Conclusion

When examining the cases of violent state punishment in the Seljuq and Mamluk chronicles, it is often difficult or even impossible to establish a correlation between offences and punishments.

As regards the early caliphal period (seventh to tenth centuries), there is certainly no shortage of examples of violent public punishments reported in the chronicles dealing with the Umayyad and Abbasid regimes. Is one really entitled, then, to speculate about an increase in punitive state violence following the ‘Barbarian incursions' of the Turks into the heartlands of Islam starting in the early eleventh century?^[300] The cruelty of the Turks is a trope in late medieval (as well as early modern and modern) Islamic litera­ture, and one should guard oneself against reproducing the anti-Turkish cliches of Arab and Persian historiography. Let us not forget also that the Ottomans, the direct heirs of both the Seljuqs and the Mamluks were, as noted above, sometimes lauded for their equity in imposing punishment on their subjects.

Still, the frequency with which public executions and other kinds of violent state punishment are mentioned in the Muslim chronicles of the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries is striking. Furthermore, it is not far-fetched to think that public spectacles of pain, as rituals of power aiming to create a sense of legitimacy, became particularly important in the highly militarised, post- caliphal periods of Islamic premodern history. In his panoramic study of Iraq and Egypt in the tenth century, Adam Mez commented that, in terms of the state's suppression of crime, ‘the Baghdad and Cairene governments show[ed] a refreshing restraint and moderation'.^[301] It would appear to be difficult to make similar assertions about the Seljuqs and Mamluks.

That said, certain shifts from Seljuq to Mamluk times can be detected. This concerns, in the first instance, changes in the legal doctrine of torture and punishment based on utilitarian considerations of the public interest. Judicial torture was legalised under the Mamluks; the definition of mutilation, for­bidden categorically by tradition, became narrower; the justification of punishment on the basis of siyasa made increasing inroads into Muslim jurisprudence, as in general siyasa and Sharia entered into a new synthesis. As for punitive practices, some punishments, such as immolation, were less common in the Mamluk period, but at the same time an array of formerly unknown, or hardly known, violent punishments appear to have been introduced. Among the non-lethal penalties, shaming punishments appear to have become more widespread and invasive, and amputation to have increased in frequency. As for capital punishments, crucifixion by nailing, bisection, impaling and skinning alive appear to feature in Mamluk chronicles more regularly than in the chronicles of previous centuries.

The standard scholarly narrative regarding Islamic law under the Mamluks has been that it was severely compromised by the siyasa-based, and therefore largely arbitrary, justice of the sultan, as well as by the failure of the Muslim jurists adequately to protect legal doctrine from becoming divorced from practice. The jurists, instead, would have contented themselves with empha­sising the theoretical, or symbolic, primacy of Sharia. More recent scholar­ship, by contrast, has emphasised the symbiotic nature of Sharia and siyasa, the fact that siyasa was commonly held, by both jurists and rulers, to encompass, not to replace, Sharia. This may be the case. However, it so happens that in the particular area of crime and punishment, and especially on account of the doctrine of discretionary punishment, the law was so underdetermined and so riddled with loopholes that only little opposition could be mounted to check the rising tide of penal violence by the state.