Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan

Abstract

This book is about a sacred place called Balkh, in today’s Afghanistan, known to the ancient Greeks as Bactra. The book offers a new look at the medieval local history of Balkh, the Faḍāʾil-i Balkh, and analyses the creation of a sacred landscape. Fundamentally, the book argues that the example of Balkh helps us to answer the fascinating question, ‘What makes a place holy?’ It shows that sacredness of place is perpetuated through narratives, irrespective of the dominant religion or religious strand of the time. Located in the north of today’s Afghanistan, along the Silk Road, Balkh was holy to many. The Prophet Zoroaster is rumoured to have died here, and during late antiquity, Balkh was the home of the “Naw Bahār”, a famed Buddhist temple and monastery. By the tenth century, Balkh had become a critical centre of Islamic learning and Persian Sufi poetry. The book provides the first in-depth study of the sacred sites and landscape of medieval Balkh, which continues to exemplify age-old sanctity in the Persian-speaking world and the eastern lands of Islam generally. It focuses on the five centuries from the Islamic conquests in the eighth century to just before the arrival of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the crucial period in the emergence of Perso-Islamic historiography and Islamic legal thought. It traces the development of ‘sacred landscape’, the notion that a place has a sensory meaning, as distinct from a purely topographical space. This opens up new possibilities for our understanding of Islamisation in the Islamic lands, and specifically the transition from Buddhism to Islam.