This paper examines clients (mawlā, pl. mawālī) in the Umayyad administration (660-750 C.E.) as a case study for exploring how proximity to positions of power informed one’s standing in late antique society. Clients in this time period are commonly understood as non-Arab members of tribal networks who became quasi-members upon conversion to Islam and/or manumission by an individual patron; as such, mawālī were members of society under the tribal protection of their patron. As clients, these individuals were subject to different taxation and compensation than their fellow Muslims and, as some scholars have suggested, a social stigma as second-class citizens. For the early Islamic period, scholars have often portrayed mawālī as aggrieved members of the Muslim community who manifested their frustration as “second-class Muslims” into opposition towards the Umayyad Caliphate. Recent scholarship, in particular that of Jamal Juda, has complicated this generalization by stressing the variety of clients’ economic conditions and employment. Recognizing that the socioeconomic conditions for clients was not universal, this paper explores why some mawālī were more equal than others. The paper asks two simple, yet admittedly enigmatic, questions: Who were these mawālī administrators before the Islamic conquest? And what can their pre-Islamic ancestry tell us about the impact of the Umayyad Caliphate on late antique social and economic networks? Scholars have long pointed out that many non-Muslims continued to staff administrative positions within the Umayyad bureaucracy after the conquest. These Umayyad-era non-Muslim administrators were often members of the same pre-Islamic elite families previously employed by the Byzantine or Sassanian empires. However, mawālī had to convert from something, so should we understand mawālī as the emergence of a new class of Muslim converts or the preservation of established pre-Islamic families, as was the case with their non-Muslim coworkers? The paper addresses the latter question by comparing the socioeconomic backgrounds of mawālī and non-Muslim bureaucrats based on a prosopographical approach to biographical and administrative literature (e.g. Ibn ‘Asākir’s Ta’rīkh madīnat Dimashq and al-Jahshiyārī’s Kitāb al-wuzarā’ wa-l-kuttāb). As a result, mawālī administrators provide insight into how the shifting political landscape of the early Umayyad Caliphate incorporated and disrupted pre-Islamic social and economic networks.

This paper argues that the milk relations of Qabīṣa ibn Dhuʾayb al-Khuzāʿī (d. ca. 87/706) and ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (r. 65–86/685–705) factored into the former’s career during the latter’s caliphate. Qabīṣa was granted several administrative responsibilities during the caliphate of ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān. His son, Isḥāq ibn Qabīṣa, had a successful career under ʿAbd al-Malik’s sons, al-Walīd (r. 86–96/705–15) and Hishām (r. 105–25/724–43), which culminated in holding the desirable post of governor. Previous scholars have noted that Qabīṣa and ʿAbd al-Malik were brothers-in-law—a marital tie which, as this paper shows, is not the only one attested between the two families. However, the fact of their milk relations, which is not found in the mainstream Muslim sources, has thus far not received the scholarly attention it deserves. The account of ʿAbd al-Malik’s and Qabīṣa’s nursing ties, I contend, provides a plausible explanation for Qabīṣa’s illustrious career, as well as contributing to our knowledge of the close relations shared by their tribes, Quraysh and Khuzāʿa, in the pre- and early Islamic periods. That Qabīṣa ibn Dhuʾayb and ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān were closely connected individuals is evident both from the marital links between their families and from the numerous appointments that Qabīṣa and his son received during the caliphates of ʿAbd al-Malik and his sons. The long history shared by the tribes to which Qabīṣa and ʿAbd al-Malik belonged provides another piece of supporting evidence for their amicable relations. However, without the missing link of the milk relationship of Qabīṣa and ʿAbd al-Malik, we are left in the dark as to why it was particularly Qabīṣa and his family that received this favorable treatment. The importance of Qabīṣa’s and ʿAbd al-Malik’s milk kinship is enhanced by the fact that evidence of its existence is rare, being found, to the best of my knowledge, in only one source. This paper thus demonstrates that consulting a wide array of primary sources in order to find unique accounts is a promising work method for elucidating the factors influencing political appointments in the early Islamic period.

This paper will inquire into the process of creating the Arabic poetic canon. The three foundational collections ¬– the Muʿallaqāt, the Mufaḍḍaliyāt, and Abu Tammām’s Ḥamāsa – were all written down between the 7th and the 9th centuries AD. Al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī in the 8th century wrote his anthology for the crown prince and future caliph al-Mahdī. The origins of the Muʿallaqāt may be connected even more directly with the caliphal power, as accounts in Ahmad b. Abi Tahir Tayfur’s Kitāb al-manthūr wa-l-manẓūm ascribe their collections to Muʿāwiya and ʿAbd al-Malik. Preserving old poetry seems to have been on the minds of the makers of the Islamic empire from early on. I suggest that we need to see the efforts to collect ancient poetry as part of broader consolidation and classification of knowledge, going on simultaneously in different fields at that time – law (Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ), Islamic jurisprudence (Shafiʿī’s Risāla), ḥadīth (Bukhari and Muslim), and next to the Translation Movement that rendered Greek philosophical and scientific knowledge into Arabic. Furthermore, I will consider parallel efforts to collect secular poetic heritage in different places of the region in roughly the same period. To the West of Baghdad, Byzantium after year 1000 witnessed the revival of Hellenism first in the form of philosophy (Michael Psellos) and then of Greek literary heritage (e.g., the 12th century Homerist Eustathios of Thessalonike). To the East, the Samanids in the 10th century patronized the compositions of epic poems retelling ancient Iranian legends and heroic traditions, of which Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāme had the most lasting impact. In the heart of the Islamic realm, the 9th-century Antony of Tagrit wrote his Syriac Rhetoric in which he frequently quotes from Greek and Syriac sources, both Christian, such as Ephrem, and non-Christian, such as Plutarch and the Iliad. Maria Mavroudi (2018) has recently noted that Byzantine and Arabic poetry offer parallels when it comes to “the process whereby an earlier literary heritage can be accommodated at the face of enormous ideological, social, and political change generated by the victory of a new religion.” This paper will examine this process through a close reading of the Arabic accounts about the emergence of the three collections put in a comparative perspective.

Since E.S. Kennedy and David Pingree’s pioneering work on the ʾAbbāsid-era astrologer Māshāʿallāh (fl. late 8th-early 9th cent. CE), it has been accepted that this scholar relied upon a version of the Sasanian astral science handbook known in Arabic as the Zīj al-Shāh for his calculations. This handbook seems to have existed in redactions commissioned by the Sasanian rulers Khusrō I (r. 531-79) and Yazdgerd III (r. 632-51). Kennedy and Pingree maintained that Māshāʿallāh must have relied on the earlier of these two redactions, due to 60-day discrepancies between two Zoroastrian calendrical dates given by Māshāʿallāh in his astrological history, and what they would be according to the Zoroastrian calendar that seems to have been otherwise standard in Māshāʿallāh’s day. For Kennedy and Pingree, this was an unmistakable sign that the version of the Zīj al-Shāh consulted by Māshāʿallāh must have been the one composed in Khusrō I’s reign, because it reflected an old form of the Zoroastrian calendar, in which two months of 30 days each had not yet been intercalated. The historicity of this Sasanian-era intercalation, which Kennedy and Pingree took for granted, has been persuasively disproven by François de Blois, but the relevance of de Blois’ finding for the interpretation of these problematic dates in Māshāʿallāh has not yet been explored. In this paper, I argue that Māshāʿallāh’s dates do not reflect his reliance on any version of the Zīj al-Shāh in particular, or, more to the point, any large-scale intercalation undertaken in the Sasanian period. What ʿallāh’s dates do reflect is his close association with Zoroastrian landowners, and their efforts, as discussed by de Blois, to reform the Zoroastrian calendar according to which the yearly harvest tax was collected. This calendar had become increasingly unmoored from the natural seasons, due to its years of a constant 365 days. While there would have been general agreement that some calendrical reform was called for, Zoroastrians would have favored an intercalation of whole-number months, rather than the finer adjustment favored by the ʾAbbāsid caliphs; this way there would have been minimal disruption to the normal course of Zoroastrian ritual observance, with each day of the month consecrated to its eponymous deity. Māshāʿallāh’s astrological history, then, reflects a fictitious Sasanian precedent, developed for these ʾAbbāsid-era calendrical disputes by his Zoroastrian contemporaries, rather than a survival from some pre-intercalation era of Sasanian history.