Aghlabid Emirate

A province, for tribute

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)formation

In 800 Harun al-Rashid granted Ifriqiya to Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab as a hereditary governorship, in exchange for an annual tribute and the caliph's name in the Friday sermon. Baghdad stopped paying for the province's garrison and stopped having to govern it.

That arrangement is the moment the Abbasid empire began converting itself into a system of clients at the height of its power, and the Aghlabids are the first case. Everything the Tahirids and the Samanids later did in the east — a hereditary governorship, a tribute, the caliph's name in the sermon, and no interference — the Aghlabids did in the west a generation earlier, and with the caliph's explicit written consent rather than by quiet accumulation.

What they did with it was go to sea. The invasion of Byzantine Sicily began in 827 and took most of a century; Palermo fell in 831, Syracuse in 878. Aghlabid fleets raided the Italian mainland and sacked the outskirts of Rome in 846. The Sicily they created was Muslim for two and a half centuries and left an administrative and agricultural inheritance that the Norman kings who took it afterwards kept substantially intact.

The dynasty was destroyed in 909 by the Kutama Berber army of the Fatimid da'wa, which had been recruiting in the mountains behind them for a decade.

Seventy-five years for one island

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)expansion

The invasion of Byzantine Sicily began in 827 with a fleet carrying perhaps ten thousand men, and the island was not fully taken until Taormina fell in 902. Seventy-five years is a long campaign, and the length is the interesting part: Byzantine Sicily was defended, fortified and reinforceable by sea, and the Aghlabids had to build a naval capacity from a province that had not had one.

They built it partly out of necessity. The emirate's Arab military elite was factious and repeatedly in revolt, and the ruling family found that a permanent external campaign was the most reliable way to keep armed men occupied and paid from plunder rather than from taxing Ifriqiya harder. The jihad against Byzantium was doctrinally respectable and politically useful at the same time.

Muslim Sicily lasted two and a half centuries and its inheritance survived the Norman conquest that ended it. The Norman kings of Sicily kept the Arabic administrative vocabulary, the tax registers, the irrigation and crops, and for a time an Arabic-Latin-Greek trilingual chancery; Roger II commissioned al-Idrisi's geography at Palermo in 1154.

The conquest took seventy-five years and produced a Muslim Sicily that lasted two and a half centuries, and then a Norman Sicily that kept its administration, its language and its scholars — which is how an emirate governed from Kairouan ended up shaping a Latin kingdom whose chancery worked in Arabic.

The judge who took the fleet

Drafted from Khallikan, Biographical Dictionary (1842)expansion

The man who commanded the invasion of Sicily in 827 was the chief judge of Kairouan, and he was appointed to the command by the emir who had appointed him to the bench.

Ibn Khallikan's notice of him is short, because Asad ibn al-Furat mattered to a thirteenth-century compiler as a jurist rather than as a general, and the military career is a footnote to the legal one. That is itself the most useful thing about the entry.

Who he was

His family came from Khurasan and he was born at Harran in northern Mesopotamia. He came into Ifriqiya with a body of troops the caliph sent west, spent five years at Kairouan and nine at Tunis, and had the Quran by heart at eighteen. Then he went east to study: to Medina, where he heard Malik himself teach; to Iraq, where he sat with the principal disciples of Abu Hanifa; and to Egypt, where he attached himself to Ibn al-Qasim and collected the legal questions and answers that became the Asadiya, which he carried back to Kairouan in 797.

De Slane preserves the joke Asad used to make about his own name, which is the only sentence in the entry that sounds like a person:

I am Asad — the lion — and the lion is the noblest of animals; my father was called Furat, and the Euphrates is the purest of waters; and my grandfather's name was Sinan — the spear — which is the best of weapons.

In 817 the emir Ziyadat Allah made him qadi of Kairouan. Ten years later the same emir gave him the command of the army that was to be sent against Sicily, and did not relieve him of the judgeship.

The expedition

The figures are precise and worth having, because the campaign that began the two-and-a-half-century Muslim history of Sicily was not a large one.

In the month of the first Rabi, A.H. 212 — June 827 — he sailed for that island with nine thousand one hundred foot and nine hundred horse.

Ten thousand men. He won a number of engagements, and died of his wounds the following year while besieging Syracuse.

The conquest of the island took another seventy-five years and was never completed by the men who began it. What the Aghlabids had done was find something for an army to do that was neither at home nor in the caliph's service, and hand it to a judge whose authority over the Arab troops came from a source the troops could not easily quarrel with.

Why a jurist

Because of what the Aghlabid emirate was: a family governing Ifriqiya on the caliph's behalf, holding an Arab military class it could not trust and a Berber population it had not assimilated, and needing every scrap of legitimacy it could find.

An emir who sends his chief judge to command a holy war against Byzantium is making a statement about what the war is. Asad's own standing came from having studied under Malik at Medina and Ibn al-Qasim in Egypt, and having brought the law back with him in writing; he was not a client of the dynasty and could not be described as one. Putting him at the head of the fleet made the expedition the community's rather than the emir's.

It also got the jund out of the country, which Aghlabid policy required for a century.

What he left

Not Sicily. Asad was dead within eighteen months of sailing, and the island was taken slowly by other men.

What he left was the Asadiya: the questions he had put to Ibn al-Qasim in Egypt, with the answers, written down without much order. Another Kairouan jurist rearranged them under headings, expanded them and resolved some of them against the Traditions he had by heart, and the result is the book the Maliki law of the entire Maghreb has rested on ever since.

That man's name was Sahnun, and Ibn Khallikan has a separate entry for him.

What a hundred years of tribute paid for

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)peak

The Aghlabids sent an annual tribute to Baghdad and kept the rest, and what they did with the rest is standing in Tunisia.

Kairouan had been founded as a garrison town during the conquests — one of the amsar, planted to hold a province rather than to be a city. Under the Aghlabids it became the capital of the western Islamic world in the sense that mattered: a place with a court, a legal school, a scholarly establishment and buildings that made an argument.

The Great Mosque is the argument. Ziyadat Allah I rebuilt it almost entirely in 836, and the building standing today is substantially his: a vast hypostyle prayer hall on columns quarried out of Roman and Byzantine ruins across Ifriqiya, a courtyard, and a square minaret in three receding tiers. That minaret is the oldest surviving tower of its kind anywhere in the Islamic world, and it is the prototype for the square minarets of the whole Maghreb and al-Andalus — the form that becomes the Giralda at Seville and the Koutoubia at Marrakesh three centuries later.

The other Aghlabid building programme is less famous and more revealing. They built water: a system of great open cisterns outside Kairouan, the largest more than a hundred and twenty metres across, fed by an aqueduct from the hills and settling silt in a smaller basin before it reached the main one. A garrison town on a plain with no river needed that to be a capital at all, and a dynasty that builds reservoirs is a dynasty that expects to be there in fifty years.

They also built the ribats — fortified coastal monasteries at Sousse and Monastir where volunteers garrisoned the shore against Byzantine raiding and spent the rest of the time in religious exercise. The institution is the frontier equivalent of the Sicily campaign: a way of directing armed and pious men outward.

That is what a hundred years of a rich province's surplus buys when it is spent at home instead of being sent east: the oldest minaret in Islam, and a water system that let a garrison town on a waterless plain become the capital of the western Islamic world.

God's curse on poverty

Drafted from Khallikan, Biographical Dictionary (1842)peak

The most durable thing the Aghlabid century produced was not a mosque or a province. It was a book of law, written down at Kairouan by a judge whose father had come west as a soldier, and it is still the authority for the Maliki school across North and West Africa.

Ibn Khallikan gives Sahnun a short entry, of the kind he gives to jurists whose importance he takes for granted. It contains one line of complaint that is worth more than the rest of it put together.

The complaint

Sahnun studied under Ibn al-Qasim, Ibn Wahb and Ashhab — Malik's Egyptian disciples — and afterwards became, in Ibn Khallikan's phrase, the head of the science in the Maghrib. What he said about the arrangement was this:

God's curse on poverty! I was a contemporary of Malik, but, having no means of going to see him, I was obliged to take lessons from Ibn al-Qasim.

He was born in 776 or 777, in Malik's lifetime, and he could not afford the journey to Medina. The whole of Maliki law in the west therefore reached it at one remove, through men who had heard the master and could be travelled to instead — and a jurist at the far end of the chain knew exactly what that cost him and said so, in a sentence somebody thought worth writing down.

The book

Asad ibn al-Furat had brought back from Egypt a set of questions he had put to Ibn al-Qasim, with the answers, in no particular order. It was called the Asadiya, and Sahnun had written it out from Asad's dictation.

He then rebuilt it. He arranged the questions under separate headings, increased their number, and resolved some of them against the Traditions he had by heart from Ibn Wahb's recension of Malik's Muwatta. The result is the Mudawwana — the digest — and Ibn Khallikan describes it plainly as the main authority relied on by the people of Kairouan.

He left some points unfinished. The book went out anyway.

What a law school is for

Sahnun was qadi of Kairouan and had, Ibn Khallikan says, a greater number of pupils than any other of Malik's disciples, and it was by his means that the doctrines of that imam were propagated throughout the Maghrib. He died in November or December 854.

That is the sentence the Aghlabid record turns on, and the dynasty barely appears in it. What the emirate had done was pay for a capital: a congregational mosque with a minaret, cisterns to keep a waterless plain supplied, and a court that employed judges of the first rank and left them alone in the matters that were theirs. What grew on that was a school — a physical place where a specific body of law was taught to a specific body of students who then went out and applied it.

By the time the Fatimids took Kairouan in 909 the Maliki jurists of the city were the most cohesive institution in Ifriqiya and the most serious obstacle to an Isma'ili government, and they outlasted it. The Aghlabids ruled for a hundred and nine years. The rite their capital exported has governed marriage, inheritance and contract from Morocco to the Niger for eleven hundred.

The bird

Ibn Khallikan ends, as he often does, with the name.

Sahnun was not a family name. It is the name of a bird found in the Maghrib and remarkable, he says, for its sagacity, and the judge was called after it. He then notes that whether the word is pronounced with an a or a u raises a question of Arabic grammatical form that would take too long to expose here, and that it has in any case been properly treated by somebody else.

The man who codified the law of half a continent is remembered under the nickname of a clever bird, and his biographer's last word on him is a footnote about vowels.

The last emir

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)contraction

The Aghlabid emirate was destroyed in a season, and the reasons it could be destroyed in a season had been accumulating for thirty years.

The dynasty's whole arrangement rested on three things: the caliph's diploma, the loyalty of the Arab military class in Ifriqiya, and the acquiescence of the Maliki scholars of Kairouan. By the 890s it was losing the second and had never really had the third.

The jund and the jurists

The Arab troops — the jund, descendants of the conquest armies, settled around Kairouan and Tunis — had been in periodic revolt for the whole life of the dynasty. Emirs had put down risings in the 820s, the 890s and repeatedly in between, and the standard remedy was to buy black slave soldiers as a counterweight, which produced an army loyal to the emir and resented by everybody else.

The jurists were worse, because they could not be bought and their objection was public. Kairouan's Maliki establishment held that the Aghlabids drank, taxed unlawfully, lived in palaces outside the city and behaved like kings, and said so. Sahnun, the great Maliki jurist of the ninth century, was appointed qadi and used the office against the court. That quarrel ran for a century and it left the dynasty with no religious cover at all.

Ibrahim II

The reign that broke it was Ibrahim II's, from 875, and by every account it was a reign of terror.

He killed members of his own family, executed officials in numbers, and was eventually the subject of a complaint to Baghdad — the caliph ordered him to abdicate, which he did in 902, handing over to his son and going off to fight in Sicily, where he died besieging Cosenza.

A dynasty whose ruler has to be removed by written order from a caliph two thousand miles away has stopped being an autonomous power and become an embarrassment that its patron cannot easily replace.

What was in the mountains

While that was happening, an Isma'ili missionary had been living among the Kutama Berbers of the Lesser Kabylie since 893.

The Kutama were inside Aghlabid territory in the sense that a line on a map went round them, and outside Aghlabid control in every sense that mattered. They had the ordinary grievances of mountain people about taxation and about lowland government, and Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i spent fifteen years turning those grievances into an army with a doctrine.

The last emir, Ziyadat Allah III, took the throne in 903 by murdering his father, his brothers and his uncles. Six years later he was on a ship to Egypt.

Recruited from inside

Drafted from Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids (1996)end

The Aghlabids were not conquered by a neighbour. They were removed by a missionary organisation that had spent a decade recruiting in the mountains behind their own capital.

The instrument that destroyed them was the da'wa — the Isma'ili mission: clandestine, hierarchical, and designed to operate inside other people's territory and persuade a rival's subjects that their ruler was illegitimate. Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i arrived in Ifriqiya in 893 and went to the Kutama Berbers of the Lesser Kabylie, who were in Aghlabid territory, were not in Aghlabid control, and had grievances of the usual kind about taxation and about being governed from a lowland city by an Arab elite that despised them.

He converted them, and then he did the thing that made it work: he organised them. The Kutama were reconstituted as a military force with a command structure and a doctrine, and by 902 they were taking Aghlabid towns.

The Aghlabid response was hampered by the fault that had run through the whole reign. The emirate's Arab military class — the jund — had been in periodic revolt for a century, the ruling family had spent decades keeping it occupied in Sicily rather than trusting it at home, and the last emir, Ziyadat Allah III, had opened his reign by killing most of his own relatives. In 909 he did not fight a final battle. He collected what he could carry and went east, and Abu Abdallah entered Raqqada, the palace city outside Kairouan, without opposition.

Then the mission's own logic asserted itself. Abu Abdallah summoned his master, who had been in hiding in southern Morocco and had been imprisoned at Sijilmasa; Abd Allah was released, brought to Ifriqiya, and declared caliph and mahdi in 909. Two years later he had Abu Abdallah — who had converted the Kutama, raised the army, taken the province and handed it over — executed.

Two things are worth holding onto. Calling this a Fatimid conquest is accurate and understates the mechanism: the conquering army was raised inside the conquered polity out of its own subjects. And the same year removed both the Aghlabids and the Rustamids at Tahert, two neighbouring dynasties brought down by the identical movement within months of each other.

Leather-dressers

Drafted from Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (1896)afterlife

Around 1510 Leo Africanus came to Kairouan and found a town of tanners.

He gives its history first, and the Aghlabids are in it, under the name Leo's sources used. After the Umayyad governors, he says, one Elagleb was appointed lieutenant, who gouerned not the towne as a Califa, and after his death his son succeeded, and the gouernment remained vnto his posterie for an hundred threescore and ten yeeres, till such time as they were depriued thereof by one Mahdi Califa.

He also records what they did with it. Under Aghlab's governorship the city grew so much in inhabitants and buildings that a second town, Raqqada, was built beside it for the prince and his nobles. And in his time also the Isle of Sicilia was woonne: a captain named Halqama was sent, who built a town there instead of a fort and called it after himself —

which name is vsed by the Sicilians euen till this present.

Alcamo, in western Sicily, is still called that. It is the only thing the Aghlabids named that anybody still says out loud, and Leo noticed.

The city he actually saw

Kairouan stands on a sandy, treeless plain that grows nothing. Its corn came from Sousse, Monastir and Mahdia, all within forty miles. Its water came from springs on a mountain twelve miles off, running down to the town; without them there was nothing but rainwater in cisterns, which lasted, Leo says, only until the beginning of June.

Every one of those facts is why the Aghlabid cisterns were built. A capital on ground with no water and no crops is a decision rather than a site, and it stayed a capital only for as long as somebody was willing to pay to supply it.

What it had been

Leo knew, and puts it in two sentences.

In this citie for certaine yeeres the studie of the Mahumetan lawe mightily flourished, so that heere were the most famous lawyers in all Africa. It was at length destroied, and replanted againe with newe inhabitants, but it coulde neuer attaine vnto the former estate.

The destruction he means is 1057, when the Banu Hilal sacked it and it was abandoned, a hundred and fifty years after the Aghlabids and fifty after the Fatimids had left for Cairo. Kairouan had been the capital of the western Islamic world for four centuries and the seat of the Maliki school for most of that, and it never got any of it back.

And what was there instead

At this present it is inhabited by none but leather-dressers, who sende their leather vnto the cities of Numidia, and exchange it also for cloth of Europe. Howbeit they are so continually oppressed by the king of Tunis, that now they are brought vnto extreme miserie.

That is the last line of the Aghlabid inheritance, six hundred years after the dynasty ended: a tanners' town on a plain with no water, exporting hides to the Sahara, taxed to ruin by a king in the city that had replaced it.

The Great Mosque was still standing when Leo passed through, as it is now — the oldest minaret in Islam, on a site with no water, in a town of tanners. He does not mention it.