Asking for a Friend: Travel Requests and Social Relations in Umayyad Egypt

Summary

In the early Islamic period, asking for a friend's help or mediation was a common strategy for obtaining one's goals. In some cases, those goals were aimed to access difficult administrative procedures. In this article, we discuss strategies of entreaty that were aimed at obtaining official documents and, more specifically, travel documents in Umayyad Egypt. We look at situations in which someone needed permission to travel and, to that end, reached out to intermediary figures. These, in turn, appealed to individuals in their own social and professional circles for assistance in obtaining the required document. Our focus is on these intermediaries and the requests they made on behalf of third parties, as if “asking for a friend.” Moreover, the sources we have selected share one additional important feature: while at times a single petition might have been enough to solve somebody's problem, the documents we present in this chapter reveal several exchanges. They thus reflect several layers of request, some explicitly mentioned in the text, others only alluded to because they preceded or followed the document's drafting. A person's desire to either leave or come back to their place of residence might result in further requests and, moreover, prompt more written documents to be prepared.

All the documents we cite below were excavated or found in Egypt and may be dated to the Umayyad period (late seventh and eighth centuries CE) based on material and linguistic features. All of them have already been published, but we offer our own translations while also considering previous editions. Our sources relate to policies that were implemented by the Marwanid rulers (a family within the Umayyad dynasty) between the early 700s and the 750s CE, with the aim of regulating individuals’ movements for work and preventing them from evading taxes in their region of residence. This select group of texts therefore allows us to study written requests as part of on-the-ground, recorded practices and to situate them in a specific regional and political context, one in which we find heightened efforts to control people's mobility. These are cases—similar to those discussed by Oded Zinger in his contribution to this special issue—in which the initial request linked the petitioner to people in their immediate social circle as well as to broader political and juridical structures in the province.