Abu'l-Fath al-Fadl ibn Ja'far ibn al-Furat was the scion of a bureaucratic dynasty, the Banu'l-Furat, that had occupied senior posts in the fiscal bureaucracy of the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad since the reign of Caliph al-Mu'tadid () and had gone on to become one of the two major factions within the Abbasid administrative elite in the first decades of the 10th century.