ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm Jackson
University of Southern California
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for the generous financial and logistical support this project received from four institutions in particular: the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Mellon Faculty Development Grant of Saint Louis University, Saint Louis University, and Princeton University. A visit to manuscripts in 2014 was made possible by practical support from the Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis, the Centre d’Études Maghrébines en Algérie, and their respective directors, Laryssa Chomiak and Robert Parks. In this connection, too, I am supremely grateful to the Kacimi Library of Zawiyat El Hamel, Algeria and, above all, to Muhammad Foued Kacimi al-Hasani al-Sharif for his intellectual generosity, personal sincerity, and warm hospitality. For access to images of manuscripts I thank M. Şükrü Hanioglu, the Süleymaniye Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de Tunisie, the British Library, and the Widener Library of Harvard University.
Numerous individuals have given generously of their time and expertise to assist me in this project. They include Mark Cohen, Michael Cook, Matthew Gordon, Hannah-Lena Hagemann, Kamel Hameidia, Andras Hamori, Alaa Kacimi, Amr Osman, Thomas Madden, Johannes Pahlitzsch, Alex Petras, Marina Rustow, Adam Sabra, Samir Khalil Samir, S.J., Uri Shachar, Rebekah Sheldon, Damian Smith, Daniel Stolz, Mark Swanson, Alexander Treiger, Elizabeth Urban, Joseph Witztum, Oded Zinger, and my colleagues at Saint Louis University and at the Fall 2012 seminar of the Katz Center. Particular thanks are due Amr Osman, Torki Fahad Al Saud, Yossef Rapoport, and Christian Sahner for reading and critiquing large parts of the book, and especially to Andras Hamori, who gave exceedingly generous and learned assistance with the poetry. Project Editor Devin Stewart deserves special thanks, too, for providing steady guidance and correcting countless errors while reading multiple drafts of the manuscript. I am also grateful to the other editors of the Library of Arabic Literature for further corrections and for their vision and faith in this project. It is fitting, too, that I acknowledge my debt to the late Claude Cahen for his pioneering work, without which this volume could not have come to be.
I wish finally to extend warmest thanks to my family. My wife Aubrey has lent encouragement and support in countless ways, notably by critiquing a draft of the translation. My parents, too, extended moral support and frequent hospitality. The labor in these pages is dedicated to my grandmother, D.B.G., whose kindness, curiosity, and wit are a legacy to her family. I alone bear responsibility for the book’s shortcomings.
Luke Yarbrough
INTRODUCTION
The malfeasance of rural and Coptic officials is incalculably vast and gravely pernicious. I have surveyed this topic elsewhere, however: in a book that I wrote and presented to the prosperous royal treasuries of Sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ. Entitled The Book of Unsheathed Ambition to Take Back What is in the Dhimmis’ Possession,1 it shows how incredible it is that the rustics and the Copts should be trusted or exercise leadership, for the simple reason that meanness and perfidy are ingrained in their natures.
—ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī, A Few Luminous Rules for Egypt’s Administrative Offices2
Thus did our author, ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī, describe The Sword of Ambition some time after he composed it, at a low point in his life, around the year 640/1242. In the book’s conclusion (§4.4.2), he unburdened himself to the reader—whom he envisioned as no less a personage than the Ayyubid sultan himself—of some piteous personal information. He and his fifty-two children and grandchildren were dependent on the dwindling rent from a dilapidated property that his father had left them.3 Social conventions in Cairo obliged them to put on a cheerful face for friends and neighbors, but within their own walls the mood was grim.4 They were down to just two Greek slaves—low-grade slaves at that—and three bedraggled riding animals. Yet Ibn al-Nābulusī eagerly informed the sultan that his prospects had not always looked so bleak. At one time, when he had been overseer of the tax offices in all the land of Egypt, his household had enjoyed the services of ten slaves and sixteen horses and mules. He had spent lavishly on them as well as on clothing, as befitted a high official. In order to sustain this lifestyle without compromising his professional integrity, he had been obliged to sell family property in Syria for the hefty sum of five thousand gold coins. After such sacrifices, he bitterly concluded, the reason for his current poverty was that he had remained honest when handling money.
Ibn al-Nābulusī’s account of his own career contrasted sharply with the patterns that he observed in the careers of the Coptic Christian (and convert) officials employed by the Ayyubid state. Whereas he had been powerful and ended up poor, it seemed to him that even the pettiest Coptic bureaucrat rapidly amassed wealth to spare. The explanation for the contrast was clear to him: the Coptic officials were corrupt. No less clear was the remedy: the Copts should be dismissed from their positions and stripped of their ill-gotten wealth. At the same time, he should be granted an official position and a stipend to match. It was to these ends that Ibn al-Nābulusī directed his literary energies, interweaving his own exhortation with a curious assortment of excerpts from earlier sources to compose the present book, to which he gave the rhyming title Tajrīd sayf al-himmah li-stikhrāj mā fī dhimmat al-dhimmah – The Sword of Ambition, or, more literally, Unsheathing Ambition’s Sword to Extract What the Dhimmis Hoard.
THE AUTHOR
Ibn al-Nābulusī’s full name, according to one of his students, a certain al-Dimyāṭī, was ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Khālid ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Salm5 al-Qurashī, al-Nābulusī (of Nablus) by extraction (al-maḥtid), al-Miṣrī (of Cairo) in birth, life, and death. The same source reports that he was born on the nineteenth of Dhū l-Ḥijjah 588 [December 26, 1192]—thus he wrote The Sword of Ambition at the age of about fifty.6 His connection to the city of Nablus in Palestine was through his father’s family. Although we cannot be certain when they moved to Egypt, it seems likely to have been during his father ʿAlam al-Dīn Ibrāhīm’s life, inasmuch as Ibn al-Nābulusī’s name meant “son of the man from Nablus,”7 and since he still maintained control of property in Syria. We know little about his father, who is described in the sources as a judge (qāḍī), an honorific title that should not necessarily be taken literally; we can be certain only that he was a professional witness or notary (ʿadl). Ibn al-Nābulusī’s maternal grandfather, the Ḥanbalī jurist and preacher Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Najā al-Anṣārī (508/1114–1115 to 599/1203), known as Ibn Nujayyah, is better known.8 He, too, had come to Egypt from Syria and, like his grandson Ibn al-Nābulusī, made it his business to exhort Egypt’s military rulers to godliness.9 Ibn Nujayyah served as an ambassador to Baghdad on behalf of the Zangid ruler Nūr al-Dīn in 564/1168–69. In The Sword of Ambition (§2.14.3), we find him remonstrating with the Fatimid vizier Ṭalāʾiʿ ibn Ruzzīk about a Christian official called Ibn Dukhān, who in addition to being corrupt and seditious also happened to be obstructing the payment of Ibn Nujayyah’s government stipend. From other sources, we learn that Ibn Nujayyah played a leading role in sniffing out the conspiracy to restore the Fatimid dynasty in which the famous poet ʿUmārah ibn Ḥamzah was involved (one of ʿUmārah’s many poems against Ibn Dukhān features in The Sword of Ambition, §2.14.4). After pretending to go along with the plot, Ibn Nujayyah reported it to Saladin, with whom he enjoyed considerable influence, in exchange for the property of one of the conspirators. ʿUmārah and the others were executed.10
Ibn al-Nābulusī had, then, a family heritage that was noteworthy for its ties to both Islamic scholarship and state power. According to his own testimony in The Sword of Ambition (§3.2.34), he spent his youth pursuing a law-college (madrasah)
