Disenchanting the Caliphate: The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought By Hayrettin Yücesoy

Disenchanting the Caliphate is a welcome effort to de-emphasize the religious aspects of caliphate in Islam, which the author believes are overdrawn, and bring out instead its secular aspects as a typical monarchical polity of the premodern age. To prove his point, Yücesoy shows that veneration of the caliphate as a sacred institution was to a considerable extent a later development. As evidence, he cites an earlier, more secularist tradition regarding the caliphate that is attested starting in the very earliest Arabic prose writings, which form the basis of his work.

Throughout, Yücesoy contrasts what he calls ‘the language of the imamate’, the title of ch. 2, with ‘the disruptive language of siyāsa’, the title of ch. 4. The former is the way the nascent class of ulema described the caliphate, while the latter is the way the caliphate was described and upheld by those who were employed in it, ‘the lay bureaucrat literati’ (pp. x, 2, 6, 81–2, 258), the ministers, the secretaries, and those who wrote books of advice for the rulers. Yücesoy contends that the latter possessed a more realistic view of the institution, as they were directly concerned with and involved in its day-to-day workings, than did the ulema, who created an idealized and sacralized picture of it. He wishes to correct the latter by emphasizing the former, and believes that the historical caliphate will look better as a result, being more parallel to other premodern polities which had the harmonious functioning of governance as their aim.

While the tradition of ‘the lay bureaucrat literati’ obviously persisted through all the centuries of Muslim history, Yücesoy largely limits his exposition to just the two earliest Arabic prose writers whose writings have survived in part: ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd b. Yaḥyā al-Kātib (d. 132/750) and ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 137/755).¹ Above all, Yücesoy dwells on the Risāla fī al-ṣaḥāba of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, in an extensive exploration of this small but very important work (pp. 118–24, 143–253). While engaging with these writings, he spends little space on the actual life histories of the two writers (pp. 107–11), neither of which are elaborated on in the medieval sources, preferring to focus on the ideological system their writings express.

In trying to demonstrate that there is a kind of ‘secular’ tendency in the Risāla fī al-ṣaḥāba, Yücesoy attempts to show that Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ was expressing a more universalist point of view rather than a narrowly sectarian one, regarding all of the inhabitants of the caliphate as equally ‘imperial subjects’ rather than only the members of a particular religious confession, even generalizing the term umma beyond the Muslim community (pp. 225–7). If Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s view is actually so, it would seem to represent a proto-modern opinion more consonant with the concept of citizenship in a modern state than what is usually stated about political organization in the books of fiqh, which is sometimes reduced to ‘the millet system’. But Yücesoy admits that Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s hinting at this is subtle, and of course the ʿAbbasids he proposed to serve came to power with messianic pretensions (pp. 33–4, 36–7, 39–40, 146–8, 192–6). Yet, given Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s non-Muslim origin and his recent embrace of Islam after 750 at the behest of his new ʿAbbasid patrons, his taking such a universalizing position seems plausible. Also, Yücesoy’s point that it was in the interests of the bureaucratic caliphal state to take the interests and the welfare of all the subjects into account is logical, and there is no doubt that throughout Muslim history such rulers had to deal with political realities, backed by a class of government employees who also supported a reality-based view of governance rather than a strictly sectarian one.

Yücesoy’s thesis is hardly new, as there has been much written on the Risāla fī al-ṣaḥāba, which one can see from his extensive bibliography, and most of it likewise focuses on the dissonance between Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and the position of the ulema whose writings later established the structures of Islam, particularly Muslim law. Yet Yücesoy’s large work brings a salutary re-emphasis to the point that Muslim societies and forms of governance are not to be seen merely as manifestations of the modern construct called ‘religion’, but rather ought to be viewed as this-worldly phenomena with their own histories intimately invested in mundane concerns and fully comparable to other societies and forms of governance. So, the book’s relevance to modern debates about Islam and the orientation of Muslims is obvious and enhanced by the clarity of Yücesoy’s writing.

However, a few of the terms used by the author seem infelicitous. It is difficult to provide an idiomatic translation of Risāla fī al-ṣaḥāba, which might be rendered ‘Treatise on Associates’ or ‘Treatise on Advisers’. Alternatively, Najm al-Din Yousefi translates it as ‘Epistle concerning the Entourage’.² All of these seem preferable to Yücesoy’s rendering it as ‘Epistle on the Caliph’s Privy’, the associations of which (without the addition of ‘Council’), given the common colloquial understanding of ‘privy’, is rather unfortunate.

One might also question Yücesoy’s use of the term ‘Abbasid’ in his book’s subtitle, The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought. After all, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib was killed by the ʿAbbasids as their enemy at the time of their coming to power, while Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, originally an Umayyad official, only survived a mere five years into the ʿAbbasid period, so his role in ʿAbbasid political thought might seem liminal at best. Possibly, the political thinking of the two might be better described as Umayyad, or transitional between the Umayyads and ʿAbbasids. However, Yücesoy does endeavour to show how, despite the uniqueness of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s writings and his position in history, his work nevertheless exerted a seminal influence on the tradition of the lay bureaucrat literati thereafter, so it still can be deemed to have entered into ʿAbbasid political thought.

One might question even more Yücesoy’s deployment of the term ‘secular’ in the context of medieval Muslim governance, because it is so laden with contemporary baggage. It is not clear to what extent ‘secular’ could have any meaning as a concept for premodern people in the Muslim world or elsewhere. Possibly, it might be taken, as it appears to be by Yücesoy, as meaning just the realm of practical politics as opposed to that of religion with its idealizing and ethical concerns. However, the extent to which one can disentangle those areas from each other remains obscure, especially in the context of the now very distant eighth century. And the use and definition of ‘secularism’ and ‘religion’ remain strongly contested in academic scholarship at present, so one should be cautious in employing them.

Despite these caveats, Yücesoy’s work still makes an important, very thorough, well-documented, and engaging contribution to current discussions about early caliphal history that should not be neglected by scholars.

Footnotes