Identity Formation of the Bureaucracy of the Early Islamic State

One does not have to be a cautious scholar to see how tricky it is to establish identity categories in the early history of the Islamic empire, the largest, most territorially ambitious empire after the end of the Roman Empire in the West. This is especially the case in the first century and a half of Islamic history, the largest portion of which was presided over by the Umayyad dynasty (41–132/660–750). ¹ Not only did this period represent the youth and gradual formation of Islamic society, but it was also a period of sustained conquests in which old empires were falling and lands and populations were constantly being added to the new empire, persistently changing the composition of its society. Despite that, it was perhaps unavoidable that this long period should witness the emergence of identifiable, differentiated groups. The Arabs, the carriers of the new faith who spearheaded the conquests, continued to express their pre-Islamic sense of tribal belonging, and the various opposition groups, like the Shī‘ites and the Khārijites, drew the contours of their groups by asserting their politico-religious divergence from the rest of society—eventually causing the state to counter their assertions by producing a thoroughly Islamic ideology of its own. While practically none of these differentiated groups have been studied from the perspective of identity formation, ² all of them were expressions of the internal dynamics of Islamic society, with no relation to its broader reality as a complex conquest society, one that incorporated various institutions and structures from the two previously dominant pre-Islamic empires in the Near East and Mediterranean basin, the Sasanian and the Byzantine. One such structure is state administration, where the bureaucracy had a recognizable existence as a group in both empires. In this respect, there is one work that tackled head-on the identity formation of the bureaucracy in the early Islamic state, namely ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib’s (d. 132/750) “Letter to the Secretaries.”