Intercession (shafā‘a) is pleading, petitioning, making requests, intervening, or mediating on behalf of others. In the Qur’an, deciding to grant intercession is God’s prerogative alone. Only the righteous are permitted intercession at the final judgment because they have entered into a covenant (‘ahd) with God (19:87). God also allows others to intercede if they “bear witness to the truth” (Q. 43:86). Later, Muhammad appears as intercessor before God on behalf of the believers, both in the hadith (prophetic tradition) and on a mosaic inscription inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem dating to 691–92 that reads, “Muhammad is the messenger of God. May God bless him and accept his intercession on the day of resurrection on behalf of his community (umma).” Other hadith reports recognize the importance and praiseworthiness of intercession among human beings, as in the statement that “the best alms (ṣadaqa) is to use one’s social prestige (jāh) to aid one who has no jāh.” Intercession is also called “the alms of the tongue,” according to the prophet a means of “freeing the prisoner, sparing lives, and bringing benefit to one’s brother and protecting him from calamity.”
For the Marwanid line of the Umayyads, the most direct path to salvation and justice led not through the prophet but through the caliph, and for the Shi‘is, through the imam. Echoes of this attitude persist well into the Abbasid period. The implication is that ritual acts and the observance of Islamic law gained meaning only in relation to the caliphs and that the caliphs were the protectors of the community. In practice, then, intercession came to mean direct justice or setting things aright, not only divine or eschatological intervention, although both meanings persisted.
The implications of this in the sociopolitical realm were that those either permanently or temporarily lower in the hierarchy sought intercession from rulers or private patrons through written and oral petitions (qiṣaṣ), including subjects of the realm, paupers, prisoners, relatives of the missing and the deceased, courtiers fallen from grace, and anyone else considered to be in need of special protection. Both public and private petitions have survived, from the earliest Arabic papyri onward. Private petitions attest to the centrality of patronage as a social glue in rural and urban contexts alike. In petitions to rulers, the premise was that victims of injustices (maẓālim) should have access to justice (‘adl) as directly as possible. When direct access was impracticable, appeal to rulers via intermediaries became the norm, with increasing regimentation and ceremony associated with the process of appeal and maẓālim justice in general, especially under the Mamluks.
The maẓālim system of providing intercession introduced a realm of administrative justice that competed directly with the courts of ordinary judges. In the early Abbasid period, judges controlled the maẓālim process, but by the late ninth century, it had come fully under the control of the viziers, with a brief reversal under the Buyids, when descendants of the Shi‘i imams oversaw it. As a means of rule, the Fatimid caliphs relied heavily on the process of issuing rescripts in response to petitions, and the Ayyubids and Mamluks followed suit.
A curious feature of requests for intercession to both the state and private patrons is that petitions are generally written by others. Sometimes this had a practical reason, as when petitioners were illiterate. But even literate petitioners often had requests lodged by a friend, a supporter, a scribe, or some other professional versed in the writing of such documents. This feature seems to be central to the etiquette of shafā‘a.
Some, though not all, chancery scribes took their role as intercessors seriously. Abu al-Qasim ‘Ali b. al-Sayrafi, head of the Fatimid chancery in the mid-12th century, explains in his Description of Chancery Practice that “rescripts and decrees in response to petitions concerning grievances” are particularly important since they involve “a man obtaining his right from another and the establishment of justice in the realm. Also, most of those with a grievance are powerless people, paupers and retiring women, most of whom arrive from distant parts of the realm, believing that they are approaching someone who will help them and redress their grievances and assist them against their adversaries.” At the same time, corruption, neglect, and sheer grudges could lead chancery officials to ignore petitions completely, as Ibn al-Sayrafi goes on to complain. In practice, connections to courtiers resulted in the prompt and effective handling of petitions, as is evident from documents preserved in the Geniza (storage chamber) of the Syro-Palestinian Rabbanite (now Ben Ezra) synagogue in Cairo.
Further Reading
Walther Björkman, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Staatskanzlei im islamischen Ägypten, 1928; A. Fu’ad Sayyid, ed., al-Qanun fi Diwan al-Rasa’il wa-al-Ishara ila man Nala al-Wizara, 1990; Christel Kessler, “‘Abd al-Malik’s Inscription in the Dome of the Rock: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1 (1970); Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, 1993; Shaun E. Marmon, “The Quality of Mercy: Intercession in Mamluk Society,” Studia Islamica 87 (1998); Jørgen Nielsen, Secular Justice in an Islamic State: Mazalim under the Bahri Mamluks, 662/1264–789/1387, 1985; Marina Rustow, “A Petition to a Woman at the Fatimid Court (413–414 A.H./1022–23 C.E.),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 73 (2010); Samuel M. Stern, Fāṭiṃid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭiṃid Chancery, 1964.
MARINA RUSTOW