LITMIR.BIZ

      The Politics of the Emirate

      When the Ḥafṣid ruler Abū Zakariyā Yaḥyā (r. 1229–49) died, his son Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad al-Mustanṣir (r. 1249–77) became ruler of Ifrīqiyā. Acceding to the throne in Tunis, al-Mustanṣir took control of a large kingdom that stretched from Ṭarāblus (Tripoli) in the east to Bijāya in the west. During his long reign, Bedouins, powerful Almohad sheikhs, and urban elites continuously challenged his authority. In 1270, the integrity of his kingdom miraculously survived a Crusade against Tunis led by Louis IX.¹ Saved by Louis’ death, al-Mustanṣir still had to pay a great sum of money to end the siege of his capital. Old, politically weakened, and seriously impoverished, he battled ceaselessly to maintain his power. After his death, the unity of the Ḥafṣid kingdom crumbled. A number of Ḥafṣid emirs based in large cities such as Bijāya, Qasanṭīna (Constantine), and Tarablus declared independence from Tunis. Supported by urban elites and powerful Bedouin armies, these emirs fought each other to maintain or expand their holdings in Ifrīqiyā. For almost a century, they challenged the preeminence of the ruler of Tunis until Abū al-Abbās Aḥmad II (r. 1370–94) led a political realignment that put an end to independent Ḥafṣid emirates. The process of reunification reached its culmination under his son Abū Fāris ‘Abd al-‘Azīz.

      Some modern scholars, the historian Robert Brunschvig foremost among them, understood the period of the multiplication of emirates in Ifrīqiyā as one of the weakness of the Ḥafṣid state.² He and others described the endemic warfare between Ḥafṣid emirs and celebrated those rare occasions when a maverick Ḥafṣid was able to impose his will on all the others. In so doing, they replicated the perspective of contemporaries such as Ibn Khaldūn, who saw the rule of autonomous emirs as the result of the weakness of the Ḥafṣid dynasty, its fragmentation, poor health, and old age. Ibn Khaldūn wrote:

      It should be known that the first (perceptible) consequence of a dynasty’s senility is that it splits…. The same was the case with the Almohad dynasty. When the shadow it cast began to shrink, the Ḥafṣids revolted in Ifrīqiyā. They made themselves independent there and founded their own realm for their descendants in that region. Their power flourished and reached its limit, but then, one of their descendants, the emir Abū Zakariyā Yaḥyā, the son of Sultan Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm, the fourth Ḥafṣid caliph, seceded in the western provinces and founded a new realm in Bijāya and Qasanṭīna and environs.³

      By framing the political history in relation to an ebb and flow of the power of a centralizing state, historians set up a particular outcome, the centralization of power in Tunis, as an ideal political situation and, by the same token, independent emirates as anomalies. While this approach is helpful in organizing the complicated and often contradictory historical record, it is irremediably attached to the dynastic perspective of the sources.⁴ As an alternative, I argue that the period between 1200 and 1400 is better understood in relation to two distinct but related processes. The first was characterized by the oscillation between two modes of Ḥafṣid political domination: the “regional” mode, in which the Ḥafṣid ruler of Tunis controlled all the major cities of Ifrīqiyā, appointed their governors, and received taxes from them; and the “local” mode, in which independent Ḥafṣid emirs withheld the taxes they collected for Tunis, and raised strong enough armies to maintain themselves in power. The second process, which will be the focus of Chapter 4, was the gradual emergence of Emirism, an ideology that became dominant under the “regional” rule of Abū Fāris.

      Conceiving of the political history in terms of an oscillation between regional and local domination generates a periodization with four important moments: (1) the foundation and consolidation of the dynasty; (2) the independence of Bijāya (and other cities); (3) the popular rebellion and non-dynastic rule of a group whom the sources refer to as the ghawghā’, or mob; and (4) the reunification of Ifrīqiyā under Abū Fāris. These moments, which form the basis for the four sections of this chapter, are not arbitrary. They mark major political realignments within the elite in support of a particular agenda and, in the case of the popular rebellion, the failure of the elites to reach a compromise with each other. In other words, each configuration of Ḥafṣid domination came about because of the victory of specific coalitions over others, not because of the fluctuation of the power of an impersonal state.⁵ Rather than presenting a state-centric view, this perspective, and by extension the organization of this chapter, imagines politics as the process by which a particular group comes to rule, a process that the references to the “Ḥafṣid state” tend to leave unexamined, or worse, to take for granted.

      Like the state, the notion of a “tribe” presents the historian with a series of challenges. First, it generally acts to mask rather than illuminate politics, mainly by casting very different circumstances under the same, generally unfavorable, label. For even if the sources describe tribes (qabā’il) as static and unchanging, they were not always the same, but represented different political groups, orientations, and agendas. Second, the tribes that appear in the sources are merely those that gained significance in relation to dynastic politics. They were not necessarily the only tribes around. Their activities both for and against the Ḥafṣids explain their depiction in the sources. Third, and as for the Bedouins’ self-representation, there are hints that they produced written narratives about the past. But these were mostly tales about the feats of hero ancestors and pious teachers.⁶ The few extant lines of poetry and hagiographic narratives clearly demonstrate the involvement of tribes in political struggles but do not offer details sufficient for an analysis of political

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