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

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Razib Khan

Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.

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AnAn
7 years ago

“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?

Jaggu
7 years ago

Or one could ask me…

#Islamistani4Life

AnAn
7 years ago
Reply to  Jaggu

Excellent point.

#Stan is the Hood

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
7 years ago
Reply to  AnAn

#Interlocutor is the Raj (king)!

omar
omar
7 years ago

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..

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