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Book Review

Asia

Peter Jackson. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xx, 367. $64.95.

If it is possible to speak of a definitive history of the Delhi Sultanate for our time, this is it. Peter Jackson has written a book that is learned, literate, and judicious, and it must be counted one of the most distinguished contributions to Indian history in our time. Jackson is already well known as an authority in this field, although his contributions to Islamic scholarship range far from the banks of the Ganges and the Indus to embrace Central Asia and Iran in the Mongol epoch as well as Middle Eastern crusader studies. He was responsible for the final editing of volume six of The Cambridge History of Iran (on the Timurid and Safavid periods) and for a new Hakluyt Society edition of the travels of William of Rubruck. 1

Throughout his scholarly career, Jackson has been preoccupied with the interplay between the thirteenth-century Mongol Empire of the Chinghizids and the history of the Delhi Sultanate. He has written a seminal account of early Muslim Delhi ("Delhi: The Problems of a Vast Military Encampment," in R. E. Frykenberg, ed., Delhi through the Ages [1986], unaccountably omitted from the recent paperback edition) along with "The Mamluk Institution in Early Muslim India" (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society [1990]) and "Sultan Radiyya bint Iltutmish" (in Gavin R. G. Hambly, ed., Women in the Medieval Islamic World [1998]). The geographical extent of his scholarship and his understanding of the complex interdependence of the lands of the Delhi Sultanate with Iran and Central Asia, his linguistic skills, and his immense knowledge of medieval Islamic geography have enabled him to compress into a single volume this splendidly nuanced assessment of the period, which is rooted in close textual analysis and a mastery of the linguistic problems presented by his sources—a mastery all too rare today and reminiscent of the research of Simon Digby. . . .

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