Petitions from Medieval Egypt and the Problem of Premodern Rights Marina Rustow ([email protected]) Dear colleagues, I’m currently writing a book about the petition-and-response procedure under the Fatimid caliphs (909–1171). Original Fatimid petitions survive by the dozen, but philologists have made better use of them than historians. Fewer than thirty have been published, and there are hundreds more that I’m working on editing and digitizing. They survived in a large pile of discarded texts in attic of a medieval Egyptian synagogue, a cache of roughly 400,000 items known as the Cairo Geniza and now held in more than sixty libraries and private collections. Most of these petitions have nothing to do with Jews. Why they survived in the Geniza is a question so complicated that when I set out to write an introduction to the book, it turned into a book of its own, which came out in January as The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton UP). It covers (or tries to cover) the entire system of Fatimid state documentation, how it evolved, and how it survived or failed to. Now I’m back to writing the book I’d meant to write, on a subset of those documents — the petitions. Petitions are sources with inherent charm: they speak to the problems of ordinary people, men and women alike, and so provide an intimate view on everyday life that is rare for their time and place. Part of what I do in the book is try to understand the stories of middling inhabitants of Egypt and Syria. But I’m also interested in what they took for granted when they submitted petitions and why the state invested resources in hearing and answering them. Those questions, in turn, have forced me to handle a question I hadn’t anticipated: whether we can speak of ‘rights’ before the eighteenth century. This paper is an attempt to come to grips with that question, and, in turn, to stabilize the book’s conceptual framework. The book is in three parts: (1) petitioners, their claims, and who wrote petitions for them; (2) how and in what settings officials responded to petitions; and (3) the contemporaneous legal and political writings supporting the practice. What follows isn’t a discrete chapter of the book, but some material from parts 1 and 3 that I hope will give us a basis for considering the rights question. Thank you very much for your time and input. I’m looking forward to the conversation. Marina Rustow 12 October 2020 New York City i ATLANTICATLANTIC OCEAN OCEAN Aral Aral C C Sea Sea a a XINJIANGXINJIANG s s T$arāz T$arāz Black SeaBlack Sea p p Turfān Turfān i i Talas Talas Corsica Corsica a a Rome Rome ConstantinopleConstantinople AL-ANDALUSAL-ANDALUS n n SOGDIASOGDIA S S Samarqand Samarqand Tarim BasinTarim Basin Sardinia Sardinia e e Bukhārā Bukhārā Dunhuang Dunhuang UMAYYAD CALIPHATEUMAYYAD CALIPHATE BYZANTINEBYZANTINE EMPIRE EMPIRE a a Panjikent Panjikent M e M e Cordoba Cordoba d i t e d i t e r Sicily r Sicily r r Aleppo Aleppo Mosul Mosul BACTRIABACTRIA Qayrawān Qayrawān a a Rayy Rayy n n Bāmiyān Bāmiyān Crete Crete A A e a e a Cyprus I Cyprus I Sāmarrā' Sāmarrā' Fez Fez n n Ctesiphon Ctesiphon Ghazna Ghazna S e a S e a R Damascus R Damascus Y Y Baghdad Baghdad Is$fahān Is$fahān Ramla Ramla KHURKHURĀSĀNĀSĀN MAGHRIBMAGHRIB Alexandria AlexandriaS S IRAQ IRAQ Sijilmāsa Sijilmāsa Jerusalem Jerusalem Minyat Ziftā Minyat Ziftā Bas$ra Bas$ra Pasargardae Pasargardae EGYPT Fustat/EGYPT Fustat/ IFRĪIFRQIYAĪQIYA Cairo MonasteryCairo of Monastery of P PersepolisP Persepolis Madīnat al-FayyMadūmīnat al-Fayyūm e e St Catherine inSt Sinai Catherine in Sinai r r Oxyrhynchos/Oxyrhynchos/ s s al-Bahnasā al-Bahnasā i a i a n n G G u l f u l f R R INDIAINDIA e e d d Arabian SeaArabian Sea FATIMIDS AND ABBASIDS IN THE LATE TENTH CENTURY S S Ctesiphon AncientCtesiphon settlementAncient settlement Dongola Dongola e e a a Fatimids: Maghrib,Fatimids: Ifriqī ya,Maghrib, Egypt, IfriqSouthernīya, Egypt, Syria, Southern and the HSyria,$ijāz and the H$ijāz YEMEN YEMEN S$an'ā' S$an'ā' Loyal to Fatimids:Loyal Sicily to Fatimids: Sicily INDIANINDIAN OCEAN OCEAN Aden Aden Loyal to Abbasids:Loyal Northern to Abbasids: Syria, Northern Iraq, Iran, Syria, Central Iraq, Asia Iran, Central Asia 0 5000 1000 500 1500 10002000 1500 km 2000 km 02500 500250 750 500 1000 miles 750 1000 miles DYNASTIES 661–750 UMAYYAD CALIPHS Capital: Damascus Sunnīs 750–1258 ABBASID CALIPHS Capital: Baghdad Sunnīs 934–1055 BUYID AMĪRS AND SHĀHANSHĀHS Capitals: Shiraz, Rayy and Baghdad Conquered much of Iran and Iraq, reducing the Abbasid caliph to vassalage. Imāmī (“twelver”) Shiʿites 909–1171 FATIMID CALIPHS Capital (from 972): Cairo Ismāʿīlī (“sevener”) Shiʿites ii When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner. — Shakespeare, Henry V, 3.6 Were the Fatimid caliphs (909–1171) politically passive — laissez-faire compared to the other dynasties that ruled the premodern Islamic world, or the premodern world more generally? A steady stream of historians have depicted them this way, with some superficial justification.1 The dynasty sat astride two burgeoning trade zones, the eastern Mediterranean and the western Indian Ocean, and their role in supporting or regulating the economy is still not well understood.2 They conquered a population mostly of Christians and Sunnī Muslims and granted them and their Jewish subjects the latitude to organize institutions, legal courts and congregations as they saw fit. The flavor of Islam they espoused was esoteric and relevant only to a small coterie of thinkers and high officials who remained uninterested in the religious practices of their subjects and even most of their appointees.3 The long- form sources they left us were chronicles and administrative guides, on the one hand, and philosophical treatises on the other; a modern scholarly division of labor has mirrored the seeming division between Fatimid high politics and high thought, compounding the sense that the dynasty’s political strategy and religious ideology were irrelevant to the larger flow of Middle East history.4 The Fatimids’ contemporary observers would have found their treatment as marginal to be perplexing. Soon after their declaration of a caliphate in 909, the Fatimids controlled the North African littoral from the Atlantic to the Libyan desert. By 929, they had an imitator in ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III of Cordoba, who followed their lead in arrogating the title of caliph from the Abbasids and in building a palatine city, Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ, modeled on the Fatimid capitals of al-Mahdiyya and al- Manṣūriyya in Ifrīqiya (modern Tunisia). By 970, the Fatimids held Egypt and Syria (though they had relinquished Sicily to independent governors). In the 980s, a geographer from Palestine who had witnessed the Fatimid conquests, al-Maqdisī, would declare that Baghdad has been “superseded until the day of judgment; [Egypt’s] metropole has now become the greatest glory of the Muslims.”5 Even 1 of 47 after the Seljuk and Frankish conquests reduced the Fatimids’ territory to Egypt, their influence continued spread beyond the borders of the Islamic world, and some Christian rulers came to regard them as models of kingship, most notably the Norman king Roger II of Sicily (1130–54), who remade his administration and his royal image in part on Fatimid models.6 It’s rare in any segment of Islamicate history for the long-form and documentary sources to align. Historians of the Fatimids are fortunate to have at their disposal not just the kinds of narrative and normative sources that underpin most studies of the medieval Islamicate world, but a plethora of documents as well; an increasing number are making use of them.7 But we still know relatively little about Fatimid statecraft, and even where documents exist abundantly enough to help revise our views of the dynasty, they haven’t always done so. One the most abundant types of document are the petitions of subjects and the rescripts of chancery staff replying to them. The scholars of the 1950s and 1960s who identified and began deciphering those documents also mustered them as evidence of the dynasty’s passivity, as though petitions were the administration’s main prompt to design policy.8 I’ve argued elsewhere that their depiction as passive has rested, paradoxically, on the same assumptions that led other historians to depict other Islamic dynasties as despotic: the idea was that caliphs and sultans governed either arbitrarily or not at all, or each in unpredictable alternation.9 Here, I’d like to push that argument forward a half-step: modern historians weren’t expecting any medieval dynasty to pursue a policy of sovereign benevolence, so when they saw the Fatimids acting benevolently, they described them instead as passive. In fact, the Fatimid petition-and-response process reflected a specific and explicit ideal of the dynasty’s founders: that the proper relationship between subjects and rulers was an exchange of tribute for justice. If the petition-and-response process was one of the ruler’s main means of interacting with his (or her; see below) subjects, the procedure was designed to give subjects direct access to the sovereign, or the illusion of it. Petitioning was not as pervasive as tax collection, but it 2 of 47 also differed from taxation in a key respect: subjects rendered taxes to local officials and tax-farmers, while by design, petitions bypassed the middle strata of the bureaucracy. Petitioning and rendering tax differ in another respect, and this brings me to the problem I would like to try to solve here.