Mujāhid al-‘Āmirī

Abu ʾl-Jaysh Mujāhid ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿĀmirī, surnamed al-Muwaffaḳ (died AD 1044/5 [AH 436]), was the ruler of Dénia and the Balearic Islands from late 1014 (early AH 405) until his death. With the exception of his early and disastrous invasion of Sardinia, his reign was mostly peaceful. His court became a centre of scholarship and literary production and he himself wrote a book about poetry (now lost).

Origins and rise Mujāhid was a ṣaḳlabī, a slave of Slavic origin. His patronymic, Ibn ʿAbd Allāh, does not refer to his actual father. He was purchased and converted to Islam by the ḥājib al-Manṣūr, who also had him educated. He may have served as governor of Dénia under al-Manṣūr's sons after 1002. After the death of al-Manṣūr's second son, Sanchuelo, in March 1009, he took control of Dénia. Within a few years he had set up his own rival puppet caliph, al-Muʿayṭī.

In AH 410 (1019–20), Mujāhid became co-ruler of the taifa of Valencia alongside Labīb al-Fatā al-Ṣaqlabī. This arrangement only lasted until AH 411 (1020–21), when Labīb was forced to leave Valencia and return to Tortosa. Soon after this, Mujāhid was replaced by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Abī ʿĀmir as the ruler of Valencia.

In 1033, Abu ʾl-Ḳāsim, the ruler of Seville, put forward an impostor claiming he was the caliph Hishām II, who had actually died in 1013. Mujāhid accepted the nominal authority of the fake Hishām II, probably as part of a series of marital alliances with the Abbadid dynasty ruling Seville.

The peace of his reign was broken only towards the end of his life, when he temporarily occupied Murcia and also became preoccupied by a dispute with his younger son, Ḥasan. He was succeeded by ʿAlī, who continued to make the court of Dénia a centre of culture.

Patronage of scholarship Mujāhid was a patron of theological and literary studies, especially of qirāʾāt (recitation). His interest in this last practice may have stemmed from his name, since one of the most influential students of qirāʾāt was Ibn Mujāhid (died 936).

Ibn Gharsiya and Ibn Burd al-Aṣghar are known to have composed works at Mujāhid's court. Ibn Gharsiya's famous risāla (treatise) on the shuʿūbiyya (non-Arab nations), criticising Arab ascendancy in Spain and praising non-Arabs, like Berbers and Slavs, was written there. Ibn Burd dedicated his Risālat al-Sayf wa ʾl-ḳalam to Mujāhid and is known to have composed other works at Dénia and elsewhere under Mujāhid's patronage. The polymath Ibn Ḥazm and the jurist Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr are also known spent time at his court.

Mujāhid himself wrote a now lost work on ʿarūḍ (Arabic metre).