Ahdath (urban militias of Syria and Upper Mesopotamia)

Ahdath, "young men", were urban militias in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia from the 4th/10th to the 6th/12th centuries. They served as police, defended the city in emergencies, and often became the active side of municipal opposition to the ruling princes.

Officially the ahdath were a police force charged with fire-fighting and, when needed, with military defence alongside the regular troops. They were paid from certain urban taxes. Their recruitment was local and non-professional, which made them more an effective local force than an ordinary police. Their importance lay in their opposition to the political authorities, who were usually foreigners or came from outside the city. They rose against the princes' rule and, when the princes were weak, forced a kind of shared rule on them. ¹

Their social base varied. At critical moments, as at Damascus just after the Fatimid occupation, popular elements led them. More often they followed the bourgeoisie and supported one or two great families, from which their chief, the ra'is, was drawn. The ra'is made the authorities recognise him as ra'is al-balad, a kind of mayor, whose influence could equal or exceed that of the qadi. Some of these arrangements produced urban dynasties, such as the Banu Nisan of Amid, hereditary chiefs of Amid in the 6th/12th century under the nominal suzerainty of the Inalid Turkman princes. ¹

The ahdath were most active where a professional police (shurta) could not be maintained, which is why Baghdad and Cairo do not offer a comparable picture. The term is found earlier in Iraq, especially at Basra and Kufa in the 2nd/8th century, where it may mean "blameworthy innovations" that disturbed public order rather than a body of young men; the article questions the older view of Dozy. From the 4th/10th century the term also applied to armed bands of the Batiniyya, the "Assassins". ¹

The article links the ahdath with the Saljuq period, when the Saljuqs or their successors placed a military commandant (shihna) at the head of each city with regular garrisons. The ahdath are compared with the fityan and the 'ayyarun of Iraq and Iran, who had the same etymology and were also active from the 4th/10th to the 6th/12th centuries. The two institutions differed in origin: the fityan and 'ayyarun were private groups recruited from the lower classes, with initiation rites, from which the ideology of futuwwa grew, and no parallel to this has been found for the ahdath. The border between cities with fityan and cities with ahdath closely follows the old Byzantine-Sasanid frontier, which suggests a possible link with the factions of the later Roman empire. The question needs a wider study of Islamic cities. ²