The study of the Mamlūks under the Seljuks is of pivotal significance, because those Mamlūks formed the essential connecting link between their predecessors in the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate and their successors in the Sultanates of the Zangids, the Ayyūbids and the Mamlūks of Egypt and Syria on the one hand, and in the Sultanate of the Ottomans on the other. They were also part of an exceptionally important stage in the ethnic transformation which those Mamlūks underwent with the progress of time.

Poverty in medieval Islam is an enormous topic. It is worth considering from a historian's point of view, especially in the light of what has been accomplished by historians of Rome, Byzantium, and the medieval and modern West who have dealt with poverty and the poor. But as always, the sources for Islamic history, especially for the formative early centuries, present difficulties. Here I wish to make a preliminary attempt at dealing with part of this problem. I shall begin by considering an event which represents a turning point in the history of the Muslim poor, or more accurately, in the way poverty and the poor have been represented in modern historical scholarship on medieval Islam. Then I shall suggest a way in which this event may be set in context, and a possible strategy for handling some of the relevant sources. This strategy involves the identification of different, competing ways in which the poor were defined in the first centuries of Islam.

Khwāja Muhammad ibn Sadīq ibn Muhammad Kujujī or “Kujūjānī” (d. Dhū-hijja 677/April, 1279), as Hamdu'llāh Mustawfī Qazwīnī called him, was a Sufi master whose sons later occupied the post of Shaykh al-Islām in Tabriz under the early Jalā'irids, the Tīmūrids and early Safavids. Born in 614/1217–18, Kujujī's life coincides with the commencement of Mongol rule in northern Persia under Chingiz Khān in 1219, the conquest of Tabrīz in 1220 by the Mongols, the later subjugation of all of Persia under Hülegü (1256–65) and the reign of his successor Abaqa Khān (1265–82).

Among the few published Central Asian sources of the seventeenth century are two very unusual Persian-language accounts by Central Asians of their stays in Mughal India: the memoirs of Mutribi al-Asamm Samarqandi, and the travelogue of Mahmud b. Amir Wali. Written in stylistically different but distinctly personal voices untypical for their time, these accounts offer the modern reader valuable first-person insight into the minds and outlooks of their authors and shed light on the nature of how Muslims in Asia thought about their world and its boundaries.

One of the questions that has prompted this study is this: despite the fact that various Xiongnu and Xianbei groups dominated the political arena in Northern China for almost 300 years between the collapse of the Western Jin and the founding of the Sui , and the usually unacknowledged fact that their descendants continued to do so for several hundreds more years,1 why is it that one could learn so little about their cultural heritage in traditional historiography?2 Even the linguistic affinity of the Tuoba Xianbei remains to this day a matter of controversy.3