Faḍā'il-i Balkh or "The merits of Balkh"
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Faḍā'il-i Balkh or "The merits of Balkh"
(Gibb Memorial Trust series)
E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust, c2021
- : hbk
- Other Title
-
فضائل بلخ
Available at 4 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Translated from the Persian, text originally published in Arabic
"Published in conjunction with the Persian edition of the text: Faḍā'il-i Balkh, Tehran: Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia, 1399/2020-21"--T.p.
Includes bibliographical references
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Glossary
Editors' Preface
Translation of the Text
1. Translator's preface
2. Introduction
3. Part One
4. Part Two
5. Part Three
Conclusion
Commentary
Other appendices
by "Nielsen BookData"