Section: The Vizierate of Execution

the officeholder, and then his dismissal is obligatory. And after dismissing him the vizier stands between two choices: either to appoint the one who made the offer, or to appoint another of the competent men. The second division: that its ground is the surplus competence of the one who made the offer, in which case he must be dismissed in favour of that man and no other. The third division: that its cause is the oppression of the one who made the offer and his rashness; then it is not permissible in governance either to dismiss the officeholder or to bring the offerer near, for it may be that one who resisted dismissal inclined toward the increase, and so the one was dismissed and the other appointed, and he became himself the oppressor who plays at hazard.

The eighth aspect is that its cause is that the officeholder is a trustee (muʼtaman) while a guarantor (ḍāmin) solicits his office; but the farming out of offices under guarantee (taḍmīn al-aʻmāl) falls outside the canons of just governance, because the man entrusted with them, if he is competent, exacts in full what is due and refrains from what is not due, and this is justice. As for the guarantor: if he guarantees them at the like of their yield (irtifāʻ), it has no effect; and if he guarantees them at more than that, he rules arbitrarily in his office and is left between oppression and flight, as though he had given his guarantee in order to gain and not in order to pay out. It is related that al-Maʼmūn resolved upon farming out the Sawād under guarantee, and with him was the judge ʻUbayd Allāh ibn al-Ḥasan al-ʻAnbarī, who said to him: Commander of the Faithful, God the Exalted has handed it over to you as a trust; do not let it out of your hand as a tax-farm (qibālah). And so he turned aside from the guarantee

This, then, is the detailed account of what pertains to the vizierate of delegation (wizārat al-tafwīḍ): of contracting and dissolving, of appointment and of dismissal.

Section

(The Vizierate of Execution)

As for the vizierate of execution (wizārat al-tanfīdh): it is the more particular, since it falls short of what the vizierate of delegation comprises, and since out of the generality of delegation it is confined to four canons (qawānīn):

The first section among its canons is the envoyship (sifārah) between the king and the people of his realm; for the king is magnified by the screen (ḥijāb) and kept from the direct exchange of address, and this requires that he have his own decorous envoy and a vizier held in honour, who is obeyed in the commands and prohibitions he conveys from him and feared in the requests and petitions he carries to him, so that he may be for the king a speaking tongue and a hearing ear.