Contents

pp v-vi

List of Illustrations

pp vii-ix

List of Tables

pp x-x

List of Contributors

pp xi-xiv

Notes on Transliteration, Place Names, Dates, Editions, and Translations

pp xv-xv

Acknowledgments

pp xvi-xvi

Introduction: The Ties that Bound the Societies of the Islamic Empire

pp 1-26

Part I - Personal ties

pp 27-28

1 - Ties of Unfreedom in Late Antiquity and Early Islam: Debt, Dependency and the Origins of Islamic Law

pp 29-59

2 - The Local Clergy and “Ties of Indebtedness” in Abbasid Egypt: Some Reflections on Studying Credit and Debt in Early Islamicate Societies

pp 60-104

3 - ‘Return to God and the Brotherhood of Good and Excellent People’: Bringing the Prodigal Son Back Home in Ayyubid Egypt

pp 105-126

4 - Aloneness as Connector in Arabic Papyrus Letters of Request

pp 127-149

5 - Swearing Abū al-Jaysh into Office: The Loyalties of Ṭūlūnid Egypt

pp 150-172

Part II - Institutions

pp 173-174

6 - Messengers in Byzantine and Early Muslim Egypt: Small Cogs, but Systemically Relevant. With Some Remarks on the Dossier of Menas, Stratiōtēs

pp 175-205

7 - The Epistolary Imamate: Circular Letters in the Administration of the Shiʿi Community

pp 206-231

8 - Early Arabic Decrees on Papyrus from the Abbasid Period

pp 232-257

9 - A State Letter from a Marwanid Caliph to his Governor of Iraq: A Historiographical Investigation into Khālid b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Qasrī’s Downfall

pp 258-296

10 - Between the Arabs and the Turks: Household, Conversion and Power Dynamics in Early Islamic Bactria

pp 297-326

11 - Emotion in Early Islamic Social Hierarchies: Affection, Threats, and Appeals to Piety in Official Documents from the Umayyad and Abbasid Periods

pp 327-350

Part III - Communities

pp 351-352

12 - Local Elites during Two Periods of Civil Strife: Al-Ashʿath b. Qays, Muḥammad b. al-Ashʿath, and the Quarter of Kinda in Seventh-Century Kufa

pp 353-380

13 - Rulers, Ḥanābila, and Shiʿis: The Unravelling Social Cohesion of Fourth/Tenth-Century Baghdad

pp 381-400

14 - Resistance to and Acceptance of the Fatimids in North Africa: A Shiʿi Dynasty in Negotiation with Both Adherents and Enemies

pp 401-422

15 - Boundaries That Bind? Pagan and Christian Arabs between Syriac and Islamic Strategies of Distinction (Late First Century AH)

pp 423-465

16 - “Peace Be upon You”: Arabic Greetings in Greek and Coptic Letters Written by Christians in Early Islamic Egypt

pp 466-480

17 - Tied to Two Empires: The Material Evidence of the Islamic Conquest of Sicily

pp 481-512

Index

pp 513-522