Geographic Regions

• Anatolia

  The core territory of the Byzantine and later Ottoman empires, and of the modern Turkish republic, whose twentieth-century secularist state alternately suppressed and later restored public religious dress in a reversal of the usual religion-versus-state-power framing.

• Bilad al-Sham (the Levant)

  The historical region comprising greater Syria, including Jerusalem and Damascus, which became the administrative and religious center of the Umayyad Caliphate.

• Egypt

  Conquered by Muslim armies from 639-642 CE; the source of the largest surviving corpus of early Arabic administrative papyri, documenting the conquest-era and early Abbasid legal and fiscal environment in unusual detail.

• Hejaz

  The western coastal region of the Arabian Peninsula, home to Mecca and Medina (Yathrib), where Islam originated in the early seventh century CE.

• Iraq

  Home to the garrison cities of Kufa and Basra, centres of the Ahl al-Ra'y legal tradition and, later, the Hanafi school, in a highly urbanised, ethnically mixed environment distinct from the Hijaz.

• Sasanian Persia

  The Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE), whose court ceremonial, administrative structure, and elite household custom — including female seclusion — were absorbed into Abbasid court culture after the Arab conquest of Iran.