Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Notes on Transliteration, Place Names, Dates, Editions, and Translations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Ties that Bound the Societies of the Islamic Empire
- Part I Personal ties
- Part II Institutions
- 6 Messengers in Byzantine and Early Muslim Egypt: Small Cogs, but Systemically Relevant. With Some Remarks on the Dossier of Menas, Stratiōtēs
- 7 The Epistolary Imamate: Circular Letters in the Administration of the Shiʿi Community
- 8 Early Arabic Decrees on Papyrus from the Abbasid Period
- 9 A State Letter from a Marwanid Caliph to his Governor of Iraq: A Historiographical Investigation into Khālid b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Qasrī’s Downfall
- 10 Between the Arabs and the Turks: Household, Conversion and Power Dynamics in Early Islamic Bactria
- 11 Emotion in Early Islamic Social Hierarchies: Affection, Threats, and Appeals to Piety in Official Documents from the Umayyad and Abbasid Periods
- Part III Communities
- Index
10 - Between the Arabs and the Turks: Household, Conversion and Power Dynamics in Early Islamic Bactria
from Part II - Institutions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Notes on Transliteration, Place Names, Dates, Editions, and Translations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Ties that Bound the Societies of the Islamic Empire
- Part I Personal ties
- Part II Institutions
- 6 Messengers in Byzantine and Early Muslim Egypt: Small Cogs, but Systemically Relevant. With Some Remarks on the Dossier of Menas, Stratiōtēs
- 7 The Epistolary Imamate: Circular Letters in the Administration of the Shiʿi Community
- 8 Early Arabic Decrees on Papyrus from the Abbasid Period
- 9 A State Letter from a Marwanid Caliph to his Governor of Iraq: A Historiographical Investigation into Khālid b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Qasrī’s Downfall
- 10 Between the Arabs and the Turks: Household, Conversion and Power Dynamics in Early Islamic Bactria
- 11 Emotion in Early Islamic Social Hierarchies: Affection, Threats, and Appeals to Piety in Official Documents from the Umayyad and Abbasid Periods
- Part III Communities
- Index
Summary
This article addresses conversion and its consequences for a Bactrian family known as the Mir family during the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. It explains the social, legal, and economic ties that bound this Bactrian family, and the problems created within the family after a member of it converted to Islam. Based on a systematic analysis of a group of Bactrian and Arabic documents issued for the members of this family by the local Bactrian and Muslim authorities, this article will show the centrality of the ‘household’ in the Bactrian society and the changes that occurred in it after the arrival of Islam. It argues that conversion to Islam seriously affected this family and eventually dismantled it. Although conversion did not remove the kinship within the household, it ended cohabitation and joint ownership, which were central social elements in the Bactrian law that kept the household together.
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- Mechanisms of Social Dependency in the Early Islamic Empire , pp. 297 - 326Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024
- Creative Commons
- This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/