This book sets out to provide further materials on the anatomy of Islamic society, a social structure sui generis. In so doing, it will be able to derive important apposite support from the work of such as Alfred von Kremer (1828–89), J. Wellhausen (1844–1914), I. Goldziher (1850–1921) or Claude Cahen (1909–91). Fact is seldom self-evident by nature, as Plato's Socrates teased out of his interlocutors by the method of maieutikē, or midwifery. In social studies, we can rely on the necessarily abbreviated, one-sided, and most often misleading written sources and monuments of the material culture that serves daily life, and these generally seldom point beyond themselves. In the study of history, we know that it is possible to build the stage of history right up to the nineteenth century "on the storms in the cloud region of politics", as Marx put it. That provided material for political history even to such as Ranke, as well. The twentieth-century historical approach broke radically with that view, and economic history, the Braudelian longue durée observation, mindset history and the discovery of the micro-world of everyday things have created the possibility of examining the "metabolism" of society in greater depth. Despite the significant efforts of great scholars in the past, it seems that much remains to be done in research into Islamic society. The present attempt too rather formulates problems and questions, and attempts to touch on a number of topics that previous studies have neglected. A fundamental question is whether the various elements of society (economy, institutional system, culture, Islam that determines processes as a "preponderant factor", the corresponding societal forms, the individual's room to move, the social role of variously rooted intelligentsia) are capable of forming an organic whole. The persistent and morbid lack of the latter plays a basic part in ever worse responses to historical challenges and in incapacity for development.