Table Of ContentPublic Violence in Islamic Societies
PUBLIC VIOLENCE IN
ISLAMIC SOCIETIES
Power, Discipline, and the Construction of the Public
Sphere, 7th–19th Centuries CE
2
Edited by Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2009
© in the individual contributions is retained by the authors
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Contents
List of abbreviations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Spatial, ritual and representational aspects of public
violence in Islamic societies (7th–19th centuries CE) 1
Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro
PART I Public violence and the construction of the public sphere
1. The case of Jaʿd b. Dirham and the punishment of ‘heretics’
in the early caliphate 27
Gerald Hawting, School of Oriental and African Studies,
London
2. Qāḍīs and the political use of the maẓālim jurisdiction under
the ʿAbbāsids 42
Mathieu Tillier, University of Oxford
3. From revolutionary violence to state violence: the Fāṭimids
(297–567/909–1171) 67
Yaacov Lev, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan
4. Actions speak louder than words: reactions to lampoons
and abusive poetry in medieval Arabic society 87
Zoltán Szombathy, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest
PART II Ritual dimensions of violence
5. Reveal or conceal: public humiliation and banishment as
punishments in early Islamic times 119
Everett K. Rowson, New York University
6. Emulating Abraham: the Fāṭimid al-Qāʾim and the
Umayyad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III 130
Maribel Fierro, Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científi cas (CSIC), Madrid
PUBLIC VIOLENCE IN ISLAMIC SOCIETIES
7. Where on earth is hell? State punishment and eschatology in
the Islamic middle period 156
Christian Lange, University of Edinburgh
8. Justice, crime and punishment in 10th/16th-century Morocco 179
Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Consejo Superior
de Investigaciones Científi cas (CSIC), Madrid
PART III Representations of public violence
9. Responses to crucifi xion in the Islamic world (1st–7th/
7th–13th centuries) 203
Tilman Seidensticker, University of Jena
10. Violence and the prince: the case of the Aghlabid
Amīr Ibrāhīm II (261–89/875–902) 217
Annliese Nef, Université Paris4-Sorbonne
11. Concepts of justice and the catalogue of punishments under
the Sultans of Delhi (7th–8th/13th–14th centuries) 238
Blain Auer, Harvard University
12. Public violence, state legitimacy: the Iqāmat al-ḥudūd and
the sacred state 256
Robert Gleave, Exeter University
13. Violence in Islamic societies through the eyes of non-Muslim
travellers: Morocco in the 19th and early 20th centuries 276
Manuela Marín, Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científi cas (CSIC), Madrid
Index 292
vi
Abbreviations
AESC Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations
AI Annales Islamologiques
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
EI1 T he Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st edition, ed. M. Th. Houtsma et
al. (Leiden: Brill, 1913–36)
EI2 T he Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al.
(Leiden: Brill, 1954–2004)
EI3 T he Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edition, ed. G. Krämer et al.
(Leiden: Brill, 2007–)
EQ T he Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. J. D. McAuliffe et al.
(Leiden: Brill, 2001–6)
ILS Islamic Law and Society
IOS Israel Oriental Studies
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
SI Studia Islamica
TG Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert
der Hidschra: eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen
Islam (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991–7)
vii
Acknowledgements
The bulk of the contributions in this volume go back to the interna-
tional conference ‘The public display of violence in Islamic societies
(seventh–eighteenth centuries)’ which was held at the Consejo Superior
de Investigaciones Científi cas (CSIC) in Madrid (15–16 June 2006). This
seminar was made possible thanks to the fi nancial support given by the
Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Acció n Complementaria
HUM2004-22361-E) and by the CSIC as part of the research project
‘Violencia y castigo en sociedades islám icas pre-modernas: Al-Andalus
y el Magreb (Violence and punishment in pre-modern Islamic societies:
al-Andalus and the Maghreb)’, which was also funded by the Spanish
Ministry of Education and Science (2002–6, BFF2002-00075).
Two contributions in this volume derive from a panel at the 2006 meeting
of the Middle East Studies Association titled ‘Punishment and discipline in
the Islamic middle ages’ (Boston, 27 November 2006). In the wake of these
two events, Robert Gleave, Annliese Nef, Everett Rowson and Mathieu
Tillier graciously agreed to come on board and thus give the volume its
present shape. The topic at hand is vast. Nevertheless, it is hoped that a
satisfying degree of coherence has been achieved, not least by means of the
introduction, which lays out a conceptual framework for the volume.
The two anonymous reviewers of the book proposal are owed thanks
for their valuable comments and suggestions for improvement of the
manuscript. The people at Edinburgh University Press, especially Nicola
Ramsey and Eddie Clark, have seen this volume through press with much
competence and patience. We are particularly grateful to our copy-editor,
Judith Oppenheimer, for her effi cient and professional work on the manu-
script, and to Dr Philip Hillyer for expertly compiling the index.
The editors
Edinburgh and Madrid, June 2009
viii
Introduction: Spatial, ritual and representational
aspects of public violence in Islamic societies
(7th–19th centuries CE)
Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro
Violence as an element in the historical relationships both among Muslims
and between Muslims and non-Muslims has been the object of some schol-
arly work in the past, as in the case of jihād, the law of rebellion (aḥkām
al-bughāt), or penal law.1 However, the role of violence in the political
economy of Muslim societies, especially inasmuch as it was used as a
strategy to take possession of the public sphere,2 has only recently begun
to receive the scholarly attention the topic deserves. Few if any attempts
have been made to offer a comprehensive picture of the political uses of
violence by Muslim states past and present, or of the historical struggle
of Muslims to defend the integrity of their bodies, property and honour
against violent intrusions by the powers that be.3 The present volume is
conceived as a step in this direction.
No study of public violence in the formation of Islamic societies
can take as its point of departure a simple defi nition of the relationship
between Islam and violence; what we are dealing with is, rather, a spec-
trum of agendas and attitudes which often took centuries to develop. As
the essays in this collection demonstrate, state violence in Islam’s early
centuries made use of a different register of punishments than in later
centuries, and reactions to state violence likewise differed according to
temporal and geographical setting.
It would be rash, therefore, to claim that the general Sunnī and Shīʿī
attitude toward state violence has been one of political quietism, the
view that it is better to live with occasional acts of violence and cruelty
by the ruler than to risk the break-up of Muslim society. True, a host of
traditions similar to the following suggest that “the tyranny of a sulṭān
for forty years is preferable to the fl ock being left without a master for a
single hour”.4 The roots of this attitude, or so the argument goes, stretch
back to the collective trauma of the civil wars of the fi rst century of Islam,
1
PUBLIC VIOLENCE IN ISLAMIC SOCIETIES
when leadership of the Muslim polity had been openly challenged, to the
brink of tearing the umma apart. It is also pointed out that the collective
memory of Islam never divorced itself from the terrifying spectre of the
Khārijites, who indulged in murderous violence based on their conviction
that allegiance to morally reprobate rulers was a form of kufr, punishable
by death. For most Shīʿīs, the disaster of the failed revolts of their early
leaders likewise led to a stress on the impermissibility of open resistance
against temporal rule. In the Islamic Middle Period, quietist attitudes
were further facilitated by the rise of Turkish military governments and
the sense of insecurity they brought to the hearts and minds of the subject
population who, to borrow from Huizinga, “in any crisis looks to the
power of the state to implement a reign of terror”.5 Writers of the Persian
mirrors-for-princes tradition eagerly exploited this dilemma, propagating
old Iranian notions of the divine right of kings to exercise absolute power.6
One would be tempted to conclude from all this that the prevailing view
was that it was better to submit to the capricious, unjust and excessively
violent ruler because justice would be done, or so one would hope, in the
hereafter.
However, stated in such extreme terms, this picture is a caricature and
must not be taken as an exact representation of how things were. While
strands of quietism were undoubtedly strong in both Sunnī and Shīʿī
Islam,7 alternative views of the legitimacy of public violence circulated.
At times these oppositional discourses were set forth openly and took
on institutionalized aspects; at other times they were deployed in a more
oblique and informal fashion. Revolutionary violence is but one, obvious
instance of an Islamic anti-quietist attitude toward violence. The success
of the ʿAbbāsid, Fāṭimid, Almohad and Safavid revolutions (as well as
numerous others in the history of Islamic societies) retrospectively legiti-
mized the use of violence against the governments these emerging dynas-
ties had helped to overthrow. Such movements, however, inevitably ran
into the problem of routinization, that is, of how to preserve and perpetuate
their charisma as revolutionary harbingers of justice and ‘good violence’.8
All too soon revolutionary governments could be regarded as just another
of the oppressive ré gimes that were based solely on military force.
Arguably, a more sustained challenge to the state’s monopoly over
violence was developed behind the scenes, in the representations of vio-
lence in the legal literature, in theology and the arts. The classical jurists’
views of rebellion by no means simply followed in the tradition of politi-
cal quietism, as Khaled Abou El Fadl’s ground-breaking study (2001) has
shown. Rather, the jurists (whether Sunnī, Shīʿī, or Ibāḍī) made room for
the concept of rebels with a cause (bughāt) and developed sophisticated
2
