A great deal of excellent scholarship has been published over the past few decades exploring the way in which premodern Muslim governments generated practical rules that were simultaneously informed by moral norms, and responsive to social needs. To this wealth of impressive work can be added Kristen Stilt's very interesting new monograph on an official called the muhtasib, who operated in Mamluk Egypt.
As scholars such as Fadel, Johansen, Pierce, Powers, Vogel. and Zaman, among others, have recently pointed out, government officials in pre-modern Sunni societies administered a regulatory regime that cannot neatly be characterized as “religious” or “secular.” Premodern Sunni Muslims believed that God had commanded them to interact with others in an ethical manner. This meant that they had to act in accordance with some specific rules that jurists could deduce from scripture. More generally, it also meant that they had to act in a way conducive to social welfare. God assigned rulers the responsibility not only to identify and punish violations of scriptural rules (something that required them to interpret and apply these rules), but also to identify and punish violations of the overarching divine command to act in the social interest. To regulate properly, then, a Muslim ruler and his delegates needed more than familiarity with scriptural rules and an ability to extrapolate from scriptural rules in order to determine how they applied to new cases. They also needed practical knowledge about the effect that a person's actions were likely to have on society.
To help them in the complex task of regulating society in accordance with God's wishes, Egypt's Mamluk rulers (1250–1517) made use of an official known as the muhtasib. The muhtasib had the power to identify and punish public acts of wrongdoing, including 1) violations of commercial or financial rules and 2) deviations from ethical practice in both the area of ritual and the area of social behavior. Over the past 100 years, scholars have debated whether the muhtasib is best characterized as a “secular” or a “religious” figure. However, as Stilt points out early on (39–42; 70–72) the attempt to characterize the office of muhtasib as either secular or religious is conceptually problematic. The muhtasib had to be familiar with the Islamic law that was developed by religious scholars. He also had to be familiar, however, with the Sultan's discretionary rules regulating commerce and finance. Finally, the muhtasib would have had to have the ability to supplement these sources of law by developing and enforcing his own normative understanding of God's command: something he would do by taking into account both scholars' interpretation of Islamic law and the ruler's rules and policies.
In her monograph, Stilt explores how Mamluk muhtasibs regulated. The book begins with two introductory chapters, which provide general background on Islamic society, the Mamluks, and the office of the muhtasib. Seven chapters then explore the muhtasib “in action.” Each chapter is devoted to a particular sphere of public life, such as regulation of devotional practice, identification and punishment of crime, regulation of religious minorities, and regulation of currency along with regulation of various commercial activities. After a general description of the challenges facing a muhtasib as he regulated in a particular sphere, a chapter provides several short case studies of regulation. These case studies start with a chronicle's truncated statement that a muhtasib took a particular regulatory action. Using the other sources available to her, Stilt then tries to explain why the muhtasib acted as he did.
As Stilt admits, one of the problems in understanding how muhtasibs operated is a lack of records. If muhtasibs kept systematic records of their activities, these did not survive. Stilt creatively uses a variety of sources to try to overcome this obstacle and understand, as best one can, the lives, training, and practice of muhtasibs in Mamluk Cairo and Fustat. These include not only chronicles but also biographical dictionaries, topographies, and treatises on regulations that muhtasibs might be expected to enforce.
The introduction asserts that by close reading of many diverse sources one can identify “all the relevant factors in a case” (7). This may be a bit overoptimistic. The writers of Islamic chronicles and bibliographies alike tend to be highly selective in their reportage. They also understand events in a way informed by class, profession, and social preferences, and supplementary materials can only take one so far. In the case studies, Stilt is often forced to speculate about why, exactly, muhtasibs exercised their discretion as they did. Nevertheless, there is a wealth of important information in the sources Stilt engages with. By triangulating chronicles and biographies against information found in other sources, she provides plausible and surprisingly detailed accounts of the way in which legal norms were created and applied in Mamluk Cairo and its environs. She also provides a great deal of information about daily life in urban Mamluk society.
Much of the information in this work is not readily available elsewhere and will be very useful to Islamicists and comparatists. The book is also engagingly written. And those who teach courses in Islamic law may be able to make use of the case studies in Stilt's book in order to illustrate how, in at least one Muslim society, the legal principles announced in technical works of fiqh were transmuted, supplemented, and woven into a socially responsive body of state regulation. It is a very welcome addition to the literature.
