Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022): 47-78

Introduction

The Near East Section of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, houses a little-explored 
collection of Arabic documents, including several originating from the provincial milieu of 
Egypt’s Fayyūm oasis during the medieval period.1 Among these items is a small leaf of 

* I would like to thank Marina Rustow, Mathieu Tillier, and Naïm Vanthieghem for advice on reading and 
interpreting the document under study; Oded Zinger for his thorough comments on an earlier draft; and Claire 
Dekle and Muhannad Salhi for help with the Library of Congress’s Arabic document collection. I am also deeply 
appreciative of the two anonymous reviewers’ comments, which greatly improved the document edition and 
sharpened my analysis.

1.  See N. Vanthieghem and L. Weitz, “Monks, Monasteries, and Muslim Scribes: Three Parchment House 

The Long Arm of the Provincial Law: 
A Custody Battle in a Qāḍī Petition  

from the Medieval Fayyūm*

Lev Weitz
Catholic University of America

(weitz@cua.edu)

Abstract
This article presents an edition, translation, and study of a short Arabic petition to a qāḍī and the rescript issued 
in response. The two texts, originating from Egypt’s Fayyūm oasis and dateable to the fourth/tenth or fifth/
eleventh century, are preserved incompletely on both sides of a single leaf of paper now in the holdings of the 
Near East Section of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. This document’s genre plus its place of origin 
make it noteworthy. Although scholars have devoted a good deal of attention to medieval Arabic petitions, 
especially those addressed to high-ranking figures of the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk states, the low-register 
provincial sort that the document at hand exemplifies remains understudied. By comparing this petition to 
other such documents, I flesh out the features of this common documentary tool used to seek aid and patronage 
in medieval Arabic-speaking societies. Furthermore, the people and places this document concerns are attested 
in other documents, which allows us to draw connections between this petition and the wider social world of the 
medieval Fayyūm and to sketch a basic outline of the workings of a provincial qāḍī court. Through the petition, 
I sketch two kinds of interconnected stories: the human stories of a father trying to care for his daughter and of 
a provincial family of legal functionaries in the Egyptian countryside, and the historical story of the role played 
by legal documents and institutions in structuring medieval social life.

© 2022 Lev Weitz. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, 
which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long 
as attribution is given to the original authors and source.



48  •  Lev Weitz

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

The Long Arm of the Provincial Law  •  49

paper containing a petition to a qāḍī and the rescript issued in response, both dateable 
to the fourth/tenth or fifth/eleventh century. Despite this document’s modest provincial 
origins, the edition, translation, and study of it presented here shed new light on two 
notable areas: the infrastructure of Islamic law in the medieval Egyptian countryside and 
the development of the Arabic petition as a tool of medieval administrative practice. 

The petition under study provides one of the few explicit documentary attestations of 
a provincial qāḍī in the late Abbasid or Fatimid period; moreover, the people and places 
it concerns are fortuitously attested in other contemporary documents. We are thus able 
to draw connections between this petition and the wider society of the medieval Fayyūm; 
to sketch a basic outline of the workings of the rural court that dealt with the petition’s 
business, particularly by tracing five generations of a lineage of court scribes and witnesses; 
and to offer some informed speculation on the madhhab affiliation and decision-making of 
a medieval provincial judge.

The genre of this document deserves scrutiny as well. Although scholars have given 
considerable attention to Arabic petitions addressed to grandees of the Fatimid, Ayyubid, 
and Mamluk states, the low-register provincial sort that the present document exemplifies 
remains understudied. Comparison to other such documents allows us to flesh out the 
features of this documentary tool, used commonly throughout the medieval Arabophone 
Islamic world to seek aid and patronage.

What appears at first glance to be a fragmentary, obdurate document reveals a surprising 
richness. It allows us to trace two sorts of interwoven stories: the human ones of a down-
on-his-luck father trying to care for his daughter and of a family of provincial legal 
functionaries, and the historical ones of the role played by legal documents and institutions 
in structuring medieval social life.

Edition

Petition to a Qāḍī and the Qāḍī’s Rescript concerning the Custody of a Minor Child

An unnamed man requests the help of a qāḍī and his delegate, Ibrāhīm b. Rizq, in 
removing the petitioner’s minor daughter from the custody of his deceased wife’s mother. 
The qāḍī responds.

P. Washington Libr. of Congress Inv. Ar. 95 Ṭuṭūn (?)
10.8 × 24 cm     fourth–fifth/tenth–eleventh century

Light brown paper. The right and left margins are preserved. The top margin is partially 
preserved, but the bottom of the sheet has been lost. A number of small and several larger 
holes pockmark the interior of the sheet. Regular horizontal creases occurring approximately 
every ten centimeters suggest that the sheet has been rolled and then flattened.2

Sales from the 4th/10th-Century Fayyūm,” Arabica 67 (2020): 461–501.
2.  My thanks are due to Clair Dekle, Senior Book Conservator at the Library of Congress, for providing 

photographs of the document.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

The Long Arm of the Provincial Law  •  49

The text of the document is in two hands. The first hand composed the petition on the 
entirety of the recto side and roughly two-thirds of the verso in a black ink with a thick 
ductus. Diacritics are infrequent and inconsistent. When continuing the text from the recto 
onto the verso, the scribe turned the sheet over the short edge such that the top of the 
verso side corresponds to the bottom of the recto.

The second hand then rotated the sheet to begin the rescript, the response to the 
petition, from the bottom of the verso side. This hand is smaller, somewhat more angular, 
and appears more rushed than the first hand. The rescript is written in a black ink; the 
text is not as well preserved because of the ink’s fading, discoloration, and damage to this 
portion of the sheet.3

(1st hand) بسم الـله الرحمن   ]1[

      الر]حيم توكلـ[ـت على الـله

اعلم سيدي القاضي اطال الـله بقاه  ]2[

وادام عاله وكبت اعداه ان لي  ]3[

بنت ماتت امها عنها وهي بنت  ]4[

شهر وسلـ]ـمـ[ـتها لـ]ـسـ[ـتها من امها  ]5[

واجريت عليها ا]لنفقة مـ[ـن خمس  ]6[

سنين ودخلت السادسة وانا  ]7[

رجل مسكن ما يمكني النفقة عليها  ]8[

]9[  عند ستها فان راى سيدي القاضي

]10[   اراه الـله مجابه يتطول بالتوقيع

]11[   الى خليفته بىططون ابرهيم بن رزق

]12[   يسلم الي بنتي حتى اجعلها عند والدتي

]13[   وهي ستها من ابوها تكون

]14[  ]. . . . . . . . . . . .[ . . . .ـن

3.  Brackets in the edition and translation denote my suggested restorations of lacunae in the text. 
Parentheses in the edition denote my expansion of an abbreviated word form. Parentheses in the translation 
denote discretionary editorial additions for clarity.

Figure 1: P. Washington Libr. of Congress 
Inv. Ar. 95 Recto



50  •  Lev Weitz

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The Long Arm of the Provincial Law  •  51

  

]1[  (1st hand) خليفة سيدي القاضي
       ادام الـله عزه

]2[  عند من يثق به حتى تكبر
]3[  الصبية ويكمل عقلها

]4[  بتسلمه فاعرفت سيدي القاضي كبت اللله
]5[  اعداه ذلك ليقف عليه ويعلمه

]6[  ان شا الـله حسبنا الـله ونعم الوكيل

]7[  (2nd hand) انشا اللـ]ـه البرهيـ[ـم ]بـ[ـن
      علي اكرمك الـله تقف على ما ذكر هذا الـ]ـر[

]8[   جل من ابنتـ]ـه[ في عجز جدتها من امها 
       وهي اوال بحـ]ـضـ[ـا]نتهـ[ـا

]9[  واكشف؟ ]. .[ .  . . . . عـ . . . . ]. .  . . .[
]10[  ورىىىه ].[ منها . . . . . الرجل . .  . .. . .

]11[  وان ضرعت النفقة عليها ابتع من
        رجلها وانفق عليها

]12[  عند جدتها فاعلم ذالك ا]ن[ شا الـله والـله
        حـ)ـسبـ(ـي ونعم الوكـ]يـ[ـل

]13[  وصلى الـله على محمد النبي واله وسلم

Recto  ]1[ ىَسم  ]ـىن ]12[  والدىَى ]11[  ررق ]10[  ىالىوقىع محابه ]9[  سىَها ]8[  سنيں ]7[  القاصى ]2 
Verso  ]2[ ٰىكىر  ]الصبى ]3 

Translation

Recto

]1[  (1st hand) In the name of God, the Merciful, the C[ompassionate! I place trus]t in God.
]2[  I inform my master the judge, may God prolong his life,
]3[  perpetuate his exaltedness, and crush his enemies, that I have
]4[  a daughter whose mother died when she was
[5]  one month old. I deli[v]ered her (to reside) with her maternal [gr]andmother,
]6[  and have provided her [support fo]r five
]7[  years. But the sixth has begun with me
]8[  a poor man, unable to provide her support
]9[  at her grandmother’s. If my master the judge should see fit—
]10[  may God show him his answer—(to) demonstrate magnanimity in his rescript

Figure 2: P. Washington Libr. of Congress 
Inv. Ar. 95 Verso



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The Long Arm of the Provincial Law  •  51

]11[  to his delegate in Ṭuṭūn, Ibrāhīm b. Rizq,
]12[  let him deliver my daughter to me until I may place her with my mother,
]13[  her paternal grandmother, who is
]14[  [. . . . . . . . . . . .] . . . . .

Verso

]1[  (1st hand) the delegate of my master the judge, may God perpetuate his might,
]2[  with someone in whom he trusts, until
]3[  the girl comes of age and her mind is fully formed
]4[  in his safekeeping. I have informed my master the judge, may God crush
[5]  his enemies, of this so that he might take cognizance of it and know of it,
]6[  if God wills. God is our sufficiency. What an excellent Keeper is He!

]7[  (2nd hand) Go[d] willing, [to Ibrāhī]m [son] of ʿAlī, may God honor him. May you  
            take cognizance of what this [m]an describes

]8[  of ]his[ daughter concerning the incapacity of her maternal grandmother, who has
       first right to cu[st]od[y of her.]
]9[  Uncover (?) [. . ]. . . . . . . . . . . . [. . . . . . . . . .]
]10[  . . . . . [.] from her . . . . . the man . . . . . . . . . . . .
]11[  If she begs for support for her, buy (something) from her (father) and provide (it)
         to her
]12[  at her grandmother(’s abode). Take cognizance of the foregoing, God [w]illing. 
         God is my sufficiency. What an excellent K[ee]per is He!
]13[  May God bless and keep Muḥammad the prophet and his family.

Commentary

Recto

]1[   [tawakkal]tu ʿ alā Allāh Compare P.Cair.Arab. 37; P.Transmission 4; P.Vente Appendix 
2; CPR XXI 74, 78.4 This addition to the opening invocation is sometimes placed 
above the basmala.

]2[  uʿlim A formulaic introduction to the exposition of the petition; see the discussion 
below.

[2–3]  aṭāla Allāh baqāʾahu wa-adāma ʿalāʾahu wa-kabata aʿdāʾahu A common blessing 
in   petitions; see the discussion below.

[5] li-[s]ittihā For sitt as “grandmother,” see J. G. Hava, Arabic-English Dictionary 
(Beirut: Catholic Press, 1899), 300.

4.  All references to documents in this article follow the system of the International Society for Arabic 
Papyrology (see https://www.naher-osten.uni-muenchen.de/isap/isap_checklist/index.html) and the Arabic 
Papyrology Database (https://www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/project.jsp). I have used both extensively 
to identify, collate, and compare relevant documents.



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The Long Arm of the Provincial Law  •  53

]8[ miskīn Reading the rasm مسكں as مسكين.
 yumkinnī Properly يمكنني, yumkinunī, rather than يمكني.

]9[ fa-in raʾā A formulaic opening to the petitioner’s request; see the discussion below.

]10[  arāhu Allāh mujābahu I am unaware of other attestations of this formula. In later 
Mamluk petitions, mujāb, “it is granted,” is a standard response in rescripts granting 
the petition’s request. See P.St.Catherine I 13 B and C = P.SternMamlukPetitions 2 
and 3. Another possible reading is addāhu Allāh mujābahu, “may God give him to 
grant it.”

 yataṭawwal Properly, we would expect the particle an to precede yataṭawwal. For 
an example in a letter of the formula fa-in raʾā . . . an yataṭawwal, “should [the 
recipient] see fit to offer his magnanimity to answer the request,” see CPR XXXII 
6.2. 

 tawqīʿ A rescript, that is, a decision written on and in response to a petition. See M. 
Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton, 
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 370–71. Other references to rescripts within 
the text of Fatimid and Ayyubid petitions and requests include P.Vind.Arab. III 
30.12; P.GenizahCambr. 95r.7; P.RustowPetition. 12.

]11[ khalīfatihi bi-Ṭuṭūn Ibrāhīm b. Rizq On the office of the delegate, the location, and 
the identity of Ibrāhīm, see the discussion below. A superfluous tooth follows the 
bāʾ in bi-Ṭuṭūn.

Verso

]4[ bi-tasallumih The rasm ىىسلمه is clear but the interpretation is uncertain. One might 
have expected يتسلمها yatasallamahā, suggesting that if the judge has a trustworthy 
guardian in mind, “let him receive her [the daughter],” but the rasm will not allow 
that reading.

 Allāh The scribe has mistakenly added a third lām.

[4–5]  fa-aʿraftu . . . dhālika li-yaqif ʿalayhi wa-yaʿlimahu in shāʾa Allāh For the formula 
“I have informed you so that you might know,” addressed to someone of higher 
rank, as in this document, see the letter concerning fiscal administration 
CPR XXXII 12.6. For the verbal phrase waqafa ʿalā in the sense used here, see 
P.GenizahCambr. 95l.2–4.

]6[ ḥasbunā Allāh wa-niʿm al-wakīl This formula, very common in the documentary 
record, was used by scribes to fill the final line of a document to the left-hand 
margin. See Y. Rāġib, Actes de vente d’esclaves et d’animaux d’Égypte médiévale 
(Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2002–6), 2:4, §10.

]7[ inshāʾa All[āh li-Ibrāhī]m [ib]n ʿAlī This reading is speculative. The rasm على is clear 
enough and one Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī b. Rizq is known from other documents (see the 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

The Long Arm of the Provincial Law  •  53

discussion below). The reading here would thus mean that Ibrāhīm b. Rizq, the 
qāḍī’s delegate named in recto l. 11, was the recipient of the rescript and charged 
with carrying out its order.

[7–8]  taqif ʿalā mā dhakara hādhā al-[r]ajul  For the phrase li-yaqif ʿalā, “let [so-and-so] 
take cognizance of,” used to deliver an instruction to the recipient of a rescript 
to a petition just as the formula is here, see P.GenizahCambr. 95l .2–4.

]12[ wa-Allāh ḥa(sb)ī wa-niʿm al-wak[ī]l If this reading is correct, this formula is an 
anomalous version of the standard one found in l. 6. Another possible reading, 
similarly unattested, would read the first half of the phrase as ــي ــله ح  wa-Allāh والـ
ḥayy, “God is the Living One.”

The Story

The protagonist of the story laid out in this document is the father of a young girl. His 
petition, likely written by a scribe he has commissioned, requests redress from a qāḍī for 
the predicament in which the father finds himself. He relates that when his daughter was 
only a month old, her mother, assuredly the petitioner’s wife, died. He then handed the 
child over to the girl’s maternal grandmother (li-sittihā min ummihā) for caretaking. The 
petitioner states that he has been furnishing maintenance (nafaqa) for his daughter for the 
last five years. As the sixth year of the girl’s life begins, however, the petitioner claims to 
be too poor to continue providing support as long as the girl lives with his former mother-
in-law. The petitioner therefore asks for help from the qāḍī and from the latter’s delegate to 
the village of Ṭuṭūn, Ibrāhīm b. Rizq, in facilitating the transfer of the girl from the custody 
of her maternal grandmother to that of the petitioner’s own mother, or perhaps to a court-
appointed guardian—the lacunae in the document render the final details of the request 
unclear.

The rescript—the judge’s response to the petition, written on the bottom half of the 
document’s verso side by either the judge or another scribe—is unfortunately more difficult 
to read and interpret. It appears to be addressed to the judge’s delegate, who is ordered to 
look into the case and, following several illegible passages, to procure material support for 
the girl at her grandmother’s home; which grandmother is meant here we cannot say.

The petition is undated, and we have the name of neither the petitioner nor the judge. 
But the document’s formal features and the two proper names that do appear in the text, 
Ṭuṭūn and the qāḍī’s delegate Ibrāhīm, allow us to make some educated inferences about 
the document’s origins and to explore the institutional and social context in which it was 
produced: a provincial court in Egypt’s Fayyūm oasis, likely during the first half-century 
following the Fatimid conquest of 359/969.

The Setting

Ṭuṭūn is a familiar locale in the Arabic documentary record of medieval Egypt. A mostly 
Christian village lying at the southern edge of the Fayyūm, Ṭuṭūn produced a considerable 
number of legal and other documents, dating especially between the third/ninth and fifth/



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The Long Arm of the Provincial Law  •  55

eleventh centuries, that have survived to the present.5 The petitioner’s daughter and her 
maternal grandmother must have resided in Ṭuṭūn, since the petitioner asks that the judge’s 
delegate in that village secure and deliver his daughter to him. The document does not 
identify the judge’s location, but two possibilities present themselves: Madīnat al-Fayyūm, 
the provincial capital, and Ṭalīt, a village about four kilometers west of Ṭuṭūn.6 I prefer 
the latter interpretation, which requires further discussion that I pursue in the following 
section. 

We know nothing of the circumstances of the document’s discovery,7 so whether it was 
excavated in the vicinity of Ṭuṭūn or elsewhere and who retained possession of it after 
its drafting remain uncertain. We might speculate that Ibrāhīm b. Rizq held on to the 
document, since he would have been charged with carrying out the order in the rescript.

Although we have no date for the petition, we are fortunate that Ibrāhīm b. Rizq appears 
in a number of other Ṭuṭūn-related documents and that plenty of other Arabic petitions 
are extant to compare to ours. As we will see, these allow us to locate our petition between 
the latter half of the fourth/tenth century (most likely after the Fatimid conquest of Egypt 
in 359/969) and the mid-fifth/eleventh. Our document and its comparanda can also help us 
partially reconstruct the Islamic judicial infrastructure of the rural district around Ṭuṭūn 
and the locals who worked in it—a notable contribution, as provincial administrative history 
is particularly difficult to trace in this period.

The Khalīfa and the Qāḍī

The petition mentions holders of two judicial positions, the khalīfa and the qāḍī. The 
term khalīfa appears relatively early in Egypt’s papyrological record to designate individuals 
delegated some judicial power by a higher authority.8 So, for example, a papyrus of the 
210s/820s calls one Ḥasan b. Yaʿqūb “the khalīfa of Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd, [who is] the khalīfa of 
the qāḍī ʿĪsā b. al-Munkadir, in the Fayyūm.”9 ʿĪsā was the chief judge of Egypt with his seat 
in Fustat; we therefore understand Ḥasan in this example to have been the Fayyūm’s main 
local judicial figure by virtue of the authority delegated down the chain to him from ʿĪsā.

5.  See C. Gaubert and J.-M. Mouton, Hommes et villages du Fayyoum dans la documentation papyrologique 
arabe (Xe–XIe siècles) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2014), 231–35; Y. Rapoport, Rural Economy and Tribal Society 
in Islamic Egypt: A Study of al-Nābulusī’s “Villages of the Fayyum” (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 43–47; L. Weitz, 
“Islamic Law on the Provincial Margins: Christian Patrons and Muslim Notaries in Upper Egypt, 2nd–5th/8th–
11th Centuries,” Islamic Law and Society 27 (2020): 5–52; M. J. Shomali, “Arabic Legal Documents from the 
Fatimid Period and Their Historical Background” (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2020).

6.  See the map in Gaubert and Mouton, Hommes et villages, 299, and the discussion in M. Tillier and N. 
Vanthieghem, “La rançon du serment: Un accord à l’amiable au tribunal fatimide de Ṭalīt,” Revue des mondes 
musulmans et de la Méditerranée 140 (2016): 53–72, at 59–60.

7.  The document belongs to a collection that the Library of Congress purchased from the Cairo dealer Au 
Bouqiniste Orientale, likely in the late 1940s or early 1950s. See Vanthieghem and Weitz, “Monks, Monasteries, 
and Muslim Scribes,” 463, n. 5.

8.  See M. Tillier, L’invention du cadi: La justice des musulmans, des juifs et des chrétiens aux premiers siècles 
de l’islam (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2017), 40–41.

9.  P.SijpesteijnDelegation.



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The Long Arm of the Provincial Law  •  55

Ibrāhīm b. Rizq appears to have enjoyed delegated judicial powers of an even more 
localized nature, limited to the village of Ṭuṭūn. Indeed, there are other examples of 
probable village-level judicial delegates elsewhere in the southern Fayyūm, designated 
by slightly different formulations: a “representative [of justice] in Uqlūl” (al-mustakhlaf 
bi-Uqlūl), witness to a document of 415/1024; a “holder of the right to justice (al-mustaḥiqq 
al-ḥukm) in Uqlūl,” 417/1026; and another “representative of justice” (al-mustakhlaf ʿalā 
al-ḥukm) in Barbanūda, 421/1030.10 What these individuals’ precise powers were is not 
certain, and we should think of khalīfa as a loose term that might connote a host of duties, 
not as a designation of a uniform office.11 In the case of our petition, at least, Ibrāhīm’s 
position involved carrying out the order of a higher authority rather than issuing a 
judgment himself.

Who is the qāḍī to whom the petition is addressed and from whom Ibrāhīm’s powers 
derive? Given the small size and generally inelegant form of the petition (discussed below), 
we cannot be dealing with Egypt’s chief qāḍī in Fustat or Cairo; a provincial judge based in 
the Fayyūm is much more probable. Thus, one possibility is that the petition is addressed to 
the qāḍī of the provincial capital, Madīnat al-Fayyūm.

A second interpretation is that the qāḍī in question occupied a judgeship in Ṭuṭūn’s 
neighboring village of Ṭalīt. We know Ṭalīt to have been home to a majlis al-ḥukm by the 
early fifth/eleventh century, as this tribunal is named in a dispute settlement that the 
majlis produced in 404/1013–14.12 Though that document gives no title for the presiding 
authority, its contents indicate that the remit of the majlis stretched beyond Ṭalīt itself into 
the surrounding region, as one of the litigants is identified as a resident of Ṭuṭūn (the other 
gets no geographical nisba).13 In view of the fact that multiple judicial delegates are attested 
in nearby villages, it is reasonable to think that a formal court serving the surrounding 
district would have been home to an official with a higher rank than that of a village-level 
khalīfa. Furthermore, another majlis al-ḥukm attested in contemporary documents was 
located in a town, al-Ushmūnayn,14 that we know was the seat of a qāḍī.15 Adding these 
observations together, it is conceivable that the qāḍī of our petition sat in Ṭalīt.16 If he did, 

10.  P.Transmission 3; P.VanthieghemArabisation; Chrest.Khoury II 19.
11.  On a qāḍī who is the khalīfa of another qāḍī in al-Ushmūnayn, see D. Livingston, “Life in the Egyptian 

Valley under Ikhshīdid and Fāṭimid Rule: Insights from Documentary Sources,” Journal of the Economic and 
Social History of the Orient 61 (2018): 426–60, at 443–44.

12.  P.TillierRancon. 
13.  The defendant is one Sūrus b. Jirja al-Ṭuṭūnī. Chrest.Khoury I 39, a quittance between a resident of 

Ṭalīt and another of Buljusūq, is another example of multi-village business that I consider likely to have been a 
product of Ṭalīt’s majlis.

14.  Judicial summonses to the majlis al-ḥukm in al-Ushmūnayn include Chrest.Khoury I 78, 79; Chrest.
Khoury II 32, 33; P.GrohmannUrkunden 7.

15.  Fourth/tenth-century petitions from al-Ushmūnayn addressed to a qāḍī include P.Heid.Arab. III 28 and 
Chrest.Khoury I 81. P.Cair.Arab. 45, a marriage contract of 461/1069, names al-Ushmūnayn’s current qāḍī.

16.  M. Tillier and N. Vanthieghem also conclude that there is a good possibility that a qāḍī sat in Ṭalīt. See 
“La rançon,” 61; “Un reçu de paiement pour une vente immobilière à terme,” Chronique d’Egypte 93 (2018): 
421–31, at 421–22.



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this village judge presumably had jurisdiction over some stretch of the southern Fayyūm 
while remaining subordinate to the qāḍī of Madīnat al-Fayyūm. 

I incline to the view that Ṭalīt indeed hosted our document’s qāḍī, largely because I 
find the overall roughness of the petition—its small size, spelling mistakes, and brusque 
rescript—suggestive of distance from a more prestigious court setting in the national or 
provincial capital. But the evidence for a qāḍīship in Ṭalīt is ultimately circumstantial, and 
we cannot rule out the possibility that the petition was destined for the eyes of a judge in 
Madīnat al-Fayyūm. It appears more certain that Ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm was a local center of 
judicial activity and that, whatever the title of its chief authority, Ṭuṭūn-related matters fell 
under its purview. In addition to the documented appearance of a Ṭuṭūnite litigant at Ṭalīt 
discussed above, the almost exclusively Coptic and biblical names of the residents of Ṭuṭūn 
found in documents related to the village give the impression that it was mostly Christian 
into the second half of the fifth/eleventh century, which militates against the likelihood 
that it hosted its own Islamic legal assembly.17 I thus consider it probable that Ibrāhīm 
was associated with Ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm. Perhaps he was made khalīfa for Ṭuṭūn by the 
Ṭalīt majlis; perhaps he himself presided over the majlis by virtue of delegated authority 
from a higher qāḍī, and that remit included responsibility for Ṭuṭūn as well. I develop this 
inference of an association between Ṭalīt’s Islamic tribunal and the khalīfa Ibrāhīm, as well 
as his broader lineage, in the following section.

Finally, wherever our petition’s addressee had his seat, it is worth noting that the 
document remains one of the earliest attestations of a judicial official in the Fayyūm bearing 
the title of qāḍī.18 If he was indeed the qāḍī of Ṭalīt, we have one of the only documentary 
attestations of that title outside of a major city or provincial capital. Mathieu Tillier has 
argued that Egypt’s Islamic court system began to expand into the provinces and rural areas 
beginning perhaps in the third/ninth century;19 although the paper trail left by that process 
has provided most of the medieval legal documents available for us to study today, explicit 
mentions of qāḍīs securely locatable in the provinces are few and far between.20 We may 
now add the Fayyūmī qāḍī of our petition to those few other references. 

Ibrāhīm and the Banū Rizq

The evidence for the identity of our qāḍī ends at the inferred location of his seat, but 
a number of other documents allow us to say more about the khalīfa Ibrāhīm and, by 
extension, the human infrastructure of his local judicial institution—the group of scribes 
and witnesses who supported its work. We would not expect a judge’s delegate to a village 
at the desert’s edge to enjoy a prominent place in the historical record, but Ibrāhīm’s nasab 

17.  See, for the same argument, Tillier and Vanthieghem, “La rançon,” 59–60. Cf. Shomali, “Arabic Legal 
Documents,” 132–35.

18.  P.Fay.Villages 37 and 40, two late fourth/tenth- to early fifth/eleventh-century letters from Damūya in 
the vicinity of the Fayyūm, mention qāḍīs. 

19.  M. Tillier, L’invention, 114–35.
20.  See the documents cited in notes 15 and 18 above.



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“ibn Rizq” crops up a number of times in the Arabic documentation of his home region.21 
Tracing this family name through the documents suggests that Ibrāhīm and his family 
belonged to a provincial Muslim literate class and maintained traditions of service to their 
local Islamic institutions. Perhaps constituting a petty elite, local lineages such as the Banū 
Rizq provided the ranks of witnesses and scribes that kept the business of village courts 
humming.

We first encounter the descendants of a certain Rizq as witnesses to two of the earliest 
extant Arabic legal documents related to Ṭuṭūn, deeds of purchase dated 268/881 and 
272/886. Al-Ḥasan b. Rizq, four of his sons, and one nephew affixed their witness signatures 
to the former; the same al-Ḥasan, four sons, a nephew, a grandnephew, and perhaps a 
grandson signed the latter.22

The latest attestations of the “ibn Rizq” nasab come nearly two hundred years later in a 
corpus of legal documents dated between 405/1014 and 456/1064. In these, all concerning 
individuals from southern Fayyūm settlements, one al-Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm b. Rizq has signed 
his name and added a note of registration in the upper margin.23 This al-Ḥasan cannot be 
the grandson of the same Rizq whose grandchildren lived two centuries earlier, but he was 
indeed Rizq’s descendant: eleven years before the younger al-Ḥasan appears as a document 
registrant, his witness signature on a deed of manumission gives his full genealogy, al-Ḥasan 
b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī b. Jibrīl b. al-Ḥasan b. Rizq.24 The fifth/eleventh-century al-Ḥasan was thus 
the great-great-grandson of his third/ninth-century namesake, and his signature indicates 
that Ibn Rizq had become the clan nasab of a broader lineage descended from that common 
ancestor.

The Banū Rizq evidently passed on a commitment to serve their local Islamic legal 
institutions from one generation to the next, as a survey of documents from the southern 
Fayyūm turns up at least thirteen members of this lineage who appear as witnesses or 
document registrants (see Table 1). Following Tillier and Naïm Vanthieghem, I would 
suggest that these individuals were closely associated with Ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm and 
perhaps resided in that village.25 With one exception, the descendants of Rizq appear as 
witnesses exclusively in documents related to residents of Ṭuṭūn; as mentioned above, 

21.  Noted in Tillier and Vanthieghem, “La rançon,” 60; Shomali, “Arabic Legal Documents,” 147–48.
22.  P.FahmiTaaqud 4, 5.
23.  P.Berl.Arab. I 22; Chrest.Khoury I 39; Chrest.Khoury II 20; CPR XXVI 10; P.Shomali 1–3, 5–7, 8–9; 

P.TillierRecu; P. Utah 850r (unpublished). See also A. Grohmann, Einführung und Chrestomathie zur arabischen 
Papyruskunde (Prague: Státní Pedagogické Nakladatelství, 1954), 121–24. Note that P.TillierRecu does not 
mention explicit toponyms or geographical nisbas. P. Utah 850r concerns parties from Ṭuṭūn, but the date is 
illegible.

24.  P.Cair.Arab. 37 (393/1003).
25.  Tillier and Vanthieghem, “La rançon,” 60. Cf. Shomali, “Arabic Legal Documents,” 139–41. Note that 

P.Shomali 1.10 describes a manor or pavilion, jawsaq, that lies in Ṭuṭūn and belongs to Ṭāhir b. al-Ḥasan b. 
Rizq. If this is the same individual who signed P.FahmiTaaqud 4 (268/881), he can no longer have been alive 
when P.Shomali 1 (405/1014) was drafted; perhaps “Ṭāhir’s manor” was the customary moniker given to this 
property. It is, in any case, evidence that at least some of the Banū Rizq owned property and might have resided 
in Ṭuṭūn at some point, but it hardly proves that the clan as a whole did. 



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Table 1. Members of the Banū Rizq Attested in Legal Documents

Name Documents (date)

al-Ḥasan b. Rizq P.FahmiTaaqud 4 (268/881), 5 (272/886)

Dāwūd b. al-Ḥasan b. Rizq P.FahmiTaaqud 4, 5

Ṭāhir b. al-Ḥasan b. Rizq P.FahmiTaaqud 4, 5

Isḥāq b. Sulaymān b. Rizq P.FahmiTaaqud 4, 5

Hārūn b. al-Ḥasan b. Rizq P.FahmiTaaqud 4, 6 (293/906)

ʿĪsā b. Isḥāq b. Sulaymān [b. Rizq] P.FahmiTaaqud 5*26

Yaʿqūb b. al-Ḥasan b. Rizq P.FahmiTaaqud 5

Sulaymān b. Yaʿqūb [b. al-Ḥasan b. 
Rizq]

P.FahmiTaaqud 5*

Aḥmad b. al-Ḥasan b. Rizq P.FahmiTaaqud 4, 5, 6

Ibrāhīm b. Aḥmad [b. al-Ḥasan] b. 
Rizq27

P.Cair.Arab. 58* (341/952), 59* (341/953), 119 (348/960); P. Berl. 
Inv. 9159* (unpublished, 346/961);28 P.FahmiTaaqud 9 (353/964)

ʿAlī b. Jibrīl [b. al-Ḥasan] b. Rizq29 P.Frantz-MurphyComparison I 1* (350/961), 2* (352/963); 
P.Vente 9 = Chrest.Khoury I 53 (372/983)

Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī [b. Jibrīl b. al-Ḥasan b. 
Rizq]

P.Cair.Arab. 37* (393/1003)30

al-Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī b. Jibrīl b. 
al-Ḥasan b. Rizq

P.Cair.Arab. 37; P.Shomali 1 (405/1014); P.Berl.Arab I 22 
(407/1016); P.Shomali 2 (417/1026), 3 (430/1038); P.TillierRecu 
(447/1055); CPR XXVI 10 (451/1059); P.Shomali 5 (454/1062), 
7 (455/1063), 8–9 (456/1064); Chrest.Khoury I 39 (456/1064); 
Chrest.Khoury II 20 (456/1064); P. Utah 850r (date illegible)

26.  Asterisks indicate that the Ibn Rizq nasab does not appear in the individual’s signature, but internal and 
cross-document comparison makes his belonging to the family likely.

27.  Ibrāhīm b. Aḥmad added the Ibn Rizq nasab to his signature in P.Cair.Arab. 119 and P.FahmiTaaqud 9 
(the editor erroneously reads Rajab for Rizq; see the plate) but not in the other documents. Grohmann’s notes to 
P.Cair.Arab. 58.15, 59.14, and 119.13 suggest that we are dealing with the same individual on all these documents 
because of the similarity of the hand.

28.  See Grohmann’s notes to P.Cair.Arab. 58.15 and 119.13.
29.  ʿAlī b. Rizq signed on P.Vente 9. He is plausibly the same individual as ʿAlī b. Jibrīl b. al-Ḥasan b. Rizq, 

the grandfather of al-Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm in al-Ḥasan’s genealogically complete signature to P.Cair.Arab. 37. I am 
therefore inclined to identify him also with the ʿAlī b. Jibrīl of P.Frantz-MurphyComparison I 1 and 2, though 
this identification is not definite. The published document images are too indistinct to compare the hands 
effectively.

30.  Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī signed as the registrant in the upper margin of this document. It is not a stretch to 
presume that he is the father of al-Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm, the document’s first witness and scribe.



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the Christian character of Ṭuṭūn gives one to suspect that Ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm served as 
the local center of Islamic legal services for its neighboring village.31 We can thus imagine 
that Ṭuṭūnites would have made the short four-kilometer walk to Ṭalīt to get their legal 
documents drawn up and registered, and there encountered the Banū Rizq and other locals 
who served the court.32

No doubt more members of this family will turn up as more documents are published 
and studied.33 Overall, the Banū Rizq’s literacy and connections to their local court suggest 
that they constituted part of the Muslim civilian elite of the southern Fayyūm. It is not 
particularly surprising to find a specialized craft and social role—here, scribal literacy and 
service to the court—passed down through the generations of a single lineage. But the Banū 
Rizq provide us a picture of this social phenomenon that is especially evocative for its small-
scale character. We more typically encounter scribal dynasties in chronicles of the Abbasid 
chancery or in Mamluk biographical dictionaries; here we have one in the handwriting of 
five generations of provincial scribes.

In this regard, the Banū Rizq’s documents reveal noteworthy details of the workings of 
a provincial Islamic court. Every member of the family listed in Table 1 had at least basic 
scribal literacy, because their witness testimonies note that they wrote in their own hands, 
with one exception: the patriarch al-Ḥasan b. Rizq, whose sons Dāwūd and Aḥmad “wrote 
for him . . . at his command and in his presence” (kataba ʿanhu . . . bi-amrihi wa-maḥḍarih).34 
Even if al-Ḥasan never learned to write Arabic, his descendants consistently cultivated that 
skill and source of social capital. At least some of them received more advanced scribal 
training as well; they not only signed legal documents as witnesses but also drafted some of 
our extant examples.35

Still others among the Banū Rizq achieved enough prominence to fill judicial roles more 
elevated than those of scribe and witness. The Ibrāhīm of our petition was a qāḍī’s delegate. 
Two members of the lineage appear as document registrants, signing and adding a note of 
validation to their respective documents’ upper margins.36 This was the practice when a 

31.  This hypothesis is strengthened by our one example of a witness explicitly identified as hailing from 
Ṭuṭūn, Abū al-ʿUlā b. Ḥudayj al-Tuṭūnī, on P.Shomali 3. Geographical nisbas are uncommon in witness signatures 
and likely to signify an individual who is nonlocal or unfamiliar to the court, especially when someone else 
writes for the witness, as in this case (though we do admittedly find one witness calling himself al-Ṭalītī on the 
Ṭalīt dispute settlement P.TillierRancon). If one witness had to be identified as a Ṭuṭūnite, it is likely that the 
others did not share that characteristic.

32.  See similarly Livingston, “Life in the Egyptian Valley,” 448–50.
33.  Three further likely candidates include Yūsuf b. Hārūn, who signed as a witness alongside his probable 

father Hārūn b. al-Ḥasan b. Rizq on P.FahmiTaaqud 6; Yūsuf’s brother Hubayra b. Hārūn b. al-Ḥasan, who signed 
alongside Yūsuf on P.VanthieghemMonks 1 and independently on P.FahmiTaaqud 7; and Yūsuf’s son ʿAbd 
al-Ṣamad b. Yūsuf b. Hārūn, witness to P.Cair.Arab. 57 and 119, Chrest.Khoury I 57, and P.Vente 9. 

34.  P.FahmiTaaqud 4.23, 5.34. This is a standard phrase for hypograph Arabic witness testimonies.
35.  Al-Ḥasan’s son Dāwūd was clearly the scribe of P.FahmiTaaqud 4 and perhaps of 5; three generations 

later, al-Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm drafted P.Cair.Arab. 37. Grohmann’s notes on the last state that the main hand and 
that of the first witness, al-Ḥasan, are different, but the plate image very clearly suggests otherwise to me.

36.  Ibrāhīm b. ʿ Alī and his son al-Ḥasan; see each of their documents in Table 1. A typical registration formula, 
of which several are attested, is “This [document] has been validated before me (ṣaḥḥa dhālika ʿindī). Al-Ḥasan 



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document was copied into a court’s register and thereby endowed with probative value.37 
Attaching the validation note was most likely the prerogative of the judge himself, one 
of his representatives, or at least a senior scribe (the registration notes are usually in a 
different hand than that of a given document’s main drafter).38 

In fact, the documentary remains of al-Ḥasan the younger’s activities offer a suggestive 
outline of the steadily ascending career a provincial scribe might hope to enjoy, and 
they demonstrate the role literate, petty notables such as the Banū Rizq could play in 
running a provincial Islamic court. We first meet al-Ḥasan in 393/1003 drafting the deed of 
manumission P.Cair.Arab. 37 and signing as the first witness. His father, Ibrāhīm (probably 
our document’s khalīfa, on which more below), signs as the registrant, so al-Ḥasan must 
have grown up with a paternal exemplar of a court servant. P.Cair.Arab. 37 is written in an 
eminently clear, deliberate hand with large letter shapes and plenty of diacritical points, 
and I am tempted to see in these characteristics a young, enthusiastic scribe new to the 
professional practice of his craft. Al-Ḥasan’s inclusion of a five-generation genealogy in his 
witness signature likewise suggests a youthful earnestness.

At some later point, al-Ḥasan began to play a judicial role comparable to his father’s: in 
each of his documents that postdate P.Cair.Arab. 37 he signs as the registrant rather than 
as a witness. His hand becomes tighter, as we might expect after years of composing legal 
formulae, but remains recognizably that of the younger man.39 Indeed, al-Ḥasan apparently 
worked in and around his local court for quite a long time; of the thirteen documents that 
he registered of which I am aware, the earliest is dated 405/1014 and the latest 456/1064. 
One, in particular, suggests that al-Ḥasan eventually attained a high regional judicial post, 
likely the qāḍīship or whatever senior position Ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm hosted. Chrest.Khoury 
I 39 of 456/1064 is a quittance for a debt between two individuals, one from Ṭalīt and the 
other from the nearby village of Buljusūq. All other documents with geographical indicators 
in which the Banū Rizq appear concern individuals from Ṭuṭūn.40 As noted above, I surmise 
that the Ṭuṭūnites went to Ṭalīt to have their legal documents drawn up, and this explains 
the concentration of particular witnesses in those deeds. But al-Ḥasan bucks the trend in 
Chrest.Khoury I 39: because he presided over a transaction involving parties from multiple 
other villages (including Ṭalīt), it is not unreasonable to think that he had by that time 
become a higher judicial official with responsibility for a wider district.41 If this inference 
is correct, al-Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm’s activities exemplify nicely the possible career arc of a 
provincial legal scribe, from witness and document drafter to registrant and judge of  

b. Ibrāhīm b. Rizq wrote [this] in his hand (bi-khaṭṭih)” (CPR XXVI 10.1–2).
37.  Rāġib, Actes, 2:116–20.
38.  See Tillier and Vanthieghem, “Un reçu,” 421, n. 5. The practice appears to have been different in the 

village of Damūya just outside the entrance to the Fayyūm, where the drafter of the legal documents P.Fay.
Villages 5–27 was also the one to register them.

39.  A distinctive final nūn, for example, remains evident in al-Ḥasan’s signature on P.TillierRecu.
40.  P.Cair.Arab. 37 and P.TillierRecu include no nisbas or other geographical indicators. I have not seen the 

unpublished P. Berl. Inv. 9159.
41.  The same conclusion is offered in Tillier and Vanthieghem, “Un reçu,” 422.



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some sort. Sons of other generations of the Banū Rizq may well have followed a path similar 
to his.

Overall, situating our petition in the context of related documents gives us an evocative 
glimpse of the structure of a minor provincial court. Its regular workings leaned on local 
families with traditions of scribal learning like the Banū Rizq; witnesses, scribes, higher 
judicial officials, and maybe even judges themselves were drawn from their ranks.

The Ibrāhīm b. Rizq of our petition fits this pattern in his service to the court as a 
judge’s delegate, but we must contend with a bit of uncertainty about his identity. If my 
reconstruction of the damaged rescript text is correct, the khalīfa was Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī b. 
Rizq, al-Ḥasan the younger’s father who registered the manumission of 393/1003. But we 
should note that Ibrāhīm b. Aḥmad b. Rizq, who appears several times as a witness in the 
mid-fourth/tenth century, is another possibility.

Which Ibrāhīm we decide on thus also affects the dating of the document. But here 
we are fortunate to have additional data in the form of the petition’s diplomatics. Recent 
work on petitions from the Fatimid caliphate has revealed much about the development 
of this genre. With these insights in mind, several formulaic and physical features of our 
petition suggest that it was produced in the later fourth/tenth century at the earliest, after 
the advent of the Fatimids in Egypt, and thus that Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī was indeed our qāḍī’s 
khalīfa in Ṭuṭūn. A close look at these same features can, in turn, shed further light on the 
development of the Arabic petition as a genre.

The Diplomatics of the Petition

Two kinds of Arabic petitions, both different from ours, have received a good degree of 
attention from scholars: petitions on papyrus from the first three Islamic centuries that 
are formally similar to letters, and generically distinctive paper petitions of the Fatimid, 
Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods addressed to high-ranking state authorities.42 Marina Rustow 
has recently made a compelling case that the evolution of the Arabic petition from the 
epistolary to the later form was programmatic rather than haphazard, an insight with 
consequences for the interpretation of the present document. In brief, Rustow argues that 
the Fatimids overhauled the Egyptian capital’s central chancery after they conquered the 
country in 359/969, instituting new script styles and document formats inspired by the 

42.  On early petitions, see especially G. Khan, “The Historical Development of the Structure of Medieval 
Arabic Petitions,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 53 (1990): 8–30. On Fatimid paper 
petitions, see now Rustow, Lost Archive, 113–244, and the works of S. D. Goitein and S. M. Stern discussed 
therein. On Ayyubid and Mamluk petitions, see D. P. Little, “Five Petitions and Consequential Decrees from Late 
Fourteenth Century Jerusalem,” al-Majalla al-ʿarabiyya li-l-ʿulūm al-insāniyya 54 (1996): 348–96; idem, “Two 
Petitions and Consequential Court Records from the Ḥaram Collection,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 
25 (2001): 171–94; D. S. Richards, “A Mamlūk Petition and a Report from the Dīwān al-Jaysh,” Bulletin of the 
School of Oriental and African Studies 40 (1977): 1–14; idem, “A Doctor’s Petition for a Salaried Post in Saladin’s 
Hospital,” Social History of Medicine 5 (1992): 297–306; idem, “A Petition for an Iqtāʿ Addressed to Saladin or 
al-ʿĀdil,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 55 (1992): 98–105; S. M. Stern, “Petitions from the 
Ayyūbid Period,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 27 (1964): 1–32; idem, “Petitions from the 
Mamlūk Period (Notes on the Mamlūk Documents from Sinai),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African 
Studies 29 (1966): 233–76.



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imperial grandeur of eastern Abbasid chancery practice. One outcome of this overhaul 
was that the petition, an important technology of state that linked subjects, lower-level 
officials, and rulers in relationships of patronage and oversight, became a “distinctive genre, 
with dedicated formulary and specific, grand formatting,” including both a “curvilinear, 
proportioned” script new to Egypt and a particular style of line shape and spacing.43 These 
features set the new Fatimid state petition drafted by scribes close to Cairo’s chancery apart 
from the earlier Arabic petitions, which had been almost indistinguishable from regular 
letters.

How does the present document fit into these developments? It appears to fall between 
the new high chancery style and the older epistolary one, and it thus belongs to an 
intermediate category that so far has received little attention from scholars. Certain of 
the document’s features exhibit a resemblance to Rustow’s Fatimid state petitions, which 
supports dating the document to the early Fatimid period (and identifying Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī as 
its khalīfa). Others are holdovers from the older epistolary petition style or are shared with 
contemporary letters but not with the high state petitions. Overall, we should understand 
our document as exemplifying a rough category—not a coherent genre—of lower-register 
petition writing that carried on alongside the high chancery style after the Fatimid reforms. 
Petitions of this kind originated or circulated at some degree of remove from the palace 
chancery context of Rustow’s archetypal Fatimid state documents;44 they absorbed some 
high-style elements while retaining epistolary features as well. I will illustrate this rough 
documentary category by examining several of our petition’s key formulaic and physical 
features and comparing them to those of other pertinent documents,45 and then circle back 
around with the resulting insights to the question of the document’s date of origin.

The most basic formal element of our petition to note is its material: paper. This essential 
feature locates the document in the 300s/900s at the earliest, as paper replaced papyrus as 
Egypt’s main writing support during that century.46 Several of the document’s key formulae, 
on the other hand, are clear carryovers from the epistolary petitionary style of earlier 
centuries. One such feature is the raʾy clause, the formula that uses some form of the root 
r-ʾ-y to express the petitioner’s request for assistance. Our document features a simple, 
tried and true version of the clause: “If [the addressee] should see fit (fa-in raʾā), ]let him 

43.  M. Rustow, “The Fatimid Petition,” Jewish History 32 (2019): 351–72, at 351–52.
44.  Note that state petitions were not chancery documents proper because they were produced outside 

the palace and sent to it rather than in the course of the palace chancery’s regular business. But their formal 
features place them clearly in the broader family of state documents. Rustow, Lost Archive, 102.

45.  I collated a corpus of low-register petitions for comparison by reviewing all texts on paper of the fourth–
fifth/tenth–eleventh centuries described as petitions in the Arabic Papyrology Database (accessed 27 May 
2020) and filtering out high state petitions from Cairo to caliphs and viziers, settling on the following eleven 
documents: P.Berl.Arab. II 82; P.Fay.Villages 44; P.Heid.Arab. III 28r; P.RustowPetition; P.Vind.Arab. II 32; P.Vind.
Arab. III 38, 40, 41, 47r, 66. (P.Vind.Arab. III 64, identified as fourth/tenth century in the database, must be 
later; see Rustow, Lost Archive, 491, n. 29.) Many and possibly all these documents are of provincial origin. This 
document set does not include the metropolitan petitions to mid-level or sub-royal officials P.GenizahCambr. 
93-98, though these share some features with the low-register corpus, as we will see below.

46.  Rustow, Lost Archive, 113.



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do the following]” (recto ll. 9–10). This simple formula is found on early papyrus petitions 
and some later paper ones,47 all of which are addressed to subroyal dignitaries; high Fatimid 
petitions to caliphs and viziers, by contrast, use newer, more syntactically complex versions 
of the raʾy formula.48

In a similar category is the verb uʿlim, “I inform,” used as a blunt introduction to the 
exposition of the petitioner’s problem (recto l. 2). This is a quintessentially cross-genre 
epistolary petitionary formula—it is found in both letters and petitions from the third/ninth 
century into the fifth/eleventh.49 Like the simple raʾy formula, it is attested in petitions to 
subcaliphal dignitaries and often in provincial contexts.50 It is not found in metropolitan 
Fatimid petitions, which prefer more oblique, less presumptuous expository introductions.51

By contrast, a third formula of note that features in our petition appears to be a later 
development shared with petitions drafted in Cairo (as well as some letters). It thus 
represents a new, higher-style element adopted in this low-register petition. The formula in 
question opens the petition with a tripartite blessing on the addressee, “may God prolong 
(aṭāla) his life, perpetuate (adāma) his exaltedness, and crush (kabata) his enemies.” The 
tripartite phrasing is manifestly formulaic; slight variations in the objects of the verbs 
are attested,52 but all iterations follow the aṭāla-adāma-kabata order. The formula appears 
to be a new usage in the era of paper. Although each of the three elements is attested 
individually in some form in early papyrus documents,53 in the published record the 
tripartite combination occurs only from the fourth/tenth century onward.

47.  The many papyrus examples include P.Kratchkovski; P.KhanPetitions 1–3. For paper examples, dateable 
by their hands to the fourth–fifth/tenth–eleventh centuries, see P.Berl.Arab. II 82; P.GenizahCambr. 93, 94 (both 
Cairo); P.Vind.Arab. III 66 (qāḍī). Here and in the following notes, I give the rank of the addressee and the 
provenance of the document, if available, in parentheses.

48.  See Khan, “Historical Development,” 18–24.
49.  Papyrus letters (among many): P.Khalili I 24; P.JoySorrow 41. Paper letters and private requests: P.Berl.

Arab. II 69; P.Vind.Arab. II 3; P.DiemPrivatbriefe 1.
50.  Papyrus petitions: P.KhanPetitions 1, 2, 3r, 3v; P.Ryl.Arab I I 2. Paper petitions: P.Heid.Arab. III (qāḍī, 

al-Ushmūnayn); P.Vind.Arab. III 41 (ʿāmil [financial administrator]), 47r (qāʾid [governor]). P.RustowPetition 
uses uʿlim to address Sitt al-Mulk, the sister and regent of the Fatimid caliph; the Fayyūmī scribe appears to 
have been unaware of any problem with using a low-register phrase that a Cairene would almost certainly not 
have employed to address a member of the caliphal house. See the discussion in M. Rustow, “Famine, State 
Extraction and Subjects’ Rights in Fatimid Egypt: A Petition to the Princess Sitt al-Mulk from the Cairo Geniza,” 
unpublished manuscript, which I thank the author for sharing with me.

51.  E.g. P.RustowWoman; P.GenizahCambr. 74, among others. This matter is discussed in Rustow, “Famine.”
52.  We find two rhyming options for the “exaltedness—enemy/enemies” sequence, either ʿuluww and 

ʿaduww or aʿlāʾ and aʿdāʾ. Sometimes “might” (ʿizz) or “beneficence” (naʿmāʾ) takes the place of “exaltedness” 
in the second element. In many examples, additional direct objects are added to the second or third element, 
and sometimes verbal elements are appended to the tripartite core. See Diem’s discussion of the variants in his 
notes to P.Vind.Arab. I 7.2–4.

53.  The elements aṭāla Allāh baqāʾa- and adāma Allāh . . . , “may God prolong [the addressee’s] life” and 
“perpetuate [some attribute of the addressee’s],” are ubiquitous. I am aware of a solitary early example of element 
3,  kabata ]Allāh[ aʿdāʾa- (“may [God] crush [the addressee’s] enemies”): P.KhanPetitions 1. “Exaltedness” (ʿalāʾ 
or ʿ uluww) as the object of the verb adāma appears in independent attestations of the second element only from 
the fourth/tenth century onward; see P.RustowWoman and P.GenizahCambr. 72.



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This tripartite blessing appears in two contexts: private letters and petitions to subcaliphal 
officials.54 Notably, several of those petitions come from Cairo, probably from the hands of 
scribes closely connected to the chancery.55 It therefore seems that the tripartite blessing 
may have originated as a metropolitan chancery address for officials below the rank of 
caliph that subsequently filtered down into private epistolary and low-register petitionary 
style.

Whether or not this hypothesis is correct, the fact that our provincial qāḍī petition 
exhibits both this newer metropolitan feature and earlier epistolary ones points to its 
hybrid character. We find a similar mixture in the physical and visual features of the 
document—its material, size and shape, script style, and text layout. The smaller and 
rougher brown paper, the absence of the petitioner’s name in the upper left-hand corner,56 
the cramped line spacing, and the thick, inelegant ductus indicate that we are far from the 
palace chancery; a Cairene scribe might have chuckled at features redolent to him of the 
Fayyūm boondocks. Our qāḍī’s rescript, which I have left aside until now because of its poor 
state of preservation, may have elicited a similar reaction, as its legible portions suggest 
an older, provincial hand. Those same features are suggestive, in turn, of less formal, more 
immediate social relationships—the qāḍī to whom the scribe was writing was probably 
not a distant, awesome authority whom he needed to address with all the extravagance of 
metropolitan chancery style, but a somewhat familiar personality.

Other graphic elements of our petition, on the other hand, suggest that the document’s 
provincial scribe was at least partially aware of the high style that Rustow associates with 
Fatimid state documents and that he sought to emulate it (either earnestly and not very 
well, half-heartedly, or perhaps even in jest). These features relate to line layouts and letter 
shapes. Some of the petition’s lines exhibit hanging baselines—that is, individual words 
are written at an angle rather than parallel to the overall line of writing, which causes 
successive words to nest in the laps of preceding ones.57 This feature is evident, for example, 
at the beginning of the document in uʿlim sayyidī al-qāḍī on the second recto line. It is most 
pronounced at the ends of some lines (most obviously recto lines 2, 7, 8, and 9, and verso 
 
 

54.  Letters: CPR XXXII 4, 12; P.Berl.Arab. II 69, 81; P.DiemPrivatBriefe 1; P.Heid.Arab. III 26; P.Vind.Arab. I 
7, 16; P.Vind.Arab. II 35; P.Vind.Arab. III 21, 25r, 26r, 29r. Petitions originating in the provinces: P.Fay.Villages 
44 (qāḍī, Fayyūm); P.Heid.Arab. II 28r (al-Ushmūnayn); P.Vind.Arab. III 38, 40 (both al-Ushmūnayn). Petitions 
in Cairo/Fustat: P.GenizahCambr. 93 (amīr), 95r (qāḍī), 96, 97 (qāʾid), 98 I and II (qāḍī); P. Washington Libr. 
of Congress Inv. Ar. 111 (vizier). On elaborate opening blessings for viziers and caliphs, see Khan, “Historical 
Development,” 26–30.

55.  See the previous note. We should not think that every scribe of a petition from Cairo/Fustat necessarily 
worked in the palace chancery and knew the chancery style inside and out. But it is still reasonable to expect 
basic elements of the high chancery style to appear in petitions originating in the capital. For example, the 
unpublished petition to a vizier in P. Washington Libr. of Congress Inv. Ar. 111 clearly shows a chancery-style 
hand (and uses the tripartite opening blessing). 

56.  See Rustow, “Fatimid Petition,” 360, n. 8.
57.  E. M. Grob, Documentary Arabic Private and Business Letters on Papyrus: Form and Function, Content 

and Context (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 166–70; Rustow, Lost Archive, 169–72.



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lines 1 and 4), which gives them hints of the upward-slanting, boat shape that Rustow sees 
as distinctive of Fatimid state petitions.58

Of the document’s letter shapes, some appear in evidently older forms typical of 
provincial hands, such as the alif with a foot (in bi-l-tawqīʿ, recto l. 10).59 Other letters, 
however, begin to approach curvilinear shapes at least comparable to those of the chancery 
style: a fully rounded bowl for final nūn and qāf;60 a two-stroke rather than “double-hairpin” 
kāf;61 a vertical rather than slanted-stroke ṭāʾ;62 and the ḥāʾ rasm, which is sometimes a “dull 
hairpin” but other times involves a greater flourish of the pen.63

Notably, the combination of high chancery and older graphic elements that I have 
identified in our document is also evident in other little-studied petitions from provincial 
contexts of the fourth–fifth/tenth–eleventh century. A Fayyūmic petition dateable to 
411–14/1021–24 and addressed to the caliph’s sister Sitt al-Mulk lacks boat lines and a 
curvilinear script but gives a tarjama, the petitioner’s name, in the upper left-hand corner 
as a petition written by a metropolitan chancery scribe would do. An example addressed to 
an unnamed shaykh in al-Ushmūnayn follows the chancery style more closely by including 
a tarjama, upward-slanting lines, and wider line spacing. A petitionary epistle addressed 
to a qāḍī in the vicinity of the Fayyūm includes a tarjama and upward-slanting, semi-boat 
shapes for the first few lines before the writer abandons the effort. A petition of uncertain 
provenance addressed to a financial administrator (ʿāmil) is generous with its line spacing 
but eschews boat-shaping.64 

Hybridity is thus the common denominator in the graphic as well as formulaic elements 
of provincial petitions in this period.65 We are dealing, in sum, with a rough petitionary form 
that lies between the earlier epistolary style and Rustow’s Fatimid state one, an amorphous 
category that we can label heuristically the “low-register paper petition.” Documents that 

58.  As halting and inelegant as the layout of our document is, it is nonetheless closer to the palace chancery 
style in this respect than is at least one petition that we suspect actually made it to the palace: P.RustowPetition, 
addressed from the Fayyūm to Sitt al-Mulk.

59.  See also the open final nūn (e.g., in, recto l. 3); the full loop for final hāʾ/tāʾ marbūṭa (al-sādisa, recto l. 
7); and the toothless ṣād (al-ṣabiya, verso l. 3). On script styles and letter shapes, see Grob, Letters on Papyrus, 
159–206; Rustow, “Fatimid Petition,” 366; Rustow, Lost Archive, 160–206.

60.  Min, fa-in, rizq, takūn, yathiq; recto ll. 5, 9, 11, 13; verso l. 2.
61.  Kabata, yumkinnī, takūn; recto ll. 3, 8, 13.
62.  Yataṭawwal, bi-Ṭuṭūn; recto ll. 10, 11.
63.  Ḥattā ajʿalahā, ḥattā, ḥasbunā; recto l. 12; verso ll. 2, 6.
64.  These documents are, respectively, P.RustowPetition, P.Vind.Arab. III 40, P.Fay.Villages 44, and P.Vind.

Arab. III 41. The petitioner of the last calls himself a Kutāmī, which the editor understands to mean a resident of 
the village of Kutāma in the Delta but which might denote instead a member of the Berber Kutāma tribe.

65.  How provincial scribes would have acquired familiarity with the metropolitan style deserves further 
study. Rustow suggests that the Fatimids invested in training functionaries in the new scribal styles even in the 
provinces (Lost Archive, 242). Perhaps anyone associated with state administrative organs, including sharīʿa 
courts, would have received some such training as Fatimid rule got up and running, and this was then passed 
on to succeeding generations of scribes. That provincials may not have viewed the new style with the same 
reverence as did metropolitan chancery scribes, for whom good style was a hallmark of a “guild identity” (Lost 
Archive, 100), could account for its incomplete dissemination outside the capital.



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fit this category were usually produced by scribes outside the immediate orbit of the palace 
chancery, addressed to subroyal dignitaries, and inflected to varying degrees by older 
petitionary, newer epistolary, and high chancery usages.

I have labeled this category “paper” rather than “Fatimid” petitions because even 
those of its features that appear to be new to the 300s/900s, such as the tripartite opening 
blessing, may predate the Fatimid overhaul of the Egyptian chancery at the latter end of 
that century. Nonetheless, in the case of our petition, I am inclined to date the document to 
the Fatimid period on the basis especially of the graphic elements—hanging baselines and 
boat-shaped lines—that Rustow sees as emblematic of the high Fatimid style. Such a dating, 
in turn, gives added weight to the identification of the document’s khalīfa as Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī 
b. Rizq, active after the Fatimid conquest of Egypt, rather than Ibrāhīm b. Aḥmad, active 
before it. On this basis, I propose 390/1000 as an approximate date for the document.

And in this direction, the petition’s formulae offer one more interesting morsel of 
evidence. After the basmala of the opening invocation, the scribe adds tawakkaltu ʿalā Allāh, 
“I place trust in God.” This extended invocation is not overly common in the published 
documentary record; I have found only two other examples in the legal documents of 
the southern Fayyūm, one of which is the deed of manumission drafted by al-Ḥasan b. 
Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī and registered by his father.66 A coincidence? The respective hands of the 
manumission and our petition are largely dissimilar, although that need not be decisive 
if the drafter of the petition was imitating a less familiar metropolitan style. Perhaps the 
tawakkul invocation was a family usage, and the scribe of our petition was either the khalīfa 
himself or his son, al-Ḥasan the longtime court servant.

Father, Daughter, and the Long Arm of the Law

The question of who drafted the petition brings us back to the human heart of our story, 
the petitioner trying to alleviate the financial problems bedeviling him, his daughter, 
and a mother-in-law with whom he was probably at loggerheads. It also returns us to the 
workings of the provincial court, since in order for the petitioner to achieve his aims, the 
text of the petition had to render his problems legible and actionable in the legal framework 
within which the qāḍī operated. Unfortunately, the text is incomplete to the degree that we 
can reconstruct neither the full facts of the case nor the qāḍī’s ruling. Nonetheless, we can 
describe the rough outline of the case in search of the story within it, and we can compare 
the case to prescriptive works of law to hazard some guesses regarding the madhhab 
affiliations of the provincial judiciary involved and the ultimate outcome of the case.

We do not know which school of Islamic law our petition’s qāḍī adhered to, if he followed 
any of them with particular fidelity. In general, we would expect the Mālikī school to 
have been best represented in the Egyptian provinces, but it is possible that the Shāfiʿīs, 
and perhaps even the Ḥanafīs and the Ismāʿīlīs (the latter only after the establishment of 
the Fatimids), had a presence there as well.67 Given the uncertainty regarding the qāḍī’s 

66.  The other is P.Transmission 4, Uqlūl, 418/1027. The invocation is attested elsewhere in P.Vente Appendix 
2 (Asyūṭ) and in CPR XXI 74, 78 (tax quittances from the first half of the third/ninth century).

67.  Worth mentioning here is the unpublished paper deed of sale P. Cambr. UL Inv. Michael. Charta B 87, 



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affiliation, the following examination touches on the opinions of each of these schools, 
though the Ismāʿīlīs are left aside for lack of any extensive discussion of the relevant legal 
problems in the extant Fatimid lawbooks.

Two principal areas of Islamic family law bear on the facts of the case as the petition 
presents them: the custody of minor children and the obligation to provide material support 
(nafaqa) for minor dependents. Regarding the former, the petition’s narrative suggests that 
the father’s actions so far had accorded precisely with the Islamic law of custody. Majority 
views across the Islamic legal schools prescribe that mothers have first right to take custody 
of and raise young children; if a child’s mother dies or is unfit to provide care, her own 
mother is next in line and takes precedence over the father and various other relations. The 
Islamic legal schools differ as to when an offspring moves out of the “tender years” and into 
an age of moral formation when the father reenters the picture as a potential custodian, 
but all would agree that the petitioner’s six-year-old daughter was still within the former 
category.68 So, in placing his daughter with her maternal grandmother after the death of his 
wife, the unnamed petitioner did exactly what Islamic law imagines he should have done in 
such a situation.

Things get more complicated with the question of maintenance. The petitioner had 
been providing material support for his daughter for several years preceding the petition, 
as Islamic law expects of the fathers of minor children.69 But in the petition he avers that 
something has recently changed and he no longer has the means to support his daughter 
in her current custodial circumstances. He appears to suggest that the support would be 
within his means if his own mother took custody of the child. Why that should be so is not 
immediately clear, but we can imagine several possible scenarios. Perhaps the petitioner’s 
mother-in-law expected an additional wage for herself beyond what sufficed for the child’s 
needs; perhaps she expected cash payments but specie was difficult to come by in a rural 
area; perhaps the petitioner shared a dwelling with his mother, so bringing his daughter 
to her would have meant taking his daughter himself (and avoiding additional rent costs).70

the parties to which include two brothers from Ṭalīt identified with the nisba al-shāfiʿayn, “the Shāfiʿīs.” This 
document, dateable formally and paleographically to the fourth–fifth/tenth–eleventh centuries, confirms 
the presence of at least some Shāfiʿīs in the southern Fayyūm. It may also suggest that Shāfiʿī affiliation was 
uncommon enough to merit a distinguishing nisba. I thank Naïm Vanthieghem for pointing me to this document 
and sharing an image of it.

68.  See generally A. F. Ibrahim, Child Custody in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice in Egypt since the Sixteenth 
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 64–71; Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, ed. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd 
al-Muḥsin al-Turkī and ʿ Abd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Hulw (Cairo: Hajr, 1986), 11:412–16, 422–23. Specifically for 
the Mālikīs, see Saḥnūn al-Tanūkhī, al-Mudawwana al-kubrā (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Saʿāda, 1322/1905–6; reprint, 
[Riyadh]: Wizārat al-Shuʾūn al-Islāmiyya wa-l-Awqāf wa-l-Daʿwa wa-l-Irshād, n.d.), 5:38–40 (maternal custody 
until age of marriage); for the Shāfiʿīs, see Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn wa-ʿumdat al-muftīn, 
ed. Muḥammad Muḥammad Ṭāhir Shaʿbān (Beirut: Dār al-Minhāj, 2005), 466 (until age of discretion); for the 
Ḥanafīs, see al-Marghīnānī, al-Hidāya sharḥ Bidāyat al-mubtadī, ed. Sāʾid Bakdāsh (Medina: Dār al-Sirāj, 2019), 
3:357–58 (until start of menstruation).

69.  Ibrahim, Child Custody, 84–87; Ibn Qudāma, Mughnī, 11:372–74.
70.  I thank Oded Zinger for the latter two suggestions.



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Overall, the petition depicts for the judge a financial situation made untenable by the 
conflicting legal imperatives of the maternal grandmother’s right to custody and the 
father’s obligation to provide material support. The petitioner seeks redress by asking the 
judge to rule that the latter imperative outweighs the former: removing the child from her 
maternal grandmother’s custody would allow the father to continue to fulfill his obligation 
of support. My reading of the rescript indicates that the qāḍī ordered Ibrāhīm to look into 
the maternal grandmother’s “incapacity” (ʿajz)—perhaps her inability to care for the child 
without the burdensome payments the father had to provide? The end of the rescript then 
suggests that the daughter should wind up with one of the grandmothers, but which one 
the judge meant we cannot tell. A survey of medieval fiqh and fatwā literature turns up 
mixed results and rulings that leave open the possibility of this case’s going either way, 
although an overall trend toward privileging the father’s position is discernible.

Consider first the petition’s implication that the father’s maintenance costs depend 
on the identity of the custodian. Some jurists might object that the child’s needs are the 
child’s needs and that these should not change from one grandmother’s house to that of 
another. This position appears to find support among some early Mālikī authorities, who 
state that the grandmother has no right to recompense (ajr) for providing custody even if 
the father could afford it;71 he owes only the child’s nafaqa. The Egyptian Ḥanafī al-Ṭaḥāwī 
(d. 321/933) offers a similar ruling.72 We might imagine that a judge who followed the logic 
of these opinions would deny both any demands for additional payments by the maternal 
grandmother and the father’s request to end her custody of the child.

But another prominent Mālikī opinion holds to the contrary that the father of a child 
who has been taken in by her maternal grandmother must provide for the child’s housing 
(suknā) in addition to her food and clothing.73 The Shāfiʿī school came to maintain in similar 
terms that the father owes a wage (maʾūna, muʾna) to the custodian.74 We would expect a 

71.  Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī, al-Nawādir wa-l-ziyādāt ʿalā mā fī al-Mudawwana min ghayrihā min 
al-ummahāt, ed. Muḥammad al-Amīn Būkhubza (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1999), 5:58, drawn from Ibn 
al-Mawwāz. The same opinion with different phrasing is attributed to Ashhab b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 204/819) and 
drawn from the Andalusian collection al-ʿUtbiyya in Ibn Yūnus al-Ṣiqillī, al-Jāmiʿ li-masāʾil al-Mudawwana, ed. 
Ḥamdān b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Idrīs al-Shamrī (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 2013), 9:516. See, with further discussion, Ibn Rushd 
al-Jadd, al-Bayān wa-l-taḥṣīl, ed. Muḥammad Ḥujjī, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1988), 5:376–77.

72.  Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī and Abū Bakr al-Jaṣṣāṣ, Mukhtaṣar Ikhtilāf al-ʿulamāʾ, ed. ʿAbd Allāh Nadhīr Aḥmad 
(Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 2014), 2:460–61. Al-Ṭaḥāwī states that a custodian may not take rent 
payments (ujrat al-manzil) from the property (māl) of the ward. The phrasing indicates that the child in this 
example has inherited his own property and is not receiving nafaqa from his father, who may be deceased, so 
al-Ṭaḥāwī does not actually specify whether a living father owes wages to a custodian beyond the child’s nafaqa. 
Al-Ṭaḥāwī goes on to say, however, that “others” aver that the custodian is due rent either from the ward’s 
property or from the nafaqa the ward is receiving. By contrasting this second opinion with the first, al-Ṭaḥāwī 
implies that his favored opinion does not make custodian’s wages obligatory on the father.

73.  Saḥnūn, Mudawwana, 5:44. For further discussion, see Ibn Rushd al-Jadd, al-Muqaddamāt al-mumahhidāt, 
ed. Muḥammad Ḥujjī (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1988), 1:570–71; Ibrahim, Child Custody, 58–63.

74.  Interestingly, al-Ṭaḥāwī comments that the opinion that the custodian is due rent money “has been 
related from al-Shāfiʿī, but I have not found a narration of this” (ḥukiya dhālika ʿan al-Shāfiʿī wa-lam najidhu 
riwāyatan; al-Ṭaḥāwī and al-Jaṣṣāṣ, Ikhtilāf, 2:461). Neither have I. A survey of the chapters on custody in 
al-Shāfiʿī’s Umm (Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, al-Umm, ed. Rifʿat Fawzī ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib [al-Manṣūra: Dār 



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judge bearing these opinions in mind to acknowledge that different custodians might place 
different cost burdens on the father. Would such a judge have pressed this line of reasoning 
further and allowed a father to remove a minor child from the care of her maternal 
grandmother, the custodian of first right, for reasons of financial exigency?

This precise question does not come up in the early foundational works of the madhhabs 
so far as I have been able to see, but similar cases receive attention in later furūʿ and fatwā 
works. Opinions are mixed, but the overall trajectory tends toward allowing a father to 
intervene in and change his minor child’s custody situation if doing so eases a financial 
burden. A fatwā of the Mālikī Ibn Sirāj al-Andalusī (d. 456/1064) describes the case of an 
orphan living with his maternal grandmother who wants to sell the ward’s last remaining 
property to pay for his upkeep; the paternal grandmother offers to raise and provide for 
the child herself to keep the property intact. Ibn Sirāj reports differing opinions, some 
prioritizing the maternal grandmother’s right to custody and others the best care for the 
ward (al-rifq bi-l-maḥḍūn). For his part, Ibn Sirāj leans toward the latter option, which he 
puts forward to support his answer to another fatwā request that is remarkably similar to 
our case. The maternal grandmother of a girl whose mother died has had custody for six 
years, at which point the girl’s property, presumably what she inherited from her mother, 
is almost used up; the father, lacking means himself, wants to bring the girl to his own 
mother, who will provide for and raise her. Ibn Sirāj prefers that he do so to prevent the 
girl’s impoverishment.75 Along similar lines, a sixth/twelfth-century Mālikī commentary 
work by Ibn Rushd al-Jadd (d. 520/1126) allows a father to remove his children from the 
care of their maternal grandmother to that of his own relatives if the grandmother will not 
provide custody for free (an taḥḍunahum bi-ghayr shayʾ).76 

I have been unable to find an opinion in a medieval Shāfiʿī work as directly related to 
our case as the Mālikī fatwās are, but the discussion in al-Juwaynī’s (d. 478/1085) Nihāyat 
al-maṭlab of the custody rights of a mother who requests a wage is relevant. Al-Juwaynī 
recognizes one view, among others, that affirms that custody is no different whether 
provided by a child’s mother or by someone else, built on the primary opinion that 
breastfeeding by a mother is not preferable to that by a volunteer (mutabarriʿa) wet nurse 
if the mother demands a wage for her labor.77 This opinion would appear to leave room for 

al-Wafāʾ, 2008], 6:238–420) and the abridgment of al-Muzanī (Abū Ibrāhīm al-Muzanī, Mukhtaṣar al-Muzanī, 
ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir Shāhīn [Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998], 309–10) confirms that no such 
opinion is found there. But the classical Shāfiʿī commentarial tradition based on al-Muzanī takes it as mostly 
uncontroversial that the custodian is indeed due a wage. See, e.g., Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī, Nihāyat 
al-maṭlab fī dirāyat al-madhhab, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm Maḥmūd al-Dīb (Jedda: Dār al-Minhāj li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 
2007), 15:566; Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, al-Wajīz fī fiqh al-imām al-Shāfiʿī, ed. ʿAlī Muʿawwaḍ and ʿĀdil ʿAbd 
al-Mawjūd (Beirut: Dār al-Arqam, 1997), 2:123; Abū al-Qāsim al-Rāfiʿī, al-ʿAzīz sharḥ al-Wajīz, ed. Muʿawwaḍ and 
ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 10:87; Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Nawawī, Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn, ed. 
Muʿawwaḍ and ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Riyadh: Dār ʿĀlam al-Kutub, 2003), 6:504.

75.  Recorded in Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Wansharīsī, al-Miʿyār al-muʿrib wa-l-jāmiʿ al-mughrib ʿan fatāwā ahl 
Ifrīqiyya wa-l-Andalus wa-l-Maghrib, ed. Muḥammad Ḥujjī (Rabat: Wizārat al-Awqāf wa-l-Shuʾūn al-Islāmiyya 
li-l-Mamlaka al-Maghribiyya, 1981–83), 4:48–49.

76.  Ibn Rushd, Bayān, 5:376.
77.  See al-Juwaynī, Nihāya, 15:539–40, no. 10,218, and 566–67, no. 10,248.



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a Shāfiʿī judge to allow a father to take over custody decisions in cases of financial exigency. 
I have been unable to find further discussion of this issue in medieval Shāfiʿī sources,78 but 
at some point Middle Eastern Shāfiʿīs adopted explicitly a position that would have favored 
our petitioner: the twelfth/eighteenth-century fatwā collection of al-Khalīlī (d. 1147/1734–
35) includes multiple opinions affirming that a paternal grandmother who demands no 
wage has priority of custody over a maternal one who requests to be paid.79

Among the Ḥanafīs, I have found no discussions of wages owed to custodians (as opposed 
to wet nurses) in al-Shaybānī’s (d. 189/804) foundational works or the major classical 
compendium of al-Sarakhsī (d. 483/1090).80 But split opinions start to crop up in Ḥanafī 
sources thereafter. The Fatāwā of Qāḍīkhān (d. 592/1196) takes up the case of a divorced 
mother who asks for a wage (ujra) on top of the support her impoverished ex-husband 
provides the child. The father’s sister offers to “raise the child with her own resources 
without recompense” (turabbī al-walad bi-mālihā majānan). Qāḍīkhān notes that opinions 
differ but declares that the correct one is that the mother be offered custody with no wage; 
if she refuses, the child goes to the paternal aunt.81 A few centuries later, a responsum 
of the Egyptian Ḥanafī Ibn Quṭlūbughā (d. 879/1474) dealing with a nearly identical case 
gives the same ruling as Qāḍīkhān’s while also citing another jurist’s contradictory opinion 
privileging the mother’s right to custody.82 Ultimately, the Ḥanafī tradition in the Arab 
lands looks to have followed Qāḍīkhān and Ibn Quṭlūbughā, affirming that wages are due 
for the provision of custody and allowing in situations of financial exigency the removal of 
children from custodians who would otherwise have first right of custody.83

The upshot of the foregoing discussion is that each of the Islamic legal schools relevant 
to an examination of early Fatimid Egypt considered the maternal grandmother to have first 
right of custody of a motherless child; but each also developed opinions that would have 
been favorable to an impoverished father’s desire to remove his child from the care of an 
otherwise rightful custodian if he was unable to afford the cost of that custody arrangement. 
Lacking the full text of the rescript, we can say only that the judge in our case might have 
ruled either way, though the overall trajectory of the discussions in the legal sources leads 
one to suspect that the case ended in the father’s favor.

78.  Including furūʿ works as well as the fatwā collections of Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, al-Nawawī, al-Subkī, and Ibn Ḥajar 
al-Haytamī.

79.  Muḥammad al-Khalīlī, Fatāwā al-Khalīlī (Egypt: n.p., n.d.), 2:134, 136.
80.  Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī, al-Aṣl, ed. Muḥammad Būynūkālin (Qatar: Wizārat al-Awqāf, 2012), 

4:544–49, 10:348–54; Shams al-Dīn al-Sarakhsī, Kitāb al-Mabsūṭ (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d.), 5:207–13.
81.  Fakhr al-Dīn Qāḍīkhān, Fatāwā Qāḍīkhān, ed. Sālim Muṣṭafā al-Badrī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 

2009), 1:367.
82.  Qāsim Ibn Quṭlūbughā, Majmūʿat al-rasāʾil, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Muḥammad al-Darwīsh and ʿAbd al-ʿAlīm 

Muḥammad al-Darwīsh (Damascus: Dār al-Nawādir, 2013), 709–10.
83.  For examples, see J. E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and 

Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 126; Shihāb al-Dīn al-Shilbī, Ḥāshiyat al-Shilbī, on 
the margins of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Zaylaʿī, Tabyīn al-ḥaqāʾiq sharḥ Kanz al-daqāʾiq (Būlāq: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kubrā 
al-Amīriyya, 1314/1896–97), 3:46; Ibn ʿĀbidīn, al-ʿUqūd al-durriyya fī tanqīḥ al-fatāwā al-ḥāmidiyya (n.p.: n.p., 
n.d.), 1:58–60.



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In speculating on the course of our case, we have so far proceeded on the assumption 
that the petitioner’s claims and stated aims were truthful. It is possible, however, that he 
was simply at odds with his mother-in-law or concerned about his daughter for emotional 
or other nonmaterial reasons and pleaded poverty as a strategy to regain custody. This 
possibility could have been behind the suggestion at the end of the petition of a trustee of 
the court as another option for a custodian: was the father trying to get his daughter away 
from her maternal grandmother at any cost?

The relationship between father and mother-in-law brings us to a final question: to which 
religions did the parties involved in the case belong? As noted earlier, the documentary 
record indicates that Ṭuṭūn was a largely Christian village into the fifth/eleventh century. 
If our petition follows this pattern and concerns a Christian family, the father was 
nonetheless apparently willing to seek remedies from a Muslim judge. The many extant 
Arabic-Islamic deeds and contracts from Ṭuṭūn and elsewhere demonstrate that Christians 
in late Abbasid and Fatimid Egypt routinely made use of Muslim courts and scribes for 
commercial and property business,84 but there is much less evidence of Fayyūmī Christians 
litigating intracommunal or family disputes before Muslim judges. Two Arabic documents 
acknowledging the apportionment of inheritances among Ṭuṭūnite Christian families may 
have been generated by litigation of this kind;85 if all the parties described in our petition 
were Christian, we have a new piece of evidence in this direction. Also of interest would be 
the fact that the custody and child-rearing practices of a Christian family accorded precisely 
with Islamic legal prescriptions. Perhaps placing the motherless child with the maternal 
grandmother had long been customary across the religious communities, or perhaps it had 
developed from an Islamic legal prescription into a regional custom.86

Another possibility is that the deceased mother came from a Christian family of Ṭuṭūn 
while the father was Muslim (the fact that the father asks for the help of the khalīfa in 
securing his daughter may indicate that he did not reside in the village). If this was the 
case, it is unsurprising to find the father petitioning a Muslim qāḍī for assistance. Such 
a scenario would also have implications for the judge’s treatment of the case depending 
on his madhhab affiliation, since we would be dealing with a Muslim child (following the 
religion of her father) in the custody of a Christian grandmother. The Ḥanafīs and most 
Mālikīs allowed Christian, Jewish, and even Zoroastrian custodians to care for Muslim 
children before the age of moral and religious formation; the Shāfiʿīs and some Mālikīs  
did not.87

84.  Weitz, “Islamic Law.”
85.  P.Hamb.Arab. I 1; CPR XXVI 10.
86.  Major medieval Copto-Arabic books of canon law, including the sixth/twelfth-century Majmūʿ al-qawānīn 

of Patriarch Ghubriyāl II b. Turayk and the seventh/thirteenth-century al-Majmūʿ al-ṣafawī of al-Ṣafī b. al-ʿAssāl, 
appear not to treat the law of custody.

87.  Ibrahim, Child Custody, 78–79; Ibn Qudāma, Mughnī, 11:412–13; al-Sarakhsī, Mabsūṭ, 5:210; Khalīl b. Isḥāq 
al-Jundī, al-Tawḍīḥ fī sharḥ al-Mukhtaṣar al-faraʿī li-Ibn al-Ḥājib, ed. Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm Najīb (Dublin: 
Markaz Najībawayh li-l-Makhṭūṭāt wa-Khidmat al-Turāth, 2008), 5:177–78; al-Nawawī, Minhāj, 465.



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Finally, perhaps both the father and the mother belonged to the little-attested Muslim 
community of Fatimid Ṭuṭūn.88

Conclusion

Our knowledge of the petitioner’s and his daughter’s circumstances ends at the margins 
of our document. Where the daughter spent the rest of her childhood remains uncertain, 
and we can only hope that the father acted with good intent in trying to win custody 
from his deceased wife’s mother. But set amid the considerable documentary evidence 
extant from the medieval southern Fayyūm, this petition and its rescript reveal a surprising 
amount about both the structures of a provincial Egyptian judiciary and the development 
of the Arabic petition, a medieval technology vital to constructing relationships between 
subjects, administrators, and rulers. The khalīfa involved in the case was likely associated 
with an Islamic majlis al-ḥukm in the village of Ṭalīt, and the qāḍī may have been as well 
(though this is less certain). If this interpretation is correct, the court activity in Ṭalīt 
attested by our document highlights just how extensive was the growth of Egypt’s Islamic 
judiciary in the later Abbasid and Fatimid periods. Provincial judicial institutions must have 
been supported by a local petty literate class of scribes and witnesses; the khalīfa Ibrāhīm’s 
family, the Banū Rizq, belonged to precisely this class, and we can trace their activities in 
service to their court for nearly two centuries. 

Though Ibrāhīm b. Rizq may have plied his trade near the desert edge of a rural province, 
his professional world was not disconnected from wider developments in law, scribal 
culture, and administration. The diplomatics of this petition suggest that its scribe had 
taken some influence from the new, high style of petition writing practiced in the orbit of 
the Fatimid chancery in Cairo. Indeed, the mixture of old and new formal features that we 
find in the document helps us date it to the first century of Fatimid rule. That mixture also 
allows us to identify a little-studied, low-register form of petition writing—continuing in 
certain ways the old Arabic epistolary genre and coexisting with the high Fatimid style—
that our document exemplifies.

Ultimately, our petition was a tool, a physical record of text that the petitioner planned 
to use in the furtherance of his interests. We may hope that things turned out well enough 
for him and his daughter. As more documents from the village world of the Fatimid Fayyūm 
are identified and studied, perhaps one or both of them will reappear and we will be able to 
follow their stories further.

88.  Two individuals identified as Ṭuṭūnites who bear apparently Arabic Muslim names are found in P.Cair.
Arab. 59.2 and P.Shomali 3 witnesses.1.



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