Best of All Patrons?

When we reconstruct in our historical consciousness the grandeur and the worldly might of the Seljuqs, this ‘audacity’ of a slave-servant (khādim) appears to be quite remarkable, manifesting the stature scholars enjoyed while in the service of a patron or patrons in royal courts. Note here that the generic appellation ‘scholars’ in this exposé denotes not only scientists but also philosophers, writers, historians, poets, artists, artisans—that is, all those preoccupied with matters relating to human thought and imagination, with historical enquiries, or with the creative arts. The boundaries between many of these disciplines being invisibly blurred anyway in the earlier periods of our human history.

But back to Khāzinī. Demonstrating the simplicity of his lifestyle despite royal patronage and high-level connections, he could turn down a massive material gesture from the powerful Sanjar—and get away with it, facing no ensuing adverse consequences. One also remembers that he had expressed such impudence twice: once before he had turned back the same financial reward of 1,000 dinars sent to him by the wife of a Seljuq emir. But then, neither the Sultan nor the majestic lady felt slighted by what seems to be an abrupt refusal on the part of a ‘lowly’ slave in their service. Khāzinī seems to have been valued as a favorite of the court whose idiosyncrasies were to be admitted.

Is this kind of security that Khāzinī felt typical for scholars attached to royal courts? Indeed, the patron-scholar/protector-protégé relationships seem so varied in Muslim societies that it is difficult to make risk-free generalizations about their precise nature: stable and secure in some cases, precarious and sinusoidal in others; long-lasting and mutually loyal here, short-lived and subject to changing political winds there; now happy, now strained; scholars being beneficiaries of rich favours at one time, suffering the wrath of the same benefactor at others. An expert of the phenomenon of patronage in the Islamic intellectual history, one of the very few let’s note, Sonja Brentjes, had told us categorically that theoretically grounded investigations in this area are non-existent. All one can do at this juncture of contemporary scholarship is show to the reader a few glimpses of empirical history and tentatively identify some enduring patterns.

And yet, despite all the variations in the patronage practices, there seem to be two characteristics of this phenomenon that are to be found universally in the history of Muslim societies. One is that scholars brought with them to the royal courts, and to individual rulers and their empires, much glory and prestige—but this is a trivial observation. The important point here is that such glory and prestige performed not only a symbolic function but were also items of concrete acquisitions that demonstrated real majestic power and served as efficacious political instruments. This last characteristic, I tentatively claim, is unique to Muslim societies. Take the Ghaznavids for example, the opulent Turkic rulers during the period 977 to 1186, whose empire at their greatest extent exercised its imperial power over much of Transoxiana, Iran, and Hindustan. The Ghaznavid Sultans loved splendour and luxury and, not unlike all other highly developed Islamic cultures of the times, their courts too embodied an elite cultural ethos. This fundamental attribute was brought into focus with much perspicacity by the historian Clifford Bosworth in his learned study of these kings.

What is the implication of Bosworth’s observation that might lead us to further historical enquiry? Patronage, he tells us, was the very foundation on which the Ghaznavid culture could rest, given the latter’s elite nature. Again, patronage was not simply a symbolic expression or a mere metaphor of glory and dominion; rather, it was irreversibly integrated into the actual running machinery of the empire. Listen to Bosworth: the  ‘financial basis of patronage was exactly the same as that upon which the fortunes of the dynasty and state rested; one cannot condemn [or explain] the one without the other’.  Small wonder, then, that courts and rulers and individual patrons often treated scholars literally as commodity, something that came as part of the booty or loot of conquests, or acquired as gifts from friendly neighbouring dynasties, or as material tokens of surrender from weak ones.

Talking about the practitioners of the mathematical sciences in Muslim societies, Brentjes starts off by noting that the languages in which they were writing, and this means largely Arabic, there existed no direct equivalent of the term ‘patronage.’ Thus there were many ways of denoting the patron’s acquisition of a protégé, and among these was the tell-tale appellation hamala (to carry (away) something) - yes, in many cases this denotes the phenomenon with graphic accuracy and one can legitimately go as far as to translate hamala contextually as ‘kidnapping,’ ‘snatching,’ or ‘looting.’ So we see: while the adventurous Sultan Mahmūd Ghaznavī, who ruled over a vast area during 998-1030, brought to his capital in Ghazna entire libraries over from Ray and Isfahan, he also acquired for his royal company and for the prestige of his empire numerous scholars, and he did this by force if he found it necessary. The canonical historian of the literary world of Central Asia and Iran, E. G. Browne, is quoted as saying that Sultan Mahmud ‘has often been described as a great patron of letters, but he was in fact rather a great kidnapper of literary men … whom he often treated in the end scurvily enough.’ 

The accounts of Bayhaqī whom we have met above, as well as those of his contemporary, the not-always-reliable chronicler Nizāmī ‘Arūżī, record many Ghaznavid anecdotes of ‘kidnapping’ - kidnapping physical embodiments of letters, such as books and manuscripts, together with men of letters - literally apprehending them, and carrying them away on horses. But here also exist in these sources reports of acquiring such cultural and human booty by means of vicious coercion wielded by the political and military might of the empire. Bahyhaqī tells us categorically about Sultan Mahmūd that ‘whenever he came across a man or woman who was an expert in any skill, he deported them tither (namely, to Ghazna).’ This is how the Tabānī family of Hanafī legists had ended up in the Ghaznavid capital from Nishapur. And when in the wake of his advance on the left bank of the Oxus and his sacking of the Ma’mūnid Khwārazmshāhs in Gurgānj, Mahmūd sent an ultimatum to the defeated ruler Abu’l-‘Abbās Ma’mūn, the victor’s demands were typical. This ultimatum is recorded by Nizāmī ‘Arūżī in his Chahār Maqāla: 

One recalls that the redoubtable intellectual giant of the times who is elevated by contemporary historians to the station of the ‘greatest scientist of Islam,’ Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (d. c. 1050), was a nadīm (boon companion) and adviser of the Khwarazmshāh Abu’l ‘Abbās, lavishing upon his patron not only private sessions of learned and witty company but also helping him in sensitive diplomatic missions. We have reports in our received historical legacy that the Khwarazmshāh court had become known for its high cultural refinement and its intellectual assets and that Mahmūd Ghaznavī had grown quite jealous and, what is uniquely revealing, he was rather fearful of this reputation due to its implications in practical politics - hence his ultimatum it seems. Indeed, the royal entourage at the Gurgānj court could boast the glow of a brilliant stellar cluster: other than Bīrūnī, the short-lived Khwarazmshāh dynasty had among its protégés the philosopher ‘Isā Masīhi, the mathematician Abū Nasr Jīlānī, and the physician Abu’l Khayr Khammār. But perhaps the brightest star in this cluster, a star that illuminated the chambers of world culture until almost the sixteenth century, was Ibn Sīnā, Latinized Avicenna, the ‘Grand Shaykh’ (al-Shaykh al-Ra’īs) of the Arabo-Islamic tradition.

Now Bīrūnī had served many courts. At the Samanid capital of Bukhara, for instance, he had secured the patronage of another eastern ruler, the emir Mansūr II ibn Nūh II (r. 997- 999). This royal embrace of the scholar yielded decisive results for intellectual history, for it was here that Bīrūnī corresponded with Avicenna who too happened to be in the same city at the time, the latter serving the Samanid rulers both as administrator and physician. This elegant correspondence has been preserved for posterity and exists in a modern edition. So here we have one of numerous examples of the intellectual harvest of patronage relationships. And more, Bīrūnī moved in the year 998 to the service of the Ziyarid emir of Tabaristān and Gorgān, Shams al-Ma‘ālī Qābūs ibn Voshmgīr. Then, under the protection of the Qābūs court, reinforced no doubt by the financial security generously provided personally by the emir, our scholar wrote his first major work on historical and scientific chronology with its internally rhyming title, al-Āthār al-Bāqàīya ‘an al-Qurūn al-Khālīya, usually translated as Chronology of Ancient Nations. Let’s recognize at once that the Ziyarid patron of Bīrūnī has thereby served as a building block in the intellectual history of the world. 

In the end, upon Sultan Mahmūd’s terrifying ultimatum for the surrender of what was considered human intellectual commodities, Bīrūnī had to leave Gurgānj of his ancestral region and relocate to Ghazna to serve his new patrons. Did Bīrūnī choose his new patrons willingly or was he forced? We know that some scholars serving the Khwarazmshāhs had refused to serve Mahmūd’s court, and stories have it that Bīrūnī was taken prisoner by the soldiers of Mahmūd - if so, one imagines him being delivered to the Ghanznavid sultan in chains. And yet, once in the Ghaznavid court, Bīrūnī began to practice the same art of flattery and boon companionship in which he indulged in the service of all other royal courts. In this court-scholar trade of patronage, did loyalties shift so smoothly, so painlessly, and instantly? 

The answer to this question is neither straightforward nor easily found. Chroniclers tell us that in Mahmūd’s court there were as many as four hundred poets, acolytes of the poet-laureate (Amīr al-Shu‘arā’) Abu’l-Qāsim ‘Unsurī, singing songs of praise, uttering hyperbole, and composing panegyrics (qasā’id, sing. qasīda) in honor of the majestic Ghaznavid patron. Bīrūnī too sang in this chorus, accompanied Mahmūd in his expeditions and territorial exploits, and dedicated his monumental astronomical treatise, the Qanūn al-Mas‘ūdī (Mas‘ūdī Canon), to Sultan Mas‘ūd, Mahmūd’s son; then, this was followed by yet another major dedication: he dedicates his comprehensive work on mineralogy, al-Jamāhir fī Ma‘rifat al-Jawāhir (On Gems), to Sultan Mawdūd Ghaznavī, Mahmūd’s grandson. But perhaps the most outstanding, well-known and enduring work of Bīrūnī is his Book of India—the full title is Tahqīq mā Li’l-Hind min Maqūla Ma‘qūla fi’l-‘Aql am Mardhūla (literally, Research on the Reasonableness or Unreasonableness of What is Said about India). Given that it was indeed Sultan Mahmūd who brought, by force or by mutual consent, our Khwārazmi scholar to the gateway to India, we ought to give this patron credit for what may be considered Bīrūnī’s supreme work, his historical magnum opus that he completed just after the Sultan’s death in the year 1030.

But the question rebounds. Was it out of his free will and a display of his true loyalty that Bīrūnī acknowledged his patrons, dedicated his books to them, and stood beside them in their travels and even in their regional military adventures? Or were these acts of his carried out as a matter of disciplinary conventions of the court, mere tropes, a client’s drill, being part of his ‘job requirements’ that he had to fulfil mechanically as it were? We might never know. And yet it remains plausible to assume that it was the financial comfort and leisure that the Ghaznavid provided him, together with his travels into the inner territories of Hindustan in the fully protected royal company of his thirteen-year long patron Mahmūd, that gave Bīrūnī the opportunity to learn Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy, and to experience Indian cultural practices first-hand; and it was precisely this specialized body of theoretical and empirical knowledge that made his India the rigorous and authentic study it is. But then, on the other hand, the famous translator of this work Edward Sachau tells us that Bīrūnī shows no enthusiasm for Mahmūd, that he speaks about this particular Sultan perfunctorily without elaboration in the book, and that we have no evidence to show that he enjoyed any kind of patronage! The matter must rest undetermined at this juncture. 

But in the intellectual history of Islam we do meet people who, like the Byzantine slave Khāzinī, assert the independence of their will even in the face of ruthless royal authority. So we have the eminently dramatic and eventful case of the Grand Shaykh Avicenna: he refused to make his will pliable to Sultan Mahmūd Ghaznavi’s whims. We have noted that at the time of the Sultan’s annexation of Gurgānj and his ultimatum to the fallen Abu’l ‘Abbās Ma’mūn requiring the handing over of scholars to Ghazna, Avicenna too happened to be in that Khwārazmshāhi cultural metropolis serving under the patronage of the Ma’mūnid ruler. While Bīrūnī ended up in Ghazna in effective compliance with the Sultan’s demand, Avicenna moved out of Gurgānj and travelled South to Khurāsān and then West to Jurjān. Was the Grand Shaykh’s refusal to deliver himself at the Ghaznavid court an act of defiance? Or was it simply avoidance? Again, there can be no simple answer to this query. In his autobiography, he is vague: ‘necessity’ called me to leave Gurgānj, he says. This ‘necessity,’ the American Arabist Dimitri Gutas figures out, means political reasons.  

The biographical story of ibn Sina, the  monumental philosopher and physician, is intriguing. At the age only of seventeen, he was summoned to treat the Samanid ruler Nūh ibn Mansūr in Bukhārā, the city in the vicinity of which the young physician was born around the year 980. The ruler recovers and the physician is admitted to the royal court. Upon the death of his father while this promising son had barely grown out of his teens, ibn Sina begins his career as a state functionary. Like his father, it is highly probable that the son too was now given the governorship of a Samanid district. Following this, after the Turkish Qarakhanid overthrow of the Samanid state, he moves from court to court, from one patron to another, from this city to that city. In many cases, these moves were made due to what is described in the autobiography as ‘necessity, that is, political exigency. This is the time, we recall, when the authority was disintegrating and many Iranian and Turkic states were coming into being and passing away, sometimes in quick succession. Avicenna served many of them. 

From Bukhārā, where he must have been identified closely with the defeated Samanids, ibn Sina moved in 999 to Gurgānj where we have already met him in the service of the Khwārazmshāhs. Here, not long after the defeat of the dynasty at the hands of Sultan Mahmūd, he moved to Jurjān, avoiding or defying the Sultan’s ultimatum. Now he was looking for another patron, the Ziyarid emir Qābūs ibn Voshmgīr who had been protecting Bīrūnī. Ibn Sina arrived in Jurjān in 1012, only to find that his prospective patron had died. The ruler at the time was Manūchehr ibn Qābūs who probably took ibn Sina under his patronage, but there exists an interesting twist in this story. Manūchehr had declared his allegiance to Sultan Mahmūd Ghaznavī and took the Sultan’s daughter as his bride. Now one impression keeps nagging at us: for some reason ibn Sina was desperately determined to stay away from the Ghaznavid Sultan! It is perhaps for this reason that despite the patronage offer of Manūchehr, as it seems likely, our Shaykh did not live in the Ziyarid royal quarters; he found a private patron who offered him his residence in Jurjān. Then, very soon, he left that city too. We note that it is here that he had met his famous biographer and companion Abu ‘Ubayd Jūzjānī. 

And then on to his twin patrons in Ray. These were the ruler Majd al-Dawla Rustam of the Shī‘ī Buyid dynasty and his mother Sayyida in whose hand lay the real power of the throne. Ibn Sina got himself recognized as a skilled physician, treating Majd to full recovery from a nasty illness, and thereby also gaining access to the political elite of the area. But things were unstable in these politically turbulent times, and we see Majd’s own brother Shams al-Dawla, who controlled Hamadān, attacking Ray. Ibn Sina moved again, now via Qazwīn to Hamadān, the city of the attacker. The reasons, again, seem to be political. 

Ibn Sina biography is highly instructive. For example, from his vitae one can practically find leads for the reconstruction of the very dynastic history of his times. When the Abbasid Baghdad was steadily receding into political irrelevance and Transoxianan, Persian, and North African rulers were arising all over from Spain to India. But more to the point, ibn Sina’s life story throws into sharp relief the second defining characteristic of patronage in Muslim societies. We have noted that one attribute of this phenomenon, tentatively claimed here to be unique to Muslims, is the political valence of scholars, hence their status as commodities to be acquired as booty in conquests or as surrender from a weak or a client state. Ibn Sina opens for us another vista: we now see the role of scholars as state functionaries, and this appears to be a pattern. Acquired or kidnapped scholars generally became part of the state machinery; they served as diplomats, viziers, governors, administrators, negotiators, and government advisors. And again: with some trepidation, we can declare this second characteristic of patronage to be unique to the world of Islam. 

Let’s pick up the thread of Avicenna’s story where we left it. Avicenna began his career in Bukhārā where he served as a high administrator, perhaps as a district governor; now in the year 1015 he is in Hamadān under the patronage of Shams al-Dawla. Here he becomes the ruler’s vizier. This grand philosopher and physician serves as a Buyid vizier for nearly six years. Upon the death of Shams in 1021, and the accession of the new emir Samā’ al-Dawla, ibn Sina abandons the high post. This was the decision, it seems, of a shrewd politician, so we gather from his eminent biographer Jūzjānī: ‘ibn Sina saw fit not to remain in the same state nor to resume the same duties and trusted that the prudent thing to do … would be to hide in anticipation of an opportunity to leave the region.’ 

Foreseeing and dreading the end of the Buyids, ibn Sina withdraws from the public eye. Now his story becomes more and more intriguing and complex, and this brings before us in full focus the messy drama of state machinations in the Muslim patron-scholar dynamics. Indeed, particularly from hereon, the Shaykh’s biography reads more like accounts of petty kings and scheming court climbers than those of a stereotypical sage, and this is hardly surprising because, after all, he was typically a state functionary scholar. Already during his ministerial service, some bad blood had developed between him and Shams’s Daylami and Turkish soldiers; there was even an army rebellion against him according to some reports. 

So, ibn Sina went into hiding for several years under the protection of a private patron to whom we ought to be grateful since it was in this secret haven, when the former minister was unencumbered by the chaotic pressures of the Buyid state, that he completed a large part of his encyclopaedic work, the Kitāb al-Shifā’ (Book of Healing). But during this time, from 1021-1024, ibn Sina was also involved in some clandestine activities: historians tell us that he corresponded secretly with the Kakuyid ‘Alā al-Dawla, a cousin of Sayyida whom she had placed on the throne in Isfahan. He was caught, and thrown into prison. The intelligence network of the Hamadān Buyid court, led by the Kurdish vizier Tāj al-Mulk, had charged him with the crime of treachery. 

There are many versions of ibn Sina’s life story, some authentic, some spurious, and one is often tempted to opt for the most sensational. But this temptation ought to be resisted. The safest thing to do is follow Dimitri Gutas who tells us that ibn Sina was incarcerated by the Buyids in a castle outside Hamadan called Fardajān. He remained in prison for four months and was freed when in 1023 his prospective Kakuyid patron ‘Alā’ al-Dawla advanced towards Hamadān and sacked Samā’ al-Dawla. The political winds changed again and ibn Sina was offered an administrative position here; he declined. One day, perhaps after one year, Avicenna escaped to Isfahan. He escaped with two slaves, his brother, and his biographer Jūzjānī - all disguised as Sufis!

Incarcerations, court intrigues, military adventures, high offices, administrative manipulations - all these are, quite typically, historical elements in the life of patronized scholars in Islamic intellectual history. What is uniquely important, scholars here were not only passively subjects to or acted upon by these elements, they were themselves actors. Thus we see ibn Sina, in the wake of his royal reception in Isfahan with much fanfare, dedicating a Persian book, Danishnāma-i ‘Alā’i (‘Alāi’i Encyclopaedia), to his yet another patron ‘Alā’ al-Dawla, and accompanying him on most of his military campaigns and trips. In fact, it was during such a trip to Hamadan that our Grand Shaykh died. He is buried in Hamadān, the very place from where some thirteen years earlier he had escaped in disguise. Now he was back with a vengeance in the company of the victor.

So scholars should indeed figure in the political history of Islam, body of history that cuts across ethnic and sectarian boundaries. Bīrūnī served both Shi‘ite and Sunni and ethnically diverse dynasties, and so did ibn Sina. The case of the twelfth-century Andalusi Ibn Tufayl, the author of the world classic Hayy ibn Yaqzān (Living, Son of Awake), shows a slight variation, but again this variation is of an ideological not sectarian or ethnic kind;  an ideology packaged in theological terms but in fact riding upon political doctrines. The court career of Ibn Tufayl embodies an eminent case of the public role of patronage relations, based on state function. He was a close confidant and trustee of the Almohad (al-Muwahhid) Caliph Abū Ya‘qūb, who ruled Spain and North Africa from his seat in Marrakesh, so close that one word of favour from the scholar was enough for one to gain access to his royal master. What is more, the philosopher ibn Rushd is a gift of Ibn Tufayl for it was he who had introduced ibn Rush to Abū Ya‘qūb, and it was this very Ibn Tufayl who had encouraged ibn Rushd, considered to be the greatest Aristotelian in the history of philosophy, to work on Aristotle.

One must recognize the importance of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy, a work that celebrates the power of human reason. Since its seventeenth-century Latin translation done by Edward Pococke, its influence and its long shadows are found all over. Indeed, as I have said elsewhere, ‘Hayy ibn Yaqzān’s historical impact in world intellectual culture was massive; in fact, mind-boggling. We hear its chimes all over Europe—in pure philosophy, in science proper, and in educational doctrines, not to speak of literature and that liberating genre of fiction that is part of world literary canon.  The founder of empiricism in modern-day philosophy, John Locke, happened to be a student of Pococke and knew his teacher’s translation since he refers to it. But what is more, historians say that the English philosopher’s classic tabula rasa (‘blank slate’) theory - the theory that human mind at birth is a blank slate - is inspired by the Hayy; this observation is highly plausible. Historians have also traced the Arabic tale’s diffusion in, and in many cases direct impact on, the thought of Robert Boyle, Voltaire, and even Karl Marx. This includes Emile: Or, On Education of Rousseau.’ It has been observed that, apart from the Qur’ān and Thousand and One Nights, there is in all likelihood no work in the entire corpus of classical Arabic that has been translated into so many other languages and published so many times. 

Yet, this Ibn Tufayl was a state functionary of the Almohads. One of his duties was that of a propagandist: promoting the ideas of the dynasty’s founder Ibn Tumart. Here again one begins to be fascinated by the yields of patronage in the field of intellectual culture. And like Ibn Tufayl we have another compelling case of Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth/fifteenth-century North African ‘father of sociology.’ His meeting with Tamerlane is familiar to us, and so is his successful role as an official negotiator between tribes, and as a royal emissary to Peter the Cruel in Seville. He refused to be recruited by the world conqueror; and he also turned down flatly the historic offer of the post-Reconquista Spanish ruler: that if he returns to his ancestral Seville, all the Khaldun family property will be restored to him. Ibn Khaldun seems to have possessed the same confidence and grit that we saw in Khāzinī with whom we began.

Citations 

There are at least four primary sources that are essential for reconstructing the biographies of the main scholars that appear in the essay. Abu’l-Fazl Bayhaqi, Ta’rikh (History); Zahir al-Din Bayhaqi, Tatimmat Siwan al-Hikma (Continuation of “The Cabinet of Wisdom”); Nizami ‘Aruzi, Chahar Maqala (Four Discourses); and Ibn abi Usyabi‘a, ‘Uyun al-Anba’ fi Tabaqat al-Atibba’ (Sources of Information Concerning the Classes of Physicians). Full bibliographic details are a bit cumbersome, but can be found in the secondary sources which I have also used for this essay. I have greatly benefitted from the works of Clifford Bosworth, particularly The Ghaznavids, their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994:1040 (Librairie du Liban,  Beirut,1973). Sonja Brentjes has been doing remarkable work on patronage, particularly of the mathematical sciences, and her work and private communications have proved uniquely important for my own studies. I have closely consulted her essay ‘Patronage of the mathematical sciences in Islamic societies: structures and rhetoric, identities and outcomes’ in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics, edited by E. Robson and J. Stedall  (Oxford University Press, 2008). For Ibn Tufayl, the anthology of Lawrence Conrad is a work of superb scholarship and his Introduction has been written in a highly readable style; the title of the work is The World of Ibn Tufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Hayy ibn Yaqzān (Brill, Leiden, 1996). For Ibn Sina, there is hardly any scholar who can match Dimitri Gutas in erudition, rigour, and historical stamina. His work is literally indispensable for any researcher on the Grand Shaykh, in particular his magnum opus, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Brill, Leiden, 2014). 

The Zahir al-Din Bayhaqi citation is taken from the entry ‘Al-Khāzinī’ in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Gillispie (Scribner, New York, 1970). The E. G. Browne, Abu’l-Fazl Bayhaqi and Nizami Aruzi quotes have been taken from Bosworth. Jujani’s words are quoted from the citations of Gutas and reproduce his translations.