his Coptic colleagues allegedly enjoyed. The other two reasons he provides are his ardent zeal for the money of the Muslim community and his love for the sultan.
The Sword of Ambition resists precise dating. Other works by Ibn al-Nābulusī may have been composed and redacted in stages, so that no single date can be assigned to them.28 While there are no definite indications that this was the case for the work at hand, neither is it possible to accept the estimate of ca. 638/1240 given by Claude Cahen, on the basis of the dating of the edict concerning non-Muslim clothing.29 That edict should probably instead be dated to 640/1242 (see §0.2 of the Translation). A handful of passages found in some manuscripts, however, refer to events that occurred long after this date, but within the lifetime of the author (e.g., §4.2.7, which mentions the year 660/1261–62). Ibn al-Nābulusī might conceivably have produced multiple recensions of the work, or early copyists might have added to it.
The perspicuous “table of contents” (§§0.3–6) presents the work’s rather stiff structure, relieving us of the need to detail its contents and organization here. Taken together, its four chapters, each of which comprises either three or fifteen sections, give the impression that the author drew on all available arguments to make the point that Coptic Christians (and converts), as well as Jewish, rural, and otherwise disreputable individuals, were unfit for state service and should therefore be dismissed. Some (and only some) of the sources used to back up these arguments were: Qurʾanic exegesis; hadith of the Prophet; historical accounts of Muslim rulers’ dealings with non-Muslim officials; demonstration of the perfidy and sedition inherent in Copts and Jews; poetry mocking incompetent officials; jokes about bumbling and illiterate Copts and other despicable persons; and both poetry and prose demonstrating the excellence of real secretaries (kuttāb), whom the author contrasted to the loathsome pretenders who were laying claim to that sublime title. The work’s eclectic angles of attack must be read in their full variety to be appreciated.30 The character of its intended audience, namely the Sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ himself, may have shaped the author’s decisions about its content. The sources depict al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ as proud, acquisitive, sober, taciturn, and aloof, an inspirer of reverence and dread. Although he did not impress his contemporaries as particularly bookish, he was known as a patron of scholars.31 These aspects of the sultan’s character might have simultaneously emboldened Ibn al-Nābulusī to beg for employment and led him to keep the sections of his work brief and vivid in order to hold the attention of his royal audience. There is some evidence that The Sword of Ambition was intended more to entertain than to bear learned scrutiny. For example, much of the poetry in the third chapter seems to have been borrowed without acknowledgment from the works of al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038), but carelessly attributed to the wrong poets in the course of the borrowing process. Similarly, a passage concerning Ibn Ṭūlūn’s rule in Egypt (§2.4.1) ascribes certain past misdeeds of the government to the Copts, where in other sources, the same misdeeds are ascribed to Muslim administrators. A learned reader would have noted such discrepancies, which the sultan, by contrast, could have been expected to overlook. Ibn al-Nābulusī thus probably did not mean The Sword of Ambition to be a resource for serious scholars. He seems rather to have intended to entertain an audience that was unlikely to have had deep prior familiarity with his material.
What sort of book is this? Its multifarious contents and disparate registers make it a poor fit for any one genre. It would be unsatisfying to classify it as exegesis (tafsīr), history (tārīkh), law (fiqh), polemic (jadal), or, save in the broadest sense, belles lettres (adab), though it contains elements of all these. I would suggest, however, that it was not sui generis. Rather, it was intended to be read (or listened to) as a representative of the established Arabic genre of advice literature (naṣīḥah).32 While its form is not typical of “mirrors for princes,” The Sword of Ambition qualifies as naṣīḥah in that it, like standard examples of that genre, was directed to a ruler in the hope of convincing him to bring his wayward conduct into line with certain principles. Unlike many naṣīḥah works, The Sword of Ambition does not present a comprehensive ethical vision for the ruler’s conduct. Instead it is concerned with a specific issue, namely the ongoing employment of Copts and other undesirables. In this it stands as an early example of a small cluster of anti-Copt treatises that were composed in Egypt between the late twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries. It drew on the same sources as some other works in the cluster did, and served as a source for others.33 The Sword of Ambition is also closely comparable to Ibn al-Nābulusī’s own Luminous Rules, which was written, as we have seen, around the same time, and which declares itself openly to be a work of naṣīḥah. Both works, no matter how far they digress, circle relentlessly back to the problem of socially marginal and unqualified men who receive stipends and administrative posts, while the deserving few (notably the author himself) are left in the cold.
Only a portion of The Sword of Ambition represents what a modern reader would call Ibn al-Nābulusī’s original work. The author, like most of his compeers in the Arabic literary heritage, makes liberal use of the sources available to him. Only in a few instances, however, does he name his sources. From a literary perspective, a work like this one would have been judged not for its originality or meticulousness, but for its artful arrangement of engaging selections of poetry and prose, interspersed with apposite remarks and digressions by the author himself. Parts of the work can be traced (or, rarely, are openly credited) to such earlier works as The Life of ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (Sīrat ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz) attributed to ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 214/829); The History of the Conquest of Egypt (Futūḥ Miṣr) by the latter’s son ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 257/871); The Book of Songs (Kitāb al-Aghānī) of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 356/967); unnamed writings of the well-known Fatimid official al-Muwaffaq ibn al-Khallāl (d. 566/1171); The Eternally Incomparable (Yatīmat al-dahr) and Inimitability and Pithiness (al-Iʿjāz wa-l-ījāz) of al-Thaʿālibī; and (for most of the historical accounts in the first and some in the second chapter) an as-yet-unidentified work against non-Muslim officials composed around the time of Saladin’s accession in Egypt (ca. 567/1171). This last source also influenced many, though not all, of the polemical works composed against Christian and Jewish officials in later medieval Egypt.34
The Sword of Ambition has greater value as an historical source for the late Ayyubid period and for inter-communal relations over the longue durée than as a work of literature per se. As a source, it is an intriguing inventory of the ideational resources available to Muslim polemicists in Egypt in the seventh/thirteenth century, and a clue to the potential methods by which, and conditions under which, these were deployed. For example, the stories about inept and illiterate Copts and others (§4.2.1 and following) might serve as a source for the social history of popular stereotypes and of humor in medieval Egypt. The work also reflects changes in the composition and self-conception of the Egyptian state’s administrative corps, given its numerous and vivid incidental references to conditions among both religious specialists (ʿulamāʾ) and secretaries (kuttāb), particularly as these groups related to state power. It is, for instance, instructive to observe the author as a liminal figure, trained as a scholar but employed as a state secretary in an age when membership in these groups increasingly overlapped (more on this below). In his capacity as a scholar-bureaucrat, Ibn al-Nābulusī uses the issue of Coptic officials to mount subtle critiques of state power, as where (§2.4.1) he attributes the standing state monopoly on the mineral natron to a Coptic plot that dated from Abbasid times, implying that this un-Islamic monopoly should be rescinded. Finally, the work is of value in that it preserves numerous earlier passages, some of which have been lost or survive only in much later sources. For example, Ibn al-Nābulusī includes long and entertaining anecdotes in §§2.9.1–3 that preserve parts of the work of al-Muwaffaq ibn al-Khallāl, otherwise found only later and in different forms in the works of the official Ghāzī ibn Aḥmad ibn al-Wāsiṭī (d. 712/1312) and the historian al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442).
In The Sword of Ambition’s
