Chapter 6 provides an overview of the history and development of the Sunnis, emphasizing how adherence to the community (jamāʿa) and the authoritative example (sunna) of the Prophet allowed for a variety of groups to contribute to an ideal of a universal Islam. It shows how the notion of the “rightly guided” caliphs functioned to promote unity across the far-flung ʿAbbāsid Empire, and how the emergence of legal schools sat in creative tension with caliphal pretensions to absolute authority. It shows how a combination of Ahl al-Ḥadīth piety, Murjiʾite notions of faith, as well as Ashʿarite and Māturīdī theology provided the theological basis for a broadly conceived consensus on proper religion. It also shows how Seljuq promotion of the madrasa system allowed for Sunnism to become the dominant communal tendency among Muslims after the sixth/twelfth century. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Karrāmiyya as an example of a group that medieval scholars excluded from the Sunni consensus, and considers why they might have done so.

This chapter investigates the emergence of imperial space in the early Islamic world, 7th–12th centuries, and Muslim notions of empire in this period. It examines how an imperial space was conquered under the Prophet Muhammad, Rashidun Caliphs and Umayyad dynasty, reaching its height in c.740, followed by its fragmentation under the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258). The role of jihad in this expansion is examined, along with the institutions that bound the empire together and the reasons for its disintegration. The expansion of the frontiers of the Islamic world only began again under Turkish dynasties, the Seljuqs, Qarakhanids and Ghaznavids in the 11th century, when parts of Anatolia, Central Asia and India were conquered. Finally, this chapter considers how imperial space was visualised and represented in this period, examining the evidence of maps in manuscripts of works by Arabic geographers of the 10th–11th centuries.

This chapter first reviews the normative bases for penal state violence, in particular for capital punishment and torture, in Islamic law and Islamic political theory. The chapter then moves on to discuss a number of examples of violent punishments, culled from Islamic historiography, first from the reign of the Seljuq sultans of Persia, Iraq and Syria (c. 1040-1194) and then, second, from that of the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Syria (c. 1250-1517). It argues that a gradual shift took place in this period, supported by changes in the legal doctrine of torture and punishment based on utilitarian considerations of the public interest, towards a proliferation of violent punishment and torture. By the end of the Mamluk period, the law was so underdetermined and so riddled with loopholes that only little opposition could be mounted to check the rising tide of penal violence by the state.

This chapter considers the changes wrought by the Mongol invasions. It first examines briefly the development of Muslim politics and literature in the pre-Mongol period, demonstrating how until the middle of the thirteenth century textual productionfocused largely on the Seljuq court. It then looks at the impact of Mongol rule, concentrating in particular on the political and religious consequences - the crisis of legitimacy caused by the Seljuq collapse and, the position of the Mongols before and after their conversion, and the persecution of Christians that intensified under Mongol rule.As a result, political discourse was infused with a new concern with unbelief, absent in the Seljuq period.

The Introduction lays out the state of the art of scholarship on history and religious change in medieval Anatolia, arguing that historians’ preoccupation with the Seljuq and Ottoman periods has led to neglect of the rich source material for the Mongol period. It considers approaches by previous scholars such as Vryonis, Köprūlü, Ocak and Kafadar.