Horizons of the World: Festschrift For İsenbike Togan

The articles gathered in this volume are dedicated to Professor İsenbike Togan by her students, colleagues, and friends to honor and celebrate her long and continuing career as one of the world’s foremost scholars in the field of Central Asian history. The range of articles that the contributors to this festschrift submitted reflects in many ways the depth and breadth of İsenbike Togan’s works and her understanding of history. Indeed, from a geographical perspective, her published works cover the vast area from China to Anatolia, and from a chronological perspective they extend from the 7th to the 21st century. While the central historical question with which İsenbike Togan engages most frequently is the nature of political culture, her books and articles address a wide range of issues and questions, including women’s history, the dhikr ceremonies of the Naqshbandi order in Eastern Turkestan, legitimacy and state formation in Central Asia, tribal politics from the perspective of anthropological history, and Chinese historiography. Through her command of a wide range of languages, historical issues, and textual sources, she not only makes ‘surprising’ connections among these seemingly diverse historical topics, but offers systematic and new approaches in the study of the Turco-Mongol peoples. Her intellectual adventure has been shaped by her unique ability to engage with the objects of her inquiry in a truly holistic and integrative manner; her works, while thoroughly rooted in painstaking and careful textual and linguistics analysis, consistently address and illuminate the ‘big picture’ in history.