Luke Yarbrough

The caliphs and sultans who once ruled the Muslim world were often assisted by powerful Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian and other non-Muslim state officials, whose employment occasioned energetic discussions among Muslim scholars and rulers. This book reveals those discussions for the first time in all their diversity, drawing on unexplored medieval sources in the realms of law, history, poetry, entertaining literature, administration, and polemic. It follows the discourse on non-Muslim officials from its beginnings in the Umayyad empire (661–750), through medieval Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Spain, to its apex in the Mamluk period (1250–1517). Far from being an intrinsic part of Islam, views about non-Muslim state officials were devised, transmitted, and elaborated at moments of intense competition between Muslim and non-Muslim learned elites. At other times, Muslim rulers employed non-Muslims without eliciting opposition. The particular shape of the Islamic discourse is comparable to analogous discourses in medieval Europe and China.

(c) NYU, 2016.Order at: http://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/books/?book=12714
The Sword of Ambition belongs to a genre of religious polemic written for the rulers of Egypt and Syria between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Unlike most medieval Muslim polemic, the concerns of this genre were more social and political than theological. Leaving no rhetorical stone unturned, the book’s author, an unemployed Egyptian scholar and former bureaucrat named Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi (d. 660/1262), poured his deep knowledge of history, law, and literature into the work. Now edited in full and translated for the first time, The Sword of Ambition opens a new window onto the fascinating culture of elite rivalry in the late-medieval Islamic Middle East. It contains a wealth of little-known historical anecdotes, unusual religious opinions, obscure and witty poetry, and humorous cultural satire. Above all, it reveals that much of the inter-communal animosity of the era was conditioned by fierce competition for scarce resources that were increasingly mediated by an ideologically committed Sunni Muslim state. This insight reminds us that seemingly timeless and inevitable “religious” conflict must be considered in its broader historical perspective.

The Sword of Ambition is both the earliest and most eclectic of several independent works composed in medieval Egypt against the employment of Coptic and Jewish officials, and is vivid testimony to the gradual integration of Islamic scholarship and state administration that was well underway in its day.

This article reassesses the early evidence relating to the notorious “Pact of ʿUmar” (Shurūṭ ʿUmar), proposing the following account: Shurūṭ ʿUmar was most likely put into circulation in Kūfa or—less probably—Ḥimṣ in the early- to mid-second/ eighth century. It then circulated among scholars in relative obscurity for at least two centuries more. It was first proposed to a Muslim ruler as an authoritative, enforceable document in the late third/early tenth century, but there is no evidence that it was enforced until the later fifth/eleventh century at the earliest. It follows that Shurūṭ ʿUmar was not the foundational reference point for the notional or effective regulation of non-Muslim populations in early Islam.

This book belongs to a subfield that has emerged over the past h a l f - c e n t u r y i n A r a b o p h o n e historical scholarship. We might call it "non-Muslim studies." It is first cousin to that historiography which has focused on particular non-Muslim religious communities—usually Jews or Christians—in relation to some period of Islamic history (think of Louis Cheikho's pioneering work on Christian poets, scholars, and state officials, or Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Ḥamad's Dawr al-yahūd fī al-ḥaḍārah al-islāmiyyah [al-Raqqah, 2006]). But "non-Muslim studies" treats non-Muslims trans-communally, usually in their legal personality, as ahl al-dhimmah.

Kitāb al-Maǧdal is a large East Syrian theological treatise that was composed in Arabic, probably in the late tenth or early eleventh century CE. One section of the work is an ecclesiastical history of the Church of the East. This essay argues that close analysis of this section reveals that elite East Syrian identity in the period overlapped to a significant extent with contemporary Muslim identity, at the level of vocabulary and conceptions of revelation and communal history. In this sense, the work represents a kind of “inter-confessional” history writing. The essay aims to contribute to recent studies of Middle Eastern Christian identity and historiography, which have focused of Syriac sources and/or late antiquity rather than Arabic sources for the Islamic middle periods.

ABSTRACT How did medieval Muslims think that they, as Muslims, ought to conduct their social interactions with non-Muslims? Modern scholars have usually sought answers to this normative question in Islamic legal sources. Yet premodern Muslim authorities also treated it in genres other than those that are usually considered part of “Islamic law”. This essay considers a passage in which the renowned Córdoban scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (d. 463/1071) addressed the issue: the chapter in his literary anthology entitled “Fraternizing with Someone Not of Your Religion”. That chapter, like much premodern Arabic literature, displays considerable moral complexity. It advances a distinctly Islamic, morally ambiguous normative vision of social relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, one that contrasts with the relatively dour and formulaic treatment of the same subject in Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr’s juristic writings. This ambivalent treatment reflects the breadth of Islamic thought concerning how Muslims should interact with unbelievers. It also tracks with historical social realities at least as well as do treatments of the topic in the Islamic juristic discourses on which modern historians have focused. In its use of Eastern Mediterranean proof texts to intimate that Muslims have moral licence to maintain amicable relations with non-Muslims, it reflects the thoroughly trans-regional quality of premodern Muslim normative thought.

ABSTRACT Modern historians routinely cast the Fatimid era in Egypt and Syria as a time when flourishing non-Muslim communities enjoyed an unusual degree of influence in the state. To complement the theme of this special issue – the real and perceived influence of minority out-groups in medieval societies – this essay examines representations of non-Muslim influence in the Fatimid period by post-Fatimid Sunni authors. Such representations do not reflect pervasive hostility among Sunni historians to Shiʿis or non-Muslims. Instead, they are quite diverse and not pervaded by sectarian antagonism. They are best understood within the contemporary ‘social logic’ of the works that contain them. At times their authors simply transmitted earlier sources intact; at others they had narrative goals that superseded their implicit views of either the Fatimids or their Jewish, Christian and Samaritan subjects.

PROOFS of chapter on Christian life in Muslim-ruled territories during the first millennium of Islamic history.  In *Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History Volume 15 Thematic Essays (600-1600)*. Edited by Douglas Pratt and Charles L. Tieszen. Leiden; New York: Brill, 2020. https://brill.com/view/title/56900

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvss3x26.14
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-syria-in-crusader-times.html
A newly discovered manuscript of the chronicle *Midmar al-haqa'iq wa-sirr al-khala'iq*, by the Ayyubid prince al-Malik al-Mansur Muhammad b. 'Umar b. Shahanshah (d. 617/1220), reveals more clearly than ever before the distinct qualities of this important source for the later 6th/12th century. The work, including its newly discovered portion, preserves a great deal of unique information concerning North Africa and Iraq. In its Syrian sections, however, it appears to represent a curious appropriation of the famous, slightly earlier chronicle by 'Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, *al-Barq al-Shami*. The bulk of of the content is taken wholesale from the latter work, while the authorial presence of al-Isfahani is studiously excised and replaced with that of al-Mansur himself. Along with other considerations, this fact raises questions about al-Mansur's authorship. In addition, the newly discovered manuscript offers other material of interest, including a new, early witness to a lost Syriac martyrology of Mar Marutha.

Modern historians routinely cast the Fatimid era in Egypt and Syria as a time when flourishing non-Muslim communities enjoyed an unusual degree of influence in the state. To complement the theme of this special issue – the real and perceived influence of minority out-groups in medieval societies – this essay examines representations of non-Muslim influence in the Fatimid period by post-Fatimid Sunni authors. Such representations do not reflect pervasive hostility among Sunni historians to Shiʿis or non-Muslims. Instead, they are quite diverse and not pervaded by sectarian antagonism. They are best understood within the contemporary ‘social logic’ of the works that contain them. At times their authors simply transmitted earlier sources intact; at others they had narrative goals that superseded their implicit views of either the Fatimids or their Jewish, Christian and Samaritan subjects.

How did medieval Muslims think that they, as Muslims, ought to conduct their social interactions with non-Muslims? Modern scholars have usually sought answers to this normative question in Islamic legal sources. Yet premodern Muslim authorities also treated it in genres other than those that are usually considered part of “Islamic law”. This essay considers a passage in which the renowned Córdoban scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (d. 463/1071) addressed the issue: the chapter in his literary anthology entitled “Fraternizing with Someone Not of Your Religion”. That chapter, like much premodern Arabic literature, displays considerable moral complexity. It advances a distinctly Islamic, morally ambiguous normative vision of social relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, one that contrasts with the relatively dour and formulaic treatment of the same subject in Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr’s juristic writings. This ambivalent treatment reflects the breadth of Islamic thought concerning how Muslims should interact with unbelievers. It also tracks with historical social realities at least as well as do treatments of the topic in the Islamic juristic discourses on which modern historians have focused. In its use of Eastern Mediterranean proof texts to intimate that Muslims have moral licence to maintain amicable relations with non-Muslims, it reflects the thoroughly trans-regional quality of premodern Muslim normative thought.

Muslim authors composed a number of polemics against the employment of non-Muslim state officials in thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Egypt and Syria. This essay argues that the majority of these works drew directly or indirectly on a previously unremarked sixth/twelfth century common source. Although the common source cannot yet be securely identified, its existence and influence have significant implications for historians' understanding of interreli-gious tensions in late medieval Egypt and Syria and for the Nachleben of innovative literary compositions in this period. Specifically, the detection of this source stretches accepted chronologies of the late-medieval surge of anti-dhimmī sentiment in the Islamic Middle East decades earlier and raises the question of literary works' role in catalyzing religious violence and exclusion.

An exhaustive conspectus of the sources relating to a putative edict or policy of the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz dismissing non-Muslim state officials. Argues that there is a range of plausible readings of the evidence. On the credulous end of that range, an historian could conclude that ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz took some measure of this sort, but could have little certainty as to what it was. On the skeptical end of the range, an historian could conclude that reports of this measure originated later and were retrospectively attached to ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. Purchase and/or download the volume *for free* here: http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/lamine/lamine-1-christians-and-others-umayyad-state

This essay studies the transmission history of three Prophetic hadiths set on the rural periphery of Medina. In all three, the Prophet rejects the military assistance of non-Muslims, proclaiming, "I'll not accept aid from a mushrik." These hadiths became important proof texts for the prescriptive view that Muslims should not ally with non-Muslims in collaborative undertakings of any sort. I use analytical methods developed by Harald Motzki (matn-cum-isnad analysis) and Behnam Sadeghi (the Traveling Tradition Test) to show that the three hadiths originated in early second/eighth century Medina. Although no conclusions are drawn about their historical accuracy, groundwork for such study is laid here. This essay does, however, show that the Arab Muslims lacked any principled, widely shared reasons not to ally with non-Muslims during the conquests, and that imagined rural spaces were instrumental for some hadith transmitters' rhetorical reinforcement of their own authority.

*A blog post at the Woolf Institute (University of Cambridge)* : Premodern Islamic states empowered countless Christian and Jewish officials, who drew reactions ranging from fulsome praise to virulent polemic from their Muslim peers. Here Dr. Luke Yarbrough explores the variation.