Misbâh ul-arvâh, or The Lantern of Spirits, is a comparatively little known Sufi didactic Persian poem written in the 12th century by the next to unknown Shaikh Shams ud-dîn Muhammad b. Îl-Tughân Bardasîrî Kirmânî. It is not a very long poem, covering only 1099 double verses (bait), but it contains both a quite comprehensive compendium of Sufi teachings and a very interesting description of the soul’s journey to the Other World. The latter furnishes fascinating parallels with Dante’s Divina Commedia. The book gives a detailed description of the contents of the poem, with many examples of it’s eloquent verse in translation. The main part of the book, however, gives a critical edition of the Persian text, based on the twelve oldest known manuscripts that contain the poem, the eight oldest of which are dated, making a detailed reconstruction of the original text possible.

This work is an edition and literary-critical study of a Manichaean text in Sogdian known as the Āzandnāmē, or Parable-Book. The first part is a new and expanded edition of the Sogdian text with English translation and philological commentary. The second part, and main contribution, is a literary-critical study of the individual parables of the Āzandnāmē as well as of the genre of parables with the framework of Manichaean literature as a whole.

This book reflects on a quarter-century of observations by Charles Kieffer (Research Director CNRS, Paris) during his dialectological research from 1957-1981 in all of Afghanistan, sometimes under very adventurous circumstances. As a contributor to the “Linguistic Atlas of Afghanistan” under the direction of the late Prof. Georges Redard (University of Bern), he has also collected material about the private life and the intimate vocabulary of the people living in the countryside. Dealing with the oral folk culture, where the people are, in part, illiterate and deeply influenced by Islam, gave the author the opportunity to bring to light some taboos, prohibitions on speech, and language obligations still well noticeable in everyday life.

From ancient times, 'Iranianate' cultures and the Persian language had a significant role beyond the borders of Iran: in the lands of the Near & Middle East, Central Asia as far as China and India. The book collects novel contributions within five chapters focussed on the Islamic periods. Creating a unique multi-disciplinary panorama, 39 scholars from twelve countries deal with individual themes from history and historiography, the history of literature and language, cultural and religious history, art history and the history of culinary culture.

This volume presents the documentation and description of the Mukri variety of the Central Kurdish, spoken in north western Iran. The volume contains background information on the dialect and the speech community, ten texts with English translations, two interlinear morphemic glossed texts, and a grammatical description and lexicon based on the author’s field work. Audio recordings of the texts are included on a CD.