IMC 2023: Sessions

This panel will examine three divergent kinds of networks in early Islamic society, and the important ways in which they illuminate significant societal phenomena. The first paper examines hitherto unutilised epigraphic sources relating to the lands of the Ḥasanid family network near Medina, in order to shed new light on inter-'Alid family network politics and the development of Shi'ism in the 7th and 8th centuries, well before the earliest extant literary text. The second paper examines the treatment of pre-Islamic times in Islamic local histories, written between the 9th and the 11th centuries, in order to demonstrate how the authors of these texts used them to forge a new communal identity and elite network. The third paper explicates the development of the important social phenomenon of the chivalric networks known as futuwwa, from the earliest Islamic texts until the 13th century. Finally, the respondent will draw together all these strands from the different periods of early Islamic history, in order to discuss the different functions these various social networks played, and the changes they illuminate in Islamic society over the course of the classical (pre-Mongol) period.