Paul Ulishney, University of Oxford
This paper explores the problems associated with the sudden appearance of mawālī (“clients,” Ar. root walāʾ, “clientage, patronage”) in early Islamic Greek papyri of the late seventh and eighth centuries CE. This otherwise unprecedented Greek title (μαυλεύς) appears in the 680s under the Marwānid governor ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 685-705), above all in the correspondences of the governor Qurra b. Ishak in the so-called Basileios Archive (P. Lond. IV, see Bell). The so-called Constitution of Medina, a group of treaty clauses preserved in various Arabic texts from hundreds of years after Muḥammad’s emigration to Medina but accepted by many Islamic Studies scholars as a broadly reliable source depicting his early Islamic polity, mentions mawālī once, but without defining the meaning of the term. Thus, we still have no answer to the simple question: why do no mawālī appear in documents before 685? To date, only one study of mawālī in documentary sources exists (Onimus). Indeed, this topic suffers from a kind of limbo in the artificial boundaries of modern academic disciplines: for various reasons, Byzantinists and papyrologists look for other things in the documentary sources of this time, while Islamic Studies scholars who do study mawālī (Bernards and Nawas) do not cite documents pertaining to them, nor does the most recent scholarly monograph which discusses them at length (Urban). Instead, these studies utilize Arabic historiographical sources from the 9th century onward (biographical dictionaries, conquest literature), nearly two-hundred years after our earliest evidence for the rise of the institution (a framework shared by Onimus). The risk of retrojecting a much later, developed Islamic identity is therefore always present. Thus, this paper offers a fresh look at the “clients” of Marwānid Egypt by restricting itself to analysis of the documentary and literary sources from the seventh and early eighth centuries. It investigates the related questions of their sudden appearance and the possibility that the title refers to elite-level conversions to Islam. Each mawlāʾ is listed formulaically in documents, e.g., in the following one, who is found in a list of messengers eligible for the dapanē. On onomastic grounds (Arabic name with Syriac patronym), this mawlāʾ was likely a convert to Islam: Γεμηλ υἱ(ὸς) Οὐσζανα μαυλε(ὺς) τοῦ συμβού(λου) σὺ(ν) φαμ(η)λ(ίαις) (P. Lond. IV 1447 l. 112) I argue that most mawālī were clients of elites within the Umayyad central administration and that their appearance should be connected to the broader Islamizing reforms of the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685-705). At the very moment when the Umayyad state began pursuing policies that emphasized much stricter differentiation between the Islamic community and non-Muslims, we find in documents for the first time the establishment of a new institution which provided a pathway for non-Muslims to become integrated into Islamic society. Contemporaneous with these documents, Greek (AS), Coptic (LIA), and Arabic (HP) literary sources attest to elite-level conversions to Islam. Anastasius of Sinai, in particular, is a useful source because his knowledge of individual Islamic elites can in some cases be confirmed by named figures in contemporaneous papyri.