Investitures for Non-Muslim Communal Leaders: Inter-Religious Communications between Muslim Sovereigns and Their Agents in the Middle East

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ABSTRACT Premodern Muslim authorities in the eastern Mediterranean routinely issued appointment documents (investitures) to their subordinates, a category that included the religious leaders of Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan communities. This essay surveys nineteen wholly or partly extant investitures written for non-Muslim communal leaders. It offers a synthetic account of their formal diplomatic structure and then examines them as instances of inter-religious communication, contending that the investitures were often occasions of meaningful, substantive communication that convey specific, context-sensitive messages. Notwithstanding certain polemical and supremacist elements, the investitures have a generally inclusive message that conveys the integration of non-Muslim communities into the Muslim-ruled body politic, both on the level of shared values and vocabulary and in the sense that non-Muslim communal leaders were treated, in certain ways, as agents of Muslim ruling authorities.