A newer Open Thread is up: Open Thread: Navarātri and Durgā Pūjā →
Need book recommendations. What are some great books on history of Islam and history of Persian Empire and Central Asia?
– Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present
– Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane
– The Silk Road: A New History
– A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind
– The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In
– When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty
– In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire
“great books on history of Islam and history of Persian Empire and Central Asia?”
Please elaborate what you mean by the history of Islam.
What time period of Persian and Central Asian history are you interested in?
Or one could ask me…
#Islamistani4Life
Excellent point.
#Stan is the Hood
#Interlocutor is the Raj (king)!
The full text of Tabari is online https://archive.org/stream/TabariEnglish/Tabari_Volume_10_djvu.txt and is a great resource.
Marshall Hodgson’s “The venture of Islam”, but of course it is not new.
“The Middle East and Islam Reader” by Marvin Gettleman is rather slanted in its historical summaries (and you surely know more than they try to cover in any case), but the original texts he has collected are worth reading (everything from early Quran and hadith excerpts, to books of Kalam to Sykes-Picot and the Balfour declaration and Michel Aflaq’s explanation of Baathism)
“The War of the Three Gods” is good about the early Islamic conquests..