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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
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The Age of the Seljuqs (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,049
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The Age of the Seljuqs (Hardcover)
Series: The Idea of Iran
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From their ancestral heartland by the shores of the Aral Sea, the
medieval Oghuz Turks marched westwards in search of dominion. Their
conquests led to control of a Muslim empire that united the
territories of the Eastern Islamic world, melded Turkic and Persian
influences and transported Persian culture to Anatolia. In the
eleventh and twelfth centuries the new Turkic-Persian symbiosis
that had earlier emerged under the Samanids, Ghaznavids and
Qarakha-nids came to fruition in a period that, under the
enlightened rule of the Seljuq dynasty, combined imperial grandeur
with remarkable artistic achievement. This latest volume in The
Idea of Iran series focuses on a system of government based on
Turkic 'men of the sword' and Persian 'men of the pen' that the
Seljuqs (famous foes of the Crusader Frankish knights) consolidated
in a form that endured for centuries. The book further explores key
topics relating to the innovative Seljuq era, including: conflicted
Sunni-Shi'a relations between the Sunni Seljuq Empire and Ismaili
Fatimid caliphate; architecture, art and culture; and politics and
poetry.Istvan Vasary looks back in Chapter 1 to the early history
of the Turks in the wider Iranian world, discussing the debates
about the dating and distribution of the early Turkish presence in
Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan. NizaAZm al-Mulk is the subject
of Chapter 2, in which Carole Hillenbrand subjects this 'maverick
vizier' to critical scrutiny. While paying due credit to his
extraordinary achievements, she does not shy away from concluding
that his career illustrates the maxim that 'power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely'. A fitting antagonist for
NizaAZm al-Mulk is the subject of Chapter 3, in which Farhad
Daftary follows the career of the remarkable revolutionary leader
Hasan-i SabbaAZh and the history of the Ismaili
state-within-a-state that he founded with his capture of the
fortress of Alamt in 1090. In Chapter 4 David Durand-Guedy examines
the Seljuq Empire from the viewpoint of its (western) capital,
Isfahan. He concentrates on the distinction between the parts of
Iran to the west of the great deserts (and in close connection to
Iraq and Baghdad) and the parts to the east, notably Khorasan, with
its ties to Transoxiana and Tokharestan.Vanessa Van Renterghem in
Chapter 5 challenges the long-held view that the Seljuq takeover of
Baghdad represented a liberation of the Abbasid caliphs from their
burden-some subordination to the heretical Buyids. Alexey
Khismatulin in Chapter 6 presents a forensic examination of two
important works of literature, casting doubt on the authorship of
both the Siyar al-muluAZk attributed to NizaAZm al-Mulk and the
NasAZhat al-muluAZk ascribed to al-GhazaAZlAZ. In Chapter 7 Asghar
Seyed-Gohrab discusses the poetry of the Ghaznavid and Seljuq
periods, demonstrating the poets' mastery of metaphor and of
extended description and riddling to build suspense. The final
chapter by Robert Hillenbrand shifts the focus from texts and
literature to architecture and to that pre-eminent Seljuq
masterpiece, the Friday Mosque of Isfaha
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