The Sword of Ambition. 'Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi
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a Spy”; Owen, “Scandal in the Egyptian Treasury.” I have benefited, too, from the work of Yossef Rapoport, who generously shared a draft of his introduction to the author’s life.
7 Also pronounced “Ibn al-Nābulsī.” This title could also of course refer to a still earlier forebear. Al-Dimyāṭī’s text refers to our author as “Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān ibn al-Nābulusī” and “al-ʿAlāʾ ibn al-Nābulusī,” indicating that he was in fact known as Ibn al-Nābulusī. Claude Cahen consistently called him “al-Nābulusī” and virtually all subsequent historians (my own earlier publications included) have followed this convention, which should now be abandoned.
8 The prosopographical literature informs us that he was wealthy (perhaps fantastically so) and well connected as well as pious and learned. See al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ, 21:393–396, no. 199; Ibn Rajab, al-Dhayl ʿalā Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābilah, 2:528–38, no. 233.
9 His emigration may have coincided with that of a large number of refugees who fled Frankish rule at around this time (see Sivan, “Réfugiés syro-palestiniens”; Talmon-Heller, “Arabic Sources on Muslim Villagers Under Frankish Rule”).
10 For this account, see Ibn Rajab, al-Dhayl, 2:532–34. For Ibn Nujayyah’s influence over Saladin, who allegedly referred to him as ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ and acted on his advice, see Ibn Rajab, al-Dhayl, 2:531.
11 For various views on the content of madrasah curricula, see Makdisi, Rise of Colleges; Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice; Stewart, “Doctorate of Islamic Law.”
12 It concerns the Prophet’s preferred supplicatory prayer (duʿāʾ) and is found in the canonical books of al-Bukhārī and Muslim (e.g., Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ, 4:2070).
13 Also suggesting an uneasy relationship between madrasah training and state employment is the slanderous accusation leveled at Ibn al-Nābulusī by his rival in a real-estate dispute (on which more below): that he was absent from work, without leave, because he was off studying in one madrasah after another. Muslim officials with scholarly backgrounds had their vulnerabilities, too.
14 Cahen and Becker, “Kitāb lumaʿ al-qawānīn,” 59, drawn to my attention by Yossef Rapoport.
15 Al-Maqrīzī, al-Mawāʿiẓ, vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 678, drawn to my attention by Yossef Rapoport.
16 For this information and what follows, see Cahen and Becker, “Kitāb lumaʿ al-qawānīn,” 36–44.
17 On al-Asʿad: Cahen and Becker, “Kitāb lumaʿ al-qawānīn,” 40 n. 15. He was to become vizier to the first Mamluk sultan, al-Muʿizz. This Nūr al-Dīn was the son of the high emir Fakhr al-Dīn ibn al-Shaykh (d. 647/1250).
18 For a strikingly similar administrative maneuver performed against a Muslim by a Christian official, supposedly in the early Abbasid period, see below in The Sword of Ambition, §1.9.1.
19 Cahen and Becker, “Kitāb lumaʿ al-qawānīn,” 43.
20 Cahen and Becker, “Kitāb lumaʿ al-qawānīn,” 61–64.
21 “Rural Society in Medieval Islam,” by Yossef Rapoport and Ido Shahar, accessed July 29, 2014, http://www2.history.qmul.ac.uk/ ruralsocietyislam. For a full study of this work we must await the forthcoming publication by Yossef Rapoport.
22 My hypothesis seems the most plausible way to construe the notion, conveyed in the title, of “victory over” certain other Muslims who ally with non-Muslims. The term istiʿānah is used most often in the context of alliance in warfare. For administrative employment the terms istiʿmāl and istiktāb are more common. See al-Maqrīzī, A History of the Ayyubid Sultans of Egypt, 262–64.
23 Cahen and Becker, “Kitāb lumaʿ al-qawānīn,” 31–34.
24 See, e.g., Cahen and Becker, “Kitāb lumaʿ al-qawānīn,” 34, and below in The Sword of Ambition, §0.3.
25 Al-Maqrīzī, al-Mawāʿiẓ, 1:231; 2:112.
26 These lines of poetry were reproduced by al-Yūnīnī in his entry on Ibn al-Nābulusī, which is dependent upon that of al-Dimyāṭī: al-Yūnīnī, Dhayl mirʾāt al-zamān, 1:504–5. For another brief sample of Ibn al-Nābulusī’s poetry, see al-Madanī, Anwār al-rabīʿ, 5:251–2.
27 On the ghiyār, see Yarbrough, “Origins of the ghiyār.”
28 On possible layers in the Lumaʿ, see Cahen and Becker, “Kitāb lumaʿ al-qawānīn,” 122f. For the same in the Iẓhār, see the editor Moritz’s introduction to Ibn al-Nābulusī, Description du Faiyoum, ii (not paginated).
29 Cahen, “Histoires coptes,” 134.
30 As Cahen wrote, “Il est surtout amusant de voir comment l’auteur utilise pour les besoins de sa cause n’importe quel épisode” (“It is above all amusing to see how the author cites all manner of episodes to make his case.”) (“Histoires coptes,” 134).
31 Al-Maqrīzī, History of the Ayyubid Sultans, 294–95; al-Makīn, Chronique, 85.
32 For an example of a passage in an advice work against non-Muslim officials being read out loud to a Mamluk sultan about fifty years later, see Yarbrough, “A Rather Small Genre.” The Luminous Rules, written shortly after The Sword of Ambition and for the same patron, was expressly presented as naṣīḥah.
33 On these works, their interrelationship, and the milieus that produced them, see el-Leithy, “Sufis, Copts, and the Politics of Piety”; Yarbrough, “A Rather Small Genre.”
34 For the unidentified source and its heirs, see Yarbrough, “A Rather Small Genre.”
35 Synesius, Essays and hymns, 2:135. A general study is Cameron and Long, Barbarians and Politics.
36 ʿĀlī, Nuṣḥatü s-selāṭīn; Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 8–9.
37 A few of the relatively recent studies of non-Muslim state officials and doctors are: Abele, Der politisch-gesellschaftliche Einfluss der nestorianischen Ärzte; Cabrol, Les secrétaires nestoriens à Bagdad; Cheikho and Héchaïmé, Wuzarāʾ al-Naṣrāniyyah; Hutait, “The Position of the Copts in Mamluk Administration”; Mazor, “Jewish Court Physicians in the Mamluk Sultanate”; Samir, “The Role of Christians in the Fāṭimid Government Services”; Sirry, “The Public Role of Dhimmīs”; Stillman, “The Emergence … of the Sephardi Courtier Class.”
38 For the beginnings of this discourse, see Yarbrough, “Upholding God’s Rule.”
39 This phase is traditionally known as the “Sunni revival.” This term has been criticized for presuming a continuity between late-medieval Sunni Islam and the pre–tenth-century ideological progenitors to which it traced its own genealogy. See for example Berkey, The Formation of Islam, 189–202.
40 For a rich selection of studies on this development, see Stewart, “The Maqāmāt,” 232 n. 43. See also Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives; Mallett, Popular Muslim Reactions.
41 For these developments in general, see Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice; Ephrat, A Learned Society.
42 Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 2:375.
43 Leiser, “The Madrasa and the Islamization of the Middle East”; Yarbrough, “The Madrasa and the Non-Muslims of Thirteenth-Century Egypt.”
44 For a near-comprehensive list of modern scholarship that refers to the work, see Yarbrough, “ʿUthmān b. Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī.” To this list should be added a few works in Arabic, including: Sayyid, al-Dawlah al-Fāṭimiyyah