The respect and veneration accorded to the family of the Prophet Muḥammad are unparalleled in Islamic society. Political or religious affiliations notwithstanding, the Prophet's family – most importantly his descendants through his daughter Fāṭima and his cousin ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, collectively known as the ʿAlids – were held in high esteem even by those who rejected their claims to the leadership of the Muslim community. Within the hierarchy of Islamic society, the ʿAlids were ‘a blood aristocracy without peer’.

Although they clearly occupied a privileged place among Muslims from the earliest period of Islam, the social prominence of the Prophet's kin was by no means a foregone conclusion. In political as well as religious terms, those who became the heirs and successors to the Prophet in the majority of Muslim communities were generally not his descendants: Political authority came to be exercised by the caliphs while religious leadership went to the scholars. Yet, despite their virtual exclusion from the leadership of the Muslim communities, both politically and religiously, the ʿAlids nevertheless became the one indisputable nobility of Islam.

This book provides the first social history of the ʿAlids in the crucial five centuries from the ʿAbbāsid Revolution to the Saljūqs (second/eighth to sixth/twelfth centuries). This period saw the formulation of many aspects still associated with the special position of sayyids and sharīfs in Muslim societies, from their exemption from some of the rules that governed ordinary Muslims to the development of ‘ʿAlidism’.