ʿAlī ibn Sahl Rabban aṭ-Ṭabarī’s health manual, which is edited and translated here, was written in the middle of the 9th century CE for a lay audience and represents the earliest extant Arabic text of its kind.

Volume I of the thirty-eight volume translation of Ṭabarī's great History begins with the creation of the world and ends with the time of Noah and the Flood. It not only brings a vast amount of speculation about the early history of mankind into sharp Muslim focus, but it also synchronizes ancient Iranian ideas about the prehistory of mankind with those inspired by the Qur'an and the Bible. The volume is thus an excellent guide to the cosmological views of many of Ṭabarī's contemporaries. The translator, Franz Rosenthal, one of the world's foremost scholars of Arabic, has also written an extensive introduction to the volume that presents all the facts known about Ṭabarī's personal and professional life. Professor Rosenthal's meticulous and original scholarship has yielded a valuable bibliography and chronology of Ṭabarī's writings, both those preserved in manuscript and those alluded to by other authors. The introduction and first volume of the translation of the History form a ground-breaking contribution to Islamic historiography in English and will prove to be an invaluable source of information for those who are interested in Middle Eastern history but are unable to read the basic works in Arabic.

The Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam is an unequalled reference work of all subjects which concern, or touch on, the religion and law of Islam. As to its geographical and historical scope, the work embraces the old Arabo-Islamic Empire, the Islamic states of Iran, Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent and Indonesia, the Ottoman Empire, and the various Muslim states and communities in Africa, Europe and the former U.S.S.R. The Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam contains an extensive index and bibliography. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

ʿAlī ibn Sahl aṭ-Ṭabarī's Indian Books, completed in Samarra in 850 CE, offer a unique, interpretative summary of Ayurvedic medicine, as he understood it on the basis of now lost Arabic translations from Sanskrit.