Polymaths of Islam analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth. James Pickett demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated und...(展开全部)

Polymaths of Islam analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth. James Pickett demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated und...(展开全部)

Timur (or Tamerlane) is famous as the fourteenth-century conqueror of much of Central Eurasia and the founder of the Timurid dynasty. His reputation lived on in his native lands and reappeared some three centuries after his death in the form of fictional biographies, authored anonymously in Persian and Turkic. These biographies have become part of popular culture. Despite a dir...(展开全部)

In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation―from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign―is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often...(展开全部)

Talal Asad is a professor of anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University.

A penetrating look into the unrecognized and unregulated links between autocratic regimes in Central Asia and centers of power and wealth throughout the West Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book...(展开全部)

Since the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 and the subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Central Asia has been undergoing considerable political, social, and economic change. In a Leon B. Poullada Memorial Lecture delivered at Princeton University in 1993, R. D. McChesney examined the historical roots of a number of the issues confronting the regi...(展开全部)

Originally published in 1969, this book consists of a revised version of Dr Chadwick's section on the oral literature of the Turkic peoples in The Growth of Literature with supplementary material on the results of research in the Soviet Union by Professor Victor Zhirmunsky. This literature is of the greatest interest and variety, and not excessively 'strange' to readers of Euro...(展开全部)

In this book Werner Hullen examines Roget's Thesaurus in relation to linguistics, philosophy and history. He explores the influence of Roget's Thesaurus abroad (Germany and the Romance countries). He epitomizes its history and compares the various editions of the book. In lexical case studies he evaluates some entries with pertinence to their cultural and political implications...(展开全部)