Beginning in the late twelfth century, it became increasingly common for state officials to be drawn from the ranks of madrasah-trained religious elites. In earlier centuries, by contrast, administrative personnel had traditionally represented a more eclectic and less uniformly orthodox cross section of the population. The secretaries (kuttāb) of the Abbasid period were famed not only for their literary virtuosity, much celebrated in The Sword of Ambition, but also for their moral laxness and their frequent dissent from law- and tradition-centered Islam of the kind that would become dominant in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. After the disintegration of the Abbasid empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, the Fatimids and their deputies and allies who ruled Egypt and much of Syria employed a motley assortment of non-Muslims, converts, foreign Muslims, Shiʿites (both Ismaʿili and Twelver), military men (who might also be of foreign origin and/or converts), and local Sunnis. Under the Ayyubids, however, as under their ideological progenitors, the Seljuq Turks, it was the Sunni scholars who increasingly received the bulk of the state’s patronage, in the form of official employment and stipends for scholars and students. Ibn al-Nābulusī was fully immersed in these currents. Madrasah-educated, with no specific training for government service (see §§3.2.34–35), he nonetheless came to depend on the state for his income. Competition from his peers, whom he portrayed as undeserving of employment because of their religious affiliation, level of education, or regional and class origin, provoked him to marshal his madrasah-honed linguistic and literary skills in support of his own cause. Michael Chamberlain has described the culture of fitnah—disapproved but ubiquitous conflict for patronage and power—that prevailed among the urban learned classes in Ayyubid and Mamluk domains of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ibn al-Nābulusī’s shrill critique of his competitors, both in The Sword of Ambition and in the Luminous Rules, is a typical product of this competitive culture.
The Sword of Ambition has seen sporadic use by modern scholars since its rediscovery and partial transcription by Claude Cahen in 1960 (on Cahen’s published transcriptions, see “The Arabic Text” below).44 These scattered references to the work may be placed into two broad categories. First, the simple fact of the work’s composition is cited as a symptom of anti-dhimmi sentiment in thirteenth-century Egypt, or as another iteration of the regular calls for enforcement of the theoretical dhimmah regulations that rigorists believed should govern the lives of non-Muslims under Islamic rule (on the term dhimmah, see “Pact of Security” in the Glossary).45 While it is perfectly defensible to use the work in this way, there is at the same time a certain risk in extrapolating from a few works of this nature to larger cultural trends without also highlighting the personal circumstances and motivations of the authors. Similarly, although Ibn al-Nābulusī does make passing reference to legal aspects of the dhimmah arrangement in The Sword of Ambition, it is not primarily a legal work and makes scarcely any mention of the “conditions” (shurūṭ) that many jurists thought should lie at the heart of that arrangement. Indeed, putative rules concerning the employment of non-Muslims as state officials are not, strictly speaking, part of the dhimmah; the obvious awkwardness of requiring non-Muslims to refuse offers of employment from Muslim leaders generally prevented Muslim elites from proposing such a requirement. It is telling that in the best-known work in the legal discourse on the dhimmah, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimmah by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (d. 751/1350), the chapter against non-Muslim officials features only the same string of Qurʾānic admonitions and cautionary anecdotes that we find in The Sword of Ambition, probably culled from the same (unidentified) source.46 The goal of these selections was to dissuade powerful Muslims from employing non-Muslims, not to dilate upon a law that non-Muslims themselves were meant to observe.
Second, modern scholars have used The Sword of Ambition in passing references that are of particular relevance to their own research. Thus, for example, Josef van Ess has used the work as evidence for chiliastic expectations surrounding the Fatimid caliph al-Ḥākim; Joseph Sadan has studied passages relevant to Jews; Brian Catlos has examined the extended anecdote involving the author’s grandfather, Ibn Nujayyah, and the Christian Ibn Dukhān; and Hassanein Rabie has used the work for evidence concerning the iqṭāʿ.47 The present publication of a full edition and translation will, it is hoped, make it easier for more scholars to use the work in similar ways.
The publication of The Sword of Ambition at the present moment poses certain challenges, however. There is, for instance, the current predicament of non-Muslim populations in many countries in the Middle East, Egypt among them.48 Inasmuch as The Sword of Ambition contains hostile denunciations of Christians and Jews, might it not lend support to those today who advocate the harsh subordination of non-Muslims? Conversely, virulent hostility toward Islam and Muslims is alive and well in Europe and North America. A work like this one could help to confirm the dark aspersions of intolerance that are regularly hurled at “Islam.” Indeed, I do not believe that either fear can be dispelled. The Sword of Ambition may really provide material for polemicists. It is in the nature of historical data to be available for a wide variety of narrative agendas.
However, there are also many reasons that favor bringing the work to light. These may even help to redeem its less appealing aspects. Most obviously, several historical works closely comparable to The Sword of Ambition in tone and subject matter are already available on bookstands in Arabic-speaking countries and online. At least one of these, which in fact drew on the present work, was translated into English long ago.49 Equally evident is the precept of modern scientific historiography according to which all evidence must be considered, no matter how marginal or unsavory it might appear. The precept is particularly important in the case of premodern history, where scarcity imbues all written sources with significance, particularly those that, like The Sword of Ambition, vividly represent aspects of contemporary life and abound with pungent anecdotes. Polemical literature has enriched our knowledge of other historical figures and their societies. How much the poorer would the study of early Christianity be if the polemics of Tertullian, Celsus, and Chrysostom were excised from it, much as these might still embolden Christian supremacists, militantly intolerant atheists, and anti-Semites?50 The history of medieval Islam deserves no less. Indeed, in the light of contemporary trends it may deserve more. The Sword of Ambition affords us an unusual opportunity to situate virulent religious polemic in the particular historical context that generated it, allowing us to see such antagonism as circumstantially conditioned. The author’s patent desperation and autobiographical candor make it clear that the project was not suggested to him by sacred texts or abstract reflection alone, but instead was inspired by historically specific, self-interested motives, however sincerely he meant it. For obvious reasons, polemicists tend not to reveal such contingent and personal aspects of their writings. It may be hoped that the present work’s manifest contingency will dull its edge among Islam’s militant supporters and its militant opponents alike. Both may in fact glimpse in it their own reflections.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The Arabic of The Sword of Ambition alternates among registers of formality and sophistication, from poetry of considerable complexity, to humorous and ribald tales, to occasional phrases that betray colloquial influence and apparently represent direct speech. These registers only intermittently intrude on a large middle ground that may be characterized, broadly, as classical literary Arabic. My translation represents an attempt to convey the fluctuating tenor of the original. Thus when the Arabic rings high and ancient, as in poetry and hoary aphorisms, I have not resisted the attraction of archaic English. In conversation and where the text implies a conspiratorial understanding between narrator and reader, I have searched for a vernacular English voice in which contractions and folk idioms are at home. For the predominant linguistic middle ground, I have aimed for what seemed to me an economical English equivalent to Ibn al-Nābulusī’s proficient but unadorned Arabic style. I have everywhere shrugged off any constraint of Arabic verb tense, mood, idiom, semantic range, and syntax that seemed, when construed strictly, to distort the sense of the original. My goal has been to translate concepts as faithfully as possible, with far less regard for literal forms.
Although
