Revolts as Rituals of Political Communication in ʿAbbāsid Baghdad (295–380/908–991)

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines popular revolts in 10th-century Baghdad, emphasizing their spatial, social, and performative dimensions while reassessing their political significance. It argues that urban geography – through the proximity of mosques, prisons, markets, and palaces – enabled rapid mobilization and shaped protest trajectories, allowing demonstrators to appropriate and challenge key sites of ʿAbbāsid authority. The study challenges traditional historiography that portrays these uprisings as chaotic or irrational. Instead, it demonstrates that Baghdadian protests followed recognizable repertoires of action, including disrupting Friday prayers, freeing prisoners, targeting officials, and deploying religiously charged language. These practices were not indiscriminate but structured, symbolic, and embedded within shared political narratives. Focusing on the 10th century as a dynamic chronological framework, the study highlights how protest traditions developed and transformed over time. Before 334/945, these movements functioned as mechanisms of negotiation through which people articulated demands for protection, justice, and fair governance. However, their effectiveness depended on a political system capable of engaging with protest. After 334/945, the fragmentation of authority and the weakening of the caliphate removed these channels of communication. Revolts lost their role as constructive political tools and increasingly became expressions of factional and confessional conflict.