is is a study of what purport to be the earliest opinions that Muslims expressed about the employment of non-Muslim administrators by an Islamic state. Matn-cumisnād analyses are performed on three early reports which claim that the caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb instituted a religious criterion for state employment. ese constitute the only credible evidence that such a criterion might have been part of administrative policy in the pre-Marwānid period. ey were also an important basis for later legal doctrines that forbade the state employment of non-Muslims. e matn-cum-isnād analyses are placed in juxtaposition to historical reports concerning the late Umayyad period, in order to advance the thesis that the reports are likely to have been put into circulation by proto-Sunnī Arab traditionists in second-/eighth-century Kufa in reaction to state policies, particularly those of the Umayyad governor Khālid al-Qasrī.
Abstract:Muslim authors composed a number of polemics against the employment of non-Muslim state officials in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Egypt and Syria. This essay argues that the majority of these works drew directly or indirectly on a previously unremarked sixth/twelfth century common source. Although the common source cannot yet be securely identified, its existence and influence have significant implications for historians’ understanding of interreligious tensions in late medieval Egypt and Syria and for the
This study examines a recent claim that it was the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 101/720) who instituted the requirement that non-Muslims living under Muslim rule adopt distinctive dress and behavior (ghiyār). After showing that the evidence for the origins of the ghiyār is neither as unanimous nor as consistent as was suggested, it is argued that the ghiyār cannot be securely attributed to ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and that the problem of its origins therefore remains in question.
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