The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

household

In the Middle East, the military-administrative household may be defined as a conglomeration of kinship and patron-client ties in which administrative functions have been concentrated. Such households date at least to the Neo-Assyrian Empire (ca. 911–612 BCE), in which the ruler’s palace was referred to as “our house” (bitenu), with the monumental palace gate (babenu, or “our doorway”) demarcating the boundary between the household and the outside world. This basic paradigm informed later administrative households, up to and including those of the major Islamic empires. In such a structure, household membership and concomitant loyalty to the ruler who headed the household determined one’s position. The more trusted a household member was, the higher he rose in the hierarchy, and the more likely he was to have access to the inner sanctum where the ruler and his family resided.

Among Islamic regimes, the first well-documented example of a household-based administration is that of the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258). In the Abbasid capital of Baghdad, constructed in 762, the caliph’s palace was surrounded by the residences of his sons and his African eunuchs, as well as the offices of the still-modest government, which was itself conceived as part of the caliph’s household. Indeed, the office of vizier (wazīr), first documented under the Abbasids, originated within the caliph’s household, since the original viziers were his trusted clients. In the ninth century, the Abbasids began systematically to recruit elite slaves, or mamluks, from among the Turkic and Iranian peoples of Central Asia, removing them from their homelands so as to ensure their exclusive loyalty to the caliph. In the Abbasid and all subsequent Islamic empires, mamluks were a key component of the ruler’s household and armies. Eunuchs, who were also imported from outside the Islamic domains, achieved the closest proximity to the ruler and his immediate family, for they had no family ties that might divide their loyalty. The ruler was not the only household head in a given Islamic society, however; viziers, provincial governors, and even religious scholar officials (‘ulama’) founded their own households, modeled to varying degrees on that of the ruler.

Women played a pivotal role in these households, as they had in households of the ancient Near East. The wife or favorite concubine of a household head presided over what amounted to a parallel female household, usually based in the harem of the palace or mansion and consisting largely of the wife’s or concubine’s slaves or former slaves. In a ruler’s palace, the “female household” was the site of dynastic reproduction. In the households of ministers and provincial notables, wives and concubines helped to generate and preserve household wealth since, under Islamic law, a woman retained her property after marriage and could acquire more in her own right.

As the most recent empire to dominate the Islamic heartland, the Ottoman Empire has left the most extensive record of how a regime based on administrative households functioned. A hierarchy extended from the sultan’s household in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace through the households of the highest-ranking government ministers to those of provincial governors and provincial grandees. Though often based in palatial mansions, lower-ranking households might take shape in military barracks or ordinary houses. They could have an impact on the cities and neighborhoods where they were located if, for example, the household head established charitable works in the vicinity. A key turning point occurred late in the 17th century, when the grand vizier moved his household permanently out of the palace. This century also saw the rise of households led by provincial governors that were independent of, and occasionally antagonistic toward, the imperial palace; they relied on private armies of mercenaries and mamluks. During the following century, notables in the Ottoman provinces were able to parlay control of life-tenure tax farms into formidable households that dominated the provincial administration and proved indispensable to Ottoman military efforts. The Tanzimat reforms, undertaken between 1839 and 1876, aimed in part to reduce the influence of these provincial households.