Fanny Bessard
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Fanny Bessard is a historian of early and Classical Islam with expertise in Arabic historiography, as well as a practicing archaeologist with a decade of field experience in the Middle East and Central Asia. Before joining Oxford, she held a Newton International Fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies from 2013 to 2015, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Feellowship at the University of St Andrews from 2015 to 2016, and a Lecturership in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol from 2016 to 2019. Her main research interest lies in the social and economic transformations of the Middle East (700-1000). Her research realises the potential of combining a wide corpus of literary sources in Arabic with physical and epigraphic evidence collected in the field and archives. Her approach is both comparative and global, and looks at the Middle East in a Eurasian context, drawing parallels between the Islamic world and Western Christendom, Byzantium, South-East Asia and China.
She joins the Paris IAS in March 2025 as part of the POP - Paris-Oxford Partnership program. Under this agreement between the University of Paris, the CNRS and the University of Oxford, the Paris IAS welcomes Oxford researchers in the humanities and social sciences for short stays.
These academics, at various career levels, benefit from the same services as IAS residents and can develop collaborative research work within a cutting-edge international and interdisciplinary community.
Research topics
Poverty and Wealth in the early Islamic World, History of Baghdad in the tenth century, Popular movement.
Power beyond the court in Baghdad (892-1055)
This period (908-991) constitutes a key moment in Baghdad when the power balance shifted from Arab civil to non-Arab military dominance in an increasingly pluralized society. The capital of the Islamic world progressively lost its supremacy. Popular riots and the rising influence of warlike mountain communities of Kurds and Iranian Daylamites challenged the authority of the Abbāsid caliphs. This shift in authority and governance in early tenth-century Baghdad has long dominated the debates on the decline and fall of the Caliphate. Then, over the last decade, the publication of court studies nuanced the established narrative, through the fine-grained analysis of the caliphs’ immediate entourage (eunuchs, viziers, queens, harem stewardesses). These studies have opened fascinating debates on elite cultures in medieval Islam, while the functioning and lifestyles of the masses and their relationship with the court remain understudied. This research focuses on those who lived outside the court. This study aims to reconstruct their social reality and how they experienced and responded to the decline of caliphal supremacy.
The methodological challenges posed by tenth-century sources are significant. The corpus of texts on Baghdad at the turn of the millennium is disparate and written mainly by courtiers and qāḍī, which served the interests of the powerful. Beyond a conventional approach to these sources, a re-reading of the material ‘against the grain’ through anthropological and historical frameworks yield significant returns. Differentiating layers of narrativization helps to reconstruct aspects of the Baghdadians’ strategies of subsistence (from charity, the theft of clothes in mosques and baths for the poor, to popular uprisings and the migration of the tujjār in Syria) and their response to threats, extortion, and violence.
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