The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

loyalty

Loyalty is sustaining one’s obligations toward friends, allies, patrons, clients, rulers, and groups. Various Arabic terms translate to “loyalty” or “fealty,” reflecting a range of possible objects: God; other human beings; political and religious groups; and those higher, lower, or equal in the social hierarchy.

One such term is walāya (allegiance), from the verb wālā (also tawallā), meaning to affiliate with or declare loyalty to someone. In early Islamic sources, the implications of allegiance to an imam (e.g., Ibn al-Zubayr’s allegiance to ‘Uthman’s party) are not merely political but eschatological. Early Islamic walāya thus differs from the walā’ or ḥilf (covenant or alliance, frequently by oath) of pre-Islamic Arabia. One of the hallmarks of the early Islamic polity was the redirection of loyalty from individuals or kin groups toward the community of believers (the umma): people whom one might not know personally but with whom one nonetheless shared ties that transcended blood or politics. The muhājirūn of the early Islamic period or the supporters of ‘Ali b. Abi Talib (Shi‘at ‘Ali) similarly shared this kind of ideologically based group solidarity; this was later famously described by Ibn Khaldun as ‘aṣabiyya (loyalty to the group).

Classical Islamic sources refer to both formal and informal loyalties, and the difference between the two is historically significant. Eighth-century jurists theorized walā’, which means patronage or clientele (the term itself being Janus-faced, literally meaning “proximity”), to be a formal, legal relationship that allowed non-Arabs to become Muslim by attaching themselves to an Arab-Muslim patron. This became the main mechanism of conversion and manumission during the Umayyad period. In principle, walā’ was contracted between the individual who had converted and the Muslim patron who had converted him, but in practice, it entailed loyalty to the entire community of believers; as a social instrument, it thus staked out a middle ground between group solidarity (and its corollary, separatism) and reciprocity, making new social alliances possible and enabling increasing numbers of people to join the umma.

But one of the main effects of the Abbasid revolution was to extend the privileges formerly reserved for Arabs to non-Arab Muslims. Those privileges included a role in politics and at court. Walā’ thus became unnecessary as a legal arrangement, and in the early Abbasid era, its legal obligations and prerogatives metamorphosed into a loose arrangement of patronage instead. The Abbasid house came to rely on its own clients—in the formal sense (those whom they had personally manumitted) and in the informal sense (those whose careers they had fostered through favors and benefactions)—for administration (the imperial bureaucracy), security (the palace guard and other military), and ideological legitimacy (supporters throughout the realm, often styled as mawlā amīr al-mu’minīn, or “client of the Commander of the Faithful,” though it is difficult to know at what point this was no longer meant in the technical legal sense). In the ninth century, clients of the caliphal household came to hold governorships and other high-ranking positions and to form a distinct group at court, and eventually, entire armies came into being through walā’—the origins of the slave-soldier institution that dominated the Near East until the 19th century.

Uses of the terms walā’ and mawlā, and the loyalties they represented, ramified as court culture, trade, and commerce burgeoned. The sources reflect the kinds of reciprocal exchanges that constituted political loyalty but also a pervasive consciousness of the obligatory nature of loyalty; its component parts were spelled out clearly only in moments when it risked severance. (Severance of ties of loyalty is often indicated with the noun barā’a, meaning “disavowal,” or the verb tabarra’a min, meaning “declaring oneself free of.”)

Another term related to loyalty is birr, which in the Qur’an means piety or devotion to God (2:177). In later sources, it comes to mean benefaction or reverence and thus to indicate two separate sides of human relationships of loyalty. Terms such as ‘ahd (pact, covenant, obligation, commitment) and dhimām (patronage), in literary and documentary texts from the post-Qur’anic period, likewise reflect the pervasiveness of loyalty and breaches of loyalty in politics and social relations. One also finds covenantal imagery invoked by ‘ahd (also ‘aqd, or contract) applied to people nearly equal in station, while dhimām reflects hierarchical relations. Similarly, ni‘ma in the Qur’an is a divine benefaction for which thanks and loyalty are due but later expands its semantic range to human relationships, in which it describes a favor granted by a patron. As God requires thanks and piety for benefactions, so, too, is loyalty to human benefactors an obligation understood to be imposed through ni‘ma.

Formal and informal or individual and group loyalty were not, in practice, always separately conceived. The Mamluks, for instance, were procured, educated, and emancipated by an ustādh (master) to whom they remained affectively loyal and to whom they were also formally attached via walā’, and the Mamluks’ individual bonds of loyalty produced group solidarity, described as khushdāshiyya.