Divan
A divan or diwan (Persian: دیوان, dīvān; from Sumerian dub, clay tablet)[1] was a high government ministry in various Islamic states, or its chief official (see dewan).
The word, recorded in English since 1586, meaning "Oriental council of a state", comes from Turkish divan, from Persian دیوان (dêvân).
The modern French, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian words douane, aduana, and dogana, respectively (meaning "customs house"), also come from diwan.
It comprised the names of the warriors of Medina who participated in the Muslim conquests and their families, and was intended to facilitate the payment of salary (ʿaṭāʾ, in coin or in rations) to them, according to their service and their relationship to Muhammad.
[8] Under Caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), the practices of the various departments began to be standardized and Arabized: instead of the local languages (Greek in Syria, Coptic and Greek in Egypt, Persian in the former Sasanian lands) and the traditional practices of book-keeping, seals and time-keeping, only Arabic and the Islamic calendar were to be used henceforth.
[8] The treasury department (bayt al-māl or dīwān al-sāmī) kept the records of revenue and expenditure, both in money and in kind, with specialized dīwāns for each category of the latter (e.g. cereals, cloth, etc.).
Its secretary had to mark all orders of payment to make them valid, and it drew up monthly and yearly balance sheets.
[8] At the same time, the various zimām bureaux were combined into a single dīwān al-zimām which re-checked all assessments, payments and receipts against its own records and, according to the 11th-century scholar al-Mawardi, was the "guardian of the rights of bayt al-māl [the treasury] and the people".
[6] Ya'qub al-Saffar (r. 867–879), the founder of the Saffarid dynasty who supplanted the Tahirids, is known to have had a bureau of the army (dīwān al-ʿarḍ) for keeping the lists and supervising the payment of the troops, at his capital Zarang.
As a result, the army department was of particular importance, and its head, the ʿariḍ al-jaysh, is frequently mentioned in the sources of the period.
Under Adud al-Dawla (r. 978–983), however, the dīwān al-sawād, which oversaw the rich lands of lower Iraq, was moved from Baghdad to Shiraz.
In addition, a dīwān al-khilāfa was established to oversee the affairs of the Abbasid caliphs, who continued to reside in Baghdad as puppets of the Buyid emirs.
[12] The Great Seljuks tended to cherish their nomadic origins, with their sultans leading a peripatetic court to their various capitals.
The sultan provided the pasha with a corps of Janissaries, which was in turn divided into a number of companies under the command of a junior officer or Bey.
