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Alison Vacca: Non-Muslim Provinces under Early Islam: Islamic Rule and Iranian Legitimacy in Armenia and Caucasian Albania. (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization.) xvi, 270 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. £75. ISBN 978 1 107 18851 8.
Alison Vacca's book is an erudite and thought-provoking engagement with the history and historiography of the Marwānid and early ʿAbbāsid North (Armenia, Albania, and Georgia), viewed through the lens of the “Iranian intermezzo” that characterized the caliphate's former Sasanian provinces in the late ninth–eleventh centuries
The book's primary interest is historiographical, examining how ʿAbbāsid-era Arabic and Armenian sources on the caliphal North (8th–9th century) adapt the region's Sasanian (perhaps also Parthian) legacies to convey an impression of continuity from pre-Islamic to early ʿAbbāsid times. However, as these sources were mostly composed during the Iranian intermezzo, Vacca argues that they should be read as comments on that period rather than earlier eras. In particular, the (re-)emergence of a specifically Iranian idiom of power during the intermezzo that was shared by Muslim and Christian rulers alike heavily influenced Armenian and Arabic writings on the caliphal North.
The history of the northern provinces in the caliphal period is of secondary import, mostly because very few contemporary works are extant today. Nevertheless, the book addresses both historiographical and...