English Summary of Chapter 4

Since the inception of the “Syndicate of the Descendants of the Prophet” (niqābat al-ashrāf ) in the tenth century, this institution was considered as a part of what the Muslim jurists called the “(public) institutions provided by (Islamic) law” (al-wilāyāt al-sharʿiyya), that is, the political, administrative, and social institutions of the Islamic state, such as the police, market supervision (ḥisba), judiciary, and the administration of religious endowments. It thus belonged to the institutions which fell under the final authority of the caliph. Whenever the Islamic heritage gained in importance for the caliphate, the ḥisba, and the judiciary, these institutions became the subject of meticulous reflection, independent jurisprudence, and of a rich literary production. Other institutions were rather neglected, and reflection about them did only sparsely develop; even though they were equally essential to Islamic society, such as the police and the Syndicate of the Descendants of the Prophet. With respect to the niqābat al-ashrāf, we observe that reflection on it was rather developed by Shāfiʿī jurists than by the other schools of law, which for a long time shared the conceptual framework that had been developed by the Shāfiʿīs. The most influential legal treatise discussing this topic was the famous book written by Abū l-Ḥasan al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058), “The Legal Provisions of Rule and of the Islamic Public Institutions” (al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya wa-l-wilāyāt al-islāmiyya), where the legal framework of the niqābat al-ashrāf is laid out in chapter 8. The contemporary Ḥanbalī jurist Abū Yaʿlā al-Farrāʾ (d. 458/1066) shows a close resemblance to Māwardī’s text in his own al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya. Both works seems to represent the legal consensus which was apparently shared during their time by the different legal schools. According to Māwardī, the basic principle on which the niqāba is founded is the protection of those of noble ancestry from the power of those who do not equal them by descent and nobility. In the fifth Islamic century, Muslim society viewed the descendants of the Prophet either with great esteem (in the case of the Sunnīs), or with outright veneration (in the case of the Shīʿīs), conceding to them the right of institutional independence from any external authority. Māwardī did not find an outright legal proof for this independence and for the establishment of a syndicate; but he referred to a Prophetic ḥadīth which called in general terms for the knowledge of one’s ancestry and for the loyalty towards one’s relatives. He established his concept of institutional independence without bothering about any further proof, and connected the