Recording debts in Sufyānid Fusṭāṭ: a reexamination of the procedures and calendar in use in the first/seventh century 1

Abstract

The phrase s.n.t. qaḍāʾ al-muʾminīn, used in several seventh-century Arabic papyri, has been subject to varying interpretations for several years. Yūsuf Rāġib considers it as an "era (sanat) of the believers' jurisdiction," while Jelle Bruning interprets it as a "legal sunna." This chapter uses new papyrological data to reexamine these competing explanations. This expression appears so far only in documents relating to debts, some of which were subject to institutional registration in Fusṭāṭ. The new documents we are editing here, as well as minor paleographic evidence, suggest that the reading sanat qaḍāʾ al-muʾminīn initially proposed by Rāġib is the most convincing, and that it refers to a calendar. Among several hypotheses, we argue that the term qaḍāʾ should be understood as a "decree" and refers to the sovereignty of the "believers," semantically associated with God's decree. This specification might have been particularly important for acknowledgment of debts in order to comply with the Qurʾanic injunction (2:282) to record the debts in writing by precisely defining their deadline. We hypothesize that this was a name of the official imperial calendar, which originally may not have referred to the Muḥammad's exodus to Medina, but rather to the affirmation of his sovereignty following the treaty of al-Ḥudaybiyya.

Language Policy and the Administrative Framework of Early Islamic Egypt

“…10 Over the next fifty-years, until the start of the Abbasid caliphate (750), we see a sharp increase in the number of Arabic documents, with 199 known texts. Therefore, while the written evidence indicates the presence of a developed and organized administration at Fusṭāṭ from its earliest days (Tillier and Vanthieghem 2019), it is not until after the Second Fitna (Islamic Civil War) in 692 that the use of Arabic begins to accelerate.…”

Monetary reform under the Sufyanids: the papyrological evidence

“…I, followed by Mathieu Tillier and Naïm Vanthieghem, took him up on this idea and further elaborated on it. 65 However, I later came across a funerary inscription from Najrān, Saudi Arabia, dated to sanat sitt ʿashra sanatin wa-khams miʾa sanatin ("the year 516"), which similarly employs the word sana both before and after the date. 66 This epitaph is of course very late, but the similarity in texture is striking.…”