Abū l-Ḍawʾ Sirāj ibn Aḥmad ibn Rajāʾ () (''fl''. 1123–''c''.1145) was a
Sicilian Muslim administrator and
Arabic poet in the
Norman
Norman or Normans may refer to:
Ethnic and cultural identity
* The Normans, a people partly descended from Norse Vikings who settled in the territory of Normandy in France in the 10th and 11th centuries
** People or things connected with the Norm ...
county of Sicily
The County of Sicily, also known as County of Sicily and Calabria, was a Italo-Normans, Norman state comprising the islands of Sicily and Malta and part of Calabria from 1071 until 1130. The county began to form during the Norman conquest of sou ...
. He worked closely with Count (later King)
Roger II
Roger II ( it, Ruggero II; 22 December 1095 – 26 February 1154) was King of Sicily and Africa, son of Roger I of Sicily and successor to his brother Simon. He began his rule as Count of Sicily in 1105, became Duke of Apulia and Calabria in ...
as a secretary and later wrote a poem on the death of one of Roger's sons.
''Abū l-Ḍawʾ'' is a nickname meaning "father of light", his birth name being Sirāj. His father was Aḥmad and his grandfather Rajāʾ. He was born into a prominent Muslim family from
Palermo
Palermo ( , ; scn, Palermu , locally also or ) is a city in southern Italy, the capital (political), capital of both the autonomous area, autonomous region of Sicily and the Metropolitan City of Palermo, the city's surrounding metropolitan ...
, the Banū Rajā. Four members of three generations of the Banū Rajā held the office of ''
al-shaykh al-faqīh al-qāḍī'' of Palermo with jurisdiction over the local Muslim community between 1123 and 1161.
Official
The earliest document to mention Abū l-Ḍawʾ dates from January 1123 and is written in
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
. It is a record of court case between Count Roger's cousin, Muriella of Petterrana, and an Arab landowner, Abū Maḍar ibn al-Biththirrānī, over the possession of a mill. Abū l-Ḍawʾ was a member of the panel of judges that found in favour of Muriella. He may have been included because the case involved some Arab witnesses and Arabic documents. The
vizier
A vizier (; ar, وزير, wazīr; fa, وزیر, vazīr), or wazir, is a high-ranking political advisor or minister in the near east. The Abbasid caliphs gave the title ''wazir'' to a minister formerly called ''katib'' (secretary), who was a ...
Christodulus
Christodulus (died 1131) ( el, Χριστόδουλος, ''Christodoulos'', meaning "Slave of Christ;" Arabic: ''Abd al-Rahman al-Nasrani'', meaning "worshiper of the All Merciful, the Nazarene"), probably either a Greek Orthodox (the name was a ...
and Abū l-Ḍawʾ's uncle, the ''
qāḍī
A qāḍī ( ar, قاضي, Qāḍī; otherwise transliterated as qazi, cadi, kadi, or kazi) is the magistrate or judge of a '' sharīʿa'' court, who also exercises extrajudicial functions such as mediation, guardianship over orphans and mino ...
'' of
Palermo
Palermo ( , ; scn, Palermu , locally also or ) is a city in southern Italy, the capital (political), capital of both the autonomous area, autonomous region of Sicily and the Metropolitan City of Palermo, the city's surrounding metropolitan ...
, also sat on the panel. The title he is given in the document is (''ho kaïtos'', a hellenized form of the Arabic ''
al-qāʾid''). In Greek, his name was rendered Βοδδάος (''Boddaos''). At a later date at least, the title of ''al-qāʾid'' was standard for all Muslim officials at court.
According to a later source,
al-Maqrīzī
Al-Maqrīzī or Maḳrīzī (Arabic: ), whose full name was Taqī al-Dīn Abū al-'Abbās Aḥmad ibn 'Alī ibn 'Abd al-Qādir ibn Muḥammad al-Maqrīzī (Arabic: ) (1364–1442) was a medieval Egyptian Arab historian during the Mamluk era, kn ...
's biography of
George of Antioch, Abū l-Ḍawʾ was offered the Sicilian vizierate after the removal of Christodulus around 1126. According to al-Maqrīzī, George denounced the vizier to Roger, who had him arrested and executed, but when Roger offered the position to Abū l-Ḍawʾ, the latter declined on the grounds that he was merely a man of letters. George was then appointed vizier. Al-Maqrīzī gives Abū l-Ḍawʾ the title of ''
al-kātib al-inshāʾ'', secretary of correspondence, which was one of the highest offices in contemporary
Fatimid Egypt
The Fatimid Caliphate was an Ismaili Shi'a caliphate extant from the tenth to the twelfth centuries AD. Spanning a large area of North Africa, it ranged from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east. The Fatimids, a d ...
. There is no evidence, however, that the Normans organized their government along Fatimid lines and little can be said about what the office of ''kātib al-inshāʾ'' would have entailed in the 1120s, if it is not merely an anachronism on the part of al-Maqrīzī.
According to
Ibn al-Athīr
Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ash-Shaybānī, better known as ʿAlī ʿIzz ad-Dīn Ibn al-Athīr al-Jazarī ( ar, علي عز الدین بن الاثیر الجزري) lived 1160–1233) was an Arab or Kurdish historian a ...
, Roger established a ''
dīwān al-maẓālim
''Al-maẓālim'' (injustices, grievances) were an ancient pre-Islamic institution that was adopted by the Abbasids in the eighth century CE. The main purpose of the ''mazalim'' courts was to give ordinary people redress. ''Mazalim'', or the sul ...
'' (board of grievances) to hear complaints from the people. It is possible that this ''dīwān'' was overseen by Abū l-Ḍawʾ, since the 1123 court has some characteristics of a ''maẓālim'' tribunal and this would be consistent with the office of ''al-kātib al-inshāʾ'' as it was in Fatimid Egypt.
The Persian historian
ʿImād ad-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī
Muhammad ibn Hamed Isfahani (1125 – 20 June 1201) ( fa, محمد ابن حامد اصفهانی), more popularly known as Imad ad-din al-Isfahani ( fa, عماد الدین اصفهانی) ( ar, عماد الدين الأصفهاني), was ...
(died 1201) also calls Abū l-Ḍawʾ a ''kātib'' (secretary). It may have been that he was responsible for Roger's correspondence with the Fatimids and
Zirids
The Zirid dynasty ( ar, الزيريون, translit=az-zīriyyūn), Banu Ziri ( ar, بنو زيري, translit=banū zīrī), or the Zirid state ( ar, الدولة الزيرية, translit=ad-dawla az-zīriyya) was a Sanhaja Berber dynasty from ...
, which was constant, and with the independent local ruler
Yusuf of Gabès
Yusuf ( ar, يوسف ') is a male name of Arabic origin meaning "God increases" (in piety, power and influence).From the Hebrew יהוה להוסיף ''YHWH Lhosif'' meaning "YHWH will increase/add". It is the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew name ...
. Al-Maqrīzī's account suggests that he was literate not only in Arabic but in Greek also, in order to have been offered Christodulus' position. Although his public activity is only evidenced for the brief period 1123–26, the poem he wrote on the death of Roger's son proved he had some proximity to the royal court as late as the mid-1140s. His importance to the development in Norman administration relates to his appearance as a high-ranking Arab secretary in the formative and experimental period between the death of Roger's mother, the Countess
Adelaide del Vasto (1118), and Roger's own royal coronation (1130).
Poet
Only three extracts of Abū l-Ḍawʾ's poetry survive. More of his work was contained in the now lost ''Anthology of Poetry and Prose of the Best Men of the Age'' compiled in Sicily by
Ibn Bashrūn al-Ṣiqillī and published in 561
AH, but only three extracts from this work quoted by ʿImād ad-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī in his anthology, ''Kharīdat al-qaṣr'', are known today. The first extract is from an exchange of verses with the ''
faqīh
A faqīh (plural ''fuqahā'', ar, فقيه, pl. ) is an Islamic jurist, an expert in ''fiqh'', or Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic Law.
Definition
Islamic jurisprudence or ''fiqh'' is the human understanding of the Sharia (bel ...
'' (jurist) ʿĪsā ibn ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-Ṣiqillī, who had asked to borrow a book. The second extract is five
verses from an
elegy
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to ''The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy'', "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometime ...
written on the death of a friend. The third and longest extract, which is also the most historically interesting and the most beautiful, is seventeen verses from a lament on the death of "the son of Roger the Frank, lord of Sicily". Below are four verses:
:The radiant moon has been extinguished and the world grown dark
:and our support has tumbled from its grandeur and its nobility
:Ah, just when he stood tall in his beauty and his majesty,
:and when glories and nations felt proud of him
:...
:His war-tents and his palaces weep for him
:and his sword and his lances lament him
:And the whinnies of his horses turn, in their throats,
:to nostalgia, though reins and halters restrain them. . .
The son is not named, but the poem suggests that he had recently come of age at the time of his death, making
Tancred
Tancred or Tankred is a masculine given name of Germanic origin that comes from ''thank-'' (thought) and ''-rath'' (counsel), meaning "well-thought advice". It was used in the High Middle Ages mainly by the Normans (see French Tancrède) and espe ...
(died 1138/40) or
Alfonso
Alphons (Latinized ''Alphonsus'', ''Adelphonsus'', or ''Adefonsus'') is a male given name recorded from the 8th century (Alfonso I of Asturias, r. 739–757) in the Christian successor states of the Visigothic kingdom in the Iberian peninsula. ...
(died 1144), who both died in their teens or early twenties, the most likely subjects. Beside these three extracts, ʿImād ad-Dīn also quotes some verses of
Abū l‐Ṣalt Umayya that were sent to Abū l-Ḍawʾ.
Notes
References
Bibliography
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Sicilian Arabic poets
Kingdom of Sicily people
12th-century Arabs
History of Palermo