Abbasid Period

The Abbasid period saw the crystallisation of the classical legal schools, the canonisation of the major Hadith collections, and — on the account followed in this paper's treatment of gender — the absorption of Byzantine and Sasanian elite household custom (veiling, domestic seclusion) into Muslim urban culture, articulated in religious terms even where the underlying process of absorption began earlier, in the Rashidun and Umayyad periods.