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Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), Xiv + 361 Pp

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Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), Xiv + 361 Pp Book Review Luke B. Yarbrough, Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), xiv + 361 pp. ISBN 978-1-1087-2174-5. Price: £90/$120 (cloth) and £24.99/$32.99 (paperback). Mohamad Ballan Stony Brook University ([email protected]) lthough there has been a consid- states. Recent approaches to the topic erable amount of scholarship have attempted to think carefully about devoted to the many dynasties, the importance of the production of Acaliphs, emirs, and sultans who exercised documents and administration,1 archives dominion throughout the Islamic world in and historical writing,2 connections and the medieval and early modern eras, until competition at royal courts,3 the nexus recently, comparatively little attention between rulers and religious author- has been paid to the officials tasked ity,4 and the emergence of particular with governing and administering these discourses of kingship and sovereignty,5 1. Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), and Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2. Fozia Bora, Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019). 3. Emma J. Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Samuel England, Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and İlker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 4. Hüseyin Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), and John P. Turner, Inquisition in Early Islam: The Competition for Religious and Political Authority in the Abbasid Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 5. Christopher Markiewicz, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). © 2020 Mohamad Ballan. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020): 436-442 437 • MOHAMAD BALLAN while shedding light on the status, of the Emir a particularly important inter- function, and self-perceptions of military vention by prompting scholars to rethink and administrative elites.6 With Friends notions of sovereignty, cultural polemics, of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials and the practice of politics in the medieval in Premodern Islamic Thought, Luke Islamic world. Yarbrough’s considered and B. Yarbrough contributes to this growing nuanced approach to the subject provides body of scholarship by closely examining a productive framework for scholars the Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and seeking to look beyond sharp dichoto- other non-Muslim officials whose employ- mies between “normative discourses” and ment occasioned energetic discussions “historical realities” in their approach to among Muslim scholars and rulers. the premodern world. This masterfully written and well-argued The book is divided into three broad book reveals those discussions for the sections: “Beginnings” (chapters 1–4), first time in all their diversity, drawing on “Elaboration” (chapters 5–6), and unexplored medieval sources in the realms “Efflorescence and Comparisons” (chapters of law, history, poetry, adab, administra- 7–9). Chapter 1 (“An Introduction to tion, and polemic. It traces the discourse on the Prescriptive Discourse Surrounding non-Muslim officials from its emergence Non-Muslim State Officials”) establishes in the Umayyad era (661–750) through the historical, methodological, and medieval Iraq, Syria, Spain, and Egypt theoretical background for the study. The to its apex in the Mamluk period (1250– chapter provides a useful historiographical 1517). Yarbrough compellingly demon- overview of works written in English, strates that for all the diversity among French, and Arabic about the question of premodern Muslim thinkers on the topic non-Muslim officials, demonstrating that of non-Muslim officials, their writings much of the scholarship has been rooted constituted not a disjointed miscellany in ahistorical assumptions that posit a but a “continuously evolving prescrip- dichotomy between textual prescription tive discourse, characterized by numerous and historical practice. The remainder recurrent structures, themes, topoi, and of the chapter outlines Yarbrough’s schemata, as well as by pervasive and overt own methodological and theoretical intertextuality” (p. 4). Far from being an approach. It is here that he provides a intrinsic part of Islam, Yarbrough convinc- critical explanation of his interpretive ingly argues, views about non-Muslim state choices, particularly the development officials were devised, transmitted, and and utilization of the concept of “valued elaborated at moments of intense compe- resources,” which is heavily indebted to tition between Muslim and non-Muslim social theory (particularly the writings of learned elites. This focus upon competi- Pierre Bourdieu), in order to demonstrate tion, professional rivalry, and the “ubiqui- the utility of thinking carefully about tous pursuit of resources” makes Friends “resources” and “capital” as ways of 6. Jo van Steenbergen (ed.), Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences (Leiden: Brill, 2020), and Maaike van Berkel and Jeroen Duindam (eds.), Prince, Pen, and Sword: Eurasian Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020) Luke B. Yarbrough’s Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials • 438 evaluating the practices of historical combinations of dependence, loyalty, actors and their motivations. One of special competencies, and lower cost the most valuable contributions of the in both material and symbolic terms. book is its exploration of the ways in The remainder of the chapter is which exclusionary behavior, including dedicated to a survey of several late- the articulation and dissemination of ancient antecedents to the discourse, not particular discourses about non-Muslim necessarily as part of an argument about officials, constituted a discursive tool the degree to which these antecedents in the ubiquitous pursuit of resources. influenced the emergence of Muslim While rejecting the notion that these prescriptive discourses but in order to discourses constituted a smokescreen explore the similar dynamics at play within for sociopolitical motives, Yarbrough the Eastern Roman and Sasanian Empires. demonstrates that many medieval Yarbrough demonstrates that in the late Muslims who shaped the discourse about Roman Empire, a number of imperial laws non-Muslim officials wrote to achieve restricted or prohibited the employment specific personal ends, which included of officials who dissented from Christian both worldly renown and ultimate orthodoxy, while in the Sasanian Empire, salvation. non-Zoroastrian officials were sometimes Chapter 2 (“Preludes to the Discourse: viewed as problematic because their Non-Muslim Officials and Late Ancient elevation destabilized the hierarchies that Antecedents”) presents a synchronic study structured Sasanian society. The chapter of non-Muslim officials and the reasons illustrates the importance of considering for their employment while surveying the emergence of Islamic polities against late antique discourses around dissenting the backdrop of the world of late antiquity officials, particularly surviving writings while serving as a useful comparative on non-Christian officials in the Eastern study of the three empires (Sasanian, Roman Empire and non-Zoroastrian Roman, and early Islamic). officials in the Sasanian Empire. The Chapter 3 (“The Beginnings of the chapter carefully defines the various Discourse to 236/851”) introduces the categories, terms, and interpretive oldest stratum of the discourse proper, frameworks employed throughout the which encompasses a wide range of book, delineating how and why the sources and consists largely of parabolic study of the prescriptive discourse about stories about early caliphs and their non-Muslim officials can shed important putative statements about non-Muslim light on premodern Islamic politics and officials. The chapter argues that society. In the first part of the chapter, these stories should be interpreted as Yarbrough argues that non-Muslim officials instruments of competition and were were ubiquitous in the administration of composed in various settings long after premodern Islamic states, primarily in a the events that they purportedly describe. bureaucratic capacity. He stresses that According to Yarbrough, the narrators of their continued employment, despite these stories used them to challenge rivals considerable opposition, was due to a for social, material, and political resources. number of factors, including various This chapter, which brings together several
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