C. P. W. Gammell's The Pearl of Khorasan is a history of the city of Herat from Mongol times to 2001 in six chapters. The title of the book refers to a poem highlighting Herat's centrality in relationship to the surrounding province of Khorasan and the world in general. There is no clear connection between the title, with its emphasis on Herat as part of a larger region, and the topics covered in the text. The first three chapters instead offer a monolithic account of events affecting the city without relating it to Khorasan. It is only in the final chapters, when Gammell describes Herat's uneasy position within the modern state of Afghanistan, that he provides any regional framework whatsoever.

Gammell endows Herat with anthropomorphic, even feminine attributes. The city “is self-sufficient, yet vulnerable” (p. 5); it “attracts, seduces, collapses, recovers and then repeats” (p. 16); Sufism runs in its blood (p. 10); “religion gives it a conscience and a soul” (p. 11); and it is “through culture, poetry, textiles and arts” that it has “made sense of the passage of time” (p. 12). Most importantly, it has repeatedly been “misunderstood” (pp. 3, 12, 13, 349). Eventually, in chapter 4, it turns into an “orphan of history and geography” (p. 179) but proves “elusive and stubborn” (p. 245) to the end. While the author acknowledges that it would be a “fool's errand” to pinpoint Herat (p. 13), he still endeavors to unlock what he feels is the city's real meaning.

Gammell summarizes the existing secondary literature on the history of Herat and attempts to spice the narrative up with quotations from Persian primary sources. This bid at authenticity backfires because of translation errors and interpolations. One recurring issue is misinterpretation of the discursive framework of the contemporaneous Persian historiography. Thus, Gammell misreads a formulaic morality tale of the education and assimilation of the nomadic conquerors by the conquered Tajik sedentary population as a mere narrative of Mongol abuse (see, e.g., pp. 24–25).Footnote ¹ Then there is Gammell's noticeable tendency to “augment” the original Persian texts by enriching purported quotes with his personal interventions, interpretations, and embellishments. Direct speech, while rendered in quotation marks, is summarized.Footnote ² On other occasions, Gammell reconstitutes separate and contrasting elements of the original text into a unitary narrative (see, e.g., p. 27).Footnote ³

This book offers a pastiche. It peoples Herat with an array of military leaders, ulama, artists, travelers, and, finally, colonial actors. Gammell seeks to “enhance” established historical facts by means of an orientalizing narrative. Yet the attributes given to the city of Herat (“self-sufficient, yet vulnerable,” “both protected and isolated,” p. 5) do little to further our understanding of local circumstances. A recurrent topos is that of the seductive and corruptive nature of Persian urban culture. The fluid politics of medieval and early modern times are forced into formulaic dichotomies: oppressive Mongols versus fickle and opportunistic Heratis; orthodoxy versus heterodoxy; Turks vs. Tajiks. In chapter 3, Gammell offers an equally misleading distinction between “a preoccupied and adolescent Safavid empire and a highly mobile and extremely greedy Shaybanid Uzbek force from Transoxania” (p. 126). While he acknowledges common wisdom that religious delineations followed political divides, he nonetheless goes on to postulate a specific religious identity for early sixteenth-century Herat: “The city resented Shia Safavid overlordship, but chafed under the rule of uncivilised [Sunni] Uzbeks from over the Oxus” (p. 133). Later in the same chapter, he constructs an equally artificial juxtaposition between the “Pashtun” Abdalis and the “Persian” conqueror Nader Shah (p. 166). The core problem of chapters 1 to 3 is that Gammell tries to carve out a syndrome specific to Herat while failing to relate local phenomena to the regional framework and to the political logic of the time. Furthermore, he assumes a moralizing tone of voice: his themes of “corruption” and “feuding” echo colonial writing and do not provide a sound analytic framework for understanding urban history in medieval and early modern times. Chapters 4 and 5 are taken up by a standard account of the Great Game, with Herat figuring as a “hotbed of intrigue” (p. 210).

This book is too ambitious in scope and tries to do too much: Gammell offers an exhaustive and exhausting enumeration of events, mostly military, some cultural, that affected Herat in the course of eight centuries. Yet the reader is left to surmise in which ways the events described are relevant to the analysis of local and regional dynamics.

The Pearl of Khorasan is at its best and most entertaining when Gammell relates the history of Herat to his own hands-on experience. The reader learns about his life in Herat between 2009 and 2014, his work with UNESCO, his walks and musings in the Musalla complex, and the receipt of a robe of honor from a former Mujahid. While reiterating an age-old colonial dream, his attempt at “going native” also adds color to the narrative. Gammell's perceptive anecdote concerning a mullah from Khost and his notion of Afghanistan as a strictly Pashtun habitat is highly instructive on the contested nature of the modern nation and Herat's problematic place in it. One would wish for more of these insights and less of a generalizing history of events. In view of these considerations, this book may be better suited for a general readership than for scholars investigating aspects of regional and intellectual history.