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Tajikistan is one of the lesser-known and least-researched former
Soviet Central Asian republics. The birth of the new state in 1991
was followed closely by a civil war which killed more than 50,000
people and displaced many tens of thousands more. While a peace
agreement was signed in 1997, significant political violence
continued until 2001 and intermittent outbreaks still occur today.
Many claim it remains a very weak state and perhaps in danger of
state failure or a return to civil war. However, the revival of
Tajikistan should not simply be seen in terms of its post-conflict
stabilization. Since its creation as a republic of the Soviet Union
in 1920s, Tajikistan has been transformed from being a shell for
socialist engineering to become a national society under a modern
state. Despite a multitude of economic, social and political
shocks, the Republic of Tajikistan endures. This book places the
transformation of Tajikistan in its Soviet and Post-Soviet
historical settings and local and global contexts. It explores the
sources of a state with Soviet roots but which has been radically
transformed by independence and its exposure to global politics and
economics. The authors address the sources of statehood in history,
Islam and secularism, gender relations, the economy, international
politics and security affairs. This book is a new edition of a
special issue of Central Asian Survey, 'Tajikistan: the sources of
statehood', including two additional papers and a revised
introduction.
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.
A comprehensive introduction to the historical forces and recent
social and political developments that have shaped today's Armenian
people. With contributions from leading Armenian, American and
European specialists, the book focuses on identity formation,
exploring how the Armenians' perceptions of themselves and their
place in the world are informed by their history, culture and
present-day situation. The book also covers contemporary politics,
economy and society, and relates these to ongoing debates over
future directions for the Armenian people, both in the homeland and
in the diaspora communities.
A comprehensive introduction to the historical forces and recent
social and political developments that have shaped today's Armenian
people. With contributions from leading Armenian, American and
European specialists, the book focuses on identity formation,
exploring how the Armenians' perceptions of themselves and their
place in the world are informed by their history, culture and
present-day situation. The book also covers contemporary politics,
economy and society, and relates these to ongoing debates over
future directions for the Armenian people, both in the homeland and
in the diaspora communities.
Tajikistan is one of the lesser-known and least-researched former
Soviet Central Asian republics. The birth of the new state in 1991
was followed closely by a civil war which killed more than 50,000
people and displaced many tens of thousands more. While a peace
agreement was signed in 1997, significant political violence
continued until 2001 and intermittent outbreaks still occur today.
Many claim it remains a very weak state and perhaps in danger of
state failure or a return to civil war. However, the revival of
Tajikistan should not simply be seen in terms of its post-conflict
stabilization. Since its creation as a republic of the Soviet Union
in 1920s, Tajikistan has been transformed from being a shell for
socialist engineering to become a national society under a modern
state. Despite a multitude of economic, social and political
shocks, the Republic of Tajikistan endures. This book places the
transformation of Tajikistan in its Soviet and Post-Soviet
historical settings and local and global contexts. It explores the
sources of a state with Soviet roots but which has been radically
transformed by independence and its exposure to global politics and
economics. The authors address the sources of statehood in history,
Islam and secularism, gender relations, the economy, international
politics and security affairs. This book is a new edition of a
special issue of Central Asian Survey, 'Tajikistan: the sources of
statehood', including two additional papers and a revised
introduction.
How did Iran remain distinctively Iranian in the centuries which
followed the Arab Conquest? How did it retain its cultural
distinctiveness after the displacement of Zoroastrianism - state
religion of the Persian empire - by Islam? This latest volume in
"The Idea of Iran" series traces that critical moment in Iranian
history which followed the transformation of ancient traditions
during the country's conversion and initial Islamic period.
Distinguished contributors (who include the late Oleg Grabar, Roy
Mottahedeh, Alan Williams and Said Amir Arjomand) discuss, from a
variety of literary, artistic, religious and cultural perspectives,
the years around the end of the first millennium CE, when the
political strength of the 'Abbasid Caliphate was on the wane, and
when the eastern lands of the Islamic empire began to be take on a
fresh 'Persianate' or 'Perso-Islamic' character. One of the
paradoxes of this era is that the establishment throughout the
eastern Islamic territories of new Turkish dynasties coincided with
the genesis and spread, into Central and South Asia, of vibrant new
Persian language and literatures. Exploring the nature of this
paradox, separate chapters engage with ideas of kingship, authority
and identity and their fascinating expression through the written
word, architecture and the visual arts.
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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