This paper discusses the succession ceremony organized by Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn in 270/884 for his son and heir, Khumārawayh, as described by Egyptian Arabic sources, notably Sīrat Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn of al-Balawī, an underutilized text for Abbasid history. The paper considers three overlapping questions. First, how should the accounts be read, as “representational” or, alternatively, as prescriptive, thus of a piece with elements of the Mirror for Princes literature? Second, were Ṭūlūnid networks of loyalty and dependence solely reliant on material inducements or did individuals invest themselves in the Egyptian regime beyond the point of self-interest? The question goes to the problem of material vs. emotional ties of dependency. And, third, was Ibn Ṭūlūn successful in creating a lasting power base? The question goes to the extent to which his contemporaries signed on to his “project” of redefining relations with the Abbasid center.

This article addresses conversion and its consequences for a Bactrian family known as the Mir family during the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. It explains the social, legal, and economic ties that bound this Bactrian family, and the problems created within the family after a member of it converted to Islam. Based on a systematic analysis of a group of Bactrian and Arabic documents issued for the members of this family by the local Bactrian and Muslim authorities, this article will show the centrality of the ‘household’ in the Bactrian society and the changes that occurred in it after the arrival of Islam. It argues that conversion to Islam seriously affected this family and eventually dismantled it. Although conversion did not remove the kinship within the household, it ended cohabitation and joint ownership, which were central social elements in the Bactrian law that kept the household together.

The present study examines three aspects of the political and military behavior of the general public, and more specifically that of the Ḥanābila, between 311/923 to 323/935. During those twelve years the Abbasid caliphs lost control of large parts of their empire, and their capital, Baghdad, witnessed increasing chaos. The first aspect that is examined is how the inhabitants of Iraq reacted to the Qarāmiṭa attacks. The second focuses on the Ḥanābila’s behavior during that period and the distinct mark they left on Baghdadi politics. The third looks at the way in which the ruling elite confronted the Ḥanābila. These three perspectives tell part of the story of the unravelling of the socio-political commitments in Baghdad, and the role played by the general populace, and in particular, by the Ḥanābila, in the undoing of its social cohesion.

This paper aims to present a general overview of the distribution of Byzantine and Early Islamic ceramics (mostly amphorae, but also some examples of fine table wares and coarse wares) on Sicily between approximately the seventh/eighth and the eleventh centuries CE. The focus will range from pottery finds found in some sites on the island, which were still part of the Byzantine Empire, to wares excavated at other sites which became part of the Emirate of Sicily. Comparison between the ceramics found in these different parts of the island will shed new light on the trade and exchange patterns of such commodities in this period.

This paper analyses the role of emotive appeals in official Umayyad and Abbasid documents that have some persuasive function. The documents all represent power hierarchies in which one party is subject to the other’s authority. Whether they are higher or lower in the social hierarchy, the authors seek to get what they want by invoking a bond beyond the mere utilitarian. Sometimes affectionate language is used, but more frequently they speak of piety and moral goodness. This paper argues that, by invoking a shared notion of pious morality and godliness, the authors seek to create an emotional bond between people in different places in the social hierarchy. This enables us to nuance our understanding of medieval Islamic governance beyond brute power and coercion, or mere economic justice. Rather, the notion of justice also involved moral goodness, goodwill, affection, loyalty, and willing compliance with one’s role, either as a patron or a protégé.

This chapter discusses the role of Christian churchmen in the credit business and, more broadly, in creating ties of indebtedness in the early Islamic empire. With the help of a multilingual corpus of papyri from the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods, it wishes to contribute to a broader conversation about historical expressions of indebtedness in the premodern Middle East, sustained by anthropological literature on the “debt–credit nexus.” It points to the versatility and multilingualism of early Islamicate documents about debt and to their relation to a wide range of activities, going beyond impoverishment due to high taxation.

Urban structure and interpersonal networks are frequently linked. This chapter draws on the very fine-grained information on the Islamic garrison town of Kufa during the seventh century to exemplarily reconstruct the urban structure and material environment of the quarter of Kinda. Due to the focus of the extant narratives, the discussion is centered on periods of civil strife in which Kufa and the quarter of Kinda were involved. By combining information on the spatial configuration of the quarter of Kinda with narratives describing the involvement of Kindī multipliers in the social history of Kufa, this contribution suggests a reconstruction of the different types of social, urban, and economic capital available to interpersonal multipliers across the first three generations of Islam.

This chapter looks at the different ways in which a free person might come to forfeit their freedom in the late antique and early Islamic Middle East. Although frowned upon and theoretically illegal, free persons might opt, due to extreme poverty or privation, to sell themselves or their family, offering their labor in return for basic sustenance. Otherwise, loss of free status might occur due to a debt default, which, if the sale of a debtor’s assets realized insufficient credit, could see them being forced to work to pay off what they owed. This solution was common in the fouth–eighth centuries, but by the ninth century it was increasingly deemed unacceptable. This chapter considers what led to this shift in legal thinking, the degree to which Islamic law continued late antique practice and the nature of this continuity.

In early Islamic Egypt, “Arab-style” Greek (and later Coptic) letters employing religiously neutral monotheistic formularies were sent in the name of Muslim officials to Christian administrators. By analyzing old and new evidence of Egyptian Christians using this epistolary template, this paper argues that in the first decades of Arab rule, probably only a few beneficiaries of the new regime employed the “Arab-style” prescript in their letters written to other Christians to demonstrate their close connection to the new government and thus their social standing. Later, however, the “Arab-style” prescript became commonplace in communication between Christians and Muslims and among Christians only in everyday life. Thus, the religiously neutral template created by the conquerors for official top–down communication became a mechanism for facilitating not only the smooth functioning of administrative structures, but also, in the long run, the social cohesion of Christians and Muslims.

In this chapter, a corpus of letters extracted from Imami Shiʿi hadith reports is analyzed to provide an overview of the system of imamic epistolary communications between imam and community members in Imami Shiʿism of the ninth century CE. The mechanisms by which letters reached the community are analyzed, including the mediation of agents (wakīl) of the imams. In particular, circular letters are looked at as illustrative of the ways in which the imam attempted to reach sections of his community beyond specific individuals, and the ways that these illuminate the distinctive aspects of Shiʿi community organization. The letters analyzed here indicate the existence of a relatively complex organizational web in the Imami Shiʿi community, whose efficacy was greatly dependent upon the trustworthiness of the individuals representing the claims of the imam to the constituencies in which they were embedded.

This study explores a cluster of six letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza written by a Jewish father from Alexandria in the first half of the thirteenth century. The writer’s son ran away from home, abandoned the family shop and overall behaved in a way unbecoming for a young middle-class Jewish man. This study uses this little-studied cluster of documents to examine the ties that bound a young Jewish man to his family and community, including exchange of letters, economic considerations, familial bonds and religious expectations. The father’s letters offer a case study for approaching social ties and cultural expectations as dynamic and ongoing work performed by specific agents. The letters are useful for recovering an urban middle-class conception of masculinity prevalent in the medieval Islamic world that emphasized belonging to social networks and required men to uphold their responsibilities to those dependent upon them.

In Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt, stratiōtai, symmachoi (arab. simāmika), apostolai, boukellarioi or beredarioi took over the function of messengers, collectors or guardians of the transport of taxes. This paper analyses the socio‐economic role of these intermediaries in the tax system of the early Islamic Empire and discusses a possible development from mere carriers to more independent players within this mechanism. At the beginning of Islamic rule, taxes in Egypt had been forwarded by armed messengers, possibly remnants of the Byzantine soldiers who safeguarded private estates. By the beginning of the eighth century we see more autonomous individuals who needed to be kept in check. Even though these agents may have only been small cogs in a larger machinery, they were functionally necessary for the effective operation of the entire economic, social and political system.