Dieser Band stellt ein bedeutendes Werk aus der kulturellen Blutezeit der fruhen Abbasiden vor. Muhammad ibn 'Abdallah al-Bazyar verfasste es fur den Kalifen al-Mutawakkil (847-861) und trug seinem Herrn darin zusammen, was uber Falken und Hunde bekannt war, insbesondere uber deren Behandlung bei Krankheiten ein grosses Bedurfnis, denn die Beizjagd war geradezu ein hofisches Ritual. Im 13. Jh. wurde das Werk des al-Bazyar unter Friedrich II. ins Lateinische und wohl unter Alfons dem Weisen ins Kastilische ubersetzt und entwickelte sich in der Folge im Abendland zu einem der meistverbreiteten Handbucher seiner Art. Die Publikation des Werks liefert zahlreiche neue Einsichten in den Prozess des orientalisch-okzidentalischen Wissenstransfers in jener Zeit."

Islam as a cultural, intellectual, and religious venture appears in the popular imagination as a monolithic entity. Orientalists of the traditional ilk have tended to describe it in essentialist terms, whilst many fundamentalist Muslims themselves promote their construction of a pure and unadulterated Islamic past, to which they strive to return by purging foreign or unauthentic elements from their religion. Next to these attempts, another more traditional view sees the influence between the Western and the Islamic world in linear and teleological terms. Knowledge was transmitted, so to speak, from Alexandria to Baghdad, and hence to Toledo and Paris. The present volume challenges both these concepts regarding the development of Islamic cultures. To do justice to the complexity of structures within which the Muslim Middle Ages unfolded, it approaches the questions of interaction and influence through a novel conceptual framework, that of crosspollination. Instead of telling the story of the transmission of Western works from Greece via Islam into the Latin world, a number of case studies highlight the plurality of encounters between Islam and other adjacent cultures.

The first encounters between the Islamic world and Tibet took place in the course of the expansion of the Abbasid Empire in the eighth century. Military and political contacts went along with an increasing interest in the other side. Cultural exchanges and the transmission of knowledge were facilitated by a trading network, with musk constituting one of the main trading goods from the Himalayas, largely through India. From the thirteenth century onwards the spread of the Mongol Empire from the Western borders of Europe through Central Asia to China facilitated further exchanges. The significance of these interactions has been long ignored in scholarship. This volume represents a major contribution to the subject, bringing together new studies by an interdisciplinary group of international scholars. They explore for the first time the multi-layered contacts between the Islamic world, Central Asia and the Himalayas from the eighth century until the present day in a variety of fields, including geography, cartography, art history, medicine, history of science and education, literature, hagiography, archaeology, and anthropology.