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.

Recent scholarship on Jews in the medieval Islamic world has upended ideas about dhimmī “communal autonomy” that held sway for much of the twentieth century, emphasizing instead that Jews of all social strata participated extensively in the political culture of the Islamic states under which they lived: communal leaders and non-elites alike maintained patronage relationships with Islamic officials, used Islamic qāḍī and state (maẓālim) courts, and related to each other using recognizably Islamicate conventions. This shift has emerged largely through study of documents preserved in the Cairo Geniza (produced mainly in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria, c. 1000-1250), and has in turn helped explain many aspects of these documents overlooked by older models. At the same time, it brings into question aspects of Jewish communal life that once seemed self-evident. If Jewish communities did not operate as hermetically sealed hierarchies, what held them together as relatively cohesive social groups? How did Jewish communal leaders cultivate and maintain loyalty? How did they exert authority given their lack of access to hard coercive powers? And why did Jews who could and did freely use Islamic legal venues nonetheless consistently choose to litigate arguments and document transactions in Jewish courts as well? This paper will approach these questions in the context of legal practice in rabbinic courts. I will argue that among other factors, Jewish judges and scribes drew authority and prestige from a set of notions about religious law shared broadly throughout the Islamic Middle East in the “Middle Periods,” although their implications for non-Muslims never became an explicit focus of Islamic legal or political thought. The first half of the paper will use anecdotal evidence from the Geniza to consider how these ideas shaped Fatimid and Ayyubid officials’ stance towards Jewish courts; in the second half, I will consider Geniza legal documents’ forms and formulae as evidence for their impact on Jewish officials’ own self-presentation.

Since its designation as the capital of the great Macedonian empire, bearing the name of its tragically ambitious ruler, Alexandria was regarded as a multicultural node. Located on the delta of the Nile River, in the southeast shore of the Mediterranean Sea, Alexandria was on the very crossroad of various global trade routes, home to markets of luxury goods and exotic spices, but also of manuscripts and books in various languages. Indeed, narratives that go back to antiquity celebrate the city’s cosmopolitan quality, envisioning that its temperate climate of pleasant habitability attracted both merchants and thinkers from the four corners of the earth. In the late Middle Ages, furthermore, this was not merely a metaphor reflecting imperial aspirations, but a reality; the city, under the firm rule of the Mamluk regime, came to house a number of exceptionally vibrant communities. Christians (Copts, Venetians, and Pizans) and Jews of various backgrounds shared an urban space with their Muslim neighbors and rulers. In recent years, in fact, Alexandria has been the subject of a number of studies that sought to reflect on the nature of the relations between its non-Muslim inhabitants and the Muslim regime. These studies, however, based primarily on a legal source-base and conceptual framework, share an implicit conviction that trade functioned as the sole principle which both regulated, and made possible, contact between various communities that, on the face of it, nurtured opposing, at times competing, worldviews. This paper, in contrast, turns to works in verse and prose, in Arabic and Romance, in order to consider how the various groups in Alexandria came to conceptualize their mutual entanglement as well as their religious and political identities. It argues that authors came increasingly to map their cultural and literary stakes, as well as their claims for hierarchical power and sacral sovereignty, on articulations of multilingualism. They, furthermore, mapped these articulations on a Mediterranean space characterized by measures of interconnectivity and mobility. For authors in late medieval Alexandria the Mediterranean, as a zone of mutual intelligibility, increasingly emerged not only as a literary trope in works of fiction, but also as a hermeneutic strategy through which they conveyed claims about their own geographic, political, and literary traditions. This approach to the study of the interactions between the various groups in Alexandria may contribute to a collective attempt to revisit outdated conceptions regarding the attitude toward dhimmis in medieval Islamic societies.

The medieval Middle East is distinctive in world history for the number of literate classes and scribal traditions which were simultaneously present in the same geographical era. Muslim ʿulamāʾ, Jewish rabbis, and Christian clergy read philosophical texts together or traded polemical treatises, and the literate physicians and merchants were drawn from multiple religious communities. Yet the scholarly history of this society has often been written from the perspective of the ʿulamāʾ, and has therefore developed a bipolar model of society according to which secular authority is vested in Muslim military rulers and cultural capital is held by the learned Islamic religious leaders, what Marshall Hodgson termed the “ayan / amir system.” This model owes much to analogies drawn from medieval European dynamics of Church and State, yet it ignores the fact that powerful non-Muslims remained important social leaders in many parts of the Middle East throughout the Middle Periods. The social functions of prominent non-Muslims, and their political relationships with Muslim elites, are poorly understood. This paper explores the mutual dependence of Muslim and Christian elites in eastern Anatolia and the Jazīra in the post-Mongol period. A high Christian population in this region and the practice of gathering taxes through the church hierarchies guaranteed that Muslim rulers knew and needed Christian ecclesiastical officials. Armenian colophons and Syriac chronicles combine with Persian historiography to portray a society in flux, where the Muslim rulers, ʿulamāʾ, Christian leaders, and a broader population of Muslims and Christians were negotiating issues of relative communal and individual prestige, discriminatory regulations, patronage patterns, and the fundamental relationship between nomadic and sedentary populations. Nora Berend’s work on religious diversity in medieval Hungary suggests that, rather than classifying the society according to a slippery binary as “tolerant” or “intolerant,” historians may identify strategies of inclusion and exclusion adopted by different actors within a society. The dhimma model was one strategy of circumscribed inclusion put forward by some (not all) ʿulamāʾ in this region, but it was neither the only nor the most successful contender for structuring society.