Download or read book Shaping a Muslim State written by Petra Sijpesteijn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a synthetic study of the political, social, and economic processes which formed early Islamic Egypt. Looking at a corpus of previously unknown Arabic papyrus letters, Sijpesteijn examines the reasons for the success of the early Arab conquests and the transition from the pre-Islamic Byzantine system to an Arab/Muslim state.