Loyalty and leadership in an early Islamic society
Roy P. Mottahedeh

Contemporary historians of premodern Islamic societies have usually sought their models of social structure in Western history. Roy Mottahedeh argues that Near Eastern social behavior of the Islamic period must, instead, be understood in it’s own terms. Studying one early Islamic society and drawing extensively on primary Arabic and Persian sources, he derives the classification of social groups and the variety of social bonds that gave shape to the social end political life of Western Iran and southern Iraq during the tenth and eleventh centuries a.d.