The study of the Mamlūks under the Seljuks is ofpivotal significance, because those Mamlūks formedthe essential connecting link between theirpredecessors in the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate and theirsuccessors in the Sultanates of the Zangids, theAyyūbids and the Mamlūks of Egypt and Syria on theone hand, and in the Sultanate of the Ottomans onthe other. They were also part of an exceptionallyimportant stage in the ethnic transformation whichthose Mamlūks underwent with the progress oftime.

Poverty in medieval Islam is an enormous topic. It isworth considering from a historian's point of view,especially in the light of what has beenaccomplished by historians of Rome, Byzantium, andthe medieval and modern West who have dealt withpoverty and the poor. But as always, the sources forIslamic history, especially for the formative earlycenturies, present difficulties. Here I wish to makea preliminary attempt at dealing with part of thisproblem. I shall begin by considering an event whichrepresents a turning point in the history of theMuslim poor, or more accurately, in the way povertyand the poor have been represented in modernhistorical scholarship on medieval Islam. Then Ishall suggest a way in which this event may be setin context, and a possible strategy for handlingsome of the relevant sources. This strategy involvesthe identification of different, competing ways inwhich the poor were defined in the first centuriesof Islam.

Khwāja Muhammad ibn Sadīq ibn Muhammad Kujujī or“Kujūjānī” (d. Dhū-hijja 677/April, 1279), asHamdu'llāh Mustawfī Qazwīnī called him, was a Sufimaster whose sons later occupied the post of Shaykhal-Islām in Tabriz under the early Jalā'irids, theTīmūrids and early Safavids. Born in 614/1217–18,Kujujī's life coincides with the commencement ofMongol rule in northern Persia under Chingiz Khān in1219, 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 theseventeenth century are two very unusualPersian-language accounts by Central Asians of theirstays in Mughal India: the memoirs of Mutribial-Asamm Samarqandi, and the travelogue of Mahmud b.Amir Wali. Written in stylistically different butdistinctly personal voices untypical for their time,these accounts offer the modern reader valuablefirst-person insight into the minds and outlooks oftheir authors and shed light on the nature of howMuslims in Asia thought about their world and itsboundaries.

One of the questions that has prompted this study isthis: despite the fact that various Xiongnu and Xianbei groupsdominated the political arena in Northern China foralmost 300 years between the collapse of the WesternJin and thefounding of the Sui , and theusually unacknowledged fact that their descendantscontinued to do so for several hundreds moreyears,1 why is it that one could learnso little about their cultural heritage intraditional historiography?2 Even thelinguistic affinity of the Tuoba Xianbeiremains to this day a matter ofcontroversy.3