To believe the administrative literature of the ‘Abbāsid empire, good government was only possible through good writing. According to the this literature – treatises, manuals and exposés generally written for and by scribes – writing was at the core of the ‘Abbāsid administration. The authors of these texts testify to the production and spread as well as archiving of large numbers and types of written documents throughout the empire. They emphasise the importance of a correct usage of the language, they provide the technical vocabularies to be used in records and registers, they take down concrete examples of good composition and provide lists of the appropriate forms of address. 

If we rely on the administrative literature we must conclude that political communication – communication intended to wield power, implement decisions or influence political decision making – was for the better part in writing. However, when studying political communication at the ‘Abbāsid court the administrative literature has its limitations. First and foremost these treatises are normative in nature. They lay down the codes for the ideal bureaucrat and the guidelines for a smoothly-running administrative machinery. And we must take into account that they propagate a political message of their own: good writing (which is indispensable for good government) is only available for a ruler through a strong and well-trained bureaucratic class. In other words, the scribes of the empire, should be at the centre of the political decision making. 

Interesting, these well-trained scribes and their ‘writerly’ culture functioned in a society in which the majority of the people were illiterate or only had been introduced to some basic level of literacy, ranging from the mere recognition of the written word as an expression of communication to being able to read but not write. Moreover, sources testify that even much of the political communication among the Baghdadi elites was oral and sometimes non-verbal. This is also true for the bureaucratic class. Many matters were orally presented and discussed and informally negotiated and concluded. Thanks to oral intercession written petitions found their way to the top of a pile of papers and through oral mediation disputes were settled outside courts. In general we can say that, as in many, or even all, modern and pre-modern bureaucracies, the informal (often oral) communication was the oil that made ‘Abbāsid state machinery run. 

In this lecture I will discuss the written and unwritten political communication at the ‘Abbāsid court in Baghdad. Unfortunately, this cannot be studied from the documents produced by the ‘Abbāsid administration. While the references to letters, surveys, registers, reports, financial accounts and internal notes issued and received by the central administration in Baghdad are numerous, only a handful of these documents have survived in their original form today. It is from the narrative sources, both the histories and the prescriptive manuals, that we can reconstruct the ways in which the various groups at the ‘Abbāsid empire tried to bring their political message to the fore. I will provide examples of various types of communication and argue that the written and the unwritten were never strictly separated or in competition with one another, but functioned supplementary to one another.