Abu ’l-Farad̲j̲ Yaʿḳūb ben Yusuf ibn Killis, al-ad̲j̲all 1st Fāṭimid Wazīr of Al-ʿAzīz

Fāṭimid vizier of the caliph al-ʿAzīz [q.v.]. He was by origin a Jew, born in Bag̲h̲dād in 318/930. He went with his father to Syria and settled at Ramla, becoming an agent for various merchants; but, according to one tradition, having appropriated their money and being unable to repay it, he fled to Egypt, where he entered the service of Kāfūr [q.v.], who thought highly of him and whose complete confidence he gained by enabling him to appropriate various inheritances whose existence he brought to his notice and in addition by making purchases for him for which Kāfūr paid in drafts on state land. He acquired precise information on the revenues of all the villages in the country and obtained control of expenditure for Syria and Egypt. Kāfūr having declared one day that if he were a Muslim he ought to be vizier, Ibn Killis aspired to the vizierate, embraced Islam in 356/967 and devoted himself to an assiduous study of the Ḳurʾān and the laws of Islam under the guidance of a teacher. But the following year Kāfūr died, and the vizier Abu ’l-Faḍl Ḏj̲aʿfar b. al-Furāt, who was jealous of Ibn Killis, had him arrested.

One of the most outstanding statesmen, administrators, and intellectuals of the beginning of the eleventh century, Yaʿqūb ibn Killis was born in Baghdad in 930 into a Jewish family that was apparently of priestly origin. Around ten years later, along with many other Iraqi Jews, the family moved to Palestine. They settled in Ramle, where Ibn Killis eventually became involved in commerce and was appointed to the important post of wakīl al-tujjār (Ar. agent of the merchants). He was soon entangled in unsavory affairs, the substance of which is unclear.

According to the Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Ṣayrafī, the rise to prominence of Ibn Killis was associated with his discovery of a 30,000-dinar treasure buried in a house in Ramle when the homeowner died. Ibn Killis reported the find to the ruler of Egypt, Kāfūr, but said it amounted to 20,000 dinars. When Kāfūr learned that the trove actually amounted to 30,000 dinars, he was impressed by Ibn Killis’s honesty in not taking advantage of the situation to pocket part of the money before reporting it. According to the chronicler, Ibn Killis later found another treasure, this one belonging to a Jew who had hidden his fortune inside a consignment of flax. Ibn Killis found the money when he bought the flax, and once again handed it over to the authorities. In this manner, he paved the way for himself into the upper echelons of the government bureaucracy, earning the affection and trust of Egypt’s ruler. Kāfūr employed him in several key positions. Another Muslim chronicler, Ibn al-Qalānisī(d. 1160), relates that Ibn Killis once heard his master say: “If he were Muslim, he would be worthy of being vizier.” Ibn Killis promptly converted to Islam, in July 967, and became a diligent student of Islamic religious and legal texts.

Later the son of this vizier was to marry a daughter of Ibn Killis (Yāḳūt, Udabāʾ, vii, 173). Thanks to interventions and bribes, he was released and set off for North Africa. It is possible that, while still in Egypt, he had been won over by the Fāṭimid propaganda which was active at the time. When Kāfūr died in 968, Ibn Killis was in mortal danger from rivals at court. He fled to the Maghreb and entered the service of the Fatimid caliph al-Muʿizz in Qayrawan. Muslim chroniclers credit him with the greater part of the initiative and planning of the Fatimid conquest of Egypt, for which his first-hand knowledge of Egyptian affairs proved invaluable. Despite his conversion, Ibn Killis maintained strong ties with the Jewish mercantile elite in Qayrawan, which in turn had strong ties to the Fatimids. When the Fatimid court moved to its new capital, Cairo, Ibn Killis was entrusted with reorganizing Egypt’s financial administration. He instituted a highly successful monetary reform that greatly increased state revenues and made the Fatimid dinar the standard currency of the Mediterranean. After al-Muʿizz died in 976, Ibn Killis became vizier to his young son and successor, al-ʿAzīz. During Ibn Killis’s vizierate, a number of Jews (and also Christians) held important posts in the administration, among them Manasseh Ibn al-Qazzāz in Damascus, who was secretary of civil and military affairs in Syria and Palestine.

He entered the service of al-Muʿizz li-dīn Allāh who was impressed by his qualities as an administrator. He returned with him to Egypt, which he had encouraged him to conquer, in 362/969. From the beginning of 363/October 973 he was entrusted with the reorganization of the financial system with the assistance of Uslūd̲j̲ b. al-Ḥasan. By vigorous measures he considerably increased the revenues of the state and ensured confidence in the muʿizzī dīnār. After the death of al-Muʿizz in 365/975, he continued to manage affairs on behalf of his son al-ʿAzīz, who appointed him vizier at the beginning of 367/August 977 and, in Ramaḍān of the following year/February 979, conferred on him the title of al-wazīr al-ad̲j̲all (“the illustrious vizier”). He was thus the first vizier of the Fāṭimid dynasty. Al-ʿAzīz bestowed on him honours and wealth, and it was during his tenure of office that under this caliph Egypt enjoyed a prosperity never before attained and the Fāṭimid empire saw its greatest territorial expansion.

Ibn Killis’s foreign policy was expressed in the advice which he gave before he died to al-ʿAzīz: to undertake nothing against the Byzantines so long as they themselves did not attack, to be satisfied with a vague acknowledgement of vassalage from the Ḥamdānids of Aleppo, but not to spare Mufarrid̲j̲ b. al-D̲j̲arrāḥ, the chief of the Ṭayyī Arabs of Palestine [see d̲j̲arrāḥids]. He carried it out successfully but not without resorting to intrigue, to deception and even to attempts at assassination. He re-took Damascus from the Turk Alptakīn, ally of the Ḳarmaṭīs, but when the latter, having become a favourite of the caliph in Egypt, showed the vizier little respect, he had him poisoned (Ibn al-At̲h̲īr, viii, 219, s.a. 365). Ibn Killis put an end to the complicated situation created in Syria and Palestine by Ḳassām, the successor of Alptakīn in Damascus, the Ḥamdānid Abū Tag̲h̲lib, who had come from D̲j̲azīra to seek his fortune in Syria, and Mufarrid̲j̲ b. al-D̲j̲arrāḥ; then he forced Bakd̲j̲ūr, the Ḥamdānid representative at Ḥimṣ (whom al-ʿAzīz had made governor of Damascus and whom Ibn Killis hated because he had had put to death the tenant of the lands which the vizier owned in the region of Damascus and had seized these lands) to leave Damascus [for details, see al-ʿazīz]. But Ibn Killis prevented the caliph from getting too deeply engaged in northern Syria.

In domestic policy, the favour which Ibn Killis enjoyed suffered only one eclipse of some months (373-4), the reasons for which were perhaps the caliph’s anger after the poisoning of Alptakīn, or disturbances caused by a famine in Egypt. He soon recovered all his offices and his immense riches. Moreover Ibn Killis did not fail to flatter his master, as witness the episode of the cherries which he had brought for him by pigeons from Syria (al-Ḳalḳas̲h̲andī, Ṣubḥ, xiv, 391 and ii, 93; Gaudefroy-Demombynes, La Syrie, 252), and the flattering verses in which Ibn Killis explained how it had come about that one of his pigeons had outstripped that of the caliph in a race, a fact of which the vizier’s enemies had made use to slander him.

Ibn Killis was noted for the magnificence of the life he led in his palace, his liberality to scholars, jurists, physicians, men of letters and poets, and his concern to promote learning: he was the first to have the idea of making al-Azhar into a university, and he maintained thirty-five jurists. He was a sincere supporter of Fāṭimism; he imprisoned an ʿAlid of Damascus who had mocked at the genealogy of the Fāṭimids. He was a specialist in Ismāʿīlī fiḳh: all his biographers emphasize the fact that he composed, on the basis of traditions received from al-Muʿizz and al-ʿAzīz, a legal treatise known as al-Risāla al-wazīriyya, that he taught it in lectures which he gave personally, and that fatwās were given on the authority of his teaching. He had a mosque built in his palace, supervised the building of the mosque known as that of al-Ḥākim, and added in 378 a fawwāra (fountain) in the mosque of ʿAmr (Yāḳūt, iii, 899). He appears to have contributed to the development of Fāṭimid ceremonial by instituting at the caliph’s court a corps of picked troops (the ḳuwwād) who paraded in processions, and by founding the regiment which bore his name, al-ṭāʾifa al-wazīriyya.

Ibn Killis’s biographers praise him highly, although they do not conceal the questionable means which he used to achieve success or to rid himself of his own enemies and those of the dynasty. On his death, at the end of 380/February 991, al-ʿAzīz, who led the ¶ funeral prayer for him, wept and showed great grief. The Christian Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd states that Ibn Killis was worthy of this; but the Egyptian populace accused him of showing too great favour to the Christians and to the Jews.

(M. Canard)

Bibliography

Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd al-Anṭākī, Annales, ed. Cheikho, 155, 163, 164, 172, 173 ( = P.O., xxiii, 390 (183), 411 (203), 414 (206), 433 (225))

Abū S̲h̲ud̲j̲āʿ al-Rud̲h̲rawārī, D̲h̲ayl Kitāb Tad̲j̲ārib al-umam, 185

Ibn al-Ṣayrafī, Kitāb al-Is̲h̲āra ilā man nāl al-wizāra, in BIFAO, xxv (1925), 19-23

Ibn al-Ḳalānisī, D̲h̲ayl Tāʾrīk̲h̲ Dimas̲h̲ḳ, 15, 22, 29, 30, 31, 32

Ibn Ḥammād, Ak̲h̲bār mulūk Banī ʿUbayd, ed. Vonderheyden, 49

Ibn al-At̲h̲īr, 1303 ed., viii, 219, ix, 6, 19, 27

Ibn Saʿīd, Kitāb al-Mug̲h̲rib . . ., book iv, ed. Tallqvist, 76

Ibn Muyassar, Ak̲h̲bār Miṣr, ed. H. Massé, 45, 51

Ibn K̲h̲allikān, Būlāḳ ed., ii, 440-4 (tr. de Slane, iv, 359)

Kutubī, Būlāḳ ed., i, 104

Ibn al-Dawādārī, Kanz al-durar wa-d̲j̲āmiʿ al-g̲h̲urar, d̲j̲uzʾ vi, ed. S. Munad̲j̲d̲j̲id, Cairo 1961, 165, 193, 198, 201-3, 205, 208, 210-3, 216, 218-23, 225-6

Maḳrīzī, K̲h̲iṭaṭ, Būlāḳ ed., i, 439, ii, 5-6, 226, 341

idem, Ittiʿāẓ al-ḥunafāʾ, ed. S̲h̲ayyāl, 196, 198-9, 275, 279, 296

Quatremère, Vie du calife fat. Moezz-lidin-Allāh, in JA, 3rd series, nos. 2 and 3

Wüstenfeld, Gesch. d. Fatimiden-Chalifen, 50-1, 133 ff.

idem, Die Statthalter von Ägypten . . ., 51

R. Gottheil, A Fetwa on the appointment of Dhimmis to office, in Festschrift Goldziher, 222

G. Wiet, L’Egypte arabe (Hist. de la Nation égypt., iv), 1937, 149-50, 188, 192, 194

W. Björkman, Beiträge zur Gesch. der Staatskanzlei im islam. Ägypten, 1928, 19, 28, 64

W. J. Fischel, Jews in the economic and political life of medieval Islam, London 1937, 45-68. See also Ḥasan Ibrāhīm Ḥasan, Tāʾrīk̲h̲ al-dawla al-fāṭimiyya, Cairo 1958, 270-2, 298-300, 426-7, 444-5, 536-7, 632-3 and index

Muḥammad Kāmil Ḥusayn, Fī adab Miṣr al-fāṭimiyya, Cairo 1950, 54-9, 174-6 and index.

Citation Canard, M.. " Ibn Killis." Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill Online , 2013. Reference. Jim Harlow. 28 January 2013 <http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-isla...>

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ibn Killis was by origin a Jew, born in Bag̲h̲dād in 318/930. He went with his father to Syria and settled at Ramla, becoming an agent for various merchants; but, according to one tradition, having appropriated their money and being unable to repay it, he fled to Egypt, where he entered the service of Kāfūr [q.v.], who thought highly of him and whose complete confidence he gained by enabling him to appropriate various inheritances whose existence he brought to his notice and in addition by making purchases for him for which Kāfūr paid in drafts on state land. He acquired precise information on the revenues of all the villages in the country and obtained control of expenditure for Syria and Egypt. Kāfūr having declared one day that if he were a Muslim he ought to be vizier, Ibn Killis aspired to the vizierate, embraced Islam in 356/967 and devoted himself to an assiduous study of the Ḳurʾān and the laws of Islam under the guidance of a teacher. But the following year Kāfūr died, and the vizier Abu ’l-Faḍl Ḏj̲aʿfar b. al-Furāt, who was jealous of Ibn Killis, had him arrested. Later the son of this vizier was to marry a daughter of Ibn Killis (Yāḳūt, Udabāʾ, vii, 173). Thanks to interventions and bribes, he was released and set off for North Africa. It is possible that, while still in Egypt, he had been won over by the Fāṭimid propaganda which was active at the time.

He entered the service of al-Muʿizz li-dīn Allāh who was impressed by his qualities as an administrator. He returned with him to Egypt, which he had encouraged him to conquer, in 362/969. From the beginning of 363/October 973 he was entrusted with the reorganization of the financial system with the assistance of Uslūd̲j̲ b. al-Ḥasan. By vigorous measures he considerably increased the revenues of the state and ensured confidence in the muʿizzī dīnār. After the death of al-Muʿizz in 365/975, he continued to manage affairs on behalf of his son al-ʿAzīz, who appointed him vizier at the beginning of 367/August 977 and, in Ramaḍān of the following year/February 979, conferred on him the title of al-wazīr al-ad̲j̲all (“the illustrious vizier”). He was thus the first vizier of the Fāṭimid dynasty. Al-ʿAzīz bestowed on him honours and wealth, and it was during his tenure of office that under this caliph Egypt enjoyed a prosperity never before attained and the Fāṭimid empire saw its greatest territorial expansion.

¶ Ibn Killis’s foreign policy was expressed in the advice which he gave before he died to al-ʿAzīz: to undertake nothing against the Byzantines so long as they themselves did not attack, to be satisfied with a vague acknowledgement of vassalage from the Ḥamdānids of Aleppo, but not to spare Mufarrid̲j̲ b. al-D̲j̲arrāḥ, the chief of the Ṭayyī Arabs of Palestine [see d̲j̲arrāḥids]. He carried it out successfully but not without resorting to intrigue, to deception and even to attempts at assassination. He re-took Damascus from the Turk Alptakīn, ally of the Ḳarmaṭīs, but when the latter, having become a favourite of the caliph in Egypt, showed the vizier little respect, he had him poisoned (Ibn al-At̲h̲īr, viii, 219, s.a. 365). Ibn Killis put an end to the complicated situation created in Syria and Palestine by Ḳassām, the successor of Alptakīn in Damascus, the Ḥamdānid Abū Tag̲h̲lib, who had come from D̲j̲azīra to seek his fortune in Syria, and Mufarrid̲j̲ b. al-D̲j̲arrāḥ; then he forced Bakd̲j̲ūr, the Ḥamdānid representative at Ḥimṣ (whom al-ʿAzīz had made governor of Damascus and whom Ibn Killis hated because he had had put to death the tenant of the lands which the vizier owned in the region of Damascus and had seized these lands) to leave Damascus [for details, see al-ʿazīz]. But Ibn Killis prevented the caliph from getting too deeply engaged in northern Syria.

In domestic policy, the favour which Ibn Killis enjoyed suffered only one eclipse of some months (373-4), the reasons for which were perhaps the caliph’s anger after the poisoning of Alptakīn, or disturbances caused by a famine in Egypt. He soon recovered all his offices and his immense riches. Moreover Ibn Killis did not fail to flatter his master, as witness the episode of the cherries which he had brought for him by pigeons from Syria (al-Ḳalḳas̲h̲andī, Ṣubḥ, xiv, 391 and ii, 93; Gaudefroy-Demombynes, La Syrie, 252), and the flattering verses in which Ibn Killis explained how it had come about that one of his pigeons had outstripped that of the caliph in a race, a fact of which the vizier’s enemies had made use to slander him.

Ibn Killis was noted for the magnificence of the life he led in his palace, his liberality to scholars, jurists, physicians, men of letters and poets, and his concern to promote learning: he was the first to have the idea of making al-Azhar into a university, and he maintained thirty-five jurists. He was a sincere supporter of Fāṭimism; he imprisoned an ʿAlid of Damascus who had mocked at the genealogy of the Fāṭimids. He was a specialist in Ismāʿīlī fiḳh: all his biographers emphasize the fact that he composed, on the basis of traditions received from al-Muʿizz and al-ʿAzīz, a legal treatise known as al-Risāla al-wazīriyya, that he taught it in lectures which he gave personally, and that fatwās were given on the authority of his teaching. He had a mosque built in his palace, supervised the building of the mosque known as that of al-Ḥākim, and added in 378 a fawwāra (fountain) in the mosque of ʿAmr (Yāḳūt, iii, 899). He appears to have contributed to the development of Fāṭimid ceremonial by instituting at the caliph’s court a corps of picked troops (the ḳuwwād) who paraded in processions, and by founding the regiment which bore his name, al-ṭāʾifa al-wazīriyya.

Ibn Killis’s biographers praise him highly, although they do not conceal the questionable means which he used to achieve success or to rid himself of his own enemies and those of the dynasty. On his death, at the end of 380/February 991, al-ʿAzīz, who led the ¶ funeral prayer for him, wept and showed great grief. The Christian Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd states that Ibn Killis was worthy of this; but the Egyptian populace accused him of showing too great favour to the Christians and to the Jews.

(M. Canard)

Bibliography

Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd al-Anṭākī, Annales, ed. Cheikho, 155, 163, 164, 172, 173 ( = P.O., xxiii, 390 (183), 411 (203), 414 (206), 433 (225))

Abū S̲h̲ud̲j̲āʿ al-Rud̲h̲rawārī, D̲h̲ayl Kitāb Tad̲j̲ārib al-umam, 185

Ibn al-Ṣayrafī, Kitāb al-Is̲h̲āra ilā man nāl al-wizāra, in BIFAO, xxv (1925), 19-23

Ibn al-Ḳalānisī, D̲h̲ayl Tāʾrīk̲h̲ Dimas̲h̲ḳ, 15, 22, 29, 30, 31, 32

Ibn Ḥammād, Ak̲h̲bār mulūk Banī ʿUbayd, ed. Vonderheyden, 49

Ibn al-At̲h̲īr, 1303 ed., viii, 219, ix, 6, 19, 27

Ibn Saʿīd, Kitāb al-Mug̲h̲rib . . ., book iv, ed. Tallqvist, 76

Ibn Muyassar, Ak̲h̲bār Miṣr, ed. H. Massé, 45, 51

Ibn K̲h̲allikān, Būlāḳ ed., ii, 440-4 (tr. de Slane, iv, 359)

Kutubī, Būlāḳ ed., i, 104

Ibn al-Dawādārī, Kanz al-durar wa-d̲j̲āmiʿ al-g̲h̲urar, d̲j̲uzʾ vi, ed. S. Munad̲j̲d̲j̲id, Cairo 1961, 165, 193, 198, 201-3, 205, 208, 210-3, 216, 218-23, 225-6

Maḳrīzī, K̲h̲iṭaṭ, Būlāḳ ed., i, 439, ii, 5-6, 226, 341

idem, Ittiʿāẓ al-ḥunafāʾ, ed. S̲h̲ayyāl, 196, 198-9, 275, 279, 296

Quatremère, Vie du calife fat. Moezz-lidin-Allāh, in JA, 3rd series, nos. 2 and 3

Wüstenfeld, Gesch. d. Fatimiden-Chalifen, 50-1, 133 ff.

idem, Die Statthalter von Ägypten . . ., 51

R. Gottheil, A Fetwa on the appointment of Dhimmis to office, in Festschrift Goldziher, 222

G. Wiet, L’Egypte arabe (Hist. de la Nation égypt., iv), 1937, 149-50, 188, 192, 194

W. Björkman, Beiträge zur Gesch. der Staatskanzlei im islam. Ägypten, 1928, 19, 28, 64

W. J. Fischel, Jews in the economic and political life of medieval Islam, London 1937, 45-68. See also Ḥasan Ibrāhīm Ḥasan, Tāʾrīk̲h̲ al-dawla al-fāṭimiyya, Cairo 1958, 270-2, 298-300, 426-7, 444-5, 536-7, 632-3 and index

Muḥammad Kāmil Ḥusayn, Fī adab Miṣr al-fāṭimiyya, Cairo 1950, 54-9, 174-6 and index.

Citation Canard, M.. " Ibn Killis." Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill Online , 2013. Reference. Jim Harlow. 28 January 2013 <http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-isla...>