This paper will use key passages from the Siyāsat nāmeh of the Seljuqs’ vizier Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 485/1092) and the Sirāj al-mulūk of the itinerant Andalusian scholar al-Ṭurṭūshī (d. 520/1126) to identify a turning point in the history of Muslim/non-Muslim relations in the Middle East around the turn of the 6th/12th century. Both works set forth detailed prescriptions for the conduct of political elites; they are, in other words, examples of advice literature (naṣīḥa), a genre well established in Persian and Arabic by their day. Both also contain a substantial measure of polemic against non-Muslim “dhimmīs,” and in this they depart markedly from the precedent of earlier advice literature. Al-Ṭurṭūshī’s Sirāj was in fact long (though erroneously) believed to be the earliest source that contains the so-called “Pact of ‘Umar.” This new marriage of advice and polemic, I will argue, signalled a novel configuration of power between Sunni ulema and foreign military rulers in the Early Middle Period. Yet rather than proceeding to the well worn narrative of a doctrinally centered “Sunni revival,” the Counter-Crusade, the Mongol invasions, and their combined effects on the non-Muslims of the Middle East, I would like to propose an alternative account according to which the most important structural factors in the marginalization of non-Muslims during the later Middle Periods were already incipient at the dawn of the 6th/12th century. Specifically, the diminution of caliphal authority and the advent of a new kind of regional military-patronage ruler (represented by the powerful vizier-kings of the Fatimid caliphs and the Seljuq sultans themselves) offered an opportunity to learned Sunnis such as Niẓām al-Mulk and al-Ṭurṭūshī. They responded by recommending their own ideologies and services to those rulers, who, they feared, might otherwise continue to prefer Shi‘ite and non-Muslim advisers and secretaries. Non-Muslims were, in other words, both a convenient “other” and real competitors for economic and symbolic resources. The previously scattered and marginal "dhimma discourse" that Niẓām al-Mulk and al-Ṭurṭūshī pressed into service in their respective advice works functioned as an instrument of competition, but was subsequently fused to the Sunni tradition as mainstream teaching. The fact that the project succeeded—and that in following centuries Sunni ulema were employed and patronized through such novel institutions as the madrasa—had major repercussions for the course of communal relations in the Middle East.