The great Mamluk era expert on chancery practice and the author of the monumental Subh al-a’sha’, al-Qalqashandi, comments favorably on the Fatimid chancery, noting that it was one of the earliest in Islam. He obviously knew of others before it but appears to mean here that the Fatimids were the first to create a formal bureau of government precisely for this purpose. A history of the Fatimid chancery has as yet not been written although the material for it is abundant. Its work is often mentioned explicitly in the historic chronicles, perhaps more often in fact than any other single bureau of government. Two treatises by members of the diwan al-insha’—Ibn Khalaf’s Mawadd al-bayan and al-Sayrafi’s al-Qanun diwan al-rasa’il—survive. Names of heads of the bureau are often given in the sources, frequently in association with this or that decree which the person in question composed. Examples of a full range of chancery products exist, many copied by al-Qalqashandi himself as illustrations of how to write a particular type of document (for examples: letters to a foreign power or decrees of appointment to office). In all we have perhaps as many as 300 examples. Prominent experts working in the Fatimid chancery were often not Ismaili, and more than a few not even Muslim. Yet seemingly any of them could at will draft a text that conformed to the religious doctrines supporting the Ismaili imamate, that expressed the wishes and policies of the Fatimid state, and yet that sounded fairly normal and uncontroversial, thus avoiding arousing enmity needlessly. In short the skill of the clerks was impressively adaptive to the needs of both politics and religion.