Download PDF | Eduardo Manzano Moreno (editor)_ Jeremy Roe (editor) - The Court of the Caliphate of al-Andalus_ Four Years in Umayyad Córdoba-Edinburgh University Press (2023).
481 Pages
Foreword to the English Edition
The last forty years have represented a kind of golden age for historical research on al-Andalus. The scholarship devoted to this western region of the medieval dār al-Islām has been impressive both in terms of quantity and quality. Arab manuscripts on a wide variety of subjects – from historical chronicles to legal works, from poetry to scientific treatises on disciplines like astronomy, botany or medicine – have been edited and, in some cases, translated. Evidence hitherto considered as intractable, like the thousands of profiles of Muslim scholars included in biographical dictionaries, has been systematised and analysed by long-term projects like the Historia de los Autores y Transmisores Andalusíes (HATA), the Biblioteca de al-Andalus or the Prosopografía de los ulemas de al-Andalus, all of them easily accessible online.
New research has also entailed the publication of a good amount of new Arab inscriptions, including those carved on stone or plaster, and also those embroidered in textiles, or engraved on metalwork or even rings. Numismatists have produced coin catalogues, as well as accurate descriptions of hoards and stray finds that have fostered detailed studies on minting and coinage circulation. On top of that, archaeology has made significant breakthroughs during these years, as regular campaigns have been undertaken at certain sites, rescue excavations, despite all their downsides, have managed to provide significant data, and analyses of materials have unveiled unexpected patterns of production, distribution and use of pottery, glass and other items. All this activity has resulted in an exponential growth in our knowledge and understanding of the political, social and cultural processes that unfolded in Islamic Iberia. However, this exciting and novel scholarship has not always had the impact it deserves on the field of Islamic medieval history.
This is partly for an objective reason: al-Andalus was a peripheral area, very distant from the main centres where classical Islam took shape. Arab geographers described it as an island (jazīra) detached from the rest of the dār al-Islām by the sea and by the frontier or thagr that demarcated the Christian lands. In this distant and distinctive ‘island’, Muslim religion and Arab culture came to flourish, but Andalusi intellectual feats were not always highly regarded in the East: ‘This is our own merchandise being sent back to us’, famously declared the Būyid vizier Ibn ‘Abbād, after having read the ‘Iqd al-Farīd, the monumental adab work by the Andalusian Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi (d. 940/328 ah). Ibn ‘Abbādʼs words dealt a severe blow to the westernersʼ pride, but were also an accurate verdict. Until well into the eleventh century (fifth ah), alAndalus was a net importer of concepts and ideas from the main intellectual centres of the dār al-Islām,and notwithstanding how brilliantly such scholarly ‘merchandise’ was assimilated and elaborated, Andalusi scholarship continued to be tainted with a blend of provincialism that exposed it as dependent on a major process of imitation. If one wants to understand how the religious, legal or cultural traits of classical Islam emerged in the first place, al-Andalus is certainly not the right place to look.
In contrast, this land is an excellent ground via which to assess how processes of Arabisation and Islamisation evolved in a social milieu lacking any previous contact with the peoples who made them possible, a major issue that explains the configuration of the whole dār al-Islām during the Middle Ages. There is another reason that accounts for the absence of al-Andalus in mainstream interpretations of the medieval Islamic period. Most of the scholarly work on Islamic Iberia has been published in European Union languages (Spanish, French, Catalan, Portuguese and German) whose status as languages of scholarly exchange has steadily and sadly decreased, while over recent decades English has come to predominate in the academic sphere. In many cases, these contributions have been printed in periodicals, conference proceedings or books, published by a myriad local and regional institutions lacking a well-established reputation as academic outlets, and, more often than not, good distribution networks. Although this state of affairs has been rapidly changing over recent years, particularly among university publishers, it is still understandably difficult, for those who are not familiar with its intricacies, to navigate a scholarly ocean of publications of very uneven quality and accessibility.
concur with those I have dealt with by examining ‘Īsà al-Rāzīʼs text, which provides us with the closest approximation we can get to the micro-level workings of the Umayyad polity in the absence of archival documents. I have mentioned these coincidences in the footnotes of the English translation wherever they are relevant, but it is also apposite to outline here a general appraisal of this scholarʼs main conclusions in relation to what both books have in common. Rustowʼs belief that ‘to call the Fatimid caliphate anything other than a state is grossly to misunderstand either the caliphate or the way states work’ (p. 103) is wholly confirmed by what can be discerned concerning the Cordoban caliphate, as I have mentioned before and as will become apparent in the following pages.
Neither of these states can be considered ‘despotic’, as Rustow rightly claims, because their rulers displayed a genuine concern for the welfare and prosperity of their subjects, and this was a key element of the legitimacy laid claim to by both dynasties. The analysis of petitions preserved in Fāṭimid documents matches al-Ḥakam IIʼs concerns about the behaviour of his provincial governors, and frequent mentions of prosperity (‘imāra) and welfare (maṣlaḥa) in the latterʼs decrees and official letters neatly match the ‘explicit linking of prosperity and justice’ (p. 225) proposed by the Fāṭimids. There is no doubt, either, that the workings of both caliphates were based on written documents that were regularly issued by their central and provincial administrations, and then carefully conserved in archives. The evidence gathered for this by Marina Rustow is indisputable.
This trait is again corroborated by ‘Īsà al-Rāzīʼs inclusion of Umayyad caliphal decrees and letters, and also by incidental references, such as missives the caliph issued to a provincial governor granting a tax exemption, which I discuss in Chapter 2, and clearly hint at the existence of local fiscal records, which may have not been very different from those Rustow describes. The prevalence of written documents in al-Andalus is also confirmed by an extraordinary source: the Kitāb al-wathāʼiq wa l-sijillāt by Ibn al-‘Aṭṭār (d. 1009/399 ah), a meticulous and grumpy notary from the late Umayyad period, who gathered almost 250 different models of contracts on sales, donations, testaments, manumissions or waqf endowments. Yet it is difficult to assess whether paper was as widely used by the Umayyads in al-Andalus, as Rustow describes having been the case for the Fāṭimid administration in Egypt. Although two or three Iberian paper manuscripts have been hesitantly dated to the late tenth century, the use of paper does not seem to have been very widespread during the period covered by the present book. Muḥammad b. ‘Īsà al-Jawlānī, known as Ibn al-Qallās, was an Andalusi scholar, who had spent much of his life travelling in the Near East.
Upon his return to Córdoba, he was asked to produce the works that he claimed he had collected after meeting the most reputed oriental‘ulamāʼ: he only managed to produce Andalusi copies of their works on parchment. When he was required to produce the originals on paper (uṣūl al-kāghid), he claimed that he had lost them during a shipwreck. This explanation did not convince his colleagues, who regarded him as a liar (Ibn al-Faraḍī, Taʼrīkh, n. 1,243). Lack of paper, though, did not impede a widescale production of documents: the rabaḍ al-Raqqāqīn, an urban district in the vicinity of the Umayyad palace in Córdoba and adjacent to the butchersʼ shops in the souk, was, as its name suggests, inhabited by parchment makers. A central tenet in Marina Rustowʼs book concerns the crucial question of what documents can tell us about the institutions that issued them, particularly if we compare these institutions with those from medieval Europe.
In this regard, the fact that documents were issued and archived in great numbers is of the utmost relevance, because, as she rightly argues, it undermines the case certain scholars have made for Islamic societies having had a ‘weak’ institutional configuration vis-à-vis Western medieval institutions, whose ‘stability and strength’ were based on ‘the preservation and reproduction of legal and social privileges’. Although Rustow seems to suggest I have espoused this view (p. 3 n. 10), this is far for being the case: its main advocates have been scholars of the so-called school of New Institutional Economics (NIE), who argue that institutions were key actors in the Westʼs economic development, because, among other things, they preserved long-term written accounts, which served to cement fundamental elements of rational economic activity, such as property rights and contractual obligations.
I have strongly criticised this view and argued against its teleological perspective, its lack of a sound empirical basis and its methodological bias. Therefore, I totally agree with Marina Rustow – and indeed I made this point in my 2015 article ‘Why did Islamic Medieval Institutions become so different from Western Medieval Institutions?’ – that it is misleading to describe medieval Islamic institutions as ‘weak’, and fundamentally wrong to qualify them as socio-political failures.
Nevertheless, Islamic and Western institutions developed major differences in the Middle Ages and it is legitimate to ask ourselves why. Comparative analysis is an excellent tool with which to identify social regularities that were at the base of institutional configuration, and, in addition, it also encourages the incorporation of Islamic history into mainstream medieval studies by challenging misconceptions that consider the history of Islamic societies as a mere succession of despotic dynasties with no rational or efficient systems of government, a perspective Marina Rustow abhors as much as I do. A broad comparison of institutions can also allow us to avoid a problem that stems from Rustowʼs interpretation of the Fāṭimid state in light of Max Weberʼs conclusions on modern state bureaucracies (pp. 103–6.) Weber considered these bureaucracies as tokens of a process of ‘rationalization’, a view that is not that different from the principles upon which the NIE scholars base their claims. In fact, the German sociologist singled out the Islamic legal system as not having been based on rational law, but rather on the arbitrary and ad hoc elements that shaped the subjective rulings of those in charge of administering justice.
Weber epitomised this view in the concept of ‘qāḍī justice’, in which he imagined Muslim judges resorting to common sense and expediency instead of conforming either to the letter of the codified law or to rational procedures of seeking evidence. Obviously, Weberʼs ideas can be selected à la carte; however, the interpretations that result somehow tend to lack coherence due to their being only partially based on his premises. It is for this reason that I have pursued an alternative approach and sought an explanation for the differences between medieval Islamic and Western institutions through a consideration of the fundamental disparity between their respective tax and land-based polities, and of how this ‘tributary mode of production’, which John Haldon has convincingly defined as a useful epistemological tool for historical interpretation, gave rise to wholly different social formations. As a matter of fact, most of the documents that Marina Rustow compiled to reconstruct the lost archive of the Fāṭimids are related to tax matters in one way or another; in contrast, none of them includes a land property grant. Perhaps this is only a matter of chance – it is important to bear in mind that Rustow has reconstructed a disappeared and disparate archive – but from what we know of the functioning of their respective caliphates, neither the Fāṭimids nor the Umayyads made land concessions to their subjects, contrary to what rulers in Western Europe were doing at that time. The only warrants involving land that, at least in al-Andalus, Muslim sovereigns occasionally granted were the so-called iqṭā‘at, which were basically revocable tax assignments on a certain territory. All the evidence seems to suggest, therefore, that these Islamic states were very much concerned with the management of taxes; in contrast, they abstained from meddling in land property rights.
Fiscal documents issued by tax-based polities are ephemeral almost by definition. They are critical for tax collecting purposes and in the case of fiscal arrears or claims, but once accounts are settled, and after some reasonable time has lapsed, most fiscal documents become useless. New censuses abrogate previous estimates, taxpayers are born, die, marry or divorce, further plots of land are cultivated, and urban workshops open, close or change hands. Fiscal administration is always concerned with an ever-changing reality, in which the written memory of the past has only a limited value for all the parties involved in present tax collection. Even fiscal exemptions granted by a ruler, the Holy Grail for taxpayers, can be revoked by his successors and rendered ineffective. This explains why Fāṭimid archives would be ‘pruned’ regularly and their documents re-used, as Marina Rustow masterfully shows, just as nowadays we have to dispose of our old tax records. In contrast, land-based polities, like those that emerged in feudal Europe, were based on what Marc Bloch summarised as the combination of the ‘right to the revenues from the land with the right to exercise authority’. Unlike taxes, land was not ephemeral, and, once it was granted, its exploitation required social forms of extra-economic coercion that merged power with authority. The Church spearheaded this institutional articulation. In 633, the Visigothic bishops, who had gathered at the IV Council of Toledo, solemnly declared that neither freedmen nor their descendants could ever escape ecclesiastic patronage, because the Church ‘is a patron who never dies’.
This self-awareness of an everlasting capacity to exercise power, in this case by bishops also vested with religious authority, laid the foundations of an institutional configuration that extended to other social sectors throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. In contrast, an increasing divergence emerged between Islamic medieval institutions that depended on power and those which adhered to principles of authority. As this book aims to explain, the Umayyads managed to merge both aspects for a short period of time, but caliphal power, which entailed heavy taxation and political coercion, was still prone to be challenged by the forceful authority of the ‘ulamāʼ, scholars who based their social standing on their monopoly of religious knowledge. Institutions which were attached and filled by these ‘ulamāʼ, like legal courts, market inspectorates or notarial offices, produced great quantities of documents, as witnessed, for instance, by the archives that both Fāṭimid and Umayyad qāḍīs left to their successors.
The contents of these documents referred to rulings or contracts on a large range of disputes and agreements among particulars so that their preservation must have been extremely uneven. Individuals may well have kept whatever documents were relevant for them and their descendants, but medieval family archives are difficult to detect by historians, for obvious reasons. In the case of institutional archives, like those of the qāḍīs, the preservation of large amounts of documents that recorded infinite numbers of individual cases made little sense in the long run, for practical reasons. But this does not mean that the written testimonies were erased. Far from it. The ‘ulamāʼ followed a strategy that consisted of compiling treatises and compendia on legal matters, such as the collections of fatwas, works on ḥiṣba or notarial formularies. In the well-organised chapters of these compilations, principles and practices were easier to locate than in the oceans of documents that were stored in archives, because at the end of the day it was the ‘ulamāʼ, and not the archivists, who were the transmitters and interpreters of religious and legal knowledge.
This long-term strategy for the preservation of authority was the social practice that led to a peculiar institutionalisation of knowledge, one that was based more on libraries and chains of learning transmission than on archives. To label this institutional Islamic knowledge as ‘weak’ or ‘irrational’ is to ignore its wide circulation, its impressive coherence, the sophisticated intellectual principles that ruled its elaboration and, last but not least, the social support it enjoyed. Hopefully, contributions like Marina Rustowʼs or that of the present book will help to defeat such a long-lasting misconception. I have always sympathised with authors who declare that, once they have produced a particular work, they try not to go back to it. A thorough revision of a book that has already been published always entails a certain degree of dissatisfaction with its contents: arguments should have been better laid out, the structure could have been improved, and here and there unforgivable mistakes emerge that resulted from the haste and saturation that always mark the final stages of a long-term endeavour. Working on this translation has forced me to confront these issues.
]
Whenever it has been possible, I have tried to correct and improve the relevant passages. As a result, I have rectified a number of errors that came up in the Spanish version of the book and I have duly acknowledged them in the footnotes. I owe the possible improvements of this translation to the comments of the anonymous reviewers, who rightly suggested, among other things, that I should add recent contributions that have been published since this book came out. I have followed their advice and other comments they made, for which I am extremely grateful. I would also like to thank my colleague at the University of St Andrews, Andrew Peacock, who suggested to me the possibility of proposing this translation project to Edinburgh University Press, whose editors I would also like to thank for all their hard work and understanding.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق