In Supplier Dieu dans l’Égypte toulounide, Mathieu Tillier and Naïm Vanthieghem provide the edition, translation, and study of a booklet preserved on papyrus and dated 267/880–881. It offers a selection of some forty hadiths heard by Khālid ibn Yazid, a minor local scholar, concerning the invocations that every pious Muslim has to use when addressing God. Composed during the reign of the famous governor Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn, the first autonomous ruler of Islamic Egypt, this manuscript bears exceptional testimony to the way traditional sciences were taught at the time. Not only does it open an unprecedented window on the milieu of ordinary transmitters, whose names soon fell into oblivion, but it also sheds new light on the Tulunids’ religious policy and on the Islamisation of Egypt.

Mathieu Tillier, Ph.D. (2004), Université Lumière-Lyon 2, is Professor of Medieval Islamic History at Sorbonne Université (Paris). His main research focuses on Islamic law and institutions. He is the author of Les cadis d’Iraq et l’État abbasside (132/750–334/945) (Damascus: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2009), and of L’invention du cadi. La justice des musulmans, des juifs et des chrétiens aux premiers siècles de l’Islam (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2017).

Naïm Vanthieghem, Ph.D. (2015), is a Research Fellow of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and has been working at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (IRHT) since 2017. He is a specialist in Ancient and Medieval Egypt. His work focuses on the edition of documentary sources discovered in the Nile Valley, and on their importance for economic, social, and intellectual history.

All interested in the history of Islamic knowledge and culture, and anyone concerned with hadith studies, Islamic piety, and the history of Islamisation will find this edition of particular importance.