ADMINISTRATION
discretion whose real assignment was to discover what kind of general
Belisarios was.^223
References to such trust in early Islamic contexts emphasize the
discretion of close advisors, especially in aphorisms ascribed to Mu'iiwiya
and Ziyad.^224 An amusing anecdote relates how Ziyad was deliberately
misled by one of his "trustworthy" men (Ar. rajulan min thiqatihi) in
a personal matter, while al-Hajjaj considered 'Urwa ibn az-Zubayr
to be a thiqa of the Commander of the Faithful because of his complete
lack of political self-interest.^225
This outlook contributed to the use of official and unofficial in-
formers for reporting the misdeeds of officials and for detecting se-
dition, a practice that dates back at least to the Assyrian empire. Their
degree of official status ranged from that of ordinary subjects who
offered unsolicited information, to those who were encouraged to do
so by the offer of rewards, to merchants, peddlers, travelers, beggars,
and old women who were paid to be spies and informers, and to the
professional information officers who maintained surveillance for the
ruler. These traditions were represented by a body of city informers
(Syr. shartri) at Edessa in the fourth century A.D.^226 Sasanian royal
informers were required to be trustworthy and to possess all of the
religious and ethical virtues that would ensure their reliability; no order
was to be given in a matter without verification of the facts in the
case by the informers.^227 The information officers (Ar. a§~ab al-akh-
bar) of Shiroe were probably such officials.m
In theory, the responsibility of his confidantes to keep the monarch
informed was extended to administrative ethics as a whole and it was
the duty of a bureaucratic official to make the head of his department
aware of what was going on (literally "letting the curtain fall from
him"), to name those who slandered him, and to reveal secrets to
223 Prokopios, Wars, H. xv. 35; xxi. 1. He also describes a certain George, who
arranged the surrender of a Persian garrison for Belisarios in 541, as a man of the
greatest discretion with whom Belisarios shared his secrets (Wars, n. xix. 22-23).
224Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi, 'Iqd, V, 6; Ibn Qutayba, 'Uyun, I, 29.
225 Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi, 'Iqd, H, 469-70; V, 45.
226 F. C. Burkitt, Euphemia and the Goth (London, 1913), pp. 113, 116-17, 173-
- For a general treatment of surveillance, communications, and spying in ancient and
medieval history, see F. Dvornik, Origins of Intelligence Services: The Ancient Near
East, Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Arab Muslim Empires (New Brunswick,
N.]., 1974).
227 Boyce, Tansar, p. 50.
228 Tha'alibi, Ghurar, p. 725.
