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. The Fatimids collected tax in coin rather than in kind (grain, flax, animals). Taxation in coin solved two technical problems premodern regimes faced in extracting taxes: arithmetic and logistics. The arithmetical problem is that it’s unclear how many sheaves of grain equal one cow, and the problem of equivalency creates a problem of bookkeeping. The logistical problem is that if you collect tax in grain, you have to transport and store it, or else use it or sell it before it spoils. Coins, being both a medium of exchange and a unit of account, are easier to add and subtract, transport and store, and don’t spoil. One goal of taxation, in other words, is equivalence, to wipe the individual face off the tax payer.

Petitioning works in the converse manner. By hearing and weighing the problems of individuals, it trucks in the exception. When subjects’ problems and the solutions the sovereigns applied to them clustered into categories, they created precedents; precedents, in turn, created presumptions. At what point can we speak of a presumption of the regime’s benevolence, of its likelihood of defending the interests of petitioners as a matter of course? The most common type of

Fatimid petitions were complaints against the injustices committed by officials, a fact that in itself suggests a regime committed to justice, or committed to seeming committed to justice, particularly when we consider that petitions were written not by ordinary subjects but by scribes trained in chancery-type hands. It is these petitions that I would like to probe for what they can tell us about subjects’ expectations of justice and their presumptions about their rights.

I. PREMODERN RIGHTS? That any premodern society developed a notion of “rights” at all might seem surprising if you’re imagining an ancien régime of the sort putatively swept off the stage by the Declaration of the

3 of 47 Rights of Man and Citizen.10 The rights of citizens in democracies are generally thought to differ from the privileges bestowed on subjects in monarchies, and to differ not merely in degree but in kind. But if the rights citizens enjoyed in late-eighteenth-century fledgling democracies were “guarantees against arbitrary governmental policy” and a defense of property claims, and premodern regimes also granted such guarantees, then where do the differences lie?11 It isn’t in their equal distribution: the

American and French Revolution granted rights to male property-owners, and excluded from them women, slaves and the propertyless. If medieval states defended rights unequally or inconsistently, by this measure they hardly differ from the modern variety. Precisely as a citizen of an imperfect (and, as of this writing, terrifying fragile) republic, I will fight to make the distinction between inalienable rights and arbitrarily granted privileges one of kind, not degree; but as a historian, I am forced to admit that the distinction is biased toward modernity. Less so would be the statement that rights and privileges have coexisted in premodern contexts and continue to coexist in modern democratic ones.

The word usually chosen to express rights in medieval Arabic texts is ḥuqūq (sing. ḥaqq). Ḥaqq is also a way of expressing debt, which leads us back to property rights; among the earliest surviving

Islamic legal instruments, for instance, are dozens of papyri from seventh through early tenth century

Egypt containing a document known as the dhikr ḥaqq, a declaration of debt on behalf of a creditor.12

Should one, then, translate ḥuqūq in political contexts not as “rights” but, perhaps more neutrally, as

“one’s due,” or “interests protected and pursued by law,” or “services provided on a guaranteed basis”?

Mohammad H. Kamali argues that ḥaqq in the Qurʾān (and elsewhere) refers equally to rights and obligations; neither meaning is dominant, because they are rarely distinct in a system in which God commands the law and is the metaphysical ground of all rights and obligations. What anthropocentric law might express as a right of ownership, then, Islamic law expresses as an exclusive entitlement, whether to tangible goods (ʿayn), usufruct (manfaʿa), the delivery of goods one has bought, not being annoyed by one’s neighbor, or freedom of movement: these rights have sense only insofar as they are

4 of 47 grounded in the law, in this case God’s law.13 Anver Emon has gone even further, arguing on behalf of a robust tradition of Islamic natural law and rights theory, and modern reformists, as he notes, have accordingly posited the compatibility of Islamic law with human rights law.14 One needn’t accept this approach to admit that, for every William of Ockham or Hugo Grotius, there was an Abū Bakr Ibn al-

ʿArabī positing that an offense against human rights is more grave than an offense against divine rights.15

But while such legal arguments are helpful for the conceptual questions behind what I’m doing here, they’re not central to it. When petitioners appealed to caliphs, they were approaching a sovereign tribunal or court of equity, not a qāḍī court. Sovereign tribunals weren’t bound by the same rules of procedure and evidence as qāḍī courts, because they belonged directly to the apparatus of the state; they enjoyed full powers of coercion, whereas the qāḍī courts had an indirect relationship to it, and that complicated the enforcement of Islamic law in practice. The justice the sovereign tribunals meted out possessed the force of law, but the justice of the sovereign was not the same as the justice of the sharīʿa. Medieval Islamic regimes each had some version of sovereign justice that functioned alongside the sharīʿa and separately from it, and the relationship between them was complex and subject to periodic renegotiation, as when sharīʿa specialists (the ʿulāmāʾ) tried to show the caliph or sultan that his system of justice was not in line with theirs.16 But the law of the jurists and the law of the sovereign were both Islamic law — even though, when we talk about “Islamic law,” in academic contexts as elsewhere, we tend to mean the law of the jurists and the qāḍīs (the sharīʿa) and ignore that of the sovereigns. Jurists could tell the rulers how to respond to petitions until they ran out of ink and breath; but the vizier and the chancery wrote the rescripts, and they didn’t necessarily consult the jurists when they wrote them.

There has, accordingly, been a dearth of sustained inquiries into state-sponsored justice in medieval Islamic studies, let alone into popular notions of justice and rights.17 Even specialists have

5 of 47 argued incorrectly that in the medieval Islamic world, rights claims weren’t contested or defended in the normal way — that is, through documents; and they have thus denied not only the relevance of the concepts but the evidentiary infrastructure that would make an inquiry into them feasible. The specialist who argued that Muslim rulers “maintained patrimonial if not absolutist claims, considered most of the wealth of subjects their own, and permitted other social bodies none of the formal autonomies they had in Europe” reflected a long-standing state of the field.18 This was Michael

Chamberlain, in a work explaining why biographical encyclopedias have survived from the medieval

Levant by the dozen (and his explanation was excellent), whereas documents have failed not only to survive but to get written in the first place (this assertion was specious). In fact, documents have survived by the tens of thousands; and many of them came into being in the service of contesting and defending rights. But so strong is the cognitive bias toward Europe as the birthplace of rights that even

Islamic specialists see them there before they existed, and fail to seem them in the Islamic world even when they did.19

Every state must fight to maintain its own legitimacy, or it risks revolts and empty coffers.

Muslim rulers offered their subjects justice, but not out of sheer liberality. They encouraged subjects to complain about the injustices their officials had perpetrated, and subjects then noticed, documented and complained about those officials’ misdeeds, and then turned to the ruler to protect them. In turning to the ruler for help, subjects also came to understand that mid-level officials were prone to corruption, defined here as the appropriation of property or power outside the law. The ruler stood to gain from subjects’ complaints as well, because they allowed him or her to keep midlevel officials in check, not through seemingly arbitrary punishments, but through an appearance of justice all the more convincing for having been demanded from below.

The documents have persuaded me that the difference between “rights” and “privileges” lies in their practical implementation — that rights aren’t inherent in the human species or solely in the

6 of 47 minds of the people, but also dependent on the willingness of states to defend said rights. Even a thousand Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabīs arguing on behalf of natural rights couldn’t substitute for an analysis of the pragmatics of defending rights claims. This is not a new idea, but has also bubbled up periodically through the sedimented layers of European political philosophy. Jeremy Bentham called arguments on behalf of inalienable rights an “anarchical fallacy,” famously and wickedly dismissing

“natural and imprescriptible rights” as “rhetorical nonsense, —nonsense upon stilts.” “Reasons for wishing there were such things as rights,” he says, “are not rights; — a reason for wishing that a certain right were established, is not that right — want is not supply — hunger is not bread.”20 To inquire after the existence of rights under the Fatimids, then, I propose to look not for hunger, but for bread.

II. RIGHTS-CLAIMS IN PETITIONS I propose to discuss, first, petitions that employ the Arabic word for rights (ḥuqūq), because they raise the question of what rights looked like from the perspective of the petitioners. The answer is, almost invariably, property rights; but the context in which they sought a defense of their property also matters, and that context was usually some official’s attempts to confiscate it.

Take, for example, a widow with three young daughters who approached a Fatimid vizier in

545/1151 asking for the restoration of the property that she stood to inherit from her husband (fig. 1).

The property had been impounded through no fault of hers or her deceased husband’s; rather, a corrupt official had drawn up debt-documents claiming to have loaned her husband’s brother 600 dīnārs—roughly twelve times the annual expenditure of a working family. This was a significant sum, especially for a man whom the petition describes as “abjectly poor.” It was not the first time the official had drawn up documents “with no validity,” which hints at extortion; as to why he extorted the petitioner’s brother-in-law in particular, she explains that there was “animosity between” them and the official “wanted to do him harm.” Saddled with this staggering debt, the brother-in-law wrote the official a promissory note for 600 dīnārs, of which he managed to pay off 400 by selling his own wife’s

7 of 47 Fig. 1. Two drafts of a petition from a widow to a Fatimid vizier regarding a forged debt claim, Cairo, 545/1151. Arabic in Hebrew script. Cambridge University Library, T-S 13J20.5. personal belongings, and then accepting cash from his brother — the petitioner’s husband. The corrupt official then died and “the penalty for the debt was rescinded” (I take this to mean that the promissory note was canceled), since “the government officials in this righteous era knew that this had been an injustice,” but a problem remained: the brother-in-law wanted his 400 dīnārs back. But before he could pursue his claim, he, too, died. That left the petitioner’s husband to seek the 400 dīnārs in his brother’s stead — only to die as well, leaving his wife to pursue the claim.

Then came the plot twist — the immediate reason for the petition: the widow and her children had received an unexpected visit from “the head of the police in Fusṭāṭ,” who descended on them not to restore the family’s 400 dīnārs, but to collect the remaining 200 of the debt, which he accomplished by impounding all their possessions. After praising “the justice (ʿadl) of these glorious

8 of 47 days,” a standard invocation of the Fatimid dynasty, which “will prevent injustice (ẓulm) from being perpetrated,” her petition closes with this request:

They (the petitioners) humbly request an investigation into their case, so that they may be

treated according to equity (al-ʿadl) and impartiality (al-inṣāf) and be granted equality

(sawiyya) with other people who enjoy equity and mercy. They further request the issuing of

an exalted command, may God increase its efficacy, in a gracious rescript headed with the

signature of (the vizier) al-ʿĀdil (Ibn Salār), (commanding) their release (from debt) and the

restoration of their rights (iṣālahum ilā ḥaqqihim), so that they may thereby live a new life. Let

it be made known in the country and the city as a just act (ʿādil) for them and their right

(ḥaqq).21

The petition uses the word ḥaqq meaning “(property) right.” It invokes these rights specifically insofar as they are to be defended from the arbitrary incursions of government officials.

The same nuance appears in a petition to the Fatimid caliph al-Āmir (1101–30) from a man who had inherited a house from his mother, but lacked written proof of its registration in his name

(fig. 2). “No one,” the petition explains, “has more right to it than he” (lam yūjad aḥaqq minhu bihā), referring to the petitioner in the third person. He asks that a decree to be issued to the local qāḍī ordering him to register his property in the archives. He also asks for a copy of the decree to be sent to him directly, “thus conveying his right to him (īṣālahu ilā ḥaqqihi), so that he may live in these splendid days.”22

These petitions share two assumptions. The first is property rights; the second is the state’s interest in defending those rights, even against the claims of its own officials. The widow protests the official’s corruption and the police chief’s impounding of her property; her right to that property is assumed, and so is the caliph’s interest in defending it. The son’s petition to secure his inheritance assumes that the local qāḍī will write up a title when the caliph or vizier orders him to do so, and it

9 of 47 does not appear far-fetched to

imagine that the order will

come. In neither of these cases is

the caliph treated as liable to

ignore specific property rights, to

deny their existence as a category,

or to respect them arbitrarily.

Cases are investigated, archives

hold documentary proof, and

petitioners invoke principles of

equity.

A right is, then, one’s due; if it is

infringed upon, it is understood

that one will raise a fuss. In

practice, petitions not only

demanded rights, but also

appealed to the ruler’s Fig. 2. Draft of a petition to the Fatimid caliph al-Āmir concerning an inheritance. New York, Jewish Theological Seminary, ENA 3974.4. qualities of mercy and

benefaction; petitioners called themselves “servants” or slaves” (mamālīk, ʿabīd), called the ruler “lord” (mawlā), and, after 1100, obligatorily included a clause in which they “kissed the ground” before explaining their situation (al- mamlūk yuqabbil al-arḍ wa-yunhī). Nor was this a mere matter of protocol. Petitions complaining about infringements on rights were likely to use the same range of formulae as petitions for outright

10 of 47 benefactions (help paying a debt, for instance), because they frankly acknowledged that the source of rights was the state.

III. THE INJUSTICES OF OFFICIALS If the official in first petition was corrupt and the qāḍī in the second could be ordered to oil the wheels of justice, both themes reappear in a third petition about property rights, from a villager in the

Fayyūm in 1024 whose grain had been confiscated (fig. 3).

This is one of three petitions that have surfaced addressed to Sitt al-Mulk, the half-sister of the caliph al-Ḥākim (996–1021), who became de facto ruler after her brother’s death. (It is widely believed that, unlike Byzantium, medieval Islamic polities had no female rulers, and the political theory of the caliphate did indeed presume that women could not rule; but that didn’t stop them from doing so.) In

Jumādā I 414 (August 1023), the Nile had failed to flood sufficiently for the second running year, plunging

Egypt into an agricultural crisis that would drag on for two years. At least two chroniclers wrote about the crisis, one contemporaneously and the second nearly four hundred years later.23 Yet a third, who had witnessed a low Nile in 362/973 and the panic that ensued, explained:

If the Nile stops rising or rises [too] little, the people worry and tell themselves there will be a

lack of water. They then hoard grain, refusing to sell it in anticipation of rising prices. Those

who have money make an effort to store cereals, whether anticipating high prices or storing

provisions for their family. This brings on short supply; and if it happens that the Nile does

rise, the prices of commodities become unstable; and if it doesn’t rise, there is famine and

drought.24

This is the progression surrounding our petition: the price of grain would soon spin out of control; a market inspector (muḥtasib), Ibn ʿAzza, would be deposed; his successor, Yaʿqūb ibn Dawwās al-

Kutāmī, would attempt to regulate the sale of grain, flour, and bread by opening the state granaries and preventing hoarding; but people still hoarded and prices still mounted.25

11 of 47 Our petition comes from the beginning of the crisis.

The petitioner had sent his son to the nearest market

town, Madīnat al-Fayyūm, with one hundred dīnārs to

buy grain. The son bought seventy sacks of grain, an

amount sufficient to feed a couple dozen people for a

year. The large quantity suggests that our petitioner

was laying in supplies (a standard practice even in the

best of times: grain was stored in earthenware jars in

the sun, usually out of reach of thieves on an upper

floor), hoarding, attempting to buy grain cheaply and

resell it at a profit.26 No sooner had his son made the

purchase than things went from potentially to

objectively bad: the petitioner reports that his son “gave

over” the grain to a local official (line 9).27 “Gave over”

is my conservatively neutral translation of nasaba, a

laconic statement probably intended to suggest,

delicately and without belaboring the point, that the

Fig. 3. Petition from a man in the Fayyūm about grain official had confiscated the grain.28 confiscated by a local official, 1023. New York, Jewish Theological Seminary, ENA 3974.3. The petitioner asked Sitt al-Mulk to issue an order to

the district governor (qāʾid) to intercept the grain

before it “arrives in Gīza,” from which we learn that it was bound for one of two Nile grain ports: Sāḥil

Maṣr, which served Fustat, and Sāḥil Maqs, which served the palace in Cairo. The second option is

more likely given that in his description of this very famine, the chronicler al-Musabbiḥī reports that

on 28 Rabī‘ II 415 (9 July 1024), the government diverted a shipment of wheat bound for Fustat to

12 of 47 supply the palace — from which I gather that the son “gave over” his grain to the official involuntarily.29

The assumptions embedded in this act of petitioning are that Sitt al-Mulk is willing to entertain a petitioner’s complaint about one of her own officials, and that she will find said official’s confiscation of the grain unlawful and restore it to the petitioner. The latter requires us to imagine some notion of property rights upon which even state officials were not supposed to infringe; the former, some notion of social equality, however provisional, to which the ruler was expected to adhere by supporting a humble subject over one of her officials.

Petitions in which otherwise unknown men and women complain about the misdeeds of midlevel officials are not difficult to come by. Each believed in his or her right to legal protection and to justice. By allowing or encouraging them to petition, the rulers permitted or even cultivated in their subjects a capacity to conceptualize and identify oppression when they saw it. They cultivated, in other words, a practical notion of equity and trust in the state’s capacity to mete it out. The question is why; to answer it, I have to set the documents aside and turn to long-form texts.

IV. THE WANDERINGS OF AN ETHICO-POLITICAL MAXIM A longstanding Near Eastern political tradition, later dubbed the circle of justice, held that every class of society was linked together as follows: there can be no sovereign power without military force, no military force without tax revenue, no tax revenue without the prosperity of subjects; and subjects cannot prosper without justice. There are loose parallels to it in pre-Islamic sources, and a proliferation of versions in Abbasid ones; but the Fatimids remade the circle.30 The surprisingly persistent form such statements took in Arabic was of a circular proem, a chain of links the last of which implicitly leads back to the first, like certain children’s songs.31 The chain could be closed explicitly, or it could take the form of an open envelope whose closure was to be inferred by the listener. So, in the open envelope, “there can be no sovereignty without soldiers, no soldiers without

13 of 47 revenue, no revenue without prosperity, no prosperity without justice,” the unstated closure would be,

“and no justice without sovereignty.”32 Such chains are attested in Middle Persian ethical literature; a consensus has emerged that the chain had its origins in Sasanian mirrors for princes.33 But while the circle of justice does indeed appear to advocate equity, there are serious questions as to whether it advocates equality, and the chain’s origins in Sasanian political thought compound them.

Louise Marlow has noted that “Islam is probably the most uncompromising of the world’s religions in its insistence on the equality of all believers before God.”34 One could quibble in a number of ways, but the fact is that even the likes of Abū l-Ḥasan al-ʿĀmirī (ca. 300–81/913–92), a philosopher of Nishapur, admitted that matters improved for the Persians when Islam arrived, describing social egalitarianism as among the gifts the Arabs brought to Iran.35 This tension between the social ideals of hierarchy, which medieval thinkers associated with the pre-Islamic past, and egalitarianism, which they associated with the present, is hardly specific to the medieval Islamicate; it is the ancien regime tune played in a different key.36 In some sense, though, where Islam is concerned, this tension is a false problem, true egalitarianism being taken as either aspirational or reserved for God’s kingdom rather than man’s. But equity is another story, bound up as it is with patronage and other forms of social reciprocity and interdependence.

The expression of such ideals in Arabic varied, and the variations are instructive. I offer a targeted smattering in this section as a prelude to my argument that in the mid-tenth century, the social ideals embedded in the chain emerge with unprecedented clarity — as though people had been mindlessly repeating the circle of justice for centuries before they finally stopped and listened to what it was saying.

I’m not the first to notice this apparent mindlessness. Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), author of the

Muqaddima, looked back over seven centuries’–worth of the chain with palpable irritation; he was unsatisfied with the Arab political philosophers who had rendered it so gnomically as to be

14 of 47 incomprehensible. Of the early Abbasid chancery official Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (ca. 103–39/721–57), Ibn

Khaldūn complained, he “did not substantiate his statements with arguments, as we have done.” Of the use of the chain by the Mālikī jurist al-Ṭurṭūshī (ca. 1059–1126) in a mirror for princes, Ibn Khaldūn groused that he “did not exhaust the problems and did not bring clear proofs.” As for the version in pseudo-Aristotle, he griped, “the treatment is not exhaustive, nor is the topic provided with all the arguments it deserves”; pseudo-Aristotle gets further demerits for being “proud of what he had hit upon” and making “much of the significance of the sentences,” by which Ibn Khaldūn meant that service to the literary structure had straitjacketed the author’s actual thought. “We, on the other hand, were inspired by God,” says Ibn Khaldūn; “he led us to a science whose truth we ruthlessly set forth” in the Muqaddima without the constraint of the aphoristic form. Breaking free of the straitjacket allowed

Ibn Khaldūn to write a masterpiece of political sociology and metahistorical philosophy — with the aid, of course, of intellectual ruthlessness and divine inspiration.37

Yet if those who “made much of the significance of the sentences” didn’t understand the chain, those who didn’t quote it at all may have understood it just the same. A version of the maxim shorn of its literary envelope appears an ad hoc field-guide to politics by an Umayyad governor of Egypt named

Qurra b. Sharīk, famous among papyrologists as the author of the earliest administrative letters to have survived in Arabic, all of them addressed to a certain Basileos, the pagarch of the town of

Aphrodito in Middle Egypt, who was like a local tax-collector with coercive powers linked to the army.38 In 91/710, Qurra b. Sharīk admonished Basileos to “restrain your fiscal functionaries

(ʿummālaka) and restrain yourself from oppressing (ʿan ẓulm) the people of the land (ahl al-arḍ),” by which he meant coercing them to render their taxes; “because the land will not suffer injustice (fa- inna l-arḍa lā ṣabra lahā ʿalā l-ẓulm) and it will not last; and if oppression and loss come to the people of the land at the hands of those who are responsible for their affairs, it will be their ruin.”39 Several things are notable here: Qurra’s use, twice, of the technical term ẓulm to mean not just any oppression

15 of 47 but the kind officials inflict on the powerless; his concern for the peasantry (“the people of the land”) rather than only tax revenues; his linking of taxation and justice; and his argument that extracting taxes coercively may lead to short-term fiscal gain but “will not last.” The same lesson may already have been learned the hard way in the late seventh century, when a group of peasants in Palestine lodged a petition to an earlier Umayyad governor protesting their tax assessment.40 One needn’t, then, quote the chain itself to stand behind its sentiments. All the more astounding, then, that for the next two hundred fifty years, those who did quote it appear to have understood it differently.

This is true of the earliest iteration of the saying in Arabic in its circular form, in a work on good government purportedly offered to the Umayyad caliph Hishām (105–25/724–43) by his chief administrator, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ Sālim, who didn’t take credit for it but claimed he’d translated it from a set of

Greek letters sent to Alexander of Macedon by his real-life tutor, Aristotle (i.e., a pseudepigraphic work later attributed to an eighth-century writer who may not have written it, either).41 Given both the content and the form of the chain, it’s more likely to have been based on Middle Persian source-texts than Greek ones, as Kevin Van Bladel has suggested.42 It renders the ethico-political maxim from the bottom up,: “Know that the sustenance (qawām) of the villages is the cities, the sustenance of the cities is the fortresses, the sustenance of the fortresses is the soldiers (rijāl), the sustenance of the soldiers is provisions and arms, and these will not exist without justice (wa-lan yajid dhālik illā bi-l-

ʿadl).”43 The addition of justice to the chain is notable; but each of the other causal links is either unclear or outright confounding: how do cities sustain villages? How does justice provision soldiers?44

In fact, this pseudo-Aristotle did have a practical plan for sovereignty; the text recommends elsewhere that the caliph “give audience to the assembled people on the new year, following the custom of India

[a term such works use interchangeably with Iran], which is meritorious.”45 The chain itself, however, leaves little room for elaboration, suggesting that it was merely the concentrated wisdom of an older

16 of 47 imperial setting, of use to the text primarily to make its author seem learned and his work rooted in tradition.

This gnomic approach, connecting the links tenuously and without explanation, was typical of the early Arabic renditions of the chain. Equally vague was Ibn Qutayba (213–76/828–89) of Kūfa, who spent the latter part of his career in Baghdad but was probably bilingual with Persian; he attributes a seven-linked iteration to the first Sasanian shāh, Ardashīr (Artaxerxes, 226–41 C.E.), claiming to have it from a collection of sayings the shāh addressed to his successors as a political testament (ʿahd).46 He is open, then, about its Sasanian origins. He expresses the chain this way: “There can be no power without soldiers, no soldiers without revenue, no revenue without prosperity, and no prosperity without justice and good government.”47 Here, the connections between the links are less mysterious.

Unlike his predecessor, however, Ibn Qutayba omits the peasantry entirely, substituting the impersonal notion of “prosperity” (ʿimāra); as a good urbanized member of the intelligentsia, he may have equated prosperity not with agricultural productivity but with any physical labor resulting in tax revenue, including loading luxury goods onto ships with the intent of selling them abroad at high profit margins. But once again, hewing to the gnomic literary form prevents Ibn Qutayba from explaining what all this means — hence Ibn Khaldūn's complaint that he “did not substantiate his statements with arguments, as we have done.”

By the tenth century, the saying had spread so widely that tracing its lines of filiation is a stemmatic challenge that even the most intrepid semitic philologist might avoid. Of the many writers and administrators who had their way with the chain, some continued to bury it in pseudepigraphic frame-stories, while others were open, even ostentatious, about its Sasanian pedigree.

On the question of hierarchy, they were equivocal. Take for instance, the Iraqi historian al-

Masʿūdī (280–345/893–956). In his universal history, first completed in 332/943, he adduces the maxim twice, both in his section on the Sasanian kings.48 He has the shāh Khosrow I (531–79) deliver the

17 of 47 maxim this way: “The kingdom relies on the army, the army on money, money on the land-tax

(kharāj), the kharāj on farming, farming on justice, justice on the integrity of officials, the integrity of officials on the loyalty of the viziers, and at the top of it all is the watchfulness of the king regarding his own inclinations and his capacity to guide them, so that he will control them and they will not control him.”49 This version is trained on the king’s top-down rule and his position at the apex of the social pyramid. But his second use of the maxim runs in the other direction, as a protest against social hierarchy. The shāh Bahram II (274–93) is traveling past a ruined village and hears two owls hooting.

He asks his companions what the owls are saying, and they explain: The female owl is asking the male for a wedding present of twenty ruined villages just like this one in which to roost; and the male is answering her: “If Bahram continues in his unjust ways, I could give you a thousand.” Then they present the shāh with the moral of the story: “The strength of a realm rests on the law, obedience to

God and the execution of his will; the law can be upheld only by the king, and the king owes his power to the soldiers; but what supports soldiers is revenue, which can come only from the flourishing of agriculture; and prosperity cannot exist without justice.”50 Here, the maxim has reemerged with a frame-story featuring officials who protest on behalf of the peasantry against the injustices of the sovereign; and while in al-Masʿūdī’s first version, the king is “controlling” the other social groups “so that they will not control him,” here, he is utterly dependent on them. Was al-Masʿūdī entangled in the straitjacket of the aphorism (Ibn Khaldūn again)? Or did he understand more than the contradictions suggest?

The answer may lie in a third passage, in which he quotes from the ʿahd Ardashīr, the same

Sasanian political testament that Ibn Quṭayba had adduced half a century earlier. The king addresses each social category in turn: (1) “the secretaries, the people responsible for the administration of the kingdom”; (2) “the religious scholars (fuqahāʾ), who are the support of religion”; (3) “the soldiers, who protect in war”; and (4) “the cultivators, who make the land prosperous.”51 This is the quadripartite

18 of 47 Fig. 4a. Aristotle’s representation of the circle of justice in the Fig. 4b. Circle of justice in a fifteenth-century copy of Sirr al-asrār. From the critical edition of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima. British Library, Or. 9574, Badawī, p. 127. f. 29v. social model of Sasanian court literature; as Louise Marlow has noted, it is rigidly hierarchical in that its function is to relate each group to the king’s power and underscore its obligations to him.52 She also notes that there are parallels in Avestan and Vedan oral traditions, with a significant difference: they divide society into three classes — priests, warriors and cattle-breeders — while the Iranian version adds a fourth, scribes and bureaucrats, the number four also being an expression of universal kingship.53 Al-Masʿūdī’s quadripartite model is so regicentric as to contradict the meaning of the ethico-political circle: four spokes radiate out from the king at the hub, instead of a loop with no center, in which each social group depends on the others.

But the later tenth-century versions are politically more sophisticated (below, I will argue that this was the Fatimids’ doing). The most long-lived of them was a book called Sirr al-asrār (The secret of secrets), which, like (pseudo-?) Abū l-ʿAlāʾ Sālim’s pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, claims to be a collection of epistles by Aristotle inherited from the Macedonian court.54 But it’s a more broad- ranging work, covering loosely related subjects such as how to govern, how courtiers and bureaucrats should behave, how to judge physiognomy, especially of potential appointees, how to prepare good-

19 of 47 luck talismans before battle, and, Harry Potter fans will be pleased to know, matters related to the philosopher’s stone. The work offers what may be the earliest iteration of the ethico-political chain that is really a circle, in which the first and last links are actually the same, and the work has Aristotle emphasize this point with a circular diagram divided into eight wedges labeled the world, the state (or the dynasty), the sovereign, the military, revenue, subjects, justice, then back again to the world (fig.

4).55 Not all the manuscripts render the drawing; but the text has Aristotle underscore the circular form: “I have divided it up like the parts of the celestial sphere,” he says, “in which each part is a social class; start with any part you want, and the next one follows, like the cycles of the heavens.”56 In this vision, society is dependent on the sovereign, but the sovereign is reciprocally dependent on society.

Did the Sirr al-asrār bring the aphorism full circle because it had in mind some Hegelian notion of power as cutting both ways? Or was it some classicizing notion of symmetry, as in the Brethren of

Purity (Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ), to which the work has been compared?

The Sirr al-asrār is of unclear authorship, but pinning down its dating matters, because its relative independence from the earlier versions of the circle of justice underscores that something important has happened in the meantime.

The preface of Sirr al-asrār claims that it’s a translation from Greek to Arabic of a work by a bilingual client (mawlā) of the caliph al-Maʾmūn named Yuḥannā b. al-Biṭrīq (d. ca. 815?), and that he found it in a pagan temple. Ancient and medieval authors came up with loads of pseudepigraphic strategies, but the archeological and antiquarian angle is a particularly nice flourish that merits its own analysis; Van Bladel accordingly notes that the topos of the accidental discovery of wisdom literature in a pagan temple was common in Arabic literature of this period.57 The work has been dated to some time between Yuḥannā b. al-Biṭrīq’s death ca. 815 and its mention by name in 377/987 in the biographical dictionary of the Andalusī court physician Ibn Juljul (944–94; his name translates roughly to “jingle bells”).58 One hundred seventy years is a uselessly broad bracket of dates; but given

20 of 47 that the terminus a quo depends on the work’s pseudepigraphic preface, it can probably be dismissed.

A consensus has emerged in favor of a firmly tenth-century dating, with a toehold in a terminus a quo in the 940s due to a copy of the sections on physiognomy in a manuscript that purports to have been copied in 330/941–42 (a modern copy of an earlier manuscript, not, as Emily Cottrell has recently cautioned, a modern forgery).59 A likely date for the Sirr al-asrār’s composition, then, is ca. 940–980.60

That puts it before al-Masʿūdī, with his anecdotes about Sasanian shāhs, which gives him even less of an excuse to have digested their wisdom so poorly.

As for the work’s ostensibly Greek background, here, too, Shaked and Van Bladel have demonstrated the origins of many of the work’s themes in Sasanian Iran. Behind the political philosophy is a text in Middle Persian composed, in Shaked’s words, in “a milieu where preoccupation with Greek political thought was coupled together with admiration for the political reality and practice of the Persians, when they were still in full force” — by which he means before the Islamic conquest of Iran.61 Van Bladel identifies awkward phrases in Arabic that are best explained by positing a Persian Vorlage, not to mention the genre of the “ethical chain,” which was common in Middle

Persian literature. Whoever compiled the Sirr al-asrār in the tenth century, then, took Iranian material and attributed it to an ancient Greek source in a period when bilingualism with Persian was common in the upper echelons of the Abbasid administration and the going political wisdom was still Iranian; but Greek was the prestige language, as Van Bladel notes, and “translators of Greek works were paid large amounts of money for their labors.”62 The roots, then, were Indo-Iranian, the literary envelope

Middle Persian, the language Arabic, and only the name on the book’s cover was Greek. But with a

Greek attribution, the author probably hoped to move more copies.

And move copies he (or they) did. The Sirr al-asrār traveled well beyond its Persian and

Abbasid milieu, eventually gaining the wildest international success of any book in the Middle Ages besides the Bible. It was translated into a dizzying number of medieval languages, among them Latin

21 of 47 (partial translation by John of Seville ca. 1120; a complete one a century later by Philip of Crusader- ruled Tripoli), Hebrew (by Yehuda al-Ḥarizi, d. 1225), and some of the Romance vernaculars.63The

Franciscan Roger Bacon (1219/20–92) encountered the Latin translation, probably in Paris in the mid-1240s, and copied it, rearranged it, and added an introduction, diagrams and glosses; more than one hundred thirty copies of the Latin translation survive that were produced before 1325, a staggering number for a medieval work.64 Pseudo-Aristotelian political wisdom with one foot in India and the other in Iran, garbed in Greek clothing and speaking Latin: this raises the question of whether the

European doctors of the law, who connected natural rights with the divine right of kings, knew the circular model in the Secretum secretorum or drew on the work’s Aristotelian charisma in constructing it. Once I had slogged through the scholarship on the stemmatics, I suspected that in tentatively drawing a seemingly wild and apologetic-sounding question about the connection between the ethical-political chain and the medieval conceptualization of rights, I may have been beaten to the punch by a margin of 750 years.

But Steven J. Williams, author of the definitive modern study of the Secretum secretorum, is decidedly more sober on the question of whether any of its readers were influenced by the circle of justice,” a question on which “proof … is very hard to come by.” He also notes that while diagrams of the circle had appeared in the Arabic and Hebrew versions and the Latin ones promised them with an unequivocal et hec est ejus figura (“and this is its form”), the illustrators followed through in far fewer; only a single manuscript of the Latin version or any of its derivatives includes the illustration, an

Italian translation from ca. 1275 (fig. 5).65 I leave it to the experts in European political philosophy to draw their own conclusions. I will add only that one should exercise caution before accepting without serious study that the tradition of natural rights began in medieval Europe and led, whether inexorably or by fits and starts, to the Enlightenment.

22 of 47 First a coda, and then conclusions to this section. The coda brings us to the Buyid courts of Iran, which enter this story because the Buyids were the Fatimids’ principal competitors when it came to administrative sophistication and cultural efflorescence, and, as it happens, when it came to iterations of the circle.

The ethico-political maxim appeared in the hands of two Buyid state officials of the tenth century. Unlike the Fig. 5. Circle of justice in an Italian translation of the Secretum armchair transmitters above, both rendered secretorum, ca. 1275. At center are Alexander of Macedon (left) and it in a manner pragmatic to the point of Aristotle (right). Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS italien 917, f. 26v. being unphilosophical; but they also rendered it in two conspicuously different forms.

The earliest Buyid version of the circle comes from the legendarily eloquent chancery expert al-Ṣāḥib Ibn ʿAbbād (d. 385/995), whose epistolary masterpieces circulated during his lifetime and long after. He was dubbed the Ṣāḥib (friend, consort) due to his intimacy with the Buyid dynasty; he had been practically born into government service, son of one Buyid vizier and protégé (ṣanīʿa) of another, Ibn al-ʿAmīd of Rayy; he himself eventually also became vizier of Rayy, serving two Buyid amīrs between 976 and 995. His version of the maxim appears in the otherwise uninspiring context of a letter instructing a tax-collector — perhaps the grandest pep-talk a tax-collector has ever received:

“The land tax (kharāj) is the fundament of the kingdom (māddat al-mamlaka), the backbone of the army (qiwām al-jaysh), the value (or perhaps fundament) of landed estates (qīmat al-amlāk), the soul

23 of 47 of the populace (arwāḥ al-raʿīya) and the support of the ruler (ʿumdat al-sulṭān).”66 We would expect, in view of the recipient’s profession, that the silver-penned Ibn ʿAbbād might turn taxation into the basis of all civilized life; but as eloquent and high-minded as his version sounds, he omits justice from the equation. Why? He was bilingual in Persian and Arabic, renowned for his refinement in Persian language and literature, and scion of an Iranian administrative milieu, so must have had access to

Persian mirrors for princes; the Persian collector of Arabic epigrams al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038) later claimed that Ibn ʿAbbād knew the maxim and attributed it to Ardashīr (as had Ibn Quṭayba and al-

Masʿūdī), and therefore that his source for it was Persian (al-Thaʿālibī added, somewhat fancifully, that

Ibn ʿAbbād thought every king should engrave it on his “pectoral jewel”).67 But was Ibn ʿAbbād’s rendition of it circular, or was it the same stack of social classes we saw in the Persianate versions, only inverted in the service of tax-collection rather right side up in the service of sovereign power?

Ibn ʿAbbād was also the last Iranian official to omit justice, or the connection between it and taxation. His protégé Abū Saʿd Manṣūr b. al-Ḥusayn al-Ābī (d. 421/1030), also vizier of Rayy, drew the link clearly by arguing that peasants could not prosper without justice, closing his rendition of the maxim this way: prosperity “depends on cultivating the people of the kharāj,” meaning those who pay it, “through justice (ʿadl) and aid (muʿāwana).”68 The addition of aid (muʿāwana) is telling, because it suggests that pragmatics and ethics had merged: the flow of the land-tax depends on the prosperity of agriculture, and the prosperity of agriculture depends on cultivating taxpayers themselves by giving them justice (ʿadl) and giving them help (muʿāwana). He added this innovation, I would suggest, to compete with the Fatimids.69

To sum up this section: the ethico-political maxim is a hall of mirrors-for-princes that reflects

Near Eastern imperial traditions a thousand different ways. I have argued elsewhere, following

Geoffrey Khan, for a continuity of administrative traditions from imperial Iran to the Abbasid East; but the bilingual officials in eighth-century Khurāsān and ninth-century Egypt who introduced into

24 of 47 Arabic administration a conspicuously Pahlavi script-slant and Iranian imperial technical terms never openly acknowledged these continuities.70 The high officials with the eloquence and opportunity to produce literary works, by contrast, acknowledged their pre-Islamic sources, be they pseudo-Greek or

Iranian, because it was precisely in naming those sources that they derived most of the benefits of quoting them.

As for the social ideals, the hierarchical model, whether tripartite or quadripartite — with or without the administrative class — was fundamentally a static one: you couldn’t transfer from one social caste to another. Islam aspired to change all this. Members of the fledgling community of believers were theoretically equal in God’s eyes because, and so long as, they were believers. Empires and sedentariness may have eroded these egalitarian ideals (Ibn Khaldūn scores another point); but with extensive empire and burgeoning cities came not only social stratification, but practices of social reciprocity no less robust than those of the Arabian peninsula, with the added value of being based on core assumptions of social mobility.71 There was never supposed to be a hereditary, self-reproducing aristocracy.

For Crone, this relatively porous social structure persisted “thanks to the tendency for military power to be assigned to men of servile or tribal origin.”72 The unfree, captured by force, socially deracinated, or both, could also rise to prominence and hold nearly every office of rule. The absence of an aristocracy “gave the higher bourgeoisie, in the loose sense of wealthy, educated townsmen, an unusual cultural prominence,” as did the centrality of government administration, which depended on learning to write well. The wealth of which Crone speaks had mostly been accumulated no more than two generations prior (yet another point for Ibn Khaldūn). In social and professional advancement, heredity counted for little after the third generation; ties of patronage mattered more, and those ties, as Roy Mottahedeh has argued, were rarely heritable and so rarely outlasted a single generation.73

25 of 47 But another factor that mitigated caste was land tenure, a point worth emphasizing because it has been so frequently misstated. Landed property did not belong exclusively or even primarily to the state (contrary to the topos of oriental despotism); it could be bequeathed and inherited. But rarely did a hereditary class of Muslim landowners also play a role in running the state, and when it did, their role rarely lasted more than a Khaldūnian cycle of three generations before they turned into men of the pen. Land ownership and political power ran in the reverse direction from in Europe: you didn’t rise to prominence because you were landed; once you had proven yourself in government, land came as a reward. You proved yourself, rather, through your wisdom and good judgment — hence the proliferation of manuals to provide you with them. As for the role of breeding, growing up in a courtly milieu conferred not pedigree but social advantages.74 On your death, the land you had been given as a reward for service reverted to the fisc, retired like the jersey number of an outstanding ball player. The result was that while Indo-Iranian texts theorized three or four immobile social strata, in the Islamic model, there were only two — the masses (al-ʿamma) and the elite (al-khāṣṣa) — and defection from one to the other. Hence, as well, the warnings to officials to elevate the former and humble the latter.75

By the third and fourth Islamic century, Muslim commentators in the East were increasingly aware of the differences between the two currents of social ideals, the stratified Persian and the flattened Islamic. Hence al-ʿĀmirī’s acknowledgment of egalitarianism as an Arab import to Iran; for him to have made the comment, the Persian-style social order must have been palpable or, at the very least, remembered. “Like so many others,” Crone writes, al-ʿĀmirī held it against the Persian kings that they had forbidden “their subjects to progress from one rank to another; they oppressed them and reduced them to chattels…. But Islam did away with all that.”76 At least in theory: al-ʿĀmirī’s remark suggests that the banishment was not quite complete and the two social models were still in tension

— that neither side had quite gone slack.

26 of 47 Holding that in mind, I’ll now turn back to the world of the Fatimids. The Fatimids had challenged the old order of which the Buyids were mere caretakers by arrogating the caliphal title for themselves, a move they buttressed with genealogical claims (descent from Muḥammad via Fāṭima and ʿAlī). But to supplant half an empire, genealogical claims won’t suffice. That brings us to the architect of Fatimid legitimacy, al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān.

V. JUSTICE AND THE WEAK ACCORDING TO AL-QĀḌĪ AL-NUʿMĀN The lapidary form of the ethico-political maxim facilitated its transmission across centuries, but it didn’t encourage its transmitters to clarify how they understood it. What, precisely, was the connection between prosperity and justice? How did the productivity of the peasantry depend on sovereign impartiality and equity? No one was saying — until Abū Ḥanīfa al-Nuʿmān b. Muḥammad

(d. 363/974), known to posterity as al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, author what is to the best of my knowledge of the first text that clarified these questions.

Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān served the Fatimids for half a century, a longevity uncommon among state officials. He began serving the first Fatimid caliph, al-Mahdī (909–34), in 313/925; the third caliph, al-

Manṣūr (946–53), appointed him to an expanding circle of judgeships, and the fourth, al-Muʿizz (953–

75), widened his jurisdiction further, charging him in 343/954 with the specific mandate of presiding over a sovereign court of equity; the investiture decree commands him “to examine the cases of those who submit grievances to you,” and “to dispense justice against those for whom it is required, and render rights to those who deserve them.”77 He was charged, in sum, with defending rights claims — not, I will note in passing, with keeping other officials in check. He continued to supervise the court of equity once the Fatimids took Egypt in 969. He also wrote dozens of works over his long career including, early on, a vast compendium of legal traditions called Kitāb al-īḍāḥ (The book of elucidation), only a fragment of which has survived; and toward the end, a codification of Ismāʿīlī law based on it called Daʿāʾim al-Islām (The Pillars of Islam). Al-Muʿizz commissioned this work some

27 of 47 time after 347/957–58; it was complete by 349/960. (He also wrote a refutation of Ibn Qutayba, the ninth-century Abbasid political theorist I discussed above, but not for his handling of the ethics- political maxim.)78

The Pillars of Islam, like the caliph for whom it was written, was one of the key vehicles of the

Fatimid metamorphosis from a movement centered on religious propaganda (daʿwa) to a state

(dawla) with a bureaucracy and imperial intentions.79 The section of the work called Kitāb al-jihād

(The book of jihād, in this context, “striving”), is a blueprint for empire — the principles of the

Fatimid imamate translated to the realm of pragmatics; it includes sections on the duties incumbent upon officials and the qualities they should possess, on how to supervise the military, the legal courts and the tax collectors, on how to write a proper document, on commerce, and on how to manage the poor and destitute. It then moves to war: conduct in battle, taking prisoners, safe-conducts, treaties, pacts, capitation taxes and booty.80 It reads, in sum, like a mission statement for the conquering

Fatimid government; and al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān wrote the work during a period when Fatimid armies were actively campaigning in the Maghrib as far as west as the Atlantic (347/958), fighting an

Umayyad–Byzantine alliance in al-Andalus (344–45/955–57), quelling Byzantine problems in Sicily and preparing — very carefully — to march on Egypt.81

The Fatimids had made three previous attempts on Egypt under the first two caliphs, in 913–15,

919–21, and 934–36; each attempt failed.82 A new round of preparations began before 353/964, and most likely before al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān had begun the Pillars. The new campaign succeeded in 969, in part because the timing was right: throughout the 350s/960s, the country had been in chaos due to a lethal combination of low Niles and political contention among the Ikhshīdid governors, who served the Abbasids, whose caliphate, in turn, was now under the management of the Buyids; Baghdad was simply too weak to take on problems as far afield as Egypt. Egypt, meanwhile, had been looking

28 of 47 elsewhere for deliverance: Fatimid coins were minted and circulated there some time between 341/952 and 353/964.83 Kitāb al-jihād is, then, an advice manual for an official class on the verge of expansion.

The book is not, however, a mirror for the sovereign. The imām, the conduit of God’s will, had no need of advice.84 But there is one section in which the text breaks rank and addresses not the official class as a whole or even in parts, but the caliph al-Muʿizz himself.

In addressing him, al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān quotes another ancient testament (ʿahd) — not of a

Sasanian shāh, but of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib himself, Muḥammad’s cousin and son-in-law, and, from the

Shiʿite perspective, the prophet’s rightful heir. The ʿahd ʿAlī is a mini-template for government. It draws on the Sasanian mirror tradition, and within that tradition, on the ethico-political maxim; but it rearranges elements of it and turns others on their head.85 (Al-Nuʿmān wasn’t the only Shiʿite to quote the ʿahd ʿAlī: a Buyid official named al-Sharīf al-Rāḍī also quoted it a half-century later, in 400/1009, in his compendium of traditions about ʿAlī, Nahj al-balāgha [The path of eloquence].86 It was no accident that within half a century, the ʿahd ʿAlī appeared in the works of high-ranking members of the Buyid and Fatimid courtly elite, the major competitors for the legitimate leadership of the post-

Abbasid world.87) But while the kernel tradition is a testament in the Sasanian mode, delivered downward in the hierarchy by ʿAlī to the official whom he appointed over Egypt, al-Ashtar, al-Nuʿmān transforms it into a lengthy piece of advice to the sovereign, and thus delivers is upward in the hierarchy. His version styles his addressee, moreover, heir of “the kings and the sons of kings from among your enemies who have been devouring the world (al-dunyā) since its beginning.”88 This is no way to describe the governor of a province; it is, rather, the description of a sovereign who has ousted his enemies from rule, or was imminently planning to do so.

The parallax aside, al-Nuʿmān’s use of the ʿahd ʿAlī in this context was intended to suggest a historical typology. Like ʿAlī himself, the Fatimid caliph al-Muʿizz ruled over an empire in the course of rapid conquest. ʿAlī had just conquered it; al-Muʿizz was actively planning to do so. ʿAlī had to face

29 of 47 territories filled with Christian officials whose local knowledge he needed if he wanted to continue to extract revenue; al-Muʿizz had to face a fully Abbasid infrastructure, which he needed to write the tax receipts, dredge the canals and distribute the seed allowances. And so al-Nuʿmān warns the caliph of the viziers he will appoint: “Keep in mind that the worst among your confidants and your viziers are those who earlier were confidants and viziers of the wicked, who participated in their crimes and rendered them any kind of service.”89 Neither ʿAlī nor al-Muʿizz, it should be noted, had a vizier; but the Abbasids did, all the more reason to be circumspect when it came to lower officials. It is here that the Fatimid theory of maẓālim — the rights of subjects to complain to the sovereign about the abuses and failings of his officials — received its first articulation.

Al-Nuʿmān’s version of the ʿahd ʿAlī is a remarkable document on many counts. It is remarkable, first, because it comes from an earlier context, and some of the seams of the document still show: the historical striation of the text has left its traces in the form of odd inconsistencies. It is also remarkable because it is an act of creative recycling that is tantamount to a typological rendering of history: the Fatimids were ushering the political vision of ʿAlī onto the world stage. It is translatio imperii in a Shīʿī mode. At the same time, it is a manifesto on the requisite humility of the sovereign, a theme that by the tenth century had come to typify Arabic mirrors for princes.90 But there, too, some of the seams show, in the form of tension between Islamic ideals of egalitarianism and Sasanian ones of social hierarchy. The addressee is called an amīr, a ruler (malik) and the heir of “the kings and the sons of kings from among your enemies”; but in still other passages, he is called a slave (mamlūk). All humans are, of course, slaves of God, kings being no exception. But the document insists repeatedly to the point of harangue that its addressee remember his humble origins.91 He is reminded of death, of the inconstancy of fortune and the transience of previous regimes. He is urged clemency toward his subjects, liberality in granting them benefactions, circumspection in his enjoyment of privileges and rigor in curbing his appetite (“for the onset of passion is sweet, but its aftermath is harmful”).92

30 of 47 Thus far Islamic ideals of egalitarianism. The Sasanian ideals of social hierarchy also pervade the document, most conspicuously in the two main themes of the Sasanian mirrors: the ethico- political maxim and the quadripartite division of society. The Fatimids were heir to a tradition that was an already-amalgamated hybrid of the pre-Islamic stratified social model and the Islamic model of a community of believers. The text could not, then, leave the quadripartite division of society intact or, for that matter, reproduce the ethico-political maxim verbatim. Instead, it dismantles them and uses them as a scaffolding for a different work — one in which the weak and powerless take center

Fig. 6. Comparison of the division of society into classes in pre-Islamic political thought and al-Qādī al-Nuʿmān.

stage.

The Sasanian quadripartite model divided society into four classes: religious scholars, soldiers, cultivators and administrators. Al-Nuʿmān adds two new classes: merchants and artisans; and the needy and destitute (fig. 6).

His new categories reflect three concerns. One is the representation of the commercial milieu that was, by now, central to Islamicate society in a way that it wasn’t to the largely agrarian Sasanian

Vedic-Avestan tradition Sasanian tradition in Arabic texts ʿAhd ʿAlī as cited by al-Qāḍī al- Nuʿmān priests religious scholars (fuqahāʾ) warriors soldiers soldiers and army cattle-breeders cultivators, who make the land taxpayers and landowners prosperous secretaries, those responsible for governor's aides, secretaries and judges administering the kingdom

merchants and artisans

the needy and destitute one. The second is a turn toward the weakest members of society, presumably on the recognition that

31 of 47 patrons are made in acts of benefaction toward the weak. Third and most strikingly, however, he has also subtracted a category: religious scholars, the fuqahāʾ. If I had to hazard an explanation, it would be that the minority Shīʿī fuqahāʾ had been coopted into the Fatimid state already, and the Sunnī fuqahāʾ would have been more hindrance than boon to regime in its expansionist phase.

His text adds another twist to the Sasanian-style legacy — a momentous one: the interdependence of these five classes, which “can prosper only in relation with the others.” It is the circle of justice, but with clearer verbs between the components:

The sustenance of the soldiers rests exclusively upon the land-tax (kharāj) and

collectivized booty (fayʾ) granted them by God.93 These [the land-tax and booty] enable them

to fight against his enemies; they and their families whose needs they have to satisfy may

conveniently rely on them.

The soldiers and those who pay the kharāj cannot subsist without the qāḍīs, the

administrators (al-ʿummāl) and the secretaries (al-kuttāb) in the administration of their

affairs, the collection of what they need and the security of their individual and general

interests (munāfiʿihim).

Nor can these do without the merchants and the artisans (al-tujjār wa-dhawī al-

ṣināʿāt), who offer them the benefits of their crafts and their bazaars, and provide them with

labor and services that they could not otherwise easily obtain.

The lowest class, that of the poor and needy, is so unfortunate as to depend on

everybody else. But God suffices for all things.94

This is not yet a proper circle of justice; that comes elsewhere, when al-Nuʿmān describes each social class’s relations with the sovereign individually. But instead of detailing their obligations to the sovereign, as the Iranian texts did, he lists the sovereign’s obligations to them. He renders the hierarchy from the bottom up, insisting that the satisfaction (raḍī) of the people is preferable to the happiness of

32 of 47 state officials,“for the resentment of the common people destroys the satisfaction of the elite (fa-inna sakhaṭ al-ʿāmma yujḥif bi-raḍī al-khāṣṣa), while the resentment of the elite can be endured when there is the satisfaction of the common people.”95 And still elsewhere: “the emaciated of the flock has more need of just treatment and solicitude than do the plump ones.”96 As in al-Masʿūdī several decades earlier, the social classes are not spokes radiating out from the hub of the sovereign; they are the sides of a circle, with a keystone but no center. But while the tension between the hierarchical Persian model and the egalitarian Islamic one does not appear to have bothered al-Masʿūdī — his main concern was to be seen quoting the Sasanian sources, but he didn’t seem to notice their rigidly hierarchical elements — al-Nuʿmān has dismantled the Iranian model and used it as building material for a thoroughly Islamic one.

That’s not to say that the tension between the two models wasn’t still lurking. Louise Marlow, in her study of the Sasanian and Islamic models of hierarchy, describes the ʿahd ʿAlī in the tenth- century forms in which we have it as “conditioned by Iranian forms of social description” — in her schema, as fundamentally hierarchical. But she also notes that it expresses concern for the masses.97 I would go further. Its concern for subjects, from the destitute to the people who paid the land-tax to the merchants, is a frank departure from the previous tradition of mirrors for princes. The conduct in which the ruler should engage is not the conduct that is incidentally beneficial to subjects, but that

“most ensures the satisfaction of the common people.”98 In the previous testaments, the common people serve the ruler. In the ʿahd, the masses are to be defended from state officials — the caliph’s own worst instincts included. “See that the people suffer no injustice from yourself, from your family or from your retainers (khāṣṣatika),” it warns. “If you do not act in this way, you are guilty of oppression (fa-innaka in lam tafʿal tuẓlim).”99

How, then, practically speaking, was one to serve the interests of the people according to the

ʿahd?

33 of 47 Provide them a forum to speak their minds. Begin with the most vulnerable: “enquire about the needs of the poor and destitute whose wants may not have become known to you, whom the notables (ʿuyūn) do not deign to notice, and who are not thought important enough that their needs are brought before you.”100

But giving voice to the voiceless is not a task for the sovereign alone. Instead, he must

“establish as a guardian for them someone on whose advice you can fully rely, someone most scrupulous in accomplishing good deeds and most humble before God, one of those who do not despise the weak and magnify the powerful.”101 The prescription is for an official who can manage a sovereign tribunal for complaints: “Take good care for the administration of justice among the people,” because God has established the judicial office on earth “to vindicate the offended against the offender (li-inṣāf al-maẓlūm min al-ẓālim), to defend the weak against the strong.”102 Establish a court where petitioners can lodge complaints against official injustices (maẓālim); once the appointee in charge of their complaints has discovered what they are, “Command him to bring their affairs to your attention, and take good care of these.”103

What then follows is a detailed description of how to carry out the defense of the weak in each class of people, beginning with the kharāj-payers; the land of Egypt that the Fatimids were on the verge of conquering was, after all, a vast domain of kharāj-paying productive agricultural laborers.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EXTRACTION AND THE MORAL ECONOMY OF JUSTICE Al-Nuʿmān offers three methods for linking the political economy of extraction to the moral economy of justice.104

The first is to maintain the infrastructure on which the peasants’ productivity depends — especially irrigation canals. The ruler should care for the land of the kharāj-payers “more than for the easy collection of their kharāj,” because there is no kharāj without the wellbeing of the kharāj-payers.

“Tax collecting,” he says, “is impossible without land cultivation” — an obvious enough point, but then

34 of 47 he goes further: “anyone who wishes to collect taxes without cultivation lays the country waste and destroys the people, a thing which cannot continue for more than a short time.”105 Short-term gain will lead to long-term loss. Thus far, perhaps, pragmatics.

The second method is to listen to the kharāj-payers and understand their living and working situations. Al-Nuʿmān urges the sovereign to “call together those who pay the kharāj from each locality and bid them make known to you the conditions in their localities, their welfare therein and the state of their land.” It is not clear whether he is recommending a cadastral survey to take stock of cultivatable land or a sovereign court of complaints to air peasant grievances. But the next sentence clarifies: the caliph must understand “their perception of the kharāj” by allowing them to “complain to you about a heavy kharāj,” and also “about damage they have suffered through the cutting off of irrigation water, or soil destruction by inundation, or desiccation, or some devastating plague.”106 Lines of communication should remain open; and if they complain of these damages, “alleviate their burden,” “give orders that they be assisted in the restoration of their affairs” and “remove the burden

(muʾna) from them.”107 Now the recommendations begin to take a turn toward the ethical.

The third method is to reroute the potential networks of patronage through the centralized node of the state. This is the classic move of solidarity movements that wish to sweep away the corruption of the past, anciens regimes past and present: centralize redistribution and drastically curtail the potential for abuses. Officials are susceptible to the lures of self-interest, and thus corruption. Individual tax collectors must not act arbitrarily, on their own initiative; to do so would be to invite personalized relationships between kharāj-payers and tax officials, a situation that can easily lead to the pursuit of the individual interests. Techniques of tax-collection should be systematized.

Officials come and go; with the proper technical skill, their coming and going will matter less. We are now in the realm of Weberian rationalization: transcending the individual in the interest of a system

35 of 47 of predictable procedures. (Tax receipts of the Fatimid period preserved in the Geniza reflect this systematization.)108

Assuming that officials have mastered the technical skills to collect tax revenue, they are then persuaded to play the long game instead of lining their own pockets: they should support the sovereign in granting the kharāj-payers tax remissions when needed.

Persuading officials to play the long-game no doubt required some doing. Tax-officials’ salaries were usually paid from the amount they rendered the fisc, and if they failed to collect a sufficient amount, they went unpaid. But according to al-Nuʿmān, the logic of self-interest is mistaken: “all they have to do is recognize that granting (peasants) freedom from (tax) burdens and (in consequence) granting rest to the soil this year will mean profit the next.”109 Allowing fields to lie fallow and forgiving the kharāj was an investment on future returns. So was offering cultivators “the necessary expenses for the soil,” since this “will insure easy collection of the kharāj” that comes from it.110 Supporting the cultivators in this way was not only good for the cultivators; it was “better for the good name” of the official.111

A tax official might naturally object that postponing the collection of this year’s kharāj until next year is risky: he cannot, he might claim, be sure that next year he will still be working in the service of the state. Al-Nuʿmān finds this point of view “really amazing.” If the official postpones the collection of the kharāj, he admonishes, one of two things will happen: either the official will still be in office the following year and “will have ameliorated his land and made his subjects prosperous, in which case he will see the favorable results of his measures”; or else he will have discharged his duties early for this year, in which case he deserves praise (though it is not clear whether he will also get paid).112 But if he presses the cultivators, the outcome is certain: he will be sacked for his harsh ways, in which case “he has gathered into his treasuries for somebody else the spoils he won by laying the

36 of 47 country waste and by destroying its subjects.” He loses two ways: “the profit will go to this other person and the sin involved will fall upon himself.”113

Officials in the agricultural administration should therefore work strategically and sustainably rather than playing the short, selfish game of maximum and immediate profit.

It is, the text continues, more “useful” to have a “flourishing state of the country” than a flourishing state of the treasury. The basis of the fisc is the land, “and if the land is laid waste, the source of the treasury is cut off, destroyed by the destruction of the soil.” The destruction of the soil and the ruin of those who live on it “come about about when the minds of the governors are turned towards accumulation.”114

These three points — maintaining the infrastructure of rural land, listening to the complaints of those who cultivate it and favoring the long-term prosperity of both over the short-term interest of official profit — amount to a social economy of reciprocal benefit on a statewide scale, from the peasants up to the fisc. Benevolence breeds prosperity; oppression breeds destruction. This is no mere hand-waving amounting to some vague connection between prosperity and justice. It is a pragmatic rendering of the causal link between them. There is no zero-sum game; it is not peasants vs. officials, but both in the service of the whole. “Do not care for the riches you may collect,” the ʿahd advises, “but rather care for the good deeds you may accumulate and for the alms you distribute.” Only these bring honor and benefit, “for he who benefits (someone else) is also helped (fa-innā al-muḥsin muʿān).”

Likewise, any governor who has “generously granted a right (ḥaqq)” to his subjects will benefit from doing so.115 The interests of individual officials were to be subordinated to the collective good — precisely the kinds of officials about whom petitioners tended to lodge formal complaints. It was to the caliph and vizier that such petitions should be addressed, because theirs was the only legitimate patronage. As with the Hebrew Bible forbidding Temple priests from owning land, mandating instead that they live off the pooled offerings of the Israelites, the ʿahd attempts to blunt the potential not just

37 of 47 for abuses, but for reinforcing the old networks of reciprocity. With this came a concomitant concern: the biggest mischief-makers in the polity are the officials whom the sovereign himself had no choice but to appoint. And the best remedy for their mischief was to revive the courts of equity that had been a feature of the Abbasid administration but fallen into desuetude. Al-Nuʿmān unequivocally recommends that the caliph convene sessions devoted to subjects’ complaints against injustices

(maẓālim). But — given that the complaints were against lower officials — who would staff them?

THE PROBLEM OF RAVENING WOLVES There is a tension in the ʿahd when it comes to the past and how large a role it should play in the present. The document expresses an open preference for change and an emphasis on loyalty to the new ruling ideology; but it also acknowledges the need for continuity in the sheer exigencies of the everyday. This tension explains some of the seemingly contradictory advice al-Nuʿmān offers.

He advises, on the one hand, that the sovereign choose for himself “a retinue (khāṣṣa) to be your companions in private and to be present with you at your council.”116 But he then acknowledges that there is no one “more burdensome to the ruler” (ashadd ʿalā al-wālī), more irksome to his designs, than “the retinue (al-khāṣṣa).” No one is “of less help to him in distress” than his officials, and no one

“feels more annoyance with equity.”117 Some officials are just plain obsequious; it behooves the sovereign to “detest most those among your companions and your viziers who are most fulsome in praise of your actions or seek to adorn you with merits you have not earned. Bid such to be silent about your accomplishments.” Instead, you should “give greatest honor” not only “to those who speak most truly,” but, above all, to those “who take most care in preserving equity (ʿadl) among your subjects.”118 Where, then, can one find someone to help run a sovereign court of complaints in

“conformity with the interests of the rulers, help to the government and hatred of the enemy?”

38 of 47 The place to seek such an official is among the “common people (al-ʿamma). Therefore lean toward them exclusively, as long as they obey you and follow your command.”119 Find loyal subjects for the task — not seasoned officials; but find ones who are learned, patient and pious.

To dispense judgment among the people, choose among your subjects the one who seems to

you the best and is the most learned, forbearing and pious, who will not grow impatient under

the strain of affairs, get angry with the contenders (al-khuṣūm), or be exasperated at the

halting speech of stammerers. (Let him be) one who will show no remissness with regard to

the tyranny of the oppressor (jawr al-ẓalūm)…, who makes every endeavor to get knowledge

(of the matter) in case of uncertainty, who is most eager to find proofs, does not get annoyed

at the exchange of arguments, shows the utmost patience in uncovering the facts and in

bringing out clearly the explanation of the two contenders. … Such is the man you should

entrust with the office of qāḍī.120

The qāḍī should be thorough, he should be slow to anger and he should never favor the strong merely because of their strength. If he was once a commoner, he should be a learned one. He should also be subject to oversight — “watch carefully over his behavior in office and the way he administers justice”121 and “see that his judgments are carried out and executed.”122 He should, finally, be paid well enough not to be susceptible to bribery: “Grant him liberally such means as will allow him to live without (indulging in) corruption and without needing (to rob) the people.”123

But who should this person be?

One option was for the governor to hear complaints in person. For “even if you show great zeal in granting everybody the right to which he is entitled (wa-in ijtahaddta fī iʿṭāʾ kull dhī ḥaqq ḥaqqahu), it is unavoidable that a number among them should want to talk with you personally about their necessities.”124 As much of a “burden” as this is, you should “give the needy a part of your attention”; you should choose “a time at which you receive them in audience and listen to any matter they may

39 of 47 address to you, soothing them with your protection (tulīnu lahum janāḥaka) and supporting patiently the diffidence of the diffident among them and the stammering of those who stammer, without showing either scorn or anger.”125 This applies not just to fielding the complaints of subjects, but to showing one’s face in general: “Do not prolong your concealment (from the public, lā tuṭil al-iḥtijāb), because this will render you suspect and cause you trouble, since people are human beings who do not understand what is hidden from them (wa-l-nās bashar lā taʿrifūn mā ghāba ʿanhum).”126 The esoteric mission of the daʿwa also requires an exoteric face: a dawla.

But the ideal of having the governor or sovereign field complaints personally would prove to be impracticable and would not last long. Delegates were also needed. But again, who?

The second option was to choose officials based on how they had discharged their duties in the past. The more technical the task, the more one might profitably draw on past experience. “The wording of your correspondence, the records of your kharāj registers and the muster-rolls of your soldiers” are essential, “your key functions and the most useful to you and to your subjects.” They should therefore be entrusted to “secretaries whom you select with utmost care.” Selecting them with care means avoiding mere instinct: “do not rely, in your selection of these officials, upon your perspicacity or your feeling of confidence in them, for there are many men who utterly foil” the perspicacity and confidence of rulers. Instead, “select them on the evidence of their record in connection with the functions they have had to perform before your time, for this is a sound basis on which men may reach a judgment about each other’s affairs.”127

But where, in fact, might one find men who had performed these functions in the past?

In the Egyptian case, one had no choice but to find Abbasid officials, either central or provincial.

Interestingly, this solution appears in a passage in which al-Nuʿmān also admonishes the ruler not to “abandon a beneficial custom (sunna ṣāliḥa), which has been maintained by good men before

40 of 47 you, has secured concord (ulfa), and worked for the welfare of the common people.” He further warns the ruler not to “introduce a new custom that violates in any way the ancient traditions of justice that have been established before you,” lest the founder of this tradition be rewarded while “you will be guilty of sin by destroying” it.128 Where Abbasid officials have administered effectively, in other words, do not hesitate to adopt them as your own; if you destroy the infrastructure they have built, subjects will find you guilty of destroying what had worked for them in the past.

But relying on Abbasid officials is a risky strategy, because “the worst among your confidants

(dakhāʾil) and viziers are those who used to be confidants and viziers of the wicked, who participated in their crimes and rendered them service.”129 You should avoid taking such men into your service, for they “are the companions of tyrants (ikhwān al-ẓalama) and the aides of criminals (aʿwān al-athama); they are like ravening wolves.”130 It is the officials of the previous regime who oppressed you “not long ago" when “you belonged to the mass of the people and were wont to blame” the pride, insolence, haughtiness, lack of compassion and harshness (jafwa) of kings, not to mention “their eagerness to take and their reluctance to give what is due (al-wājib).”131

Instead of the governor fielding complaints himself, and instead of leaning on the officials of the previous regime, a third option was needed:

You will find among the people (fī l-nās) those to supersede them, men superior to them in

knowledge, who will give better advice, and who have already given affairs more careful

attention, so that they have recognized their harmful aspects and have thought over how they

should proceed therein. These will give you less trouble and better help, will be more

affectionate toward you and less inclined toward others. They will not help a tyrant in tyranny

(ẓāliman ʿalā ẓulmin) nor a sinner in sin.132

Although the passage leaves unanswered the question of who these commoners-turned- petition-writers might be in practice, the documents help answer it: the ordinary, middling literate

41 of 47 person would now hear the complaints of petitioners and write them up not like men of the old regime, but like men of the new dispensation.

The corpus of surviving Abbasid petitions, all of which are from Egypt, are mere letters that happen to contain a formal request clause. But Fatimid petitions are, for the first time in the history of the Arabic petition, a genre in themselves. They use a range of formulae that are unmistakably

Fatimid, among them benedictions and clauses of obeisance that are entirely new in Arabic diplomatics; they also have an arenga, a section enumerating the ruler’s qualities of justice and mercy that would, the petitioners hoped, motivate him or her to grant them what they requested. The decrees likewise contain an arenga section in which the ruler enumerates those same qualities, though in this they hardly differed from Latin decrees; but Fatimid petitions are the first Arabic document to transpose the arenga to the mouth of the petitioner. This was a virtual social contract, an explicit agreement between ruler and ruled that granted the sovereign legitimacy and the subjects guarantees. Fatimid petitions also use a specific script, layout and structure. If I gave you a sheaf of

Fatimid letters and petitions, you’d be able to spot the petitions immediately, without a single word of

Arabic, whereas if I gave you a sheaf of Abbasid letters and petitions, even if you were fluent you might not be able to tell them apart.133 At the same time, the hands of the scribes who wrote petitions varied by locale, a fact that hints at a class of local officials empire-wide whose job it was to intercede on subjects’ behalf. That, in turn, suggests that the state invested resources in creating such a class— that the upper echelons of the administration not only tolerated the petition-and-response process, but deliberately encouraged and developed it.

In constructing a theory of sovereignty, then, the Fatimids had several sets of tools on which they could draw. The Middle Persian mirrors for princes and their ideas about social stratification proved useful in placing kingship at the center of the polity, a good fit in a dispensation in which the imām was the organizing principle of the state and its nomos. But the Persian mirrors were mere

42 of 47 sketch-outlines of the social system, offering little by way of practical advice on administration. The circle of justice was another tool in the cumulative regional arsenal of governance literature. By the tenth century, the ethico-political maxim had, as Marlow puts it, “come to constitute part of the common stock of materials employed in the didactic literature of the Muslim courts.”134 It provided another template of sovereignty and statehood, in which each part of society depended not on the sovereign but on the others. But the connection between each link and its neighbor in the circle had not yet been made explicit, as Ibn Khaldūn later huffed. Wasn’t extraction by its nature an inegalitarian business, if not a downright unjust one? What, in real-time, linked their prosperity, or the practice of extracting their resources, with the ideal of justice? For al-Nuʿmān, there were answers to these questions: invest in the prosperity of the peasantry through irrigation works, seed-advances, and tax postponement as needed; invite subjects to complain about injustices of the old administrative elite; and close ranks with peasantry against untrustworthy officials.

VI. PRAGMATICS OR ETHICS? Was al-Nuʿmān’s motive in all this an ethical interest in the moral economy of body politic? Or was his attending to the complaints of subjects merely a way to keep officials on their toes and confiscate ill-gotten gains to the benefit of the fisc?

The commentators are divided. Louise Marlow reads the expanded version of the Sasanian ethico-political maxim in the ʿahd ʿAlī as a document of pure hierarchical thinking. “Despite its expression of concern for the welfare of the common people,” she argues, the social model the ʿahd outlines “is in striking contrast to the numerous egalitarian maxims placed in ʿAlī’s mouth

[elsewhere].” Its tone is also different from “the predominantly pious” early Islamic political testament in the letter of the amīr Ṭāhir b. al-Ḥusayn (159–207/775–822) to his son ʿAbdallāh on the latter’s appointment as governor of Diyār Rabīʿa in 206/821, which Marlow describes as an iteration of early

Islamic egalitarian social ideals.135 Although both testaments offer “attention to the peasants,” on

43 of 47 Marlow’s view, the ʿahd ʿAlī focuses on them for reasons that are “not only ethical but also pragmatic”

— as part of “the assertion of social control by the ruler.”136 Then again, Marlow holds the circle of justice to be “at least in part a means of justifying social domination.”137

But the pragmatic and the ethical need not mutually exclude. In the eyes of Aziz al-Azmeh, they are indistinguishable. In his study of Islamic kingship, he posits that “the rationally optimal conduct of absolutism is at once the ethically optimal.”138 Satisfying the masses is a useful strategy for a small group of newcomers taking over a province of empire; one could muster parallels from well beyond the Shīʿī century and beyond the Islamicate world, whether of democracy or demagoguery.

But al-Azmeh goes further. On his view, the models of Islamic kingship of the Abbasid and post-

Abbasid worlds all show the influence of the hierarchical ideas of Iranian sovereignty. This is a model in which “subjects are mere objects for the activity of the sole subjectivity at play, that of the king.” So when the Arabophone political philosophers address “the relationship between the king and various grades of his subjects,” the result is “a body of manipulative prescriptions centering on the obligations the king expects each category to fill,” without the reciprocal obligations he must fill for them.139

But to see Abbasid-era political philosophy as immersed in ancient Near Eastern ideals of kingship — or, as al-Azmeh does, to see Abbasid sovereignty as “radiating terror” — is to see only part of the story, and not all have seen it that way. On Darling’s view, the circle of justice encourages the exercise of power from below and political initiative among the “productive classes.” She pitches her study explicitly against the long-lived stereotype of oriental despotism, underscoring the active role of the masses, from the Young Turks to what she calls pan-Arab socialism’s “just welfare state.”140 But this, too, is only part of the story.

The problem, in the end, is not, pace Ibn Khaldūn, that those who rendered the ethico- political maxim did so in contradictory ways or left its contradictions intact. Nor is the Arabic political-philosophical tradition a mere Rorschach, a mute premodern inkblot under the gaze of three

44 of 47 modern historians projecting readings from the realm of his or her own inclinations. It is more like the elephant of Indo-Iranian legend, subjected to the groping of three blind men who emerge with wildly different ideas of what an elephant must be. Each interpretation is germane to the tradition: the elephant fits their descriptions because the political tradition is precisely about holding tension between the sovereign-centered view and the view from below. In the sovereign-centered view, the ruler extends the shade of his patronage across the breadth of society, whether with or without patrimonial or autocratic intent. But the lowliest subjects who petitioned against local officials must also believe, if only provisionally, that the sovereign can defend their rights. The contradictions may be inherent in statehood itself.

The petition-and-response procedure sought to balance those contradictions via a social contract. The reciprocal obligations, the exchange of loyalty and clienthood for protection and benefaction, the sovereign’s obligation to protect the weak — all this was reiterated in every petition and decree. Thus did petitioning constitute the political agency of subjects and ruler alike.

The Fatimid preference for the weak was not, then, motivated by populism pure and simple — or perhaps it was, if one understands the term properly. Rulers have deployed such tactics in political situations too numerous to count, a fact of which few need reminding at present; it is hardly specific to the premodern world. But in medieval monarchies, populism created considerably less ideological obfuscation and mischief than in modern nation-states. Modern populist movements (and the theoretical literature on populism deals nearly exclusively with the modern variety) pitch themselves against groups deemed corrupt or foreign: the previous party in power; the intellectuals; immigrants.

They get away with such ideological obfuscation so long as their supporters believe that their interests are represented, and ignore the inconvenient fact that the leaders are themselves an elite interested chiefly in its own gain. Populist movements thrive on the idea that their leaders represent the will of the people, even when those leaders are in fact inventing the popular will in order to reap more

45 of 47 benefits from said popular will than those to whom they ascribe it. Medieval rulers were more honest about what it took to satisfy people’s needs: not the “popular will,” but sovereign benevolence. Let us, then, call the concern for the common people in this text populism, but let us also admit that populism, if it serves the people (and it doesn’t always), never serves them alone, and often serves them last.141

The Fatimid caliphs’ interest in hearing their subjects’ complaints about midlevel officials explains the relatively large number of petitions in the Geniza. It also explains why nearly all of them are phrased as complaints against mid-level officials, even when the real complaint lies elsewhere: the caliphs and viziers were more likely to listen when the disciplining of their officials was at stake. It also explains why some of the language of the petitions is surprisingly direct. Subjects make demands of the sovereign; and while they call themselves “slaves” and they call the caliphs and viziers “lords” and

“masters,” they also invoke their rights.

CONCLUSIONS Nearly half a century ago, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, the great historical sociologist of the premodern Islamic world, noted that Western scholars often “found themselves baffled” when trying to understand medieval Islamicate social relations through “Occidental legitimistic categories.”142 The

“personal responsibilities of office” in the Islamic world were conceived not on the basis of hereditary right or sacrosanct ascriptive status, as in medieval Latin Europe, “but on an egalitarian basis: in principle, they might be assumed by anyone who was qualified.”143 The relationship between ruler and ruled had to be “renewed personally with each new holder of authority and was properly binding only on those who had personally accepted it” (I can confirm his view from within the corpus of Fatimid decrees of investiture for high officials, qāḍīs, and Christian and Jewish communal leaders): patron and client each had a part to play in maintaining the bond.144 This was the meaning of the bayʿa, the oath of allegiance that notables took on behalf of the entire umma. “It was not enough simply to

46 of 47 submit to the established ruler when occasion arose; the individual Muslim must explicitly assume his side of the relationship.”145 Occidental legitimistic categories may also have fooled us into believing that rights are ascriptive, settled once and for all, rather than relational.

Or it may be that the language of rights is simply too stark. Rights discourses, like revolutions, by definition hold that what came before was inadequate and is to be superseded, and neither rights nor revolutions are always what they claim. But as soon as we put rights on a spectrum with privileges, are they still rights? Are rights, by definition, absolute? If so, do they exist only in the minds of philosophers?

The Fatimid material has persuaded me that rights are rights even before the revolutions of the eighteenth century, and to claim otherwise is also to insist that we’ve been born into an age more advanced than those that preceded us. It’s Whiggish, in sum, to see modern rights as inalienable and medieval ones as granted like privileges.

My intent is not to wax apologetic for the Middle East, or the Middle Ages. Neither needs my apologia, and the business of the historian is not apologetics. The business of the historian is, however, to examine our encrusted assumptions and subject them to the acid-bath of comparison. My intent, rather, is to break down the presumptions of modernity. The sharp distinction between rights and privileges is a modern ideology, not an ontological or even a historical fact; it is a claim, because rights require institutions willing to defend them, a social perception of the existence of rights, or both.146

Once we admit that, we’ve leveled the playing field between the Middle Ages and modernity; and with a level playing-field, we can start to compare more honestly.

47 of 47 i of xiii 1 Thus Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 2:404; Paula Sanders, “Robes of Honor in Fatimid Egypt”; Janet Abu Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 276, but of the Indian Ocean trade system, presumably including the part the Fatimids controlled; Udovitch, “Merchants and amīrs,” 55; and, more equivocally, Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, 57.

2 But there is recent progress on this question: Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World (Cambridge, 2012); and Lorenzo Bondioli, “Peasants, Merchants, and Caliphs: Capital and Empire in Fatimid Egypt, 900–1200 CE,” dissertation in progress, History Department, Princeton University (defense scheduled for November 2020).

3 As Delia Cortese has recently pointed out, this putative lack of interaction between Ismāʿīlī thinkers and those of the Imāmī and Sunnī schools is mostly an illusion produced by modern scholarly silos. Cortese, “Twelver Shi‘i and Ismaili Scholarly Interactions in 11th century Fatimid Egypt,” paper delivered at the Middle East Studies Association, 5 October 2020.

4 A sense both contradicted and to some extent compounded in Walker, Exploring an Islamic Empire.

5 Al-Maqdīsī, Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm (The best divisions for knowledge of the regions), ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1906), 193.

6 Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Diwan (Cambridge, 2002).

7 S. M. Stern, Fatimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fatimid Chancery (London, 1964); Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge, 1993); Chris Wickham, “The Power of Property: Land Tenure in Fatimid Egypt,” JESHO 62 (2019): 67–107; David Bramoullé, Les Fatimides et la mer (909– 1171) (Leiden: Brill, 2020); Rustow, Lost Archive; Bondioli, “Peasants, Merchants, and Caliphs.” On trade, see also Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World (Cambridge, 2012), and Roxani Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (UNC Press, 2014).

8 Goitein, “New Sources”; S. M. Stern, “Three Petitions of the Fatimid Period,” 187; and Stern, Fatimid Decrees. All ten of the decrees Stern published were responses to petitions, a fact he takes to indicate that the chancery issued decrees only when a petitioner prompted it to examine an issue. I have refuted this view in Lost Archive, 101–2.

9 Rustow, Lost Archive, ch. 16, esp. 443.

10 See, e.g., Gail Bossenga’s review article “Rights and Citizens in the Old Regime,” French Historical Studies 20 1997): 217– 243, p. 217–18: “Whereas in the Old Regime there had been a highly developed system of legal superiority and inferiority, post-revolutionary citizenship inaugurated a sphere of equality in which the same rights were attributed to all citizens. Whereas the absolute monarchy had described rights as favors bequeathed at its pleasure, citizenship now made rights inherent in the individual, a source of protection against capricious action by the state. Not only were citizens offered guarantees against arbitrary governmental policy, they were given the positive freedom of participation in government, the chance to be involved in the decision-making process, primarily by electing representatives. Democratic citizenship created a new basis for the legitimacy of the state. Sovereignty was no longer conferred by God from above or by ancient traditions; it was generated through the act of association of the citizens themselves. Modern citizenship, therefore, called for the formation of a new kind of state based on the principles of equality, freedom, secularization, and national self-determination.”

11 For the quotation, see previous note.

ii of xiii 12 Michael H. Thung, “Written Obligations from the 2nd/8th to the 4th/10th Century,” Islamic Law and Society 3 (1996): 1–12; Thung, 93–129; Arabische Juristische Urkunden aus der Papyrussammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2006); Khan, Bills, Letters and Deeds (from 796 CE).

13 Mohammed H. Kamali, “Fundamental Rights of the Individual: An Analysis of Haqq (Right) in Islamic Law.”

14 Anver M. Emon, Islamic Natural Law Theories (Oxford, 2010); Emon, “Law, Natural,” Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World; Emon, “Ḥuqūq Allāh and Ḥuqūq Al-‘Ibād: a Legal Heuristic for a Natural Rights Regime,” Islamic Law and Society 325 (2006); Emon, “Natural Law in Islam.”

15 Aḥkām, 267.4, to Q3:21, quoted in Cook, Commanding Right, 366–67; cf. Richard Tuck; Brian Tierney.

16 This is a field of thought that became known as al-siyāsa al-sharʿīyya, or governing according to sharīʿa, on which see Yossef Rapoport, “Royal Justice and Religious Law: Siyāsah and Shariʿah under the Mamluks,” Mamlūk Studies Review 16 (2012): 72–102.

17 The standard work is still Jørgen Nielsen, Secular Justice in an Islamic State: Maẓālim Under the Bahri Mamluks, 662– 789/1264–1387 (1985). See now Yaacov Lev, The Administration of Justice Medieval Egypt from the 7th to the 12th Century (Edinburgh, 2020).

18 Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge, 1993), *.

19 Thus also Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies (Oxford, 1989), 157–60.

20 Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies; being an Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued during the French Revolution (1791–95; pub. 1816), 501.

21 Cambridge University Library, T-S 13J20.5, ed. Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; repr. 2001), doc. 79; also digitized at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qb1BrGnq5CXNz1bzEc8FK3nsfLUJXbcae2rn-CKsKf4/edit?usp=sharing. The petition has survived in two drafts, one on recto, one on verso, both in Judaeo-Arabic. I have quoted from both drafts, except in the block quotation, where I have quoted only the first. The second adds that the rescript should “remove any obstruction to (their father’s) residential property and factory, granting them access to coercive force (al-shadd) to recover what is owed to them from everyone who is in debt to their father, as well as other debts (ḥuqūq), and preventing anyone from removing their ownership and gaining access to their father’s property.”

22 New York, Jewish Theological Seminary, ENA 3974.4, ed. Geoffrey Khan, “A Petition to the Fatimid Caliph al-Ä€mir Concerning an Inheritance,” in Orientalistische Studien zur Sprache und Literatur: Festgabe zum 65. Geburtstag von Werner Diem, ed. U. Marzolph (Wiesbaden, 2011), 175–86; digitized, with revised translation by Marina Rustow, at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HH2zBFL0JYB9silz2aSo5iYQVH-mYh-Km-mafa5i_FE/edit?usp=sharing. A crossed-out phrase on l. 7 says that the petitioner's father “has been silent in the countryside in Maḥallat Salīm ibn Sahl and has left his hometown,” from which Khan deduces, persuasively in my view, that the petitioner submitted this claim to secure his inheritance against a possible claim from his father. He offers a second, less persuasive possibility: that the petitioner was concerned about government confiscation, since (Khan argues) while Islamic law of succession is clear on the matter of agnate heirs, so his claim shouldn't have been contested, in practice, “the government sometimes confiscated inheritances even when there were heirs,” a matter on which he cites only studies of the Mamluk era: Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1977), 175, and D. S. Little, “Ḥaram Documents Related to the Jews of Late Fourteenth Century Jerusalem,” Jewish Social Studies 30 (1985): 227–64 (254).

23 The surviving chapter of al-Musabbiḥī’s chronicle covers the period from 1 Jumādā II 414 through the end of 415 (August 1023–March 1025); the other is al-Maqrīzī, Ittiʿaẓ, *. See also Bianquis, “Une crise frumentaire dans l’Égypte fāṭimide,” JESHO 23 (1978): 67-101; idem, Damas et la Syrie, ii, 399-511; Ayman Fuʾād Sayyid, al-Dawla al-fāṭimiyya fī Miṣr: Tafsīr jadīd, 119-23 and index; and Lev, State and Society, 169–75.

24 Ibn Zulāq (d. 386/996), as preserved in al-Maqrīzī, Khiṭaṭ (Būlāq), 1:61.

iii of xiii 25 Bianquis, “Crise frumentaire,” 77–78. On Ibn ʿAzza, see Lev

26 The “sack” (tillīs, line 9) was a standard measure of about 67.5 kilograms, the near equivalent of another standard measure of the period, the irdabb (about 70 kilograms). Seventy sacks is a very large quantity of grain: about 4,750 kg (70 tillīs x 67.5 kg per tillīs). Half an irdabb (33–35 kg) sufficed for a small family for a month, and one irdabb for an extended family with male members of the household who might entertain business associates. Seventy sacks would have lasted him five or six years at minimum. On line 8, he claims that the grain was for his family’s consumption; if so, it was an extraordinarily large extended family, and indeed, on line 14 he says, “in our house there are many dependents [ʿindanā min al-ʿiyāl mā law abṣarathum la-raḥimathum].” On the other hand, in context, the latter statement sounds like typical petitioner’s rhetoric, so perhaps he was a village headman, or he was hoarding and lying about it, or any combination of these; the uncertainty is hardly resolved by what looks like an afterthought of the scribe clarifying that the wheat or barley his son bought was “for us to eat” (naʾkuluhu), which sounds like protesting too much. But he also claims earlier in the petition to require as much as thirty dirhams per day to buy "food for himself and fodder for his animal” (around one dinar or a bit more depending on how far off normal the exchange rate had gone), so either they both ate impossibly large quantities of food, or by “himself,” he meant himself and his dependents, and there were a lot of them.

27 There is an official by this name, Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥasan b. Thiqat al-Dawla ʿAlī b. Aḥmad, known as Ibn Abī Kadīna, in al-Maqrīzī’s chronicle Ittiʿāẓ al-ḥunafāʾ, under the year 466. This is more than forty years after our petition, so it’s unlikely that he was our amīr; he may have been our amīr’s his grandson. He also could have been someone completely unrelated, given how common his kunya, name and title were at this period. All we know about him, then, is that he was a titled Fatimid official, and likely one local to the Fayyūm.

28 Nasabahā in itself does not suggest confiscation. He might have “ascribed them to the amīr,” meaning labeled them as belonging to him, not out of the question if he was transporting them on one of the many official-owned craft. I am ruling out the possibility that it was a bribe: although payment and bribes were given to amīrs in both cash and grain (Goitein, Med. Soc., 1:117), bribes were so widely accepted as to fall outside the range of actionable corruption, so could hardly have formed the subject of petitions.

29 Al-Musabbiḥī, 39: wa-fīhi turāfi‘u … (bottom of page). Discussed in Bianquis, “Crise frumentaire,” 80, and Lev, State and Society, 170–71. The confiscation al-Musabbiḥī mentions happened on 28 Rabī‘ II 415 (9 July 1024), when prices had already been mounting for several months. This petition suggests that that the confiscations may have begun even earlier, before Rabīʿ I 415/late May 1024, and possibly as early as Jumādā II 414 (September 1023). This is logical: the Nile inundation occurs in late August or September (Thoth), and that’s when nervousness about famine would have begun. Or perhaps confiscation was the unofficial practice of local governors before it was the official policy of the central government; either a rogue amīr anticipated what later became a general policy, or al-Musabbiḥī found out about the confiscations somewhere between a month and nine months after they had begun.

30 Darling, Social Justice. Borrowing from E. P. Thompson’s classic work on English farmers during the Industrial Revolution, Darling calls the circle “a moral economy of the Middle Eastern peasant,” on the argument that “peasants’ political and economic support for the ruler” depended on the reciprocal benefits they received (6). Her purview is not just explicit statements of the circle, but evidence of principles of reciprocity between sovereign and subject, as well as notions of just kingship, responsive taxation practices and concern for the welfare of the peasantry. That breadth is extraordinary, as is the book’s bibliographic breadth, but its claims for continuity verge on apologetics. Still, the problem is a serious one — how writers expressed the circle, how they altered it, how they understood it, and what relationship it bore to the political structures they knew. See also Jennifer A. London, “The 'Circle of Justice,’” History of Political Thought 32 (2011): 425–47; and, for an excellent use of the circle as a map of Islamicate societies circa 1050, see Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Arab History of the Crusades, 23–28 (Oxford, 2014).

31 Harry Fox, “The Circular Proem: Composition, Terminology, and Antecedents,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 49 (1982): 1– 31.

iv of xiii 32 This version from the probably Sassanian text (which was preserved only in Arabic) ʿAhd Ardashir, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dar Sader, 1967), 98, on which see more below.

33 Sadan, “Closed-Circuit Saying,” 341. See the impressive list of parallels on 340. See also Sirr al-asrār, in A. Badawī, al- Uṣūl al-yūnāniyya li-l-naẓariyāt al-siyāsiyya fī l-Islām, part 1 (Cairo, 1954), 65–171; Manzalaoui; Van Bladel, “The Iranian and Sanskrit Characteristics and Forged Greek Attributions in the Arabic Sirr al-asrār (Secret of Secrets),” Melanges de I'Université Saint-Joseph 57 (2004), 151–72; and for other models, al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, 128–29.

34 Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism, xi.

35 Crone, God’s Rule, 334–36. The references there (334n9): al-ʿĀmirī, Kitāb al-iʿlām bi-manāqib al-islām; ed. H. H. Ghurāb (Cairo, 1967), 160, 174–76; Marlow, Hierarchy, 88ff; Tabarī 1:2269: "since Ardashīr came to power the Persians have not allowed anyone from among the lowly people to leave their occupations.”

36 Rustow 2009.

37 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, an Introduction to History, tr. F. Rosenthal, ed. and abr. N. J. Dawood (New York, 1958), 40–42.

38 Nabia Abbott, The Ḳurrah Papyri from Aphrodito in the Oriental Institute; Sijpesteijn; Papaconstantinou;

39 Heidelberg, P.Heid. Inv. Arab. 3 + Arab. 4 + Arab. 5 + Arab. 6 + Arab. 7, lines 64–72; Becker, Papyri Schott Reinhardt no. 2 (68–76); Khoury, Chrestomathie, no. 91 (155–60).

40 Grohmann, APEL 3:70, 111; see Darling, 232 n. 34.

41 On the authorship problem, see

42 Van Bladel, “Iranian Characteristics,” 155–56.

43 Van Bladel, “The Iranian and Sanskrit Characteristics and Forged Greek Attributions in the Arabic Sirr al-asrār (Secret of Secrets),” Melanges de I'Université Saint-Joseph 57 (2004), 151–72; M. Grignaschi, “La ‘Siyāsatu-l-Āmiyya’ et l’infuence iranienne sur pa pensée politique islamique,” Monumentum H. S. Nyberg, AcIr 6, ser. 2 (Leiden: Brill 1975) 3:191. See Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, ed. Fluegel, 117; Grignaschi, “Les ‘rasāʾil ārisṭāṭālīsa ilā al-Iskandar’ de Sālim Abu-l-ʿAlāʾ et l’activité culturelle à l’époque omayyade,” BEO 19 (1965–66): 7–83; Grignaschi, “L’épistolaire classique conservé dans la version arabe de Sālim Abū-l-ʿAlāʾ,” Le Muséon 80 (1967): 211–64; Grignaschi, “Un roman épistolaire gŕeco-arabe: la correspondence entre Aristote et Alexandre,” in M. Bridges and J. C. Bürgel, eds., The Problematics of Power: Eastern and Western Representations of Alexandre the Great (Bern: P. Lang, 1996), 109n1; S. M. Stern, Aristotle on the World State (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), 2n2; J. Bielawski, trans., Lettre d’Aristote à Alexandre sur la politique envers les cités (Wroclaw: Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1970); J. D. Latham, “The beginnings of Arabic prose literature: the epistolary genre,” in The Cambridge history of Arabic literature [i.] Arabic literature to the end of the Umayyad period (Cambridge, 1983): 154–64; Emily Cottrell, “An Early Arabic Mirror for Princes and Manual for Secretaries,” in Alexander the Great and the East: History, Art, Tradition, ed. Krzysztof Nawotka and Agnieszka Wojciechowska (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016), 303–28, with copious citations and reevaluations of previous studies.

44 One cannot rule out the possibility of haplography, the scribe’s inadvertent omission of repeated text, skipping from qawām to qawām.

v of xiii 45 Grignaschi, “Les ‘rasāʾil ārisṭāṭālīsa ilā al-Iskandar,’” 10, quoting from Kitāb fī l-siyāsa l-ʿāmmiyya, MS Aya Sofia 4260.30r (ibid., 10n3); cf. 24v (ibid., 10n2). On the Iranian pedigree of the idea of holding audiences to redress the complaints of subjects, see the mid-third/ninth century mirror for princes that quotes the testaments (ʿuhūd) of some of the Sasanian shāhs emphasizing the sovereign’s obligation to hear his subjects’ complaints on festival days in a public ceremony. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥārith al-Taghlibī (or al-Thaʿlibī), Kitāb al-akhlāq al-mulūk (Book of ethics for kings), also known as Kitāb al-tāj (Book of the crown), ed. Aḥmad Zakī Pāshā (*); trans. Ch. Pellat, Le Livre de la couronne, attribué à Ǧaḥiẓ (Paris: Société d’Édition Les Belles Lettres, 1954), 179–82; on the work’s authorship, G. Schoeler, “Verfasser und Titel des dem Ǧaḥiẓ zugeschriebenen sog. Kitāb at-Taǧ,” ZDMG 130 (1980): 217–25; and see the discussion in Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism, 66.

46 ʿAhd Ardashīr, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās, Beirut 1387/1967.

47 ʿAbd Allāh b. Muslim Ibn Qutayba, Kitāb ʿuyūn al-akhbār, 10 pts. in 4 vols. (Cairo 1925–30), 1:9; partial trans. Josef Horovitz, Ibn Quteiba’s ʿUyun al-akhbar, IC 4 (1930): 171–98, 331–62, 487–540; 5 (1931), 1–27, 194–224 [[193]]; trans. Lewis, Islam, 1:185; on ʿAhd Ardashīr, Sadan, 336; on Ibn Qutayba, Gérard Lecomte, Ibn Qutayba. L’homme, son oeuvre, ses idées (Damascus, 1965) and the précis of ibid. s.v. in Encyclopaedia of Islam2.

48 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar (Meadows of gold and mines of gems), 1:272; see Marlow, 87n100 and 102; Ch. Pellat, s.v. in EI2.

49 J. Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia, 2nd ed., London-NY: Tauris 2001, p.191; in the latter, cited from “murūǧ I, 311, 18ff. Pellat (transl. Altheim/Stiehl).” I am grateful to Dan Caner for reminding me of this passage.

50 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, 1:293–94.

51 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, 1:272; see Marlow, 87n100 and 102.

52 Marlow, 69–72.

53 Van Bladel, “Iranian Characteristics,” *; Marlow, 68-72.

54 Sirr al-asrār, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī, al-Uṣūl al-yūnāniyya li-l-naẓariyyāt al-siyāsiyya fī l-Islām, part 1 (Cairo: Maktabat Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1954). Two recensions of the work have survived, a longer and a shorter one, of which Badawī published only the longer one. The earliest surviving manuscripts date to the twelfth century, of the short recension in Oxford, MS Laud. Or. 210 (GAL 1:203, occupying the same manuscript as GAL 1:423), dated to 541/1146–47 (Mahmoud Manzalaoui, “The Pseudo-Aristotelian Kitāb Sirr al-Asrār. Facts and Problems,” Oriens 23–24 (1974): 147–257 [148, no. 1]); the copy in Vienna, MS 1828, Neue Folge, 278 (ibid., 148, no. 2) may be a century earlier, but this is uncertain; of the long recension, Mosul, Madrasat Jāmīʿ al-Bāshā, MS 55/134 (Manzalaoui, 151, no. 17), but the dating is uncertain. There is an unknown recension in Alexandria (Municipal Library, G 3641) that may date to the twelfth century C.E.; the manuscript could not be located when Manzalaoui surveyed them; and there appears to be a manuscript at the Metropolitan Museum of Art inscribed on the frontispiece with the name of the Zangid atabeg of Mosul Nūr al-Dīn Arslān Shāh (1193–1211) (online and in Canby, Beyazit and Rugiadi, Court and Cosmos, no. 10, p. 60), acquired from Sam Fogg after 2003 (looted from Mosul and identical with the above?). The literature on this text is vast; this note deals with the Arabic only. In addition to Mazalaoui, see Mario Grignaschi, “Quelques spécimens de la littérature sassanide conservés dans les bibliothèques d’Istanbul,” Journal Asiatique 254 (1966), 1–142; Grignaschi, “L’origine et les métamorphoses du Sirr al-ʾasrār (Secretum secretorum),” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age (1976), 7–112; Joseph Sadan, “A ‘Closed-Circuit’ Saying on Practical Justice,” JSAI 10 (1987), 325–41; Shaul Shaked, “From Iran to Islam: Notes on Some Themes in Transmission. 1. ‘Religion and Sovereignty are Twins’ in Ibn al- Muqaffa’s Theory of Government. 2. The Four Sages,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 4 (1984): 31–67; P. S. van Koningsveld, “Greek Manuscripts in the Early Abbasid Empire: Fiction and Facts about their Origin, Translation, and Destruction," Bibliotheca Orientalis 55 (1998): 346–72; and Van Bladel, “Iranian Characteristics and Forged Greek Attributes.”

55 Sirr al-asrār (ed. Badawī), 127; see his comments on the diagram in the manuscript,

vi of xiii 56 Sirr al-asrār (ed. Badawī), 126.

57 Van Bladel, “Iranian Characteristics and Forged Greek Attributes”; see also Cottrell, “Ekphrasis,” 431–32.

58 Van Bladel, 158 and 158n25; Ibn Juljul, Ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ wa-l-ḥukamāʾ, *; cf. Cottrell, “Ekphrasis,” 361.

59 British Library, Or. 12070; see Manzalaoui, 155, no. 47; and see now Emily Cottrell, “Ekphrasis of a manuscript (MS London, British Library, Or. 12070). Is the “London Physiognomy” a fake or a “semi-fake,” and is it a witness to the Secret of Secrets (Sirr al-Asrār) or to one of its sources?” Cottrell persuasively argues that this manuscript is a faithful modern copy whose scribe has dutifully included the original colophon and medieval marginalia, not the product of a Tehran forger’s workshop.

60 Manzalaoui, “The Pseudo-Aristotelian ‘Kitāb sirr al-asrār,’” 159ff.

61 Shaked, “From Iran to Islam,” 49; Van Bladel, “Iranian Characteristics.” The ultimate source seems to have been a Middle Persian translation by Borzūya, ca. 570 C.E., of the Sanskrit Pančatantra, which was eventually translated to Syriac and then again from Persian to Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa as Kalīla wa-dimna, but does this actually refer to the work in question? Pahlavi Tāj-nāmak said to have been one of the works translated by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ; and see J. London, “How To Do Things With Fables: Ibn al-Muqaffas Frank Speech in Stories from Kalila wa Dimna,” History of Political Thought 29: 2 (2008).

62 Van Bladel, “Iranian Characteristics.”

63 Steven J. Williams, The secret of secrets: the scholarly career of a pseudo-Aristotelian text in the Latin Middle Ages (2003). For the Hebrew Sod ha-sodot, see Moses Gaster, “The Hebrew Version of the Secretum Secretorum, a Mediæval Treatise Ascribed to Aristotle,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1907): 879–912 (edition of the Hebrew), (1908): 111–62 (English translation), and (1908): 1065–84 (introduction), repr. Gaster, Studies and Texts in Folklore, Magic, Medieval Romance, Hebrew Apocrypha and Samaritan Archaeology, 3 vols. (London, 1925–28), 2:742–813 (introduction and English translation) and 3:246–78 (edition); and for an excellent review and reevaluation of scholarship, see Shamma Boyarin, "The Contexts of the Hebrew Secret of Secrets,” in Trajectoires européennes du Secretum secretorum du Pseudo‑Aristote (xiiie-xvie siècle), ed. Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Margaret Bridges and Jean-Yves Tilliette (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 451–72.

64 Robert Steele (ed.), Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, vol. 5, Secretum secretorum, English trans. Ismail Ali (Oxford, 1920); William F. Ryan and Charles B. Schmitt (eds.), Pseudo-Aristotle, The “Secret of Secrets.” Sources and Influences (London: Warburg Institute, 1982); Steven J. Williams, “Roger Bacon and the Secret of Secrets,” in Jeremiah Hackett, ed., Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays (Leiden: Brill, 1997): 365–74; Williams, "The vernacular tradition of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets in the Middle Ages: translations, manuscripts, readers,” in Filosofia in volgare nel medioevo (2003), 451–82; Williams, “Giving Advice and Taking It: The Reception by Rulers of the Pseudo- Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum as a Speculum Principis,” in Consilium. Teorie e pratiche del consigliare nella cultura medievale (2004), 139–80. Williams, Secret of secrets, Appendix 3, lists 73 manuscripts of the John of Seville translation and 58 of the Philip of Tripoli; I have not included the fragments, excerpts and manuscripts of uncertain dating.

65 Paris, BnF, italien 917, f. 26v (as digitized at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8433316q/f64.item); Williams, 144n11, lists the folio as 27v. He also mentions some phantom drawings; for one of them, a hand-drawn circle attributed to Aristotle (but never added to the manuscript in question), see Sadan, “Closed-Circuit Saying,” 335n20. There is apparently also a diagram in the Istanbul MS of the Secretum, Reis el-kuttap (Asir 1), 1002, fol. 121b. (Cf. Frontispiece, Vol. 2.) (Rosenthal Muqaddimah n. 29).

66 Pomerantz, “Licit Magic and Divine Grace: The Life and Letters of al-Ṣāhib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/995),” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2010), quoting Ibn ʿAbbād, Rasāʾīl, 58 [2.10]. I have departed from his translation. On the Ṣāḥib’s biography and historical context, see ibid., 30–*.

67 al-Thaʿalibī, Ādāb al-mulūk, ed. Esad Efendi, 1808/1, fol. 10b.*

vii of xiii 68 Manṣūr b. al-Ḥusayn al-Ābī, Nathr al-durr, vol. 8 (Tunis, 1983), ed. ʿU. Būghānmī, 87; ed. Muḥammad ʿAlī Qarnah et al. (Cairo, 1980–91), *, apparently citing the ʿAhd Sābūr (the Testament of Shāpūr): “Know that the preservation (qawām) of your realm depends on the flow of the land-tax (kharāj), and the flow of the land-tax depends on the flourishing of agriculture (ʿimārat al-bilād), and the greatest success in this (task) depends on cultivating the people (who pay it— literally, “its people,” i.e., the people of the kharāj) through justice (ʿadl) and aid (muʿāwana).”

69 Account for al-Sharīf al-Raḍī in his version

70 Khan, Arabic Papyri, 40 (and more generally, 39–46); Khan, “Remarks on the Historical Background and Development of Early Arabic Documentary Formulae,” 897; and Grob, Documentary Arabic Private and Business Letters on Papyrus, 163, and generally 159–73; and Rustow, Lost Archive, ch. 6, esp. 161–72.

71 On which see Rustow 2008, 2009, and 2014.

72 Crone, God’s Rule, 335; cf. Crone, Slaves on Horses.

73 Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership, **; cf. Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law. Thus far, Rustow, 2008, 2009; what follows (on land tenure) is new.

74 By the period of the Fatimids, decrees appointing state officials would even emphasize their noble lineage, perhaps in deference to Shīʿī ideals. Walker, “Responsibilities,” 104.

75 Paul Walker, “The Responsibilities of Political Office in a Shiʿi Caliphate and the Delineation of Public Duties under the Fatimids,” in Asma Afsaruddin, ed., Islam, the State, and Political Authority: Medieval Issues and Modern Concerns (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), 93–110 (103).

76 Crone, God’s Rule, 334.

77 For the investiture decree appointing him over the maẓālim, see al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, Ikhtilāf uṣūl al-madhāhib, ed. and trans. Devin Stewart (New York, 2015), 34–37; Poonawala, introduction to al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, The Pillars of Islam, 1:xxviii; Paul Walker, “Responsibilities of the Political Office,” * (at n. 26); Poonawala, “Chronology,” 97–98.

78 Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān b. Muḥammad b. Ḥayyūn, Daʿāʾim al-Islām wa-dhikr al-halāl wa al-ḥarām wa-l-qaḍāya wa-l-aḥkām ʿan ahl rasūl Allāh ʿalayhi wa ʿalayhim afḍal al-salām, ed. A. A. A. Fyzee, 2 vols. (Cairo, 1951–61); second edition of volume 1, 1963. On the work’s composition and date, see W. Ivanow, A Creed of the Fatimids (Bombay, 1936), 6*; Idrīs, ʿUyūn al-akhbār, 6:42–43; Daftary, “Al-Qādī al-Nuʿmān, Ismāʿīlī Law and Imāmī Shīʿism,” 182–83; Ismail K. Poonawala, “The Chronology of al-Qāḍī l-Nuʿmān’s Works,” Arabica 65 (2018): 84–162, with a comprehensive discussion of earlier studies. On the extant fragment of Kitāb al-īḍāḥ, see Wilferd Madelung, “The Sources of Ismāʿīlī Law,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 35 (1976): 29–40. For a definitive analysis of his work, see Sumaiya A. Hamdani, Between Revolution and State: The Path to Fatimid Statehood, Qāḍī l-Nuʿmān and the Construction of Fatimid Legitimacy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006). For the refutation of Ibn Qutayba, see Avraham Hakim, “Al-Qāḍī l-Nuʿmān b. Muḥammad al-Maghribī (M. 363/974). Risālat dhāt al-bayān fī-l-radd ʿalā Ibn Qutayba ou L’Épître de l’éloquente clarification concernant la réfutation d’Ibn Qutayba (I & II),” Al-Qantara 31 (2010): 77–102, 351–369; Hakim, “*,” JSAI 38 (2011): 311–36; and Ismail K. Poonawala, “Al-Qāḍī l-Nuʿmān and his refutation of Ibn Qutayba,” in Fortresses of the Intellect: Ismaili and other Islamic Studies in Honour of Farhad Daftary, ed. Omar Ali-de-Unzaga (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 275–307;Hakim, ed., The Epistle of the Eloquent Clarification Concerning the Refutation of Ibn Qutayba by Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān b. Muḥammad (d. 363/974) (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

79 W. Madelung, “Das Imamat in der frühen ismailitischen Lehre,” Der Islam 37–38 (1961): 43–155; Madelung, “The Sources of Ismāʿīlī Law,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 5 (1975), p. 29 and n. 2.; Hamdani, Between Revolution and State, 125–26; see also Fierro, “Codifying the Law,” in Diverging Paths? ed. Hudson and Echevarria, 105; Farhat Dachraoui, s.v. “al- Nuʿmān,” in EI2.

viii of xiii 80 al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, Daʿāʾim al-Islām. The books, in order, are on the principles of succession (al-wilāya); ritual purity (aṭ-ṭahāra); prayer (aṣ-ṣalāt), burial (al-janāʾiz), tithing and charity (az-zakāt, including ṣadaqa), fasting and mosque- based retreat (aṣ-ṣawm wa-l-iʿtikāf), and the ḥajj, followed by K. al-jihād.

81 al-Maqrīzī, Ittiʿāẓ, * (cf. Jiwa, 54-55 and 58); Cahen, s.v. “Fatimids” in EI2.

82 See Marius Canard, s.v. “Fāṭimids," in EI2 where the third date has been converted in error; cf. Jere Bacharach, s.v. “Muḥammad b. Ṭug̲h̲d̲j ̲ b. D̲ju̲ ff b. Yiltakīn b. Fūrān b. Fūrī b. K̲h̲āḳān, Abū Bakr, al-Ikhshīd,” in ibid.

83 Miles, Fāṭimid Coins, 51; Ehrenkreuz and Heck, “Additional Evidence of the Fāṭimid Use of Dīnārs for Propaganda Purposes,” in Islamic History and Civilization in Honour of Professor David Ayalon, ed. Moshe Sharon (Leiden, 1986): 145–51; Sayyid, al-Dawla al-fāṭimiyya, 129.

84 Imām had no need of a mirror: Walker, “Responsibilities,” *.

85 Daʿāʾim, 1:350–68; trans. of this section, which I have followed in the main, in G. Salinger, “A Muslim Mirror for Princes,” Muslim World 46 (1956): 24–*. Cf. also Gerard Salinger, “The Kitāb al-Jihād from al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān’s Daʿāʾim al- Islam” (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1935). I do not agree with Walker’s assessment that the text is full of “pious advice” and “platitudes” similar to what one finds in other mirrors for princes, “most of it aimed generally and valid for almost any holder of a public responsibility” (“Responsibility,” 100). Given what came before, it strikes me as a departure.

86 al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāgha (The Way of Eloquence), a compilation of the virtues of ʿAlī; see Iḥsān ʿAbbās, al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (Beirut, 1959), 52–58; M. Djebli, “Encore à propos de l’authenticité du Nahdj al-Balāgha,” SI 72 (1992): 36–52; Chittick, Anthology, 68ff; al-Qāḍī, “Early Fatimid Political Document,” *; Tahera Qutbuddin is currently editing and translating the text. Crone, God’s Rule, 123n48 (and cf. 152n23), calls this second recension “the imāmī version.”

87 Like the governor of Egypt in the ʿahd, the Buyids and Fatimids each faced a mass of subjects who adhered to a different religious dispensation from theirs: in al-Ashtar’s case, Christians; in the Buyids’, Sunnī Muslims; in the Fatimids’, Christians and Sunnīs. But there were key differences. Only two of the three faced a phalanx of bureaucrats who had worked for the old regime — another subject on which the ʿahd is particularly voluble — Greek-speaking Roman administrators in al-Ashtar’s case and Abbasid administrators in Egypt in al-Muʿizz’s. The Iraqi imāmī recension emerged as the Buyids entered their sixth decade of rule as the amīrs and caretakers of a truncated and reduced Abbasid caliphate. The text would have served nicely as a political testament legitimating the Buyids as more than the mercenaries as which they had begun half a century earlier. Its frame-story offered an irrefragable precedent for the appointment of amīrs by caliphs, all the more so if those amīrs were Shīʿīs. The compiler of the Iraqi recension, al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (né Muḥammad b. Abī Aḥmad al-Ḥusayn), was a Buyid and Abbasid court poet, a court brat steeped in the life, learning and mores of Rayy, an ʿAlīd on both sides of his family (hence the sharīf in his title) and educated by the highest echelons of the imāmī elite. He dedicated a series of poems to the Abbasid caliph al-Ṭāʾiʿ (d. 393/1003) and to the Buyid amīr Bahāʾ al-Dawla (*) (See his Dīwān, e.g., 1:13–18, 53–64, 277–78, 413–18 and 2:444–48, cited in Moktar Djebli, s.v. “al-Sharīf al-Raḍī,” in EI2). He was sensitive to the subject of petitions against official injustice, a topic on which the ʿahd is quite voluble: in 380/990, at the age of only twenty-four, he inherited from his father the supervision of the Buyid sovereign tribunals (maẓālim courts). He also received a string of impressive titles: in 388/998, when he was thirty-two, Bahāʾ al-Dawla titled him al-Sharīf al-Jalīl, “the venerable noble one”; by forty-one, in 398/1007, he had received the title al-Raḍī, “the pleasing”; and, a year after he composed the work in which his recension of the ʿahd ʿAlī appears, 401/1011, he was called al-Sharīf al-Ajall, “the most venerable noble one.” A Shīʿī Buyid amīr would have appreciated the caliph ʿAlī’s testament for his amīr as much as a Fatimid caliph would have appreciated Muḥammad’s for ʿAlī. The ʿAhd ʿAlī — with a subjective or an objective genitive, composed by ʿAlī or addressed to him — was the best and most authoritative testament that a tenth-century imāmī official could possibly find for his sovereign patron, the most fitting mirror for his prince. But it was not enough, because the circumstances had changed. They had changed on many counts, and changed in similar ways for the Buyids and the Fatimids.

88 Fyzee, 351; Salinger, 25.

ix of xiii 89 Daʿāʾim, 8*; Salinger, 29; Nahj, *; Chittick, 147.

90 See especially Louise Marlow, Pseudo-Māwardī*. For a basic bibliography of the genre, see EI2 s.v. “Naṣīḥat al-mulūk” (C. E. Bosworth).

91 Salinger, 26.

92 Salinger, 25-26.

93 Fayʾ is plunder taken in battle, collectivized and made into a pious trust, as distinct from ghanīma, movable property distributed to individual warriors.

94 Daʿāʾim, 357-58; Salinger, 30-31 (with my modifications).

95 Daʿāʾim, 355; Salinger, 28.

96 Fa-inna hazīl al-raʿiyya aḥwaj ilā al-inṣāf wa-l-taʿāhud min dhawī al-samāna. Daʿāʾim, 366; Salinger, 37.

97 Marlow, 122, comparing the work to the testament of Ṭāhir b. al-Ḥusayn (159–207/775–822) for his son ʿAbdallāh on the latter’s appointment as governor of Diyār Rabīʿa in 206/821. The testament of Ṭāhir, she argues, is all about early Islamic egalitarian social ideals, while ʿAlī’s letter to al-Ashtar is all about Iranian-style social hierarchy.

98 Daʿāʾim, 355; Salinger, 28.

99 Daʿāʾim, 354–55; Salinger, 28.

100 Daʿāʾim, 367–68; Salinger, 37.

101 Daʿāʾim, 368; Salinger, 37.

102 Daʿāʾim, 359; Salinger, 31.

103 Daʿāʾim, 366; Salinger, 37.

104 Cf. al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād: “The land tax (kharāj) is the fundament of the kingdom (māddat al-mamlaka), the backbone of the army (qiwām al-jaysh), the worth of possessions (qīmat al-amlāk), the soul of the populace (arwāḥ al-raʿīya) and the support of the ruler (ʿumdat al-sulṭān).” This needn’t have been more than a dry, matter-of-fact acknowledgement, in a letter to the tax-collector he had just appointed, that the kingdom cannot run without revenue. His disciple al-Ābī came closer to the mark when he writes to one of his appointees, “Know that the preservation (qawām) of your realm depends on the flow of the land-tax (kharāj), and the flow of the land-tax depends on the flourishing of agriculture (ʿimārat al- bilād), and the greatest success in this (task) depends on cultivating (*) the people (who pay it) through justice (ʿadl) and aid (muʿāwana).” Al-Ābī comes closest to al-Nuʿmān; but even he never spells out how precisely collecting the land- tax depends on rendering aid and justice to the agriculturally productive classes. The Buyid viziers may well have known the imāmī recension of the ʿahd and been thinking of it; they may even have known al-Nuʿmān’s Pillars. But they did not offer the ethico-political maxim the extensive treatment al-Nuʿmān did. His citation of the ʿahd talks for pages and pages about the importance of cultivating the cultivators.

105 Daʿāʾim, 363; Salinger, 33 (with modifications). I cannot explain the uncanny similarities between this text and the excavated letter of Qurra b. Sharīk that I quoted above.

106 Daʿāʾim, 363; Salinger, 33.

107 Daʿāʾim, 363; Salinger, 33.

x of xiii 108 Rustow, Lost Archive, ch 13. Tax receipts are technical documents that follow standard procedures and protocols. There are generally five hands per receipt: that of the cashier (jahbadh) in the territory who writes the main part of the receipts, and, above those, requests for registration from each of two fiscal bureaus in the field (such as the dīwān al- ʿamal or the dīwān al-jāliya and the dīwān al-ishrāf), and registration marks from the bureaus in question. The sums were recorded by both the cashiers and the bureaucrats who added registration marks; the sums were also recorded in fiscal registers kept centrally in the archives, as a way of ensuring that the amount of tax money that reached the fisc was the same the tax-payer or tax-farmer had brought to the jahbadh. Most importantly, the tax receipts are legible only with great difficulty unless one already knows what they say. The illegibility factor enters with abusive ligatures, unproportioned script, fragmented but irregularly spaced baselines, and a marked jaggedness of strokes—failure to lift the pen and a preference for speed over regulated movement of the hand. The sense of chaos was not, however, accidental or haphazard. It served a semiotic function. These were technical texts, shibboleths for a cadre of technically trained administrators of the type one finds in bureaucracies in which predictability was at a premium and specialization a mark of power.

109 Daʿāʾim, 364; Salinger, 34.

110 Daʿāʾim, 364; Salinger, 34.

111 Daʿāʾim, 364; Salinger, 34.

112 Daʿāʾim, 364; Salinger, 34.

113 Daʿāʾim, 364; Salinger, 34.

114 Daʿāʾim, 364; Salinger, 34.

115 Daʿāʾim, 364; Salinger, 35.

116 (28/355)

117 Daʿāʾim, 355; Salinger, 28.

118 (28/355)

119 Daʿāʾim, 355; Salinger, 28.

120 Daʿāʾim, 360; Salinger, 31.

121 Daʿāʾim, 360; Salinger, 31.

122 Daʿāʾim, 361; Salinger, 32.

123 Daʿāʾim, 361; Salinger, 31.

124 367/37.

125 (37–38/367)

126 (38/367)

127 (36/366)

xi of xiii 128 Daʿāʾim, 357; Salinger, 30 (with modifications); cf. Nahj, 47. Cf. Walker, “Responsibilities,” 107: “The one area of greatest contrast between Fatimid and non-Fatimid delineations of public duty is the appeal in the latter to observe and adhere to the prevailing consensus of the Islamic scholarly community, in other words to follow the lead of illustrious predecessors. That provision is absent from Fatimid documents, which focus exclusively on the guidance of the imam. Thus the major difference and what distinguishes Fatimid doctrine from that of its rivals is its insistence on the pure and unshared authority of the living imam — an authority that is comprehensive for all aspects of Islamic law and practice, in fact for government and governing in every respect.”

129 355/29

130 (29/356)

131 (26/352)

132 (29/356)

133 Stern, “Three Petitions of the Fatimid Period,” 189; Khan, “Historical Development of the Structure of the Fatimid Petition”; Rustow, Lost Archive, 213–21.

134 Marlow, 90.

135 Marlow, 122–23.

136 Marlow, *

137 Marlow, 129.

138 Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, 129 (my emphasis).

139 To help the reader envision this sovereign-centric ideal in its extreme form, al-Azmeh also draws on Sasanian sovereign iconography, turning to Ernst Herzfeld’s studies of ancient Iranian iconography. Herzfeld (1879–1948) excavated Achaemenid Persepolis, Parthian and Sasanian Ctesiphon, and Abbasid Baghdad and Samarra. In his lengthy study of the transformation of sovereign iconography from the Achaemenids to the Sasanids, Herzfeld contrasted the hellenistic image of the sovereign in unthreatening profile or three-quarters view with the Sasanian depiction in full frontal view, legs akimbo, “knees asunder,” in which the ruler is “the natural centre, the ‘cynosure, the axis and pole of the world,’ as some royal titles put it … radiating the terror which the sight of the oriental potentate actually inspires” (Herzfeld, 320). For al-Azmeh, the Muslim king of the Abbasid and post-Abbasid worlds is, likewise, “a figure of terror.” Herzfeld’s use of the phrase “oriental potentate” — and al-Azmeh’s by extension — draws on the surprisingly persistent European image of oriental sovereignty as despotism. That tradition begins with Aristotle’s description of despotic rule as characteristic of Asia, whose people are “more servile in character than Greeks” and will tolerate it “without any complaint.” The tradition culminated in Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” and found echoes and afterthoughts in Michael Rostovtzeff’s depiction of the Roman emperor with the high orientalist trappings of an enfeebled, stagnant, passive and effeminate sovereign, and in the anti-Stalinist “hydraulic despotism” of Karl Wittfogel’s ancient Mesopotamia and China. Herzfeld actually calls the full frontal iconography of ancient Iranian kingship “thoroughly Asiatic.” Anderson; Rubiés; Rostovtzeff, vol. 1 ch 12 (1926); Shaw, “Under Russian Eyes”; Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (1957); Rustow, Lost Archive, Ch. 16.

140 Darling, Social Justice, 180.

141 Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, “Introduction: The Sceptre and the Spectre,” in eidem, Twenty-First Century Populism (*), 3: Populism is “an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice.” See also Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason,

142 Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 2:349.

xii of xiii 143 Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 2:349.

144 Rustow 2009

145 Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 2:348.

146 Owen M. Fiss, “Human Rights as Social Ideals,” in Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia, ed. Carla Hesse and Robert Post (New York: Zone, 1999); repr. in Fiss, The Dictates of Justice: Essays on Law and Human Rights (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2011); cf. Fiss, The Civil Rights Injunction (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1978).

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