Violence and warfare in Medieval Western Islam

ABSTRACT

Studies bearing on the relationship between religion and violence in Islam are numerous. So are those on Ibn Khaldūn’s theory of the State, which bases the latter’s emergence on the ‘natural’ violence of peripheral tribes. This contribution aims to put the general theory that can be drawn from these studies into perspective by confronting it with some local examples: the Andalusian Taifas, the Almoravid emirate and the Almohad caliphate. These case studies highlight the diversity of forms taken by state violence and warfare in Islamic contexts. The integration of ´seculaŕ or profane patterns in the killing of enemies or in warfare, and the justification of violence sometimes by religion, sometimes by popular wisdom or common sense, contradict the fairly widespread essentialist discourses on the congenital relationship that Islam and violence maintained from the beginning. On the contrary, these processes highlight the complexity and diversity of the discursive justification of physical violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Berber empires
• Islamic societies
• medieval Maghreb
• warfare
• violence
• religion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This study is part of the IGAMWI Imperial government and authority in medieval Western Islam project (2010–2016) which was financed by the 7th PCRD of the European Research Council: FP7-ERC-StG-2010-263361. The participants in this project, which was led by Pascal Buresi (CNRS- CIHAM, EHESS, IISMM), were Hicham El Aallaoui (CNRS), Mehdi Ghouirgate (Univ. Bordeaux III), Hassan Chahdi (EPHE), Moez Dridi (CNRS-UMR 8167), and Travis Bruce (Univ. McGill, Montréal).

2 Abdallah Hammoudi (1974) criticises Gellner’s book, arguing that Gellner situates the saints outside of society and seems to confuse their normative marginality with a sociological one.

3 Gellner’s theory has been criticised for, among other things, having imported an African (primitive) model into a (developed) Islamic society. As Gianni Albergoni and Alain Mahé (1995) state, this critique is not really well founded, as Evans-Pritchard’s model of segmentarity was based originally on his previous study of the Arabian Peninsula (Albergoni and Mahé 1995).

4 At least, this was the very convincing hypothesis that Maribel Fierro supported in her paper presented at the conference ‘Education for the People? The Case of the Almohad Revolution (12th–13th Centuries)’ at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 2012. An article of hers on the topic is in press.

5 The presence of Muslim mercenaries in the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb has been studied by Nikolas Jaspert (2018). He shows that this group of professional fighters did not constitute a watertight group in the host society – an example of ‘harmonious transculturality’ – but, on the contrary, provoked debates on apostasy and commingling from the end of the twelfth century. Hussein Fancy (2016) argues (erroneously) that the Jinetes (the Muslim mercenaries hired by the King of Aragon from the end of the twelfth century) were holy warriors (ghuzāt mujāhidūn), and that the Aragonese kings deliberately used their religious otherness in order to demonstrate a kind of imperial authority transcending political or religious borders. (There are parallels in ancient Rome and Byzantium, under the Abbasid and Almohad caliphates, and also under the Hohenstaufens.) For critiques bearing on several assertions in Fancy’s book, see Catlos (2017).

6 I draw here on an unpublished May 2017 Vienna workshop paper by Iannis Stouraitis.

7 A group of seven texts reproduced in the Riḥla of the Sevillian judge Ibn al-ʿArabī legitimises Yūsuf b. Tašfīn’s action against the kings of Taifa. For instance, the well-known theologian, al- Ghazālī (d. 1111) wrote in his letter: ‘Anyone who rebels against the truth, must be brought to it by the sword.’

8 References to Lévi-Provençal indicate first the page(s) of the Arabic edition, then the page(s) of the French translation.

9 According to the geographer al-Bakrī, who died in 1094, the Barghawāṭa sect had a Berber Qurʾrān with 80 suras, the last of which was titled Yūnus [Jonah] (Ferhat 1994; Buresi and Ghouirgate 2013, 9).

10 For a fictional (in fact science fiction) description of steppe and desert societies, see Franck Herbert’s science-fiction novel, Dune (Herbert 1965).

11 While the Almohad Empire was united, the Christian Iberian Peninsula was divided into five kingdoms: Portugal, Castile, León, Aragon and Navarre (the last did not share a border with al- Andalus).