Development of political and legal institutions

2.1 The early caliphate

Despite its diversity in different times and places, pre-modern Islamic governance was based on a number of distinctive administrative institutions and practices.

The first recognizable administrative institution has been traced to the practice of the sec­ond caliph, 'Umar (r. 634—644), who reportedly established the public treasury (bayt al-mal), understood as public wealth as opposed to private ownership, by two measures: setting aside conquered lands as property of all Muslims rather than just the participants in the conquest, and establishing a register or bureau (diwan) after the Sasanian model, in order to deal with the collection of taxes and recording stipends ('ata ’) of Muslims. The register increasingly included expanding functions pertaining to the governing and taxing of the conquered sed­entary peoples.

The Muslim policy of conquest comprised two principles: preventing damage at the hands of the conquering armies — especially the ones fighting the Sasanians, as they consisted of chiefly nomadic tribes not used to relations with city dwellers — to the established Iranian cities and their agricultural system, thus disturbing the conquered populations as little as possible religiously, socially or administratively, and seeking the cooperation of the previous elite in governance. The first principle was underpinned by the Qur'anic injunction of ‘no compulsion in religion’ (2:255) allowing religious autonomy to the ‘people of the book’, a general pattern actualized by the Prophet himself in his pact with the Jewish and pagan tribes of Medina, to leave each tribe to live by its own religion and tradition and form an alliance of mutual defence with authority of final arbitration resting in the Prophet.

Apart from these basic principles and practices, the relationship between the caliphate and the conquered peoples varied, due in part to the treaties and deals that were made with the chiefs or rulers during conquest. The old city-state status that had been the unit of political organization in Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt since antiquity was replaced by a central ad­ministration that appointed governors. The governor oversaw the collection of tributes and taxes, supervised the distribution of stipends, led the Muslims in prayer and war, and dissem­inated religious knowledge among Muslims. In the more remote areas or where the strong resistance of the old rulers had earned them favourable arrangements, only annual tribute was collected, at least for a time. In Iran, Muslims established garrisons in or near established cities such as Hamadan, Isfahan, Qazvin, Rey, Nishapur and Marv. In Iraq, the Sasanian chancery (diwan), the old system of collecting taxes and distributing stipends, was adopted, and the taxes included both a land tax (kharaj) and a poll tax for non-Muslims (jizya).

Non-Arab converts to Islam were absorbed into the old clan structure as clients (mawali, sing. mawla) into a multigenerational, symbiotic relationship, in which loyalty and protection were exchanged, along with social capital such as knowledge (many of the chief scholars of Islam had been clients of Arab scholars), marriages and economic benefits, but the superior status of the old Arab clan was retained.

We do not possess any legal treatises from the period, nor are there dedicated jurists; law and policy are indistinguishable, and the provenance of both is the practical decision making of the caliphs and their advisers, or their appointed governors and qadis in the provinces or garrison towns (see 2.2 ‘The imperial caliphate’). By and large, the appointment of these officials was based on their excellence and precedence in Islam, but also merit and lineage, in a manner continuous with the pre-Islamic Arabia.

2.2 The imperial caliphate: the Umayyads and the early Abbasids

The Umayyads (661—750), and more particularly the Marwanid-Umayyads (684—750), with important exceptions, attempted to fashion the caliphate as an Arab phenomenon against the threat to their interests posed by non-Arab conversions to Islam, and were ultimately toppled.

There is little reason to think that the Umayyads altered the Rashidun’s practice of ap­pointing qadis among the capable men who judged by their knowledge of the Qur'an and the Prophetic tradition (not yet codified as hadith). Until the third quarter of the first/seventh century, the jurisdiction of the qadi was limited to the garrison towns and to the resolution of disputes among Arab tribesmen and their families and clients; only with the Umayyads it began to extend to the surrounding countryside and to the towns inhabited by Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews and others.¹¹

The most extraordinary Umayyad, and the most important for the development of Islamic law, is 'Umar b. 'Abd al-Aziz or 'Umar II (d. 101/719), who is seen as having righted all that had gone wrong in the Umayyad practice since the pious early caliphs, thus earning the honorary title ‘Fifth Rightly Guided Caliph’, and becoming the yardstick against which all the vices of the Umayyads could be measured.

The early Abbasids (749—945), although rejecting the Umayyads’ Arab-centred concep­tion of rule and restoring a universalist Islamic basis for legitimacy, inherited the personnel and traditions of the Umayyads and the early caliphs, who had in turn adopted and adapted the Byzantine and Sasanian practices in granting tax revenues in return for military service. In contrast with the Umayyads, the Abbasids focused on consolidation rather than expansion, professionalized the army, and over time embraced their role as leaders of a loose, multi­ethnic empire, constituted as a coalition of intellectual and provincial elites. It was an em­pire primarily of cities, which in turn were divided into many walled communities, which makes it difficult to speak of a ‘society’ in its modern sense, and should be employed only to mean a collection of communities.

The caliph was vested with the authority to rule on behalf of the Muslim community, and from him all other offices drew their authority; in practice, of course, challenges to the authority of the caliph were constant. The directly controlled provinces were Iraq, Egypt, Syria, western Iran and Khuzestan. The term wazir first applied to the high secretaries close to the caliph, but by the middle of the ninth century, the office of the waztr headed all administration and drew from established families that often succeeded in passing it on he­reditarily. The Sasanian registers, or bureaus (diwan), were further developed into the diwan al-rasa 'il (chancery), diwan al-kharaj (tax collection), and diwan al-jaysh (payment of salaries); later, there also developed from these bureaus the diwan al-azimmah (internal auditors or controller’s office), diwan al-tawqi' (countersignature), and barid (the official messenger and information service). A different kind of elite, the 'ulama ', in particular the Hanafis, served as judges (qudit, sing. qadi).

To ensure provincial loyalty to the centre, several means of check and balance were em­ployed in times and places where centralization could be achieved, such as frequent rotation of governors (wulit, sing. wall), a practice established early on by the second caliph 'Umar, and division of functions, such that the governor served as the military commander, a repre­sentative of the central treasury (‘imil) oversaw financial affairs, and the qadi drawn from the 'ulama ' class performed a range of functions besides dispensing justice, all being subject to the oversight of the barid. Local government was minimal, limited to taxation, hierarchically divided into rustiq (also called dih or qarya; sub-district, consisting of a market and an admin­istrative town, surrounded by villages); larger geographic units were called kira and tassuj.

In addition to the cultivated lands that were privately owned and taxed, there were two other kinds, the crown lands that belonged to the caliphate and those ceded to individuals on a revocable basis, called iqta '. One kind was iqta ' tamlik, usually created out of wastelands for the sake of stimulating agricultural investment with a three-year grace period and other incentives; such lands ended up becoming private property. Another kind was akin to tax farming, iqta' istighlal, when an insolvent caliph received a sum of money equivalent to the tithe (‘ushr) for the period in question, in return for the right to tax the peasantry at a higher rate. The sum thus received was used to finance administration, pay off political debts, and offset budget deficits or pet projects. Tax collection was enormously demanding on a bu­reaucracy suited for communication and record keeping; it required visiting the villages with a team of specialists including those who could survey, estimate, adjudicate disputes (qadis), register deeds, provide intelligence and extract, violently if necessary, the revenues. This would be impossible without the cooperation of middlemen, called a wan (helpers), who were the local headmen (rats and dihqan in Iran, shaykh al-balad in Egypt), who were prone to pocketing commissions from either side. Family ties, extended by patronage, were crucial to this system.

Against this institutional backdrop, the burgeoning circles of Muslim jurists found two major areas of normative intervention, court practices or judicial procedures, and taxation. When one browses the legal literature ofpolitical interest from the period, whether surviving or mentioned in lists, the most common titles are Kitab al-Kharaj (The Book of Taxation), Adab al-Qadi (Judicial Conduct) or some variant of these names. Some of the chief surviving treatises of the kind, which can be considered the earliest dedicated treatises of Islamic law concerned with governance from this period, are: Abu Yusuf (d. 182/798), al-Kharaj and Adab al-Qadi; Yahya b. Adam (d. 203/818), al-Kharaj; Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), al-Qada’; and al-Waki' (d. 306/918), Akhbar al-Quda.

In addition, numerous comprehensive collections of traditions, precedents and law ad­dressed the role of political authority (sultai n) in various direct and indirect ways. In this vein, a common observation is the increasing of depoliticization offiqh in the following sense. The four surviving Sunni schools ofjurisprudence eventually absorbed all others. The eponymic founders and hence founding milieus of the Hanafi and Maliki schools can be traced to the first half of the second/eighth century, or the Umayyad period, and the two younger schools, Shafi'i and Hanbali, were formed in the Abbasid period. The role assigned to a legitimate political authority in resolving disputes and making policy is notably greater in the two older schools, whereas the two younger ones, the Shafi'i in particular, limits the discretion and policy-making powers of the ruler, formalizing the roles of both the imam or caliph as well as the qadi. Put differently, the attitude of the jurists becomes depoliticized over the course of the second/eighth century onward, as the ideal of a legitimate, pious, accountable govern­ment appears more out of reach.¹³

2.3 The early medieval period: the sultanates

2.3.1 The period of military patronage rule

After the loss of Abbasid power and the fragmentation of the empire to provincial warlords starting in the late fourth/tenth century, the caliphate was slowly recast as a symbolic office (see 2.3.2 ‘The Sunni caliphate discourse’). The Seljuqs, who came in as converts to and saviours of Sunni Islam, ruled through a mix of Persianate bureaucracy and central Asian tribal ruling custom. As all other horseback warriors of the period across Eurasia, they were unable to maintain a central empire, and moulded the iqta ' system of the late Abbasid times into a system of financial administration that, under various names, was later adapted by the Mamluk, Mongol, Timurid, Ottoman, Safavid, Uzbek and Mughal empires. The iqta ', timar, tuyUl and jagir (names for grants of tax revenues) all represent a similar principle of decentralized financial compensation to the military elite. Other examples of administra­tive uniformities among Muslims states are taxation on a kharaj-jizya or land- and poll-tax basis, and the endowment of waqfs for religious purposes. In many cases, as in Central Asia and North Africa, these uniformities were due to the direct transfer of Middle Eastern institutions, but in many others, they were due to the inheritance of similar institutions from earlier non-Muslim regimes, and to the adoption of a common Muslim terminology for separate precedents.

2.3.2 The Sunni caliphate discourse

As noted earlier, the caliphate was theorized as a vital institution when it could not be taken for granted; the most elaborate Sunni defence and elaboration of caliphate dates from the fifth/11th century, composed primarily in the discipline of Sunni kalam, no doubt in response to the threat posed by the Shi'i rebels and warlords who took power nearly every­where except, ironically, Persia. Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate and the intellectual centre of Islam itself fell to the Shi'i Buyids (932—1062). Not that any authority ever doubted the obligation of an imam (leader) for the community; all Muslim sects and schools, including the Sunnis as well as the Shi'a, consider the installation of an imam (also called caliph for the Sunnis) a religious obligation. The difference is that the Shi'a consider it part of their creed, meaning that without giving one’s allegiance to the true imam one cannot be considered a proper Muslim, whereas Sunnis consider it an obligation, which means that establishing the caliphate is an obligation on the community (fard kifa T), but not doing so results in a sin rather than invalidation of one’s faith.¹⁴

In addition to the caliphate literature produced by the 'ulama ' in a theological vein (dis­cussed below), far more relevant in practice was the legal discourse which required the ruler to uphold the law and intervene in the regular functioning of the society in various ways. Fi­nally, there was what could be called the statecraft literature, including ‘mirrors for princes’, which addressed the rulers or their administrators, authored often by the rulers, state officials and the 'ulama '. Whereas the caliphate discourse concerned itself with foundational and con­stitutional matters, and discussed theological and legal rulings pertaining to the governance of the Muslim community at large rather than a particular territorial unit, the legal discourse, as well as the statecraft literature, often merely addressed a Muslim authority with power to uphold the law, whether a legitimate caliph or local warlord.

One of the earliest and most well-known statecraft treatises in the Perso-Islamic tradition was Siyasat-nameh (The Book of Politics), also known as Siyar al-Muluk (Lives of Kings). It has been attributed to Hasan b. 'Ali of Tus, known as Khwaja Nizam al-Mulk.

During the sultanate period, the statecraft was a mix of Sasanid-Persian, Central Asian tribal and Islamic models, and is reflected in the political advice literature, in particular the mirrors for princes genre.¹⁵ Central Asian nomadic tribes, whether Turkoman or Mongol, had been hierarchically organized and hence their clash with Persian statecraft had been less than with the original Arab egalitarianism, which had for all purposes been already tamed, but not eliminated, by the Persian tradition. Variants of this statecraft could also be found throughout the Muslim world. In this sense, even though the statecraft of the period ad­dressed concerns other than those addressed by the orthodox discourse, the sources as well as norms of the two genres clashed in some ways. For instance, the Sunni theory does not see the caliph as ‘God’s caliph’ nor give precedence to the caliph’s interpretation on dis­puted points of law, and exhorts caliphs to resort to the teachings of the salaf, as evident in Abu Yusuf’s Kitab al-Kharaj. The statecraft literature, in contrast, had no qualms describing the king or sultan as God’s deputy, as ‘God’s shadow on earth’, ‘God’s caliph’ and as abso­lute in his powers. At times, the very same author would represent two directly opposing viewpoints depending on the genre, as evident in the case of al-Mawardi discussed in the following section.

2.3.3 Mawardi and al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya

Al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya (henceforth, Ahkam) by Abu al-Hasan 'Ali al-Mawardi (364— 450/974—1058) has long been considered an authoritative expression of the classical Sunni theory of caliphate. Mawardi was an eminent Shafi'i jurist, chief judge of Baghdad under the Buyids and a caliphal envoy and adviser. He was a thinker of great significance and some originality who knew politics both in theory and practice and was read widely not only in Is­lamic but also Greek and Persian ethical and political traditions. Ahkam was authored during the last few years of his life and reflects the formal Sunni approach to the caliphate, and is to be contrasted with the statecraft literature authored earlier by Mawardi, which draws on a wide array sources and in some ways contradicts the vision of politics portrayed in Ahkam.

In Ahkam, Mawardi for the first time brought together the theological issues of the imam­ate and role of the caliph or imam with the jurisprudential matters in one discrete treatise. After Mawardi, there began to appear, although not consistently, brief chapters on the imam­ate in standard juristic works among the Shafi'is and Hanbalis. Owing particularly to his concession to legitimize a usurper in ikhtiydr (election of the ruler), Juwayni also chastised him on this and other points. Modern commentators have seen Ahkam as attempting to le­gitimize the status quo and legalize the illegal. Subsequent Muslim writers on the subject, including al-Juwayni, also chastised him on this and other points.

Of the 20 chapters of Ahkam, the first two cover theological debates, while the rest cover administration and governance and typically present, along with his own Shafi'i school, Maliki and Hanafi opinions on any given matter. Curiously, Mawardi’s Ahkam leaves out the Hanbali school. This neglect perhaps prompted an equally celebrated contemporary, the Hanbali al-Qadi Abu Yala al-Farra’ (d. 458/1066), to author a treatise carrying the exact same title and chapter organization but comprising only Hanbali opinions and rejecting some of Mawardi’s key innovations. Abu Ya'la’s treatise is unfairly considered an unimaginative copy of Mawardi’s treatise. The differences between the two works are significant, and at­tributable to a different ideological outlook. Abu Ya'la is consistently more ‘idealistic’ and closer to the earlier Sunni view —maintaining the early ideal of the caliph as the representa­tive of the Muslim community at large.

Mawardi’s contribution was extraordinary in other ways as well. The Sunni caliphate dis­course had been created almost exclusively by Ash'ari theologians as Sunni polemics against the Mu'tazila, the Shi'a and the Kharijis. Mawardi’s primary intention, however, was neither theological defence of the Sunni view of early history and political authority nor to carve out a more coherent or accurate doctrine of caliphate from among the various opinions. Rather, it was the defence of the existing Sunni caliphal institution against the possibility of irrelevance or extinction. He therefore sought to project an aura of general agreement among the Sunnis and moved the debate from the realm of theology to the realm of practice and jurisprudence. To that end, he made a few subtle but significant innovations in his approach to the standard issues.

1) One key contention of the Ash'ari theologians had been that the imamate is an ob­ligation known by revelation, not reason. Mawardi’s view was closer to that of the Mu'tazila and that is why he states both opinions without committing to any, thus avoid­ing provocation.

2) In an innovation that changed the very nature of the institution of caliphate, Mawardi states that power can be lost via hajr (rebellion by insiders of the government), or qahr (re­bellion by outsiders of the government). This was an unveiled concession to the Buyid, and possibly the upcoming Saljuqs. Mawardi’s overall direction is in the case of the agency that appointed the next imam. On this question, there were two central issues: the identity and qualifications of those who elected the caliph (ahl al-hall wa-l-' aqd, lit. those who loosen and bind) and whether the caliph could be appointed through testa­mentary designation by the reigning caliph (pass').

The proper way to appoint the next caliph in Sunni doctrine had been election by some number of electors followed by an oath of allegiance (bay a) by all Muslims. Mawardi lists the following opinions about the identity of the electors: a pledge of allegiance (bay a) by the majority of Muslims, election by at least five of ‘those who loosen and bind’; by three of them (based on an analogy to marriage with the judge and two witnesses), and finally by only one, which Mawardi bases on a report that 'Abbas told 'Ali that if he ('Abbas) pledged his allegiance to 'Ali, the whole community would follow. Of these four opinions, the only one Mawardi rejects out of hand is the first one — ironically, the only one that could poten­tially lead to actual substantive confirmation of the caliph’s authority by involving the Mus­lim community. But, realistically, it could thereby threaten the ritual nature of the process Mawardi was advocating. The reason he offers for this rejection relies, in a typical Ash'ari and Shafi'i fashion, on the elevation of a historical anecdote to the level of a formal principle: since the involvement of the entire Muslim community was not needed in the case of the appointment of Abu Bakr by the Prophet, it could not be a requirement.

Similarly, in the early phase of the caliphate discourse, there existed significant disagree­ment about whether testamentary designation was an independent means of appointment. The Mu'tazili scholars consider it invalid altogether. Sunnis such as the Maliki Abu Bakr al-Baqillani and the Hanbali Abu Ya' la al-Farra’ considered it valid if followed by bay 'a by the electors, thus effectively reducing its value to nomination. 'Abd al-Qahir Tahir al-Baghdadi considered designation legitimate but without explicitly specifying whether the confirma­tion by the electors is necessary. Mawardi was the first to not only claim a consensus on the issue but also to consider designation a method of appointment independent of confirmation by the electors.

Three aspects of Mawardi’s caliphate theory stand out as distinct from what his predeces­sors and contemporaries wrote on the subject:

1) he moves the discourse of caliphate from theology to jurisprudence;

2) he sanctifies and ritualizes the imamate by allowing the separation of caliphal authority from effective power to govern; and

3) the community completely disappears from his theory.

Mawardi’s interest is to wed theory to reality and sustain the caliphate as much as possible, and so he makes the formal aspect of the appointment a ritual that is easy to carry out. That his political programme looks odd and unrealistic is not because it is divorced from practice, but precisely because he was trying to wed theory to practice without challenging either too much.

2.3.4 Post-Mongol developments

The late medieval era or post-Mongol period is largely continuous with the early medieval period in its institutions and ideas. An important institutional development was the rise of military slaves (mamluk; pl. mamaltk) as rulers in the Syro-Egyptian world. On the whole, the Mamluk period (our chief concern being the Sunni world) is quite conservative, in which the most consummate works of Sunni scholarship are produced. Non-conformity was suc­cessfully repressed or ignored, which is why the potentially remarkable political ideas of Ibn Taymiyya had limited immediate impact on practice and scholarship.

As noted earlier, Ibn Taymiyya stands out for his emphasis on the law rather than the individual ruler as the primary object of political allegiance. In the process, he reconciles the two separate strands of political thinking in Islam: the orthodox strand of the caliphate dis­course which upheld the absolute obligation and necessity of the caliphate on the one hand, and the actual statecraft driven by power, expediency and petty politics on the other. For Ibn Taymiyya, an Islamic government was not only a matter of ritual continuity with the past, but also a direct requirement of scriptural imperative, grounded in the obligation of the Muslim community to ‘command right and forbid wrong’. It was an obligatory institution, furthermore, whose basic parameters could be broadly determined by the scriptural texts and the practice of the rightly guided caliphs; any institutional developments after this normative period he considered relative and non-essential.¹⁶

Other important political thinkers of the period include the Maliki jurist Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (d. ca. 684/1285), who laid out in perceptive detail the differences between the respective authorities of the 'ulama ' as juristconsults (muftis) and as judges (qadis), and of the ruler as the political authority (hakim), all governed by the law.¹⁷ The most renowned and cre­ative of political thinkers of this period, and of all times, was the Maliki jurist and historian 'Abd al-Rahman Abu Zayd b. Khaldun (d. 809/1406), whose Prolegomena to his voluminous history of the Islamic world has been seen as a pioneering contribution in the philosophy of history and social sciences.¹⁸

2.4 The gunpowder empires: Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals

In the early modern period, nearly the entire Muslim world came to be reconsolidated, after centuries of dispersion into smaller kingdoms, into three large empires: the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal. While on the intellectual plane, even in administrative practices, there is little that was drastically new, each of the empires erected strong centralized bureaucratic institu­tions unprecedented in their coherence since classical Abbasid times, and the general populace achieved a considerable level of prosperity. Of the three, the Mughals of India were the grand­est and most populous, but also the shortest-lived. Central supervision reached its peak in the Ottoman Empire. The rulers of all three empires shared Central Asian stock: the Ottomans were Oghuz Turks whose ancestors had immigrated to Anatolia after their Seljuk cousins had settled in the old Islamic lands; the ancestors of the Safavids hailed from Azerbaijan, near the Caspian coast, and the Mughals traced their ancestry to Tamerlane (Timur Lang), who was proud of his mixed Turkish and Mongol lineage. Among Central Asian tribes, the rule of succession was that there was no rule, and the tradition continued even as they ruled mainly sedentary empires. The Ottomans even employed fratricide at first to eliminate the threat of competition, a practice common between 15th and 17th centuries. The Safavid succession relied on a more peaceful contest in an assembly of the chief courtiers to choose which son would succeed after the monarch’s death. In any case, unlike earlier military patronage states, centralized power was highly valued and none of the empires were allowed to be parcelled between the male heirs of a monarch as had been the case among the Seljuqs. The leadership of the Sunni world, contested briefly by the Mughals, fell to the Ottomans when they vanquished the Mamluk rulers of the central Arab regions of Syria and Egypt. The caliph residing in Cairo was decommissioned and the title of caliphate claimed by the Ottoman sultan for himself.

In administration, the Safavids built on pre-existing Turko-Persian patterns, whereas the Ottomans created distinct military and civilian offices out of the diverse populations they ruled over in Anatolia and Eastern Europe; Turkish was established as one of the official languages in the Ottoman court and literature alongside the rich and ancient Persian. Even­tually, Turkish largely replaced Persian in bureaucracy and literature and Arabic in religious discourse. But this did not mean privileging Turkic ethnicity, and ethnic Turks were limited in their political and military roles, opting often to advance through madrasa education to become 'ulama' or scribes. For the military-administrative elite, the Ottomans created a new ‘Roman’ race, a new blend, Turkish-speaking and Muslim, but from non-Muslim, non-Turkish origins. Ottoman writers took pride in how the Ottomans took the best qual­ities of many nations and blended them into a new, superior race. The Ottoman state was the rule and reign of the sultans, but in an important sense it was a conglomeration of all the households, the sultans’ as well as those of this ‘Ottoman Roman’ elite. In contrast, the Safavid Empire centred on a charismatic shah, seen as divinely anointed and even divine by some of his early followers; this conception abated with the death of Shah Isma'il in 1524.

The Ottoman—Safavid military rivalry lasted from 1578 until 1639, when a treaty was concluded. In both empires the emperor needed to bolster revenues for military ends; mili­tary service was rewarded through temporary revenue grants (timars, the Turkish equivalent of iqta ') — a system that had been in place since Abbasid times. The rulers’ own revenues mostly came from customs duties on international trade and commercial taxes, and so in­crease in foreign trade enhanced the ruler’s revenues, hence the age-old tradition of building caravanserais, bridges and roads to facilitate trade, and providing security at mountain passes and river crossings. Both empires learned from each other: the Safavids discovered that ideol­ogy alone will not guarantee success; the Ottomans realized that administration was not suf­ficient, and over the course of the 16th century various ideological bases were posited. While the Ottoman rulers had claimed to be ‘commanders of the faithful’ earlier on, the conquest of Egypt in 1517 and confrontation with the Safavid ‘heretics’ led them to emphasize the sultan as the caliph, the leader of the Sunni world. Süleyman I Kanuni (the ‘Lawgiver’; d. 1566) wanted to ensure that his sultanistic edicts were fully in accord with the Shari'ah, and by the end of the century, the sultan was presented routinely as the champion of Sunni Islam.

Prior to 1600, the ‘classic’ Ottoman rule was based on the principle of an egalitarian agrar­ian society. The peasants were allocated plots of equal productivity sufficient for a family. In the Ottoman realm there were about 50,000 cavalrymen and several hundred provincial of­ficers who lived close to their revenue sources alongside peasants and townsmen. The holders of larger revenue grants were distant in proportion to the size of the grant in both empires. The Safavids allowed their Turkoman commanders to hold large land grants in the provinces. After 1600, the more efficient and superior Ottoman system that had relied on large number of small-scale holdings came to resemble the Safavids as the need for revenue and military expenses against the Safavids and Habsburgs put pressure on the Ottomans to make larger grants. The power and protection of the Ottoman state, which reached individual subjects directly before this time, now devolved upon civic, religious or ethnic communities.

A crucial difference between the two empires — the Mughal Empire resembling the Ot­tomans in this respect — was the position of the 'ulama '. The Shi' i 'ulama ' were empowered by the religious ideology of the Safavid realm, and after the founding dynasty lost its sway, the 'ulama ’’s power, based on secure religious taxes in the Imami school (khumus') and eco­nomic grants, only increased, whereas the Ottoman 'ulama ', by contrast, had become state functionaries. An Ottoman qadi administered not only Shari'ah to Muslims but also the sul­tan’s qanun law to all subjects. To be considered for the judiciary, the 'ulama ' had to not only follow the Hanafi school that the Ottomans preferred but also learn Turkish and join provin­cial rotation. This put an end to the Arab ‘ulama’s traditional role of socio-religious leader­ship that had long acted as a check against political abuse.

2.4.1 The poll tax on non-Muslims fkharaj, jizye or

jizye-i sher 7} in the Ottoman Empire

Sanctioned by scriptural text (nass) and juristic convention, as asserted in the firman, jizya was for the Ottomans a religious tax whose collection and spending had to be done with special care. It was collected as a rule directly for the state treasury. As a shar T tax belonging to the bayt mal al-muslimTn, its administration was put under the supervision of the qadis and not in­frequently its actual collection was made by them. The jizya revenues were usually spent for military purposes. Exemption from jizya was usually made in return for military services. In accordance with the Shari 'ah the Ottoman government always exempted from jizya children, women, disabled and blind men, and the unemployed poor. Earlier, monks (ruhbTn) and cler­ics were exempted from jizya, but in the reform of 1691 all able clerics were subjected to jizya. In 1692 the ruhbTn sent a petition to the sultan stating a sharT opinion about the necessity of the exemption of those ruhbTn who were in retirement and not earning their own living, but it was rejected on the basis of the differing opinion of Imam Abu Yusuf.

Like the first Muslim conquerors of Egypt and Syria, the Ottomans used varied admin­istrative modes of collecting jizya, in some cases identifying previous taxes as jizya (as in Hungary). When a conquered land was to be organized as an Ottoman province, a census of people subject to jizya was made by the qadi appointed there, and a book called defter-i jizya-i gabrTn was drawn up and two copies made, one for the central treasury and the other for the provincial administration.

Islamic jurisprudence distinguished two kinds of jizya, that fixed by sulh, agreement, the amount of which could not be altered (called by Ottomans the fixed jizya, or maqtu'), and that levied from individuals, al-jizya 'ala al-ru'us (poll tax). Considering the basic sharT character of the poll tax, the government often insisted on its payment individually. On the other hand, the maqtu' might become too onerous when the population of such a group for one reason or another decreased. In such cases a new census was often asked for, to reduce the amount or to return to the payment by individuals. The maqtu ' system of jizya, however, came to be more and more extensively applied in the period of decline, during which the central government had increasingly lost control of tax collection in the provinces. It was the sultan’s responsibility to declare every new year the rates of jizya to be collected on the basis of a fatwa given by the Shaykh al-Islam, who determined it according to the shar T scale. The wealthy, middle-income and poor paid 48, 24 and 12 dirhams respectively; payment could be made in silver and gold coins in circulation. If a non-Muslim visitor (musta 'min; one given amTn) prolonged his stay in the Ottoman dominions longer than one year he was treated as a dhimmT, subjected to jizya. Later on under the capitulations, the Ottoman government be­came more and more tolerant in this matter.

Corruption appeared in the form of bribery; collectors could allow the wealthy a lower rate and force the poor to pay higher, or burden the people for their expenses, or be unduly harsh.

The Tanzimat decree of 1839 brought a new concept of citizenship to the society of the Ottoman state: the idea that both the Muslims and the Christians living in the empire were to be treated as equal before the law. This involved the question of taxation, including the kharaj, which there was pressure to abolish from Western diplomats in Istanbul. A decision on this was only made after the 1856 reforms, when both kharaj and jizya were abolished, and instead non-Muslim subjects were to pay a tax in lieu of military service (bedel-e asker).

2.4.2 India

A recognizably Islamicate administration that more or less replicated the diwan system devel­oped under the Abbasids was introduced into India during the rule of the Ghaznavids, whose seat of administration was at Lahore, and the administration was organized under it into as many as ten different departments. This system of government seems to have been fully de­veloped during the sultanate period, as we find quite a number of departments in existence.

The question of the levy of jizya in India is contested, and there is evidence that it was not normally levied under the Dihli sultanate in the sense of a discriminatory religious tax. Un­der the Dihli sultanate, political conditions do not appear to have been apt for the imposition of a novel discriminatory tax by a minority upon a majority; authors employ jizya to mean tribute from Hindu kings. Efforts were made by Firuz Shah Tughluq (but the context sug­gests it was not distinguished from land revenue). In the Sayyid and Lodhi periods nothing is heard of the levy of jizya. There is mention of Akbar’s abolition of it, but it is dubious and appears to be panegyrical. Following a number of orthodox measures discriminating against non-Muslims, Awrangzib (d. 1707) imposed an unpopular jizya in 1679 on the urging of the 'ulama ’; in this, government servants were exempted, and there were three rates of tax — owners of property worth 2,500 rupees were assessed at 16 rupees, those worth 250 rupees at 6 rupees 8 annas, and those worth 52 rupees were assessed at 3 rupees and 4 annas, the blind, the paralysed, and the indigent being exempt. Awrangzlb’s successors largely abolished it; Muhammad Shah made a futile attempt in 1725 to restore it.