This small monograph promises to explore the Fażāʾil-i Balkh, an account of the “virtues” of the celebrated “mother of cities” in Khurāsān, preserved in a Persian adaptation, from 676/1278, of a lost Arabic original, written in 610/1214. This source, available in ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī's text edition for more than 40 years, is of particular interest as a “transitional” work: as an example of the “city histories” often produced in the pre-Mongol period, dominated by biographical accounts of the local religious elites, it displays more attention to these figures’ shrines than in many such works, though still far less than in the fully developed “shrine guides”, focused more on “founding” saints or Sufis than on the ʿulamā, that appear somewhat later. As such, the Fażāʾil-i Balkh, in its memorialization of the holy people whose presence, in life and death, was held to sanctify Balkh, would make an ideal platform for a study countering the tendency of much scholarship on sacred sites and local pilgrimage practices in the Muslim world to dwell more on the presumed “pre-Islamic origins” of such places and rites than on their roles and meanings, embedded in a sacralized landscape, in Muslim religiosity. It is thus disappointing that Azad's book instead adopts that tiresome tendency, and devotes so little space to a direct and substantive engagement with her source, or to a deeper and more insightful analytical stance.

It is not possible, in a short review, to report the specific problems – of style, fact, or interpretation – in the book, or to note the sources or studies that ought to have been consulted; but as it stands, the book seems unfinished, both in terms of what is not covered (or not covered sufficiently, when compared with tangential issues accorded more space), and in terms of the many places in need of editorial attention. The overall structure likewise suggests that the book contains disparate parts of a larger whole. In the introduction, for example, Azad offers some preliminary thoughts about the meaning of “place”, a capsule history of Afghanistan, some orientation about the Fażāʾil-i Balkh, and further discussion of sacred space and sacralized landscape; the scholarly literature on the latter subjects, whether theoretical and comparative or case studies, is only thinly represented, however, and throughout the volume, the reader is left unsure what the main focus of the work is supposed to be: is it how the physical landscape is experienced and made meaningful in religious terms, how the built environment shapes religious encounters with a landscape, how religious narratives are embedded at local holy sites, how to use a work such as the Fażāʾil-i Balkh as a historical source, how that work's author understood the social and religious history of his city, or something else?

The first chapter focuses on the Fażāʾil-i Balkh, recounting the history of its composition, transmission, and study; the discussion belabours technical issues about the source and its manuscript copies that might have been relegated to the notes or an appendix. Azad handles well the question of the sources used by the work's author, giving a detailed analysis and attempting to classify the works he used by genre; she is less at home, and less thorough, in discussing references to the Fażāʾil-i Balkh in later works, from the post-Mongol era, and unfortunately gives only perfunctory attention to the many works dealing with Balkh – and its saints and shrines – produced from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The lack of attention to such sources, which could illuminate the ongoing process of sanctifying Balkh in a Muslim framework, is underscored by the excessive attention, in the second chapter, to insisting on the pre-Islamic origins of the sites held sacred by Muslim Balkhīs: Azad devotes nearly 40 pages to the circumstantial architectural, archaeological, and textual evidence on Balkh's Buddhist past – a story long known and often told – but her distinctly unsatisfying discussion of practices at the Muslim shrines of Balkh mentioned in her source occupies just four pages. It is a pity that instead of allowing the Muslim voices recorded in the Fażāʾil-i Balkh to speak, and analysing their construction of a Muslim vision of Balkh's history, Azad has placed the notion of pre-Islamic origins front and centre. Even then she must resort to conjectural and speculative phrasing in showing that Buddhist holy sites became Muslim holy sites; and in implying that simply correlating places regarded as sacred in her thirteenth-century source with sites used in Buddhist ritual contexts in pre-Islamic times can demonstrate a meaningful continuity of sacrality (or even memory), she again drifts away from the actual contents of the Fażāʾil-i Balkh.

Chapter 3, finally, shifts the focus from places deemed sacred to the people – scholars active in Balkh – whose activity there sanctified the city. Here Azad attempts to identify what made the 70 figures accorded biographical entries, chronologically arranged, in the Fażāʾil-i Balkh central to the city's sanctification, but her treatment is mostly synthetic and classificatory, as she first suggests certain factors – madhhab, wealth or the lack of it, familial connections, place of origin, etc. – as possible shared features, and then distils several narrative patterns, mostly involving the scholars’ religious profiles and their interactions with rulers, as keys to the sanctity they bestowed upon Balkh. There is certainly merit in the latter mode of analysis; but Azad again pulls back from actually engaging with any single narrative about any of the 70 scholars, by way of exploring how those narratives make, or reflect, the sanctity of a shrine or of Balkh as a whole; she likewise avoids exploring if, and how, we might link the stories of figures active early in the history of Islamic Balkh with the sacred, or memorialized, landscape of Balkh during the author's time. The biographical entries in the Fażāʾil-i Balkh occupy over 330 pages in Ḥabībī's text edition; it is unfortunate that this “revisitation” of the work pays more attention to revisiting issues extraneous to it, and to its subjects, than to “listening” to the work itself.