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.