Sources: Policing
Yes, I made up the Grave Crimes Section. Abbasid era police were an arm of the military with a complex hierarchy of offices and roles. But as far as I know, there was no office of police investigators designated to solve “grave crimes” such as assault and murder. The Sufi Mysteries explore the workings and behaviour of policing, the court, and penal system as well as extra-judicial policing and courts.
My novels do not romanticize the police, but rather try to show how systems of policing, even when finding “creative resolutions,” cannot deliver justice. My characters in The Sufi Mysteries, especially the detectives for the Grave Crimes Section, Tein and Ammar, come up against these facts and have some ethical choices to make. The Jealous, in particular, examines the structural and personal inequities of the policing and court systems.
With zero desire to continue writing about the police from a personal commitment to the process of abolition, I have set the forthcoming Rat City Chronicles in an alternative medieval Muslim city in which policing and prisons have been outlawed (I have followed Mirame Kaba’s We Do This Until We Free Us and Qur’anic and Prophetic principles for my abolition-society principles). Rat City, the first in the series lays out this world and how justice works. It’s a noir series, so I keep the difficulties in clear view. My friends doing on the ground abolition work encouraged me to keep it complex and messy. There are “criminal” organizations, corrupt authorities, people working angles, alongside folks who have to work with them and around them to keep their community healthy.
In my reading of medieval sources over the years, I kept running into brief observations about the policing habits and brutality of localized police forces. I knew that there was no office of the police in the early days of the Muslim empire. Wrongdoing and how communities responded to it changed conceptually as the empire grew but I did not know how. Once I was writing novels, the work of scholars such as Maribel Fierro, Christian Lange, Hugh Kennedy, and Mathieu Tillier helped me understand how crime was conceived and policed (by watchmen, higher level police, marketplace inspectors and the like), and how suspects were tried by the police chief’s court and other court systems.
Once arrested, those suspected of murder were turned over for prosecution by the Police Chief’s court. The court was under no obligation to follow religious rulings on procuring and determining adequate evidence to convict. While there are examples of lenient and creative resolutions to seemingly insoluble problems, the police and its court more regularly used torture to extract confessions and made use of unreliable witnesses to mete out sentences of capital punishment.
Capital punishment had many forms, not simply execution. Lange’s discussion of parading, and the role it played in societal order, not simply judicial ordering, found its way into the novels. Parading could involve leading a person through the streets on a donkey, their face smeared with charcoal to “blacken” them (an upcoming blog will discuss notions of blackness at the time and in the novels), humiliating objects hung around the necks, and a cryer announcing their crime, all while dozens to thousands of people insulted them as they passed, even throwing objects. The purpose was to make the convict’s secrets public and shamed.
Parading seems to have been used as a punishment by police courts as well as local religious courts and the caliphal high court. According to Lange, it was intended overall to enforce the limits of social disruption. Perjury, in this case, was a serious crime as it undermined trust and honour. Blasphemy and heresy, too. Those found drinking or engaging extra-marital encounters that did not take place in one of a city’s many taverns or brothels (which were sometimes taxed and overseen by the marketplace inspector) might be sentenced to parading. Lange mentions four women, their faces smeared with charcoal, were led through the streets as punishment for having been caught drinking along the Tigris with a group of men. But powerful men, now on the wrong side of influence, might find themselves brutally punished on the back of a donkey, as well.
In the novels, I had to consider how my police detectives, Ammar and Tein—given their own identities, personal histories, and relationships to the military and policing—would navigate and respond to the brutality of the system they agreed to uphold on the job. To what degree would they work with it, against it, or even consider abandoning it? What is the attitude of their friends and family, who suffered under the police? What about the attitudes of the people they are meant to be protecting?
From The Unseen
“You!” Ammar called out to a watchman. “Go to the tomb and examine the grounds, look for a weapon, any sign of the killer.”
The watchman went into the crowd and tried to get past a large woman wanting a better view, sending her into the arms of the man behind her. He yelled at the watchman. “Your mother should have left you to die when the devil pulled you from her belly!” Others joined in, their curses drowning out the gossip and prayers of those around them.
Sighing at their curses, Ammar studied the faces in the crowd for likely suspects. But there was no one with a telltale furtive, smug, or fearful expression. Only the usual curiosity or horror at the body and disgust with the police.
An old woman in a threadbare black wrap covering all but one browned and wrinkled eye peered at him. The squint, the intensity of the gaze, there was no mistaking the hatred. And she was not alone. A man further away, covered in mud stains from brick-making, pulled back his head, made an unmistakable sound and lobbed his phlegmy spit in Ammar’s direction.
Likewise, Zaytuna, the Mysteries’ amateur sleuth, has a complicated relationship with the police. She is both a poor woman who has seen first-hand what policing can do, but is also the sister of Tein and finds herself necessarily working with them on cases. In the process, she is forced to examine her own complicity, even as she struggles to do the right thing.
But the characters’ emotional lives in relation to policing are not depicted to romanticize the struggle to be a good “cop,” but rather to place them within the series’ sole conclusion, abolition, and see how they navigate their experiences.
I also had to consider how my main characters might come up on the wrong side of the police. Mustafa’s early morning walk in the darkness to Bahgdad’s Round City puts him under suspicion of the watchmen. How far could Saliha, a widow and a washerwoman, go without being caught out? Public flirtations and illicit meetings in ruined alleys, stables, or taverns were common at the time and Saliha makes use of every opportunity. But her behaviour never crosses limits in ways that could only be resolved by legal action. That said, her friends’ concern for her is not in the least unfounded and their protection is necessary.
The novels also explore extra-judicial policing of morals and crimes. I brought back in time (by about ten years) the extremist Hanbali, Barbahari, and his crew of men. As is attested by the sources, they dragged married couples out of their own homes and beat them on suspicion of adultery or smashed the wine jars of tavern keepers. To them, the religious and secular courts were not doing enough and they did it themselves. Their public moral policing and break with Hanbali ethical norms is described in Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought by Michael Cook. Also, see Christopher Melchert’s translation of “Eight Early Hanbali Creeds,” the last of which is attributed to Barbahari and makes an appearance when Tein and Ammar interview one of Barbahari’s men in The Unseen.
While my account of the distinct Abbasid court systems follows the scholarship of Mathieu Tillier, I went a bit further and included an extra-judicial Jinn court. Here I was guided by the work of Ali A Olomi whose public facing scholarship on jinn detailed, critical, and justifiably famous. He kindly answered questions so I could depict the jinn court in keeping with classical understanding. I’ve already said too much, and forgive me if the mere existence of a jinn court amounts to a spoiler.
Finally, in the extra-judicial category I depict regular people. Before the police even have a chance to get involved, communities of friends, family, and neighbours step in and handle matters. Old women might step in to protect a younger woman who has exposed herself to suspicions of fornication or otherwise scandalous behaviour. A wise neighbour, a religious leader, a mercantile guild, or a group of elders might mediate between victims, their families, and a perpetrator. A community might then take in the guilty party and work to restore their humanity rather than have them rot in jail, paraded, or be executed. The results might be ugly or beautiful. Criminal organizations, too, might call the shots to right wrongs under their watch. And if the police do arrive, a man who has not forgotten who he is might just turn away.
In all cases, I stayed true to the secondary sources even where I had to massage the facts for the narrative. I am deeply indebted to Tillier who helped me find a way around a serious break with history, making it plausible all the same. Other than Tillier’s detailed and extensive scholarship on courts and Lange and Fierro’s explorations of crime in society, the secondary sources I relied on for the structure of the police were limited in detail for my purposes, and, as it turns out, needed expansion. Mohammed Allehbi, a graduate student at Vanderbilt working on crime in the Abbasid period, has since shared his clarifying research with me. I cannot share his findings here, in turn, but I was happy to find that my first three novels are not out of step in any significant way. Not out of any brilliance on my part. I was saved by omission. An author cannot give every detail in the story and so I had to leave a lot out.
Image is “Abu Zayd Pleads Before the Qadi.”