“He is a child and this land is a borderland of Islam”: Under-Age Rule and the Quest for Political Stability in the Ayyubid Period

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Abstract

Under-age rule started to play a salient role in the central Islamic lands during the late and post-Abbasid periods. The rule of children implied a potential instability which had to be compensated for. Considering the Ayyubid dynasty as an example it can be argued that in this period (1) under-age rule is mainly a non-legal concept, which has to be supplemented by the concepts of ‘independent rule’ and ‘prolonged under-age rule’, (2) under-age rule was taken seriously as a prelude to the following independent rule without regents striving to instrumentalise the under-age ruler for their own quest for power, (3) the uneven distribution of under-age rule among the Ayyubid principalities can be explained by the period’s flexible system of succession.