"The Vicegerent of God, From Him We Expect Rain": The Incorporation of The Pre-Islamic State in Early Islamic Political Culture

The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain:
The Incorporation of the Pre-Islamic State

in Early Islamic Political Culture
Linda T. Darling
University of Arizona
The Islamic historical narrative indicates a sharp break between the age of ignorance (jhiliyya) and the age of Islam that extends beyond religion and ethics
to politics and culture. This article contributes to the scholarly effort to refute
that break by examining an aspect of continuity in political thought, the Circle
of Justice, a shorthand description of the organization of the state in the Middle
East since ancient times. The stereotype sees the Circle as a Persian product; this
article shows that the Circle of Justice emerged millennia before the Persians, that
the Persians were actually slow to make it their own, that aspects of it were part
of Arabic culture before Islam, and that many people other than Persian scribes
quoted or used it in the early Islamic centuries. Examining ancient cuneiform royal
inscriptions, Pahlavi documents, the poetry addressed to Umayyad and Abbsid
rulers, and early works of history and political thought, the article traces the Circles ideas down through the centuries until their encapsulation in the form we
know today, the earliest version of which is found in the work of the historian and
adab writer Ibn Qutayba.
The Umayyads Abd al-Malik (r. 685705) and his two successors were among the Islamic
caliphs commonly expected to bring rain. This ancient attribute of kingship symbolized the
rulers responsibility to provide prosperity to his people so that they could provide revenue
to the state. The interdependence between kings and peoples was a characteristic feature of
Middle Eastern states throughout millennia and across changes of religion and language. The
provision of water and bountiful crops was only the beginning. Rulers also had to supply
protection and justice, while the people offered submission and economic support in the form
of taxes. This political relationship, and the state structures that embodied it, were articulated
and summarized in the ninth-century saying quoted by Ibn Qutayba and known as the Circle
of Justice: There can be no government without men, no men without money, no money
without prosperity, and no prosperity without justice and good government.1
This paper traces the political concept of the Circle of Justice from its pre-Islamic beginnings through the ancient empires and the culture of the Arabs to its articulation by Ibn
Qutayba. The stereotype in most Western literature holds that the Circle was a Persian idea,
alien to Islamic concepts of state, a kernel of derangement, as H. A. R. Gibb insisted.2
The Persians, however, did not originate it, nor were they the first to transmit it. Its elements
1. Ibn Qutayba, Kitb Uyn al-akhbr (Cairo: Dr al-Kutub al-Miriyya, 192530), 1: 9; Bernard Lewis,
Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (New York 1973), 1: 185. The Circle of Justice was embodied not just in Ibn Qutaybas words but in the institutional relationships they refer to. As an Ottoman
historian I address this issue because of the significance of Muslim monarchy in world history and the inadequacy
of Persian as a label for it.
2. H. A. R. Gibb, An Interpretation of Islamic History, in Studies on the Civilization of Islam, ed. S. J. Shaw
and W. K. Polk (Boston: Beacon, 1962), 14.
Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)
407
408
appear together in still older Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian texts, and the Persians
themselves appear to have adopted their political ideas from the Median and Babylonian
empires they conquered.3 Although many ulema condemned the Circle as a foreign concept,
the monarchy it described was known in Arabia before the rise of Islam and the growth of
Perso-Islamic political culture. Its foreignness has been suggested as the reason that Muslims did not embrace monarchy thoroughly enough to create a workable Islamic politics;
however, religious thought in Islambased, as Marshall Hodgson showed, on populist and
anti-aristocratic principlesinitially wrote off all government as a priori unjust.4 The concepts of the Circle coexisted with this judgment and eventually modified it.
Muslim ideology posited a sharp break between the era of the revelation of Islam and
everything that came before it, so direct textual links between ancient and Islamic ideas
of kingship and uses of the Circle of Justice cannot be traced. Nevertheless, the conquest
inaugurated a civilizational process in which Arabs and non-Arabs together reconceptualized and reworked the legacy of the past within the framework of Islam.5 This process gave
Islamicate civilization a universal appeal it might not otherwise have had, although the mere
fact that this argument must be made reveals the extent of Arab-Islamic cultural hegemony.6
The conquest was less a destruction and replacement of Mesopotamian civilization than an
incorporation of the existing cultures into a new Arabic and Islamic framework. It has been
treated as a unique event, and in some respects it was, but in many ways it followed the
pattern of prior conquests in the region. Viewed from the Fertile Crescent, one more largely
pastoral group from a peripheral society invaded Mesopotamia with a new faith and set of
customs to begin the process of acculturation yet again. Like other ancient Mesopotamian
conquerors, the new invaders took advantage of the disruption of a longstanding stable territorial division (this time by the Roman-Persian wars) and the fortuitous devastation of the
plague to gain control of revenue sources and trade routes.7 The resulting economic, ethnic,
and ideological changes became permanent features of the region.
The relationship between pre-Islamic cultures and the tenets of Islam changed over time.
At first, measures taken by the early community in line with ancient concepts of state were
assimilated into Islamic law as part of the normative practice (sunna) of the early Muslims.
When the Muslims redefined the sunna to mean only the practice of the Prophet, existing
governmental practices began to be seen as conflicting with political values derived from
3. For this history, see Linda T. Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East:
The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (London: Routledge, 2013).
4. Marshall G. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1974), 1: 12837. Also Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 57, 71, 8587; Franz Rosenthal, Political Justice and the Just Ruler,
Israel Oriental Studies 10 (1983): 96.
5. See Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
2010), 10618. It is difficult to decide what to call this conquest. Donner and Suliman Bashear both argue that for
about the first hundred years, the conquerors did not possess an Islamic identity as we know it from later documents.
Donner relates that the initial conquering army contained numerous Christians, but the second phase of expansion
under Abd al-Malik exhibited a more Islamic character (ibid., 176, 196, 2023, 205, 221). He sees the conquerors as
united by a common religious and moral enthusiasm that transcended doctrinal divisions, while Bashear (Arabs and
Others in Early Islam [Princeton: Darwin, 1997], 116, 118) believes they were united by a common Arab culture.
Certainly, as the conquerors pushed beyond the peninsula and moved into areas previously uninhabited by Arabic
speakers, Islamic ideology developed and linguistic and cultural ties gained importance.
6. Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), 35.
7. Mogens Trolle Larsen, The Tradition of Empire in Mesopotamia, in Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires, ed. M. T. Larsen (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1979), 75103; Michael G. Morony,
Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), 50726.
Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain
409
Muammads reported behavior and regarded as more authentically Islamic.8 The Muslims
then ascribed the reappearance of ancient Mesopotamian ideals of governance in Islamic
political thought to the conquest of Persia and its imperial system, the emergence of a scribal
class of Persian origin, and the creation of a Persian-influenced Arabic literature. Maintaining its Persian cultural trappings allowed proponents of imperial government to endow it
with the aura of success and permanence associated with the Sasanian empire, but permitted
opponents to stigmatize it as foreign to Islam, which verdict must have owed a great deal
to the vehemence with which the community rejected the claim attributed to Uthmn b.
Affn, that the caliphs possessed such a characteristic feature of Mesopotamian kingship as
divine appointment.9 Ancient political traditions did, however, appear in early Arabic writings unattributed to Persian precedents and treated as common knowledge, as already part
of Arabic culture. Even in pre-Islamic poetry the concept of justice had already shifted from
tribal egalitarianism to a restoration dispensed by authorities.10 This is clearly the Circles
concept of justice, too; unlike those who see the Iranian tradition as an influence from
outside Islam, I see this important part of it as already inside. Explicitly Persian political
ideas overlaid an existing Arabic conceptual base and were easily adapted to Islamic purposes, however strongly Islamic ideology may have protested such adaptations.
Earlier studies of the Circle of Justice have referred to Hammurabis inscriptions, 11 but
this paper consults a wider range of sources and traces the concepts history farther back and
in greater detail, providing the context that allowed the Circle to form an integral part of the
culture rather than an exotic import, despite its association with rejected ideas such as divine
kingship. The study also examines how this concept was expressed in early Islamic political
culture, in court poetry and advice to rulers, and in the behavior of kings and subjects. It
brings together recent scholarship (and some not so recent) on the pre-Islamic and early
Islamic periods, joining other publications that challenge the standard Islamic narrative of
origins by placing the rise of Islam in a wider context than the ijz.12 It posits that ancient
political concepts provided a degree of continuity for a people undergoing great religious and
cultural changes, a continuity obscured by the Muslim communitys arguments around the
establishment of the caliphate, and it traces that continuity through governmental practices
and literary development. For the sake of brevity it focuses largely on one aspect of the
Circle, the rulers responsibility to provide prosperity and justice, notably in the form of the
provision of water in a dry climate.
pre-islamic origins
Among the most ancient texts of the Middle East we can find royal inscriptions that
acknowledge the kings responsibility to contribute to the prosperity and flourishing of his
8. Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden: Brill, 19602004, hereafter EI2), s.v. nn, iii, Financial and
Public Administration; Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam: An Introductory Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), 22.
9. Alfred von Kremer, The Orient under the Caliphs (Beirut: United Publishers, 1973), 2425; Ab Jafar
al-abar, The History of al-abar (hereafter History), vol. 15: The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, tr. R. Stephen
Humphreys (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), 19697.
10. Mohammed A. Bamyeh, The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse (Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1999), 24547; cf. Haim Gerber, Islamic Law and Culture, 16001840 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 50.
11. Ysuf Kh jib, Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes, tr.
R. Dankoff (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), 5.
12. Besides Bashear 1997 and Donner 2010 (supra, n. 5), see Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It:
A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton: Darwin, 1997).
410
land; they often represented him as the sun or the rain, the sources of fertility.13 This imperial
ideology can be seen in Sumerian royal inscriptions as early as ca. 2350 b.c.e. Lugalzagesi,
king of the city-state of Uruk, emphasized both the rulers domination of the land and his
responsibility for the people:
When Enlil, king [god] of all lands, gave to Lugalzagesi the kingship of the nation, directed all
the eyes of the land obediently toward him, put all the lands at his feet, and from east to west
made them subject to him; then, from the Lower Sea, along the Tigris and Euphrates to the
Upper Sea, he put their routes in good order for him. From east to west, Enlil permitted him
no rival; under him the lands rested contentedly, the people made merry, and the suzerains of
Sumer and rulers of other lands conceded sovereignty to him at Uruk. [...] Under me, may the
lands rest contentedly, may the populace become as widespread as the grass, may the nipples of
heaven function properly, and the people experience prosperity [...] may I always be the leading shepherd.14
Divine favor and right leadership led to military victory, and victory to the fruitfulness of the
land and the prosperity of the people under the rulers shepherding care.
The provision of welfare did not mean merely satisfying material needs but also granting
justice for the ruled, as shown in the inscriptions of Lugalzagesis contemporary, Urukagina
of Lagash (ca. 2350), who made a binding agreement with the god Ningirsu that he would
never subject the orphan or widow to the powerful.15 The texts describing Urukaginas
reforms became classic works of statecraft and were recopied many times in later centuries. 16
Sumerian kings were divinely chosen and given power in order to bring unity, order, justice,
and provision to the people so that they in turn would worship, provide for, and obey the
gods.17 Such concepts were not visible in the inscriptions left by the Akkadian invaders of
23342154 b.c.e., but they reappeared after the restoration of Sumerian rule under Gudea,
king of Lagash (r. 21432124), whose recorded activities built on the sense of a causal connection among the righteousness of king and people, the gods favor, prosperity, and justice
affirmed earlier by Urukagina.18 During the Ur III dynasty (21122006 b.c.e.), a period of
wealth and power, the rulers followed Gudeas model; Shulgi (r. 20952047), for example,
stated that he was born of a goddess to bring prosperity, to fill the granaries of the Land
with barley, to stock the treasuries of the Land with goods [...] To let justice never come to
an end.19
13. H. P. LOrange, Studies on the Iconography of Cosmic Kingship in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1953); Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948); Aziz al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power
and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997).
14. Jerrold S. Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions (New Haven: AOS, 1986), 94. The nipples of heaven were
rain-bearing clouds, and Lugalzagesi performed social functions attributed to God in the Hebrew Psalms.
15. Douglas R. Frayne, Presargonic Period (27002350 BC) (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008), 25965.
Some authorities read Urukagina as Uruinimgina. See F. Charles Fensham, Widow, Orphan, and the Poor in
Ancient Near Eastern Legal and Wisdom Literature, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 21 (1962): 12939; Zhi Yang,
King of Justice, Aula Orientalia 9 (1991): 24546.
16. See Blahoslav Hruka, Die Reformtexte Urukaginas: Der versptete Versuch einer Konsolidierung des
Stadtstaates von Laga, in Le palais et la royaut (archologie et civilisation), ed. P. Garelli (Paris: Paul Geuthner,
1974), 153.
17. Marie-Joseph Seux, pithtes royales akkadiennes et sumriennes (Paris: Letouzey et An, 1967), 19,
2526.
18. Dietz Otto Edzard, Gudea and His Dynasty (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), 7879, 98; Thorkild
Jacobsen, The Harps That Once ... : Sumerian Poetry in Translation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 12728.
19. Unattributed quotation, from Jacob Klein, Shulgi of Ur: King of a Neo-Sumerian Empire, in Civilizations
of the Ancient Near East, ed. J. M. Sasson, vol. 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), 851.
411
The collapse of the Ur III dynasty brought little in the way of cultural change. Rulers in
successive Mesopotamian capitals left inscriptions associating care for the people with justice, often expressed through the metaphor of the king as shepherd and exemplified by the
digging of canals and the provision of water. Enlil-bani of Isin (r. 18601837), the shepherd
who makes everything abundant for Nippur, asserted, I established justice in Nippur. I
made righteousness appear [...] I made anybody with a complaint a taboo thing.20 NurAdad of Larsa (r. 18651850) claimed: I enlarged the cattle pens and sheepfolds. I made
oil and butter abundant. I had my people eat food of all kinds, and drink abundant water. I
destroyed the brigand, the wicked, and the evil-doer in their midst. I made the weak, widow,
and orphan content.21 His son Sin-iddinam of Larsa (r. 18491843), in order to establish
good water for my city and land, became the one who dug the Tigris, the broad river, who
supplied good water, abundance without end for his city and land.22 Warad-Sin of Larsa (r.
18341823) declared that the gods word had purely moved him to care for the living ones
like a shepherd, to make their land safe, to establish water in their midst....23 His brother
Rim-Sin of Larsa (r. 18221763) boasted, I, Rim-Sin [...] dug that canal, [...] established
abundant water in its intake, and filled its reservoir. [...] I restored the cities and villages. I
established there, for my numerous people, food to eat and water to drink.24
Babylonian royal ideology was heir to the Sumerian: as servants of the gods kings provided for the people. The great Hammurabi of Babylon (r. 17921750) called himself the
shepherd and claimed divine appointment to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy
the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak.25 Hammurabi informed
posterity that when he built a city wall, I dug its canal and provided perpetual water for its
land. I heaped up plenty and abundance.26 To one of his canals he gave the name Hammurabi Is the Abundance of the People.27 Hammurabis son Samsu-iluna (r. 17491712) reiterated that the god gave to me [...] the totality of the lands to shepherd and [...] to make
his nation lie down in pastures and to lead his extensive people in well-being, forever.28
While the evidence for Babylonian political ideology grows thin in the mid-second millennium, we are better informed on the society of Assyria to the north. The inscriptions
of the Assyrian kings mainly extolled their divinely guided conquests, but the kings did
call themselves shepherds of the people.29 Some kings, especially in the later Neo-Assyrian
period, also recorded their construction of cities and palaces and their channeling of water
and provision of prosperity. When Tukulti-Ninurta (r. 12441208) built the city of KarTukulti-Ninurta, he cut a wide path for a stream which supports life in the land and which
20. Douglas R. Frayne, ed., Old Babylonian Period (20031595 BC) (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1990),
78, 79, 8081, 82, 85, 87, 8990. For similar statements by Lipit-Ishtar, see ibid., 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 56.
21. Ibid., 139, 148.
22. Ibid., 159, 176.
23. Ibid., 242, 248.
24. Ibid., 29293.
25. James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1955), 164.
26. Frayne, Old Babylonian Period, 336.
27. Ibid., 341.
28. Ibid., 381. For the title of shepherd from the third millennium through the sixth century, see Seux, pithtes,
24350; for Sumerian examples, ibid., 44142.
29. Mogens Trolle Larsen, The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies (Copenhagen: Akademisk, 1976),
11415; Samuel M. Paley, King of the World: Ashur-nasir-pal II of Assyria, 883859 B.C. (New York: Brooklyn
Museum, 1976), 1, 20; J. E. Curtis and J. E. Reade, eds., Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British
Museum (London: British Museum, 1995), 39101.
412
provides abundance and named it Canal of Justice.30 Tiglath-Pileser I (r. 11151077)

recorded that he fostered the cultivation and storage of grain and domesticated trees and garden plants from all the known regions of the world in the gardens of Assyria.31 Adad-nirari II
(r. 911891) told posterity that he rebuilt the wall and moat of the city of Assur and repaired
the canal that fed it, planting orchards beside it.32 The inscriptions of Sargon II (r. 721705)
chronicled his provision of water for fields, gardens, and orchards, his raising of crops on
mountain slopes, and his cultivation of waste areas to cause the waters of abundance to rise
high.33 Ashurbanipal (r. 668627) announced that in his time Adad sent down his rains for
me, Ea opened for me his underground waters, [...] during my reign there were prosperity
and abundance, in my years plenty was heaped up.34 And when Sennacherib (r. 704681)
enlarged the city of Nineveh, he built a new wall to protect it and channeled water to it to
increase its prosperity.35 The canal he constructed was about ten miles long and was connected to massive water works spanning the Irq countryside.36 In his inscriptions Sennacherib billed himself as the ruler who digs canals, opens wells, runs irrigation ditches, who
brings plenty and abundance to the wide acres of Assyria, who furnishes water for irrigation
to Assyrias meadows.37
Ancient Mesopotamian wisdom literature described kings and gods as working together
to provide for the poor and the weak and prevent their exploitation.38 The rulers made similar claims: Sargon II was one of many who proclaimed that the creator goddess made his
sovereignty without peer so that the weak might not be oppressed and to assure justice to the
powerless,39 and Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883859) appealed to the sun god in calling himself
the shepherd of the four quarters, who has brought all peoples under one authority, [...]
whose protection spreads like the rays of the sun over his land and who has governed his
people in well-being.40
It was not enough merely to claim a love of justice; kings had an ongoing responsibility to
deliver justice in response to complaints. Cuneiform tablets show that Mesopotamian kings
had regular days when they received appeals from their subjects and dispensed justice.41
Beyond the fair settlement of an individual case, justice in these circumstances implied
30. A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC, 2 vols. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press, 1991), 1: 270, 273, 276.
31. Daniel David Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 192627), 1: 87. See also Mirko Novak, The Artificial Paradise: Programme and Ideology of Royal Gardens, in Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East, ed. S. Parpola and R. M. Whiting, 2 vols. (Helsinki: NeoAssyrian Text Corpus Project, 2002), 2: 44552.
32. Luckenbill, Ancient Records, 1: 123.
33. Ibid., 2: 51, 55, quotation on p. 62.
34. Jack M. Sasson, ed., Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, 4 vols. (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), 1: 408; cf. Seux, pithtes, 237; Grant Frame, Rulers of Babylonia: From the Second Dynasty of Isin to
the End of Assyrian Domination (1157612 BC) (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1995), 226.
35. Long description at Frame, Rulers of Babylonia, 17172.
36. Thorkild Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd, Sennacheribs Aqueduct at Jerwan (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1935).
37. Luckenbill, Ancient Records, 2: 184.
38. Fensham, Widow, Orphan, and the Poor, 13032.
39. Seux, pithtes, 368.
40. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers, 2: 308.
41. R. Frankena, ed., Briefe aus dem British Museum (LIH und CT233) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), items 6, 24,
28, 74; W. H. van Soldt, Letters in the British Museum, Part 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), items 4, 10, 12, 13, 21, 27,
43; W. F. Leemans, King ammurapi as Judge, in Symbolae iuridicae et historicae Martino David dedicatae, ed.
J. A. Ankum et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 2: 10729.
413
a balancing of the social scales between rich and poor, strong and weak. The procedures
employed for handling complaints reappeared in the practices of the Persian and Islamic
empires. Subjects could complain directly to the royal court or indirectly through a provincial
official or judge; rulers sat in judgment at regular intervals to hear individuals or read petitions; and they delegated enforcement to provincial officials and their troops. Petitions from
distant subjects or officials and royal responses were forwarded over the post system, the
royal messenger service. The Babylonian post system was later expanded and maintained by
the Assyrians and succeeding dynasties as an essential tool in the distribution of justice from
the capital throughout the empire.42
The Persian conquest of Babylonia in 539 bc expanded Persian political ideas with the
ideology of the Mesopotamian regimes. Earlier Achaemenid kings had been described in
pastoral terms as rulers of the kingdom, great, having good horses, having good men.43
But when Cyrus II (r. 539530) conquered Babylonia he had himself crowned according to
Mesopotamian rites and gave himself the titles of a Babylonian king.44 Darius I (r. 521486),
whose realm encompassed the whole Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Anatolia, described himself in Assyrian terms as King of Kings, King of countries containing all kinds of men.45
The Persians are usually credited with developing the concept of a world empire as a fusion
of peoples and cultures, but this inclusiveness was already part of Assyrian ideology. The
Assyrians moved people from conquered regions, resettled them in newly opened areas or
in rebuilt cities, allocated fields to them, and counted them with the people of Assyria.46
The Persians adopted and intensified this universality; reliefs in Persepolis, the Achaemenid
capital, showed people from many lands supporting the rulers throne or paying him homage.47 Like the Assyrians, the Persians brought children of the conquered people to staff the
imperial palace, creating a household at the heart of the empire made up of all its peoples, a
practice that reappeared in the Ottoman devirme.48
Persian rulers felt the need to provide for their society, but instead of prosperity they
provided order, regimentation, stability. The Persian class system was quite rigid; the kings
set great store by having everyone and everything in its proper place.49 The king at the top
42. Francis Dvornik, Origins of Intelligence Services: The Ancient Near East, Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Arab Muslim Empires, the Mongol Empire, China, Muscovy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press,
1974); Adam J. Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2007).
43. Inscription of Darius at Persepolis F, in R. G. Kent, Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon, 2nd ed. (New
Haven: AOS, 1953), 14344; cf. 116, 136.
44. Wilhelm Eilers, Le texte cuniforme du Cylindre de Cyrus, in Commmoration Cyrus, hommage universel: Actes du congrs de Shiraz 1971 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 33; Amlie Kuhrt, Usurpation, Conquest and
Ceremonial: From Babylon to Persia, in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed.
D. Cannadine and S. Price (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 50.
45. Darius at Naqsh-i Rustem, in Kent, Old Persian, 138; see Darius at Susa F, ibid., 144. On Darius Is ideology, see C. Herrenschmidt, Dsignation de lempire et concepts politiques de Darius Ier daprs ses inscriptions
en vieux-perse, Studia Iranica 5 (1976): 3365; Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art:
Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979).
46. Luckenbill, Ancient Records, 1: 270, 2: 44; Grayson, Assyrian Rulers, 1: 2629.
47. Donald N. Wilber, Persepolis: The Archaeology of Parsa, Seat of the Persian Kings (rev. ed., Princeton:
Darwin, 1989), esp. 72100, plates 1823.
48. Pierre Briant, Histoire de lempire perse de Cyrus Alexandre (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 2013; Muhammad
Dandamayev, Achaemenid Babylonia, in Ancient Mesopotamia, Socio-Economic History: A Collection of Studies
by Soviet Scholars (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), 309.
49. Darius at Behistun, tr. Rdiger Schmitt, The Bisitun Inscriptions of Darius the Great: Old Persian Text
(London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1991), 53; see Darius at Susa E, in Kent, Old Persian, 142.
414
of the social pyramid was far above his subjectsliterally so in some imperial art.50 This
social rigidity, however, was combined with a concern for the welfare of the whole society. The Avesta praised agriculture and reclamation of wastelands and made the king, the
Feeder, responsible for the cultivation of the land. When God was asked where the earth is
gladdened He was said to respond: Wherever grain is most produced, [...] wherever arid
land is changed into watered and marshy into dry land.51 The Achaemenid government followed Mesopotamian precedents, investing substantially in irrigation works, completing a
canal linking the Nile with the Red Sea, and involving itself in the agriculture and trade of
the empire.52 Coins and seals portrayed the king as a gardener, whose gardens housed trees,
plants, and animals from all corners of the empire; the subject peoples were symbolically
invited to participate in the sumptuousness and variety of the kings table.53 Persian gardens
mirrored paradise, but they also brought fertility to the land.
These political relationships outlasted Achaemenid rule to become part of the ideology
of subsequent conquerors. The Seleucid kings (330140), heirs of Alexander the Great, deified themselves for the sake of their Greek subjects, but for the sake of their Mesopotamian
subjects they became providers, portraying themselves as shepherds.54 They founded cities,
established agricultural colonies, and extended the irrigation works, cultivating exotic new
plants.55 In contrast, the Arsacids (171 b.c.a.d. 224), Parthian nomads from eastern Iran,
developed an aristocratic political culture that altered the character of their constructions.
Although they, too, built cities and irrigation works and contributed to agricultural prosperity,
their literature stripped prosperity and justice of their institutional supports and personalized
them, portraying them as issuing from the wisdom and virtue of heroic monarchs rather than
from well-regulated administrative systems and bureaucratic oversight.56
The Sasanians (224637) presided over the restoration of an imagined Persian past
based on Parthian foundations, but they came from Persis (Frs), where the Achaemenid governmental heritage remained accessible. They ascribed their political ideas to eastern Iranian
monarchs, symbolizing the victory and wealth brought by divine favor in hunting scenes,
and the aristocratic hierarchy remained a powerful political force.57 Their governing prac50. Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Persia (New York: The New American Library/Mentor, 1963), 77, 121;
T. Cuyler Young Jr., The Consolidation of the Empire and Its Limits of Growth under Darius and Xerxes, in Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 4: Persia, Greece and the Western Mediterranean, c. 525 to 479 B.C., ed. J. Boardman
et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 8182; Root, King and Kingship, 131, 296.
51. Vendidad, quoted in Ann K. S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia (rpt. London: I.B. Tauris, 1991),
xviiixix.
52. Peter Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environments in the History of the Middle East,
500 B.C. to A.D. 1500 (Odense: Univ. of Copenhagen Museum Tusculanum Press, 1993), 5259.
53. Briant, Histoire, 21315, 226, 246.
54. F. W. Walbank, Monarchies and Monarchic Ideas, in Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 7, pt. 1: The Hellenistic World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 8283.
55. Susan Sherwin-White and Amlie Kuhrt, From Samarkand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid
Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 20, 27, 127, 14344; G. G. Aperghis, The
Seleukid Royal Economy: The Finances and Financial Administration of the Seleukid Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 31, 297, 299300.
56. Richard N. Frye, The History of Ancient Iran (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1984), 216, 21926, 28284; Jsef
Wolski, LEmpire des Arsacides (Louvain: Peeters, 1993), 99108; Malcolm A. R. Colledge, The Parthians (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 6472, 175.
57. Ehsan Yarshater, Were the Sasanians Heirs to the Achaemenids? in La Persia nel medioevo (Rome:
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1971), 51731; Prudence O. Harper and Pieter Meyers, Silver Vessels of the
Sasanian Period, vol. 1: Royal Imagery (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981), 139; Roman Ghirshman,
Iran: Parthians and Sassanians ([London]: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 119. Assyrian reliefs and Islamic court art
415
tices, however, more closely resembled those of the Achaemenids and their Mesopotamian
predecessors: they founded cities, settled war prisoners, extended irrigation, protected trade,
recentralized the empire, and established Zoroastrianism as the doctrine of the state. These
developments were all credited to the first Sasanian king, Ardashr I (r. 224241), but they
actually came into full flower only later; imperial centralization and religious reform seem to
have been instituted more gradually than Sasanian histories depicted.
Although Sasanian justice later became legendary, the concept of justice played a minor
role in political legitimation except in sources attributed to the reign of Khusrau I Anshrvn
(r. 531579). What the Sasanians meant by justice, however, was similar to what the Babylonians and Assyrians had understood it to be: the protection of the realm and the deliverance of
its people from ruin either by oppression or natural disaster. Sasanian ethical texts described
good government as the provision of prosperity; according to the Mng Xrad: Good government is that which maintains and directs a province flourishing, the poor untroubled, and
the law and customs true, and sets aside improper laws and customs.58 The Dnkard defined
an unjust king as one who was unable to deal with his subjects loss of prosperity: If distress
appears everywhere, and if he is incapable of putting an end to it by himself, or if he doesnt
worry about it or try to find a remedy, then that king, who is weak and can neither overcome
the evil nor ameliorate it, is obviously incapable of administering justice in any way, shape,
or form; thus other claimants to the throne must challenge him in the name of justice.59 The
superiority of the king resided uniquely in his capacity to act for the general good of society;
legendarily, he killed dragons, the bringers of drought.60 The Dnkard stated: According to
the teachings of the Good Religion [...] it is the obligation of the ruler [...] to expel misery,
want, anguish, sickness, and infirmity from among the people of his realm.61
Justice gained legitimating power in late Sasanian political ideology during the reign of
Anshrvn. The Book of Deeds or Life of Anshrvn reports a speech emphasizing
interdependence between social groups: If the cultivators do not have what they need to live
and to cultivate their lands, the warriors will perish. The land can only be cultivated with the
surplus remaining in the hands of the peasants.62 Superiority of status was not to become
an excuse for oppression; rather, He who tyrannizes the peasants, who wants to destroy our
protection which constitutes the buttress and the refuge of the weak, does wrong to us.63
Concurrently, the pictures on Sasanian metal vessels began to depict an intrinsic relationship
between royal glory and prosperity.64
depicted the hunting theme for similar purposes. On the rigid class system, see Arthur E. Christensen, LIran sous
les Sassanides, 2nd ed. (Osnabrck: O. Zeller, 1971), 31621.
58. Dn- Marg- Khirad, in Pahlavi Texts, pt. 3, ed. and tr. E. W. West (Oxford: Clarendon, 1885), 43; a
newer Persian translation is A. Tafazzol, Mn-ye xerad (Tehran: s, 1364/1985).
59. The Dinkard, quoted in Arthur E. Christensen, LEmpire des Sassanides: Le peuple, ltat, la cour (Copenhagen: B. Lunos, 1907), 80.
60. Testament of Ardashr, tr. Mario Grignaschi, Quelques spcimens de la littrature sassanide conservs
dans les bibliothques dIstanbul, Journal Asiatique 254 (1966), 77; Jamsheed K. Choksy, Sacral Kingship in
Sasanian Iran, Bulletin of the Asia Institute n.s. 2 (1988): 38; see Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects
of Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).
61. Dnkart, tr. J. P. de Mnasce, Le troisime livre du Dnkart (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1973), 5758. Khusrau
Parviz was compared to the sun, which gladdens the whole earth; Morony, Iraq, 31.
62. Karnamag-i Anshrvn, Grignaschi, Quelques spcimens, 26.
63. Ibid., 23.
64. B. I. Marshak, The Decoration of Some Late Sasanian Silver Vessels and Its Subject-Matter, in The Art
and Archaeology of Ancient Persia: New Light on the Parthian and Sasanian Empires, ed. V. S. Curtis et al. (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 85.
416
Ironically, this heightened awareness emerged just when the productivity of Mesopotamia, on which the empire depended, was declining. Shifts in the rivers entailed frantic work
on the irrigation system, the arrival of the plague may have killed as much as a third of the
working population, and war broke out with Byzantium. To meet the increased demand for
revenue, Anshrvn instituted a series of tax reforms that reassessed the entire realm.65 He
also improved the bureaucracy, sponsored architectural projects, built roads, bridges, and
caravanserais, and funded irrigation works.66 An annual speech addressed to him foreshadowed the Muslims Circle of Justice: O king, wealth flows from taxation; with wealth one
possesses soldiers and the soldiers destroy the enemy, from which results power.67 The
Letter of Tansar preserved a negative summary of the same set of principles: When the
people have become poor, the royal treasury remains empty, the soldier receives no pay, and
the kingdom is lost.68
Muslim writers later ascribed the concept of state encapsulated in the Circle of Justice
to the Persians in general and the Sasanian Ardashr in particular, but it actually originated
nearly three millennia earlier in Mesopotamian inscriptions. It developed gradually over time
as it was assimilated into Assyrian and Persian ideologies, and it was enunciated in full by
the Sasanians late in their regime, during Muammads lifetime. Mesopotamian governmental concepts, filtered through Persian political and social arrangements, were thus available to
Islamic political thought as soon as the Arabs left the peninsula, and probably before.
the arabian conquest: a cultural blending
During the lifetime of the Prophet Muammad state formation was spreading into areas
like the Arabian peninsula that had previously been stateless and tribally organized. The
Arabs on the periphery already had states, but the tribal Arabs around Mecca had not yet been
incorporated; they proudly used a special term for people like themselves who had never
submitted to a king.69 They experienced the conquest as a major political break, and their
experience became normative for Muslim society. They defined political legitimacy either
in terms of succession to Muammad as leader of the Muslim community or in terms of the
traditional role of tribal chief, and the caliphate, their new monarchical institution, initially
fulfilled both roles.70 In creating their state organization, the first Muslims transferred certain
responsibilities granted in other places to the stateincluding protection of the weak and
provision for the needyto the community as a whole and to its individual members. After
65. Karnamag-i Anshrvn, Grignaschi, Quelques spcimens, 1718, 2023.
66. For Sasanian and Achaemenid provision of bridges, roads, and the post system, see Adam Mez, The Renaissance of Islam (rpt. London: Luzac, 1957), 49495, 5012.
67. Grignaschi, Quelques spcimens, 12930.
68. Mary Boyce, tr., The Letter of Tansar (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1968), 49.
According to Boyce, this text appeared in modern Persian in the work of Ibn Isfandiyr, who reworked and translated it from the Arabic translation of the Umayyad scribe Ibn al-Muqaffa, who translated it with comments from
an adaptation of the time of Anshrvn, from a text possibly written in the time of Ardashr I.
69. Ar. laq; Manfred Ullmann, Wrterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1979), 2: 107576; Bernard Lewis, Monarchy in the Middle East, in Middle East Monarchies: The Challenge
of Modernity, ed. J. Kostiner (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 16. Fred Donner (The Early Islamic Conquests
[Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981], 6975, 25153) locates state crystallization under Muammad, but a state
apparatus developed only under Umar.
70. Ann K. S. Lambton, State and Government in Medieval Islam: An Introduction to the Study of Islamic
Political Theory. The Jurists (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 142. Lambton makes the point that juristic theory
formed only one of the three strands of Islamic political thought, and her study clearly reveals its dependence on the
ideas of philosophers and statesmen.
417
Muammads death these responsibilities were gradually reintroduced at the state level, but
some people continued to see them as illegitimate.71 The ulema took on the task of shunning,
limiting, or seeking to control state power. Tribal Arabs rebelled against caliphal rule and
were only reconciled to it by force and by the early caliphs rejection of royal pomp and prerogatives.72 It became ideologically necessary for the Muslims to differentiate their caliphs
from ordinary kings, both in style and in modes of legitimation; the early caliphs adopted a
personalistic style of rule modeled on that of the tribal sheikh. The distinction, however, was
neither total nor permanent: although pre-Islamic norms for the selection and legitimation of
kings were considered unsuitable for an Islamic caliph, the ancient Mesopotamian practices
of royal justice and provision of prosperity became obligatory for all Muslim rulers.
The first century of Arab rule was enough to demonstrate that neither the caliphal nor the
tribal style of governance could adequately control and administer a multicontinental and
multicultural empire. As an Islamicate culture developed in the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamian administrative practices and concepts of kingship appeared among the Muslims, just as
they had emerged among the Persians after their conquest of Babylonia. The story goes, for
example, that Muwiya used to have read to him the histories of Arab and Persian kings.73
Although the caliphate remained the only legitimate form of rule and political discourse continued to employ a caliphal and tribal vocabulary, the nature of the caliphate began to shift
toward kingship. Opponents of the Umayyad dynasty drew an unfavorable contrast between
the elective caliphate and Umayyad kingship, hereditary and tyrannical, but the Quran
itself held a more balanced view, condemning the tyrannical god-king Pharaoh but praising
David, the prophet-king.74 Pastoral Arabs readily incorporated the shepherding aspect of
Mesopotamian kingship; early caliphal art depicted the caliph as a shepherd, responsible for
the provision of blessing and justice. The caliph Uthmn (r. 644656) maintained that God
commanded the imams to be shepherds, and a adth reported that Muammad agreed:
The ruler over mankind is a shepherd over them and as such is responsible for them.75
Gradually, political ideology and institutions expanded to accommodate the concept of the
caliph as a king or emperor.
Mesopotamian-style monarchy, moreover, was not actually foreign to many early Muslims, although the first leaders of the Muslim community came from outside imperial ter
ritory.76 While the ancient kingdoms of southern Mesopotamia had disappeared by early
Islamic times due to the shifting of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and the gradual desertification of the region, their place in the geographical and political landscape was filled by the
Arab kingdom of the Lakhmids at al-ra. Peninsular Arabs had for centuries had military
and diplomatic relations with the Assyrian, Achaemenid, Sasanian, and Roman empires,
71. Gibb, Interpretation, 14; Crone, Slaves on Horses, 6264.

72. John Davis (Libyan Politics: An Account of the Zuwaya and Their Government [London: I. B. Tauris,
1987]) shows how statelessness and anti-state attitudes flow logically from tribal politics. This anti-monarchical
attitude is not unique to Islam but also appears in Hebrew and Greek thought; Jocelyne Dakhlia, Le Divan des rois:
Le politique et le religieux dans lIslam (Paris: Aubier, 1998), 83.
73. Nisar Ahmed Faruqi, Early Muslim Historiography: A Study of Early Transmitters of Arab History from
the Rise of Islam up to the End of Umayyad Period, 612750 A.D. (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1979), 187.
74. Q 38:2526 (tr. Arberry). The Umayyads have been called convenient scapegoats for Islamic societys
inability to institutionalize its own political ideals; H. A. R. Gibb, The Evolution of Government in Early Islam,
in Studies on the Civilization of Islam, ed. S. J. Shaw and W. K. Polk (Boston: Beacon, 1962), 36.
75.Al-abar, History, 15: 6; Ibn Sallm, The Book of Revenue: Kitb al-Amwl, tr. I. A. K. Nyazee (Reading,
UK: Garnet, 2002), 4.
76. Hodgson, Venture, 1: 4143; al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, 64.
418
and many of them had moved into those empires Syrian and Irq territories.77 The Roman
emperor Philip the Arab (r. 244249) came from Syria. Some Arabs had monarchical traditions of their own, in particular those in Syria, Yemen, al-ra, and the Gulf. Poets from the
peninsula ornamented the Arab courts in Syria and al-ra, and Arabs served in the Sasanian bureaucracy and in the Roman and Byzantine governments.78 The Lakhmid region held
numbers of Christians and Zoroastrians whose grandparents had belonged to ancient Mesopotamian religions and who may well have retained some ancient political ideas as well.79 At
various times the Lakhmids controlled large parts of the Arabian peninsula, including if
and Yathrib/Medina, where an Arab king was appointed in the late sixth century.80 Sasanians
and Ethiopians disputed possession of Yemen, where art and culture combined eastern and
western influences.81 Muammad himself visited the kingdom of Yemen and the Arab provinces of the Byzantine empire. The trade routes that ran from Mesopotamia down the Gulf
coast to Oman and India, from the Mediterranean down the Red Sea coast, and from Persia
through Central Arabia to Yemen, some of which dated back to Sumerian times, formed
broad avenues of cultural transmission.82
There were also non-Arabs in the Muslim community from the beginning. In Mecca lived
Persians and adherents of Persian culture, typified in Salmn the Persian.83 Even the Arabs
who had no kings of their own were well acquainted with monarchical traditions: pre-Islamic
poetry contained references to royal culture and a palace imagery attributed to Yemen and
al-ra.84 In the second Islamic century non-Arab Muslims began to outnumber those origi-
77. Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon (556539 BC) (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1989), 17085; Jacques Ryckmans, LInstitution monarchique en Arabie mridionale avant lIslam (Man
et Saba) (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1951); Israel Ephal, The Ancient Arabs: Nomads on the Borders of
the Fertile Crescent, 9th5th Centuries BC (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), 20610; Irfan Shahid, Rome and the
Arabs: A Prolegomena to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984); Wael B.
Hallaq, The Use and Abuse of Evidence: The Question of Provincial and Roman Influences on Early Islamic Law,
JAOS 110 (1990): 7991. For an Arab treaty with the Neo-Assyrian ruler Aurbanipal, see Neo-Assyrian Treaties
and Loyalty Oaths, ed. S. Parpola and K. Watanabe (Helsinki: Helsinki Univ. Press, 1988), 6869. For Arab tribal
contingents in the Roman army, see J. Cantineau, Le Nabaten (rpt. Osnabruck: O. Zeller, 1978), 2: 50.
78. R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 12, 29,
40, 52, 139; Grabar, Formation, 79; Morony, Iraq, 65. For the impact of empires on Arabic literary culture, see C. E.
Bosworth, The Persian Impact on Arabic Literature, in Arabic Literature at the End of the Umayyad Period, ed.
A. F. L. Beeston et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 485.
79. Morony, Iraq, 386400.
80. amd-Allh Mustawf Qazvn, The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, tr. G. Le Strange (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1919), 13; Robert Simon, Meccan Trade and Islam: Problems of Origin and Structure (Budapest: Akadmiai Kiad, 1989), 5657; Michael Lecker, The Levying of Taxes for the Sassanians in Pre-Islamic Medina,
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 27 (2002): 112. The king in Yathrib was called King of the ijz, and it
was presumably the lack of such a figure in the seventh century that created the need for Muammad to serve as
arbitrator there.
81. Morony, Iraq, 13754; E. J. Keall, Carved Stonework from the Hadramawt in Yemen: Is It Sasanian? in
The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Persia: New Light on the Parthian and Sasanian Empires, ed. V. S. Curtis et al.
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 14149.
82. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1963), 61, 67; Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1980), 3032; Ignaz
Goldziher, Islamisme et Parsisme, Revue de lHistoire des Religions 43 (1901): 22; Touraj Daryaee, The Persian
Gulf Trade in Late Antiquity, Journal of World History 14 (2003): 116.
83. EI2, s.v. Salmn al-Fris (G. Levi Della Vida). Cf. J. Horovitz, Salman al-Farisi, Der Islam 12 (1922):
17883.
84. E.g., Imru al-Qays and Ash al-Maymn; Charles Greville Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry: 162 Poems
from Imrulkais to Maarri (London: KPI, 1985), 93, 103; Ehsan Yarshater, The Persian Presence in the Islamic
419
nating from the Arabian peninsula.85 Non-Arab converts were crucial to the growth of the
Islamic sciences such as Arabic grammar, Quranic exegesis, and the collection of adth
and historical traditions.86 In addition, non-Muslims, mostly non-Arab, formed the majority
of the empires population for several centuries. Non-Arabs, both Muslim and non-Muslim,
played an active role in Islamicate government and culture from the earliest days. There
were Persians on the staff of Umar I (r. 634644), and the condemnation of Uthmn for
appointing family members in governing positions reflects the expansion of administration
during his reign. The transfer of the Muslim capital from the Arabian peninsula to the Fertile Crescent further expanded the role of non-Arabs in government. In the capital cities of
Damascus and Bara, Hellenized Syrian, Coptic, and Persian officials in the caliphal administration restored and maintained Roman and Sasanian practices of taxation and governmental
organization. The Persian empires local notables, of varied origins, served in the army and
as local governors, tax collectors, and officials.87 From very early on the contributions of all
these groups made Islamicate civilization a blend of Arab and non-Arab elements, although
there was a consensus among Muslims that the Arab elements should be cherished and given
extra weight.88
the umayyads (661750), bringers of rain
With the Umayyad move of the Muslim capital to Damascus, the later caliphs of the
dynasty held court in a very different manner from tribal chieftains and more like the emperors whose lands they had appropriated.89 Their image has come down to us as dissipated and
ineffectual, but the rapidity of the conquests and the immense wealth they amassed made
many regard them as channels of divine blessing and providers of abundance. Lower-level
administrators, the conquered peoples, and some Arab fighters advocated an imperial style
of rule, while most religious leaders and many tribesmen opposed monarchical culture. The
fact that the Umayyads chose to appeal to the conquered peoples rather than the Arab tribes
suggests the strength of imperial ideas among the non-peninsular population of the empire.
When criticized for his adoption of Byzantine symbols of authority, Muwiya is said to
have replied that none would believe in his power if he did not behave and look like an
emperor.90
World, in The Persian Presence in the Islamic World, ed. R. G. Hovannisian and G. Sabagh (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 14, 27.
85. By a hundred years later their dominance was obvious; Richard W Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the
Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 8, 23; Jamsheed
K. Choksy, Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 83, 88, 141.
86. Ibn Khaldn, cited in Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 150; Ignaz Goldziher, Arab and Ajam, in Muslim Studies, ed. S. M. Stern (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 188990), 1: 1049.
87. Goldziher, Arab and Ajam, 1: 110; Michael G. Morony, Conquerors and Conquered: Iran, in Studies
on the First Century of Islamic Society, ed. G. H. A. Juynboll (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1982),
7475.
88. Bertold Spuler, Iran: The Persistent Heritage, in Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization, ed. G. E. von
Grunebaum (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955), 171. Early Muslim authorities struggled to keep the Arabs
from imitating non-Arab ways but were only partly successful; Bashear, Arabs and Others, 3336.
89. Oleg Grabar, Notes sur les crmonies umayyades, in Studies in Memory of Gaston Wiet, ed. M. RosenAyalon (Jerusalem: Institute of Asian and African Studies, Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem, 1977), 5357; idem, Formation, 14849.
90. Al-abar, cited in Oleg Grabar, Islamic Art and Byzantium, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 88; see
also Speros Vryonis Jr., Byzantium and Islam: SevenSeventeenth Century, East European Quarterly 2 (1968):
420
Poetry dedicated to Umayyad caliphs imitated the style of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry but
expressed ideas of kingship consonant with Mesopotamian and Persian royal ideologies.
Although the poets cited Persian precedents rarely and Mesopotamian ones never, they were
clearly reworking older political traditions to praise their rulers and to express the extent and
limits of their power. They called the Umayyad caliphs pillars of religion, reminiscent of
the Sasanian kings role as protectors of the faith, or the shepherd of God on earth, with
the Muslim community as their flock.91 Like Mesopotamian kings, Muslim caliphs were
said to be divinely appointed to their posts; as the poet al-Aws told the caliph Sulaymn
(r. 715717), God has confided to you rule and authority over us; command and be just.92
Hishm (r. 724743) was addressed as governor of God, the title of the Sumerian rulers.93
The caliphs task was to bring prosperity to the people; as al-Akhal wrote, God allotted
to them the good fortune that made them victorious [...] It is they who vie with the rainbearing wind to bring sustenance when impoverished supplicants find scant food.94 Like
old-time tribal chiefs, the Umayyad caliphs were seen as empowered to pray (successfully)
for rain.95 Like a Babylonian or Assyrian king, Abd al-Malik was hailed as one whom God
has made victorious, [...] the vicegerent of God, from him we expect rain.96 His successors al-Wald I (r. 705715) and Sulaymn were also expected to control fertility by bringing
rain.97 A poem by the caliph al-Wald II (r. 743744) put his own accession in a similar light:
The shrewd and evilbringing one is dead; the rain is already falling.98
The later Umayyads clearly shared the poets view of the caliphate as having qualities
and responsibilities belonging to kings. In order to justify his seizure of the throne, Yazd
III (r. 744) claimed that he would not allow the mighty to oppress the weak, nor overtax the
peasantry and force them to flee, nor squander the treasury on women, palaces, or irrigation
works, but would treat his distant subjects equally with those nearby and would pay stipends
promptly.99 Provincial governors were also addressed as shepherds in poetry embellished
211. The introduction of non-tribal concepts of legitimacy by the numerous converts of the tenth to twelfth centuries
reduced the gap between religious and secular politics; Darling, History, ch. 6.
91. Helmer Ringgren, Some Religious Aspects of the Caliphate, in The Sacral Kingship (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1959), 73748; see William Thomson, The Character of Early Semitic Sects, in Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume, ed. S. Lwinger and J. Somogyi (rpt. Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1958), 1: 9192. Suzanne Stetkevych (The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode [Bloomington: Indiana Univ.
Press, 2002]) shows how Umayyad poets drew on the pre-Islamic Arabic poetic tradition, but they were clearly also
drawing on the broader Mesopotamian tradition.
92. mile Tyan, Institutions du droit public musulman (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1954), 1: 442 and n. 2. For this
stance within a Quranic context, see Wadd al-Q, The Religious Foundation of Late Umayyad Ideology and
Practice, in Saber religioso y poder poltico en el Islam (Madrid: Agencia Espaola de Cooperacin Internacional,
1994), 23173.
93. Tyan, Institutions, 1: 443.
94. Tr. Stetkevych, Poetics, 93.
95. Henri Lammens, LArabie occidentale avant lhgire (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1928), 15960 and
n. 1.
96. Al-Akhal, tr. Henri Lammens, Le chantre des Omiades: Notes biographiques et littraires sur le pote
arabe Aal, Journal Asiatique, ser. 9, vol. 4 (1894): 16364; Stetkkevych, Poetics, 9091.
97. Al-Nbigha and al-Farazdq, tr. Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, Gods Caliph: Religious Authority in the
First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 9. Crone (Gods Rule: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2004], 4142) attributes the use of these images
to messianism, ignoring their origin in ancient concepts of state.
98. Ringgren, Some Religious Aspects, 740.
99. Crone and Hinds, Gods Caliph, 68 and n. 63; G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad
Caliphate, AD 661750 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 95.
421
with pastoral imagery: When the flock goes astray, you do not oppress.100 By the end of
the Umayyad period, Mesopotamian kingly obligations related to the Circle of Justice
shepherding the people and providing prosperity and justicewere solidly entrenched in the
rhetoric and conceptualization of caliphal governance.
The Umayyads opponents deployed the same ancient concepts of kingship to criticize
the caliphs and their deeds, emphasizing the need for their fulfillment in practice. Extremist
rebels looked for a mahd who would fill the world with justice and equity as it is now filled
with tyranny and oppression. In his time the heavens would not withhold rain; the earth
would give bountiful crops and surrender her precious metals.101 The Shiite movement
awaited the coming of a mahd from the family of the Prophet who would distribute equally
among the people and [...] establish justice among his subjects.102 The Shiite imam was
endowed with numerous attributes of Mesopotamian kingship: he was chosen by God, a
shepherd of his sheep, without whom worship and prayers could not be accepted; he was
the pillar of the earth, the father of orphans, the judge, the interpreter of Gods commands;
he was the light towards which people walk, a raincloud of blessings and kindness and a
clear spring that flows at Gods command, the owner of all the land and fresh waters and the
treasures of the earth.103
Although Persian-style governance is usually ascribed to the Abbsids, the Umay
yads political culture already followed patterns established by the older empires. Byzantine
and Persian royal iconography decorated Umayyad palaces and aristocratic residences.104
Despite some decline since the Sasanian period, Mesopotamia was still the economic hub
of the empire and set the style for the rest, artistically as well as ideologically.105 During the
second Islamic century, caliphal palaces in Syria and Baghdad exhibited structures, layouts,
and ornamentation already found in Muslim governors residences in Irq, the place where
Arab, Mesopotamian, and Persian traditions met and blended. Like Mesopotamian and Persian kings, caliphs and their governors planted gardens to convey their ability to make the
world fertile and prosperous, and they collected rare plants and animals from distant regions
to illustrate the universality of their rule.106 Like Assyrian rulers, the Umayyads constructed
100. Poem to Ziyd, in al-abar, History, vol. 18: Between Civil Wars: The Caliphate of Muwiyah, tr.
Michael G. Morony, 84.
101. Unattributed quotations, Bernard Lewis, On the Revolutions in Early Islam, Studia Islamica 32 (1970),
225; see Israel Friedlaender, The Heterodoxies of the Shiites in the Presentation of Ibn azm, JAOS 28 (1907):
4344.
102. The tradition regarding the Shiite mahd, attributed to the fifth imam Muammad al-Bqir, is quoted in
A. A. Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of the Mahdi in Twelver Shiism (Albany: State Univ. of New York
Press, 1981), 39.
103. The Characteristics of the Imama, from Kitb al-ujja, in al-Kulayn (d. 940), Ul al-Kf, quoted in
Sachedina, Islamic Messianism, 18892.
104. Dominique Sourdel, Questions de crmonial abbaside, Revue des tudes Islamiques 28 (1960): 123
32; Grabar, Notes, 52; idem, Formation, 58, 153; Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Art at the Crossroads: East Versus
West at Mshatt, in Essays in Islamic Art and Architecture in Honor of Katharina Otto-Dorn, ed. A. Daneshvari
(Malibu: Undena, 1981), 6386. On one such building, see Richard Ettinghausen, From Byzantium to Sasanian Iran
and the Islamic World: Three Modes of Artistic Influence (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), 1765. On a single artistic
motif across cultures, see Willy Hartner and Richard Ettinghausen, The Conquering Lion, the Life Cycle of a
Symbol, in Art and Archaeology: Collected Papers, ed. M. Rosen-Ayalon (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1984), 693712.
105. Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr, 8592.
106. Oleg Grabar, Al-Mushatta, Baghdd, and Wsi, in The World of Islam: Studies in Honor of Philip
K. Hitti, ed. J. Kritzeck and R. B. Winder (London: Macmillan, 1959), 99108; Morony, Iraq, 10, 7479. More
broadly, Massoud Azarnoush, From Persepolis to al-Fustat: Continuation of Achaemenid Architectural Concepts,
in Proceedings of the Second European Conference of Iranian Studies, ed. Bert G. Fragner et al. (Rome: Istituto
Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1995), 4752. On gardens, see Andrew M. Watson, Botanical Gardens in
422
canals to carry water, sometimes from long distances, to imperial and governoral palaces that
were surrounded by fields and pastures. They also worked to repair the disruption of the late
Sasanian period and the destruction of conquest, digging extensive irrigation works around
Damascus and Bara, and also in northern Syria and central Irq.107
In addition to an ideology and symbolism of kingship recalling pre-Islamic empires, the
Umayyads employed many administrative practices of the past, adapted to suit both the new
religious ethos and the changed geographical and economic conditions of the post-conquest
period. These practices then became identified as Islamic, part of the tradition of the Muslim
community.108 Simply by continuing to use them, the conquered peoples saw to it that the
mechanisms developed by previous empires for fostering prosperity and controlling powerful landholders and officials were incorporated into the practices of the new Islamic regime.
While the scribes were instrumental in their further development, neither they nor the rulers
caused them to be adopted. The people of the empireMuslim and non-Muslim, Arab and
non-Arabensured that the Muslim polity possessed an imperial apparatus.
Islamicate administration is usually traced back to the caliph Umar I and his establishment of the dwn to allocate the booty of conquest; the first archive seems to have appeared
during his time.109 Nonetheless, early Islamic officials incorporated into Islamic governing
practices numerous mechanisms devised in pre-Islamic times to promote order and justice,
such as bureaucratic control of taxation and the rulers accessibility to petitioners. Papyrus
finance records, often modeled directly on the documents of past regimes, reveal that Muslim
administrators in Egypt and Palestine continued to employ pre-Islamic systems for surveying agricultural lands, preparing registers of population and landholdings, assessing taxes,
and issuing receipts for taxes paid.110 Although similar documents have not survived in Iraq,
Sasanian taxation practices and exemptions also continued there; the new conquerors are
reported as standardizing rates and measures and taking care to appoint virtuous people as
tax collectors.111 Surviving documents record demands that the caliph and his officials accept
responsibility for providing justice, appeals of military and taxation issues to the provincial
governor, and complaints to officials at various levels about theft, debt payment, the grain
supply, and road works.112 The advice of an Umayyad governor to Egypt to his subordinate
to listen to such appeals used language reminiscent of ancient Egyptian advice.113
the Early Islamic World, in Corolla Torontonensis: Studies in Honour of Ronald Morton Smith, ed. E. Robbins and
S. Sandahl (Toronto: TSAR and Centre for Korean Studies, 1994), 10511.
107. Oleg Grabar, Umayyad Palace and the Abbasid Revolution, Studia Islamica 18 (1963): 518; Robert McC. Adams, Land Behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1965), 8485; Eliyahu Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 4648.
108. Paul L. Heck, The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization: Qudma b. Jafar and His Kitb
al-Kharj wa-inat al-Kitba (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 147; Fred M. Donner, ed., The Articulation of Early Islamic
State Structures (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012).
109. Meir M. Bravmann, The State Archives in the Early Islamic Era, Arabica 15 (1968): 8789; Frq Sad
Majdalw, Islamic Administration under Omar Ibn AlKhattab (Amman: Majdalawi Masterpieces, 2002), 4053.
110. Adolf Grohmann, Arabic Papyri in the Egyptian Library (Cairo: Egyptian Library Press, 1938), 3: 186,
191, 195203; H. I. Bell, Translations of the Greek Aphrodito Papyri in the British Museum, Der Islam 2 (1911):
27283; 3 (1912): 13340, 36973; 4 (1913): 8796; Casper J. Kraemer Jr., Excavations at Nessana, vol. 3: NonLiterary Papyri (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958), 170.
111. Morony, Iraq, 99124.
112. Bell, Translations (1911), 28182; Fred Donner, The Formation of the Islamic State, JAOS 106
(1980): 28589, 29293.
113. R. B. Serjeant, The Caliph Umars Letters to Ab Ms al-Ashar and Muwiya, Journal of Semitic
Studies 29 (1984): 6579; cf. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 2: 23.
423
The new administrators need for detailed information on prior governing institutions
inspired translations of older political and administrative literature. The head of the Umayyad
chancery, Ab l-Al Slim, translated several pre-Islamic works of political thought for the
caliph Hishm, including the apocryphal Letters of Aristotle to Alexander.114 In addition
to what this work derived from Greek and Persian precedents, it contained recommendations
based on ancient Mesopotamian practices, notably that the ruler should hold audience to
hear appeals for justice on a daily basis and should ensure that the legal system redressed the
grievances of the people.115 These recommendations may have come via a Syriac rather than
a Persian source; a long literature in Syriac (related to the Aramaic of the ancient empires)
had already integrated Greek, Mesopotamian, and Persian political thought.116 Translations
of Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Indian texts promoted the assimilation of their ideas through
the genres of Arabic literature.
Slims successor Abd al-amd (d. 750), who headed the chancery of Marwn II, was
famed both for his elegant epistolary style in Arabic and for his Epistle to the Secretaries,
the first, as far as we know, in what became a long tradition of professional literature for
Muslim scribes.117 Although the values and training of court secretaries were modeled on
those of the Persian scribes, the secretarial class of the Islamic era was more limited in scope;
the grouping of philosophers, doctors, and other intellectuals with the religio-legal scholars
in the category of ulema left the secretaries and bureaucrats in a class by themselves. Their
isolation may have increased their sense of identity as well as their demand for professional
literature, such as Abd al-amds risla.118
As before upon the conquest of the Fertile Crescent, e.g., by the Akkadians and Achaemenids, once again the scribes took responsibility for instructing the new rulers in the customs
and practices of imperial administration.119 Abd al-amd asserted that through secretaries
114. Mario Grignaschi, Les Rasil Arislsa il-l-Iskandar de Slim Ab-l-Al et lactivit culturelle
lpoque omayyade, Bulletin dtudes Orientales 19 (196566): 783; idem, Le roman pistolaire classique
conserv dans la version arabe de Slim Ab-l-Al, Le Muson 80 (1967): 21164; S. M. Stern, Aristotle on the
World State (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1968), 2 and n. 2; Jozef Bielawski, tr., Lettre dAristote
Alexandre sur la politique envers les cits (Wroclaw: Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1970). The romance of Alexander
had already been translated into Armenian and Pahlavi and from there into Syriac; Tomas Hgg, The Oriental
Reception of Greek Novels: A Survey with Some Preliminary Considerations, Symbolae Osloensis 61 (1986): 104,
123 n. 23.
115. Grignaschi, Rasil Arislsa, 912; idem, Un roman pistolaire grco-arabe: La correspondence
entre Aristote et Alexandre, in The Problematics of Power: Eastern and Western Representations of Alexander the
Great, ed. M. Bridges and J. Ch. Brgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), 109 n. 1.
116. Sebastian P. Brock, Syriac Culture in the Seventh Century, ARAM 1 (1989): 26880; Morony, Iraq, 359.
On Arabic wisdom literature, see Dimitri Gutas, Classical Arabic Wisdom Literature: Nature and Scope, JAOS
101 (1981): 4986; on the assimilation of Greek wisdom literature into Arabic, see idem, Greek Wisdom Literature
in Arabic Translation (New Haven: AOS, 1975), 2. The wisdom tradition was one way for Islamic society to define
and limit the exercise of political power [...]; it functioned as a vehicle for theories of state; Heck, Construction
of Knowledge, 22627.
117. Abd al-amd, Risla il l-kuttb, in Rasil al-bulagh, ed. M. Kurd Al (Cairo: Dr al-Kutub
al-Arabiyya al-Kubr, 1913), 17276; Ihsan Abbas, ed., Abd al-amd bin Yay al-Ktib wa-m tabaqq min
rasilihi wa-rasil Slim Ab l-Al (Amman: Dr al-Shurq, 1988), 28187, tr. Lewis, Islam, 1: 18691. On
secretaries and their work, see Ibn al-Nadm, The Fihrist of al-Nadm: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture,
ed. and tr. B. Dodge (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), 1: 256306.
118. On changes in scribal identity during the Abbsid period, see Roy P. Mottahedeh, Bureaucracy and the
Patrimonial State in Early Islamic Iran and Iraq, Al-Abth 29 (1981): 2536.
119. Some Mesopotamian kings had received good educations: Shulgi and Esarhaddon had boasted of their
literacy, and a large tablet, on which Ashurbanipal described his education for the throne, shows how intensively he
was trained for rule and administration and how important the scribal arts (divination, arithmetic, the reading of old
424
God fits government to the people, and the land prospers.120 Fitting government to the
people involved adherence to administrative and fiscal patterns developed in pre-Islamic
times so that the land would prosper. Here, too, Irq formed the model for the empire as a
whole, displaying an almost unbroken continuity in fiscal management and practice.
Only one generation after the conquest of Irq, Muwiyas revenue official Ibn Durrj
reinstituted Persian taxation practices there. For decades afterward taxation records and
procedures for the eastern half of the empire were controlled by a Persian fiscal secretary,
Zdhnfarrkh (d. 701), whose descendants served as governmental secretaries for generations. Zdhnfarrkhs protg, the Persian convert li b. Abd al-Ramn (d. 717), translated the tax records of Irq from Persian to Arabic; the rest of the empire followed suit.
Rather than eliminating the non-Arab scribes, this move impelled them to learn Arabic.
li trained the next generation of secretaries, including the father of the Persian convert
and expert in Arabic Ibn al-Muqaffa (d. ca. 756), who in turn was probably trained by Abd
al-amd.121 This continuity of secretarial practice over the decades facilitated the transmission of scribal intellectual traditions across changes of rule and allowed the governing
concepts and administrative practices of the pre-Islamic rulers of the region to be retained
and built upon by their successors.122
the abbsids (750945), shadows of god
The Abbsids were doubly shadows of God, being considered both protectors and providers. Shadow of God on Earth, the caliphal title that the piety-minded saw as the most
presumptuous, was first given to the Abbsid caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 847861), but its
bestowal was attributed to the Prophet in a adth.123 The metaphor had already been used,
however, in Babylonian and Sasanian times; it referred to the quality of protection afforded
by the shade in the Near Eastern desert climate, which the ruler was supposed to provide.124
This shade was symbolized by a ceremonial parasol, visible in ancient reliefs and carried by
some Muslim rulers including the Abbsids.125 The late fourteenth-century author al-Ibshh
scripts, and the intricacies of the art of writing) had become to good government in his day; Luckenbill, Ancient
Records, 2: 292, 379; Sasson, Civilizations, 2: 853, 951.
120. Abd al-amd, Risla il l-kuttb, in Amad Zak afwat, Jamharat rasil al-arab f usr al-arabiyya
al-zhira (Egypt: al-Bb al-alab, 1971), 2: 45560, tr. Lewis, Islam, 1: 186.
121. M. Sprengling, From Persian to Arabic, American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 56
(1939): 175224, 32536; 57 (1940): 3025; al-Baldhur, The Origins of the Islamic State, part 2, tr. F. C. Murgotten (New York: n.p., 1924), 26061; al-Jahshiyr, Kitb al-Wuzar wa-l-kuttb, tr. Lewis, Islam, 1: 196; J. D.
Latham, The Beginnings of Arabic Prose Literature: The Epistolary Genre, in Arabic Literature to the End of the
Umayyad Period, ed. A. F. L. Beeston et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 163; Dominique Sourdel,
La Biographie dIbn al-Muqaffa daprs les sources anciennes, Arabica 1 (1954), 307; Said Amir Arjomand,
Abd Allah Ibn al-Muqaffa and the Abbasid Revolution, Iranian Studies 27 (1994): 13 and n. 24, 1719, 2425.
122. For other cases of hereditary service in government, a natural route of transmission for administrative
practices and ideology, see Morony, Iraq, 97, 171, 176, 179, 210.
123. Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1970), 317; Tyan, Institutions, 1: 448;
see the sixteenth-century collection of versions of this adth by Al b. Abd al-Malik al-Muttaq, Kanz al-umml
f sunan al-aqwl wa-l-af l (Aleppo: Manshrt Maktabat al-Turth al-Islm, 1969), 6: 414. According to
Lambton, the adth was recorded by Ibn Quzayma, Ibn Nuaym, and al-Daylam but was regarded as weak by
al-Bayhq; Najm al-Dn Rz, The Path of Gods Bondsmen from Origin to Return, tr. Hamid Algar (Delmar, NY:
Caravan Books, 1982), 49 n. 32.
124. Ignaz Goldziher, Du sens propre des expressions Ombre de Dieu, Khalife de Dieu, pour designer les
chefs dIslam, Revue de lHistoire des Religions 35 (1897), 33235; Ringgren, Some Religious Aspects, 74546.
125. For the Abbsids use of the parasol, see Mez, Renaissance, 13334; for the Fimids, Saljqs, Ayybids,
and Mamlks, see Paula Sanders, Ritual, Politics, and the City in Fatimid Cairo (Albany: State Univ. of New York
425
employed the metaphor of the virtuous man with a cloud over his head that shaded him
from the sun; this cloud has been associated with prophethood, but that association surely
derives from the concept of the shadow of God and its symbol of the parasol.126
The takeover by the Abbsids in 750 is usually called a revolution, and the Abbsids
advertised themselves as having all the virtues the Umayyads allegedly lacked, but in many
respects their rule continued trends begun in the Umayyad period. In particular, the demand
for unity intensified an already-existing interest in pre-Islamic governmental systems.
Although Muslims were still a numerical minority in their empire, under the Umayyads they
had already begun a new cultural and political synthesis that assimilated Mesopotamian, Persian, and Greek political ideas and institutions together with concepts and practice from the
Arab heritage and the example of the Prophet.127 In the Khurasanian home of the Abbsid
movement and of many of its prominent members, the Persian social structure was more or
less intact, and the leading families of the region preserved the history, values, and governmental patterns of Sasanian times. The Abbsids brought Muslims of Persian background
into the expanding bureaucracy, possibly less as a deliberate Persianization of Abbsid
governance than as the natural administrative expansion of imperial rule.128
Transferring the Muslim capital from Syria to Irq, the Abbsids built Baghdad next
to the old Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon/Madin. The construction of new capital cities
embodying a new rulers agenda followed an Assyrian pattern; Baghdads round plan identified the city with past imperial capitals and with the heavenly city of God, and extensive
canals supplied water and increased prosperity.129 The Abbsids surrounded their palaces
with gardens of exotic plants and wild animals, exhibiting their dominance over the natural
realm as well as the political.130 Just outside Kfa the old Lakhmid capital of al-ra and the
palace of Khawarnaq, now a site of wineshops and drinking parties, remained an accessible
reminder of ancient kingship. Abbsid poets portrayed the caliphs in metaphors referring
to Lakhmid and Sasanian kings, palaces, and governing practices.131 Like earlier Mesopotamian rulers, the Abbsids engaged in city-building, construction of public works, and
development of the economy. Administrative development began as early as the reign of the
second caliph al-Manr (r. 755775), although outwardly he retained the style of an Arab
Press, 1994), index, s.v. parasol; Tyan, Institutions, 2: 31, 155; Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey: A General
Survey of the Material and Spiritual Culture and History c. 10711330 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968), 220.
126. See Dakhlia, Divan des rois, 168, 25152 and n. 96.
127. Spuler, Iran, 17274. On the scientific heritage, see Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture:
The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbsid Society (2nd4th/8th10th Centuries)
(London: Routledge, 1998).
128. EI2, s.v. al-Barmika (D. Sourdel); L. Bouvat, Les Barmcides daprs les historiens arabes et perses
(Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1912); David White Biddle, The Development of the Bureaucracy of the Islamic Empire
during the Late Umayyad and Early Abbasid Period, Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Texas, 1972, 6872; al-abar, History,
vol. 29: Al-Manr and al-Mad, tr. Hugh Kennedy, 105.
129. Jacob Lassner, The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages: Text and Studies (Detroit: Wayne
State Univ. Press, 1970); Christopher I. Beckwith, The Plan of the City of Peace: Central Asian Iranian Factors in
Early Abbsid Designs, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungarica 38 (1984): 144.
130. Dakhlia, Divan des rois, 90. Smarrs huge zoological park was copied from Spain to Afghanistan;
Yasser Tabbaa, The Medieval Islamic Garden: Typology and Hydraulics, in Garden History: Issues, Approaches,
Methods, ed. J. D. Hunt (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1992), 3068.
131. Julie S. Meisami, Places in the Past: The Poetics/Politics of Nostalgia, Edebiyat 8 (1998): 76; Gutas,
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 111; Ibn al-Muqaffa, Risla f l-aba, in Charles Pellat, Ibn al-Muqaffa mort
vers 140/757: Conseilleur du calife (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1976), 4244; Crone and Hinds, Gods
Caliph, 86.
426
tribal sheikh as a rebuke to the kingship of the Umayyads.132 The later caliphs adopted the
external trappings of the Sasanian kings in dress, court ceremonial, epistolary style, and the
array of officials, palace servants, and entertainers who attended the monarch.133
On the ceremonial stage the caliphs reenacted the Sasanian emperors role as pinnacle of
the social pyramid, protector of the realm, shepherd of the populace, religious arbiter, divine
representative, and shadow of God on earth. The Abbsids radiated the light of prophecy,
whereas the Umayyads had shone with the light of kingship.134 They took throne-names
proclaiming divine support for their rule, though from a different divinity than those of the
ancient kings. Court poetry expressed this royal ideology, endowing the Abbsid caliphs
with the attributes of ancient kings: virtue, the divine light, victory, and the ability to renew
the world:
Through you the expanses of the land have become fertile.
How can the world be barren when you are its protector?135
These qualities extended to the caliphs agents: one of the Abbsid viziers, Muammad
al-Zayyt, was compared to the abundant rain that nourished the sterile ground.136 The caliph
was not only the rain but the sun:
Hrn came and all was bright.
Again the sun shoots forth his rays.137
The Abbsid caliphs were often explicitly compared with Sasanian kings; for example,
al-Mamn was called a power continuing that of Khusrau; al-Mutaim (r. 833842), who
conquered Amorium despite the ill omen of Halleys comet, kept company with Khusrau and
Alexander; and al-Mutadid (r. 892902) equalled the Persian Ardashr when he restored
an annihilated realm.138 By modeling aspects of their caliphate on the pattern of Sasanian
kingship, the Abbsids were clearly attempting to evoke in their subjects the reverence and
loyalty seemingly commanded by those monarchs. Caliphal supporters, on the other hand,
used Persian metaphors of kingship prescriptively, urging the caliphs to dispense the justice
and prosperity that Persian subjects were thought to have enjoyed.
The translation of Persian literary and political works into Arabic stimulated Muslim
societys assimilation of ancient Mesopotamian ideals, ideals understood as Persian because
they were articulated in the speeches of Persian kings. Ibn al-Muqaffa translated a number of
132. For al-Manrs administrative developments, see Hugh Kennedy, The Barmakid Revolution in Islamic
Government, in History and Literature in Iran: Persian and Islamic Studies in Honour of P. W. Avery, ed. C. Melville (rpt. London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 93; Ab Jafar al-abar, The History of al-abar: The Early Abbs Empire,
tr. John Alden Williams (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 2: 7, 38. For his simple lifestyle, see ibid., 2: 37,
41 (simple clothing), 2: 21 (austere bedroom), 2: 29 (no wine at table).
133. See Sourdel, Questions, 13646.
134. Al-Farazdq: Ignaz Goldziher, Umayyads and Abbsids, in Muslim Studies, ed. Stern, 2: 60 n. 2, 61.
135. Al-Bukhtur to al-Mutawakkil (r. 847861), tr. Steven Sperl, Islamic Kingship and Arabic Panegyric
Poetry in the Early 9th Century, Journal of Arabic Literature 8 (1977): 24.
136. By Ab Tammm (d. 858), tr. O. Petit and W. Voisin, La Posie arabe classique: tudes textuelles (Paris:
Publisud, 1989), 67. On Ab Tammms use of Islamic and pre-Islamic symbols of legitimacy, see Suzanne P. Stetkevych, Ab Tammm and the Poetics of the Abbsid Age (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 11530.
137. Isq al-Mawil, for the caliph Hrn al-Rashd (r. 786809), tr. J. D. Carlyle, in W. A. Clouston, ed.,
Arabian Poetry for English Readers (Glasgow: n.p., 1881), 110. For Hrn as a source of rain, see Crone and Hinds,
Gods Caliph, 82 and n. 152.
138. Richard N. Frye, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), 72; Petit and Voisin, Posie, 79; Stetkevych, Poetics, 15758, 164;
Goldziher, Islamisme et Parsisme, 7.
427
such works and saw himself as a primary instrument in the process of rapprochement.139 By
his time, more than a century after the conquest, there was considerable interest in cultural
rapprochement: non-Arab government servants converted to Islam and learned the Arabic
language and customs, while Arabs, particularly those surrounding the ruler, absorbed the
cultures of the Persians and Greeks. The ninth-century wave of translation from Greek and
Syriac into Arabic probably provided some of the sources for what were later identified as
Persian elements in Islamic thought. These translations reflect a new valuation by Arabic
speakers of the worth of non-Arab intellectual and political traditions as well as a new appreciation of the Arabic language by non-Arabs.
In the ninth and tenth centuries the strains of cultural rapprochement ignited the Shubiyya
controversy, represented in Abbsid literature by a series of diatribes against non-Arabs and
their cultures and countered by diatribes against Arabs and Arabic.140 This prolonged and
vitriolic exchange has been depicted in a number of ways, usually as a duel between Arabs
and Persians, but it was not a conflict between mutually exclusive groupsArabs and nonArabs appeared on both sides of the controversy, and others such as Arameans, Iberians, and
Africans also participated. Rather, it represented at least in part a reconceptualization of the
past, an assertion by Muslims of different backgrounds that the non-Arab past was as noble
and worthy of respect as that of the Arabs. The fictitious genealogies that multiplied in this
periodtracing leading Persian families back to noble Arab tribes, historic Persian kings,
or bothshould be understood in the same light, as statements about the value of the preIslamic pasts for the Islamic present.141
The changes that occurred in the writing of history during precisely this period support
the view of the Shubiyya controversy as being concerned with the Muslims view of their
past as a multicultural heritage. Early Muslim historical writing dealt primarily with the Arab
past, including the life and sayings of Muammad, narratives of the conquests, information
on the Muslim community, and stories of the pre-Islamic Arabs. The non-Arab pasts were
understood as having ended with the coming of Islam, to which only portions of the Arab
past were at all relevant. The new universal histories, however, treated the pre-Islamic
pasts of all Muslim peoples, not that of the Arabs alone, as prefatory to the coming of the
revelationas the common property of all Muslims.142 The ninth-century author al-Ji,
for example, considered Islamic civilization as the heir to all previous world civilizations.143
139. EI2, s.v. Ibn al-Muaffa (F. Gabrieli).
140. EI2, s.v. al-Shubiyya (S. Enderwitz).
141. The Umayyad caliph al-Yazd II (d. 744) saw himself as personifying such a synthesis; he proudly traced
his ancestry to the ruling families of the Arabs, Persians, Byzantines, and Turks; C. E. Bosworth, The Heritage of
Rulership in Early Islamic Iran and the Search for Dynastic Connections with the Past, Iran 11 (1973): 5162, 12;
Abd al-Malik al-Thalib, The Latif al-Marif of Thalib: The Book of Curious and Entertaining Information,
tr. C. E. Bosworth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1966), 73. The effort by the eighth-century caliphs to reconcile the deep ethnic divisions in society paralleled a similar effort on the theological level to bridge the SunniShiite
gap, which the Umayyads did by ignoring both positions and the Abbsids by embracing both.
142. H. A. R. Gibb, Tarkh, in Studies on the Civilization of Islam, ed. S. J. Shaw and W. K. Polk (Boston: Beacon, 1962), 10837; A. A. Duri, The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs, ed. and tr. L. I. Conrad
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 6471; Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography, 2nd rev. ed.
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 9091; Claude Cahen, History and Historians, in Religion, Learning and Science in
the Abbasid Period, ed. M. J. L. Young et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 18995. On the development of early Arabic historiography, see Fred Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic
Historical Writing (Princeton: Darwin, 1998); Albrecht Noth and Lawrence I. Conrad, The Early Arabic Historical
Tradition: A Source-Critical Study (Princeton: Darwin, 1994).
143. Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.,
1994), 104. Grabar (Formation, 38) called this process the islamization of the collective memory of the Iranian
428
This realization permitted aspects of the non-Arab past, including parts of the Mesopotamian
governmental tradition labeled as Persian, to be carried legitimately into the Islamic present.
Customs and ideas attributed to the Sasanians could now be recommended to rulers, not as
the dubious counsels of infidels but as the wisdom of the centuries on the management of
empires.144
Although he took the Arab side in the Shubiyya controversy, the historian Ibn Qutayba
(d. 889) also valued the non-Arabic literatures.145 He chided Muslims who, in absorbing
the learning of the non-Muslims, abandoned that of the Muslim community; his goal was to
bring the two together.146 The earliest writer we know of to quote the shorter Arabic formula
for the Circle of Justice, Ibn Qutayba, also likened the ruler to the rain which is the irrigation of God, which could either bring life to the land or wreak destruction by floods.147 He
did not claim that his rendition of the Circle of Justice was his own invention but presented
it as a citation from earlier authority, unfortunately without providing enough information to
identify his source or sources.148 As a proponent of the Arab side of the Shubiyya controversy, however, he was not likely to have represented the Persian tradition as a significant
current of political thought unless it was fully assimilated into Islamicate culture.
Ibn Qutaybas quotation of the Circle of Justice was the first of many. When the ulema
of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries began to write mirrors for princes, they, too, quoted
Sasanian and Greek as well as Islamic precedents and employed the Circle of Justice as a
description of good government. By that time the opposition to cultural blending had faded
away or become marginalized, and the continuity between Mesopotamian political concepts
and those of the Islamic polity was widely acknowledged.
conclusion
In contrast to the Islamic construction of a complete break between the jhil and Islamic
eras, certain political values that developed in pre-Islamic times remained part of political
culture in the Islamic period. The concepts encapsulated in the Circle of Justice originated
with the Sumerians much earlier than is commonly believed and, far from their being Persian
in origin, the Persians were slow to adopt or express them. The model of kingship that they
embodied was already known in Arabic culture at the time of the rise of Islam, and they were
integrated into Islamicate politics well before their articulation by Ibn Qutayba. Routes of
transmission, besides Persian influences, include the Greek and Syriac writings of Mesopotamia, the culture of Arabic speakers acquainted with the Roman and Persian empires, and
existing practices in the conquered lands and in some Arab kingdoms.
The foreign origin of the Circle of Justice supposedly reflected the influence of nonMuslims and scribal converts over the rulers, emphasizing by contrast the purity of their critics, the ulema. While that is certainly the story we have been given, it quite obviously served
past, unlike Gibb (Tarkh, 118), who imputed the inclusion of these histories to the desire of knowledge for its
own sake.
144. Gibb (Evolution, 45) wrote negatively of Islamic jurists who, seeking to justify the historical process,
were forced to attempt to integrate the concept of universal empire with Islam.
145. J. Horovitz, Ibn Quteibas Uyun al-Akhbar, Islamic Culture 4 (1930): 173.
146. Grard Lecomte, LIntroduction du Kitb Adab al-Ktib dIbn Qutayba, in Mlanges Louis Massignon
(Damascus: Institut Franais du Damas, 1956), 3: 5355, 60; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 109.
147. Horovitz, Ibn Quteiba, 18687. The Circle of Justice is quoted supra, text at n. 1.
148. He introduced it with kna yuqlu (it has been said), indicating a composite account from many sources
without controversial points; for the similar example of al-Baldhur, see Tarif Khalidi, Islamic Historiography: The
Histories of Masd (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1975), 25.
429
the purposes of the anti-state ulema, whereas many ulema from whom we do not hear must
have supported the state, which certainly supported them. Scholars have shown that Arab
and Islamic were two different things in the earliest years, and that the new community
only gradually developed an Islamic identity. The men who guided the institutional development of the Muslim community were not the nomads, with their pride of independence. The
ruling Quraysh were sedentarizing and experimenting with new governing styles before the
arrival of Islam. The communitys leaders, if not thoroughly acquainted with imperial institutions, were seeking to know and implement them as rapidly as possible. In the preaching of
Muammad and the religious leaders who followed him, these experiments were condemned
by association with the iniquity and injustice of the Quraysh; the derogatory label of foreign was sufficient condemnation.
Strangely, the Quraysh themselves do not seem to have protested that label, so for them
the words foreign and Persian probably did not reference the alienness and contamination of these ideas. Surely, however, those terms were meant to denigrate imperial governmental practices, even in the mouths of men who were busily installing them in their own
polity. Their reason for disparaging such concepts of royalty, then, may not have been so
much to discourage their practice as to belittle the Persians to whom they were attributed,
who had become such an intrinsic part of the state and the religion, and to prevent them from
taking full control or benefitting too extensively. Some of the Persians were wealthy, experienced, and affiliated with the powerful; disparaging their culture could have been a way to
make use of them without allowing them too much status, although the episode of the Barmakids shows that even that was almost unsuccessful. I must leave this idea to be explored
by experts on the early Islamic period.
If the condemnation of Mesopotamian kingship or the Circle of Justice as a Persian
concept hindered its acceptance by the Muslim community, it was not enough to prevent
it. The sultans in later years practiced a kingship far different from tribal chieftainship or
prophetic governance, although in the early modern period they gained back a little of the
religious aura the caliphs had claimed. Instead, imperial governance in accord with the Circle
of Justice became the goal toward which their advisors urged them and a significant aspect
of their own legitimacy. The people of the Muslim realm regarded this largely as a positive
development, contributing to political stability, economic prosperity, and the redress of grievances. Most of the duties of the caliph enumerated by the eleventh-century jurist al-Mward,
for example, come straight from the Circles concept of kingship.149 The governmental ideologies and practices of ancient Mesopotamia were not extinguished by Persian or Muslim
civilization but extended farther toward the present than we often recognize.
149. Wafaa H. Wahba, tr., Al-Maward, the Ordinances of Government (Reading, UK: Garnet, 1996), 16.

"The Vicegerent of God, From Him We Expect Rain": The Incorporation of The Pre-Islamic State in Early Islamic Political Culture

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The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain:

The Incorporation of the Pre-Islamic State

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

provides abundance and named it Canal of Justice.30 Tiglath-Pileser I (r. 11151077)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

71. Gibb, Interpretation, 14; Crone, Slaves on Horses, 6264.

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

Darling: The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain

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