This paper will discuss the significance of patron-client relationships and strong individual ties in the Islamic east during the 10th-12th centuries, arguing that among both Muslims and Jews, the prevalence and uses of reciprocity-based relationships differed from some of the solidarity-based mechanisms of group coherence that characterized the eras immediately before and after. In an attempt to reconstruct an anatomy of social obligation and its manifestations in language, I will take up patronage and sacred texts in two ways: by discussing the ways in which sacred texts give special meanings to the terms that invoke patronage (and transfer solidarity-based concepts to the world of reciprocity); and by discussing different kinds of patronage (political, social, artistic) and how and whether they are connected.