Somehow I missed Jeremy Johns' excellent article on the Palermo Koran, as I was (perfunctorily) researching the Maliki takeover of Spain. The same madhhab - actually a cult, out West - took over Sicily. It happens both Spain and Sicily were taken from the same place, North Africa; and back "home", the locals might not have been so quick to shift.
Hallmarks of the Malikiya were the Warsh Qurân of the Madina... and the dogma that this be ghayr makhlûq / laysa bi-makhlûqin. The Qurân if Divinely-created is a Thing; suras 6 and 13 hail God as creator of everything. If this text is not Created, then the Qurân is inextricable from Him.
This MS's ghayr rejects a "heresy" as assuredly as the Dome rejected shirk, there and then the local Melkite Christianity. That 'Abbâsî-era heresy had been the Mutazila of caliphs Ma'mun and Vathek. Johns teaches us that when al-Mutawakkil overturned this policy, the Aghlâbid vicegerency out West kept it on. Their mosques did not include ghayr makhlûq.
But the (Warsh) codices of the Malikiya, like the Palermo MS, injected it. It also appears that, as in Spain, some amirs bowed to them.
The locals - looking at Berbers especially, who still had some Haruris out in the bush, but also leftover Christians - interpreted the Malikiya as totalitarian tyranny, which it was. But in Islam exists a third option. Where Sunnis like the Aghlâbids are suasible to Sunni arguments, the Shî'a are not. Some Africans rallied around one such sect, led by a selfproclaimed descendate of Imam Ismail (not counted as Imam by most Shî'a today). These "Fatimids" (Ibn Khaldûn considered them frauds) attacked the North African cities and, er, won. Then they took Egypt.
The Shî'a regime couldn't take Spain (which simply raised their Umayyads back into the caliphate) and it seems they didn't have Sicily either.
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