In a book to be entitled Early Ismā'īlism I shall argue in some detail that the Ismā'īlī movement began about the middle of the third/ninth century. It was at that date that the missionaries sent out by the leaders of the movement appeared in various parts of the Islamic world; soon afterwards their successful preaching, the increasing number of their followers, and various armed conflicts with the authorities, brought the movement to the knowledge of the outside world and secured for it the first entries in the pages of the chroniclers.

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The monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai possesses a large collection of odocuments concerning its own affairs and dating from the Fāṭimid, Ayyūbid, Mamlūk, and Ottoman periods. They were used for historical purposes as early as the seventeenth century by certain writers belonging to the monastery, but, if exception be made for the pioneer (but limited) work done by B. Moritz in the early years of this century, they remained unexploited by modern scholars. The American expedition of 1950, which has microfilmed about one-half of the library's manuscripts in various languages, brought back microfilms of the entire collection of Arabic and Turkish documents, thus making a thorough study of them possible for the first time. There is no need to specify the earlier bibliography of the Sinai documents, since readers of this Bulletin can obtain the necessary information from an article of mine published in an earlier volume.

During all periods of Islamic history, subjects with a grievance were free to address petitions to the ruler, one of whose traditional functions was to remedy injustice personally (al-naẓar fi'l-maẓālim). From Egypt we have a series of extant petitions from the Middle Ages. The practice of the Fāṭimids has been described in the detailed commentary accompanying my edition of three petitions from the time of that dynasty; the information which can be derived from the documents is there completed by accounts in literary sources. Here I publish all those petitions from the Ayyūbid period which are known to me. In another study I hope to perform the task carried out for the Fāṭimid period for the Mamlūk period also, comparing the detailed statements of the historians with the extant documents. For the Ayyūbid period there are no detailed descriptions of the procedure followed in submitting petitions, and the little which is known will be set out in the course of our discussion.

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