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5 - The ʿAlids as Local Nobility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2013

Teresa Bernheimer
Affiliation:
SOAS, University of London
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Summary

Much of the secondary literature on local notables in medieval Islam has focused on the question of the extent of state authority versus local autonomy. The role of local elites has been examined mainly with regard to their relationship to the centre. There has been less discussion of who those elites were and from where their authority derived. There is little doubt that scholarship was an important factor in determining one's social standing in medieval Islamic society: As Richard Bulliet has shown, the local elites in fifth-/eleventh-century Nishapur were almost entirely made up of qāḍīs and scholars, and it was not uncommon for a merchant to trade his wealth for scholarship in order to gain respectability. Chase Robinson has similarly suggested that in second-/eighth-century Mosul this idea of status preservation through scholarship had already been applied; Robinson says of one family of politicians and landowners whose sons became scholars that they were ‘not the only Mosuli family that understood that scholarship was one of the best ways to retain elite status in an Abbasid commonwealth of learning’. Scholarship, moreover, could be the basis for real power. Some families, such as the Burhān family in fifth-/eleventh-century Bukhārā, initially rose to prominence on account of their learning.

This emphasis on learning and scholarship is not surprising. As Roy Mottahedeh has cautioned, much of our information on local elites comes from biographical dictionaries, works that were ‘written by ʿulamā for ulamāʾ’.

Type
Chapter
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The 'Alids
The First Family of Islam, 750-1200
, pp. 71 - 86
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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