Iran and Islam

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Students of Classical Islam Now Have Several Substantial English-language reference works at their disposal. Foremost among these is the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (henceforth EI2) an imposing enterprise which attempts to cover all aspects of Islam in all lands from the time of the Prophet until the present. This noble ambition has carried the price of slow progress. Publication began in 1952 and after nearly half a century the work is still not complete. In the meantime The Encyclopedia of Religion and The Dictionary of the Middle Ages have appeared and been completed. Although the purview of these two works is much broader than the religion of Islam and the Islamic world, they contain many articles of considerable interest to Islamicists. Since the publication of its first fascicle in 1982, the Encyclopaedia Iranica has been supplementing these distinguished works, and eight volumes of a projected twenty have now been completed.