Book Review

Asia

The tension between transregional bonds and regional diversities has informed much of the history of South, Central, and West Asia. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Muslim elites in the Mughal, Uzbek, and Safavid empires clashed, mixed, and collaborated within a largely shared high culture that was quite distinct from the cultures of many of the people they ruled. In a work of careful scholarship, Richard Foltz describes the ways that Uzbek and Mughal court cultures comprised "one world" (p. xxiv). His fine book further reveals how the disintegration of the Soviet Union has opened up new possibilities both for reconceptualizing transnational cultural regions and for bringing together scholarship from across what were Cold War boundaries.

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Foltz's meticulous research focuses on the immigration patterns of Central Asians to the Mughal imperial court and also on the high Persio-Islamic cultural influences that paralleled these movements. He leaves to other scholars analysis of the more well-documented and more extensive movements and influences from Safavid Iran into India. Nevertheless, he asserts that the Persian literary and Uzbek court cultures formed the major bonds among Central Asian elites living in their homeland and those in India. Due to the nature of the literary source material, which Foltz has used extensively, we learn little about most individuals (aside from royalty). Chapter six, which analyzes the travel narratives of Mahmud bin Amir Wali and Mutribi al-Asamm Samarqandi, thus stands as particularly revealing of the individual motivations and responses of Central Asians in India.

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