rel="nofollow" href="#ue84c8165-57ff-504b-81c2-3c5794a16e0a">Chapter Three) that present outstanding examples of poetry and prose produced by secretaries, these appear invariably in the vein of bons mots. This is not surprising in view of Ibn al-Nābulusī’s professional background. Although he wrote in praise of refined literature (adab, §3.2.1), Ibn al-Nābulusī was in fact a bureaucrat and religious scholar of ordinary rank who does not seem to have been much noted as a littérateur. Ibn al-Nābulusī’s lifelong involvement in the competitive worlds of scholarship and court life, along with his weighty family responsibilities, may have forced him to subordinate his literary aspirations to the more quotidian tastes of the audience he needed to sway.
It will be worthwhile briefly to consider The Sword of Ambition alongside other premodern literary productions of a similar stripe. To the classicist, for example, it may recall the polemics of the Neo-Platonist philosopher and Christian bishop Synesius of Cyrene (d. ca. AD 414) against politically influential “barbarians,” primarily Goths, in De Regno and De Providentia. Synesius’s opposition to powerful Gothic generals and courtiers did not arise from Roman chauvinism alone; it had an additional, ideational aspect. “Let all be excluded from magistracies,” Synesius wrote in De Regno, “and kept away from the privileges of the council who are ashamed of all that has been sacred to the Romans from olden times, and has been so esteemed. Of a truth both Themis, herself sacred to the Senate, and the god of our battle-line must I think, cover their faces when the man with leather jerkin marches in command of those that wear the general’s cloak, and whenever such a one divests himself of the sheepskin in which he was clad to assume the toga.”35 Ibn al-Nābulusī’s own invective urges the exclusion of officials who spurned symbols revered by Muslims (the Pilgrimage rites, for example, in §2.15.2) and mocks pretenders who dared don the cowl or ṭaylasān, the garment that marked Muslim secretaries and scholars (e.g., §4.2.9).
Well after Ibn al-Nābulusī’s lifetime, we find another point of comparison in the work of the Ottoman official and historian Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī (d. 1008/1600), who in his book of advice, Nuṣḥatü s-selāṭīn, plainly intended to secure the dismissal of his rivals by invoking their ethnicity and alleged unsuitability for employment. His larger corpus of writings, like Ibn al-Nābulusī’s, evinces a petulant preoccupation with the sagging standards of state officialdom. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s modern biographer, Cornell Fleischer, has described him as “able, well-educated and far more outspoken than most of his peers,” but also “an embittered bureaucrat … a disappointed man who felt that his abilities had gone unrewarded.”36 Mutatis mutandis, the characterization holds for Ibn al-Nābulusī, who, though a lesser intellect than Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī, channeled his disappointment into similar literary productions.
Notwithstanding its similarity to works of other times and places and its liberal use of earlier sources, The Sword of Ambition is very much the product of a particular moment in the history of Egypt, and indeed of Islamic societies more broadly. It should be noted that Ibn al-Nābulusī’s preoccupation with non-Muslim state officials was widely shared in certain Muslim circles in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Egypt, and that it was a recurrent issue in Islamic history. It has often been pointed out that Muslim rulers sometimes preferred to hire non-Muslims for certain positions; those employees’ relative weakness and lack of connections to powerful Muslim factions tended—in the eyes of some Muslim employers, at least—to make them more trustworthy. This phenomenon can be traced from the Syrian Umayyad court, where a Christian progenitor of John of Damascus oversaw the empire’s finances, to Islamic Spain, where Jewish officials, such as the tenth-century figure Hasdai ibn Shaprut, occasionally served as the Muslim ruler’s right-hand men, to the very eve of modernity. When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he found the financial administration in the hands of a Copt, Jirjis al-Jawharī, whom the French preserved in office.37 Muslim religious elites regularly objected to the empowerment of non-Muslims. Their complaints form a continuous discourse that runs throughout Islamic history, and in which The Sword of Ambition participates.38 The fact that Muslim rulers regularly perceived non-Muslims as especially trustworthy was the hidden counterargument that Ibn al-Nābulusī, like other figures who contributed to the discourse, sought to discredit.
We may briefly consider two major ways, however, in which the work reflects more particularly the social, religious, and political developments of its day. Both relate to what may be called the “Sunni shift,” a series of momentous changes in the relation of emergent Sunni Islam to state power in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries.39 The Sunni shift saw the accession of a number of powerful dynasties, from Afghanistan to North Africa, that relied for their legitimacy upon the established Sunni religious elites who already functioned as foci for popular support in their capacity as scholars, preachers, judges, and local notables. The religious elites who supported these dynasties were rewarded with unprecedented patronage, notably via such novel institutions as the madrasah for legal scholars and khānqāh for Sufis, both of which were supported by the expanded use of waqf (charitable endowment) as a means for transmitting wealth and social power. The rapprochement between military rulers and Sunni religious elites tended to benefit both parties, faced as they were with the religio-political challenges of Shiʿite-leaning states with heritages dating to the tenth century, of the European Crusading movement that challenged Muslim ascendancy in Egypt and greater Syria from the early twelfth century until the late thirteenth and even beyond, and finally of the Mongol storm that broke across the region in the mid-thirteenth century.
In adducing the Crusades, we in fact identify the first major way in which The Sword of Ambition most pervasively reflects its historical moment. The work may be read, with considerable justification, as representative of the Muslim “counter-crusade” by which militant sentiment against the European Crusaders contributed to significant change within Islamic societies, notably by generating pressure upon marginal elements to conform to an ideal of comprehensive Muslim ascendancy as articulated and advocated by certain Sunni religious elites.40 In such a climate, native Christians and Jews, especially when seen to exercise undue power, could more easily find themselves in conflict with Muslims who saw non-Muslim power as an implicit challenge to their vision of the properly ordered Islamic society. In practical terms, non-Muslims, especially Christians, could come under suspicion as a fifth column for Crusader designs on Muslim territory. This fear is clearly visible in The Sword of Ambition, as both an historical “fact” (as in §2.14.4, the case of the disloyal Christian Ibn Dukhān) and a present danger. Sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil is made to remark in a timeless tone (§3.2.37) that when Copts become too wealthy, their incorrigible tendency to conspire with foreign enemies poses a grave threat to the security of the Egyptian state.
Although it is plain that the idea of “counter-crusade” resonates strongly with particular passages in The Sword of Ambition, the currency of counter-crusade ideology in the mid-thirteenth century does not explain why Ibn al-Nābulusī should have found it expedient to invoke that ideology, in a limited way, in his screed against Coptic officials, or indeed why he set out to write the screed at all. The more finely grained problem of authorial motivation and strategy highlights the second major way in which The Sword of Ambition most pervasively reflects its historical moment, namely as a symptom of a set of social and political developments that are relatively detached from the counter-crusade and more firmly internal to the Islamic sphere. In the period following the Sunni shift in Egypt, for reasons that cannot be developed here, the state both increased its control over economic activity in Egypt and expanded its patronage of Sunni urban religious elites (ʿulamāʾ), generating heightened competition for state patronage among those elites and between them and other competitors, such as Christians, Jews, and (Ibn al-Nābulusī would remind us) Muslim rural elites.41 As S. D. Goitein argues, “from the thirteenth century on, … when the economy became increasingly monopolized by the state, the clamoring of Muslim candidates for government posts became ever stronger, and the minority groups had to give way.”42 The clamoring arose as the madrasah was increasingly utilized by the Ayyubids to make the military-patronage state the primary source of economic support for Sunni
