This work presents an explanation of how and why slave soldiers came to be a central feature of the Muslim polity. The conceptual framework in which the explanation is set is that of Hagarism, and to the extent that the crux of the explanation has already appeared there, this work maybe regarded as simply an overextended footnote. There is, however, one respect in which the two works differ radically; for where Hagarism rejected the Islamic tradition, the present work is squarely based upon it.

This apparent lack of historiographical morality may meet with some disapproval, but it arises from the nature of Islamic historiography itself. Whereas the religious tradition is such that it must be accepted or rejected in toto, the secular tradition can to some extent be taken to pieces, and though a great deal of it has to be discarded, there remains enough for a coherent historical account. Before going on to the subject of this book, it is worth lending substance to this claim.

Muslim knowledge of the Muslim past was transmitted orally for about a century and a half. Whatever the attitude to the permissibility of writing history, little history was actually written until the late Umayyad period, and the first historical works proper were only composed in early ʻAbbāsid Iraq.’ The fact that history was transmitted orally does not, of course, in itself mean that it was transmitted unreliably.