The Faqih Who Brought Islam To Sicily

“When Asad looked at the army gathered around him from every side, the horses neighing, the drums beating, and the banners fluttering, he said: ‘There is no god but Allah, alone, without partner. By Allah, Oh assembly of Muslims, neither my father nor my grandfather ever held such a position of command, nor did anyone among my ancestors see anything like this. I have only reached what you see before you through the pen. So strive, exhaust yourselves in its pursuit, and persevere in the recording of knowledge; through it, you shall attain both this world and the Hereafter.’ Then, Asad ibn al-Furat, the Prince-Judge, departed for Sicily.”¹

On the coast of Mazara del Vallo in northwestern Sicily, we stood a dozen miles from the mist-clouded port of Marsala, literally Marsa Allah, the Port of God. This is where Asad ibn al-Furat, and his army landed in 827 CE, transforming the small Byzantine town into a prosperous trade hub, initiating the beginnings of the Emirate of Sicily.

At 70 years old, Asad ibn Furat was no ordinary military commander. A student of Imam Malik and the leading Hanafi jurists of Iraq, he had become chief judge of Ifriqiya and a renowned scholar whose legal opinions shaped the consolidation of Maliki jurisprudence across North Africa. His command of religious and civil authority made him perhaps one of the most consequential figures of his age.

The island he was about to step upon was in a state of arrested development. Despite its strategic location in the center of the Mediterranean, on the eve of the Muslim conquest Sicily was a stagnant Byzantine frontier², governed from a great distance, heavily taxed and politically brittle. It would not remain so for long.

A Scholar’s Formation

Asad ibn al-Furat ibn Sinan was born in 759 CE/144 AH in Harran in Upper Mesopotamia. He moved west as a child to Ifriqiya, where Kairouan (in modern day Tunisia) was becoming one of the great intellectual cities of the Islamic world.³

His education was broad; he spent his early years in Kairouan, nearly a decade under the tutelage of the jurist ʿAli ibn Ziyad (also known as Imam al-Tarabulsi).⁴ After exhausting opportunities there, Asad went eastward to Medina to study with Imam al-Tarabulsi’s own teacher – the eminent scholar, faqih and muhaddith, Imam Malik himself.

Asad studied Imam Malik’s Muwatta, one of the earliest collections of hadith (that predates Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim), learning the legal methodology that would define the Maliki school, i.e. reliance upon the established practice of the people of Medina, the city of the Prophet ﷺ, as a living source of authority.

After several years, he traveled east to Iraq to study with leading Hanafi scholars, including students of Imam Abu Hanifa such as Qadi Abu Yusuf and Muhammad al-Shaybani.⁵ This move could be attributed to a number of reasons: Baghdad was then the intellectual heartland of the Abbassids, and he was drawn to the ra’y (reason-based)⁶ approach associated with Hanafi jurisprudence. In one narration, Asad, fond of hypotheticals and questions, was eventually told by Imam Malik, “If you love raʾy, then go to Iraq.”⁷

Asad’s rise to prominence in the scholarly circles of Iraq began through an encounter with Qadi Abu Yusuf, who noticed Asad when he correctly responded to a legal question he had raised with Imam Malik’s view on the matter.⁸ Abu Yusuf then directed him to the young scholar beside him, Muhammad al-Shaybani. Asad studied with al-Shaybani as a student during the day, and private classes at night. He went on to accompany al-Shaybani to Mecca, later recalling that he would ask him questions constantly, sometimes even interrupting his prayer.⁹

Famously, the news of Imam Malik’s passing (ra) reached Asad while he was with Imam al-Shaybani. Al-Shaybani reportedly exclaimed, “What a great calamity! Malik ibn Anas has died, the Commander of the Believers in hadith has died.”¹⁰ As the news spread through the mosque, people were overcome with grief. Following Imam Malik’s death, Asad departed for Egypt where Imam Malik’s foremost students were gathered, to study with them.¹¹

This history and diverse education made Asad a somewhat unusual student, with roots both in Medina and Iraq. While he did engage seriously with Hanafi jurisprudence and helped transmit some of its methods to Ifriqiya, Asad’s scholarly legacy lies in the consolidation of Maliki jurisprudence.¹² In Egypt, he brought legal questions to Ibn al-Qasim, one of Imam Malik’s top students. Unlike some other Malikis there who limited themselves to transmitting reports, Ibn al-Qasim answered Asad’s probing legal questions, so much so that Asad is said to have declared publicly, “Malik ibn Anas has passed, so this is Malik ibn Anas.”¹³ From these question-and-answer sessions, Asad compiled a large body of legal material known as the Asadiyya.

Although no extant manuscripts of the Asadiyya survive, its importance lies in its basis for the later Mudawwana. Imam Sahnun, another major student of Ibn al-Qasim, took the Asadiyya back to Egypt and read it back to Ibn al-Qasim, who corrected and refined it resulting in a compendium that became known as the Mudawwana – now one of the foundational books of the Maliki school of jurisprudence.

The Case for War: A Judge’s Ijtihad

Sicily was not an unknown entity to the Muslim world before Asad. Arab-Muslim naval expeditions had probed and raided the coasts since the mid-seventh century under the Companion Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, during the early Umayyad period. The medieval author Al-Harawi even noted the presence of the graves of seven Companions. These encounters, however, were episodic and did not amount to sustained presence.

By the time the question of Sicily entered his life, Asad ibn al-Furat was a statesman and one of two chief qadis under the Aghlabids, a vassal dynasty of the Abbasids¹⁴, and a teacher of both the Hanafi and Maliki schools. Meanwhile, the Aghlabids were looking to establish stability on their northern coast to consolidate control over Ifriqiya, while the Byzantines were stretched thin in managing threats from the Bulgars and Abbasids in Anatolia. In order to protect trade and shipping access to the region, the Aghlabids and the Byzantines had struck a peace treaty in 805 CE and another in 813 CE, permitting trade and operation of ships without harassment along the coast.

In 827 CE, a Byzantine general by the name of Euphemius appealed to the Aghlabid emir Ziyadat Allah I for support. As was common in the medieval Islamic world, political decisions and religious authority were not divorced from one another, thus, the emir presented the matter before the jurists. Questions of war and peace too fell within the domain of Islamic law and required the sanction of qualified legal scholars. Thus, the judges deliberated.

The other chief judge, Abu Muhriz, was against immediate intervention and preferred to proceed cautiously. Asad, however, held that it was justified. His legal reasoning in its favour, as seen in an exchange with Sicilian envoys (that the historian Al-Maqrizi records), was due to the Byzantines’ imprisoning of Muslim merchants – a violation of the treaty.¹⁵ Moreover, true to his use of ijtihād (legal reasoning), he argued that as Muslims were in a position of strength at this time, they ought to seize an opportunity to bring justice to the tumultuous Sicilian state. He cited the following ayah for his reasoning:

وَلَا تَهِنُوا۟ وَلَا تَحْزَنُوا۟ وَأَنتُمُ ٱلْأَعْلَوْنَ إِن كُنتُم مُّؤْمِنِينَ
Do not falter or grieve, for you will have the upper hand, if you are ˹true˺ believers. (3:139)

Asad’s argument was accepted. With the emir’s appointment of Asad as commander, he became the first in Ifriqiya to hold positions both in the judiciary and as a military leader.¹⁶ The appointment seemed to unsettle him; he asked Ziyadat Allah I, that after the years he had spent judging between people in matters of the lawful and unlawful, “will you remove me and appoint me to command?” Ziyadat Allah responded he had not removed him from judgeship, rather he’d added the responsibility of command to it, “and command is more noble than the judgeship.”¹⁷

The Campaign and Siege of Syracuse

In Rabi al-Awwal that year, he led a force of appproximately 10,000 men¹⁸ consisting of Arabs, Amazigh, and Andalusians¹⁹ across the narrow channel from Sousse (in Ifriqiya) to Marsala.²⁰ The alliance with Euphemius was short-lived; he was killed early into the expedition, leaving Asad and his army to press forward. One report also suggests that Asad was careful to keep the Muslim army distinct from Euphemius’ Christian followers, saying that Muslims had no need to depend on their help, but that they should mark themselves so they were not mistaken as adversaries.²¹

Sources about Asad during this time are thin; some eyewitness accounts note his bravery and major victories forcing the Byzantines to retreat to Syracuse despite being heavily outnumbered.²² The expedition was taxing on the Muslims. Hunger grew so severe that the troops reportedly ate horse meat. Some of the men pressed him to return to Ifriqiya but Asad refused, insisting there was still strength among the Muslims. He would carry the banner and read Surah Yasin.²³

What had begun as an intervention in a Byzantine civil dispute transformed into a sustained conquest in stages. The army moved northeast along the coast and defeated a Byzantine force near Mazara del Vallo, and then scored an early victory at the Battle of Trapani river. Asad pivoted south and besieged Syracuse, hoping to take the island’s administrative capital and break Byzantine resistance in one blow.

His hopes did not come to fruition. Syracuse was not conquered until more than fifty years after this initial siege, and Asad himself did not live to see Sicily come under Muslim rule. The biographical tradition places his death in Rabi al-Thani in 828 during the siege, attributing it to disease from sustained wounds.²⁴ Muslim Sicily was decades in the making, with the conquest finally complete in the year 902.

Bal’harm: The Rise of Muslim Palermo

Three centuries of a linguistic, agricultural, cultural, social, religious and political revolution followed the Muslim conquest, in which Sicily was neither wholly North African nor Byzantine, but distinctly its own.

When the Aghlabids conquered Palermo in 831 CE and made it the island’s capital, they changed the name from Panormus to Bal’harm.

Bal’harm grew rapidly from what was a modest town into one of the great cities in the Mediterranean at the time, with its population reaching an estimated 100,000 or more by the 10th century CE. The Byzantine basilica was turned into the city’s central masjid, (which, following the Norman conquest in the 11th century, was converted into a Cathedral using re-purposed material from the masjid). Dozens of smaller mosques were built across the city; the 10th century geographer Ibn Hawqal reportedly saw 300 mosques,²⁵ giving rise to Palermo’s title as the city of mosques.

New markets and amenities of an urbanized life spread across the island. Forty minutes outside Palermo, for example, still stands the Terme di Cefalà Diana, a preserved Arabo-Norman bathhouse (a hammam complex so named because the original structure that the Muslims built was renovated and modified over the following centuries).

Linguistically, Sicily before Muslims was predominantly Byzantine Greek in administration, while older Latin survived in varying degrees. Under the Emirate, Arabic became the predominant language, especially on the western side of the island. However, we would be amiss to call this a replacement of one language by another. Arabic circulated alongside local Romance dialects, Greek, and Hebrew. Christians and Jews preserved their communal languages while operating within an Arabic administrative and commercial system. Over time, this developed into a distinct Sicilian-Arabic (Siculo-Arabic) that is no longer spoken today, though some of its features can still be discerned in its only surviving linguistic descendant, Maltese.

Additionally, Asad’s campaign set an agricultural transformation into motion.²⁶ The Muslims introduced and dramatically expanded the cultivation of crops largely absent from the land under the Byzantines, including cotton, lemons, sugar cane, date palms, pistachios, and new varieties of wheat (importantly, couscous).²⁷ They brought improved irrigation techniques, including underground channels and water-lifting systems suited to Sicily’s land and climate.²⁸ Settlements like Agrigento (Kerkent), Trapani (Ṭarābīnish), and Marsala grew as agricultural and commercial sites with Marsala’s natural harbor, making it a key waypoint in the Aghlabid trade network between Ifriqiya and the Tyrrhenian Coast.

Part of what contributed to this growth was that the conquest of Sicily was not exclusively a military one. From the ninth century onward, Muslim families arrived and settled, mixing with local populations, a significant number of whom accepted Islam. Even the layout of the old medina in Mazara del Vallo is telling, historically consisting of winding lanes and residential clusters in a labyrinth-like pattern around the central masjid. Jewish and Christian communities occupied their own quarters with a degree of internal autonomy²⁹ – a pattern still partially observable in the medina today.

All of this gave rise to a distinct Sicilian character with a nod to North African sensibilities in various aspects of language and culture, including cuisine and architecture. There is an arch still standing in the medina, itself the best preserved and continuously inhabited medieval Islamic urban neighborhood (with its later Norman, Arab-Norman, medieval accretion on top) surviving anywhere in Italy.

Muslims Under Norman Rule

By the time the Normans arrived, and as late as the 1200s, Muslims formed a majority of the island’s population, even occupying positions in the royal court. The new rulers of Sicily incorporated Muslim soldiers, farmers, scholars, bureaucrats etc. into the formation of their own conquest.³⁰ Arabic remained a language of Norman administration alongside Greek and Latin, and the geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi completed his world atlas at the court of Roger II at the latter’s request.³¹

But this too did not last. Worsening relations, ongoing Crusades, sporadic revolts in Sicily, dismantling local Muslim populations over generations through pressure, exclusion from land rights, and eventual exile, culminated in the loss of Sicily’s Muslim community. In 1189 CE, as Crusading fervor intensified across Europe, many of Palermo’s Muslims were massacred. Roman Emperor (then King of Sicily) Frederick II, himself a product of Arabo-Norman court culture, eventually forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Sicilian Muslims to Lucera, a town in the southern peninsular section of the mainland, between the 1220s and 1240s. This community, too, would disappear eighty years later with the Angevins’ conquest, resulting in slaughter, enslavement, and displacement.

What Sicily Tells Us About Europe

Today, Islam is often portrayed as an outside, invading force, with cultures that are alien to Europe. But what is missing from these discussions, is that Europe was not historically the fixed entity that this narrative requires it to be.

As we have seen, Asad ibn al-Furat’s arrival in Sicily was the start of a process that outlived him by four centuries, leaving its mark upon political, social, linguistic, cultural systems within Europe that persist to this day. The Normans who followed, for all their eventual hostility, understood this enough to keep Muslims in their courts and armies, to build in what would become the ‘Arabo-Norman’ style and to govern and trade in Arabic. Sicily forces us to have a more capacious idea of what Europe was historically and is today, and who has contributed towards its making.

At the entrance to the medina in Mazara del Vallo hangs a mural painted in recent years by local students, illustrating the city’s history as they understand it. Notably, it begins with the arrival of Muslims from North Africa.

Footnotes

1. al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ ibn Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī. (1965–1983). Tartīb al-madārik wa-taqrīb al-masālik li-maʿrifat aʿlām madhhab Mālik. Maṭbaʿat Faḍālah. ↩︎
2. Davis-Secord, S.C. (2010), Medieval Sicily and Southern Italy in Recent Historiographical Perspective. History Compass, 8: 61-87. ↩︎
3. Sezgin, F. (1439 AH). Tārīkh al-turāth al-ʿArabī li-Sizkīn: Al-ʿulūm al-sharʿiyya [History of the Arabic heritage according to Sezgin: Religious sciences]. Jāmiʿat al-Imām Muḥammad ibn Suʿūd al-Islāmiyya. ↩︎
4. al-Shaḥūd, ʿA. b. N. (n.d.). Mashāhīr aʿlām al-Muslimīn. ↩︎
5. Sezgin, F. (1439 AH). Tārīkh al-turāth al-ʿArabī li-Sizkīn: Al-ʿulūm al-sharʿiyya [History of the Arabic heritage according to Sezgin: Religious sciences]. Jāmiʿat al-Imām Muḥammad ibn Suʿūd al-Islāmiyya. ↩︎
6. The oft-mentioned contrast between ahl ra’y and ahl hadith is not reason versus revelation, as both used both, but rather a matter of preponderance and evidentiary priority. ↩︎
7. Abū Bakr al-Mālikī. (1994). Riyāḍ al-nufūs fī ṭabaqāt ʿulamāʾ al-Qayrawān wa-Ifrīqiyya (B. al-Bakkūsh, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
8. al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ ibn Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī. (1965–1983). Tartīb al-madārik wa-taqrīb al-masālik li-maʿrifat aʿlām madhhab Mālik. Maṭbaʿat Faḍālah. ↩︎
9. al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ ibn Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī. (1965–1983). Tartīb al-madārik wa-taqrīb al-masālik li-maʿrifat aʿlām madhhab Mālik. Maṭbaʿat Faḍālah. ↩︎
10. Abū Bakr al-Mālikī. (1994). Riyāḍ al-nufūs fī ṭabaqāt ʿulamāʾ al-Qayrawān wa-Ifrīqiyya (B. al-Bakkūsh, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
11. al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ ibn Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī. (1965–1983). Tartīb al-madārik wa-taqrīb al-masālik li-maʿrifat aʿlām madhhab Mālik. Maṭbaʿat Faḍālah. ↩︎
12. al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ ibn Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī. (1965–1983). Tartīb al-madārik wa-taqrīb al-masālik li-maʿrifat aʿlām madhhab Mālik. Maṭbaʿat Faḍālah. ↩︎
13. Abū Bakr al-Mālikī. (1994). Riyāḍ al-nufūs fī ṭabaqāt ʿulamāʾ al-Qayrawān wa-Ifrīqiyya (B. al-Bakkūsh, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
14. Abū Bakr al-Mālikī. (1994). Riyāḍ al-nufūs fī ṭabaqāt ʿulamāʾ al-Qayrawān wa-Ifrīqiyya (B. al-Bakkūsh, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
15. al-Maqrīzī, Taqī al-Dīn. (2006). Al-Muqaffā al-kabīr (M. al-Yaʿlāwī, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
16. Abū Bakr al-Mālikī. (1994). Riyāḍ al-nufūs fī ṭabaqāt ʿulamāʾ al-Qayrawān wa-Ifrīqiyya (B. al-Bakkūsh, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
17. al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ ibn Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī. (1965–1983). Tartīb al-madārik wa-taqrīb al-masālik li-maʿrifat aʿlām madhhab Mālik. Maṭbaʿat Faḍālah. ↩︎
18. Abū Bakr al-Mālikī. (1994). Riyāḍ al-nufūs fī ṭabaqāt ʿulamāʾ al-Qayrawān wa-Ifrīqiyya (B. al-Bakkūsh, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
19. al-Maqrizi notes Andalusians were among the original departing forces from Sousse (this is distinct from the reinforcements sent by the Emirate of Córdoba. There were Andalusians already in Ifriqiya at the time following a largely scholar-led uprising against the Umayyad Emir of Córdoba (Revolt of the Arrabal). ↩︎
20. al-Maqrīzī, Taqī al-Dīn. (2006). Al-Muqaffā al-kabīr (M. al-Yaʿlāwī, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
21. Abū Bakr al-Mālikī. (1994). Riyāḍ al-nufūs fī ṭabaqāt ʿulamāʾ al-Qayrawān wa-Ifrīqiyya (B. al-Bakkūsh, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
22. al-Shaḥūd, ʿA. b. N. (n.d.). Mashāhīr aʿlām al-Muslimīn. ↩︎
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24. Ibn al-ʿArabī, A. B. (1992). Al-Qabas fī sharḥ Muwaṭṭaʾ Mālik b. Anas (M. A. Wuld Karīm, Ed.; 1st ed.). Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. ↩︎
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31.  Pastuch, C. (2022, January). Al-Idrisi’s masterpiece of medieval geography. Library of Congress Blogs – Maps. ↩︎