The Sword of Ambition. 'Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi
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He seems rather to have intended to entertain an audience that was unlikely to have had deep prior familiarity with his material.
What sort of book is this? Its multifarious contents and disparate registers make it a poor fit for any one genre. It would be unsatisfying to classify it as exegesis (tafsīr), history (tārīkh), law (fiqh), polemic (jadal), or, save in the broadest sense, belles lettres (adab), though it contains elements of all these. I would suggest, however, that it was not sui generis. Rather, it was intended to be read (or listened to) as a representative of the established Arabic genre of advice literature (naṣīḥah).32 While its form is not typical of “mirrors for princes,” The Sword of Ambition qualifies as naṣīḥah in that it, like standard examples of that genre, was directed to a ruler in the hope of convincing him to bring his wayward conduct into line with certain principles. Unlike many naṣīḥah works, The Sword of Ambition does not present a comprehensive ethical vision for the ruler’s conduct. Instead it is concerned with a specific issue, namely the ongoing employment of Copts and other undesirables. In this it stands as an early example of a small cluster of anti-Copt treatises that were composed in Egypt between the late twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries. It drew on the same sources as some other works in the cluster did, and served as a source for others.33 The Sword of Ambition is also closely comparable to Ibn al-Nābulusī’s own Luminous Rules, which was written, as we have seen, around the same time, and which declares itself openly to be a work of naṣīḥah. Both works, no matter how far they digress, circle relentlessly back to the problem of socially marginal and unqualified men who receive stipends and administrative posts, while the deserving few (notably the author himself) are left in the cold.
Only a portion of The Sword of Ambition represents what a modern reader would call Ibn al-Nābulusī’s original work. The author, like most of his compeers in the Arabic literary heritage, makes liberal use of the sources available to him. Only in a few instances, however, does he name his sources. From a literary perspective, a work like this one would have been judged not for its originality or meticulousness, but for its artful arrangement of engaging selections of poetry and prose, interspersed with apposite remarks and digressions by the author himself. Parts of the work can be traced (or, rarely, are openly credited) to such earlier works as The Life of ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (Sīrat ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz) attributed to ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 214/829); The History of the Conquest of Egypt (Futūḥ Miṣr) by the latter’s son ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 257/871); The Book of Songs (Kitāb al-Aghānī) of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 356/967); unnamed writings of the well-known Fatimid official al-Muwaffaq ibn al-Khallāl (d. 566/1171); The Eternally Incomparable (Yatīmat al-dahr) and Inimitability and Pithiness (al-Iʿjāz wa-l-ījāz) of al-Thaʿālibī; and (for most of the historical accounts in the first and some in the second chapter) an as-yet-unidentified work against non-Muslim officials composed around the time of Saladin’s accession in Egypt (ca. 567/1171). This last source also influenced many, though not all, of the polemical works composed against Christian and Jewish officials in later medieval Egypt.34
The Sword of Ambition has greater value as an historical source for the late Ayyubid period and for inter-communal relations over the longue durée than as a work of literature per se. As a source, it is an intriguing inventory of the ideational resources available to Muslim polemicists in Egypt in the seventh/thirteenth century, and a clue to the potential methods by which, and conditions under which, these were deployed. For example, the stories about inept and illiterate Copts and others (§4.2.1 and following) might serve as a source for the social history of popular stereotypes and of humor in medieval Egypt. The work also reflects changes in the composition and self-conception of the Egyptian state’s administrative corps, given its numerous and vivid incidental references to conditions among both religious specialists (ʿulamāʾ) and secretaries (kuttāb), particularly as these groups related to state power. It is, for instance, instructive to observe the author as a liminal figure, trained as a scholar but employed as a state secretary in an age when membership in these groups increasingly overlapped (more on this below). In his capacity as a scholar-bureaucrat, Ibn al-Nābulusī uses the issue of Coptic officials to mount subtle critiques of state power, as where (§2.4.1) he attributes the standing state monopoly on the mineral natron to a Coptic plot that dated from Abbasid times, implying that this un-Islamic monopoly should be rescinded. Finally, the work is of value in that it preserves numerous earlier passages, some of which have been lost or survive only in much later sources. For example, Ibn al-Nābulusī includes long and entertaining anecdotes in §§2.9.1–3 that preserve parts of the work of al-Muwaffaq ibn al-Khallāl, otherwise found only later and in different forms in the works of the official Ghāzī ibn Aḥmad ibn al-Wāsiṭī (d. 712/1312) and the historian al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442).
In The Sword of Ambition’s anthologizing portions, the author’s choices were guided by subject matter rather than literary artistry; even in sections (notably Chapter Three) that present outstanding examples of poetry and prose produced by secretaries, these appear invariably in the vein of bons mots. This is not surprising in view of Ibn al-Nābulusī’s professional background. Although he wrote in praise of refined literature (adab, §3.2.1), Ibn al-Nābulusī was in fact a bureaucrat and religious scholar of ordinary rank who does not seem to have been much noted as a littérateur. Ibn al-Nābulusī’s lifelong involvement in the competitive worlds of scholarship and court life, along with his weighty family responsibilities, may have forced him to subordinate his literary aspirations to the more quotidian tastes of the audience he needed to sway.
It will be worthwhile briefly to consider The Sword of Ambition alongside other premodern literary productions of a similar stripe. To the classicist, for example, it may recall the polemics of the Neo-Platonist philosopher and Christian bishop Synesius of Cyrene (d. ca. AD 414) against politically influential “barbarians,” primarily Goths, in De Regno and De Providentia. Synesius’s opposition to powerful Gothic generals and courtiers did not arise from Roman chauvinism alone; it had an additional, ideational aspect. “Let all be excluded from magistracies,” Synesius wrote in De Regno, “and kept away from the privileges of the council who are ashamed of all that has been sacred to the Romans from olden times, and has been so esteemed. Of a truth both Themis, herself sacred to the Senate, and the god of our battle-line must I think, cover their faces when the man with leather jerkin marches in command of those that wear the general’s cloak, and whenever such a one divests himself of the sheepskin in which he was clad to assume the toga.”35 Ibn al-Nābulusī’s own invective urges the exclusion of officials who spurned symbols revered by Muslims (the Pilgrimage rites, for example, in §2.15.2) and mocks pretenders who dared don the cowl or ṭaylasān, the garment that marked Muslim secretaries and scholars (e.g., §4.2.9).
Well after Ibn al-Nābulusī’s lifetime, we find another point of comparison in the work of the Ottoman official and historian Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī (d. 1008/1600), who in his book of advice, Nuṣḥatü s-selāṭīn, plainly intended to secure the dismissal of his rivals by invoking their ethnicity and alleged unsuitability for employment. His larger corpus of writings, like Ibn al-Nābulusī’s, evinces a petulant preoccupation with the sagging standards of state officialdom. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s modern biographer, Cornell Fleischer, has described him as “able, well-educated and far more outspoken than most of his peers,” but also “an embittered bureaucrat … a disappointed man who felt that his abilities had gone unrewarded.”36 Mutatis mutandis, the characterization holds for Ibn al-Nābulusī, who, though a lesser intellect than Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī, channeled his disappointment into similar literary productions.
Notwithstanding its similarity to works of other times and places and its liberal use of earlier sources, The Sword of Ambition is very much the product of a particular moment in the history of Egypt, and indeed of Islamic societies more broadly. It should be noted that Ibn al-Nābulusī’s preoccupation with non-Muslim state officials was widely shared in certain Muslim circles in thirteenth-