The Islamic oath of allegiance — from a commercial root, originally the handclasp sealing a bargain — historically given to caliphs and still given to monarchs in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. In Sufism it is the rite of initiation: the seeker's pledge of allegiance to the shaykh of a tariqa, which creates the master–disciple bond and grafts the newcomer onto the order's silsila. In the Cronologia projects, saying someone 'took bay'ah' is therefore a membership claim — initiation, not mere sympathy — and enters a dataset only with self-disclosure or scholarship behind it.[1]