Faḍāʾil-i Balkh (The Merits of Balkh)

— —

Arezou Azad (Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Invisible East programme, University of Oxford) Ali Mir-Ansari

Faḍāʾil-i Balkh

The Merits of Balkh

Arezou Azad (Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Invisible East programme, University of Oxford), Ali Mir-Ansari, Edmund Herzig

$265

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Gibb Memorial Trust
11 May 2021

Asian history; Middle Eastern history

Series: Gibb Memorial Trust

This is a critical edition and translation of the medieval local history of Balkh, known as Fail-i Balkh (""The Merits of Balkh""), which was completed in 610 Hijr (1214 CE) in Arabic by Shaykh al-Islm Ab Bakr Abd Allh al-Wi and translated into Persian by Abd Allh al-usayn 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 Fail-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.

Edited by: Arezou Azad (Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Invisible East programme University of Oxford), Edmund Herzig
Other: Ali Mir-Ansari
Imprint: Gibb Memorial Trust
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 170mm,
ISBN: 9781913604004
ISBN 10: 1913604004
Series: Gibb Memorial Trust
Pages: 462
Publication Date: 11 May 2021
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Arezou Azad is Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Invisible East programme at the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. She is also Professor and Chair of the Arts and Heritage of Afghanistan at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco) in Paris. She has authored three other peer-reviewed books: The Warehouse of Bamiyan: Economic Life in Medieval Afghanistan (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), Faḍāʾil-i Balkh or “The Merits of Balkh”, an annotated translation of a 13th-century history of Balkh (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2013).