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Taqiyya, precautionary dissimulation, is a significant feature of Islam, and particularly of Shi'i Islam. For the Ismaili Shi'a — a minority within a minority whose creed emphasized the paramount importance of the esoteric dimension of the revelation — this need was even more pronounced. The destruction of their network of fortresses ushered in a period in which, more than ever, dissimulation was required for survival. Ismaili tradition maintains that when Alamut was vanquished, the Imam Shams al-Din Muhammad was smuggled away to safety. This chapter is about the life of this Imam and that of one of his disciples, the poet Nizari Quhistani, whose life and writings shed light on the practice of taqiyya.

Succession struggles have often marked the dynasties. In principle, all male members of the ruling family had an equal right to rule. On many ocassions, the empire has been divided into appenages or territories where individual members of the dynasty ruled. In Seljuq dynasties, succession struggles were also prevalent. This struggle was particularly prevalent in Khurasan, the first basis of Seljuq power. This chapter discusses succession struggle. The thesis of this chapter is that pretenders for the throne were mobilising sets of resources, above all military manpower, to win their interest to the throne. In this chapter the focus is on Arslān Arghūn, the brother of the demised Sultan Malikshāh. Alp Arslān who was one of the claimants to the emptied throne. It takes another look at the succession struggle from the vantage point of Arslān Arghūn, who lost his bid to power to Barkyāruq. First, the chapter recounts his story in detail and then shows the resources he used in his undertaking. Finally, it discusses whether his attempt at gaining at least regional power in Khurasan was due to his nomadic influence and whether he lost by mere chance of whether his attempt was bound to fail.

This chapter begins by studying the role of al-Azd and the Muhallabids in the Islamic conquests along the eastern frontier of the Islamic world, in Khurasan and Sind. It critiques the idea that the Azd were a driving force behind the conquest of Sind, noting their prior presence in that region. Examining Yazid b. al-Muhallab’s campaigns in Jurjan and Tabaristan south of the Caspian Sea, it argues that both the Caspian and Sind campaigns were the result of governors linked to the Umayyad caliphs conquering territories to which their factional rivals had ties. Finally, there is a study of the role of al-Azd identity in Khurasan on the eve of the Abbasid Revolution.

Islam's social revolution came a century and a quarter after Muhammad's unification of Arabia, and was the revolution of the non-Arab Muslims on the northeastern periphery of the Arab empire. The non-Arab converts to Islam formed the special category of clients (mawali) whose patrons were Arabs. The Mawali of Khorasan and Transoxania launched a mass movement for equality with Arabs on the basis of Islam in the second quarter of the eighth century, and the opponents of the Umayyad Caliphate from Muhammad's clan of Banu Hashem began sending agents to the region to recruit a clandestine party for a revolution on their behalf. The Hashemite revolution of the Khorasanian Mawali broke out in 747 and is known by the name of its victors as the Abbasid Revolution. In 750, the army sent from Khorasan by its leader, Abu Muslim, destroyed the Umayyad Arab empire that had begun to crumble from within in 744. The two major consequences of the Abbasid Revolution, the integration of the Persian Mawali into the Muslim empire and the rise of caliphal absolutism, are explained by our two main models of integrative and centralizing (Tocquevillian) revolution.

Al-Ghazali’s letters reveal that the decade he spent in his native Khurasan between teaching in Baghdad and Nishapur were not years of solitary retreat. Rather, he spent this time actively promoting his Revivalist agenda. He did so by writing shorter versions of the Revival, including a Persian version of his masterpiece, the Alchemy of Happiness. He called on contacts he had from his days working with the Seljuk regime to aid him in his revivalist agenda. He recruited disciples in his Science of the Hereafter, including the Seljuk minister Fakhr al-Mulk, son of his previous patron Nizam al-Mulk, who was instrumental in his return to teaching in Nishapur 1106.

The human form can impart both scale and spatial logic to the objects it adorns. This phenomenon was put to unexpected and sometimes humorous ends by medieval artisans. Focusing on perception, this chapter considers the role of the human figure in architectural allusions on objects from the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Iranian plateau. The power of the represented human form is explored first through ceramic stands that make explicit reference to architectural pavilions. After these, a group of inlaid metalwork inkwells, and the delicately allusive nature of their relationships with full-scale architecture, form the chapter’s main focus. This study models a means of approach that considers the complex ornamental programs of these objects in their entirety: architectural, figural, epigraphic, geometric, and vegetal ornament are recognized as inseparable from each other and also from the three-dimensional materiality of objects that respond to vision, touch, movement, and use.

Christine Noelle-Karimi analyzes two Persian histories written during the early Durrani period by Mahmud al-Husayni of Mashhad (in present-day Iran) and Imam al-Din Husayni of Lahore (in present-day Pakistan). Rather than presenting the Durrani Empire as a forerunner to the Afghan nation-state, Noelle-Karimi situates its historians in their own spatial horizons by showing how the historiography of the Durrani Empire emerged out of the political and literary geographies of the earlier Iranian and Indian empires from which Durrani power had itself emerged.

By focusing on the Tarikh-i Ahmad Shahi of the aforementioned Mahmud al-Husayni, in Chapter 2 Amin Tarzi presents a powerfully revisionist reading of this “first history of Afghanistan”. By working through the way in which the Tarikh-i Ahmad Shahi explained Ahmad Shah Durrani’s rise to power, his relationship with his former sovereign, the Iranian Nadir Shah Afshar and the motivations for the change of his dynastic title from Abdali to Durrani, Tarzi reconstructs the political self-conceptions of the early Durrani state. Having done so, Tarzi then looks ahead to give a critical assessment of the effects that this Durrani political economy had on the future contours of the Afghan state.

This chapter introduces the Shāfiʿite legal tradition. It notes that Shāfiʿite coercion jurisprudence was not as complex as Ḥanafism’s because Shāfiʿites took a straightforward approach to speech acts: coercion invalidated their legal consequences. It describes Shāfiʿī’s legal opinions on coerced speech acts and homicide, especially those resulting from superior orders. It describes the internal disagreement within Shāfiʿīsm in the eleventh century on the legal definition of coercion. Iraqi Shāfiʿites held that what is coercive depends on a variety of factors, including the ability of the coerced agent to withstand the threat, the agent’s social status, and the relationship between the demand and the threat made by the coercer. Khurasani Shāfiʿites favored a red line standard, holding that only credible threats against one’s life or limb are legally coercive. It notes that Shāfiʿite attempts to legally define coercion relied little on interpretations of scripture and almost entirely on empirical and rational claims.