Faḍāʾil-i Balkh (The Merits of Balkh)

Arezou Azad, Edmund Herzig (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

462 Seiten

2021
Gibb Memorial Trust (Verlag)
978-1-913604-00-4 (ISBN)

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First annotated English translation from Persian of the 13th-century local history of the famed city and province of Balkh (Afghanistan).

This is a critical edition and translation of the medieval local history of Balkh, known as Faḍāʾil-i Balkh ("The Merits of Balkh"), which was completed in 610 Hijrī (1214 CE) in Arabic by Shaykh al-Islām Abū Bakr ʿAbd Allāh al-Wāʿiẓ and translated into Persian by ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥusaynī in 676 Hijri (1278 CE). It is the Persian version which survives today and forms the source text for this book. Balkh is one of the most illustrious cities of the Islamicate East, and yet we know very little about life in the city during the first five centuries of Islam (8th-13th centuries CE). The Faḍāʾil-i Balkh, the oldest surviving local history of Balkh, changes that. The work is the sum of its parts, the first being a collection of accounts about the history of Balkh attributed largely to Muslim religious and legal scholars and their chains of transmission.

The second part consists of original descriptions of Balkh’s economic, urban and cultural life. The researcher who wants to know about Balkh’s topography will need to look elsewhere, since in part three, which forms the bulk of the book, we learn about Balkh’s learned Islamic scholars. What makes the account fascinating is the up-close and personal account of each scholar, with intimate details not only of their intellectual ideas and milieu, but also of their personal circumstances, .e.g. their wives, children and servants, how they related to the landscape around them, the city and the region to which they belonged, as well as to the wider Islamicate world of caliphs and sultans.

The detailed commentary and introduction to this new publication gives remarkable and fascinating insights into the self-perception of one erudite man of Balkh. He has left us a social history of the medieval Islamicate East, and this new book brings it to life in ways an English-speaking audience has not yet seen.

Arezou Azad is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and Principal Investigator for research projects on the history of the medieval Islamicate East. Before academia, she served as UN peacekeeper, inter alia, in the Balkans and Timor Leste. Edmund Herzig is Masoumeh & Fereydoon Soudavar Professor of Persian Studies at Oxford. He co-led the Balkh Art and Cultural Heritage project, and is currently leading the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Programme Ali Mir-Ansari is Director of Literature at the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia in Tehran, Iran, and was previously Bahari Fellow at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He has published numerous work in Persian

Abbreviations

Glossary

Editors' Preface

Translation of the Text

    1. Translator's preface

    2. Introduction

    3. Part One

    4. Part Two

    5. Part Three

    Conclusion

Commentary

Other appendices

Erscheinungsdatum	01.02.2021
Reihe/Serie	Gibb Memorial Trust
Mitarbeit	Sonstige Mitarbeit: Ali Mir-Ansari
Zusatzinfo	b/w
Verlagsort	Cambridge
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	1-913604-00-4 / 1913604004
ISBN-13	978-1-913604-00-4 / 9781913604004
Zustand	Neuware