Arezou Azad is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and Principal Investigator for research projects on the history of the medieval Islamicate East. Before academia, she served as UN peacekeeper, inter alia, in the Balkans and Timor Leste. Edmund Herzig is Masoumeh & Fereydoon Soudavar Professor of Persian Studies at Oxford. He co-led the Balkh Art and Cultural Heritage project, and is currently leading the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Programme Ali Mir-Ansari is Director of Literature at the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia in Tehran, Iran, and was previously Bahari Fellow at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He has published numerous work in Persian