The Salaries of Judges in Early Islam: The Evidence of the Documentary and Literary Sources

Abstract

The information we have on the salaries of the employees of the early Islamic state under the Umayyads and the early oAbbasids is very small, and the scholarship on it is even smaller;1 that on the judges is miniscule, and the scholarship on it does not exceed a few pages.2 This information is furthermore derived entirely from the Arabic historical tradition in its literary form, particularly that of biographies. In its documentary form, no such information, as far as I know, has survived, be it on papyri, inscriptions, coins, or glass weights. Recently, however, I had the opportunity to study a text that occurs in the Kitab al-qudat of the early historian of Egypt Abu oUmar Muhammad b. Yusuf al-Kindi (283–350/897–961).3 The text appears in the biography of oAbd al-Rahman b. Salim alJayshani, a hadith scholar who was judge of Egypt during the late Umayyad and early oAbbasid periods, Muharram 128–Ramadan 133/October 745–April 751, and later headed