Recently, advancements in Islamic legal studies have uncovered much of the institutional and normative roots of premodern Islamic law. However, the origins and evolution of penal structures in the first century of Islam have not been thoroughly examined. Mathieu Tillier and Irene Scheinder discuss the existence of criminal prisons (sijn al-jarim) during the eighth and ninth centuries. Beyond containment and control, these jails also served as a means of judgement and punishment for the offenders. Given the fact that prisons had a minimal presence in Arab societies before the advent of Islam, what prompted the emergence of such inquisitorial procedures? Late Antique Eastern Roman and Sasanian regimes utilized imprisonment as a penalty. In contrast, pre-Islamic and early Islamic civilizations largely viewed detainment as the primary purpose of these sites. Remarkably, a radical expansion in the function of incarceration ensued during the seventh and eighth century under the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. Penitentiaries became punitive spaces for torture, ad hoc lashings, and lengthy sentences as expressions of the state’s legal authority. This momentous development was not an inevitability. Despite Europe’s Roman heritage, these institutions and penalties only materialized centuries later in premodern Latin-Christian societies, like late medieval Italy and early modern France. This driving need must have demanded a legal-political transformation, propelled by dramatic social and political factors. I argue that along with expanding central authority and notions of sovereignty at the expense of tribal dynamics and provincial autonomy, rapid urbanization and population growth gave rise to criminal prisons. Utilizing a wide range of sources such as literary narratives, political and legal treatises, and papyri records allows for a more three-dimensional portrait of this penal trajectory. Umayyad and Abbasid-era authors, such as Abd al-Hamid al-Katib (d. 749/750) and al-Tabari (d. 923) are integral to my argument. Aligning these depictions with secondary scholarship on Late Antique prisons and medieval European prisons, I can better perceive the principal dynamics that give rise to incarceration as a disciplinary measure.

What do Hebrew- and Arabic-script personal letters, court deeds, petitions and rescripts from the Cairo Geniza reveal about the ways everyday people experienced spaces of state violence in medieval Syria and Egypt? Chronicles that discuss incarceration privilege the experiences of courtiers and other state elites. Cairo Geniza documents, on the other hand, speak to the lives of incarcerated people outside the court: merchants, bankers, scholars, dyers, glassmakers and other working classes. While courtiers were held in palace dungeons, everyday people experienced police quarters, funduqs, private homes and brick-and-mortar prisons as sites of confinement, interrogation and torture. Spaces of state violence in Geniza sources vary from a city square where police brutally beat a man who failed to pay the jizyah (capitation tax), to a private Cairene travel lodge in which constables engage in a clandestine interrogation of a wealthy merchant suspected of underhanded dealings. Moreover, the practice of house arrest turned hundreds of debtors’ residences into personal prisons where the poor were compelled to pay the salaries of their own guards. Finally, state-sanctioned, formal prisons appear in documents as both prominent urban landmarks and heralds of starvation and terror. This presentation contends that the spatialization of state violence in medieval Egypt and Syria allowed Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk leaders to punish in the public and private spheres and thus effectively assert their power over both arenas.

By the ninth century, the prison had become more than a place of detention and rehabilitation: it was a theater of punishment. Danger surrounded the prison, an institution meant to be both symbolically visible to the public yet structurally defensible; where people went to vent social and political frustrations and where policing authorities tried to contain and isolate criminal elements. Though previous scholarship has addressed the institutional origins of the prison and the development of criminal law in the ninth century, the prison as a site of urban resistance has been largely overlooked. Cracks in the Abbasid regime began to emerge as political control became decentralized and vested between competing administrators jockeying over money, power, prestige, and vainglory. Tulunid governors began to exercise regional and judicial autonomy in Egyptian Fustat in the second half of the ninth century, reinterpreting political ceremonies and building urban areas of discipline and justice all in an effort to affirm territorial sovereignty. This period witnessed massive changes in the administration and in the urban geographies of the Abbasid capital (Baghdad) and Fustat, changes that impacted the carceral regime. These bureaucratic shifts in power and hierarchy could be felt on the ground, at prisons which became more diverse and responsive to the rise of crime and the anxieties of the public. This paper explores the social and administrative changes occurring as the prison became an embodiment of punishment. Capturing the dynamic social and administrative shifts in the medieval Islamic prison requires a robust range of sources such as political and biographical literature, administrative and jurisprudential treatises, and urban geographies. Looking at different Islamic contexts such as Baghdad and Fustat, the paper prioritizes a comparative angle to show the broader impact of penal prosecution, punishment and reform in the medieval Middle East. The prison exposes a punitive relationship between governing authorities and civilians, where policing officials disciplined criminals and displayed corpses in a way that educated the public and where locals staged protests and assaulted prison walls and gates to engage in resistance and social reform.