Loyal and Knowledgeable Supporters Integrating Egyptian Elites in Early Islamic Egypt

Tucked away in the “Rome and Ancient Sudan” section in the basement of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum is a marble gravestone inscribed with an Arabic text. It commemorates a woman who died in the month of Muḥarram in the year 256 AH (December 9, 869– January 7, 870 CE). The gravestone contains beautifully carved floral Kufic with Qur’ānic citations and an avowal of the dead woman’s belief in God, God’s Prophet, and death followed by the afterlife as ordained by God. The quality of the material used, its size, and its workmanship suggest that the family that erected the stone was a fairly affluent one. On the stele, the deceased is identified as Ḥujja daughter of ‘Abd alRaḥmān, alfārisī.1 Set up 230 years after the arrival of the Arab armies in Egypt, the gravestone offers a good entry point into the topic of this chapter, as a witness and expression of the social and cultural changes that Egyptian society underwent in the first two centuries of Arab rule. Starting with the conquest in the midseventh century and continuing into the ninth century, demographic shifts and processes of acculturation comprehensively reconfigured the social landscape, and with it the markers with which it was signposted and by means of which individuals and groups within it identified themselves. ‘Abd alRaḥmān arrived in Egypt not as the result of a Persian invasion or such but rather as part of the waves of migrants moving from the eastern part of the Islamic Empire in the early ninth century CE. These newcomers, like alḤujja’s family, apparently, often ended up on the upper rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. This was partially the result of the increased role that TurkoPersian military and governing cadres had started to play throughout the caliphate, but in Egypt, the old ArabMuslim elites seem to have suffered especially badly as a result of the internal fighting that had afflicted the province from the end of the eighth century. The identification of