| This dissertation is based on thirty-seven Arabic papyrus letters dating from between A.D. 730 and 750 written and related to `Abd Allah b. As`ad, a Muslim administrator and merchant in the south-western Fayyum oasis in Egypt. Unique in its extent and composition, these letters show Islamic administration at work less than a hundred years after the Muslim conquest and at a bureaucratic level represented by no other published corpus of texts. As well as providing an edition, translation and commentary of these previously unknown and unpublished texts, three analytical chapters offer synthetic studies of the political and economic processes that shaped early Islamic Egypt.;Chapter One describes the geographical and historical landscape out of which the papyri come and the social, political and economic structures in which the letters' actors operated. In general, the corpus reveals a more decentralized system, with greater authority in hands of local Muslim administrators and a more significant role for Christian elites than earlier accounts have allowed for. Discussing local trade networks and the commercial mechanisms behind these, I examine the overlap between the merchant and bureaucratic classes.;Chapter Two discusses the Muslim fiscal system, how its religiously based tax categories reinforced social demarcations, and how this was affected by the ongoing processes of conversion. The chapter features a new contribution to the debate on early Muslim taxation policy, interpreting one of the papyri in the archive as announcing a government-collected and regulated tax to be levied exclusively on Muslims and how the latter protested against this measure.;The final chapter deals with the dissemination of information from the Muslim authorities to their subjects. Its central question is how the papyri and public notices functioned in an environment in which not every passer-by was able to read and understand Arabic, but where government announcements and messages were nevertheless routinely conveyed in written form. From the mechanics of diffusion, the discussion proceeds to what tacit messages these Arabic papyri carried from the Muslim capital to the Egyptian countryside. A study of the epistolography shows how the letters fit into the development of Arabic epistolary formulae and how the common language of the letters was an expression of a professional Muslim chancellery. |
