This whole book is, in a sense, about epistolary protocol. The study of the culture of letter-writing in the Islamic Middle period could have gone in many different directions. This work has not placed much focus on the metalinguistic details of letter-writing, such as the spacing requirements for specific aspects of a given epistle, even though those details are in themselves fascinating and important, but some reference will be made to them later in this chapter. What should have become clear so far, however, is that the secretaries spared no detail in setting the parameters, codes and protocol for epistolary composition. In this final chapter I am going to focus on two things. The first is to look in much more detail at two elements of letter-writing which were emphasised by the secretaries. These were the salutation and the honorifics. The chapter will be concluded by a brief, but necessary, illustration of two very different types of letter to give the reader a further indication of how a letter was constructed and on what theoretical bases.

At the end of the previous chapter I mentioned the importance of text and context in all aspects of Islamic letter-writing. The du‘ā’ section of a letter was, together with the honorifics, possibly the most important example of how text and context combined to maximum effect. This point was expressed clearly by Ibn Ḫalaf in his Mawādd al-Bayān: ‘the invocations must prove the objectives of the letter … If the epistle is on the subject of mourning the invocation should be derived from the description of it’.