Prophetic Hadith; al-Dimyāṭī reproduces a hadith that he transmitted.12 The same passage of The Sword of Ambition that alludes to his law-college education strongly implies that he and his contemporaries did not view it as a springboard to state service, but on the contrary as quite distinct from the formation expected of a secretary (kātib), though it was of course standard for a judge (qāḍī), mosque preacher (khaṭīb), or other holder of an overtly religious office.13 Nevertheless, early in the reign of the Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil (r. 615–35/1218–38), through the intercession of a patron and thanks to his own talents and his show of reluctance to accept employment, Ibn al-Nābulusī became a state official. One office that he mentions explicitly from this period of his life is the directorship of the Royal Guesthouse (dār al-ḍiyāfah).14 Sultan al-Kāmil promoted him to a series of progressively more important posts. Eventually, according to his own report as well as that of al-Maqrīzī,15 he became overseer or auditor (nāẓir) of the tax administration in virtually all of Egypt, a position that he had urged his patron to create. In about 634/1237, however, he fell out of favor with al-Kāmil. This event, as he tells it, was due to the machinations of an Ayyubid emir who coveted a house that he owned beside the Nile in Giza.16 The house, called Dār al-Malik (or al-Mulk), was part of the property that had been granted to his maternal grandfather, Ibn Nujayyah, by Saladin.
It is to the subsequent nadir in Ibn al-Nābulusī’s career that we owe The Sword of Ambition. Another of his works, Lumaʿ al-qawānīn al-muḍiyyah fī dawāwīn al-diyār al-miṣriyyah (A Few Luminous Rules for Egypt’s Administrative Offices, cited at the beginning of this Introduction), was drafted some time afterward and offers additional biographical clues to the context of The Sword of Ambition. For instance, it is evident from information in the Luminous Rules that Coptic Christians or converts played prominent roles in the real-estate dispute in which Ibn al-Nābulusī lost his high post in the administration, not to mention his riverfront estate. Our author tells the story in his typical wounded way. As he engaged in reluctant negotiations with the powerful emir Nūr al-Dīn over the price of the estate, which the latter had espied and sworn to possess, a powerful converted Copt, al-Asʿad al-Fāʾizī, sided vocally with Nūr al-Dīn.17 Later, after Ibn al-Nābulusī and then Nūr al-Dīn himself had lost control of the property, the same al-Asʿad purchased it from its shadow owner for a song and transferred it to the charitable endowments of the deceased sultan al-Kāmil.18 Ibn al-Nābulusī later implored the current sultan, al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ (r. 637–47/1240–49), to return the estate to him, describing the hardships that its loss had inflicted upon his family. Having lost their spot on the water, they suffered the indignity of day-tripping: “Now the children and I have no vantage point from which to view the river. When they want to behold the Nile, that great work of God, they have to set up a tent outside the city. Then at the end of the day they have to leave.”19
Ibn al-Nābulusī thus had enemies among the converted Copts in the administration; it is not unreasonable to suppose that this factored in his decision to write The Sword of Ambition, a book against Coptic officials that contains strident, thinly veiled personal polemic against those of them who had converted outwardly to Islam (§§2.15.1–3, 4.2.2). The tone of the Luminous Rules, too, reflects Ibn al-Nābulusī’s zeal to denounce fellow administrators whom he judged to be incompetent, corrupt, impious, or dull. This might justly be called the central theme of the book, to the degree that in its introduction the author was at pains to distinguish between sincere advice (naṣīḥah) and self-serving slander of rivals (siʿāyah). His own book, naturally, was naṣīḥah, but he nevertheless confessed that he hesitated to write it, so much did he worry that he might be suspected of harboring ulterior personal motives (aghrāḍ) against his colleagues. Perhaps this hesitation arose from his intention to level a string of savage accusations at his fellow officials, several of whom he named in the work.20 As in The Sword of Ambition and indeed in his work on the Fayyūm (see below), he evinced marked antipathy not only to Copts but also to rural Muslims, undereducated Muslims, and even, in one passage of our work (§§4.2.32–36) ignorant Muslim judges. We may thus characterize our author as well-bred, educated, and professionally accomplished, yet at this point in his life also embittered and envious.
It is evident from Ibn al-Nābulusī’s third and final surviving work that he found his way for a time into the graces of al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ, the last independent Ayyubid sultan in Egypt. The Luminous Rules and/or The Sword of Ambition, which were directed to al-Ṣāliḥ, may thus indirectly have had their desired effect. This third work, Iẓhār ṣanʿat al-Ḥayy al-Qayyūm fī tartīb bilād al-Fayyūm (A Presentation of the Living, Eternal God’s Work in Regulating the Fayyūm), has recently been described as “the most detailed tax survey to have survived from any region of the medieval Islamic world, a Domesday Book for the medieval Egyptian countryside.”21 It is a detailed report on conditions in the fertile Fayyūm oasis of Egypt—whither Ibn al-Nābulusī was dispatched as an inspector in 642/1245—insofar as these are relevant to tax administration, touching for instance upon demography, land tenure, and sources of revenue. This work constitutes the last indication we have of the author’s life until he died, in relative obscurity, at Cairo on 25 Jumādā I 660 [April 17, 1262], a Monday evening. He was buried at the foot of the Muqaṭṭam heights to the east of the city.
Ibn al-Nābulusī composed at least three other works, none of which seems to have survived. One is known only from an allusion in The Sword of Ambition (§1.1.4), and had a theme similar to that of the present work. Its title—Taṣrīḥ al-Qurʾān bi-l-naṣr ʿalā man istaʿāna bi-kuffār al-ʿaṣr (The Qurʾan’s Assurance of Victory over Those Who Seek Aid from the Infidels of This Age)—indicates that it used scriptural exegesis to demonstrate that allying or cooperating with non-Muslims is forbidden and will lead to the downfall of the Muslim who indulges in it. The work might possibly have been a polemic against the Ayyubid rivals of al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ Najm al-Dīn, namely al-Ṣāliḥ ʿImād al-Dīn and al-Ṣāliḥ Ismāʿīl, who at various times allied with the Franks against their kinsman.22 Another of his works, mentioned in the book on the Fayyūm, was probably a panegyric to the Ayyubid sultan; its title is Ḥusn al-sulūk fī faḍl malik Miṣr ʿalā sāʾir al-mulūk (A Seemly Demonstration of the Superiority of Egypt’s King over All Others).23 Ibn al-Nābulusī showed elsewhere that he was prepared to praise the sultan in effusive (not to say sycophantic) terms.24 The final composition attributed to Ibn al-Nābulusī—Ḥusn al-sarīrah fī ttikhādh al-ḥiṣn bi-l-Jazīrah (The Excellent Idea of Establishing the Island Fortress)—appears to have praised al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ’s decision to build a citadel on the Nile island of al-Rawḍah to serve as a base for his large corps of mamlūk (“owned”) Turkic military slaves.25 It was they, of course, who would soon supplant the Ayyubids as rulers of Egypt. For more than a century the Mamluk rulers would be known as the baḥrī or “river” dynasty because of their ties to this fortress.
Ibn al-Nābulusī earned very minor repute as a poet. The account by his student al-Dimyāṭī preserves five lines of his verse. It is fitting that they should express the author’s preoccupation with hierarchy, railing eloquently against the elevation of low-class people (al-asāfil) at the expense of the high-born (al-aʿālī).26
THE WORK
In The Sword of Ambition, Ibn al-Nābulusī explains the circumstances and motives of the work’s composition, announcing in its introductory section that he has been inspired by a recent edict that imposed traditional discriminatory restrictions on non-Muslims, notably the distinctive clothing they were required to wear (the ghiyār; see §0.2).27 He also expresses confidence that this measure is only a first step in the right direction, and hope that the present book will encourage the sultan to finish the job, as it were, by dismissing and cashiering his Coptic officials. In the conclusion, Ibn al-Nābulusī
