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Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan - Revisiting the Fada"il-i Balkh (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R3,974
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Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan - Revisiting the Fada"il-i Balkh (Hardcover, New)
Series: Oxford Oriental Monographs
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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This book is about a sacred place called Balkh, known to the
ancient Greeks as Bactra. Located in the north of today's
Afghanistan, along the silk road, Balkh was holy to many. The
Prophet Zoroaster is rumoured to have died here, and during late
antiquity, Balkh was the home of the Naw Bahar, a famed Buddhist
temple and monastery. By the tenth century, Balkh had become a
critical centre of Islamic learning and early poetry in the New
Persian language that grew after the Islamic conquests and
continues to be spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and parts of Central
Asia today. In this book, Arezou Azad provides the first in-depth
study of the sacred sites and landscape of medieval Balkh, which
continues to exemplify age-old sanctity in the Persian-speaking
world and the eastern lands of Islam generally. Azad focuses on the
five centuries from the Islamic conquests in the eighth century to
just before the arrival of the Mongols in the thirteenth century,
the crucial period in the emergence of Perso-Islamic historiography
and Islamic legal thought. The book traces the development of
'sacred landscape', the notion that a place has a sensory meaning,
as distinct from a purely topographical space. This opens up new
possibilities for our understanding of Islamisation in the eastern
Islamic lands, and specifically the transition from Buddhism to
Islam. Azad offers a new look at the medieval local history of
Balkh, the Fada"il-i Balkh, and analyses its creation of a sacred
landscape for Balkh. In doing so, she provides a compelling example
of how the sacredness of a place is perpetuated through narratives,
irrespective of the dominant religion or religious strand of the
time.
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