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THE HISTORY OF THE SAFFARIDS OF SISTAN AND THE MALIKS OF NIMRUZ (247/861 to 949/1542-3). By C. E. BOSWORTH. Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 1994. 477 pp. $49.00.
In this extremely detailed monograph Bosworth returns to the scholarly territory with which he was very familiar at the beginning of his long career in Islamic studies-the eastern Islamic world-and it is heartening to see that he is as confident and surefooted in this area as he was in 1968, when he wrote Sistan under the Arabs. But time has moved on, of course, and Bosworth is not content in this new work just to go over old ground. The present book sprang from a series of five lectures which he delivered in the Columbia Lecture Series on Iranian Studies in 1991, and it sheds considerable light on the history of a very obscure corner of the Islamic world.
The book is divided into two parts: the first deals with the Saffarid dynasty of Sistan, and the second traces the history of the area under the Maliks of Nimruz to the end of the sixteenth century. The book also contains four genealogical tables and two maps. The bibliography is impressively full. Part 1, which contains seven chapters, gives a detailed description...