Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought.

• Author: Safran, Janina

Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought. By LUKE B. YARBROUGH. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. xiv + 361. $120 (cloth); $32.99 (paper).

Luke Yarbrough's Friends of the Emir contributes to the work of understanding Muslim-dhimmi relations in historical terms and contexts, but it is not a book about Muslim-dhimmi relations; rather, Yarbrough presents a history of a discourse, of how medieval Muslim writers debated and argued against the employment of non-Muslim officials. The book delivers arguments about the historical emergence, qualities, and effects of this discourse by way of attentive sleuthing into the production of the relevant sources and their import, from the Umayyad era (661-750) through medieval Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Spain to the end of the Mamluk era (1250-1517). The big takeaway is that Muslim rulers regularly employed dhimmis in the premodern Islamic world; however, in times of elite competition in specific places, arguments against such employment emerged and contributed to a discourse with typical proof texts and recurring "structures, themes, topoi and schemata." The title of the book refers to one such proof text (Q 5:51): "O you who have believed, take not Jews and Christians as friends." The discourse, Yarbrough underscores, was meant to regulate the behavior of fellow Muslims, not dhimmis, and its prescriptions do not belong to the category of terms that defined the legal status of dhimmis. He suggests that, historically, niters did not so much defy jurists' opposition to non-Muslim officials as not recognize the religious identity of officials to be relevant, or an obstacle, to their employment; in some circumstances, dhimmis' outsider status was advantageous. Rulers' employment of non-Muslims helped inspire the discourse and its reiterations when Muslim elites found their advancement frustrated. Yarbrough explains how the terms of the discourse become an "ideational patrimony" for later writers. Elements of the discourse appear in more, or less, elaborated forms and in a range of texts, and the book traces its development and variety over successive chapters, beginning with parables about paradigmatic early caliphs (chap. three) and edicts (chap. four), followed by investigation of juristic writings (chap. five), adab (chap. six), and independent counsel works (nasiha, chap. seven).

Yarbrough's application of sociological theory adds an important dimension to our...