has often been pointed out that Muslim rulers sometimes preferred to hire non-Muslims for certain positions; those employees’ relative weakness and lack of connections to powerful Muslim factions tended—in the eyes of some Muslim employers, at least—to make them more trustworthy. This phenomenon can be traced from the Syrian Umayyad court, where a Christian progenitor of John of Damascus oversaw the empire’s finances, to Islamic Spain, where Jewish officials, such as the tenth-century figure Hasdai ibn Shaprut, occasionally served as the Muslim ruler’s right-hand men, to the very eve of modernity. When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he found the financial administration in the hands of a Copt, Jirjis al-Jawharī, whom the French preserved in office.37 Muslim religious elites regularly objected to the empowerment of non-Muslims. Their complaints form a continuous discourse that runs throughout Islamic history, and in which The Sword of Ambition participates.38 The fact that Muslim rulers regularly perceived non-Muslims as especially trustworthy was the hidden counterargument that Ibn al-Nābulusī, like other figures who contributed to the discourse, sought to discredit.
We may briefly consider two major ways, however, in which the work reflects more particularly the social, religious, and political developments of its day. Both relate to what may be called the “Sunni shift,” a series of momentous changes in the relation of emergent Sunni Islam to state power in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries.39 The Sunni shift saw the accession of a number of powerful dynasties, from Afghanistan to North Africa, that relied for their legitimacy upon the established Sunni religious elites who already functioned as foci for popular support in their capacity as scholars, preachers, judges, and local notables. The religious elites who supported these dynasties were rewarded with unprecedented patronage, notably via such novel institutions as the madrasah for legal scholars and khānqāh for Sufis, both of which were supported by the expanded use of waqf (charitable endowment) as a means for transmitting wealth and social power. The rapprochement between military rulers and Sunni religious elites tended to benefit both parties, faced as they were with the religio-political challenges of Shiʿite-leaning states with heritages dating to the tenth century, of the European Crusading movement that challenged Muslim ascendancy in Egypt and greater Syria from the early twelfth century until the late thirteenth and even beyond, and finally of the Mongol storm that broke across the region in the mid-thirteenth century.
In adducing the Crusades, we in fact identify the first major way in which The Sword of Ambition most pervasively reflects its historical moment. The work may be read, with considerable justification, as representative of the Muslim “counter-crusade” by which militant sentiment against the European Crusaders contributed to significant change within Islamic societies, notably by generating pressure upon marginal elements to conform to an ideal of comprehensive Muslim ascendancy as articulated and advocated by certain Sunni religious elites.40 In such a climate, native Christians and Jews, especially when seen to exercise undue power, could more easily find themselves in conflict with Muslims who saw non-Muslim power as an implicit challenge to their vision of the properly ordered Islamic society. In practical terms, non-Muslims, especially Christians, could come under suspicion as a fifth column for Crusader designs on Muslim territory. This fear is clearly visible in The Sword of Ambition, as both an historical “fact” (as in §2.14.4, the case of the disloyal Christian Ibn Dukhān) and a present danger. Sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil is made to remark in a timeless tone (§3.2.37) that when Copts become too wealthy, their incorrigible tendency to conspire with foreign enemies poses a grave threat to the security of the Egyptian state.
Although it is plain that the idea of “counter-crusade” resonates strongly with particular passages in The Sword of Ambition, the currency of counter-crusade ideology in the mid-thirteenth century does not explain why Ibn al-Nābulusī should have found it expedient to invoke that ideology, in a limited way, in his screed against Coptic officials, or indeed why he set out to write the screed at all. The more finely grained problem of authorial motivation and strategy highlights the second major way in which The Sword of Ambition most pervasively reflects its historical moment, namely as a symptom of a set of social and political developments that are relatively detached from the counter-crusade and more firmly internal to the Islamic sphere. In the period following the Sunni shift in Egypt, for reasons that cannot be developed here, the state both increased its control over economic activity in Egypt and expanded its patronage of Sunni urban religious elites (ʿulamāʾ), generating heightened competition for state patronage among those elites and between them and other competitors, such as Christians, Jews, and (Ibn al-Nābulusī would remind us) Muslim rural elites.41 As S. D. Goitein argues, “from the thirteenth century on, … when the economy became increasingly monopolized by the state, the clamoring of Muslim candidates for government posts became ever stronger, and the minority groups had to give way.”42 The clamoring arose as the madrasah was increasingly utilized by the Ayyubids to make the military-patronage state the primary source of economic support for Sunni religious elites, cementing ties between them and the Sunni rulers.43 Beginning in the late twelfth century, it became increasingly common for state officials to be drawn from the ranks of madrasah-trained religious elites. In earlier centuries, by contrast, administrative personnel had traditionally represented a more eclectic and less uniformly orthodox cross section of the population. The secretaries (kuttāb) of the Abbasid period were famed not only for their literary virtuosity, much celebrated in The Sword of Ambition, but also for their moral laxness and their frequent dissent from law- and tradition-centered Islam of the kind that would become dominant in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. After the disintegration of the Abbasid empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, the Fatimids and their deputies and allies who ruled Egypt and much of Syria employed a motley assortment of non-Muslims, converts, foreign Muslims, Shiʿites (both Ismaʿili and Twelver), military men (who might also be of foreign origin and/or converts), and local Sunnis. Under the Ayyubids, however, as under their ideological progenitors, the Seljuq Turks, it was the Sunni scholars who increasingly received the bulk of the state’s patronage, in the form of official employment and stipends for scholars and students. Ibn al-Nābulusī was fully immersed in these currents. Madrasah-educated, with no specific training for government service (see §§3.2.34–35), he nonetheless came to depend on the state for his income. Competition from his peers, whom he portrayed as undeserving of employment because of their religious affiliation, level of education, or regional and class origin, provoked him to marshal his madrasah-honed linguistic and literary skills in support of his own cause. Michael Chamberlain has described the culture of fitnah—disapproved but ubiquitous conflict for patronage and power—that prevailed among the urban learned classes in Ayyubid and Mamluk domains of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ibn al-Nābulusī’s shrill critique of his competitors, both in The Sword of Ambition and in the Luminous Rules, is a typical product of this competitive culture.
The Sword of Ambition has seen sporadic use by modern scholars since its rediscovery and partial transcription by Claude Cahen in 1960 (on Cahen’s published transcriptions, see “The Arabic Text” below).44 These scattered references to the work may be placed into two broad categories. First, the simple fact of the work’s composition is cited as a symptom of anti-dhimmi sentiment in thirteenth-century Egypt, or as another iteration of the regular calls for enforcement of the theoretical dhimmah regulations that rigorists believed should govern the lives of non-Muslims under Islamic rule (on the term dhimmah, see “Pact of Security” in the Glossary).45 While it is perfectly defensible to use the work in this way, there is at the same time a certain risk in extrapolating from a few works of this nature to larger cultural trends without also highlighting the personal circumstances and motivations of the authors. Similarly, although Ibn al-Nābulusī does make passing reference to legal aspects of the dhimmah arrangement in The Sword of Ambition, it is not primarily a legal work and makes scarcely any mention of the “conditions” (shurūṭ) that many jurists thought should lie at the heart of that arrangement. Indeed, putative rules concerning the employment of non-Muslims as state officials are not, strictly speaking, part of the dhimmah; the obvious awkwardness of requiring non-Muslims to refuse offers of employment from Muslim leaders generally prevented Muslim elites from proposing such a requirement. It is telling that in the best-known work in the legal discourse on the dhimmah, Aḥkām