Recognizing that we know little about Arab settlement and Muslim populations in Armenia and Caucasian Albania during the Abbasid period, this article considers the data available in specific biographical compendia in Arabic: the works of al-Samʿānī, Ibn al-Aṯīr, Yāqūt, al-Ṣafadī, and Ibn Ḫallikān. It examines entries of notable Muslims from the fourth/eleventh through the seventh/fourteenth centuries with the nisbas related to the three provinces of the North. These tell of ethnic diversity, but also perceived geographical, scholarly, and ideological connectivity between the North and the more central lands of Islam and, specifically, the Persian cultural sphere. They engage themes and ideas that are key to the study of medieval Islam, such as ethnic diversity, slavery, the geographical definition of Islam, ǧihād, ṯuġūr, Sufism and asceticism, travel fī ṭalab al-ʿilm, and lines of transmission and authority.

Modern scholarly narratives of the development of Anatolia from the medieval period onwards have generally reflected a nationalist focus, while many of the primary sources from the region feature a clear religious perspective. However, investigation reveals that not only the larger imperial projects of the ninth-eleventh and fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, but also most of the smaller-scale states whose rise and fall occupies the interim are both polyethnic and religiously diverse. This finding must therefore problematise the rigid application of such categories to the data under review as conceptions of social identity like other boundaries and borders of the time could be much more porous. As we shall see, often pragmatic considerations could be more determinative than broader ideological concerns and change more prevalent than stable continuity. Moreover, the resulting pluralism emerges not only in the synchronic but also the diachronic dimension. Thus, while it is patent at the macro level that an elemental demographic transformation is underway from a majority Christian to Muslim polity and from the regional dominance of Greek, Armenian, and Syriac entities to that of a Turkish and Kurdish population, nevertheless the process under investigation manifests en route a panoply of changing alliances, mutual influences, and mercantile and cultural exchange that reveals patterns of symbiosis and interdependence at more micro levels. Consequently, greater attention must be paid to the diversity of differentials and the varying dynamics at work in specific regions, communities, and socioeconomic environments to figure those trajectories into our overall mapping of the contours of development at higher levels. This chapter seeks to illustrate the multiple roles Armenians adopted in their engagement in this regional interchange and to highlight the factors that impacted the latter's patterns of metamorphosis over this time frame.

My initiative to study the Armenian experience in the medieval Islamic world through paradigmatic cases of interaction takes its beginnings from the Armenian condition in the Near Eastern region. It is best explained by Nietzsche's dictum sum ergo cogito, "I exist therefore I think:' Existential in many respects, this questioning is also its motive and inner dimension. In this perspective, writing about the history of Armenians in the medieval Islamic world means trying to make sense of the circumstances. It means an effort to create/define, rather, to recreate/ redefine the historicity of experiences. Being Armenian, almost universally, is having a mobile line of ethnic ancestry that is laden with narratives from the vast historic Armenian oikoumene or habitat from Iran to Constantinople and from the Caucasus to Egypt. This study reflects, then, a questioning that a minimal level of concern about my Armenological Dasein, or my being an Armenologist requires. The condition of my generation of the 1960s, in particular, meant growing up in trilingual and pluricultural communities in ancient cities of mosques, churches, suks, local and missionary schools, and eastern/ western ideologies and folklore(s). Above all, it meant carrying a heavy luggage of vaguely perceived legacies, while learning-living in local and cosmopolitan networks of relations.