The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

clients

“Clients” (mawālī) is a term used in early Islamic history, and in Islamic law thereafter, for a legal status originally bestowed on every non-Arab member of the Arab society established by conquest in the Middle East outside Arabia. The Arab conquerors were tribally organized, but their non-Arab subjects had “forgotten their genealogies,” as the Arabs put it. Partly for this reason and partly because most converts in the first century were slaves (originally captives) who had been uprooted from their own families, non-Arab newcomers to Muslim society had to be attached to a kin group willing to pay blood money for any damage to life or property they might inflict. The group in question was that of the newcomer’s patron (also called a mawlā). Freed slaves in principle always became clients of their manumitter, but a free person could choose his own patron by converting “at the hands of” a Muslim with whom he had reached an agreement. The reward for the patron, apart from a loyal follower, lay in his entitlement to a share in his client’s estate. The tie survived the death of both parties, continuing among their descendants in perpetuity, but its relevance decreased as time passed. Clients rapidly acquired clients of their own. Whether the patron was an Arab or an assimilated client, the institution served to regulate the reception of newcomers and ensure both their subordination and their assimilation to the Arabs. The tie did not affect the newcomer’s status in public law, however: the convert became a full “citizen,” endowed with the same rights and duties as other Muslims. At some point, perhaps in the mid-eighth century, the jurists began to reject the institution of clientage for converts, but all jurists retained the institution for freedmen, and some retained it for free partners as long as conversion was not involved. The obligation to pay blood money on behalf of a kinless newcomer was shifted to other institutions, such as the treasury.

The term “clients” eventually came to be used in the loose sense of “non-Arab Muslims” (as in the expression al-‘arab wa-l-mawālī), and it is in that sense that it tends to be used in the secondary literature, too. The sources never use the word in the sense of protegés and beneficiaries of patronage in general, and though the institution was of considerable social and political importance in the first centuries, its significance lies primarily in cultural history. The Arabs formed a privileged ruling elite imposed on the non-Arabian Middle East by conquest, and like most elites of this kind, they were both jealous of their privileges and contemptuous of the defeated natives. Non-Arab Muslims were derided as “slaves,” paid less than their Arab peers in the army, deemed unfit for positions of authority or marriage with Arab women, and worth less than Arabs in terms of blood money. But even so, they rose with extreme rapidity in Muslim society, and they appear to have outnumbered Arab Muslims within two generations of the conquests, for the Arab conquest society had one characteristic unparalleled in other imperial expansions: the bar to membership was set extremely low. The Arabs had expanded in the name of a universalist religion, with the result that the community of believers happened also to be an imperial elite. The only requirement for membership of this elite was recitation of the confession of faith to a Muslim willing to act as one’s patron. In practice, many migrated to the Muslim centers without even having patrons. Fearing the loss not only of their revenues but also of their very identity, the Arab authorities tried to stem the tide by imposing tests on converts, refusing to register them on the military roll, or deporting them outright as illegal immigrants. But however much they pushed away converts with one hand, they continued to accept them in the form of freedmen with the other, so the privileged conquest elite disappeared with great speed. It was in that context that the jurists, often non-Arabs themselves, began to reject the institution of clientage for converts.

The fact that newcomers were granted what we would now call full citizenship meant that non-Arab Muslims accepted the legitimacy of the Muslim polity that had replaced their native states instead of clamoring for independence: what they sought to change was the dynasty that they saw as responsible for the prejudice against them. The Abbasid revolution, conducted from eastern Iran a mere century after the conquest of this region, would under other circumstances have been a war of independence. Instead it replaced the Umayyad dynasty with that of the Abbasids and put an end to what remained of the political hegemony of the Arabs. This did not of course put an end to the tense relationship between the original bearers of Islam and its new representatives. The century after the revolution was dominated by often acrimonious debates about the relative merits of Arabs and mawālī in the sense of non-Arabs, best known in the form of polemics for and against the so-called Shu‘ubis. But the debates were about the terms of coexistence within the same political house, the desirability of which was taken for granted. A prominent item of debate was the relative value and prestige of the cultural traditions represented by the parties involved. This debate accompanied the formation of a synthesis of the beliefs and values brought by the conquerors and the legacy of the imperial civilizations they had defeated. In short, this was when classical Islamic civilization emerged.