Friends of the emir : non-Muslim state officials in premodern Islamic thought /
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 a...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press,
[2019]
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| Series: | Cambridge studies in Islamic civilization.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 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. |
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| Physical Description: | xiv, 361 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-344) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781108496605 1108496601 |