminate in his socio-philosophical Mugaddima as well as his opus on positive history, Kitab al-‘Ibar. The history of Islamic Sicily, spanning roughly 827-1060, indeed must have presented to him a discreet and highly illustrative model on which to reflect on rise(s) and fall(s).
Ibn Khaldun’s by now well-known and oft-cited thesis of the five cycles in the life span of a nation (atwar al-dawla) may very well have been shaped, at least in part, by his reading of Islamic Sicily, one that rose and fell many years before. His thesis of cycles includes (i) a period of conquest in which a primitive way of life prevails, based on natural solidarity and religious sentiment; (ii) the years of consolidation of power in the form of a powerful army and a strong government; (iii) a period of financial success, luxury and ease, fortified by a well-developed (urban) infrastructure and civil institutions; (iv) a period of contentment in which luxury is expected, accustomed and constantly pursued; and (v) a final period of waste, deterioration and decline.'
The Islamic conquest of Sicily was launched in the full pageantry of jihad that united various and often-contentious groups under the banner of the Aghlabid prince of the semi-autonomous province of Ifriqiya. The campaign was led by a highly respected Muslim jurist and scholar, Asad ibn al-Furat, and it included a remarkable number from the ‘religious’ establishment. The period of conquest, lasting some seventy years, was followed by a modicum of Aghlabid political consolidation, especially with the development of Palermo as a regional metropolis. By the end of the first century, the Kalbid dynasty, having achieved great success on the military front against Byzantium, came to preside over a royal court that could boast a high culture and a strong and robust economy. Finally, political and social divisions, the result of greed and ambition, led to fragmentation and military defeat at the hands of the Norman militia.
Ibn Khaldun, along with two great master chroniclers who preceded him, Ibn al-Athir (d.1239) and al-Nuwayri (d.1332), is credited, as Michele Amari has observed, with providing the framework for our reconstruction of Muslim Sicily’s political or dynastic history. Each one, as I mentioned above, was not only equipped with a plethora of historical documents but also enjoyed the advantage of hindsight, they all faced nonetheless the challenges of making sense of a messy history from a corpus of fragmented reports and narratives.
The Aghlabid court at Qayrawan in search of an external enemy
The Mediterranean island of Sicily was inhabited by Arabs and Muslims from the early ninth century until the early decades of the thirteenth century. From a broad historical perspective, the Arab invasion and settlement of Sicily in the early ninth century may be read within the long continuum of the Islamic wars of conquest that began shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. As the Arab armies moved beyond the borders of the Arabian Peninsula, they spread in every direction. In their movement westward, beyond the lands of Egypt and into the Maghrib, they eventually covered the whole of the African continent north of the Sahara, and from the farthest point west of the Maghreb, they crossed the Mediterranean and entered, conquered and settled the Iberian Peninsula from the year 711.
Medieval Arab (as well as Latin and Greek) chronicles report sporadic Muslim naval incursions into Sicily as early as the mid-seventh century. As the largest of the Mediterranean islands and the most strategically located, Sicily had long been the target of foreign invaders. Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans and Byzantines all staked their claims to the vulnerable island, invading, occupying and ultimately inscribing ‘Sicilian’ chapters onto their histories. And so it was natural for the Arab Muslims, in their quest for religious, political, military and commercial sovereignty over the Mediterranean, to cast their sights and carve their name on Sicily as well.
By the beginning of the third Islamic century (ninth century), however, the Islamic Empire had ceased to be a single, monolithic empire with one universally accepted authority. The Islamic ‘nation’ (umma) was politically and religiously divided, and the caliphate in Baghdad was no longer recognized as the sole legitimate authority of all Muslims. The Muslim empire of alAndalus in the Iberian Peninsula proclaimed its own caliphate in Cordoba, while Sunnis, Shiites and Kharijites acted upon their conflicting visions of legitimate authority and rightful rulership throughout North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Additionally, the Muslims of the third Muslim century, now long ensconced in their role as conquerors of nations and cultures, harboured few notions of universal Islam, as their political ideas and treatises began to deal with the more complicated questions of peaceful coexistence and the rights of non-Muslims. In sharp contrast to the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula a century earlier, the Muslim invasion of Sicily was launched against a background ofa divided Muslim world, on the one hand, and a series of negotiated peace treaties with the Byzantine warlords of Sicily, on the other.
More precisely, the history of Muslim Sicily begins somewhere along the corridors and inside the grand chambers of the Aghlabid royal palace in the city of Qayrawan (Tunisia) in the early years of the ninth century. The Aghlabids were a dynasty of Arab princes who ruled the province of Ifriqiya, a region extending from Constantine (Algeria) in the west to Tripoli (Libya) in the east, from 800 until 909. Their founder, Ibrahim I ibn al-Aghlab, was granted autonomy by the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid in 800 in exchange of a yearly tribute tax and pledges of allegiance to the Abbasid Court. By the time of Abu Muhammad Ziyadat-allah (1817-38), the province was facing a host of domestic problems. Ziyadat-allah had to put down a long and violent insurrection led by a disgruntled military officer, Mansur ibn Nasr al-Tunbudhi, in 824, who, through an alliance with various tribal chieftains, succeeded in seizing control over much of the province for several years. Although the rebellious al-Tunbudhi eventually surrendered and was put to death, residual resentment among the army factions towards the Aghlabid palace continued to fester.
Throughout the rural areas within and beyond Aghlabid rule, the political movement of Kharijism held wide popular appeal, especially among the nomadic Berbers. Kharijism was a sect that began in opposition to both Sunni and Shiite notions of political and religious authority. Meanwhile, many of the Kutama Berbers adhered to Shi‘ism in direct opposition to the Sunni orthodox Aghlabids. Also, tensions between the Arab elite and the Berber masses in the urban centres flared up from time to time, and if this were not enough of a disturbance, the religious scholars (fuqaha’) emerged as popular supporters for the disenfranchised urban poor. Their public and vociferous criticisms of the ruling family and its special interest groups drew attention not only to the economic and social inequities plaguing the realm but also to the licentious and decadent ways that permeated the highest echelons of government.
In the early months of 827, word reached Ziyadat-allah that the Byzantines of Sicily were holding Muslim soldiers as captives. A renegade Byzantine general from Sicily, Euphemius, had contacted the Aghlabid court with this news as well as with other vital military information he offered in exchange for Aghlabid assistance in overthrowing his enemies in Sicily. The military intelligence was extremely valuable to Ziyadat-allah, considering his domestic problems with a restless army, an aggrieved population and a hostile ulema. Sicily, long the target of Muslim raiding expeditions, could easily be reconfigured as enemy territory. At the same time, its strategic location offered exciting prospects for renewed commercial and military ventures. On the domestic front, a war to liberate Muslim captives from enemy lands could redirect the attentions of the masses away from internal problems, and it could provide employment to an idle and troublesome army. However, the question of invading the island was not a simple matter since Ziyadat-allah was bound to a peace treaty with Byzantine Sicily that had been concluded by his successor. In a quandary, the Aghlabid ruler summoned his inner circle for advice.
Two voices emerged during the spirited debates, those of Ziyadat-allah’s two chief judges. Abu Muhriz (d.829), a powerful voice among the Qayrawani religious scholarly community, counselled caution and pleaded for a wait-andsee strategy despite the evidence of a possible Byzantine violation of the treaty. His argument was overwhelmingly supported by his peers. Asad ibn al-Furat, a maverick Hanifi-turned-Maliki scholar of great note as well as an Aghlabid loyalist who was instrumental in Ziyadat-allah’s successful campaign against al-Tunbudhi, took the opposite position. His advice was couched in religious terms as he quoted the Qur’anic verse: ‘So do not become weak-kneed and sue for peace, for you will have the upper hand; as God is with you, and will not overlook your deeds.” By standing on solid scriptural ground, whereby appeasing the religious conservatives, Asad pleaded the case that Ziyadat-allah launch an attack.’
The very existence of these debates underscores two important issues at stake at this time. The first issue is the ‘legal’ dimension of a major decision such as waging a war. Despite being something of an absolute potentate, Ziyadat-allah was bound to higher authorities, distant and abstract as they may have been. The caliph in Baghdad was still held as supreme political authority among the urban Qayrawani orthodox masses in spite of the autonomy granted to the Aghlabid ruling family. Any major undertaking on behalf of Dar al-Islam needed at least the nominal blessings of the Baghdad caliphate, or it had to be done in such a way as to not undermine the interests of the larger umma. There was also the authority of Islamic law (al-shari‘a) itself, in both its scriptural precision and in its evolving, elastic and negotiable interpretations. Chapters on jihad in the early manuals of jurisprudence and the emerging genre of siyar literature,* as will be seen again in Chapter 3, were moving in directions beyond the early treatises, and the nature and role of legitimate rulership was faring more prominently in the manuals for waging war and peace.
The second issue was the virtual power of the religious and legal scholars, not only as guardians of sacred law and legality but as public critics, political dissidents and protectors of the disenfranchised masses. The mere fact that Ziyadat-allah had two chief judges, a non-standard practice in Islam at the time, not to mention his consultations with them on any potential raid on Sicily, points to the sensitivity of the circumstances as well as the reality of power, politics and religion that held significant sway over this issue. Abu Muhriz was a deeply devout and conservative jurist and a disciple of Malik ibn Anas (d.795), the founder of the Sunni school of Islamic law that came to dominate the Islamic Maghreb (North Africa, Spain and Sicily) for centuries. His appointment to the chief judgeship, grudgingly made by Ziyadat-allah’s father, Ibrahim, positioned him among the leadership of the emerging Maliki jurists who engaged in anti-Aghlabid campaigns in an attempt to impose their authority and control over the masses.
Ziyadat-allah broke with tradition and hired a second chief judge for Qayrawan. His choice of Asad ibn al-Furat was a stroke of political genius. Asad was a loyal subject and public servant, a skilled negotiator (he was responsible for convincing the rebellious al-Tunbudhi to surrender to the Aghlabid authorities), and a jurist with outstanding academic credentials. He travelled to Mecca to make his pilgrimage and spent a brief period studying with Malik ibn Anas. He then journeyed to Baghdad where he studied under Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani (d.805), a disciple of Abu Hanifa, and then to Cairo to study with ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Qasim, disciple of Malik. He returned to Qayrawan with his own completed compendium on Islamic law, al-Asadiyya, which gained immediate and widespread popularity throughout Maghribi scholarly circles. In the process, he had become a rival of Abu Muhriz, as both men came to represent opposing factions among the Qayrawani ulema. In their debate on the issue of Sicily, Ziyadat-allah played one faction off the other while paying lip service to all of his potential critics.
On a June morning in the year 827, a fleet was assembled on the orders of Ziyadat-allah at the port city of Susa (eastern coast of modern Tunisia) to set sail towards Sicily. Throngs of people surrounded a cavalry of 700 and an infantry of 10,000, recruited and assembled to board a flotilla of 100 ships. The warriors were Arabs of various tribes, as well as Berbers, Persians, professional soldiers and even members from the scholar/clerical community, many of whom evidently experienced a change of heart in joining the jihad. Asad ibn al-Furat was appointed commander of the fleet, with the royal decree that he maintain his official title as chief judge of Qayrawan. Amid the excitement of the crowds, the neighing of horses, the rolling of drums and the waving of banners, Asad spoke:
There is no god but God alone; he has no partners. O people, neither a father nor grandfather created a state for me nor chose me to rule. No one before me has even seen such a sight, and I have only read about what you now see. Exert your minds and labor your bodies in the search and pursuit of knowledge; increase it and be patient with its intensity, for you will gain with it this world and the next.
Within three days, the forces of Ziyadat-allah reached Mazara on the southwestern tip of Sicily. A large army, headed by P/Balata, the Byzantine governor of Sicily, was stationed at port in anticipation of their arrival. The actual history of Muslim Sicily commences here.
The Arab invasion of Sicily was clearly propelled by local politics but cast in a wider regional context of Muslim-Byzantine rivalries. In this way, the invasion was unlike the Muslim invasions of the Iberian peninsula a century earlier and may be viewed as separate from the general Islamic wars of conquest (hurub al-futuh). In sum, it was conceived and executed by Ziyadat-allah in response to internal conditions. In the words of Georges Marcais, the invasion ‘was doubtless inspired by the desire to divert the energies of the Arabs to an external theatre of operations:® It had far-reaching economic and political advantages, giving new opportunities for employment to a restless army as well as to new conscripts. Mohamed Talbi observes: “The invasion of Sicily brought in booty and enriched the public treasury as well as private coffers; it stimulated the slave trade, and for a variety of reasons stimulated the flow of money.’ Politically, the decision to invade buttressed the fragile government of Ziyadat-allah while gaining the approval and blessings of the religious leaders and the general masses. The image of ‘defender of the faith’ was undoubtedly enhanced and exploited. This was done, and most likely could only have been done, through the scriptural prescriptions, the religio-legal bases, and the political and military pageantry of jihad.
Aghlabid Sicily (827-909)
The first years of the Islamic jihad in Sicily were difficult for the Muslim armies. Despite Euphemius’s treason and the divisions within the Byzantine politicomilitary infrastructure that induced it, the Muslim conquest of the island was not facilitated by a dilapidated government, a bitterly divided church, nor any oppressed segments of the population only too willing to receive and assist the invasion in the ways that it had with the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711. Resistance to the Arab army, on both the popular and official levels, was fierce. If anything, the invasion seemingly patched up any lingering divisions, and Constantinople was quick and generous in its response with reinforcements. Unfamiliar with the terrain and the climate, the Muslims suffered as many defeats as victories in the early days. An epidemic that struck them within their first year took many lives, including that of their leader, Asad ibn al-Furat.
Upon his death, the military commanders acted quickly and elected one of their own, Muhammad Abu al-Jawari, to lead the jihad. Cut off from their military headquarters and command posts in Qayrawan, the troops on the ground needed to act quickly and independently. This early act of ‘autoelection’ on the part of the invading troops would calcify into a political bone of contention between the Muslims of Sicily and their North African patrons throughout the entire history of Muslim Sicily, as will be seen repeatedly throughout this chapter. Meanwhile, when it appeared that the Byzantines were able to regroup and regain the upper hand, the Muslims decided to leave the island. But when they discovered that the seaports had been blockaded by a massive flotilla of Byzantine vessels, they burned their own ships and sought shelter inland. During their siege of the city of Mineo, reinforcements came from Qayrawan, and the fortuitous arrival of a passing armada of Spanish Muslim profiteers eagerly offering their assistance helped the Muslim forces get back on their feet. The tides had turned in the Muslim favour, and they succeeded in taking Mineo and the city of Agrigento soon thereafter. In their fourth year, 831, the Muslim armies entered the politically and strategically important city of Palermo and expelled the Byzantine ruling family to whom they granted safe passage. From this time, Palermo became their capital city.
With the Sicilian jihad back on track, the Aghlabid palace in Ifriqiya reasserted its direct control through the process of appointing the commanders, rather than leaving these decisions to the soldiers on the ground. In 832, Ziyadat-allah dispatched his cousin, Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah ibn al-Aghlab, better known as Abu Fihr, as commander. Upon his death three years later Ziyadat-allah appointed Muhammad’s brother, Ibrahim, who commanded the Muslims of Sicily until 850. These two decades saw stunning progress with much of the western province of the island, Val di Mazara, securely settling under Muslim rule, while other major urban areas — and Byzantine strongholds — in the centre of the island, such as Castrogiovanni (modern Enna) and Syracuse, were well on their way to becoming part of Muslim territory. By appointing members of his own family, Ziyadat-allah maintained both political control of the newly established Muslim communities and economic control over the vast wealth that the spoils of war wielded in the way of war booty: gold and silver sacked from churches and royal palaces, slaves of various kinds, protection payment (jizya) from Christians and Jews who capitulated to Islamic rule, and various land and treaty taxes imposed on both non-Muslim and Muslim subjects.
This Aghlabid policy of scrupulous attention and lavish support for the Sicilian jihad would survive intact long after Ziyadat-allah’s death in 838.
With the death in 850 of Ziyadat-allah’s appointed governor, Muhammad ibn al-Aghlab, whom the historians describe as never having left his palace in Palermo but opting instead to direct the jihad through military commanders, the Muslim forces on the ground in Sicily elected by acclamation one of their own generals, al-‘Abbas ibn al-Fad1, as their commander. They then sent word to Qayrawan notifying the court of their choice. Not content to wait for a response, al-‘Abbas set out on a new offensive with the objective of conquering Castrogiovanni, the seat of the Byzantine military command since it was driven out of Syracuse some several years prior. The eleven-year reign of al-‘Abbas, for whom an official letter of investiture eventually arrived from Ifriqiya, was marked by a succession of brilliant military victories, aided and abetted by the skills and loyalty of his son ‘Abdallah and his uncle Rabbah (Riyah, according to Ibn Khaldun), that culminated in the long, violent but successful conquest of Castrogiovanni. Once again, these two trends bear significance: The Sicilian troops were only too ready and willing to elect one of their own in a leadership vacuum, with or without the consent of Ifriqiya; and any ascension to power and legitimation of that power were first and foremost predicated on an active and decisive role in the jihad campaign.
The unexpected death of al-‘Abbas in 861 immediately following the Muslim victory at Castrogiovanni prompted the Muslim forces to repeat what had been proven to be a successful tactic: They elected from within their own ranks. This time it was ‘Abdallah, al-‘Abbas’s son, and they acclaimed him as their leader before writing to Ifriqiya of their choice. Like his father, Abdallah chose not to command from behind the scenes but to lead his army personally into new forays onto untrodden enemy territory. But this time, the response from the Aghlabid court was different. In what could very well be interpreted as serious apprehensions about the increasing independent-mindedness among the Muslim troops in Sicily, the palace in Qayrawan immediately dispatched emissaries to inform the troops of its rejection of ‘Abdallah and to announce the appointment of Khafaja ibn Sufyan, who arrived in Palermo five months after ‘Abbas’s death.
To backtracka step or two, the contrast between Muhammad ibn al-Aghlab, who directed the jihad from the palace at Palermo, and al-‘Abbas ibn al-Fadl,professional soldier at the front, may be far more fraught with meaning than a mere difference in leadership styles. In fact, it underscores two new trends in the history of Muslim Sicily: firstly, the establishment of Palermo as a capital city created a new urban centre that gradually developed along the lines of other urban centres of the medieval Muslim world, and one that cultivated social, cultural and economic institutions markedly more civilian than military in nature; secondly, there emerged differences of opinion concerning local ‘elections’ of leaders and political appointments from Ifriqiya that would create a political fault line between the gradually settling and settled Muslims within Sicily and their patrons and benefactors from Qayrawan, as political, personal and financial interests of both parties would eventually come to diverge.
Khafaja ibn Sufyan’s arrival in 861 as governor of Sicily was immediately followed by a two-pronged attack in the east of the island. Along with his son Muhammad, he concentrated his jihad efforts towards the Christian strongholds of Noto in the southeast and Taormina in the northeast. In 869, on his way back to Palermo after an extensive raiding expedition on and around Syracuse, Khafaja was assassinated by a Muslim soldier who was able to escape to Syracuse. His body was returned to Palermo where he was buried, and his son Muhammad was elected by the Palermitans and confirmed with investiture by Qayrawan. In 871, Muhammad was also assassinated, this time by his own eunuch guards who, again, were able to escape.
The political and military history of Muslim Sicily for the remainder of the ninth century runs along similar lines. The jihad campaign was heavily concentrated in the island’s eastern cities, and Syracuse was finally captured in 878. The governing of the island and the direction of the jihad campaigns were occupied by a large number of insignificant leaders, either appointed by the palace in Ifriqiya or by the Muslim Sicilian officers with eventual Qayrawani approval. What does come to surface in the chronicles is an increase of civil disturbances among the Muslim Sicilians, often, but not exclusively, drawn along Arab/Berber lines. The assassinations of Khafaja and his son Muhammad, although never stated as such, may have had some connection to these growing rifts among the Muslims.
In 875, Abu Ishaq Ibrahim II ascended the Aghlabid throne by popular acclamation in Qayrawan. His twenty-seven-year reign witnessed a complex of stunning military and cultural achievements on the one hand, and violence and widespread dissent on the other. His public pronouncements for social justice and economic well-being for the poor and his generosity and support for the Sicilian jihad were overshadowed by rising domestic opposition on a number of fronts, compounded by uprisings from the Berbers of Zab (Southeast Algeria) and military threats from the Tulunids of Egypt. The disagreement among the historians in assessing his rule attests to his highly complex and schizophrenic temperament that fluctuated unpredictably between a just and benevolent rule and a murderous paranoia. Ibn al-Athir is the lone voice in favourably judging the rule of Ibrahim IJ:
He was just and resolute in his affairs. He secured the land and killed the licentious and corrupt. He used to hold court at the Grand Mosque at Qayrawan on Mondays and Thursdays, hearing cases and mediating. Caravans and merchants traveled safely on the roads. He built fortresses and guarding posts along the coast. He was determined to perform the pilgrimage. He redressed oppressive acts and displayed piety and asceticism. He made his way to Sicily to perform both pilgrimage and holy war.
Ibn Khaldun, writing more than a century later, seizes the opportunity to contradict Ibn al-Athir upon whom he otherwise relies heavily for his information:
That year a messenger from the caliph al-Mu'tadid came and discharged Ibrahim because of the North Africans’ complaints against him. He (Ibrahim) recalled his son Abu al-‘Abbas from Sicily and then he himself went there to show repentance and banishment. This is according to Ibn al-Raqiq, who also mentioned that he was a tyrant, oppressive and bloodthirsty, who was afflicted with melancholy at the end of his life, which accounted for his excessive killing ... Ibn al-Athir [on the contrary] praised him for his intellect, his justice and his kindness.*
In Sicily, Ibrahim II faced a serious challenge to his rule in an open revolt in 900, and he responded by appointing his own son, Abu al-‘Abbas ibn Ibrahim ibn Ahmad ibn al-Aghlab, as governor. Abu al-‘Abbas arrived at the western port city of Trapani in August 900 with a flotilla of 160 ships and immediately set up a blockade around the port. At the time of his arrival, the (Arab) Palermitans were fighting with the (Berber) Agrigentans. When the news of his arrival spread, the Palermitan forces returned to the capital and immediately dispatched an embassy to the new governor offering excuses for their battle with Agrigento. The Agrigentans in turn also sent their emissaries to complain of Palermos abusive policies. Following these initial attempts to play off one against the another, which apparently did not succeed in bringing Abu al-‘Abbas to one side or the other, the Sicilians (and here we are to assume both Palermitans and Agrigentans) united - for reasons never explained by the historians - and waged an attack against the newly arrived Aghlabid forces. The following month, September 900, the combined Sicilian militias were defeated after a series of bitterly fought land and sea battles, and Abu al-‘Abbas took control of the capital first and then the rest of the Muslim-controlled areas of the island. The leaders of the army who led the revolt fled to Christian territories in the northeast of the island, Val Demone, with some going even as far as Constantinople. Once order was restored, Abu al-‘Abbas headed in the direction of the northeast to continue the jihad.
In Ifriqiya, meanwhile, Ibrahim’s erratic behaviour reached such a peak that the caliph in Baghdad, al-Mu'tadid, was called upon and implored to intervene. He sent orders in 902 for Ibrahim to abdicate the throne. As previously mentioned, the Ifriqiyan masses still regarded the caliphate in Baghdad as a higher religious and political authority despite Aghlabid autonomy, and these orders held powerful sway over local politics. Ibrahim complied and named his son, Abu al-‘Abbas, as his successor. Father and son, in essence, exchanged jobs. In a public and ostentatious display of contrition and penance, Ibrahim donned the robes of a pious ascetic and holy warrior (mujahid) and set sail for Sicily to participate in the jihad, a response that echoed Ziyadat-allah’s pompfilled invasion to invade Sicily seventy-three years earlier. Ibrahim led an expedition across the Straits of Messina and died a martyr’s death in Calabria that same year. The command of Sicily, meanwhile, had been bequeathed to Ibrahim’s grandson, Abu Mudar Ziyadat-allah III. During his brief reign there, his own father had him arrested for drunkenness and abuse of office. In revenge, he conspired in the assassination of his father and ascended the throne upon his death in Ifriqiya. Although he remained committed to the Sicilian jihad, his patricidal legacy and his licentious ways had become targets for the mission of the Fatimid Mahdi and its anti-Aghlabid campaign. His escape to Egypt in 909 put an effective end to Aghlabid rule in Ifriqiya and its Sicilian province.
Fatimid Sicily (909-944)
In the vast stretches of the Maghrib in the early years of the tenth century loomed the proselytizing mission (da‘wa) of the Fatimid Shi'ite missionary Abu ‘Abdallah (al-Shi‘i).'° It was a time and place of widespread discontent, especially among the Berber populations who felt deprived of the privileges of Arab elitism. Some had found comfort and support in the fiery rhetoric of the Kharijite movement that not only denounced the immorality and illegitimacy of the Aghlabid rulers but proclaimed as well that any righteous Muslim could serve as the leader of the community. Others, especially Berbers of the Kutama tribal confederation, were at this time responding to the invitation of the Fatimid mission that was gaining ground in such a climate of discontent. The Fatimids, who claimed descent from Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad and wife of the fourth caliph, ‘Ali, were a branch of the Isma ili Shi ‘ites who were advancing a brand of popularist egalitarianism and calling for economic, social and religious reform, the headline of their campaign. They also addressed the widespread opposition to years of Aghlabid corruption and abuse of power, and their campaign succeeded in the end in muffling the Aghlabids’ last desperate and half-hearted appeals at reformation. Ibrahim II’s abdication and public display of holy contrition, and Abu al-‘Abbas’s promises of ‘justice, moderation, and jihad’ were insufficient to save the dynasty. Ziyadat-allah III was overthrown in 909 by the forces of Abu ‘Abdallah, and in the following year the Fatimid Mahdi, “‘Ubayd Allah, entered Raqqada” in triumph. He wasted little time in erecting his official palaces, having his name read at the Friday prayer (khutba) and bestowing upon himself the title of Commander of the Faithful.
The success of the Mahdi and his mission in North A fricahad repercussions in Sicily, obviously, given that the island continued to exist as a province to Ifriqiya whose native sons settled the newly conquered lands and produced successive generations of Sicilian-born Muslims. The Sicilian-Ifriqiyan relationship had also developed into one of mutual dependency. ‘The Sicilian jihad movement, and those who depended upon it for their livelihood, continued to be heavily dependent upon constant reinforcements from Ifriqiya. These reinforcements not only included heavy doses of arms and other war materiel but manpower as well. For its part, the rulership in Ifriqiya depended on the spoils of war that filled its coffers, and it counted on Sicily as its base in the Mediterranean to protect its overseas interests. Also, the jihad machinery kept a restless and rebellion-prone army employed, while the aura of a ruler as ‘defender of the faith’ remained well burnished.
A quick stray from the chronicle path and a look at the contemporary Shiite literature sheds much light on how vital the Fatimid mission viewed Sicily, at least in the early years. The Fatimid Ismaili jurist, political theorist and court historian, al-Qadi al-Nu‘man (d.973),”” arguably their most eminent and accomplished propagandist, served the first four Fatimid caliphs: “‘Ubayd Allah (d.934), al-Qaim (d.946), al-Mansur (d.953) and al-Mu‘izz (d.976). His Da‘aim al-islam (the Pillars of Islam)'? was the standard Isma‘ili law text throughout the Fatimid empire. Among his many works, his Iftitah alda‘wa (the Initiation of the Mission),'* a history of the Fatimid mission from its beginnings in Yemen to the Mahdi’s triumphal entrance into Raqqada in 910, sheds precious light on how the new Fatimid rulers maintained — if not surpassed — the Aghlabid Sicilian jihad in its thrust and execution and how they manipulated it to serve their political interests and expansionist goals.
In the several passages addressed to the Muslims of Sicily, three major points of interest are worthy of note. Firstly, the Shiite Fatimids displayed cautious (if not feigned) deference to the Sunni caliph of Baghdad, crediting him, at the expense of the Aghlabids, with supplying much of the power that produced a Muslim victory in Sicily. This was clearly a case of treading lightly in an area dominated by Maliki Sunnism, and whose religious/scholarly leaders had been outspoken critics of Aghlabid abuses and champions of the cause of the urban working classes and the rural poor. Secondly, the Fatimid mission lavished praise on the Muslims of Sicily and promised its full support of their jihad movement.
You, inhabitants of the island of Sicily, are most worthy of favors and special treatment, because you live so close to the polytheists and remain engaged in holy war against the wicked infidels; God willing, I will fill your island with horses and soldiers from among the faithful who will wage the most just of wars so that God will strengthen our religion and the Muslims through whom He will crush polytheism and polytheists. For all change and power is with Almighty God, upon whom we rely. He is indeed the Best One to rely on.”
Thirdly, the Fatimid appeal to the Sicilians and their jihad was built on an anti-Aghlabid campaign that was subtle in its beginning and unequivocally hostile by the end. It grudgingly paid homage to Ziyadat-allah I for his decision to launch the jihad against the enemy, albeit for self-serving reasons, and it urged the Muslims to obey the Aghlabid rulers especially while they were actively engaged in combat against the Christians. But the mission’s frequent use of the word for enemy (fasiq: one who departs from the right way; disobedient; transgressor; sinful; wicked; immoral), which was ‘mostly applied to one who has taken upon himself to observe what the law ordains, and has acknowledged its authority, and then fallen short of observance in respect of its ordinances,'* offers a most interesting lexical alternative to the usual kafir (infidel), mushrik (polytheist), ‘I? (pagan) or adu (generic enemy) that are generally used by the Arab chroniclers - and poets — in referring to the Christian enemy. Given the accusations of corruption and immorality that the Fatimids hurled against the Aghlabids, one can comprehend the propaganda. Exhorting the Sicilians to carry on with their jihad against the enemy, the Mahdi raised the accusation of guilt by association through the manipulation of the term fasiq and, in so doing, redirected the holy war against the enemy within.
Undertake jihad with your possessions and your souls, just as it has been prescribed to you; rid yourselves of your licentiousness and your sacrileges, lest you be led away from the rightful path of your religion; and defend it (religion) against anyone who would alter it; free yourselves from whomever would innovate or change it.!”
The Fatimids, capitalizing on the deterioration of the Aghlabid dynasty by constantly reminding the public of its patricide, mass murder, corruption and moral depravation, interpolated these events and failures into their own vision and interpretation of jihad, projecting themselves as ruling in absolute adherence to both the scriptural and juridical precepts of righteousness, purity of heart and the legal authority of the ruler (imam) of the Muslim community to wage a holy war. In the process, they were also able to put forth the Shi‘ite concept of caliphal legitimacy.
Thanks be to God and His blessings. Since assuming my duty to serve His Truth, I have not ceased to defend His religion and seek justice for His pious followers. I rule by His command, pray to Him for guidance, and prohibit that which He has prohibited. I warn that I will resurrect what the oppressors have destroyed in the way of the truth. I shall wage holy war against the heretic enemies of God who have usurped the right which belongs to the descendants of God’s prophet. I reproach the Aghlabids and serve them notice that I will diminish their ranks and penetrate their cities in order to shame them into the truth, so that they may return to it, acknowledge it, and live under its banner. I will do this patiently, in the hopes of sparing Muslim lives. Yet, the more I try to be kind to them with every good intention, the more they persist in straying further from the truth, openly oppressing God’s servants, sinning without hesitation, transgressing boldly, and usurping everything for themselves arrogantly. For indeed they have seized what belongs to God as their private property and His servants as their chattel, with no regard for righteous conduct, and with no respect for God’s people and everything that is sacred."
The first Fatimid caliph, “‘Ubayd Allah, acted quickly in turning his attention to the affairs of Sicily, which he ruled through direct proxy. He did this first from his new capital in Raqqada and then from the newly built palatine town of al-Mahdiyya, and similar in fashion, one might add, to that of his Aghlabid predecessors. In order to secure control over the island’s Muslim population, as well as the politically powerful and economically lucrative jihad campaign that had already made significant inroads into Southern Italy (especially in Calabria and Apulia), “‘Ubayd Allah appointed trusted followers with proven military skills. As governor for Sicily, he chose al-Hasan ibn Ahmad ibn Abi Khinzir, a member of the Kutama Berber tribe, which was fiercely loyal to the Fatimids. Al-Hasan arrived at Mazara at the end of 902, along with Ishaq ibn al-Minhal who was appointed as chief judge of Sicily. Given the injustices inflicted upon Sicily by the last Aghlabid governor of Sicily, Abu Mudar Ziyadat-allah II, ‘Ubayd Allah may well have been staging an attempt to redress Aghlabid injustices. In addition, he appointed al-Hasan’s brother ‘Ali as regional governor of Agrigento, the stronghold of the Sicilian Berber community. Amari observes that this separate appointment was not in existence under the Aghlabids, and he suggests that the Mahdi was trying to win favour with the Berbers and instigate tension between them and the Arab community."
ittle is reported in the sources on the immediate reaction of the Sicilian Muslims to the changing of the guard in North Africa. Although the master historian Ibn al-Athir (d.1233) reports widespread opposition in and around Qayrawan, nothing is mentioned of rampant disturbances in Sicily upon the arrival of Ibn Abi Khinzir.”° Thus, it can be assumed that the Sicilians were at least cautious. It is interesting to note that one of the new governor’s first public actions was to lead a raiding expedition in 910 into the Val Demone, ‘pillaging, taking prisoners and burning the lands: Once again, this may well be read as reinforcement of a clearly established pattern that an activist role in the jihad campaign was essential to legitimating and solidifying one’s (right to) rule. However, not long after his return from this expedition, the Sicilians revolted against him and sent him and his brother back to Raqqada. The Fatimid palace responded by appointing ‘Ali ibn “Umar al-Balawi, but his tenure in Sicily was even shorter.
Despite Ibn Abi Khinzir’s jihadish foray into enemy territory, neither he nor his successor apparently understood or mastered the art of ruling the island: the former was too harsh and the latter too weak, according to the Arab chroniclers. And the Sicilians, with an uncanny ability to come together when their collective interests were at stake, made their case to the Fatimid court in no unequivocal terms. The Mahdi could only acquiesce to their wishes and recall his first two Sicilian appointees. Acting upon the conviction that they knew best, and reverting to their old political habits, the Sicilians elected by acclamation one of their own, Ahmad ibn Qurhub, to assume the reins of power.
The curious case of Ahmad ibn Qurhub
The dynastic interregnum of Muslim Sicily (903-909), that is, the short period of the last years of Aghlabid decline and the consolidation of Fatimid rulers, had already witnessed, as we have seen, the murder of the Aghlabid leader Abu al-‘Abbas, engineered by his own son, Abu Mudar Ziyadat-allah III. It also witnessed the killing of other prominent members of the ruling family. Abu Mudar had been deposed by his father, then Aghlabid emir in North Africa, from the governorship of Sicily, because of his corruption and addiction to alcohol. At that time of Abu Mudar’s imprisonment, Abu al-‘Abbas had appointed a certain Muhammad ibn al-Sarqusi (from Syracuse) as governor of Sicily. This period also saw the rule of Ahmad ibn Abi al-Husayn ibn Rabbah, of the Arab (Mudarite) aristocracy of Palermo (and grandson of Rabbah, the uncle of ‘Abbas b. al-Fadl), whose family remained loyal relatives to the Aghlabids and distinguished for its leadership in Sicily. His rule was followed by the rule of ‘Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Abi al-Fawaris, a local champion of the Fatimid cause.”
The relatively rapid succession of these rulers underscores the fact that Muslim Sicily had suffered from the political disruption caused by a combination of local squabbles and the disruption and chaos taking place within the ruling family in Ifriqiya. The election of the above-mentioned ‘Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Abi al-Fawaris suggests that the island’s (Sunni) Muslim population may not have been totally hostile to the (Shi'ite) Fatimids, at least in the beginning. But the failure of the first two Fatimid appointees in Sicily, Ibn Abi Khinzir and ‘Ali ibn “Umar al-Balawi, and the subsequent election by acclamation of Ahmad ibn Qurhub to power with a wide base of support (i.e. the backing of both Arab Palermo and Berber Agrigento) were undoubtedly an internal response to the rapid changes taking place in Ifriqiya. Most interestingly, Ibn Qurhubs initial reluctance to accept the mandate to rule the island adds confusion to the already chaotic and speculative accounts of events at this time. It was only after the Sicilians gave Ibn Qurhub their assurances of staunch support that he begrudgingly acquiesced. Amari sees his rise ‘prominent citizen, nobleman, orthodox, held in esteem by both the Aghlabids and the Sicilians’ — as something of a compromise between two hostile factions within Sicily that emerged in confrontation during the interregnum between Aghlabid and Fatimid rule.”
Once Ibn Qurhub accepted to be governor of Sicily in 912, he set out, within what has now become a discernible pattern, on a raiding expedition into Christian territory. He crossed over into Calabria where his plundering yielded vast amounts of treasures and slaves. In the aftermath of this successful raid, he dispatched his son ‘Ali in 913 to seize the Christian hill town of Taormina. His intention was to make it a personal fortress where his son could safeguard the family holdings in the event of any future Muslim Sicilian uprising. Three months into the siege, factions of the army revolted against ‘Ali. They set fire to his tents with the intention to kill him, but a contingent of Arab troops (al-arab) intervened on his behalf.”
Back in Palermo, Ibn Qurhub announced his intention to pledge allegiance to the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir in Baghdad, amounting, in essence, to an open rebellion against the new Fatimid government in Ifriqiya. With popular consent, at least according to our admittedly Sunni chroniclers, he replaced the Mahdi’s name with that of the Abbasid caliph at the Friday sermon and dispatched an emissary to Baghdad with Sicily’s pledge of allegiance. In what may be considered a preemptive strike, Ibn Qurhub dispatched a flotilla to the Ifriqiyan coast where it was met by the Mahdi’s naval forces commanded by Ibn Abi Khinzir, Sicily’s first ousted Fatimid ruler. The reports of this battle waver between the bare essentials and the most gruesome of details. In sum, the Sicilian forces burnt the Mahdi’s ships, killed Ibn Abi Khinzir and sent his severed head back to Ibn Qurhub in Palermo. Following this victory, the Sicilian navy headed south along the Tunisian coast, pillaged the city of Sfax and made their way towards Tripoli where they were stopped by a Fatimid naval force commanded by the Mahdi’s son, al-Qaim.
Back again in Palermo, when the robes of investiture arrived from Baghdad, Ibn Qurhub, predictably, dispatched a fresh battalion into Calabria. During its return, it was ambushed and soundly defeated by a flotilla of the Fatimid navy. This defeat signalled the end for Ibn Qurhub. The Agrigentans rebelled against him and sent word to the Mahdi that they were ready to recognize Fatimid authority. As more towns followed suit, the rebellion against Ibn Qurhub spread throughout all of Muslim Sicily, including Palermo. He was captured, taken prisoner and sent, along with members of his inner circle, to the Mahdi in Raqqada. When asked why he rebelled, Ibn Qurhub responded to the Mahdi that the Sicilians were prone to disobedience and rebellion against their leaders and that the only way to control them was with an iron fist. The Mahdi ordered Ibn Qurhub and his followers to be executed at the gravesite of Ibn Abi Khinzir. But the Mahdi did heed the advice of Ibn Qurhub. He immediately dispatched to Sicily a major battalion, commanded by Abu Sa‘id Musa ibn Ahmad and manned with a large army of Kutama Berbers, to reassert his control. The Sicilians’ reaction was to group together and launch a united military resistance, but as the Mahdi’s forces proved to be too powerful, the Sicilians capitulated. Some factions requested safe passage, first the Palermitans and then the Agrigentans, with citizens from other towns following suit. Only the leaders of the revolt were executed, while a general amnesty was decreed by the Mahdi.
Modern historians have interpreted - subtly by Amari, openly by Aziz Ahmad (A History of Muslim Sicily, Edinburgh, 1975) - that Ibn Qurhub’s rise to power was a reaction of Sunni Sicily against Fatimid Shi‘ism. There is no doubt that Sicilian Islam, at least up until this point, was overwhelmingly Sunni. Yet this reason is, at best, secondary. The fact that Ibn Qurhub was deposed not long after his ascension to power undermines the explanation that Sunni reaction against Fatimid Shiism was the sole reason for Ibn Qurhubs acclamation as ruler by the Sicilian Muslims. Moreover, the Sicilian complaints against the first two Fatimid appointees based on ill treatment and weakness also suggest that Shi‘ism may not have been the major bone of Sicilian contention with the Fatimids.
The Byzantine historian A. A. Vasiliev suggested that Ibn Qurhub was deposed by the Berbers.”* Although the Berbers did initiate resistance to his ascent to power, they were not the only ones among the Sicilians to do so. The term fear used throughout the chronicles, if borne in mind in connection with Ibn Qurhub’s remarks to the Mahdi concerning the recalcitrant nature of the Muslim Sicilians, provides us with at least a surface reason for Ibn Qurhub’s tragic ending: the fact that he ruled Sicily with an iron hand was unacceptable to the Sicilians, regardless of whether he was a native son or appointed by North Africa. The references to ‘the people} and then the emphasis of ‘Agrigentans, and finally ‘the inhabitants of the other towns’ cancel out the Berbers or Shi‘ism as being solely responsible for Ibn Qurhub’s rise and fall.
What must be understood from these events, as well as from the ultimate fate of Ibn Qurhub, is something of a pro-North African versus anti-North African political divide among the Sicilian Muslims that often — but not always — ran perpendicular to Arab/Berber tensions. In Ibn Qurhub, Amari sees a Sicilian ‘consciousness’ and a struggle against North Africa.”
From the end of 913 until 925, scant information is provided as the chronicles thin out on the history of Muslim Sicily. Sometime around 917, the Mahdi appointed Salim ibn Rashid (1.917-37) as its governor. His first years in office coincided with renewed military aggressions against Byzantium in both Sicily and Southern Italy. His rule also overlapped with the death of the Mahdi and the ascension of his son, al-Qa’im (1.934-46). This period saw a greater role for North African troops in these campaigns and the emergence of Slavs among them. The existence of a slav(e) quarter in Palermo, which the tenth-century Arab geographer and historian Ibn Hawgqal would describe after a visit to Palermo some fifty years later, suggests their substantial numbers. The Mahdi also dispatched an expedition from Mahdiyya to pillage Genoa, and a flotilla even reached Sardinia where they were able to set fire to a number of ships along the coast.
The uprisings of 938: A united Sicilian front
In 937, the Muslims of Agrigento arose in revolt against their Fatimid governor, Salim ibn Rashid. He was able to put down the insurrection, and many of its participants were forced to flee the city when he set up a blockade around it. As a backup, he requested reinforcements from al-Qaim, the new Fatimid caliph, who responded with a huge battalion under the command of Khalil ibn Ishaq.
The vacillation at this point in time between allegiance and rebellion on the part of the Sicilians - mainly the Arabs of Palermo and the Berbers of Agrigento - to their Fatimid-appointed governors, and by extension, the new Fatimid court in Mahdiyya itself, defies any clear-cut explanation. The heavy injections of Ifriqiyan and other foreign troops, iron-fist rule and economic exploitation all played a role in Sicilian discontent with North Africa in general, and Salim in particular, but, again, not enough to create a united Sicilian front with a clear and consistent articulation of grievances against the Fatimids. This time, resentment was, according to some accounts, aimed at Salim’s repressive fiscal policies,” an issue that will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3. The influx of ‘foreign troops’ to assist in the jihad campaigns that had now been well underway in Calabria and Apulia undoubtedly raised the demand for increases in military salaries as well as parcels of land or other forms of booty to be distributed among the holy warriors. The insurrections in the cities and towns and their surrounding farm regions, meanwhile, wreaked havoc on the land and crops, pushing prices higher and forcing the local authorities to raise taxes on Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
When the Fatimid military commander Khalil ibn Ishaq arrived in Agrigento, the inhabitants came out to greet him en masse, as woman and children overwhelmed him with stories of atrocities perpetrated against them by their Fatimid governor, Salim. Citizens of other towns in Sicily followed suit. When many of them pledged allegiance to the Mahdi, Khalil was taken by surprise and offered his support to help them. Fearing for his position, Salim devised a scheme to pit the Sicilians against Khalil, calling attention to the huge army that accompanied Khalil to Sicily and convincing them that the Mahdi had sent Khalil to exact revenge for their uprising.
Salim’s scheme succeeded in achieving more than its immediate goal of pitting the Sicilians against Khalil. The sight of a large battalion of newly dispatched Kutama Berbers from North Africa, compounded by the building of the new fortress city, frightened the Sicilians into, once again, uniting in armed revolt. With the odds overwhelmingly against them, the Sicilians dispatched an embassy to Constantinople seeking its assistance. Responding in kind, Khalil sought and received reinforcements from alQaim. The next two years witnessed something of a civil war with broader ‘superpower’ dimensions, pitting Sicilian Muslims against their leaders in Ifriqiya and the Fatimids against the Byzantines. When the forces of Khalil prevailed, many Sicilians took refuge in Christian-held territories, while those who remained in the fortresses were granted amnesty on condition of their surrender.
Despite Khalil’s success in putting an end to the insurrection in 941, Sicily in its aftermath suffered its many consequences. In addition to the obvious decrease in population due to death in battle, pillaging and the emigration of substantial numbers of Muslim citizens, residual animosity still smouldered in what had now become an even more brittle relationship between the island and its North African rulers. The fact that Sicilians could seek the military assistance of the Byzantine enemy against their own patrons and co-religionists must have had a severe impact on the fragile network of alliances and balances that kept the Muslims together. Also, the island suffered mass starvation in the years 940-2, in which the pillaging and burning of land and crops had undoubtedly played a role.”’
The Fatimid court in Mahdiyya at this time was battling a serious threat to its government on its own turf with a rebellion, led by the Kharijite Abu Yazid (Makhlad ibn Kaydad), which came to a head in the years 943-7. Simultaneously, the Fatimid forays into the lands of the east, towards which the court had always set its goals, were beginning to bear fruit. Their mission’s successes in Egypt were redirecting their energies away from North Africa and Sicily. With an eye towards Baghdad, the Fatimids prepared the departure by breaking up their vast North African territories into smaller principalities to be ruled, separately, by loyal and trusted servants.
Kalbid Sicily (944-1044)
The family of the tribe of Kalb of the Bani Wabara” came to rule Sicily in the same way others before them had come to do: by way of services rendered to, and unflinching support for, the dominant rulers of North Africa. Just as the Aghlabid court chose family members and trusted generals to execute its military and administrative policies in Sicily, so too did the Fatimids continue in this practice of appointing loyal servants. Their Kalbid clients, however, would eventually evolve into their own dynasty, which succeeded in completing the jihad campaign in Sicily and provided a considerable degree of political stability and social cohesion among the Sicilian Muslim population. Their rule over the island also coincided with the early stages of the development of Arabic and Muslim civilian and scholarly institutions with a particular Sicilian flavour. This was as much due to their fortuitous timing, having come to power after a century of Arab settlement, as it was to their attention and cultivation of local talent, which they encouraged and patronized.
It should be recalled that the outbreak of the rebellions of 937 and mass starvation in Sicily, along with the intensity of Abu Yazid’s anti-Fatimid campaign in North Africa that came to a climax in 947, helped bring the Kalbids to power in Sicily. They ruled the island at first under close scrutiny of the Mahdi but gradually came to enjoy a greater degree of freedom to rule. The Fatimid move to Cairo in 972, decreasing but not altogether eliminating Fatimid hegemony over Sicily, allowed for increasing Kalbid autonomy. ‘Ali ibn Abi al-Husayn al-Kalbi (son-in-law of Salim ibn Rashid) died during the uprisings in Agrigento in 938, and his son, al-Hasan ibn ‘Ali, who served both Mahdis, al-Qa’im and al-Mansur, proved himself in suppressing the Kharijite rebellion of Abu Yazid. His was rewarded with the governorship of Sicily, and through him, the line of Kalbid succession actually began.”
Other local factors contributed to al-Hasan’s appointment to Sicily as well. A certain ‘Attaf, who had been in charge of the island prior to al-Hasan, was viewed as so weak that the Christians saw no need to pay a tax stipulated by a treaty concluded with the Muslims. Also, there emerges in the chronicles during this time an influential clan, the Bani al-Tabari, whose strength was based upon a vast network of clientele. Their numbers and influence, testament to local powers and interests, had allowed them to form a solid front against ‘Attaf. When the Palermitans joined forces with them in their rebellion against ‘Attaf, he fled the island in 947, once again prompting the court at Mahdiyya to intervene. All of this, once again, reflects the close attention the rulership in North Africa paid to its vital interests in Sicily.
Once firmly ensconced at Palermo, al-Hasan resumed raiding expeditions against the Sicilian Christian strongholds in the northeast of the island and full-scale military attacks against the Byzantines in Calabria. At this time, Constantinople was renewing its reinforcements via Otranto, where the Byzantine forces had been previously defeated by Muslims forces dispatched directly from North Africa. But when al-Mansur died in 953 and his son alMu‘izz (r.953-75) became Mahdi, al-Hasan was called back to the court in Mahdiyya. He left the duties of ruling Sicily to his son Ahmad, and it would be more correct to say that ‘Kalbid’ Sicily actually begins here. Whereas al-Hasan had always been closely connected to the Fatimid governments in North Africa and later in Cairo where the Fatimid caliphate and central government moved in 969, it was more accurately under Ahmad that Muslim Sicily gained a significant degree of autonomy. Al-Hasan’s reappearance in Sicily at major battles, however, does point to a still-ongoing Fatimid involvement in Sicilian military affairs after the Fatimids’ move to Egypt.
Muslim-Christian relations within and immediately around Sicily had become more varied and complex by this time. The number of treaties increased, as did the number of confrontations. Added to this richness and complexity was the Sicilian-Maghribi-Egyptian axis created by the newly established Fatimid dynasty of Egypt. At the heart of this axis lay a lucrative and bustling commerce that brought together Muslim, Christian and Jewish merchants, craftsmen, importers and exporters, shippers and soldiers of fortune from the Mediterranean basin. Ibn Hawqal mentions the Jewish neighbourhood during his visit in 973, which he locates between the Bab al-Jadid and Ibn Saqlab Mosque quarters, two neighbourhoods of Palermo he cites as having the most markets.** Whenever hostilities did erupt, the historians speak of breaking treaties or violating conditions of truces. The fact that the fiercest of battles were fought by troops from North Africa and Constantinople, sent onto the Sicilian battlefield to assist their co-religionists, may in some way be related to Ibn Hawgal’s disparaging remarks about the cowardly Sicilians who shirked their responsibilities in fighting the jihad.
As the Muslim, Christian and Jewish Sicilians cohabited the same land between the swells of war and peace, as well as within the capricious and unpredictable complex of Fatimid-Byzantine relations, other external factors began to emerge in and around Sicily. The Fatimids, as was mentioned, directed their efforts and energies towards the East, remaining on constant guard against their rivals in Baghdad, as Southern Italy and Sicily loomed increasingly in the eyes of ambitious rulers from the North. The capture of Taormina in 962, the last major Christian stronghold on the island, and the subsequent fall of Rometta, as well as the great naval victory for the Muslims fought at the Straits of Messina (waq‘at al-majaz: the Battle of the Straits) in 965 brought Fatimid-Byzantine hostilities to both a height and a halt.*' The humiliating defeat at Messina suffered by Byzantium under the command of Manuel Phocas put an immediate halt to the tremendous momentum gained by his uncle, Nicephorus (Phocas) II, conqueror-turned-emperor, which had begun with the capture of Crete in 961 after 135 years of Muslim occupation.” In the aftermath, a new alliance between the Fatimids and Byzantium emerged through necessity. Although skirmishes between the two enemies would break out from time to time, they were not on a large scale. The pressure was coming from the North where the Emperor Otto I (1.936-73) cast his sights on Southern Italy, where both Byzantium and the Muslims had much to lose. In 982, the army of Otto II (1.973-83), comprised Saxons, Bavarians and other Germans, as well as Italians from the North and the Lombard provinces, was defeated in Calabria by joint Muslim-Byzantine forces.”
The three decades after the reign of Ahmad ibn al-Hasan (d.969) were relatively peaceful and prosperous ones for Sicily. With the exception of an outburst in 969 between rival Arab and Berber factions, between the clients (mawali) of the Kutama and the tribes (al-qaba’il), the chronicles make no mention of civil unrest. Those who occupied the government at Palermo, moreover, are reported as having been popular with Sicilians. The circumstances surrounding the outburst of hostilities in 969-70 are not clear, but they did occur during the brief reign of Ya‘ish, a client of al-Hasan ibn ‘Ali ibn Abi al-Husayn, who was appointed by the Mahdi, al-Mu‘izz. When word of this reached al-Mu‘izz, he had Ya‘ish removed and appointed Abu al-Qasim ibn al-Hasan ibn ‘Ali ibn Abi al-Husayn to replace his brother Ahmad, much to the satisfaction of the Sicilians.
Whatever the underlying reasons were for this outburst, for which it may be assumed that Ya‘ish bore some responsibility, it is clear that the new quasiautonomous ruling family of the Kalbids enjoyed the confidence of both the Fatimid Mahdi and the majority of the Sicilian Muslims. Their position strengthened when al-Mu‘izz moved to Egypt, between 969-972, where he established the centre of his new caliphate. With the move to Cairo, al-Mu‘izz left the province of Ifriqiya in the hands of Yusuf Bulukkin ibn Ziri, but he did not grant him control of Sicily, thus wrestling the island, for the first time, from under the control of al-Mahdiyya. In this reconfiguration of Fatimid-held lands in the Maghrib, Abu al-Qasim ibn al-Hasan was given an unprecedented degree of autonomy to rule Sicily.
Abu al-Qasim ruled Sicily for twelve years during which time he expended much energy and resources into military ventures in Christian territories of the northeast province of Val Demone and in Calabria of the Italian mainland. There seems to have been few troops dispatched onto the island from North Africa at this time, in sharp contrast to the days of Salim ibn Rashid and Khalil ibn Ishaq. Abu al-Qasim’s death in 982 during the battle with Otto II’s forces in Calabria prompted the Muslims to elect his son, Jabir. Jabir’s decadent behaviour and poor administration, however, forced the Sicilians to remove him from office a year later. In his stead, they elected his cousin Ja‘far, who had been a minister and boon companion to the Fatimid Mahdi al-‘Aziz (1.97396). His election proved wise, because he was able to restore the order that Abu al-Qasim had brought to the island. His death four years later was followed by his brother ‘Abdallah’s rule, who continued Ja‘far’s policies.
This period of internal stability came to a high point with the nine-year rule of Abu al-Futuh Yusuf ibn ‘Abdallah, from 989 to 998. The chroniclers lavish high praise on him, and since little is recorded in the way of military encounters with the Christians or of internal factionalism among the Muslims, it is safe to assume that the island passed through one of its most peaceful and prosperous periods under his rule. Unfortunately, Thiqat al-Dawla (the confidence of the state), the name by which Yusuf was popularly known, suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed in 998. He then transferred the affairs of state to his son, Ja‘far (r.998-1019).
Concurrently, it is at this moment in Arabo-Sicilian history when the Arabic sources begin to yield rich information on the cultural and intellectual production of Muslim Sicilians. The entries of early biographers and chroniclers, echoed by and preserved in later medieval master histories and anthologies, attest to prodigious scholarship in the religious or Qur’anic sciences. Sicilian works of Islamic jurisprudence (figh), mainly written in the tradition of Maliki law, confirmed the island’s scholarly connection to the motherland of North Africa where Maliki Sunnism survived and flourished even during the period of Fatimid Shiism. The study of law in Sicily, as elsewhere throughout the Islamic world, included its cognate disciplines of prophetic traditions (hadith), Quranic exegesis (tafsir) and speculative theology (kalam).
Secondly, particularly strong in Arabo-Sicilian scholarship was the study of the Arabic language (Iugha) and its subfields. One could comfortably assume that the necessity of teaching Arabic to large segments of the Sicilian population whose native language was not Arabic broadened the depth and scope of language studies. The relatively scant information from the medieval Sicilian Arabic bio-bibliography nonetheless provides surprisingly copious works on grammar, syntax, poetry and prosody, prose composition, lexicography and literary criticism. These fields, perhaps the hallmark of Sicilian-Islamic culture, would reach their high points throughout the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, with eminent philologists such as Ibn al-Birr (d.1068), Ibn Makki (d.1107), Ibn Fahham (d.1112) and Ibn al-Qatta‘ (d.1121).**
Thirdly, the field of poetry, as a logical extension of and subfield to linguistic scholarship, and as a public and transposable commodity for the propagation of political legitimization and the advancement of high-court culture, came into full bloom at the Kalbid Court in the later decades of tenthcentury Palermo. Sicilian poets, from the fully professional to the dilettante, came from different walks of life. Many of the philologists and grammarians, who read and researched the anthologies of the masters of classical Arabic poetry for imitable models of linguistic perfection, in turn tried their hand at poetic composition. There were also the royal princes and their protégés, some of whom were elevated to positions as high as governor (amir), who composed their own verses for sport as much as to display their erudition and elitist social stature. Finally, there were the court panegyrists, the hired guns of public opinion, who were called upon to enhance the image of the prince and his court, to sing his personal praises, to congratulate him on a military victory, or to offer condolences on the loss of a member of the royal family or of a loved one. Perhaps the best example of these was Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali al-Rub‘i, best known as Ibn al-Khayyat, whose career as a Kalbid panegyrist began sometime within the reign of Abu al-Futuh Yusuf (r.989-998) and extending into the reign of petty warlord Ibn al-Thumna, that is, from as early as 989 until possibly as late as 1050.*°
Apogee and decline: The house of Abu al-Futuh Yusuf divided
Ja‘far ibn Yusuf’s ascendency to power over the Kalbid court upon his father’s paralysis in 998 began with all the confidence and support the Sicilians had bestowed upon his father. However, c.1014, for reasons never made clear, his brother ‘Ali rose up and rebelled against him with the support of Berbers and the slave corps. Ja‘far dispatched an expedition against ‘Ali from Palermo. The eight days of fighting, during which a large number of ‘Ali’s forces were killed, ended with ‘Ali’s capture and execution, the execution of the slaves and the expulsion of Berber forces from the island. As a precaution against further disturbances, Ja‘far rebuilt his military forces, conscripting only ‘Sicilian troops. This may suggest that the Berbers who had supported his brother ‘lis rebellion were those Kutama Berbers who had come to Sicily within the past few generations and not the native Sicilian Berbers who long inhabited Agrigento as well as other parts of the islands.
Other acts that contradict the earlier reports about Ja‘far’s reputation as a ruler surface in the chronicles and suggest that he had a change in policy towards ruling the island. His ill treatment of members of his own family, princes who themselves must have had their own entourages of wealthy and influential clients, eroded his base of support in Palermo. His regional representatives treated the populace and the elders of their communities with contempt, and they used oppressive measures in exacting a 10 per cent tax on agricultural products, a tax normally levied on non-Muslim subjects. In reaction to Ja‘far’s new tyranny, the Sicilians turned against him, dethroned him and demanded his execution.
The paralysed Abu al-Futuh Yusuf was brought out on a stretcher just in time to save his son’s life. Still very much loved by the people, Yusuf was able to appease them by appointing his third son, Ahmad, known as al-Akhal (1.10191037), to govern Sicily. Yusuf then departed to Egypt with Ja‘far, taking along with them exorbitant amounts of their wealth. The new governor wasted no time in setting out on raiding expeditions into enemy territory. During one of these raids his son, also named Ja‘far, was placed in charge of the court during the father’s absence and, opposing the conduct of his father, rebelled against him.
Tensions flared up once again, and the tenuous peace of Muslim Sicily was torn apart along pro-Sicilian and pro-North African lines. Al-Akhal summoned the Sicilians with a proposition: ‘I will rid you of the North Africans with whom you have been cohabiting by expelling them altogether from the island’** The Sicilians responded: “We have united with them in marriage and we have become one people’ He dismissed them and proposed the same thing to the North Africans. When they responded favourably, he gathered the North Africans around him, placed protections on their property and imposed a tax on the Sicilians.
‘The series of disturbing and complicated events that follow the paralysis of Abu al-Futuh Yusuf were not lost on the insightful Ibn al-Athir who, writing two centuries later, saw a sudden sequence of rise and fall in the twisted and tortuous line of succession into which the sons of Yusuf fought their way to power. In fact, his entire narrative on the fall of Muslim Sicily, which he records in the events of 1091, the year in which the Normans in effect completed their conquest of the island, begins an entire century earlier where he sees the self-destructive rebellions, fratricide and disastrous attempts to pit the oldgeneration Sicilians and the more recently arrived North African Sicilians against each other as the real reasons for the breakdown of the jihad campaign and the consequent tearing of the political fabric of Muslim Sicily.
In 484 (1091) the Normans - may God damn them - occupied the entire island of Sicily. May God return it to Islam and the Muslims! The reason for this is as follows: In 388 (998) the ruler of Sicily, Abu al-Futuh Yusuf ibn ‘Abdallah ibn Abi al-Husayn, who had been appointed to the post by the Shi‘ite ruler of Egypt and Ifriqiya, al-‘Aziz, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side and severely weakened the left. He appointed his son, Ja‘far, to replace him. He assumed power and took full control of the country. He treated his subjects well until 405 (1014) when his own brother ‘Ali rebelled against him.*”
In Ifriqiya, meanwhile, the Zirid princes, by now well established through an orderly dynastic succession, took an aggressive interest in Sicilian affairs and sought to regain the Ifriqiyan role as major patrons for the bitterly divided and beleaguered Muslim population. In 1021, al-Mu'izz ibn Badis (1.1016-62) assembled a flotilla of four hundred ships and dispatched it to Sicily upon receiving news that the Byzantines had recaptured all the territories in Calabria that had been under Muslim control. Unfortunately, most of the navy perished during a storm at sea, somewhere off the coast of Pantellaria, between Tunis and Sicily.
The Fatimid presence in Egypt had still not resulted in severed relations altogether between its court in Cairo and that of the Kalbids in Sicily, but it did create a distance the Zirids sought to exploit. While Fatimid interests, energies and priorities lay in Egypt and pointed east, the newly assertive Zirid court in Mahdiyya succeeded in their goal of regaining influence over Sicily. Zirid political animosity towards their former Fatimid patrons culminated in Mu‘izz ibn Badis’s break with Cairo, and his symbolic pledge of allegiance to the Sunni caliphate in Baghdad, c.1044, brought them increased political leverage, especially among the Sunni majorities in Sicily and North Africa. It was from the Zirid court that the Sicilians sought assistance in 1036 in an attempt to protect their own interests in the face of al-Akhal’s double dealing.** Al-Mu‘izz was all too willing to accommodate them for a number of reasons. First, with the departure of the Fatimids, their North African territories were divided among a number of petty principalities whose rivalries often led to skirmishes and outright wars. A new Zirid hegemony over Sicily would enhance both the political and military prestige of its court in Mahdiyya. Secondly, the vast majority of Muslim Sicilians, Arabs and Berbers, traced their ancestry, from as recently as one generation to as many as six, to the province of Ifriqiya that provided the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who fought the jihad, settled the land and sired new generations of native-born Sicilians. It was proximity, a demographic continuum, and generations of coexistence and interdependence that preserved the bonds between the province and the motherland. And thirdly, the militarily powerful, politically prestigious and economically lucrative jihad machine provided wealth in the form of land, gold and silver, and slaves, stimulating an arms industry and providing new avenues for trade and the circulation of capital. How could the Zirid court refuse such an offer to the Sicilians when they sent messages asking for its help? In their plea to al-Mu'izz, they expressed their desire to remain as his subjects, but they made it clear to him as well that they would seek the assistance of the Byzantines if he failed to do so.
Al-Mu‘izz ibn Badis responded to the Sicilian pleas with an army, this time commanded by his own son, ‘Abdallah. When he reached Palermo and surrounded al-Akhal at the Fatimid al-Khalisa fortress, once again the Sicilian Muslims, true to form, divided in dispute. While some chose to remain with al-Akhal, others joined forces with ‘Abdallah. When the two factions came face to face, a Sicilian loyal to al-Akhal asked a Sicilian loyal to al-Mu'izz: “You have brought in foreigners to help you, and, by God, to what end?’ The Sicilians were quick to patch up their differences, at least for the moment, and in a surprise turn of events, they launched an attack against the Zirid army. With a loss of eight hundred men, ‘Abdallah returned with his remaining troops to Ifriqiya.
In 1038, with al-Akhal dead, the Sicilians elected his brother, Hasan alSamsam (r.1040-1053), the fourth of Abu al-Futuh’s sons, as their governor. In spite of several successes in resisting new Byzantine offences, which included the recapture of some territories in Calabria and a handful of minor victories around Messina, al-Samsam’s effective control was short-lived. Added to the rapid deterioration of Muslim unity and Byzantine counter offences was the expanding meddling of Northern armies in the affairs of Southern Italy and the Mediterranean. The Pisan and Genoese navies, and above all the Normans, whom the Arab Sicilians first encountered at Salerno in 1016, were progressing farther south. As early as 1034, the Muslim armies were very much on the defensive. The deposition of Hasan al-Samsam led to the fragmentation of the island, divided and ruled by a small number of warlords. ‘Abdallah ibn Mankut took Mazara and Trapani, ‘Ali ibn Nima al-Hawwas held Castrogiovanni and Agrigento, and Ibn al-Thumna claimed Syracuse and Catania. The constant hostilities among the three give credence to Ibn al-Athir’s assessment: “The Sicilians then appointed Hasan al-Samsam, brother of al-Akhal, as their leader. But the situation deteriorated and power fell into the hands of the most despicable of men, each seizing independent control over a part of the island?“
Ibn al-Thumna’s overtures to the Normans, a promise of delivering the island to them in exchange for their assistance, evokes the memory of Euphemius two centuries earlier. The die was cast. The Norman entry into a precariously divided Arab Sicily and thirty-five years of relatively easy victories ended Muslim rule over the island. The Fatimids were focused on the lands of the east. The Zirids of North Africa, who themselves were facing tremendous political and social pressures from the onslaught of the Banu Hilal tribes and rival petty states in the Maghrib, offered assistance wherever they could. And despite the last-minute heroic resistance from the Muslim populations of Castrogiovanni, Agrigento and Noto, the Arabs had no choice but to step aside and let the Normans take their turn in the occupation of Sicily.
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