While the previous chapter discussed demographic changes and the impact of enslaved concubines on early Islamic ideologies, this chapter traces how enslaved and unfree persons accessed political power in the Umayyad empire. Particularly, it interrogates the ways that two unfree groups – courtesans and scribes – used their education, training and lin-guistic expertise to participate in Umayyad politics. When viewed together, these two groups indicate that the increasing centralisation of the Umayyad ruling household during the Marwanid period (64–132/684–749) provided increased opportunities for educated slaves and freedmen to exercise political power. However, these subaltern groups were always in a precarious position, for they had to use their linguistic mastery in ways that pleased their imperial masters. If they did something to upset the balance of power, they could be dismissed or even killed without a second thought.

This chapter also analyses the complex, contested development of the term ‘Arab’ as it was slowly crystallising during the late Umayyad period. Like the ‘mixed-breeds’ studied in the previous chapter, these courtesans and scribes seem to have inhabited a liminal position. But unlike the ‘mixed breeds’, the tensions that the courtesans and scribes raised were not so much about lineage – the question was not necessarily whether they had ‘non-Arab blood’. Rather, courtesans and scribes seem to have raised questions about the meaning of linguistic and cultural attributes, about the ‘cultural stuff’ that people use to express ethnic identity. These subaltern groups’ entire job was to master Arabic language and learning and to produce Arabic culture. As such, concubines and scribes represent a somewhat open, cosmopolitan definition of ‘Arabness’, based on language mastery and accessible to anyone steeped in Arabic lore. I suggest that many Arabic-Islamic authors spill much ink trying to resolve the question of whether such linguistic and cultural masters are truly ‘Arabs’, although they are never able to fully resolve the issue.

Courtesans and Scribes: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Many previous scholars have separately studied either the courtesans (qiyān) or the secretaries (kuttāb), but I suggest that both groups can fruitfully be viewed together in order to illuminate these questions of language, power and cultural definitions of ‘Arabness’.