In 26 well-chosen research essays, this volume celebrates the 70th birthday of Professor C.E. Bosworth FBA, the distinguished Middle East Historian.

Professor C.E. Bosworth FBA is a Middle East historian of world stature. In this volume his friends and colleagues come together to honour his 70th birthday. This book ranges widely over time and space but its core is the Islamic culture of Iran and Turkey. The contributors cover topics from the Arab conquest in the seventh century to Turkish and Iranian nationalism in the twentieth century. Special attention is paid to medieval Turco-Persian history, an area which lies at the heart of Professor Bosworth's oeuvre: more than half of the articles fall into this category. Moreover, five of them focus on that early medieval eastern Iranian world on which he has written so widely. While the emphasis lies squarely on history, other fields such as religion, literature, music, art and numismatics are also represented. Thus the volume offers a conspectus of the cultural contribution of Iran and Turkey to Islamic civilisation.

A.C.S. Peacock is Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews, and holds a PhD in Oriental Studies from Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is the author of Early Seljuq History: A New Interpretation (2010), and is the co-editor of The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (I.B.Tauris, 2012) and Ferdowsi, the Mongols and the History of Iran: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to Qajar Persia (I.B.Tauris, 2013).D.G. Tor is Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle Eastern History at the University of Notre Dame, and holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. She is the author of The Great Selkuq Sultanate and the Formation of Islamic Civilization: A Thematic History (forthcoming) and Violent Order: Religious Warfare, Chivalry and the 'Ayyar Phenomenon in the Medieval Islamic World (2007).

Al-Mu'ayyad bi-llah al-Haruni (d. 411/1020) was a representative of the intellectual center of the Zaydiyya in Northern Iran and a student of the leading Muʿtazilite theologians of the time. In his Kitab Ithbat nubuwwat al-nabi he presents a proof of prophecy of Muḥammad and a refutation of the Isma'ilyya.The present volume explores the historical and intellectual context of the oeuvre and includes a partial critical edition of the text.

How did Iran remain distinctively Iranian in the centuries which followed the Arab Conquest? How did it retain its cultural distinctiveness after the displacement of Zoroastrianism - state religion of the Persian empire - by Islam? This latest volume in "The Idea of Iran" series traces that critical moment in Iranian history which followed the transformation of ancient traditions during the country's conversion and initial Islamic period. Distinguished contributors (who include the late Oleg Grabar, Roy Mottahedeh, Alan Williams and Said Amir Arjomand) discuss, from a variety of literary, artistic, religious and cultural perspectives, the years around the end of the first millennium CE, when the political strength of the 'Abbasid Caliphate was on the wane, and when the eastern lands of the Islamic empire began to be take on a fresh 'Persianate' or 'Perso-Islamic' character. One of the paradoxes of this era is that the establishment throughout the eastern Islamic territories of new Turkish dynasties coincided with the genesis and spread, into Central and South Asia, of vibrant new Persian language and literatures. Exploring the nature of this paradox, separate chapters engage with ideas of kingship, authority and identity and their fascinating expression through the written word, architecture and the visual arts.