This is a collection of papers based on those given at a conference at the University of St Andrews in 2013. It is dedicated to the memory of two scholars: Professor C. Edmund Bosworth, who died in 2015, and whose paper in the volume is presumably one of his last publications, and Berenike Walburg, a St Andrews graduate student who was involved in the planning of the conference and would have been a participant, had she not died in a road accident in 2012. The conference, and the volume which has followed, were concerned with Iran and Central Asia, more specifically Khurasan in its wide pre-modern sense, during the centuries immediately preceding the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. The overall argument is that while the so-called “Iranian intermezzo” of the ninth century onwards has – certainly ever since Vladimir Minorsky coined the phrase – been seriously studied, concentration has tended to be on the Shii dynasties, most notably the Buyids, who for a time dominated western Iran and Iraq, to the detriment of the largely Sunni east, to which insufficient attention has been paid.

The editors suggest that their volume is the first to collect together studies on this area since Islamic Civilisation 950–1150 (ed. D.S. Richards), appeared in 1973. That was a valuable collection, based on an Oxford conference of 1969, to which many of the then-leading scholars of the subject, such as Goitein, Cahen, Lambton, Makdisi and Sourdel, contributed (of them, Bosworth and Roy Mottahedeh have contributions in the new volume). The editors of the new volume say of its predecessor that, significant though it was and still is, “it did not differentiate between the Shiʿite ‘Iraqayn’ on the one hand, and the culturally cohesive world of Sunni Khurasan and Transoxiana on the other” – whereas their volume concentrates on the latter area.

The editors are well qualified to preside over this enterprise, having themselves published extensively on the period, especially the latter part of it. Dr Peacock published, in 2015, the first major modern survey in English of the Seljuk phenomenon as a whole (The Great Seljuk Empire, Edinburgh, 2015), and Professor Tor has written a volume of similar scope though differently organized, which is soon to appear. The papers in the volume, after a Preface by the editors, are: “The importance of Khurasan and Transoxiana in the Persianate dynastic period (850–1220)” (D.G. Tor); “The spread of Hanafism to Khurasan and Transoxiana” (Christopher Melchert); “The khassa and the ʿamma: intermediaries in the Samanid polity” (Louis Marlow); “Content versus context in Samanid epigraphic pottery” (Robert Hillenbrand); “A venture on the frontier: Alptegin's conquest of Ghazna and its sequel” (Minoru Inaba); “Finding Iran in the panegyrics of the Ghaznavid court” (Roy Mottahedeh); “Khurasani historiography and identity in the light of the fragments of the Akhbar Wulat Khurasan and the Tarikh-i Harat” (A.C.S. Peacock); “The life and times of ʿAmid al-Mulk al-Kunduri” (Carole Hillenbrand); “Local lords or rural notables? Some remarks on the ra'is in twelfth century eastern Iran” (Jürgen Paul); and “The Ghurids in Khurasan” (C. Edmund Bosworth).

The essays repay careful study. As the editors say, the relevant textual source base has not expanded enormously since the appearance of what is still the standard secondary account, Barthold's Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion, a book dating essentially from its original Russian edition of 1900 – though as Peacock's paper shows, there are some new sources; and old ones can be re-examined and reinterpreted. What is notable about the collection is the extent to which non-textual evidence – archaeology, art, poetry, etc. – has been drawn on to shed previously unsuspected light on what was going on. Taken as a whole, the papers make a persuasive case for the significance of Khurasan and Transoxiana as a – perhaps the – centre of Sunni Islamic civilization for several centuries, at least until the devastation which followed the Oghuz capture of the Seljuk sultan Sanjar in 1153, which, it is argued, was far more destructive than has generally been recognized by modern scholars. This, if accepted, might help understanding of why the main Seljuk successor-state, that of the Khwarazmshahs, fell so comparatively easily to Mongol assault in the early thirteenth century. This is an important volume, which is likely to prove as signficant as Islamic Civilisation 950–1150 was in its day.