570 Reviews Arezou Azad, Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan: Revisiting the Faḍāʾil-i Balkh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, xxiii+213 pp., 17 plates, ISBN: 9780199687053. Reviewed by Ahmad Khan, The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, ahmad.khan@aucegypt.edu https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2021-0033 Arezou Azad has produced a splendid, focused, and well-written monograph on a text that has attracted little attention beyond a small coterie of Iranologists. Faḍāʾil-i Balkh is one of a number of city-histories written prior to the Mongol inva- sions in Khurasan. It was published in 1971 by the prolific historian ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī; but already a decade earlier in Paris, a young Ali Shariati was busy writing a doctoral dissertation on the basis of existing manuscripts of Faḍāʾil-i Balkh, culminating in a partial edition and study of the text. Though a number of schol- ars have made use of Faḍāʾil-i Balkh for the history of Sufism, Islamic law, and religious history, Azad’s book is by far the most substantial treatment of the text. The history and significance of Faḍāʾil-i Balkh is documented in three large chapters. The first studies some elementary issues concerning the text. Azad’s discussion is welcome and valuable given a number of uncertainties surrounding Faḍāʾil-i Balkh. It was originally written in Arabic, perhaps around the year 1214, and we know little about the text’s author other than what can be construed from internal evidence in Faḍāʾil-i Balkh. Now, the Arabic original has not survived, and the edition we have today is a Persian adaptation of Faḍāʾil-i Balkh composed by ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim al-Ḥusaynī in the year 1278. The rest of the chapter contains a very competent sketch of the textual landscape in which Faḍāʾil-i Balkh emerged. Azad explains that Faḍāʾil-i Balkh relies on five major genres of writing: ṭabaqāt; faḍāʾil, legal works, Sufi writings and biographical dictionaries, and poetry. She furnishes a precise and technical account of the fre- quency with which Faḍāʾil-i Balkh cites different texts belonging to each of these genres, noting along the way a number of other texts that don’t fall so neatly into one of the five categories. The chapter closes with a sensitive essay (“how to ‘read’ the message”) on the composite nature of Faḍāʾil-i Balkh and its sources, prompting readers to consider how such texts should be read and for what kind of audience it was intended. Chapter Two presents the major framing of Azad’s book. Faḍāʾil-i Balkh is, for Azad, a book about the city’s sacred landscape. It exhibits a conception of sanctity that is interwoven into the diverse religious and architectural environ- ment of Balkh, and Azad spends a great deal of effort documenting the contin- uous and evolving legacy of Balkh’s Buddhist sites and memories. The subject