Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan
Revisiting the Faḍā"il-i Balkh
Series: Oxford Oriental Monographs;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 12 December 2013
- ISBN 9780199687053
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages240 pages
- Size 222x144x22 mm
- Weight 458 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 13 colour plates, 7 b/w in-text figures, 3 maps 0
Categories
Short description:
Afghanistan has played a crucial role in shaping the history of Islam. This book provides the first in-depth study of the sacred sites and landscape of medieval Balkh, in today's northern Afghanistan, in the five centuries from the Islamic conquests of the eighth century to the arrival of the Mongols in the thirteenth century.
MoreLong description:
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 Bahār, 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 Faḍā"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.
Arezou Azad has produced a splendid, focused, and well-written monograph on a text that has attracted little attention beyond a small coterie of Iranologists ... Though a number of scholars have made use of Faḍā?il-i Balkh for the history of Sufism, Islamic law, and religious history, Azad's book is by far the most substantial treatment of the text ... This book should be read widely by students and scholars of pre-modern Islam.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Discourse of Landscape, Balkh and its History
Writing about Place: Faḍā"il-i Balkh
Text and transmission
The Question of Sources
How to Read the Message
The Sacred Sites and the City
The sacred sites of Balkh
The sacred landscape of Balkh
Scholars, the Spirits of Sacred Landscape
Religious distinctions and affiliations
The Character of Sanctity
Conclusion: Looking Back, Moving Forward
