Books for 2019 on Central Asia and Islam

A comment below:

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

5 thoughts on “Books for 2019 on Central Asia and Islam”

  1. “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?

  2. 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..

Comments are closed.

Brown Pundits