Shurá¹Âa (, from Latin cohors) is the common Arabic term for police. Its literal meaning is that of a "picked" or elite force. The shurá¹Âa or police force were established in the early days of the Caliphate, perhaps as early as the caliphate of Uthman (644âÂÂ656). In the Umayyad and the Abbasid Caliphates, the shurá¹Âa had considerable power, and its head, the á¹£ÃÂḥib al-shurá¹Âa (), was an important official, whether at the provincial level or in the central government.
The duties of the shurá¹Âa varied with time and place: it was primarily a police or the secret police and internal security force and also had judicial functions, but it could also be entrusted with suppressing brigandage, enforcing the ḥisbah, customs and tax duties, rubbish collection, acting as a bodyguard for governors, etc.
In the Abbasid East, the chief of police also supervised the prison system. Shurá¹Âa is one of the secret police agencies and officials of the Abbasid caliphs which was headquartered in Baghdad in the 8th and 9th centuries.
From the 10th century, the importance of the shurá¹Âa declined, along with the power of the central government: the army, now dominated by foreign military castes (ghilmÃÂn or mamÃÂlëk), assumed the internal security role, and the cities regained a measure of self-government and appropriated the more local tasks of the shurá¹Âa such as that of the night watch.