Upholding God’s Rule: Early Muslim Juristic Opposition to the State Employment of non-Muslims

Abstract

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.

Ordered Relationships. The Regulation of Jewish-Christian Marriages and Children in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Legal Works

“…In the case of non-Muslim employment Ibn al-Qayyim's attention can be related to a broader interest in the topic in the public sphere and the resonance that this was beginning to have with some circles of scholars. This is reflected by the fact that polemical texts written by authors outside the sphere of legal scholarship around the same time as the composition of Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma invoke this phenomenon as a problem facing Muslims and Muslim society (Yarbrough 2019(Yarbrough , 2012Perlmann 1945).…”