The Sword of Ambition. 'Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi
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malfeasance of rural and Coptic officials is incalculably vast and gravely pernicious. I have surveyed this topic elsewhere, however: in a book that I wrote and presented to the prosperous royal treasuries of Sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ. Entitled The Book of Unsheathed Ambition to Take Back What is in the Dhimmis’ Possession,1 it shows how incredible it is that the rustics and the Copts should be trusted or exercise leadership, for the simple reason that meanness and perfidy are ingrained in their natures.
—ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī, A Few Luminous Rules for Egypt’s Administrative Offices2
Thus did our author, ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī, describe The Sword of Ambition some time after he composed it, at a low point in his life, around the year 640/1242. In the book’s conclusion (§4.4.2), he unburdened himself to the reader—whom he envisioned as no less a personage than the Ayyubid sultan himself—of some piteous personal information. He and his fifty-two children and grandchildren were dependent on the dwindling rent from a dilapidated property that his father had left them.3 Social conventions in Cairo obliged them to put on a cheerful face for friends and neighbors, but within their own walls the mood was grim.4 They were down to just two Greek slaves—low-grade slaves at that—and three bedraggled riding animals. Yet Ibn al-Nābulusī eagerly informed the sultan that his prospects had not always looked so bleak. At one time, when he had been overseer of the tax offices in all the land of Egypt, his household had enjoyed the services of ten slaves and sixteen horses and mules. He had spent lavishly on them as well as on clothing, as befitted a high official. In order to sustain this lifestyle without compromising his professional integrity, he had been obliged to sell family property in Syria for the hefty sum of five thousand gold coins. After such sacrifices, he bitterly concluded, the reason for his current poverty was that he had remained honest when handling money.
Ibn al-Nābulusī’s account of his own career contrasted sharply with the patterns that he observed in the careers of the Coptic Christian (and convert) officials employed by the Ayyubid state. Whereas he had been powerful and ended up poor, it seemed to him that even the pettiest Coptic bureaucrat rapidly amassed wealth to spare. The explanation for the contrast was clear to him: the Coptic officials were corrupt. No less clear was the remedy: the Copts should be dismissed from their positions and stripped of their ill-gotten wealth. At the same time, he should be granted an official position and a stipend to match. It was to these ends that Ibn al-Nābulusī directed his literary energies, interweaving his own exhortation with a curious assortment of excerpts from earlier sources to compose the present book, to which he gave the rhyming title Tajrīd sayf al-himmah li-stikhrāj mā fī dhimmat al-dhimmah – The Sword of Ambition, or, more literally, Unsheathing Ambition’s Sword to Extract What the Dhimmis Hoard.
THE AUTHOR
Ibn al-Nābulusī’s full name, according to one of his students, a certain al-Dimyāṭī, was ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Khālid ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Salm5 al-Qurashī, al-Nābulusī (of Nablus) by extraction (al-maḥtid), al-Miṣrī (of Cairo) in birth, life, and death. The same source reports that he was born on the nineteenth of Dhū l-Ḥijjah 588 [December 26, 1192]—thus he wrote The Sword of Ambition at the age of about fifty.6 His connection to the city of Nablus in Palestine was through his father’s family. Although we cannot be certain when they moved to Egypt, it seems likely to have been during his father ʿAlam al-Dīn Ibrāhīm’s life, inasmuch as Ibn al-Nābulusī’s name meant “son of the man from Nablus,”7 and since he still maintained control of property in Syria. We know little about his father, who is described in the sources as a judge (qāḍī), an honorific title that should not necessarily be taken literally; we can be certain only that he was a professional witness or notary (ʿadl). Ibn al-Nābulusī’s maternal grandfather, the Ḥanbalī jurist and preacher Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Najā al-Anṣārī (508/1114–1115 to 599/1203), known as Ibn Nujayyah, is better known.8 He, too, had come to Egypt from Syria and, like his grandson Ibn al-Nābulusī, made it his business to exhort Egypt’s military rulers to godliness.9 Ibn Nujayyah served as an ambassador to Baghdad on behalf of the Zangid ruler Nūr al-Dīn in 564/1168–69. In The Sword of Ambition (§2.14.3), we find him remonstrating with the Fatimid vizier Ṭalāʾiʿ ibn Ruzzīk about a Christian official called Ibn Dukhān, who in addition to being corrupt and seditious also happened to be obstructing the payment of Ibn Nujayyah’s government stipend. From other sources, we learn that Ibn Nujayyah played a leading role in sniffing out the conspiracy to restore the Fatimid dynasty in which the famous poet ʿUmārah ibn Ḥamzah was involved (one of ʿUmārah’s many poems against Ibn Dukhān features in The Sword of Ambition, §2.14.4). After pretending to go along with the plot, Ibn Nujayyah reported it to Saladin, with whom he enjoyed considerable influence, in exchange for the property of one of the conspirators. ʿUmārah and the others were executed.10
Ibn al-Nābulusī had, then, a family heritage that was noteworthy for its ties to both Islamic scholarship and state power. According to his own testimony in The Sword of Ambition (§3.2.34), he spent his youth pursuing a law-college (madrasah) curriculum that must have focused on Islamic law, quite possibly in the very Nābulusiyyah Madrasah that his father had established.11 His student, al-Dimyāṭī, notes that he followed the Shāfiʿī legal rite (madhhab). We also know that he heard and later narrated Prophetic Hadith; al-Dimyāṭī reproduces a hadith that he transmitted.12 The same passage of The Sword of Ambition that alludes to his law-college education strongly implies that he and his contemporaries did not view it as a springboard to state service, but on the contrary as quite distinct from the formation expected of a secretary (kātib), though it was of course standard for a judge (qāḍī), mosque preacher (khaṭīb), or other holder of an overtly religious office.13 Nevertheless, early in the reign of the Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil (r. 615–35/1218–38), through the intercession of a patron and thanks to his own talents and his show of reluctance to accept employment, Ibn al-Nābulusī became a state official. One office that he mentions explicitly from this period of his life is the directorship of the Royal Guesthouse (dār al-ḍiyāfah).14 Sultan al-Kāmil promoted him to a series of progressively more important posts. Eventually, according to his own report as well as that of al-Maqrīzī,15 he became overseer or auditor (nāẓir) of the tax administration in virtually all of Egypt, a position that he had urged his patron to create. In about 634/1237, however, he fell out of favor with al-Kāmil. This event, as he tells it, was due to the machinations of an Ayyubid emir who coveted a house that he owned beside the Nile in Giza.16 The house, called Dār al-Malik (or al-Mulk), was part of the property that had been granted to his maternal grandfather, Ibn Nujayyah, by Saladin.
It is to the subsequent nadir in Ibn al-Nābulusī’s career that we owe The Sword of Ambition. Another of his works, Lumaʿ al-qawānīn al-muḍiyyah fī dawāwīn al-diyār al-miṣriyyah (A Few Luminous Rules for Egypt’s Administrative Offices, cited at the beginning of this Introduction), was drafted some time afterward and offers additional biographical clues to the context of The Sword of Ambition. For instance, it is evident from information in the Luminous Rules that Coptic Christians or converts played prominent roles in the real-estate dispute in which Ibn al-Nābulusī lost his high post in the administration, not to mention his riverfront estate. Our author tells the story in his typical wounded way. As he engaged in reluctant negotiations with the powerful emir Nūr al-Dīn over the price of the estate, which the latter had espied and sworn to possess, a powerful converted Copt, al-Asʿad al-Fāʾizī, sided vocally with Nūr al-Dīn.17 Later, after Ibn al-Nābulusī and then Nūr al-Dīn himself had lost control of the property, the same al-Asʿad purchased it from its shadow owner for a song and transferred it to the charitable endowments of the deceased sultan al-Kāmil.18 Ibn al-Nābulusī later implored the current sultan, al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ (r. 637–47/1240–49), to return the estate to him, describing the hardships that its loss had inflicted upon his family. Having lost their spot on the water, they suffered the indignity of day-tripping: “Now the children and I have