An Introduction to the Prescriptive Discourse Surrounding Non-Muslim State Officials

Throughout the history of premodern Islamic states, Muslim rulers and their agents frequently appointed officials who were not Muslims, sometimes to powerful positions. According to the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406), “accounting remained the province of non-Arab clients and dhimmis” even well after the watershed reforms of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd alMalik (d. 86/705) that made Arabic the language of imperial administration. Indeed, Ibn Khaldūn’s statement holds true, in varying degrees, for many of the Islamic states that preceded the early-modernMuslim empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. What did contemporary Muslims make of this state of affairs? This book offers an extended answer to that question, but since we can scarcely be sure what premodern people thought, or even what they said, this book will study what learned Muslims took the trouble to write down about the employment of non-Muslim state officials. What they wrote obviously stands in some relation to what they believed, but is more productively understood as an indication of what they wished their audiences to hear. Those Muslims who possessed the motives and means to produce and disseminate texts concerning non-Muslim officials overwhelmingly expressed disapproval of their employment, though not as overwhelmingly as many have supposed. They approached the issue from numerous angles and in a variety of genres, including history, exegesis, jurisprudence, counsel for rulers, administrative manuals, polemic, and poetry, all of which this book will consider. Yet for all this diversity, their extant writings on the matter constitute not a disjointed