Aristocratic Violence and Holy War: Studies in the Jihad and the Arab-Byzantine Frontier.

• Author: Hawting, G. R.
• Position: Review

MICHAEL BONNER. American Oriental Series, vol. 81. New Haven: AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY, 1996. Pp. xv + 221. $35.

Michael Bonner's studies, although they can be read independently, are united by a number of common themes and questions, and by a critical historical method. Chapters two and three, which attempt to construct and analyze the political and administrative history during the early Abbasid period of the border (the thughur and, subsequently, the region known as the awasim) between the caliphate and the Byzantine empire are the center of the book. These chapters are important in that this period is relatively sparsely treated in the literature concerning Arab-Byzantine warfare. One of Bonner's main concerns in these two central chapters is with the competition for authority among the caliphs, religious scholars, and military groups of various sorts and origins, and this concern also informs the other studies collected here that discuss different themes and questions and use different source materials.

The author's historical method is evident not only in his approach to the different types of sources (chronicles and narrative works, hadith, fiqh, and biographical dictionaries) but also in the way in which his questions are generated by comparison between the time and place with which he is concerned and studies of other similar societies and regions. This leads him to emphasize what he sees as two distinctive features of the Arab-Byzantine border in the period under review: that it was relatively stable in extent and did not lead to significant territorial expansion, and that there did not take root there a landholding warrior aristocracy. Both features, he argues, distinguish this border from others in the Islamic world and medieval Europe.

The opening study discusses the practice whereby an individual or group

summoned to participate in warfare sends another instead. Bonner is concerned with developments in procedure and changing attitudes to the practice as reflected especially in hadith and fiqh. He argues that the practice was, as it were, made acceptable by the early Islamic lawyers who assimilated it to the law of hire and that it subsequently came to be disapproved of as the religious valuation of jihad strengthened. The discussion here is of interest for students of hadith and fiqh since Bonner organizes his material according to Schachtian principles (i.e., the relative lateness of prophetic hadiths compared with those...