Download PDF | Luke Yarbrough - Friends of the Emir_ Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought-Cambridge University Press (2019).
380 Pages
The caliphs and sultans who once ruled the Muslim world were often assisted
by powerful Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and other non-Muslim state
officials, whose employment occasioned energetic discussions among
Muslim scholars and rulers. This book reveals those discussions for the first
time in all their diversity, drawing on unexplored medieval sources in the
realms of law, history, poetry, entertaining literature, administration, and
polemic. It follows the discourse on non-Muslim officials from its beginnings
in the Umayyad empire (661–750), through medieval Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and
Spain, to its apex in the Mamluk period (1250–1517). Far from being a fixed,
changeless part of Islam, views about non-Muslim state officials were
devised, transmitted, and elaborated at moments of intense competition
between Muslim and non-Muslim learned elites. At other times, Muslim
rulers employed non-Muslims without eliciting opposition. The particular
shape of the Islamic discourse on this issue is comparable to analogous
discourses in medieval Europe and China.
luke b. yarbrough is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and
Cultures at UCLA. A specialist in early and medieval Islamic history, he
previously taught at Saint Louis University, Missouri, and as visiting faculty
at the Sorbonne, and held research fellowships at the University of
Pennsylvania and New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of
numerous scholarly articles, as well as a recent edition of a medieval Arabic
polemic from Egypt, The Sword of Ambition, by Uthman ibn Ibrahim alNabulusi (2016). He holds a PhD from Princeton University, and has studied
and researched widely in the Middle East, notably in Algeria, Egypt,
Morocco, and Tunisia.
An Introduction to the Prescriptive Discourse
Surrounding Non-Muslim State Officials
Throughout the history of premodern Islamic states, Muslim rulers and their
agents frequently appointed officials who were not Muslims, sometimes to
powerful positions.1 According to the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldūn (d.
808/1406), “accounting remained the province of non-Arab clients and dhimmis” even well after the watershed reforms of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd alMalik (d. 86/705) that made Arabic the language of imperial administration.2
Indeed, Ibn Khaldūn’s statement holds true, in varying degrees, for many of the
Islamic states that preceded the early-modern Muslim empires of the Ottomans,
Safavids, and Mughals. What did contemporary Muslims make of this state of
affairs? This book offers an extended answer to that question, but since we can
scarcely be sure what premodern people thought, or even what they said, this
book will study what learned Muslims took the trouble to write down about the
employment of non-Muslim state officials. What they wrote obviously stands
in some relation to what they believed, but is more productively understood as
an indication of what they wished their audiences to hear. Those Muslims who
possessed the motives and means to produce and disseminate texts concerning
non-Muslim officials overwhelmingly expressed disapproval of their employment, though not as overwhelmingly as many have supposed.3 They
approached the issue from numerous angles and in a variety of genres, including history, exegesis, jurisprudence, counsel for rulers, administrative manuals,
polemic, and poetry, all of which this book will consider. Yet for all this
diversity, their extant writings on the matter constitute not a disjointed miscellany, but a continuously evolving prescriptive discourse, characterized
by numerous recurrent structures, themes, topoi, and schemata, as well as by
pervasive and overt intertextuality.4 Their writings were prescriptive in that
they used overtly normative language to urge change in human affairs.
They
qualify as a discourse in the sense that they formed a conversation across time
among their producers, whose choices when writing were conditioned by
earlier texts and designed to affect their audiences. In the process, the texts
that they produced justified and structured unequal relationships among individuals and groups. This book tells the story of how the prescriptive discourse
around non-Muslim officials was created and progressively elaborated.
To glimpse this prescriptive discourse as it was woven together across time
and space, consider the case of Abū Bakr al-Jaṣṣāṣ (d. 370/981). Al-Jaṣṣāṣ was
a leading Muslim scholar of Baghdad, who contributed to abstract debates in
Ḥanafī jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh), speculative theology (kalām), and scriptural exegesis (tafsīr).5 Abstract though they be, his works also reflect the banal
annoyances of life in Iraq and Iran under the faltering Abbasid caliphate and the
Būyid adventurers who seized power there in 334/945. For example, in an
influential book on legal rulings derived from the Qurʾān, Aḥkām al-Qurʾān,
al-Jaṣṣāṣ complains about certain Christian state officials who, he writes, were
using the authority granted them by Muslim rulers to lord it over Muslims and
to line their own pockets. He argues that Christian officials who act in this
manner have effectively cancelled their pact of security (dhimmah) with the
Muslim community. In principle, therefore, they could be killed with impunity.
We shall examine the particulars of al-Jaṣṣāṣ’ argument in Chapter 5. What
concerns us here is the way in which he justified his position. His argument
against the employment of non-Muslim officials foregrounds two verses of the
Qurʾān: 3:118 and 5:51. Both advise believers to dissociate from Jews and
Christians. But al-Jaṣṣāṣ had not independently fancied these passages as proof
texts for this particular issue. Instead, they had been mediated to him by
a cluster of earlier texts, which he duly reproduced: three short, parabolic
anecdotes (akhbār) about the second caliph, ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (d. 23/
644), in which the revered caliph quotes the same verses to justify his own
disapproval of non-Muslim officials. As we shall see in Chapter 3, the anecdotes about ʿUmar had actually been composed and disseminated in the Iraqi city of Kufa about a century after ʿUmar’s death, as a way to protest a philoChristian governor who favored non-Muslim officials.
Thus, al-Jaṣṣāṣ reacted to the nuisance of confiscatory non-Muslim officials
in his own day by drawing upon an issue-specific prescriptive discourse that
had been transmitted and elaborated for centuries before it reached him. His
own contribution to the discourse in Aḥkām al-Qurʾān was, in turn, seized upon
by later authors. For instance, al-Jaṣṣāṣ’ book was thrice cited in an eighth/
fourteenth-century Egyptian diatribe against employing non-Muslims, entitled
al-Qawl al-mukhtār fī l-manʿ ʿan takhyīr al-kuffār (The Selected Saying
Concerning the Prohibition Against Preferring Infidels). The unidentified
author of this work composed it to celebrate and shore up a recent edict of
the Mamluk sultan that dismissed non-Muslims from state employment,
thereby appropriating and elaborating upon the discourse in response to the
exigencies of his own historical setting. Around the same time, the famous
scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (d. 751/1350) included al-Jaṣṣāṣ’ views
in almost precisely the same words in a now-famous work: Aḥkām ahl
al-dhimmah (Legal Rulings Regarding Dhimmis). But he attributed them
to an altogether different figure, the renowned jurist Abū Yaʿlā ibn
al-Farrāʾ (d. 458/1066), who belonged to his own Ḥanbalī school of
legal thought. From Ibn al-Qayyim’s work, al-Jaṣṣāṣ’ deracinated view
then re-entered the Ḥanafī literature in a lengthy Qurʾān commentary by
the Egyptian Ḥanafī scholar and Ottoman official al-Shihāb al-Khafājī
(d. 1069/1659), who paired it with some of his own invective poetry
against Ottoman rulers who favored Jewish courtiers.6
Here, then, is a section of one strand within our prescriptive discourse.
It runs
from the eighth to the seventeenth century, and indeed beyond, if we cared to
follow it into later generations. For example, The Selected Saying was lithographed in Cairo as part of an anti-colonial pamphlet assembled in nineteenthcentury Mecca by a Ḥaḍramī Sufi political exile from British India, a certain
Faḍl Pasha, who went on to become an advisor to the Ottoman sultan Abdul
Hamid II and an associate of the famous modernist reformer Jamāl al-Dīn alAfghānī. Clearly, this one strand acquired certain hues of meaning and shed
others as it was woven through a variety of texts and historical contexts by
particular authors. Yet there are also continuities. For example, the same
hortatory phrases were repeatedly directed at audiences that wielded, contested, or sought to share in state power; they decried alleged misconduct
among present-day non-Muslim officials and their Muslim patrons; they
appealed to textual loci of authority; and they abetted their creators’ ambitions
to compete for scarce, valued resources.
This example raises two important though somewhat countervailing observations about the discourse that should be made at the outset. The first is that
scholars like al-Jaṣṣāṣ wrote about thousands of other topics in addition to nonMuslim officials. Thus, Islamic textual traditions contain innumerable other
prescriptive discourses that resemble this one. Discourses concerned with
proper burial practices, with rebellion and violence, and with who may (and
may not) set foot in mosques are only three examples among thousands that
might be given.7 Yet this discourse has certain features that make it unusual
among its analogues in the Islamic tradition. Premodern Islamic prescription,
particularly in its juristic forms as fashioned by scholars like al-Jaṣṣāṣ, was
often somewhat removed from contemporary historical circumstances, concerned with the actions of individuals rather than those of state elites, and
lacking in overt relevance to the scholars who formulated it. For example,
prescriptive discussions of almsgiving (zakāt), are voluminous but often quite
disconnected from contemporary practice, while those on burial and on entering mosques were, for all their many extended resonances, concerned in the
first instance with the quotidian affairs of individuals.
Texts that concerned
non-Muslim state officials, by contrast, were often generated by highly visible
and concrete political realities – most obviously the employment of such
officials by states – that are frequently attested in other sources, and that had
considerable implications for the position of ulama vis-à-vis those states.
This feature of the discourse gives it uncommon potential as a case study in
which to trace the historical development of prescriptive thought in Islamic
societies. The discourse around non-Muslim officials is also promising as an
index of how Muslim learned elites negotiated their own ever-shifting social
and political positions, and of how they leveraged texts and institutions to
compete for resources. This promise lies in its reflexive quality.
It is distinctive,
though not unique, in that it led its learned authors to reflect upon their own
social and political positions in ways that modern readers can clearly discern.
In urging the dismissal of non-Muslim learned elites, they implicitly urged the
employment of Muslim ones, sometimes themselves. While writing learned
treatises in favor of the observance of some other aspect of Islamic normativity
could, of course, enhance a scholar’s prestige and that of his colleagues, this
effect was fairly indirect. Only admonition to rulers about the sorts of men
whom states should employ put Muslim learned elites in a position to reflect so
directly on their own relationship to state power. This relationship, in turn, is
one of the central problems in the study of Islamic history. If we listen closely to the prescriptive discourse that premodern Muslims wove around the issue of
non-Muslim state officials, we will hear impassioned, long-forgotten views that
were recorded at the fraught nexus of Islamic authority, textual production,
state power, and communal difference.
The Discourse Reconsidered
The task at hand, then, is to historicize the surviving textual evidence of that
discourse. We will undertake this task by consistently posing a set of particular
questions. Most basically, we will ask when, where, and why the discourse’s
principal constitutive elements were forged and subsequently repurposed. What
were the concerns of its producers and their audiences? What were the intersecting discourses and historical trends that it affected and absorbed? Where was it
located in wider currents of Islamic political and legal expression? To what
degree did it impinge upon the historical activities of non-Muslim state officials,
their employers, and other contemporaries? We will find that the men who
produced the discourse were primarily concerned to secure and advance their
own positions in particular fields of competition, sometimes in relation to state
power, though this concern also took the form of zeal for particular ideological,
social, and legal orders. Thus, the texts they produced were as much about the
constantly evolving relationships between the learned custodians of Islamic
knowledge and authority and the holders of political power as they were about
non-Muslims and their employment as state officials.
This last assertion runs against the grain of much previous scholarship on the
discourse, which has read it as primarily about non-Muslim officials. Indeed,
few of the questions posed above have been addressed systematically. This is
mildly surprising. After all, it is conceded across disciplines that normativity,
like all aspects of culture, is subject to steady change.
Yet change has garnered
relatively little attention in the considerable volume of modern scholarship that
has touched upon the discourse, and to which this book is indebted in countless
ways. The tendency of that scholarship, like much modern work on the history
of Islamic law and prescriptive thought more broadly, has been to overlook the
gradual and progressive nature of the discourse’s elaboration, its contingency,
and the way that implicit authorial motivations shaped it.8 Instead, modern
observers have typically presented opposition to non-Muslim state officials as
an aboriginal, fixed, and authoritative aspect of Islam.9 This section details three principal ways in which this book redirects received wisdom concerning
the discourse: by highlighting and tracing its uncertain, contingent, and cumulative development; by showing how its scope extended beyond the cul-de-sac
of “dhimmi law” in which it has usually been placed; and by considering how
a historicized analysis of one discourse can inform our understanding of the
relationship between prescriptive discourses and political practice in historical
Islamic states, particularly through the recognition that it was produced primarily as an instrument of competition for scarce, exchangeable resources
among literate elites.
A Historical Discourse
The most extensive treatment of the discourse in a European language to date is
that by the legal historian and Lebanese diplomat Antoine Fattal, in a chapter of
his classic 1958 survey of the legal status of non-Muslims in Islamic law, Le
statut légal des non-musulmans en pays d’Islam. That chapter, entitled “Public
Service,” is divided into two sections: “the doctrine of the jurists” and “the
historical facts.” “The doctrine of the jurists that strives to establish the ineligibility of dhimmis to hold public office,” Fattal writes, “is in formal contradiction with the historical facts.”
10 In other words, there is abundant evidence
that non-Muslims were commonly employed as state officials throughout
Islamic history, whatever Muslim jurists may have opined. Fattal’s approach
exemplifies a trend in the scholarship on Islamic prescriptive thought, and
Islamic law in particular, that remains pervasive, especially in areas of public
law: to erect a partition between prescriptive views and “historical facts.” Such
partitions accentuate apparent contrasts between textual prescription and historical practice, but have done little to show how prescription and practice were
intertwined and mutually conditioned.11 Because the “doctrines of the jurists”
are “historical facts” in their own right, there remains a need to re-inscribe them
within a historical narrative alongside other prescriptive registers, such as those
expressed in literature.
Fattal was far from the first to study “doctrines” on non-Muslim officials at
a remove from their historical circumstances. Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), a leading founder of modern Islamic Studies in Europe, prefigured Fattal’s
partition in his own general characterization of the discourse: “Although the
Muslim religious law may have forbidden the head of state to appoint the
adherents of other religions to administrative positions, it could hardly have
been observed.”
12 Implicit in Goldziher’s statement, with which he introduced
a brief study of the topic, are several suppositions: that Islamic law was the
supreme form of prescription in Islamic societies; that this law was temporally
prior to the practices on which it pronounced; and that it could be expected, as
modern law commonly is, to regulate the conduct of the state itself.
The approach taken by the Jesuit scholar Camille Hechaïmé, in a more recent,
comprehensive survey of Christian officials in historical Islamic states, accords
with that of Fattal and Goldziher. The introduction to his book, which builds on
the work of Louis Cheikho, begins by stating that “Islamic law, in principle,
does not permit the state employment of dhimmis.” A number of qurʾānic
quotations are then presented, which the author takes as proof that Scripture is
“clear on this matter.”
13 This view has recently and independently been
repeated by the historian Brian Catlos: “The Qur’an was explicit on this
point: dhimmis were not to serve in positions of authority over the faithful.”14
These modern views align with those of many Muslim rigorists who contributed to the prescriptive discourse on the topic. Both elide the historical process
by which certain qurʾānic verses came gradually to be understood as relevant to
the administration of complex agrarian states. But the Qurʾān’s relevance here
may not in fact be so incontrovertible. No less severe a figure than the modern
cleric Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (d. 1996) maintained that “[t]he Qurʾān does not
forbid the employment of The People of the Book in positions for which they
are qualified.” Instead, the verses usually cited to this effect are, in his view,
“unconnected to this subject.”15
The historian Arthur Stanley Tritton (d. 1973) dedicated a chapter of his
pathbreaking survey of non-Muslim life under Islam to the topic of state
employment, which he, too, understood to have been a fundamentally transgressive phenomenon. According to Tritton, the famous edict against nonMuslim officials that was issued by the third/ninth-century Abbasid caliph
al-Mutawakkil, the text of which is studied for the first time in Chapter 4 of
this book, “re-enacted the law that no non-Muslim should be in government service.”
16 Here the caliph’s decree, which is actually the first in Islamic history
of which there is incontestable evidence, is assumed to “re-enact” a “law” of
unquestioned authority and antiquity. In like fashion, the several modern booklength surveys of the discourse in Arabic treat the issue as an exclusively legaltheoretical one, in which historical factors seldom disturb juristic
ratiocination.17 Similarly, a brilliant study by the literary historian Ross
Brann accepts it as a simple fact that non-Muslim officials were unlawful.
For Brann, “the political prominence of dhimmīs in contravention of Islamic
law” was a transgression of the “inviolate social and political boundaries Islam
imposed on its Jewish subjects.”
18 In a sense, this is quite correct, for numerous
Muslim authors did indeed declare the employment of non-Muslims
a transgression of inviolate boundaries imposed by an impersonal, timeless
Islam.
The jurists’ language, like many discourses of power, scrubbed prescription clean of the historical forces that produced, sustained, and constrained
it, framing its arguments as authoritative interpretations of the divine will.
The trend of isolating juristic views from historical developments continues in
a recent contribution to the literature on the discourse, a learned study of nonMuslim officials in the early Abbasid caliphate by Mun’im Sirry, which preserves the clear partition between “juristic discourses” and “historical realities,” as though the former were not historical and the latter not mediated to
modern historians chiefly through discourses of their own.19
Even when modern scholarship has not dehistoricized the discourse, it has
tended to simplify it by imputing unanimity to its producers. For example,
Bernard Lewis’ influential survey The Jews of Islam informs its readers that
“the attitude of the doctors of the law to the employment of dhimmīs was
unequivocal.”
20 Yet in fact the “doctors’” attitudes, on the particular occasions
when they had cause to express them in writing, were marked by substantial
disagreement. Even where their conclusions tallied, their reasoning took highly
divergent paths, as we shall see in Chapter 5. Diversity in prescriptive reasoning is significant, for it signals that the stated justifications for particular,
subjective views on right and wrong actions – such as certain qurʾānic verses,
stories (ḥadīth) about the Prophet, or parables from Islamic history – are not by
themselves sufficient to explain why a diverse range of thinkers held those views. Diversity in reasoning invites us to seek deeper patterns that lie behind
whatever uniformity may be apparent in shared conclusions.
To be sure, not all modern scholarship has presented a de-historicized or
oversimplified account of the prescriptive discourse surrounding non-Muslim
officials. Numerous historians who have touched, in passing, upon some facet
of it have taken its historical contingency for granted, without, however, tracing
its development through time.21 For those readers to whom their assumption
seems warranted, this book, by splitting the mass of evidence at a new angle,
will show how particular iterations of recorded Muslim thought on the issue
conformed to and constituted (or diverged from and diverted) long-term patterns.
The cost of taking a diachronic view of the discourse rather than dwelling
on the broad source base of a single historical moment is that we risk misinterpreting its constitutive elements in their respective contexts. The payoff,
however, is a panoramic view of a discourse’s evolution, and a sense of what
was distinct or unremarkable about its particular instantiations.
But how is one to entwine the two existing strands of scholarship on the
prescriptive discourse – ahistorical surveys and historically sensitive but fragmented snapshots – in a way that complements the achievements of both
approaches? One way forward is suggested by the legal historian Sherman
Jackson in an influential 2002 book chapter. Drawing insights from legal
realism and critical legal studies, Jackson foregrounds the contribution made
to the discourse by al-Juwaynī (d. 478/1085) – a renowned Muslim scholar of
the fifth/eleventh century – to suggest that the rationales that premodern
Muslim jurists gave for their rulings often diverged from their own stated
principles for deriving rulings from authoritative sources of law.22 Jackson’s
concern is principally with legal theory, not non-Muslim officials per se, as we
shall see in Chapter 5. He suggests that the highly theorized body of Islamic
juristic hermeneutics (uṣūl al-fiqh) is, for all its sophistication, a kind of
“fiction” that masks the true causes of legal rulings. His approach, which has
since been developed further by Behnam Sadeghi, points the way to new
avenues for research.
By opening space between prescriptive opinions and their formal pretexts, Jackson’s approach invites us to identify alternative,
implicit reasons for widely shared conclusions – here, Muslim jurists’ tendency
to take a dim view of non-Muslim officials. For us, this task begins by
identifying the specific historical settings in which some of the most durable
and influential elements of the discourse were fashioned. Even if one agrees in
principle that the discourse was contingent and responsive to context, the
particulars of that contingency have remained largely unknown. For those
who already concede the merits of this approach, the payoff will be not
a new framework in which to imagine the discourse, but substance to fill out
a framework of historical evolution that has thus far remained mostly empty.
A Discourse by and about Muslims
In addition to systematically historicizing the prescriptive discourse surrounding non-Muslim officials, this book situates it more precisely within the world
of Islamic prescriptive textuality. Modern scholars have tended to treat writings
on non-Muslim state officials as part of a particular subset of Islamic law that
pertained specifically to dhimmis, analogous to Christian “Jewry law.” In this
vein, Joseph Sadan has described the discourse in relation to this subset of
Islamic prescriptive thought as “[t]he strict rules imposed on the Protected
People (ahl al-dhimmah), including the principles forbidding the employment
of non-Muslim officials.”
23 I will argue, by contrast, that the prescriptive
discourse concerning non-Muslim officials is in fact not a part of dhimmi
law, if such a thing can be said to exist.24 To borrow a distinction proposed
by David Freidenreich, the discourse was primarily “reflexive,” not “imposed,”
meaning that it was meant mainly to regulate the community of Muslims that
generated it, not other, subordinate communities.25 Its primary goal was to
affect what other Muslims habitually did: employ unbelievers. Only in exceptional cases did it attempt to regulate non-Muslims directly while ignoring their Muslim employers.26 The distinction is not trivial.
Observing it can preserve
scholars from errors of fact, such as D. S. Richards’s assertion that “[o]ne
clause of the Covenant [of ʿUmar] stipulated that no dhimmī should be
employed in the administration.”
27 In fact, no version of the Covenant or
Pact of ʿUmar – a well-known list of negotiated restrictions on dhimmis later
attributed to the second caliph – contains such a clause. It would verge on
incoherence to demand that non-Muslims hew to a principle routinely flouted
by the Muslims who sought to employ them.
It is true that the discourse affected non-Muslim communities deeply, albeit
indirectly. Its Muslim creators frequently invoked dhimmi restrictions as
a rhetorical means of ousting non-Muslim officials, and those restrictions,
when they were heeded, could be applied much more widely. For historians
interested primarily in the subordinate communities, it is thus tempting to see
the discourse as malicious persecution, and to view it as primarily “about” nonMuslims, where “about” may even imply that non-Muslims caused it in
a willfully reckless way.28 Thus, for Bernard Lewis “the main purpose” of
edicts dismissing non-Muslim officials was “to reduce the encroachment of
non-Muslims on the Muslim state and their arrogation to themselves of an
authority that would rightfully belong to Muslims alone.”29 Here Lewis, if
perhaps facetiously, imputes most of the agency in the employment of nonMuslims to the employees, and treats the hierarchies advocated by private
Muslim jurists and political theorists as transparently normative for rulers
and other officials, the real employers. Similarly, Milka Levy-Rubin sums up
the discourse as “the prohibition on holding public office.” I would contend,
however, that we will gain little analytical traction in the sources until we take
seriously their authors’ overwhelming tendency to identify the issue in terms
not of what non-Muslims do in “holding public office,” but of what their
Muslim employers do in appointing them, and not as a blanket “prohibition,”
but as a position periodically advocated and asserted by particular, interested
actors.
The tendency to foreground non-Muslims in the study of the discourse
has also caused it to be studied in exclusive relation to specific religious
communities. Thus, Cheikho, Hechaïmé, and Bo Holmberg limited their inquiries to Christian secretaries and viziers; Salo Baron, Walter Fischel, Eliyahu Strauss, S. D. Goitein, Sadan, Brann, and others were concerned mainly with
Jewish ones; and Zoroastrian, “Sabian,” Samaritan, and others from less wellstudied non-Muslim communities have received correspondingly less
treatment.30
Yet only in a few instances did the discourse’s producers make such clean
distinctions among the subordinate non-Muslims. Instead they tended, rhetorically at least, to advocate the exclusion of non-Muslims generally, as well as
that of Muslims whom they opposed.31 In writing against the employment of
non-Muslim officials, they sought, it is true, to regulate the lives of the latter,
but they were equally keen to affect the policies of Muslim political authorities
toward themselves. In the juristic fiqh literature, the topic of non-Muslim
officials arises most often not among the regulations relating to dhimmis, but
in passages concerned with who may lawfully collect the alms tax (zakāt), who
may serve as scribe to a judge (qāḍī), and who may serve as vizier.32 Its native
literary habitat is less the surrender treaty or shurūṭ literature, such as the Pact
of ʿUmar, than books of counsel (naṣīḥah) for rulers. The discourse’s primary
concern is more to promote an idealized vision of an Islamic state, in which the
status of the discourse’s producers as a privileged learned elite is preserved
uncontested, than it is to regulate the status and role proper to non-Muslims. For
this reason, it must be juxtaposed just as closely to views on political empowerment that do not involve non-Muslims (such as the ideal qualifications for
state officials), as to analogous views on issues that do (such as the poll tax,
sumptuary regulations, rules concerning places of worship, and so forth).
Seeing the prescriptive discourse surrounding non-Muslim officials as the
contingent, cumulative creation of particular historical actors rather than as an
ahistorical, indelible feature of Islam reorients our view of how non-Muslims
participated in premodern Islamic politics. For instance, such a perspective
shows us that when we insist on setting non-Muslims’ political participation in
Islamic states apart from that of Muslims, we unwittingly adopt the outlooks of
the Muslim scholars who wrote our sources, often in preference to those of
Muslim rulers and high officials, and even to those of our own non-confessional
traditions of inquiry. For those who delegated state power in premodern Islamic
states, practical concerns such as competence, loyalty, and cost were
paramount.33
Although religious affiliation inflected each of these concerns, it was not the touchstone that the most officious jurists urged it should be. It is
less accurate to say that Muslim rulers persisted in employing non-Muslims in
spite of the jurists’ opposition than to say that Muslim rulers tended, in deed if
not in word, to deny that the jurists’ distinctions governed them at all. In this
study, therefore, the premodern discourse that sought to distinguish between
Muslim and non-Muslim state administrators, and often to induce the dismissal
of the latter, will be brought into focus and thus restricted, rather than coloring
our own views of administrative employment. When historians of state institutions single out “Christian secretaries” or “non-Muslims in the military,” for
example, they risk tacitly reinforcing categories that medieval jurists struggled
to uphold as part of their interested strategies of boundary maintenance.
A Discursive Tool in the Pursuit of Resources
Those Muslims who wrote against non-Muslims’ exercise of political power,
from Umayyad Iraq to al-Andalus to Mamluk Egypt, were engaged in the
pursuit of resources of diverse kinds. They wrote to achieve specific personal
ends: to win appointment, obtain revenge against rivals, gain literary renown,
buttress the coherency or appeal of a casuistic legal framework to which they
publicly subscribed, or exalt a particular symbol – such as the truth and glory of
Islam – in which they vested their hopes for worldly renown and ultimate
salvation. This observation suggests a broad and robust framework for understanding the mechanisms of conflict and exclusion that take place at the
contested borders of human communities. I will not suggest, as some historians
have directly or indirectly done, that the men who produced the discourse used
religious pretexts as a smokescreen – that their motives were “socialeconomic ... disguised as religious” – or even that personal and economic
motives happened periodically to dovetail with a specifically Muslim, dogmatic commitment to the maintenance of hierarchy.35 Rather, I will proceed on
the supposition that that all exclusionary behavior, including that which is
advocated symbolically in texts, participates in the ubiquitous pursuit of
resources.
A focus on the pursuit of resources appears to contrast with some of the usual
approaches to the perennially knotty problems of conflict and exclusion – the forcible subordination and restriction of people who share some particular
defining feature(s), such as ethnicity, class origin, or shared communal identity.
Premodern Islamic societies, like others, practiced their share of exclusionary
boundary maintenance. While some thinkers decline to analyze particularly
objectionable forms of exclusion and violence, others have sought out their
causes.36 Amid the surge of Islamist political ideologies since the 1970s, and
especially since September 11, 2001, the fallout to the 2011 “Arab Spring,” and
the declaration of the self-styled “Islamic State,” these concerns have gained
further prominence in the study of Islamic history, particularly in its legal and
other prescriptive aspects that claim to govern Muslims’ actions.
Various explanations are regularly advanced for forms of exclusionary
behavior that are couched in explicitly Islamic terms. Some of the views we
have encountered above, for instance, imply that historical exclusion is an
inevitable corollary of particular dogmas espoused by Muslims.
To return to
a straightforward example: if the Qurʾān is indeed unequivocal in its disapproval of non-Muslim officials, and Islamic law is the application of the Qurʾān
and other authoritative sources to the life of the Muslim community, then the
juristic discourse on non-Muslim officials follows directly from the text of the
Qurʾān.37 To other minds, however, ideological explanations for exclusion are
secondary. Rather, it is argued, when Muslims appeal to some form of difference as grounds for exclusion, they use particularly Islamic rationales (such as
qurʾānic verses) as a mask for personal motives, such as avarice or personal
hostility.38 Or, exclusionary practices that reinforce communal boundaries can
be read as masks for anxieties that are not personal, but abstract – about
distributions of power, say, or the ways it is exercised at a particular moment.
On such a view, critiques of non-Muslim officials are not about applying
principles drawn from revelation, or about settling personal scores, but instead
are coded political critiques.39
Such explanatory moves are persuasive in varying degrees, depending upon
the particular events they are used to explain. Their shared shortcoming,
however, is that they are not easily integrated with one another. Indeed, it is tempting to treat them as mutually exclusive, by arguing, for example, that
a polemical text is not really about upholding legal dogma, but instead about
social prestige, a personal grudge, or a ruler’s unjust conduct. When such
explanations for exclusion are combined, it is often done in portmanteau
fashion, so that a pogrom, say, takes place at the murky intersection of ethnic
animosity, jostling for political honors, an annual ceremonial procession, and
conflict over revenues from trade. But these various components speak no
common language, and by invoking them we are able only tentatively to
parse their respective causal contributions. The result tends to be either thisand-not-that (e.g., “dogma, not avarice”), or all-of-the-above-together, in
mysterious admixture.40 But by explicitly speaking about diverse kinds of
valued resources, pursued by means of competition and cooperation, I seek
to employ a common idiom in terms of which to understand the multiple
causes of exclusion. My use of this concept is indebted to sociology and
social theory, particularly the thought of Pierre Bourdieu and his
expositors.41
Here I briefly explain my use of the language of resource
pursuit, which, in this historical study, is necessarily rough-and-ready, and
more useful for prosaic interactions involving individuals and specific
resources than for abstract, socially determined desiderata, such as “freedom” or “purity.”
Humans incessantly seek access to the things they need, want, and otherwise
invest with value, beginning with the basic necessities of survival, which they
may sometimes forego in pursuit of other desiderata, as do ascetics, lovers, and
martyrs. Ecologists and economists alike call such desiderata “resources.”
42
Some aspects of the resources we seek may be less obvious, however. For
example, resources include not only tangible desiderata, but also subtle and
intangible ones like leisure and seclusion, as well as such “higher” goods as symbolic systems that offer meaning, or human relationships. These, too, are
things we desire, in their infinite degrees and forms, and which we may even be
said to need. Certain resources may also be stored. I shall call stored resources
“capital,” following Bourdieu.43 But others are time-bound and for this or other
reasons do not store well.
Demand for some resources exceeds supply; such resources are said to be
scarce. There is only so much gold in circulation, so much social access to
a particular person, so many ideologies that can enjoy widespread, enthusiastic
approval in any one society, notably where those ideologies make competing
claims to truth and allegiance. Access to resources that are scarce and thus
valuable is attended by competition, helpfully defined by Keddy as “the
negative effects that one organism has upon another by consuming, or controlling access to, a resource that is limited in availability.”
44 Some but not all
scarce resources, including some intangible and even potential ones, may be
exchanged for others, in particular forms and under particular historical
conditions.45 Markets of resource exchange may be regarded as objectively
ubiquitous in human societies, every bit as real as the commodity and currency
markets of which we are accustomed to speak.46
The exchange rates that obtain
in such markets vary according to supply, demand, and, creating these, the
socially conditioned needs and tastes of individual market participants; an
uncommonly strong desire may lead a participant to offer more (or less) in
exchange for a particular resource. Incense, famously, fell out of demand when
the Mediterranean world became Christian.47 And because the high value
placed upon certain resources, notably intangible ones such as familial ties or
allegiance to religious ideologies, can only be sustained by denying their
exchangeability for others, e.g., by calling them unique and priceless, it will
be held that these stand altogether outside any system of exchange.48 Indeed, it often happens that an individual places so high a value on such resources as
family and creed that for her, practically speaking, they are non-exchangeable.
Most human practices, if not all, can be conceptualized as interested, that is,
as calculated to obtain or maintain access to valuable resources by competing
and/or cooperating.49 Indeed, this book will adopt “Bourdieu’s general view of
society as a web of interweaving fields of struggle over various kinds of valued
resources.”
50 It is also helpful to taxonomize resources into broad ideal categories, the precise boundaries among which are conventional and overlapping;
in the real world, no resource belongs purely to one category. The present
analysis will proceed with the following ideal categories:51 material resources,
including the symbolic medium of money as well as other tangible forms
(agricultural land, trade goods, precious metals, gems, etc.) that lack some of
money’s classic features;52 social resources, i.e., interpersonal obligations,
most often positively valorized;53 political resources, i.e., power to affect
others’ actions that can be exercised, through impersonal institutions, without
direct recourse to physical coercion;54 ideational/intellectual resources, i.e.,
valued knowledge and its systems and structures, as well the capacities to
organize and deploy them effectively;55 and symbolic resources, an amorphous
category that overlaps with others, as with material capital in the form of money
and social capital in the form of reputation, but also maintains its own territory,
in which lie those resources that attach in the minds of market participants, in
the form of respect and esteem, to visual or linguistic signs (such as modern consumer brands, royal iconography and titulature, names, and symbols that
represent communities or belief systems).
Given the endless diversity of historical human cultures, individuals and
groups will store resources in various degrees, forms, and configurations.
A family may be socially rich and materially poor, or jealously guard a good
name to compensate for its splendid isolation and puerility.
Of course, in many
historical settings, individual agency in pursuit of resources has been heavily
constrained for all people to some degree, and extremely constrained for many,
notably most women and unfree persons. Put differently, such resources as
freedom and self-determination have frequently been too costly for many
people to acquire them. It should be noted, too, that the hazy boundaries
between categories affect exchangeability because they create uncertainty as
to relative value, and because certain categories derive their value from the
widespread belief that they stand above markets of resource exchange.56
The relative value of such things is highly uncertain, partly because many of
them cannot be exchanged openly. Exchange within categories is more
straightforward: one currency is traded for another, or for fungible commodities like wheat, at known rates; one friendship gradually supplants another;
“conversion” designates the exchange of one guiding ideology (and social
group) for another that fills many of the same needs.
It may be useful to clothe this theoretical skeleton in historical flesh. Since
education and the concurrent reproduction of social hierarchies were central to
Bourdieu’s work, let us consider a concrete case from Islamic history: the
famous autobiography of the polymath ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (d.
629/1231).57 ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was born into a well-to-do scholarly family in
Baghdad in 557/1162. As a result, he grew up with access to valuable material,
social, intellectual, and symbolic resources (e.g., a good name), in addition to
his innate talent. Indeed, his father must have paid well for the tutoring that his
son received in the highly abstract and sophisticated Islamic religious sciences,
grammar, poetry, and other subjects, most of them of little practical use outside
the high-cultural circles in which he expected his son would move.58
There was
an opportunity cost to all this education in terms of ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s boyish
desiderata: “I knew neither pleasure nor leisure, and spent most of my time
learning ḥadīth.” His father obtained qualifications for him – Bourdieusian
institutionalized cultural capital – from “professors in Baghdad, Khurasan, Syria, and Egypt” doubtless spending more money and calling in favors from
his social networks.
In this and the subsequent period of his life, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf acquired a habitus:
a set of inculcated dispositions particular to his status group that prepared him
to compete successfully in certain fields.59 Investing in one particular, illiquid
habitus rather than another was risky, for times and tastes change. But ʿAbd alLaṭīf’s gamble paid off, as he parlayed his learning and good name into
connections with powerful state officials, including al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil and
ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī. Al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil first measured ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s
store of intellectual capital by quizzing him on Qurʾānic exegesis, then used
his own political capital to reward ʿAbd al-Laṭīf with a stipend. Such intimacy
with power committed ʿAbd al-Laṭīf to one patron rather than another, and may
have run down his reputation (symbolic capital) – after all, he himself criticized
Maimonides for being “overcome with the love of leadership and of service to
worldly lords,” and praised a certain Abū l-Qāsim al-Shāriʿī for his material
and political poverty – but it won him money, influence, and a teaching post by
which he replicated his own intellectual and social dispositions in a new
generation. His patrons burnished their own reputations by the connection to
ʿAbd al-Laṭīf that they purchased. His written remarks about himself and his
coevals were, among other things, tools: symbolic media by which he consciously and unconsciously (de)valorized particular forms of capital, savaging
alchemy, for example. His success was hard-won. When he visited Saladin, he
found that the sultan’s “entourage emulated him, competing for acknowledgement.” But ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was prepared for this, and emerged with a stipend.
This line of analysis could be pursued in far greater depth for ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s
autobiography alone. For our purposes, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s case is an example of
how the pursuit of resources functions to (re)produce and accentuate social
distinctions. The various models for explaining exclusion that are prevalent
among historians, as we have mentioned, can also be framed in terms of
competition for resources, in all their forms. Indeed, this is precisely what the
sociological field of “closure theory” does in studying, following Weber,
“processes of drawing boundaries, constructing identities, and building communities in order to monopolize scarce resources for one’s own group, thereby
excluding others from using them.”60
This means that there are not numerous,
incommensurable causes of exclusion, but one cause – the pursuit of resources –
that is historically inflected in infinite ways. The questions asked in this book will thus be not whether exclusionary rhetoric is “really” political, religious,
economic, or otherwise, but instead which resources are valorized by particular
actors within certain fields and across societies; how these are stored and
exchanged; and what strategies are deployed by actors to access and valorize
them. In short, I suggest, thinking of and through resources and capital provides
historians both a common underlying substrate, a protean currency in which to
evaluate the practices of historical actors, and a common language that mediates among political, ideological, economic, and other motives as these are
traditionally conceived.
A resource-pursuit model, though intended to create commensurability, need
not be reductive, essentialist, or belittling to any human practice, any more than
it is reductive to remark the ubiquity of competition, mutualism, and predation
as strategies among other organisms. The variety of forms that resources
assume among humans is limitless: the particular luxuries they crave, the social
bonds they form, the cosmoi they contemplate, and the intricate combinations
thereof, as well as the practices in which they engage, under unique historical
conditions, to access them. Nor does the model imply that any resource is
unreal or artificial. It may appear cynical to cast a cherished belief or a personal
relationship in resource terms, but it no more implies that those things are
illusory than that an expensive wine or a “priceless” work of art are, in fact,
unreal.
In writing disapprovingly of non-Muslim officials, Muslim authors pursued
resources by deploying competitive practices, thus working to access and
accumulate capital within particular fields.
They performed, in fact, “symbolic
labor,” which “produces symbolic power by transforming relations of interest
into disinterested meanings.”61 They wrote, for instance, to uphold the reputations of their own intellectual forebears who had already declared non-Muslim
officials unlawful, or to prop up the value of Islam’s symbolic capital, in which
they had heavily invested by their acquisition of particular ideational resources.
As one eighth/fourteenth-century author wrote, to recommend the empowerment of non-Muslims, as his opponents evidently did, was to “make their
symbol victorious (iẓhār shiʿārihim) in the lands of Islam.”
62 Of course, they
also wrote to obtain material, social, and political resources, among others.
A seventh/thirteenth-century Egyptian author penned a book that decried nonMuslim officials, his personal rivals and competitors for office, in order to land
a salaried appointment, thus attempting to parlay his intellectual capital into
material form.63 To be sure, the same authors also cooperated with contemporaries who shared their interests and stood to benefit from their risk and effort,
one of many instances where cooperation operates alongside competition.
In sum, a resource-pursuit approach implies an integrated rather than
a fragmentary understanding of the exclusionary textual practices that this
book studies.
When prescriptive discourses are understood as the instruments and, thus,
products of the pursuit of resources, fashioned and wielded by specific learned
elites, it becomes clear that any such discourse can form only one locus of
normativity in a given society. Other actors, whether competing learned elites,
rulers, or unlettered common folk, may also contribute to the formation of
widely held norms, textually encoded or not. As a result of this study’s
theoretical and methodological approach, then, the prescriptive discourse
about non-Muslim officials will be taken to encompass a wider field than
Islamic law as it is now usually understood. Even this extended conception,
however, will be granted no normative hegemony in conceiving of attitudes
toward non-Muslim officials in premodern Islamic societies. More precisely,
the effective practices of rule that regularly empowered non-Muslim officials,
as well as the more subtle outlooks and assumptions reflected in contemporary
discourses of less overtly prescriptive characters, must be placed in the balance
alongside the statements of jurists, belletrists, and polemicists in considering
the place of non-Muslim state officials in the thought of premodern Muslims.
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