Princely Authority in the Early Marwānid State

This study of the career of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Marwān naturally focuses on his time as governor of Egypt between 65/685 and his death in 86/705. His father, the caliph Marwān, had appointed ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and his half-brother, ʿAbd al-Malik, as joint heirs apparent. In accordance with that arrangement, when Marwān died in 65/685 ʿAbd al-Malik succeeded him as caliph while ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, next in line, governed Egypt. As things turned out, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz died some months before his brother, and the caliphate passed to ʿAbd al-Malik’s son, al-Walīd. Joshua Mabra’s main argument is that ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz governed Egypt virtually independently and not in subservience to his brother. To the extent that this argument is persuasive, it should affect scholarly interpretations of the development of the administration of early Islamic Egypt and modify views about the effectiveness of ʿAbd al-Malik’s policies of centralization, Arabization, and Islamization. It is clear that Mabra wishes to argue that ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was not his brother’s agent and that the policies of the caliph were either rejected, or applied only to a limited extent in Egypt. There are, however, degrees between absolute subservience and complete independence, and Mabra sometimes uses different words to indicate where he puts ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz on the scale. In one place we are told that he ruled ‘with almost no involvement from his brother’, and that he ‘refused to participate in a number of his brother’s Islamicizing and centralizing reforms’ (p. 11). Elsewhere, though, it is said that although the Egyptian governor respected the authority of the caliph, ‘he certainly did not wholly toe the line’ (p. 97). That last is a considerably weaker formulation than the earlier one

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