ABSTRACT
The entry of Turks from the steppes of Central Asia into the Middle East gave new directions to Islamicate political thought. The process of acculturating them to sedentary governing styles brought the Circle of Justice to the fore in political culture and life. For some observers, the Abbasid caliphate would always represent the high point of Islamic government, but others incorporated new political forms into their definitions of Islamic rule. History textbooks often omit or gloss over the middle periods of Islamic history, when the once-unified Islamic realm split into a multitude of states with fluctuating boundaries, governed in different fashions for varying lengths of time, and often at war with each other. New peoples invaded the region, introducing their own cultures and politics but also destroying documents and killing members of the old regimes whose job it was to record events for posterity. They created new governing institutions whose differences from the old were seen as decline and corruption. It is fatally easy just to skip over these troubled times and go directly to the modern period, where politics again takes on a familiar shape. Yet it was in these tumultuous middle centuries that the Circle of Justice proved its worth both as a governing ideology and as a way to introduce outsiders from nomad societies to the structures of sedentary government.
