Bibliography of Islamic Central Asia.

• Author: Sinor, Denis

Three volumes. Compiled and edited by YURI BREGEL. Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series, vol. 160. Bloomington: INDIANA UNIVERSITY RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR INNER ASIAN STUDIES, 1995. Pp. 2,276. $299.

For the purposes of this bibliography Professor Bregel defined Central Asia as

... the western, Turko-Iranian, part of the Inner Asian heartland, whose indigenous population consisted of various Iranian peoples, most of whom have been by now Turkicized, and whose growing Turkic population has to various degrees assimilated its indigenous Iranian culture; in geographical terms, it spreads from the Caspian Sea and the Ural river basin in the west to the Altai mountains and the Turfan oasis in the east, and from the limits of the Inner Asian steppe belt in the north to the Hindukush and the Kopet-Dagh in the south. (p. viii)

Some sentence!

The bibliography is limited to history, with all its auxiliary fields and related disciplines, such as archaeology and ethnography. Professor Bregel claims that the bibliography does not include those works dealing with languages or literatures. This may be true when the term "literature" is applied only to its written form. Monographs and articles dealing with its oral form take up over eighty pages in volume two.

Since the Islamization of Central Asia was a process that extended over several centuries, Bregel had to draw the lines of coverage somewhat arbitrarily. The terminus post quem is the early eighth century A.D., the termini a quo are, for Western Turkestan, October 1917, for Eastern Turkestan, 1949, and 1979 for Afghan Turkestan. "For the history of the Seljukids, the Golden Horde, the Ilkhans of Iran, and the Jungars, whose centers were outside of Central Asia only those works are included which deal with the subjects that bear upon Central Asia" (p. xii). The total number of records (non-duplicated entries) in this bibliography is about 30,500. Of these some 8,000 were examined visually. The twenty pages of abbreviations used (wisely, the list is reprinted in vols. 2 and 3) refer to approximately nine hundred periodicals and collective volumes. The bibliography claims to include publications in all languages except Chinese and Japanese.

These data give an idea of the magnitude of the task undertaken by Professor Bregel but it is only the perusal of the work over a longer period (hence the delay in this review) that make one realize what impeccable scholarship informs the presentation, what...