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.

This is a critical edition and translation of the medieval local history of Balkh, known as Fada'il-i Balkh ("The Merits of Balkh"), which was completed in 610 Hijri (1214 CE) in Arabic by Shaykh al-Islam Abu Bakr 'Abd Allah al-Wa'iz and translated into Persian by 'Abd Allah al-Husayni 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 Fada'il-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.