This is a guest post by Abdulqadir K Haidermota.
This post is the second of a two-part series. The first outlines the background of the pilot study and its methodology; this post focuses on the outcomes.
Outcomes: Visualising the Administrative Soul
Analysis reveals that the ‘emotional density’ of this corpus is remarkably high, with 70.8% of all analysed phrases carrying an explicit affective charge. This suggests that for the Fatimid chancery, the communication of ‘hard facts’ was operationally inseparable from the deployment of a specific affective scaffold.
1. The Fabric of Connection
The analysis reveals the structural prominence of Devotion. Visualising the manuscript’s composition, we observe a striking balance between the relational framing (the blessings) and the informational content (the request).
The data shows that nearly half (46.8%) of the text in the corpus is dedicated to Devotion. In fragments like ENA 3974.4, the specific grievance (qiṣṣa) is not merely preceded by blessings but is embedded within them.
Figure 1: Composition Analysis / Devotion vs. Content
Interpretation: This suggests that Devotion functions as the document’s connective tissue rather than a decorative border. It appears here not as an external rule, but as the fundamental language of the state—the essential medium through which the bond between subject and ruler is maintained.
2. The Distribution of Content
How is this information distributed? By mapping the emotional tags against Geoffrey Khan’s diplomatic sections, a Heatmap was generated that provides a bird’s-eye view of the scribal organisation.
- The Framework: The Openings (Salwala) and Closings are exclusively composed of Devotion.
- The Identification: The Tarjama (Sender’s name) is defined by Humility (al-mamlūk).
- The Narrative Core: The Narratio (Presentation of the Case) shows the highest diversity. This is the section where Neutral facts, Hope, and Desperation intersect.
Figure 2: Heatmap of Emotion Distribution.
Interpretation: The Heatmap reveals an architecture of integrated affects. By embedding variable ‘case data’ into a standardised operating syntax, the document creates a space where high devotion and raw desperation are not contradictory, but complementary. This structural logic suggests that the structure of the petitions allowed different emotional expressions to coexist within a standardised format, treating diverse rhetorical registers as essential components of a single, coherent bureaucratic transaction.
3. The Trajectory of Redress: A Procedural Arc
If we trace the petitioner’s path through the document linearly, a procedural geometry emerges. This is not a static list of complaints, but a sequence of affective transitions.
Figure 3: The U-Shaped Trajectory of Redress.
The data reveals a distinct ‘U-Shaped’ trajectory:
- The Alignment (Humility): The text begins by establishing the petitioner’s coordinates relative to the Caliph (‘The servant kisses the ground…’).
- The Evidence (Narratio): The petitioner presents the ‘moral data’ of their condition—a mix of Neutral facts and Desperation.
- The Ascent (Request): Having established both standing and need, the text pivots to Hope, explicitly engaging the agency of the Diwan.
- The Seal (Closing): The document concludes by restoring the cosmic order with high Devotion.
Interpretation: Across the complete petitions in the present corpus, a consistent sequence emerges. This pattern, while based on limited evidence, suggests a standardised scribal template worthy of further investigation.
4. The Vocabulary of the Genre
What specific terms constitute these categories? The frequency analysis isolates the lexical patterns associated with each register.
Figure 4: Arabic Word Clouds by Emotional Register.
Humility is Spatial: It utilises terms related to physical location, such as al-arḍ (‘the ground’) and yuqabbil (‘he kisses’), aligning the petitioner with the cosmic order, where all created beings are low before the Creator and His vicegerent.
Devotion is Genealogical: It frequently employs Salawāt (‘blessings’) upon the Ṭāhirīn (‘the Ancestors’), linking the current administration to its lineage.
Desperation is Performative and Evidentiary. It combines urgent verbs of pleading (yas’al, yadra’u) with somatic evidence (makfūf al–baṣar, jūʿ, halaka), transforming the petitioner’s body into the primary site of proof.
Hope is Relational and Anticipatory. It expresses trust in the addressee’s known generosity (inʿām, iḥsān – ‘favour and beneficence’) and projects a positive future (li–yahyā fī hādhihi al–ayyām al-zāhira – ‘that he may live in these flourishing days’)
Neutral is Evidentiary. It provides the factual scaffolding—dates, quantities, names, locations—upon which emotional appeals are constructed.
Frequency analysis reveals the lexical building blocks of each register. Contextual reading remains necessary to understand how these words functioned within the petition’s procedural arc.
5. The Relational Ecosystem
Finally, Network Analysis was used to map how these emotions co-occur. This allows us to visualise the ‘syntax’ of the petition—which feelings are allowed to touch?
Figure 5: Emotion Co-occurrence Network Graph.
This graph illustrates the most critical finding: Devotion is the central node. It connects to every other register. In this corpus, ‘Hope’ rarely appears without being tethered to ‘Devotion’. ‘Humility’ is almost always anchored by ‘Devotion’.
Interpretation: The graph suggests that Devotion acts as the stabilising node of the genre. It creates the permissible space for all other feelings to exist. Notably, this network holds true even for T-S Ar.30.273, a petition from a Jewish merchant. Whether this reflects the scribe’s training or a genuinely shared administrative language, it suggests that the emotional architecture was detailed enough to serve petitioners across communal lines.
This reinforces the idea that this emotional architecture was a shared administrative utility that transcended religious boundaries.
Conclusion: The Affective State
The Fatimid petition, read through its emotional architecture, emerges not as a dry bureaucratic form but as a granular map of the premodern emotional performance. Consider the blind man of T-S Ar.42.177. His hunger (jūʿ) and blinded sight (makfūf al-baṣar) are not presented as a raw outcry. Instead, they are embedded within a structure that moves from prostrate humility through somatic evidence to relational hope—all anchored by the genealogical devotion that frames the text. The scribe who reframed this plea translated bodily suffering into the state’s moral metrics, transforming a man’s case and hunger into a claim formatted for administrative action.
This reading suggests that the ‘State of Letters’ was also a State of Feelings. The patterns visualised here—the zoning of affect and the centralising role of devotion—hint at an administrative culture that processed emotion as rigorously as it processed petitions. The scribe emerges as a translator of human vulnerability, transmuting the raw, chaotic pain of the individual into a structured language of shared affective values.
The consistency of these patterns, in this initial study, across both Jewish and Muslim fragments suggests a common administrative utility. For the history of emotions, this pilot suggests that feeling in premodern bureaucracies was not merely expressed but patterned—structured in ways that computational methods can help us see. For Digital Humanities, it demonstrates how visualisation can render visible the emotional logic embedded in formulaic texts.
Prostrate humility, genealogical devotion, performative desperation—these were not masks for the blind man’s suffering but the forms that made it visible. The algorithm tracks rhetorical structure, not psychology. While we cannot know what the petitioner felt in his heart, we can see how the scribe rendered the grief into the architecture of emotional terrain.
Limitation and Future Directions
This section acknowledges the study’s constraints—a small, unevenly preserved corpus over-representing Jewish petitions—while defending its value as a proof of concept. It notes that lexical annotation captures presence, not reception, and that computational methods reveal patterns where interpretation remains the historian’s task. Future research will expand the corpus, incorporate response documents, or compare with other petitionary traditions. The blind man’s voice persists, and future work may help us hear it more clearly.
Note on Research: This work is part of a larger, ongoing research trajectory for a future project. The current methodology and findings are preliminary and are being refined for a forthcoming academic study.
References
Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Primary Sources
To ensure the reproducibility of this pilot study, each cited document in the bibliography is hyperlinked to its corresponding entry in the Princeton Geniza Project (PGP) database. This provides direct access to the digital surrogates, diplomatic transcriptions, and foundational metadata used to build the Affective Algorithm. All documents last accessed via the PGP on February 14, 2026.
Bodl. MS heb. b 18/21 + T-S Ar.30.278 (Join). Bodleian Library, Oxford and Cambridge University Library. PGPID 1256.
ENA 3974.4. Jewish Theological Seminary Library, New York. PGPID 11702.
ENA NS 71.12. Jewish Theological Seminary Library, New York. PGPID 12664.
T-S Ar.7.38. Cambridge University Library. PGPID 18932.
T-S Ar.30.273. Cambridge University Library. PGPID 9235.
T-S Ar.39.470. Cambridge University Library. PGPID 16767.
T-S Ar.42.158. Cambridge University Library. PGPID 16261.
T-S Ar.42.177. Cambridge University Library. PGPID 18562.
T-S Misc.28.169. Cambridge University Library. PGPID 16795.
The complete dataset of 62 phrases from 9 Fatimid petitions, with diplomatic segmentationand emotional annotation, is available for reference: https://bit.ly/4bRJeyN
