Policing Baghdad: Space, Subordinate Agents, and Bureaucratic Paperwork in Early Abbasid Iraq

Abstract Most studies of the Abbasid shurṭa in Iraq focus on the institution’s military leadership, overshadowing its subordinate agents—ordinary policemen ( shuraṭ ), guards ( ḥurrās ), and clerks ( ʿurrāḍ )—whose daily actions sustained the apparatus of policing and state control. These figures rarely appear in historical sources, and when they do, their presence is fleeting, often reduced to single words or short phrases. One important exception is the Risālat siyāsat al-mulūk (Anonymous ms., Haci Mahmud Effendi 2041, Istanbul), a late third/ninth-century administrative manual that devotes an entire section to the shurṭa and its auxiliary staff. This paper argues that reconstructing the daily routine of the Abbasid police requires not only assembling fragmentary evidence but also shifting the methodological lens—from elite narratives to a micro-level reading of bureaucratic practices. In doing so, it challenges the notion, famously articulated by Michel Foucault, that such minor agents are faceless machinists of power. Instead, by examining chronicles, biographical dictionaries, mirrors for princes, and administrative treatises, this study recovers the spatial, social, and archival dimensions of subordinate police work in both urban and rural Iraq during the early Abbasid period. It shows how the internal organisation of the police mirrored the geography of state control and how the bureaucratisation of policing shaped interactions between the state and society.