The Abbasid caliph al-Nasir Li-Din Allah is famous for restoring Abbasid sovereignty in Iraq. As Angelika Hartmann has argued, he promoted the Caliphate as the sole spiritual and secular center of the Islamic world. To this end, he reorganized the futuwwa (mystical brotherhoods) and ulama of Baghdad, positioning himself as the supreme authority of the fityan and as a hadith transmitter. He also tried to unite Sunnis and Shiites under his rule. In this paper, I ask what al-Nasir’s administrative reforms meant for Iraq’s Jewish community. In addition to the traditional sources typically used to study al-Nasir’s reign—the chronicles of Ibn al-Sa?i, Ibn al-Fuwati, and Ibn al-Jawzi—I will draw on Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic texts produced by Jews in Iraq during the same period. These include: letters and copies of letters written by Jewish communal leaders in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries (most notably those of Samuel b. ‘Ali Ibn al-Dastur, the head of the Rabbinic Academy of Iraq) that were preserved in the Cairo Geniza, as well as the Diwan of El ‘azar b. Ya‘aqov Ha-Bavli, a collection of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic poetry composed in honor of Jewish elites in thirteenth-century Baghdad. I will argue that al-Nasir’s administrative reforms also impacted non-Muslims. Al-Nasir was the first caliph to grant a title of investiture to the head of the Rabbinic Academy of Iraq. As a result, during al-Nasir’s reign, rabbinic leaders relied on the Abbasid state to a greater degree than ever before to advance their rule over Jewish communities throughout Iraq, particularly those in Kirkuk, Mosul, and Erbil. In doing so, they equated obedience to the state with obedience to God’s precepts. At the same time, Iraq’s rabbinic leadership expressed some ambivalence about their new political status; in their writings, they almost never referred explicitly to the Abbasid state itself. Instead, they advanced an ideology whereby the rabbis themselves invested gentile kings with authority and gave them license to rule—not the other way around.

How can we study religious conversion in the early Islamic period? This paper presents the findings of a study on religious conversion in Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham) and northern Iraq (al-Jazira) from roughly 640 to 850 CE (20-235 AH). It analyzes textual data on conversion written in Arabic and Syriac, aggregated from early chronicles, hadith collections, martyrologies, apocalypses, polemical treatises and legal texts, to identify the way conversion is discussed in general and within each genre. It also examines topics discussed in tandem with conversion to better understand the way in which it was perceived by scholars writing in Syriac and Arabic during the first two hundred years after the Muslim conquest of Bilad al-Sham and al-Jazira. While reliable demographic figures are impossible to come by during the early Islamic period, this study finds that the way conversion was described in both Syriac and Arabic texts changed over the course of the first two hundred years of Muslim rule of these regions. Writing on conversion increased in both sophistication and in polemical tone, perhaps as conversion became more common and thus increased in stakes for writers of different faiths. Muslim belief also became more distinct from other monotheistic faiths over the course of the seventh century CE in particular, which allowed writers to clarify religious differences and set defined boundaries between these faiths. A concern with boundary demarcation between faiths is noted throughout the era, though inversely. While Muslim writers were initially most preoccupied with false converts, or converts maintaining non-Muslim beliefs, this concern was gradually superseded in the textual evidence by Christian writers, for example, who become increasingly worried about individual Muslim beliefs and practices taking hold among their constituents. It must be noted that during this period, both Muslim and non-Muslim writers of various genres frequently associated false conversions with military service or payment of taxes. Possible interpretations of this finding and other conclusions will be presented, as well as potential avenues of further study.

In the 8th and 9th centuries, there lived in Iraq a sect which was branded as “heretical” by orthodox Muslim writers. Known for their “extreme” adoration of the Imams and the Prophet, they were called “extremists” (ghulat) by Muslim heresiographers. In addition to accusing them of holding the wrong Islamic beliefs, however, heresiographers lavish upon them charges of all manner of antinomian behavior. Among these, abstention from prayer and the drinking of wine are the lightest. Many also charge them with having sex with their mothers and sisters, of sharing their wives, and having orgies. Of course, one is well justified in viewing such accounts as “fake news,” aimed at belittling the group, and until recently scholars unanimously viewed these accusations as just that. However, a series of newly published sources produced by these sectarians shows that at least some of these accusations were not entirely groundless. They do indeed contain hints – expressed in various degrees of subtlety – that their idea about prayer or pilgrimage differed from that held by the majority of Muslims at the time. In my paper I will pursue two goals. On the one hand, I will study the heresiographic accusations against the evidence of the newly available accounts written by the sectarians themselves. Having separated the wheat from the chaff, and having shown that some of the accusations of antinomianism were accurate, I will study the cultural context in which the antinomian behaviors of the sectarians may be understood. My contention is that the distinct approach to the accepted Muslim rituals served as a visible marker of identity for this group of sectarians. For if ritual is deployed to show one’s belonging to a certain group, by the same token, abstaining from a ritual performed by everyone is also a way of displaying one’s membership in a group.

How do leaders gain substantial followings? The organization of human communities is classically associated with hierarchization, the distinction between leaders and the led. In light of problematic categories for describing the attraction between leaders and followers in existing literature, we propose metrics of the leader-follower relationship that expressed through network topology and stylometry. As a case study, we examine the hierarchization of a community of religious figures known as "Sufis" from 9th-10th century Iraq. While data standardization poses issues, we find that the most attractive Sufi leaders exhibit: (1) the strongest ties to followers; (2) the most original message; and (3) the most heterogenous message. Existing theories of leadership appeal to the concept of attraction to explain hierarchization. For instance, several approaches to leadership consider ascriptive qualities (e.g. lineage, "charisma") as invariably attractive to followers. Conversely, other theories hold that constituencies follow individuals who exert control of over resources (e.g., currency, divine inspiration). Although these theories of attraction explain dynamics in contemporary communities, their application to historical communities assumes strong parameters that are difficult to identify in historical cases. Network analysis offers an avenue to articulate concepts that are more applicable to historical instances of hierarchization. Three categories for evaluating leader-follower relationships can be expressed using commonly-used network metrics. First, we evaluate the "strength" of ties between leaders and followers. Second, we evaluate the originality of a leader's "message," composed of discrete "sayings." Topologically, this corresponds to the geodesic distance between a statement's originator (node[o]) and a leader (node[j]); thus, an "original" message returns a value of "0", while more "traditional" messages return increasingly higher values. Finally, we evaluate the heterogeneity of a leader's message through stylometric analysis. Using a list of key words, we evaluate their relative frequency in a leader's message: absolute values (0.0, 1.0) indicate homogenous messages, while a median value (0.5) indicates a heterogeneous message. We apply these categories to a corpus of texts written by Sufis from the 9th-11th centuries, in order to discern the factors that influenced the development of a leader-follower hierarchy. A unique structural feature of these texts is a record of the transmission pathway for sayings by leading Sufis (i.e., x ? y ? z ['saying']); our corpus comprises nine works with ~1,900 transmission pathways.