Arezou Azad. Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan

The city of Balkh was one of the most important urban areas of Central Asia both before and after the coming of Islam, a multi-religious and multiethnic frontier town where goods and ideas were exchanged between the Islamic world and the predominantly Buddhist Asian lands to the East. This book is a study of the only surviving historical text relating to the town from the pre-Mongol period, the Faḍāʾil-i Balkh (FB), an originally Arabic text that today survives only as a Persian adaptation from 676/1278. This book is one of a number of recent studies examining ideas of space, and particularly sacred space, in the medieval Islamic world, and what space can reveal about those societies through the application of anthropological principles to historical research. The introduction first examines current ideas of place, particularly in Afghanistan, and highlights how the central method to be employed—studying the history of Balkh through the writings of a medieval scholar from that town—departs from current scholarship. In so doing, the author claims to be at the vanguard of “critical place studies,” although this method has been used in a number of other studies (p. 3). Arezou Azad assesses the history of Balkh and its historical image in both the Islamic world and in the West before he poses the study's main question: What made Balkh sacred to the writer of the FB, particularly with regard to the shrines that form the major part of its focus?

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Arabic · Archaeology · Art · Buddhism · Central asia · Frontier · Geography · History of Islam · Islam · Period (music) · Political science · Scholarship · Space (punctuation) · Classics · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East