It is not to be wondered at if the lack of integration in society finds expression in the impossibility of demonstrating social stratification arising from a common base. Until now, attempts at this have met with failure,1 and at best it has been possible to say that there is no reliable theory of stratification.2 Islamic society is neither a caste-system nor feudal,3 nor yet a class-society in the Marxian sense, dependent on ownership of property or division of labour.4 In recent times, a stratification with very many indistinct layers – stemming from a gravely disapproved, but apparently not indispensable mosaic-model – has arisen from numerous determinations of society: factors include power-sharing (the privileges of the ahl as-sayf, the "people of the sword", come from this, and the military iqtāc,5 and furthermore, it assures them of the privileged status of the iltizām and tīmār orders); on the basis of various sorts of activity that provide for the "metabolism" of society, occasionally shaping divisions of labour that rely on one another (basically through agriculture, animal husbandry and handicrafts); ethnic points of view were perhaps the most important in the Umayyad period, and these divided society into at least three strata: fully enfranchised Muslim Arabs, mawālís – converts to Islam who were not fully enfranchised – and non-Arabs who retained their religions; a basis of religion (fundamentally, differentiating between fully enfranchised Muslims and the partially enfranchised ahl al-dzimma, "the people of defence", Jews and Christians); freemen and slaves; the tribal society that lingered on and which – mainly in North Africa and Central Asia – retained a framework of effective segmentation; and last but not least, the experts on religion and religious law, who formed separate groups in society and may be regarded as the élite of Islam, as well as the women who lived in town and seldom qualified for attention (in the particularly male-dominated society they were better able to be embedded in a tribal milieu in rural areas). Thus, we can see that sharing in power, membership of an ethnic or religious group, legal status, the segmentary nature of tribal society, the intelligentsia that framed the communal interests, together with the function based on sexual differentiation (which excluded townswomen from social life, restricting them to the service of house and family) all contributed to determining the strata of society. These displayed their several characteristics of lifestyle, power, wealth and culture in the central urban environment, in rural areas and on the periphery of the empire alike.