This collection expands the focus of the conference from which it originated (on the public display of violence in Islamic societies) to the topic of violence “in the political economy of Muslim societies, especially inasmuch as it was used as a strategy to take possession of the public sphere” (p. 1). In their cogent introduction, the editors distinguish the volume's laudable aim from the existing scholarship on violence in the history of Islam, which has mainly looked at jihad, penal law, and the juridical rules surrounding rebellion. Given this goal, the collection proves not only timely, but also highly ambitious. The collection's thirteen contributions are divided into three well-thought out parts that lend the collection a logical progression and comprehensiveness of scope. The first covers “Public Violence and the Construction of the Public Sphere,” the second looks at the “Ritual Dimension of Violence,” and the third covers “Representations of Public Violence.”
Lange and Fierro's introductory chapter is more than a summary of the volume's contents; the editors also offer a broader conceptual discussion of themes that the collection's three parts are meant to address. Particularly illuminating is their framing of Part I on violence and the construction of the public sphere. They acknowledge the difficulty of adapting the “modern concept of the public sphere” to the pre-modern context, while still insisting that it is misleading to imagine that Muslim societies consisted of no more than two opposing realms of domesticity and state domination (p. 3). In making the case for some form of the intermediate realm of the public sphere in pre-modern Muslim societies, they advocate a process of definition in the negative. Thus, they distinguish the public in Islam from territorial concepts of privacy like hurma (the inviolability of houses) and harim (as specifically relating to inviolate urban spaces like the mosque, market, and cemetery), concepts about the inviolability of the private human body, and through reference to the general social value placed upon honor and reputation (which could either be denied through public punishment intended to make the perpetrator “notorious,” or upheld, especially for the elite, through private punishment meted out in secret).
As for the four chapters comprising Part I, the first comes from Gerald Hawting (“The case of Ja‘d b. Dirham and the punishment of ‘heretics’ in the early caliphate,” pp. 27–41). Hawting discusses the execution of a well-known Muslim heretic in Iraq toward the end of the Umayyad era on the Festival Day of Id al-Adha. The chapter is largely exploratory in nature, with Hawting ultimately concluding that it is hard to find strong evidence for an association between sacrificial animal slaughter on Id al-Adha and the public execution of offending figures like Ja‘d. Mathieu Tillier's contribution explores “Qadis and the political use of mazalim jurisdiction under the ‘Abbasids” (pp. 42–66), though the focus is on the role of mazalim as a projection of sovereign authority more than it is on the precise role of qadis as jurisdictional personnel. Nonetheless, the chapter offers valuable insights about the role of mazalim jurisdiction in the assertion of provincial autonomy and considers the way assigning qadis to mazalim courts became a means of equating the sovereign's justice with God's ‘decree’ (qadaʾ). The third chapter is Yaacov Lev's “From revolutionary violence to state violence: the Fatimids [297-567/909-1171]” (pp. 67–86). The first part of the chapter centers on Qadi al-Numan's Iftitah al-da‘wa wa-ibtida ʾal-dawla and its author's unwavering support for the Fatimid imam against the last of the Aghlabaid rulers; the second part of the chapter turns to the violence of the state (dawla), through considering the Fatimid polity's suppression of rebellion, its opposition to external enemies, and its imposition of law and order. The final chapter of Part I is also the least connected to the organizing theme of Part I: Zoltan Szombathy's discussion of abusive poetry (“Actions speak louder than words: reactions to lampoons and abusive poetry in medieval Arabic society,” pp. 87–118). Szombathy examines the poetic genre of hijaʾ (satire or lampoon), the disapproval that attached to it with the Islamicization of values, and the reactions it could elicit, ranging from extreme violence to embarrassed indifference.
Part II of the collection brings together four contributions. The first, from Everett Rowson (“Reveal or conceal: public humiliation and banishment as punishment in early Islamic times,” pp. 119–29), provides a general overview of tashhir (public humiliation, lit. ‘making notorious’) and banishment as punishments, especially for behavior deemed to be scandalous or sexually illicit. While Rowson shows that tashhir and banishment were recognized for their practical value in preserving public morality, the chapter touches only faintly on the ritual character of such forms of punishment. Fierro's contribution (“Emulating Abraham: the Fatimid al-Qaʾim and the Umayyad ‘Abd al-Raḥman III,” pp. 130–55) returns to the topic of the appropriation of ‘Id al-Adḥa as a symbolic stage for legitimizing capital punishment through its conflation with Islamic animal sacrifice rituals. Fierro's starting point is the claim in some sources that the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Raḥman III ordered his son ‘Abd Allāh to be executed on charges of conspiracy on 10 Dhu l-Hijja in the year 950. She then considers whether ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III's order was an attempt at bettering his Fatimid adversaries in appropriating the template of Abrahamic ritual, given the Fatimid Caliph's practice of performing the ‘Id al-Adha sacrifice by his own hand. Christian Lange's contribution (“Where on earth is hell? State punishment and eschatology in the Islamic middle period,” pp. 156–78) steps back to argue broadly that “representations of violence in the Islamic eschatological imagination mirror the structural processes and symbolic imagery of state violence as it was enacted in the socio-political context” in which those representations circulated and were given literary form. Part II closes with Fernando Mediano's chapter, entitled “Justice, crime, and punishment in 10th/16th-century Morocco” (pp. 179–200). While Mediano's wider point is about the nature of “violence” as “a universal language” (p. 190) more than it is about violence and ritual, the chapter's primary focus is on Sa'dian Morocco and the establishment of the Sharif dynasties through establishing the state's monopoly on legitimate forms of violence.
The final five chapters of the collection turn, ostensibly, to representations of public violence. Tilman Seidensticker (“Responses to crucifixion in the Islamic world,” pp. 203–16) examines references to post-mortem “crucifixion” (meaning salb or ‘display’) of corpses in Arabic poetry dating from the first/seventh to the seventh/thirteenth centuries. Annliese Nef (“Violence and the prince: the case of the Aghlabid Amir Ibrāhīm II,” pp. 217–37) argues against reading elements of narrative structure that appear in chronicles of the uncommonly sadistic rule of one of the last Aghlabid amīrs prior to the Fatimids as evidence for defining an inherent violence within “Islam which is destined to repeat itself throughout history” (p. 229). Blain Auer's chapter discusses “Concepts of justice and the catalogue of punishment under the Sultans of Delhi” (pp. 238–55). While the chapter is one of the most illuminating in the collection, its focus is less on representation than on the general tension between justice (‘adl) and punishment (siyasa) in legitimating Muslim political authority (as illustrated by examining one crucial section from Ziya al-Din Barani's Ta'rikh-i Firuz Shahi). The penultimate chapter is Robert Gleave's “Public violence, state legitimacy: the Iqamat al-hudud and the sacred state” (pp. 256–75). The focus here again is less on representation than intellectual exposition (in particular, concerning how Shi‘i jurists theorized the problem of whether hudud punishment could be implemented in the absence of the legitimate authority of the Imam). The final contribution from Manuela Marin (“Violence in Islamic societies through the eyes of non-Muslim travellers: Morocco in the 19th and early 20th Centuries,” pp. 276–91) looks at several Spanish-language accounts of travelers to North Africa. Marin finds that these voyagers remained fixated on oriental despotism by highlighting the violence that emanated from an absolute sultanic ruler who they portrayed as exercising authority in an arbitrary way.
If there is an overall criticism that should be made of the collection it is that the volume suffers, at times, from false advertising. This occurs in two ways. First, the volume is about violence “in the political economy of Muslim societies” only insofar as “political economy” is understood in terms of the state as a governance structure. Therefore, because the concern is really with state violence or violence committed by the state, the editors’ intention (in Part I) of illuminating how violence was constitutive of a realm of the “public sphere” – understood as something different from the realm of state domination – tends to go unfulfilled. Second, this tendency of the contributions to deviate from the task of illustrating the broader themes the collection is organized according to becomes more pronounced as one moves from Part I to Parts II and III. Therefore, the contributions in Parts II and III often seem to deal less with ritual and representation than they continue to do with the state's monopolization on the means of violence and its legitimation through the monopolization of those means (which is the real focus of Part I).
