Joy and sorrow in early Muslim Egypt : Arabic papyrus letters, text and content

Abstract

People in early Muslim Egypt, like people everywhere at this time, had good and bad experiences, went through sad and happy occasions, suffered from sickness and depression and faced the inevitable fate, death, when their time came. In their writings, they expressed to each other their emotions, their grief and hope, and how they experienced these turns of the fate. This study is an attempt to explore the social and emotional aspects as they appear in their personal letters endeavoring to show how people in early Islam expressed themselves, their joy and sorrow, how they responded to misfortunes in their writings, what interested and stirred them and what they worried about and believed in. In addition to editing forty-three letters relevant for the study of emotions, this study investigated and analyzed the representation of people__s personal feelings in almost all published Arabic private and business letters on papyrus covering the first four centuries of Muslim rule in Egypt (1st-4th/7th-10th), but focusing mainly on the earliest two and a half centuries. The study also used some of the unpublished letters which are relevant to the main theme of this study.