Friends of the Emir

The caliphs and sultans who once ruled the Muslim world were often assisted by powerful Jewish Christian Zoroastrian and other non-Muslim state officials whose employment occasioned energetic discussions among Muslim scholars and rulers. This book reveals those discussions for the first time in all their diversity drawing on unexplored medieval sources in the realms of law history poetry entertaining literature administration and polemic. It follows the discourse on non-Muslim officials from its beginnings in the Umayyad empire (661750) through medieval Iraq Egypt Syria and Spain to its apex in the Mamluk period (12501517). Far from being an intrinsic part of Islam views about non-Muslim state officials were devised transmitted and elaborated at moments of intense competition between Muslim and non-Muslim learned elites. At other times Muslim rulers employed non-Muslims without eliciting opposition. The particular shape of the Islamic discourse on this issue is comparable to analogous discourses in medieval Europe and China.