In essays drawn from over the course of his distinguished career, Roy Mottahedeh explores such diverse topics as the social bonds that connected people in the early Islamic Middle East, the transmission of learning in the Muslim world and the theme of ‘wonders’ in The Thousand and One Nights. His rich corpus attends to the early Islamic period, the medieval era and modern times. A number of pieces concern Iran, the country of his father’s birth, and here too Mottahedeh’s focus is varied, as he studies Persian panegyric poetry, the origins of the city of Kashan and Shi‘ite political thought.
Intended not only for those in Islamic studies but for students of history and interested lay readers, there are introductions to each section written with the non-specialist in mind, and these sections progress from more general topics to those more specialised. In the Shadow of the Prophet thus reflects Mottahedeh’s desire that the Islamic world and its history become better understood in the Western world.