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This study outlines the main features of the theory and practice of political power in Muslim polities in the Middle Ages against the background of Near Eastern traditions of kingship, particularly Hellenistic, Persian and Byzantine. The early Arab-Muslim polity is treated as an integral part of late Antiquity and the book explores the way in which older traditions were transposed into Islamic form and given specifically Islamic textual sanction. Succeeding chapters deal with the assumptions about power shared by the different Muslim traditions, the central imperial theories, practices and ceremonial of power which took their classical form in Baghdad; the diffusion of these traditions to the provinces and successor states; the caliphate and its legal and ceremonial institutions, the relationship of the caliphate to the sultanate and, finally, the eschatalogical and utopian notions of power and the sacred found in philosophy, activist pantheistic mysticism and the two main branches of Shi'ism.