Governing the Empire. Provincial Administration in the Almohad Caliphate (1224-1269) ; Governing the Empire. Provincial Administration in the Almohad Caliphate (1224-1269): Critical Edition, Translation, and Study of Manuscript 4752 of the Ḥasaniyya Library in Rabat Containing 77 Taqādīm ("Appointments")

Abstract

traduction anglaise Travis Bruce ; Governing Empire is a study, accompanied by a re-edition and a French translation, of maǧmūʿ Yaḥyá, the " compendium of Yaḥyá ", manuscript 4752 in the Library ḥasaniyya in Rabat. This little volume, the surviving copy of which dates from the 16th-17th centuries, reproduces a formulary composed in the late 13th century by Yaḥyá al-Ḫaḏūǧ, a man of letters living at the time of the demise of the Almohad Empire in 1269. It contains 77 acts of appointment of provincial officials, governors, military chiefs, chiefs of Arab tribes, tax-collectors and judges, written between 1224 and 1269. Of this total, 73 acts (two of them identical) concern the Almohad Empire, especially the Maghrebian part, and four concern the anti-Almohad principality of Ibn Hūd al-Mutawakkil of Murcia (r. 1228-1238) in the Iberian Peninsula. The acts reproduced by Yaḥyá belong to the highly codified genre of chancery literature. Written most frequently in rhyming prose (saǧʿ) and intended for proclamation in the great mosques of the Empire, they obey rules of composition and follow rhetorical, syntactical and linguistic procedures which place them --as the compiler asserts-- in the sphere of the adab, that is literature, or more generally the culture of the "man of good breeding". Partaking of poetry, sermon, oratory, normative literature and religious discourse, the appointments reproduced there are the expression of a sovereign order, the Almohad imperial order, or the anti-Almohad order of the Hūdi principality of Murcia. Set down in writing and rendered anonymous through the quasi-systematic deletion of proper names, toponyms and dates, these acts were neutralized for the use of successive specialists in the language of power. Performative as they were, they came to be accepted as models and thus were absorbed into the ever-growing thesaurus of reference texts. This pragmatic collection is the last vestige of the most important indigenous authority in the history of the Maghreb. Governing Empire begins by ...