Religious Knowledge between Scholarly Conservatism and Commoners’ Agency

The present chapter looks at the complex and ever negotiable dynamics of the transmission of religious knowledge and at the social and religious meaning attached to it in the Later Middle Period with particular focus on the Sunni central lands of the Islamic ecumene. It considers the scholars’ claim for monopoly over religious knowledge, and over theology in particular, and explores the power relations between the religious elite and ordinary people. These relations did not evolve in a political vacuum and this is why we first need to recapitulate a number of dramatic political changes that the Islamic ecumene witnessed in this epoch.