From holy warriors to chivalric order: The ‘ ayyars in the eastern Islamic world, A.D. 800–1055

This study examines the first 250 years (800–1055) of the organized paramilitary groups known as `ayyars, which occupied a prominent place in the history of the Medieval Islamic world. The prevailing scholarly view of the `ayyars holds that they were little more than common bandits or criminal gangs. This opinion, however, rests upon an extremely limited source base of later eleventh- to fourteenth-century Arabic annals composed by Baghdadi clerics. This dissertation therefore seeks to give a more balanced and historically contextual interpretation of the ` ayyar phenomenon. It achieves this goal, first, by taking into account a much fuller range—geographically, linguistically, chronologically, and typologically—of pre-Mongol sources, particularly the long-neglected Persian ones. Second, the historical sources are examined chronologically in order to ascertain what the true societal and contextual definitions of the `ayyar phenomenon were, and whether these definitions remained static or changed and evolved over the centuries.

The findings of this study demonstrate that the `ayyar phenomenon developed and transformed over time. The `ayyars when they first appear at the turn of the ninth century are clearly volunteer Sunni holy warriors for the faith (mutatawwi`a), and are closely connected with many of the central figures of nascent Hanbalism, one of the major streams of orthodox Sunni Islam. By the tenth century, however, another meaning, which soon became the primary one, accrued to the word ` ayyar: chivalric person, one possessing courtoisie. After the chivalric element of the `ayyar phenomenon becomes predominant, the `ayyars arouse a clerical religious opposition that strongly parallels the identical clerical antipathy towards the courtly found in Western Europe in the High Middle Ages.

In short, the `ayyars played a far more integral—and respectable—social, religious and political role in Islamic society than the later clerical authors would have us believe. Moreover, the discovery that the `ayyars developed into a chivalric order may call for a total reassessment of not only the `_ayyars, but also of the entire history of chivalry, which would now have to be dated several hundred years earlier—and more eastward—than heretofore.