| Summary: | The first part of this study examines the emergence of the mamluk institution as an answer to the problem of conducting imperial politics in a Muslim context. As long as tribal ties served to set off the conquerors against the conquered population the need for such an imperial tool did not arise, and the erosion of the tribal roots did not immediately create one, since the transfer of power to the generals in the Marwanid period engendered a factionalism which drew metropolitan and provincial armies together in common rivalries. When the rise of a new army brought the faction to an end the Abbasids attempted to build up an imperial aristocracy, using, inter alia, the tie of free clientage, as part of their overall effort to foster an Islamic imperial ideal. When this failed the discrepancy between the norms of Islam and the demands of government dictated the use of foreigners recruited as slaves. The second part takes up the formation of these norms themselves, and here the starting point is the fusion of a Jewish heresy with a tribal tradition. Islam began as a Judeo-messianic movement, and it was in the long search for a religious identity of their own that the Arabs were brought to elaborate Islam as an Arab religion, in the course of which they increasingly sanctified a normative tribal past over and above the cultures of the conquered peoples. The Shu'ubi protests proved ineffectual and the tension between Islam as a national or universal religion was never quite resolved. In cultural terms the result was the incompatibility of the two traditions which the Abbasids tried to fuse.
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