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The Origin of the Vizierate and Its True Character

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The Origin of the Vizierate and Its True Character CHAPTER NINE THE ORIGIN OF THE VIZIERATE AND ITS TRUE CHARACTER This paper was written twenty-five years ago, but no substantial changes were made in it, because it is repeatedly referred to in a two volume book devoted to the same subject, Dominique Sourdel's Le Vizirat 'Abbaside, Damascus 1959-60. Despite Sourdel's extensive study, the material presented here for the first time has retained its value and the conclusions drawn from it are valid. Moreover, this chapter is perhaps better suited as an introduction to the historical problems involved than an extremely detailed book. However, in order to enable the reader to form his own judgment, the article is printed here in its original form. The vizierate is so typical an institution of the Muslim state that the very term vizier has come to be internationally accepted in the sense of an oriental prime minister with unrestricted powers. Never­ theless, we are still far from a correct historical conception of the origin and the true character of this important office. The Encyclo­ paedia of Islam s.v. Wazir (Franz Babinger) takes it for granted that both the word and the institution were borrowed from the Sassanian empire. Philip K. Hitti simply speaks of It ••• the vizir (wazir), whose office was of Persian origin."! In his L'lran sous les Sassanides, which appeared in 1936, Arthur Christensen still adheres to the opinion, expressed thirty years before in his L'Empire des Sassanides, p. 33, that "la charge de grand vezir... est un emprunt direct (!) de l'Etat Sassanide."2 But when he comes to describe the office of the Sassanian vuzurg [ramddhdr, the alleged prototype of the vizierate, his lack of material is so considerable that he must take recourse to the description of the vizierate by Mawardi, the eleventh century Muslim lawyer. In fact, so far, no one has indicated the channels through which the Muslims borrowed the office of vizier, which came into existence more than a hundred years after 1 History of the Arabs (znd edition) 1940, p. 318. 2 The list of authors holding the same opinion could be easily extended. In this connection I should like to mention one book especially devoted to the question, i.e., Harold Bowen, The Life and Times of (Ali Ibn -ts«, 'the Good Vizier', Cambridge, 1928. Bowen says on p. 14: "The designation Vizier, of Persian origin, had been introduced by the Abbasids, who had modelled their Court procedure as closely as possible on that of the Sassanians." THE ORIGIN OF THE VIZIERATE 169 the destruction of the Sassanid empire. As a matter of fact, no sources have been adduced to corroborate the assumption that it was actually borrowed. This theory is, indeed, nothing but a mere generalization based on the fact that many Iranians, and above all the famous Barmecides, held the post of vizier in the Abbasid government, and that books and sayings on Sassanid statecraft in general profoundly impressed Muslim writers. But there were many viziers of non-Iranian origin. Furthermore, the Barmecides were not the first viziers, and, above all, their forefathers were Buddhists, not Zoroastrians, and consequently had no connection with the fanatically Zoroastrian Sassanid administration. For the Muslim writers the vizierate was not typically or solely Sassanid. As far as they were concerned, there had also been viziers in the Greek (Byzantine), Roman, Indian and Chinese empires, as well as in the pre-Islamic Arabic kingdoms.! It is true that Buzurgmihr, the vizier of the Sassanid King Khusr6 Aniisharvan, is the prototype of the wise minister in Muslim literature. However, it was observed by Th. Noeldeke" long ago that Buzurgmihr does not appear in strictly historical tradition, but only in the rhetorical and moralist writings of the Muslims, from which the late Russian Orientalist W. Barth­ old" very ingeniously inferred that it was not the historical Buzurg­ mihr who had influenced the Abbasid viziers, but the picture of a legendary Buzurgmihr which had been modelled after the proto­ types of the Barmecides and other great Muslim viziers. As we see, the Persian origin of the vizierate is far from an estab­ lished fact. Thus far, the whole question has been treated in a very general way and has, moreover, been based mainly on juridical literature and books of Adab, while the historical narratives and sources especially devoted to the subject, like Ibn 'Abdiis al-]ah­ shiyari's Book of the Viziers and Scribes,4 have been neglected. In the following pages an attempt is made to understand the origin and 1 Cf., e.g., Mas iud], Tanbih, pp. 339-40. 2 Geschichte der Perser und Araber sur Zeit der Sasaniden, 1879 , p. 251, note I. 8 "Die Persische Shuubija und die moderne Wissenschaft" (The Persian Shuubiya and Modern Research). Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie, 1912. We shall have occasion to come back to this important article. 4 Published in facsimile by V. Mzik, 1926. The fact that this most valuable source was published in facsimile and not in print may be the reason why it was used less widely than it deserves to be. It is only recently that the book has been published in print, and this time by two rival Egyptian editors in the course of one year..
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