ABSTRACT
This paper approaches ‘patronage’ in Islamic societies from a linguistic point of view. This is a complicated enterprise, because in medieval Arabic and Persian there is no unambiguous term for ‘patronage’. Over the centuries and in different contexts, there were various terms used to describe this reality. Sometimes only a few words sufficed to express relationships of hierarchy, promotion and knowledge between people, while at other times a veritable linguistic manifold was tapped into for narrating, differentiating and evaluating. The use of the words and their meaning differed also territorially and socially. This work offers a description of some of the basic problems when dealing with this vocabulary, illustrating them with examples primarily from medicine, astrology and occasionally mathematics, philosophy and theology.
