Chapter 7 is devoted to undercutting or problematizing claims that this book has made in the Introduction about the nature of sectarianism, as well as those which are implied in the structure of the work. This is done because the narrative-identity approach demands an appreciation of complexity. It aims to show that sectarian identifications are not clean, exclusive, or as permanent as the neat divisions of the preceding chapters seem to imply, neither is the definition of “sect,” “school,” or firqa stable or fixed. The chapter asks a few key questions: What does it mean for the study of Muslim sects and schools, then, when sect identification is not primary, or obvious? What was the nature of relations between sectarian and communal groups in the early period, and what can this tell us about the idea of “sectarianism”? Where does the definition of sectarianism itself break down and become unhelpful? This chapter explores these questions and ambiguities as a means toward understanding how sectarian identifications existed in relation to each other.

An experiment in state-building during the medieval Islamic period, the Sultanate emerged in consequence of a junta by Mamluk slave-soldiers against their patron, the Ayyubid ruler al-Salih (647/1249). A junta participant, al-Zahir Baybars (r. 658/1260-676/1277), consolidated the coup into a stable government. His successor, al-Mansur Qalawun (r. 678/1279-689/1290), sustained the regime, but it was Qalawun’s son, al-Nasir Muhammad (3rd r. 709/1310-741/1341), who oversaw the Sultanate’s halcyon era. Egypt, Syria and the Red Sea were united as the leading imperial power of the central Arab lands. Al-Nasir terminated rivalry from the Sultanate’s main opponent, the Mongol Il-khanate in Iran. His descendants presided over the Sultanate as a quasi-dynasty until an officer of Circassian origin, al-Zahir Barquq (r. 784/1382-801/1399) restored the rule of 1st-generation Mamluks. Barquq and his prominent successors, al-Muʾayyad Shaykh (r. 815/1412-824/1421)and al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 825/1422-841/1438) upheld the regime’s sovereignty against resistance from insurgents in Syria and eastern Anatolia, while enhancing its role as a key participant in commerce with South and East Asia via the Red Sea. They also initiated policies of extraction and monopolies over lucrative commodities that met the fiscal demands of the military hierarchy but compromised the economy long-term. The Sultanate’s final rulers: al-Ashraf Qaʾitbay (r. 872/1468-901/1496) and Qansawh al-Ghawri (r. 906/1501-922/1516) continued these policies until the regime’s defeat by the Ottomans.

This chapter describes and analyzes the medieval Mongol origins of the dynasty of the Great Mughals that ruled much of the subcontinent in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It was the successful development of the institution of the corporate Turko-Mongol clan and the Mongol imperial heritage that went with it that allowed the Great Mughals to overcome the normal limitations of nomad tribes in a way their Afghan opponents and medieval predecessors could not.