Der Dortmunder Totenbund Heinrichs II. und die Reform der futuwwa durch den Bagdader Kalifen al-Nāṣir:Überlegungen zu einer vergleichenden Geschichte mittelalterlicher Institutionen
In the middle ages, political rulers began to use religious institutions in new ways to legitimize their rule. The German king Henry II was the first to establish a new kind of confraternity, of which he became a member himself, together with his wife, the Saxon duke and several bishops. The participants incurred mutual obligations, both liturgical and charitable. The earliest comparable Islamic parallel is the reform of the futuwwa by the caliph al-Nasir. Also in this case, the ruler became a member of a particular religious organization, distinct from the umma at large. However, futuwwa brotherhoods had existed before, but only after the breakdown of Seljuk power had the caliph been in a position to make himself a master of such organizations, using them to promote his religious standing in the wider Sunni world. The relative chances of stability of the institutions depended on many factors, such as ideas concerning the role of monarchs within the respective religious communities, as well as regarding their relationship with political elites. A careful contextualized comparison shows that in western Christianity reciprocal relations of monarchs and other believers were more in line with religious tradition than in Sunni Islam, where it was far more difficult to present the ruler as a member of particular religious confraternities. It becomes evident that the history of political institutions cannot be written without putting them into the wider religious and social context
