“the vicegerent of god, from him we expect rain”: the incorporation of the pre-islamic state ...

8/16/2019 “The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain”: The Incorporation of the Pre-Islamic State in Early Islamic Poli…

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Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014) 407

“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 igno-rance” ( jāhiliyya) and the age of Islam that extends beyond religion and ethicsto politics and culture. This article contributes to the scholarly effort to refutethat break by examining an aspect of continuity in political thought, the Circleof Justice, a shorthand description of the organization of the state in the MiddleEast since ancient times. The stereotype sees the Circle as a Persian product; thisarticle 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 partof Arabic culture before Islam, and that many people other than Persian scribesquoted or used it in the early Islamic centuries. Examining ancient cuneiform royalinscriptions, Pahlavi documents, the poetry addressed to Umayyad and ʿAbbāsidrulers, and early works of history and political thought, the article traces the Cir-cle’s ideas down through the centuries until their encapsulation in the form weknow today, the earliest version of which is found in the work of the historian andadab writer Ibn Qutayba.

The Umayyads ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) and his two successors were among the Islamic

caliphs commonly expected to bring rain. This ancient attribute of kingship symbolized theruler’s responsibility to provide prosperity to his people so that they could provide revenueto the state. The interdependence between kings and peoples was a characteristic feature ofMiddle Eastern states throughout millennia and across changes of religion and language. Theprovision of water and bountiful crops was only the beginning. Rulers also had to supplyprotection and justice, while the people offered submission and economic support in the formof taxes. This political relationship, and the state structures that embodied it, were articulatedand summarized in the ninth-century saying quoted by Ibn Qutayba and known as the Circleof Justice: “There can be no government without men, no men without money, no moneywithout 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 begin-

nings through the ancient empires and the culture of the Arabs to its articulation by IbnQutayba. 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, Kitāb ʿUyūn al-akhbār (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1925–30), 1: 9; Bernard Lewis, Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (New York 1973), 1: 185. The Circle of Jus-tice was embodied not just in Ibn Qutayba’s words but in the institutional relationships they refer to. As an Ottomanhistorian I address this issue because of the significance of Muslim monarchy in world history and the inadequacyof “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. Shawand W. K. Polk (Boston: Beacon, 1962), 14.


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408 Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.3 (2014)

appear together in still older Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian texts, and the Persiansthemselves appear to have adopted their political ideas from the Median and Babylonianempires 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 Mus-lims did not embrace monarchy thoroughly enough to create a workable Islamic politics;however, religious thought in Islam—based, as Marshall Hodgson showed, on populist andanti-aristocratic principles—initially wrote off all government as a priori unjust. 4 The con-cepts 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 andeverything that came before it, so direct textual links between ancient and Islamic ideasof kingship and uses of the Circle of Justice cannot be traced. Nevertheless, the conquestinaugurated a civilizational process in which Arabs and non-Arabs together reconceptual-ized and reworked the legacy of the past within the framework of Islam. 5 This process gaveIslamicate civilization a universal appeal it might not otherwise have had, although the merefact 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 anincorporation of the existing cultures into a new Arabic and Islamic framework. It has beentreated as a unique event, and in some respects it was, but in many ways it followed thepattern of prior conquests in the region. Viewed from the Fertile Crescent, one more largelypastoral group from a peripheral society invaded Mesopotamia with a new faith and set ofcustoms to begin the process of acculturation yet again. Like other ancient Mesopotamianconquerors, the new invaders took advantage of the disruption of a longstanding stable ter-ritorial division (this time by the Roman-Persian wars) and the fortuitous devastation of theplague 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 wereassimilated 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, existinggovernmental 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: 128–37. Also Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 57, 71, 85–87; 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), 106–18. It is difficult to decide what to call this conquest. Donner and Suliman Bashear both argue that forabout 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 expansionunder ʿ Abd al-Malik exhibited a more Islamic character (ibid., 176, 196, 202–3, 205, 221). He sees the conquerors asunited by a common religious and moral enthusiasm that transcended doctrinal divisions, while Bashear ( Arabs andOthers 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 Arabicspeakers, 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 Sympo-

sium on Ancient Empires, ed. M. T. Larsen (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1979), 75–103; Michael G. Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), 507–26.


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409DARLING: “The Vicegerent of God, from Him We Expect Rain”

Muḥammad’s reported behavior and regarded as more authentically Islamic. 8 The Muslimsthen ascribed the reappearance of ancient Mesopotamian ideals of governance in Islamicpolitical thought to the conquest of Persia and its imperial system, the emergence of a scribalclass of Persian origin, and the creation of a Persian-influenced Arabic literature. Maintain-

ing its Persian cultural trappings allowed proponents of imperial government to endow itwith the aura of success and permanence associated with the Sasanian empire, but permittedopponents to stigmatize it as foreign to Islam, which verdict must have owed a great dealto the vehemence with which the community rejected the claim attributed to ʿUthmān b.ʿAffān, that the caliphs possessed such a characteristic feature of Mesopotamian kingship asdivine appointment. 9 Ancient political traditions did, however, appear in early Arabic writ-ings unattributed to Persian precedents and treated as common knowledge, as already partof Arabic culture. Even in pre-Islamic poetry the concept of justice had already shifted fromtribal egalitarianism to a restoration dispensed by authorities. 10 This is clearly the Circle’sconcept 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 politicalideas overlaid an existing Arabic conceptual base and were easily adapted to Islamic pur-poses, however strongly Islamic ideology may have protested such adaptations.

Earlier studies of the Circle of Justice have referred to Hammurabi’s inscriptions, 11 butthis paper consults a wider range of sources and traces the concept’s history farther back andin greater detail, providing the context that allowed the Circle to form an integral part of theculture rather than an exotic import, despite its association with rejected ideas such as divinekingship. The study also examines how this concept was expressed in early Islamic politicalculture, in court poetry and advice to rulers, and in the behavior of kings and subjects. Itbrings together recent scholarship (and some not so recent) on the pre-Islamic and earlyIslamic periods, joining other publications that challenge the standard Islamic narrative of

origins by placing the rise of Islam in a wider context than the Ḥijāz. 12 It posits that ancientpolitical concepts provided a degree of continuity for a people undergoing great religious andcultural changes, a continuity obscured by the Muslim community’s arguments around theestablishment of the caliphate, and it traces that continuity through governmental practicesand literary development. For the sake of brevity it focuses largely on one aspect of theCircle, the ruler’s responsibility to provide prosperity and justice, notably in the form of theprovision 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 king’s responsibility to contribute to the prosperity and flourishing of his

8. Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2004, hereafter EI2), s.v. Ḳānūn, iii, Financial andPublic Administration; Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam: An Introductory Outline (Cam-bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), 22.

9. Alfred von Kremer, The Orient under the Caliphs (Beirut: United Publishers, 1973), 24–25; Abū Jaʿfaral-Ṭabarī, The History of al-Ṭabarī (hereafter History), vol. 15: The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, tr. R. StephenHumphreys (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), 196–97.

10. Mohammed A. Bamyeh, The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse (Minneapolis: Univ. ofMinnesota Press, 1999), 245–47; cf. Haim Gerber, Islamic Law and Culture, 1600–1840 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 50.

11. Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib, 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).


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land; they often represented him as the sun or the rain, the sources of fertility. 13 This imperialideology 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 ruler’s domination of the land and hisresponsibility for the people:

When Enlil, king [god] of all lands, gave to Lugalzagesi the kingship of the nation, directed allthe eyes of the land obediently toward him, put all the lands at his feet, and from east to westmade them subject to him; then, from the Lower Sea, along the Tigris and Euphrates to theUpper Sea, he put their routes in good order for him. From east to west, Enlil permitted himno rival; under him the lands rested contentedly, the people made merry, and the suzerains ofSumer and rulers of other lands conceded sovereignty to him at Uruk. [. . .] Under me, may thelands rest contentedly, may the populace become as widespread as the grass, may the nipples ofheaven function properly, and the people experience prosperity [. . .] may I always be the lead-ing 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 ruler’s 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 Lugalzagesi’s contemporary, Urukaginaof Lagash (ca. 2350), who “made a binding agreement with the god Ningirsu that he wouldnever subject the orphan or widow to the powerful.” 15 The texts describing Urukagina’sreforms 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 thegods. 17 Such concepts were not visible in the inscriptions left by the Akkadian invaders of2334–2154 B.C.E., but they reappeared after the restoration of Sumerian rule under Gudea,king of Lagash (r. 2143–2124), whose recorded activities built on the sense of a causal con-

nection among the righteousness of king and people, the gods’ favor, prosperity, and justiceaffirmed earlier by Urukagina. 18 During the Ur III dynasty (2112–2006 B.C.E.), a period ofwealth and power, the rulers followed Gudea’s model; Shulgi (r. 2095–2047), for example,stated that he was born of a goddess to bring prosperity, “to fill the granaries of the Landwith barley, to stock the treasuries of the Land with goods [. . .] To let justice never come toan end.” 19

13. H. P. L’Orange, Studies on the Iconography of Cosmic Kingship in the Ancient World (Cambridge: HarvardUniv. Press, 1953); Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Inte-gration of Society and Nature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948); Aziz al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Powerand 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” wererain-bearing clouds, and Lugalzagesi performed social functions attributed to God in the Hebrew Psalms.

15. Douglas R. Frayne, Presargonic Period (2700–2350 BC) (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008), 259–65.Some authorities read Urukagina as Uru’inimgina. See F. Charles Fensham, “Widow, Orphan, and the Poor inAncient Near Eastern Legal and Wisdom Literature,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 21 (1962): 129–39; Zhi Yang,“King of Justice,” Aula Orientalia 9 (1991): 245–46.

16. See Blahoslav Hruška, “Die Reformtexte Urukaginas: Der verspätete Versuch einer Konsolidierung desStadtstaates von Lagaš,” in Le palais et la royauté (archéologie et civilisation), ed. P. Garelli (Paris: Paul Geuthner,1974), 153.

17. Marie-Joseph Seux, Épithètes royales akkadiennes et sumériennes (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1967), 19,25–26.

18. Dietz Otto Edzard, Gudea and His Dynasty (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), 78–79, 98; ThorkildJacobsen, The Harps That Once . . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 127–28.

19. Unattributed quotation, from Jacob Klein, “Shulgi of Ur: King of a Neo-Sumerian Empire,” in Civilizationsof the Ancient Near East , ed. J. M. Sasson, vol. 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), 851.


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The collapse of the Ur III dynasty brought little in the way of cultural change. Rulers insuccessive Mesopotamian capitals left inscriptions associating care for the people with jus-tice, often expressed through the metaphor of the king as shepherd and exemplified by thedigging of canals and the provision of water. Enlil-bani of Isin (r. 1860–1837), the “shepherd

who makes everything abundant for Nippur,” asserted, “I established justice in Nippur. Imade righteousness appear [. . .] I made anybody with a complaint a taboo thing.” 20 Nur-Adad of Larsa (r. 1865–1850) claimed: “I enlarged the cattle pens and sheepfolds. I madeoil and butter abundant. I had my people eat food of all kinds, and drink abundant water. Idestroyed 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. 1849–1843), “in order to establishgood water for my city and land,” became “the one who dug the Tigris, the broad river, whosupplied good water, abundance without end for his city and land.” 22 Warad-Sin of Larsa (r.1834–1823) declared that the gods’ word had “purely moved him to care for the living oneslike a shepherd, to make their land safe, to establish water in their midst. . . .” 23 His brotherRim-Sin of Larsa (r. 1822–1763) boasted, “I, Rim-Sin [. . .] dug that canal, [. . .] establishedabundant water in its intake, and filled its reservoir. [. . .] I restored the cities and villages. Iestablished 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 pro-vided for the people. The great Hammurabi of Babylon (r. 1792–1750) called himself “theshepherd” and claimed divine appointment “to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroythe wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak.” 25 Hammurabi informedposterity that when he built a city wall, “I dug its canal and provided perpetual water for itsland. I heaped up plenty and abundance.” 26 To one of his canals he gave the name “Hammu-rabi Is the Abundance of the People.” 27 Hammurabi’s son Samsu-iluna (r. 1749–1712) reit-erated 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.” 28While the evidence for Babylonian political ideology grows thin in the mid-second mil-lennium, we are better informed on the society of Assyria to the north. The inscriptionsof the Assyrian kings mainly extolled their divinely guided conquests, but the kings didcall themselves shepherds of the people. 29 Some kings, especially in the later Neo-Assyrianperiod, also recorded their construction of cities and palaces and their channeling of waterand provision of prosperity. When Tukulti-Ninurta (r. 1244–1208) built the city of Kar-Tukulti-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 (2003–1595 BC) (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1990),

78, 79, 80–81, 82, 85, 87, 89–90. 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., 292–93.25. 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, Épithètes,

243–50; for Sumerian examples, ibid., 441–42.29. Mogens Trolle Larsen, The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies (Copenhagen: Akademisk, 1976),

114–15; Samuel M. Paley, King of the World: Ashur-nasir-pal II of Assyria, 883–859 B.C . (New York: BrooklynMuseum, 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), 39–101.


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provides abundance” and named it “Canal of Justice.” 30 Tiglath-Pileser I (r. 1115–1077)recorded that he fostered the cultivation and storage of grain and domesticated trees and gar-den plants from all the known regions of the world in the gardens of Assyria. 31 Adad-nirari II(r. 911–891) 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. 721–705)chronicled his provision of water for fields, gardens, and orchards, his raising of crops onmountain slopes, and his cultivation of waste areas “to cause the waters of abundance to risehigh.” 33 Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627) announced that in his time “Adad sent down his rains forme, Ea opened for me his underground waters, [. . .] during my reign there were prosperityand abundance, in my years plenty was heaped up.” 34 And when Sennacherib (r. 704–681)enlarged the city of Nineveh, he built a new wall to protect it and channeled water to it toincrease its prosperity. 35 The canal he constructed was about ten miles long and was con-nected to massive water works spanning the ʿ Irāqī countryside. 36 In his inscriptions Sennach-erib billed himself as the ruler “who digs canals, opens wells, runs irrigation ditches, whobrings plenty and abundance to the wide acres of Assyria, who furnishes water for irrigationto Assyria’s meadows.” 37

Ancient Mesopotamian wisdom literature described kings and gods as working togetherto provide for the poor and the weak and prevent their exploitation. 38 The rulers made simi-lar claims: Sargon II was one of many who proclaimed that “the creator goddess made hissovereignty without peer so that the weak might not be oppressed and to assure justice to thepowerless,” 39 and Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859) appealed to the sun god in calling himselfthe “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 hispeople 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 kingshad 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 TorontoPress, 1991), 1: 270, 273, 276.

31. Daniel David Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of ChicagoPress, 1926–27), 1: 87. See also Mirko Novak, “The Artificial Paradise: Programme and Ideology of Royal Gar-dens,” in Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East , ed. S. Parpola and R. M. Whiting, 2 vols. (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2002), 2: 445–52.

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 Macmil-

lan, 1995), 1: 408; cf. Seux, Épithètes, 237; Grant Frame, Rulers of Babylonia: From the Second Dynasty of Isin tothe End of Assyrian Domination (1157–612 BC) (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1995), 226.

35. Long description at Frame, Rulers of Babylonia, 171–72.36. Thorkild Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd, Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,

1935).37. Luckenbill, Ancient Records, 2: 184.38. Fensham, “Widow, Orphan, and the Poor,” 130–32.39. Seux, Épithètes, 368.40. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers, 2: 308.41. R. Frankena, ed., Briefe aus dem British Museum (LIH und CT2–33) (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 Ḫammurapi as Judge,” in Symbolae iuridicae et historicae Martino David dedicatae, ed.J. A. Ankum et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 2: 107–29.


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a balancing of the social scales between rich and poor, strong and weak. The proceduresemployed for handling complaints reappeared in the practices of the Persian and Islamicempires. Subjects could complain directly to the royal court or indirectly through a provincialofficial or judge; rulers sat in judgment at regular intervals to hear individuals or read peti-

tions; and they delegated enforcement to provincial officials and their troops. Petitions fromdistant subjects or officials and royal responses were forwarded over the post system, theroyal messenger service. The Babylonian post system was later expanded and maintained bythe Assyrians and succeeding dynasties as an essential tool in the distribution of justice fromthe capital throughout the empire. 42

The Persian conquest of Babylonia in 539 BC expanded Persian political ideas with theideology of the Mesopotamian regimes. Earlier Achaemenid kings had been described inpastoral terms as rulers of “the kingdom, great, having good horses, having good men.” 43

But when Cyrus II (r. 539–530) conquered Babylonia he had himself crowned according toMesopotamian rites and gave himself the titles of a Babylonian king. 44 Darius I (r. 521–486),whose realm encompassed the whole Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Anatolia, described him-self 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 fusionof peoples and cultures, but this inclusiveness was already part of Assyrian ideology. TheAssyrians moved people from conquered regions, resettled them in newly opened areas orin 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 Achaemenidcapital, showed people from many lands supporting the ruler’s throne or paying him hom-age. 47 Like the Assyrians, the Persians brought children of the conquered people to staff theimperial palace, creating a household at the heart of the empire made up of all its peoples, apractice that reappeared in the Ottoman devşirme. 48

Persian rulers felt the need to provide for their society, but instead of prosperity theyprovided order, regimentation, stability. The Persian class system was quite rigid; the kingsset 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, Byzan-tium, 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. (NewHaven: AOS, 1953), 143–44; cf. 116, 136.

44. Wilhelm Eilers, “Le texte cunéiforme du Cylindre de Cyrus,” in Commémoration Cyrus, hommage uni-

versel: Actes du congrès de Shiraz 1971 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 33; Amélie Kuhrt, “Usurpation, Conquest andCeremonial: 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 I’s ideol-ogy, see C. Herrenschmidt, “Désignation de l’empire et concepts politiques de Darius Ier d’après ses inscriptionsen vieux-perse,” Studia Iranica 5 (1976): 33–65; 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: 26–29.47. Donald N. Wilber, Persepolis: The Archaeology of Parsa, Seat of the Persian Kings (rev. ed., Princeton:

Darwin, 1989), esp. 72–100, plates 18–23.48. Pierre Briant, Histoire de l’empire perse de Cyrus à Alexandre (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 201–3; Muhammad

Dandamayev, “Achaemenid Babylonia ,” in Ancient Mesopotamia, Socio-Economic History: A Collection of Studiesby Soviet Scholars (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1969), 309.

49. Darius at Behistun, tr. Rüdiger 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.


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of the social pyramid was far above his subjects—literally so in some imperial art. 50 Thissocial rigidity, however, was combined with a concern for the welfare of the whole soci-ety. The Avesta praised agriculture and reclamation of wastelands and made the king, “theFeeder,” 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 aridland is changed into watered and marshy into dry land.” 51 The Achaemenid government fol-lowed Mesopotamian precedents, investing substantially in irrigation works, completing acanal linking the Nile with the Red Sea, and involving itself in the agriculture and trade ofthe 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 symbolicallyinvited to participate in the sumptuousness and variety of the king’s table. 53 Persian gardensmirrored paradise, but they also brought fertility to the land.

These political relationships outlasted Achaemenid rule to become part of the ideologyof subsequent conquerors. The Seleucid kings (330–140), heirs of Alexander the Great, dei-fied themselves for the sake of their Greek subjects, but for the sake of their Mesopotamiansubjects they became providers, portraying themselves as shepherds. 54 They founded cities,established agricultural colonies, and extended the irrigation works, cultivating exotic newplants. 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 personalizedthem, portraying them as issuing from the wisdom and virtue of heroic monarchs rather thanfrom well-regulated administrative systems and bureaucratic oversight. 56

The Sasanians (224–637) presided over the “restoration” of an imagined Persian pastbased on Parthian foundations, but they came from Persis (Fārs), where the Achaemenid gov-

ernmental heritage remained accessible. They ascribed their political ideas to eastern Iranianmonarchs, symbolizing the victory and wealth brought by divine favor in hunting scenes,and the aristocratic hierarchy remained a powerful political force. 57 Their governing prac-

50. 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 Cam-bridge Ancient History, vol. 4: Persia, Greece and the Western Mediterranean, c. 525 to 479 B.C., ed. J. Boardmanet al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 81–82; 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),xviii–xix.

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), 52–59.53. Briant, Histoire, 213–15, 226, 246.54. F. W. Walbank, “Monarchies and Monarchic Ideas,” in Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 7, pt. 1: The Hel-

lenistic World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 82–83.55. Susan Sherwin-White and Amélie Kuhrt, From Samarkand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid

Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 20, 27, 127, 143–44; G. G. Aperghis, TheSeleukid Royal Economy: The Finances and Financial Administration of the Seleukid Empire (Cambridge: Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 2004), 31, 297, 299–300.

56. Richard N. Frye, The History of Ancient Iran (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1984), 216, 219–26, 282–84; JósefWolski, L’Empire des Arsacides (Louvain: Peeters, 1993), 99–108; Malcolm A. R. Colledge, The Parthians (NewYork: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 64–72, 175.

57. Ehsan Yarshater, “Were the Sasanians Heirs to the Achaemenids?” in La Persia nel medioevo (Rome:Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1971), 517–31; Prudence O. Harper and Pieter Meyers, Silver Vessels of theSasanian 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


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tices, however, more closely resembled those of the Achaemenids and their Mesopotamianpredecessors: they founded cities, settled war prisoners, extended irrigation, protected trade,recentralized the empire, and established Zoroastrianism as the doctrine of the state. Thesedevelopments were all credited to the first Sasanian king, Ardashīr I (r. 224–241), but they

actually came into full flower only later; imperial centralization and religious reform seem tohave 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 Anūshīrvān(r. 531–579). What the Sasanians meant by justice, however, was similar to what the Babylo-nians and Assyrians had understood it to be: the protection of the realm and the deliverance ofits people from ruin either by oppression or natural disaster. Sasanian ethical texts describedgood government as the provision of prosperity; according to the Mēnōg ī Xrad : “Good gov-ernment is that which maintains and directs a province flourishing, the poor untroubled, andthe law and customs true, and sets aside improper laws and customs.” 58 The Dēnkard definedan unjust king as one who was unable to deal with his subjects’ loss of prosperity: “If distressappears everywhere, and if he is incapable of putting an end to it by himself, or if he doesn’tworry about it or try to find a remedy, then that king, who is weak and can neither overcomethe 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 Thesuperiority 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 Dēnkard stated: “According tothe 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 ofAnūshīrvān. The “Book of Deeds” or “Life of Anūshīrvān” reports a speech emphasizing

interdependence between social groups: “If the cultivators do not have what they need to liveand to cultivate their lands, the warriors will perish. The land can only be cultivated with thesurplus remaining in the hands of the peasants.” 62 Superiority of status was not to becomean excuse for oppression; rather, “He who tyrannizes the peasants, who wants to destroy ourprotection 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 relationshipbetween royal glory and prosperity. 64

depicted the hunting theme for similar purposes. On the rigid class system, see Arthur E. Christensen, L’Iran sousles Sassanides, 2nd ed. (Osnabrück: O. Zeller, 1971), 316–21.

58. “Dînâ-î Maîrôg-î Khirad,” in Pahlavi Texts, pt. 3, ed. and tr. E. W. West (Oxford: Clarendon, 1885), 43; anewer Persian translation is A. Tafazzolī, Mēnō-ye xerad (Tehran: Ṭūs, 1364/1985).

59. The Dinkard , quoted in Arthur E. Christensen, L’Empire des Sassanides: Le peuple, l’état, la cour (Copen-hagen: B. Lunos, 1907), 80.

60. “Testament of Ardashīr,” tr. Mario Grignaschi, “Quelques spécimens de la littérature sassanide conservésdans les bibliothèques d’Istanbul,” Journal Asiatique 254 (1966), 77; Jamsheed K. Choksy, “Sacral Kingship inSasanian Iran,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute n.s. 2 (1988): 38; see Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspectsof Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).

61. Dēnkart , tr. J. P. de Ménasce, Le troisième livre du Dēnkart (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1973), 57–58. KhusrauParviz was compared to the sun, “which gladdens the whole earth”; Morony, Iraq, 31.

62. “Karnamag-i Anūshīrvān,” Grignaschi, “Quelques spécimens,” 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. (Lon-don: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 85.


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Ironically, this heightened awareness emerged just when the productivity of Mesopota-mia, on which the empire depended, was declining. Shifts in the rivers entailed frantic workon the irrigation system, the arrival of the plague may have killed as much as a third of theworking population, and war broke out with Byzantium. To meet the increased demand for

revenue, Anūshīrvān instituted a series of tax reforms that reassessed the entire realm. 65 Healso improved the bureaucracy, sponsored architectural projects, built roads, bridges, andcaravanserais, and funded irrigation works. 66 An annual speech addressed to him foreshad-owed the Muslims’ Circle of Justice: “O king, wealth flows from taxation; with wealth onepossesses 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 thepeople have become poor, the royal treasury remains empty, the soldier receives no pay, andthe kingdom is lost.” 68

Muslim writers later ascribed the concept of state encapsulated in the Circle of Justiceto the Persians in general and the Sasanian Ardashīr in particular, but it actually originatednearly three millennia earlier in Mesopotamian inscriptions. It developed gradually over timeas it was assimilated into Assyrian and Persian ideologies, and it was enunciated in full bythe Sasanians late in their regime, during Muḥammad’s lifetime. Mesopotamian governmen-tal concepts, filtered through Persian political and social arrangements, were thus available toIslamic 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 Muḥammad state formation was spreading into areaslike the Arabian peninsula that had previously been stateless and tribally organized. TheArabs on the periphery already had states, but the tribal Arabs around Mecca had not yet beenincorporated; they proudly used a special term for people like themselves who had “neversubmitted to a king.” 69 They experienced the conquest as a major political break, and theirexperience became normative for Muslim society. They defined political legitimacy eitherin terms of succession to Muḥammad as leader of the Muslim community or in terms of thetraditional role of tribal chief, and the caliphate, their new monarchical institution, initiallyfulfilled both roles. 70 In creating their state organization, the first Muslims transferred certainresponsibilities granted in other places to the state—including protection of the weak andprovision for the needy—to the community as a whole and to its individual members. After

65. “Karnamag-i Anūshīrvān,” Grignaschi, “Quelques spécimens,” 17–18, 20–23.66. For Sasanian and Achaemenid provision of bridges, roads, and the post system, see Adam Mez, The Renais-

sance of Islam (rpt. London: Luzac, 1957), 494–95, 501–2.67. Grignaschi, “Quelques spécimens,” 129–30.68. 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 Isfandiyār, who reworked and trans-lated it from the Arabic translation of the Umayyad scribe Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, who translated it with comments froman adaptation of the time of Anūshīrvān, from a text possibly written in the time of Ardashīr I.

69. Ar. laqāḥ; Manfred Ullmann, Wörterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,1979), 2: 1075–76; Bernard Lewis, “Monarchy in the Middle East,” in Middle East Monarchies: The Challengeof Modernity, ed. J. Kostiner (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 16. Fred Donner (The Early Islamic Conquests [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981], 69–75, 251–53) locates state crystallization under Muḥammad, but a stateapparatus developed only under ʿUmar.

70. Ann K. S. Lambton, State and Government in Medieval Islam: An Introduction to the Study of IslamicPolitical Theory. The Jurists (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 1–42. Lambton makes the point that juristic theoryformed only one of the three strands of Islamic political thought, and her study clearly reveals its dependence on theideas of philosophers and statesmen.


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Muḥammad’s death these responsibilities were gradually reintroduced at the state level, butsome 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 andwere only reconciled to it by force and by the early caliphs’ rejection of royal pomp and pre-

rogatives. 72 It became ideologically necessary for the Muslims to differentiate their caliphsfrom ordinary kings, both in style and in modes of legitimation; the early caliphs adopted apersonalistic style of rule modeled on that of the tribal sheikh. The distinction, however, wasneither total nor permanent: although pre-Islamic norms for the selection and legitimation ofkings were considered unsuitable for an Islamic caliph, the ancient Mesopotamian practicesof 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 thetribal style of governance could adequately control and administer a multicontinental andmulticultural empire. As an Islamicate culture developed in the Fertile Crescent, Mesopota-mian administrative practices and concepts of kingship appeared among the Muslims, just asthey had emerged among the Persians after their conquest of Babylonia. The story goes, forexample, that Muʿāwiya used to have read to him the histories of Arab and Persian kings. 73Although the caliphate remained the only legitimate form of rule and political discourse con-tinued to employ a caliphal and tribal vocabulary, the nature of the caliphate began to shifttoward kingship. Opponents of the Umayyad dynasty drew an unfavorable contrast betweenthe elective caliphate and Umayyad “kingship,” hereditary and tyrannical, but the Quranitself held a more balanced view, condemning the tyrannical god-king Pharaoh but praisingDavid, the prophet-king. 74 Pastoral Arabs readily incorporated the shepherding aspect ofMesopotamian kingship; early caliphal art depicted the caliph as a shepherd, responsible forthe provision of blessing and justice. The caliph ʿUthmān (r. 644–656) maintained that God“commanded the imams to be shepherds,” and a ḥadīth reported that Muḥammad agreed:

“The ruler over mankind is a shepherd over them and as such is responsible for them.” 75Gradually, political ideology and institutions expanded to accommodate the concept of thecaliph as a king or emperor.

Mesopotamian-style monarchy, moreover, was not actually foreign to many early Mus-lims, 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 earlyIslamic times due to the shifting of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and the gradual desertifi-cation of the region, their place in the geographical and political landscape was filled by theArab kingdom of the Lakhmids at al-Ḥīra. Peninsular Arabs had for centuries had militaryand diplomatic relations with the Assyrian, Achaemenid, Sasanian, and Roman empires,

71. Gibb, “Interpretation,” 14; Crone, Slaves on Horses, 62–64.72. 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-monarchicalattitude 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 l’Islam (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, 612–750 A.D. (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1979), 187.74. Q 38:25–26 (tr. Arberry). The Umayyads have been called “convenient scapegoats” for Islamic society’s

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-Ṭabarī, History, 15: 6; Ibn Sallām, The Book of Revenue: Kitāb al-Amwāl, tr. I. A. K. Nyazee (Reading,UK: Garnet, 2002), 4.

76. Hodgson, Venture, 1: 41–43; al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, 64.


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and many of them had moved into those empires’ Syrian and ʿIrāqī territories. 77 The Romanemperor Philip the Arab (r. 244–249) came from Syria. Some Arabs had monarchical tradi-tions of their own, in particular those in Syria, Yemen, al-Ḥīra, and the Gulf. Poets from thepeninsula ornamented the Arab courts in Syria and al-Ḥīra, and Arabs served in the Sasa-

nian bureaucracy and in the Roman and Byzantine governments. 78 The Lakhmid region heldnumbers of Christians and Zoroastrians whose grandparents had belonged to ancient Meso-potamian religions and who may well have retained some ancient political ideas as well. 79 Atvarious times the Lakhmids controlled large parts of the Arabian peninsula, including Ṭāʾifand Yathrib/Medina, where an Arab king was appointed in the late sixth century. 80 Sasaniansand Ethiopians disputed possession of Yemen, where art and culture combined eastern andwestern influences. 81 Muḥammad himself visited the kingdom of Yemen and the Arab prov-inces of the Byzantine empire. The trade routes that ran from Mesopotamia down the Gulfcoast to Oman and India, from the Mediterranean down the Red Sea coast, and from Persiathrough Central Arabia to Yemen, some of which dated back to Sumerian times, formedbroad avenues of cultural transmission. 82

There were also non-Arabs in the Muslim community from the beginning. In Mecca livedPersians and adherents of Persian culture, typified in Salmān “the Persian.” 83 Even the Arabswho had no kings of their own were well acquainted with monarchical traditions: pre-Islamicpoetry contained references to royal culture and a palace imagery attributed to Yemen andal-Ḥīra. 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 (556–539 BC) (New Haven: Yale Univ.Press, 1989), 170–85; Jacques Ryckmans, L’Institution monarchique en Arabie méridionale avant l’Islam (Ma‘înet Saba) (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1951); Israel Ephal, The Ancient Arabs: Nomads on the Borders of

the Fertile Crescent, 9th–5th Centuries BC (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), 206–10; 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): 79–91. For an Arab treaty with the Neo-Assyrian ruler Aššurbanipal, see Neo-Assyrian Treatiesand Loyalty Oaths, ed. S. Parpola and K. Watanabe (Helsinki: Helsinki Univ. Press, 1988), 68–69. For Arab tribalcontingents in the Roman army, see J. Cantineau, Le Nabatéen (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, 386–400.80. Ḥamd-Allāh Mustawfī Qazvīnī, 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: Aka-

démiai Kiadó, 1989), 56–57; 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 Ḥijāz,” and itwas presumably the lack of such a figure in the seventh century that created the need for Muḥammad to serve asarbitrator there.

81. Morony, Iraq, 137–54; E. J. Keall, “Carved Stonework from the Hadramawt in Yemen: Is It Sasanian?” inThe 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), 141–49.

82. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: Univ. of ChicagoPress, 1963), 61, 67; Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1980), 30–32; IgnazGoldziher, “Islamisme et Parsisme,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 43 (1901): 22; Touraj Daryaee, “The PersianGulf Trade in Late Antiquity,” Journal of World History 14 (2003): 1–16.

83. EI2, s.v. Salmān al-Fārisī (G. Levi Della Vida). Cf. J. Horovitz, “Salman al-Farisi,” Der Islam 12 (1922):178–83.

84. E.g., Imruʾ al-Qays and Aʿshā al-Maymūn; Charles Greville Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry: 162 Poems from Imrulkais to Maʻarri (London: KPI, 1985), 93, 103; Ehsan Yarshater, “The Persian Presence in the Islamic


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nating from the Arabian peninsula. 85 Non-Arab converts were crucial to the growth of theIslamic sciences such as Arabic grammar, Quranic exegesis, and the collection of ḥadīth and historical traditions. 86 In addition, non-Muslims, mostly non-Arab, formed the majorityof the empire’s population for several centuries. Non-Arabs, both Muslim and non-Muslim,

played an active role in Islamicate government and culture from the earliest days. Therewere Persians on the staff of ʿUmar I (r. 634–644), and the condemnation of ʿUthmān forappointing family members in governing positions reflects the expansion of administrationduring his reign. The transfer of the Muslim capital from the Arabian peninsula to the Fer-tile Crescent further expanded the role of non-Arabs in government. In the capital cities ofDamascus and Baṣra, Hellenized Syrian, Coptic, and Persian officials in the caliphal adminis-tration restored and maintained Roman and Sasanian practices of taxation and governmentalorganization. The Persian empire’s local notables, of varied origins, served in the army andas local governors, tax collectors, and officials. 87 From very early on the contributions of allthese groups made Islamicate civilization a blend of Arab and non-Arab elements, althoughthere was a consensus among Muslims that the Arab elements should be cherished and givenextra weight. 88

THE UMAYYADS (661–750), BRINGERS OF RAIN

With the Umayyad move of the Muslim capital to Damascus, the later caliphs of thedynasty held court in a very different manner from tribal chieftains and more like the emper-ors whose lands they had appropriated. 89 Their image has come down to us as dissipated andineffectual, but the rapidity of the conquests and the immense wealth they amassed mademany regard them as channels of divine blessing and providers of abundance. Lower-leveladministrators, the conquered peoples, and some Arab fighters advocated an imperial styleof rule, while most religious leaders and many tribesmen opposed monarchical culture. Thefact that the Umayyads chose to appeal to the conquered peoples rather than the Arab tribessuggests the strength of imperial ideas among the non-peninsular population of the empire.When criticized for his adoption of Byzantine symbols of authority, Muʿāwiya is said tohave replied that “none would believe in his power if he did not behave and look like anemperor.” 90

World,” in The Persian Presence in the Islamic World , ed. R. G. Hovannisian and G. Sabagh (Cambridge: Cam-bridge 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; JamsheedK. Choksy, Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society (New

York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 83, 88, 141.86. Ibn Khaldūn, cited in Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (London: Wei-

denfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 150; Ignaz Goldziher, “ʿArab and ʿ Ajam,” in Muslim Studies, ed. S. M. Stern (London:George Allen & Unwin, 1889–90), 1: 104–9.

87. Goldziher, “ Aʿrab and Aʿjam,” 1: 110; Michael G. Morony, “Conquerors and Conquered: Iran,” in Studieson the First Century of Islamic Society, ed. G. H. A. Juynboll (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1982),74–75.

88. Bertold Spuler, “Iran: The Persistent Heritage,” in Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization, ed. G. E. vonGrunebaum (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955), 171. Early Muslim authorities struggled to keep the Arabsfrom imitating non-Arab ways but were only partly successful; Bashear, Arabs and Others, 33–36.

89. Oleg Grabar, “Notes sur les cérémonies umayyades,” in Studies in Memory of Gaston Wiet , ed. M. Rosen-Ayalon (Jerusalem: Institute of Asian and African Studies, Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem, 1977), 53–57; idem, Forma-tion, 148–49.

90. Al-Ṭabarī, cited in Oleg Grabar, “Islamic Art and Byzantium,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 88; seealso Speros Vryonis Jr., “Byzantium and Islam: Seven–Seventeenth Century,” East European Quarterly 2 (1968):


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Poetry dedicated to Umayyad caliphs imitated the style of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry butexpressed ideas of kingship consonant with Mesopotamian and Persian royal ideologies.Although the poets cited Persian precedents rarely and Mesopotamian ones never, they wereclearly 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 ofthe Sasanian kings’ role as protectors of the faith, or “the shepherd of God on earth,” withthe Muslim community as their flock. 91 Like Mesopotamian kings, Muslim caliphs weresaid to be divinely appointed to their posts; as the poet al-Aḥwās told the caliph Sulaymān(r. 715–717), “God has confided to you rule and authority over us; command and be just.” 92

Hishām (r. 724–743) 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-Akhṭal wrote, “God allottedto them the good fortune that made them victorious [. . .] It is they who vie with the rain-bearing wind to bring sustenance when impoverished supplicants find scant food.” 94 Likeold-time tribal chiefs, the Umayyad caliphs were seen as empowered to pray (successfully)for rain. 95 Like a Babylonian or Assyrian king, ʿAbd al-Malik was hailed as one “whom Godhas made victorious, [. . .] the vicegerent of God, from him we expect rain.” 96 His succes-sors al-Walīd I (r. 705–715) and Sulaymān were also expected to control fertility by bringingrain. 97 A poem by the caliph al-Walīd II (r. 743–744) 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 qualitiesand responsibilities belonging to kings. In order to justify his seizure of the throne, YazīdIII (r. 744) claimed that he would not allow the mighty to oppress the weak, nor overtax thepeasantry and force them to flee, nor squander the treasury on women, palaces, or irrigationworks, but would treat his distant subjects equally with those nearby and would pay stipendspromptly. 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 centuriesreduced 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), 737–48; see William Thomson, “The Character of Early Semitic Sects,” in Ignace Goldziher Memorial Vol-ume, ed. S. Löwinger and J. Somogyi (rpt. Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1958), 1: 91–92. Suzanne Stetkevych (The Poet-ics 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 alsodrawing on the broader Mesopotamian tradition.

92. Émile Tyan, Institutions du droit public musulman (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1954), 1: 442 and n. 2. For thisstance within a Quranic context, see Wadād al-Qāḍī, “The Religious Foundation of Late Umayyad Ideology and

Practice,” in Saber religioso y poder político en el Islam (Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional,1994), 231–73.

93. Tyan, Institutions, 1: 443.94. Tr. Stetkevych, Poetics, 93.95. Henri Lammens, L’Arabie occidentale avant l’hégire (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1928), 159–60 and

n. 1.96. Al-Akhṭal, tr. Henri Lammens, “Le chantre des Omiades: Notes biographiques et littéraires sur le poète

arabe Aḫṭal,” Journal Asiatique, ser. 9, vol. 4 (1894): 163–64; Stetkkevych, Poetics, 90–91.97. Al-Nābigha and al-Farazdāq, tr. Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the

First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 9. Crone (God’s Rule: Six Centuries of Medi-eval Islamic Political Thought [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2004], 41–42) attributes the use of these imagesto messianism, ignoring their origin in ancient concepts of state.

98. Ringgren, “Some Religious Aspects,” 740.99. Crone and Hinds, God’s Caliph, 68 and n. 63; G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad

Caliphate, AD 661–750 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 95.


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with pastoral imagery: “When the flock goes astray, you do not oppress.” 100 By the end ofthe Umayyad period, Mesopotamian kingly obligations related to the Circle of Justice—shepherding the people and providing prosperity and justice—were solidly entrenched in therhetoric and conceptualization of caliphal governance.

The Umayyads’ opponents deployed the same ancient concepts of kingship to criticizethe caliphs and their deeds, emphasizing the need for their fulfillment in practice. Extremistrebels looked for a mahdī who would “fill the world with justice and equity as it is now filledwith tyranny and oppression.” In his time “the heavens would not withhold rain; the earthwould give bountiful crops and surrender her precious metals.” 101 The Shiʿite movementawaited the coming of a mahdī from the family of the Prophet who would “distribute equallyamong the people and [. . .] establish justice among his subjects.” 102 The Shiʿite imam wasendowed with numerous attributes of Mesopotamian kingship: he was chosen by God, ashepherd of his sheep, without whom worship and prayers could not be accepted; he wasthe pillar of the earth, the father of orphans, the judge, the interpreter of God’s commands;he was the light towards which people walk, a raincloud of blessings and kindness and aclear spring that flows at God’s command, the owner of all the land and fresh waters and thetreasures of the earth. 103

Although “Persian-style” governance is usually ascribed to the ʿAbbāsids, the Umay-yads’ political culture already followed patterns established by the older empires. Byzantineand Persian royal iconography decorated Umayyad palaces and aristocratic residences. 104

Despite some decline since the Sasanian period, Mesopotamia was still the economic hubof the empire and set the style for the rest, artistically as well as ideologically. 105 During thesecond Islamic century, caliphal palaces in Syria and Baghdad exhibited structures, layouts,and ornamentation already found in Muslim governors’ residences in ʿIrāq, the place whereArab, Mesopotamian, and Persian traditions met and blended. Like Mesopotamian and Per-

sian kings, caliphs and their governors planted gardens to convey their ability to make theworld fertile and prosperous, and they collected rare plants and animals from distant regionsto illustrate the universality of their rule. 106 Like Assyrian rulers, the Umayyads constructed

100. Poem to Ziyād, in al-Ṭabarī, History, vol. 18: Between Civil Wars: The Caliphate of Muʿāwiyah, 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 Ḥazm,” JAOS 28 (1907):43–44.

102. The tradition regarding the Shiʿite mahdī , attributed to the fifth imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir, is quoted inA. A. Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of the Mahdi in Twelver Shiʻism (Albany: State Univ. of New YorkPress, 1981), 39.

103. “The Characteristics of the Imama,” from Kitāb al-Ḥujja, in al-Kulaynī (d. 940), Uṣūl al-Kāfī , quoted inSachedina, Islamic Messianism, 188–92.

104. Dominique Sourdel, “Questions de cérémonial abbaside,” Revue des Études Islamiques 28 (1960): 123–32; Grabar, “Notes,” 52; idem, Formation, 58, 153; Robert Hillenbrand, “Islamic Art at the Crossroads: East VersusWest at Mshattā,” in Essays in Islamic Art and Architecture in Honor of Katharina Otto-Dorn , ed. A. Daneshvari(Malibu: Undena, 1981), 63–86. On one such building, see Richard Ettinghausen, From Byzantium to Sasanian Iranand the Islamic World: Three Modes of Artistic Influence (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), 17–65. On a single artisticmotif across cultures, see Willy Hartner and Richard Ettinghausen, “The Conquering Lion, the Life Cycle of aSymbol,” in Art and Archaeology: Collected Papers, ed. M. Rosen-Ayalon (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1984), 693–712.

105. Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr , 85–92.106. Oleg Grabar, “Al-Mushatta, Baghdād, and Wāsiṭ,” in The World of Islam: Studies in Honor of Philip

K. Hitti, ed. J. Kritzeck and R. B. Winder (London: Macmillan, 1959), 99–108; Morony, Iraq, 10, 74–79. Morebroadly, 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: IstitutoItaliano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1995), 47–52. On gardens, see Andrew M. Watson, “Botanical Gardens in


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canals to carry water, sometimes from long distances, to imperial and governoral palaces thatwere surrounded by fields and pastures. They also worked to repair the disruption of the lateSasanian period and the destruction of conquest, digging extensive irrigation works aroundDamascus and Baṣra, and also in northern Syria and central ʿIrāq. 107

In addition to an ideology and symbolism of kingship recalling pre-Islamic empires, theUmayyads employed many administrative practices of the past, adapted to suit both the newreligious ethos and the changed geographical and economic conditions of the post-conquestperiod. These practices then became identified as Islamic, part of the tradition of the Muslimcommunity. 108 Simply by continuing to use them, the conquered peoples saw to it that themechanisms developed by previous empires for fostering prosperity and controlling power-ful 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 rulerscaused them to be adopted. The people of the empire—Muslim and non-Muslim, Arab andnon-Arab—ensured that the Muslim polity possessed an imperial apparatus.

Islamicate administration is usually traced back to the caliph ʿUmar I and his establish-ment of the dīwān to allocate the booty of conquest; the first archive seems to have appearedduring his time. 109 Nonetheless, early Islamic officials incorporated into Islamic governingpractices numerous mechanisms devised in pre-Islamic times to promote order and justice,such as bureaucratic control of taxation and the ruler’s accessibility to petitioners. Papyrusfinance records, often modeled directly on the documents of past regimes, reveal that Muslimadministrators in Egypt and Palestine continued to employ pre-Islamic systems for survey-ing 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 arereported 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 acceptresponsibility for providing justice, appeals of military and taxation issues to the provincialgovernor, and complaints to officials at various levels about theft, debt payment, the grainsupply, and road works. 112 The advice of an Umayyad governor to Egypt to his subordinateto 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 andS. Sandahl (Toronto: TSAR and Centre for Korean Studies, 1994), 105–11.

107. Oleg Grabar, “Umayyad ‘Palace’ and the ʻAbbasid ‘Revolution,’” Studia Islamica 18 (1963): 5–18; Rob-ert McC. Adams, Land Behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains (Chicago: Univ. of ChicagoPress, 1965), 84–85; Eliyahu Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 46–48.108. Paul L. Heck, The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization: Qudāma b. Jaʿfar and His Kitābal-Kharāj wa-Ṣināʿat al-Kitāba (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 147; Fred M. Donner, ed., The Articulation of Early IslamicState Structures (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012).

109. Meir M. Bravmann, “The State Archives in the Early Islamic Era,” Arabica 15 (1968): 87–89; Fārūq SaʿīdMajdalāwī, Islamic Administration under Omar Ibn Al-Khattab (Amman: Majdalawi Masterpieces, 2002), 40–53.

110. Adolf Grohmann, Arabic Papyri in the Egyptian Library (Cairo: Egyptian Library Press, 1938), 3: 186,191, 195–203; H. I. Bell, “Translations of the Greek Aphrodito Papyri in the British Museum,” Der Islam 2 (1911):272–83; 3 (1912): 133–40, 369–73; 4 (1913): 87–96; Casper J. Kraemer Jr., Excavations at Nessana, vol. 3: Non-

Literary Papyri (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958), 170.111. Morony, Iraq, 99–124.112. Bell, “Translations” (1911), 281–82; Fred Donner, “The Formation of the Islamic State,” JAOS 106

(1980): 285–89, 292–93.

113. R. B. Serjeant, “The Caliph ʿUmar’s Letters to Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī and Muʿāwiya,” Journal of SemiticStudies 29 (1984): 65–79; cf. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings (Berkeley andLos Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 2: 23.


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The new administrators’ need for detailed information on prior governing institutionsinspired translations of older political and administrative literature. The head of the Umayyadchancery, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ Sālim, translated several pre-Islamic works of political thought for thecaliph Hishām, including the apocryphal “Letters of Aristotle to Alexander.” 114 In addition

to what this work derived from Greek and Persian precedents, it contained recommendationsbased on ancient Mesopotamian practices, notably that the ruler should hold audience tohear appeals for justice on a daily basis and should ensure that the legal system redressed thegrievances of the people. 115 These recommendations may have come via a Syriac rather thana 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 Translationsof Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Indian texts promoted the assimilation of their ideas throughthe genres of Arabic literature.

Sālim’s successor ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd (d. 750), who headed the chancery of Marwān II, wasfamed 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 forMuslim scribes. 117 Although the values and training of court secretaries were modeled onthose 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 scholarsin the category of ulema left the secretaries and bureaucrats in a class by themselves. Theirisolation may have increased their sense of identity as well as their demand for professionalliterature, such as ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd’s risāla. 118

As before upon the conquest of the Fertile Crescent, e.g., by the Akkadians and Achaeme-nids, once again the scribes took responsibility for instructing the new rulers in the customsand practices of imperial administration. 119 ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd asserted that through secretaries

114. Mario Grignaschi, “Les ‘Rasāʾil Arisṭāṭālīsa ilā-l-Iskandar’ de Sālim Abū-l- Aʿlāʾ et l’activité culturelleà l’époque omayyade,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 19 (1965–66): 7–83; idem, “Le roman épistolaire classiqueconservé dans la version arabe de Sālim Abū-l-ʿAlāʾ,” Le Muséon 80 (1967): 211–64; S. M. Stern, Aristotle on theWorld State (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1968), 2 and n. 2; Jozef Bielawski, tr., Lettre d’Aristote à

Alexandre sur la politique envers les cités (Wroclaw: Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1970). The romance of Alexanderhad already been translated into Armenian and Pahlavi and from there into Syriac; Tomas Hägg, “The OrientalReception of Greek Novels: A Survey with Some Preliminary Considerations,” Symbolae Osloensis 61 (1986): 104,123 n. 23.

115. Grignaschi, “Rasāʾil Arisṭāṭālīsa,” 9–12; idem, “Un roman épistolaire gréco-arabe: La correspondenceentre Aristote et Alexandre,” in The Problematics of Power: Eastern and Western Representations of Alexander theGreat , ed. M. Bridges and J. Ch. Bürgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), 109 n. 1.

116. Sebastian P. Brock, “Syriac Culture in the Seventh Century,” ARAM 1 (1989): 268–80; Morony, Iraq, 359.On Arabic wisdom literature, see Dimitri Gutas, “Classical Arabic Wisdom Literature: Nature and Scope,” JAOS 101 (1981): 49–86; on the assimilation of Greek wisdom literature into Arabic, see idem, Greek Wisdom Literaturein Arabic Translation (New Haven: AOS, 1975), 2. The wisdom tradition was one way for Islamic society to “defineand limit the exercise of political power [. . .]; it functioned as a vehicle for theories of state”; Heck, Constructionof Knowledge, 226–27.

117. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, Risāla ilā l-kuttāb, in Rasāʾil al-bulaghāʾ, ed. M. Kurd ʿAlī (Cairo: Dār al-Kutubal-ʿArabiyya al-Kubrā, 1913), 172–76; Ihsan Abbas, ed., ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd bin Yaḥyā al-Kātib wa-mā tabaqqā minrasāʾilihi wa-rasāʾil Sālim Abī l- ʿAlāʾ (Amman: Dār al-Shurūq, 1988), 281–87, tr. Lewis, Islam, 1: 186–91. Onsecretaries and their work, see Ibn al-Nadīm, The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture,ed. and tr. B. Dodge (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), 1: 256–306.

118. On changes in scribal identity during the Aʿbbāsid period, see Roy P. Mottahedeh, “Bureaucracy and thePatrimonial State in Early Islamic Iran and Iraq,” Al-Abḥāth 29 (1981): 25–36.

119. Some Mesopotamian kings had received good educations: Shulgi and Esarhaddon had boasted of theirliteracy, and a large tablet, on which Ashurbanipal described his education for the throne, shows how intensively hewas trained for rule and administration and how important the scribal arts (divination, arithmetic, the reading of old


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“God fits government to the people, and the land prospers.” 120 “Fitting government to thepeople” involved adherence to administrative and fiscal patterns developed in pre-Islamictimes so that the land would prosper. Here, too, ʿIrāq formed the model for the empire as awhole, displaying an almost unbroken continuity in fiscal management and practice.

Only one generation after the conquest of ʿIrāq, Muʿāwiya’s revenue official Ibn Durrājreinstituted Persian taxation practices there. For decades afterward taxation records andprocedures for the eastern half of the empire were controlled by a Persian fiscal secretary,Zādhānfarrūkh (d. 701), whose descendants served as governmental secretaries for genera-tions. Zādhānfarrūkh’s protégé, the Persian convert Ṣāliḥ b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. 717), trans-lated the tax records of ʿIrāq 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.Ṣāliḥ trained the next generation of secretaries, including the father of the Persian convertand expert in Arabic Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. ca. 756), who in turn was probably trained by ʿAbdal-Ḥamīd. 121 This continuity of secretarial practice over the decades facilitated the trans-mission of scribal intellectual traditions across changes of rule and allowed the governingconcepts and administrative practices of the pre-Islamic rulers of the region to be retainedand built upon by their successors. 122

THE ʿABBĀSIDS (750–945), “SHADOWS OF GOD”

The ʿAbbāsids were doubly “shadows of God,” being considered both protectors and pro-viders. “Shadow of God on Earth,” the caliphal title that the piety-minded saw as the mostpresumptuous, was first given to the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–861), but itsbestowal was attributed to the Prophet in a ḥadīth. 123 The metaphor had already been used,however, in Babylonian and Sasanian times; it referred to the quality of protection affordedby 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 bysome Muslim rulers including the ʿAbbāsids. 125 The late fourteenth-century author al-Ibshīhī

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. Aʿbd al-Ḥamīd, Risāla ilā l-kuttāb, in Aḥmad Zakī Ṣafwat, Jamharat rasāʾil al-ʿarab fī ʿusūr al-ʿarabiyyaal-zāhira (Egypt: al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1971), 2: 455–60, tr. Lewis, Islam, 1: 186.

121. M. Sprengling, “From Persian to Arabic,” American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 56(1939): 175–224, 325–36; 57 (1940): 302–5; al-Balādhurī, The Origins of the Islamic State, part 2, tr. F. C. Mur-gotten (New York: n.p., 1924), 260–61; al-Jahshiyārī, Kitāb al-Wuzarāʾ wa-l-kuttāb, 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 d’Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ d’après les sources anciennes,” Arabica 1 (1954), 307; Said Amir Arjomand,“ʿAbd Allah Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and the ʿAbbasid Revolution,” Iranian Studies 27 (1994): 13 and n. 24, 17–19, 24–25.

122. For other cases of hereditary service in government, a natural route of transmission for administrativepractices 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 ḥadīth by ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Muttaqī, Kanz al-ʿummāl

fī sunan al-aqwāl wa-l-af ʿāl (Aleppo: Manshūrāt Maktabat al-Turāth al-Islāmī, 1969), 6: 4–14. According toLambton, the ḥadīth was recorded by Ibn Quzayma, Ibn Nuʿaym, and al-Daylamī but was regarded as weak byal-Bayhāqī; Najm al-Dīn Rāzī, The Path of God’s 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 leschefs d’Islam,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 35 (1897), 332–35; Ringgren, “Some Religious Aspects,” 745–46.

125. For the Aʿbbāsids’ use of the parasol, see Mez, Renaissance, 133–34; for the Fāṭimids, Saljūqs, Ayyūbids,and Mamlūks, see Paula Sanders, Ritual, Politics, and the City in Fatimid Cairo (Albany: State Univ. of New York


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employed the metaphor of the virtuous “man with a cloud” over his head that shaded himfrom the sun; this cloud has been associated with prophethood, but that association surelyderives from the concept of the “shadow of God” and its symbol of the parasol. 126

The takeover by the ʿAbbāsids in 750 is usually called a revolution, and the ʿAbbāsids

advertised themselves as having all the virtues the Umayyads allegedly lacked, but in manyrespects their rule continued trends begun in the Umayyad period. In particular, the demandfor unity intensified an already-existing interest in pre-Islamic governmental systems.Although Muslims were still a numerical minority in their empire, under the Umayyads theyhad already begun a new cultural and political synthesis that assimilated Mesopotamian, Per-sian, and Greek political ideas and institutions together with concepts and practice from theArab heritage and the example of the Prophet. 127 In the Khurasanian home of the ʿAbbāsidmovement and of many of its prominent members, the Persian social structure was more orless intact, and the leading families of the region preserved the history, values, and govern-mental patterns of Sasanian times. The ʿAbbāsids brought Muslims of Persian backgroundinto the expanding bureaucracy, possibly less as a deliberate “Persianization” of ʿAbbāsidgovernance than as the natural administrative expansion of imperial rule. 128

Transferring the Muslim capital from Syria to ʿIrāq, the ʿAbbāsids built Baghdad nextto the old Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon/Madāʾin. The construction of new capital citiesembodying a new ruler’s agenda followed an Assyrian pattern; Baghdad’s round plan iden-tified the city with past imperial capitals and with the heavenly city of God, and extensivecanals supplied water and increased prosperity. 129 The ʿAbbāsids surrounded their palaceswith gardens of exotic plants and wild animals, exhibiting their dominance over the naturalrealm as well as the political. 130 Just outside Kūfa the old Lakhmid capital of al-Ḥīra and thepalace of Khawarnaq, now a site of wineshops and drinking parties, remained an accessiblereminder of ancient kingship. ʿAbbāsid poets portrayed the caliphs in metaphors referring

to Lakhmid and Sasanian kings, palaces, and governing practices. 131 Like earlier Meso-potamian rulers, the ʿAbbāsids engaged in city-building, construction of public works, anddevelopment of the economy. Administrative development began as early as the reign of thesecond caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 755–775), 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 GeneralSurvey of the Material and Spiritual Culture and History c. 1071–1330 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968), 220.

126. See Dakhlia, Divan des rois, 168, 251–52 and n. 96.127. Spuler, “Iran,” 172–74. On the scientific heritage, see Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture:

The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries)

(London: Routledge, 1998).128. EI2, s.v. al-Barāmika (D. Sourdel); L. Bouvat, Les Barmécides d’après les historiens arabes et perses

(Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1912); David White Biddle, “The Development of the Bureaucracy of the Islamic Empireduring the Late Umayyad and Early Abbasid Period,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Texas, 1972, 68–72; al-Ṭabarī, History,vol. 29: Al-Manṣūr and al-Maḥdī , tr. Hugh Kennedy, 105.

129. Jac

“the vicegerent of god, from him we expect rain”: the incorporation of the pre-islamic state ...

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