![]() These turn out to be valid for other periods of Islamic History as well, be it the formation of Islam or the early modern period. After stocktaking latest developments in the field, it gives suggestions about trends and priorities for future research. The paper is an overview of Arabic documentary studies of late medieval Egypt and Syria (1250‒1517 CE). It also suggests some broader conclusions about the dispersal, survival, or disappearance of pre-Ottoman Middle Eastern archives and documents. The article offers possible explanations as to why petitions such as this one, which concerns an Ismaili mosque, found their way to the Jewish community of Fustat whose members reused them and preserved them in the Geniza. It is likely that these, too, were addressed to Sitt al-Mulk. Geoffrey Khan had previously identified two petitions, housed in Cambridge and New York, addressed to a Fatimid princess. It shows Sitt al-Mulk to have headed the Fatimid state between her brother's death and her own in 414/1023. While at least one chronicler mentions that Sitt al-Mulk received petitions, this is the first documentary evidence for that claim. The petition is addressed to Sitt al-Mulk, half-sister of the caliph al-Ḥākim (386–411/996–1021). This article provides an edition, translation, and discussion of a petition housed among the Genizah documents of the Bodleian Library. ![]() The Genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat preserved dozens of petitions addressed to the Fatimid and Ayyubid chanceries in Cairo and decrees that they issued in response. Through the petition, I sketch two kinds of interconnected stories: the human stories of a father trying to care for his daughter and of a provincial family of legal functionaries in the Egyptian countryside, and the historical story of the role played by legal documents and institutions in structuring medieval social life. Furthermore, the people and places this document concerns are attested in other documents, which allows us to draw connections between this petition and the wider social world of the medieval Fayyūm and to sketch a basic outline of the workings of a provincial qāḍī court. By comparing this petition to other such documents, I flesh out the features of this common documentary tool used to seek aid and patronage in medieval Arabic-speaking societies. Although scholars have devoted a good deal of attention to medieval Arabic petitions, especially those addressed to high-ranking figures of the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk states, the low-register provincial sort that the document at hand exemplifies remains understudied. ![]() This document’s genre plus its place of origin make it noteworthy. The two texts, originating from Egypt’s Fayyūm oasis and dateable to the fourth/tenth or fifth/ eleventh century, are preserved incompletely on both sides of a single leaf of paper now in the holdings of the Near East Section of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. This article presents an edition, translation, and study of a short Arabic petition to a qāḍī and the rescript issued in response.
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