How notions of loyalty, belonging, and perhaps especially the tricky related concept of identity, were conceived has become a popular topic of research on late antique and early Islamic history in recent years, as no doubt in the study of other periods and regions. Most studies have addressed these issues by attempting to look at either the formation of ethnic or genealogical identities or religious affiliations; for early Islamic history, think in particular of studies seeking to establish what the term Arab meant in late antiquity, how complex genealogies were constructed for those who came to be known as Arabs over the first Islamic centuries, and the formation of classical Sunnism and Shiism. Zayde Antrim's new book seeks to bring attachment to land, more commonly associated with modern nationalism, back into the picture.

The main concern of her book is to establish the existence of what she calls the “discourse of place” across many different genres of Arabic literature in the third/ninth to fifth/eleventh centuries and, as a result of this, to demonstrate that, “In the early Islamic world, from the Iberian Peninsula to the river valleys of the Indus and Oxus, land was an object of desire and a category of belonging” (p. 8). The author defines this discourse of place as “a conceptual framework I use to bring together a wide variety of formal texts committed to the representation of territory in and of itself, rather than as a setting or backdrop for something else” (p. 1), and through its study Antrim seeks to highlight “the key role the geographical imagination played not only in intellectual endeavors, but also in everyday debates about political and religious authority” (p. 6). She sets about this by focusing on the various ways in which land was both conceived of and used for political and emotive purposes in texts discussing different scales of territory over the three parts of the book: on “Home” (pp. 11–29), “City” (pp. 33–83) and “Region” (pp. 87–142).

It is impossible to summarize here the full range of conclusions reached within the five main chapters which together constitute these three parts of the book. It is evident that Antrim has read a wide range of texts across a number of genres – especially but not exclusively adab anthologies, local histories, works on the merits (faḍā’il) of particular lands and geographical treatises – very carefully and she is able to utilize them to make her arguments clearly and mostly convincingly. She has certainly succeeded in her primary aims of demonstrating the existence of a discourse of place and showing how it can be a very useful analytical tool for modern historians when the relevant texts are read appropriately. No-one should now be able to doubt the fundamental fact that land was one focus of loyalty and belonging, albeit alongside others, for many Muslims of the third/ninth to the fifth/eleventh centuries. Most of the texts Antrim uses will be very familiar to scholars of early Islamic history, but she has a talent for reading these in new, engaging and informative ways: a particularly good example of this is her treatment (at pp. 72–8) of the depictions of Baghdad across al-Yaʿqūbī’s geographical treatise, al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s foundation narrative in his local history, and the elegiac poem of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Khuraymī, which displays the occasionally subversive ends to which textual strategies within the discourse of place could be put. The book as a whole is very well and lucidly written with only a small number of typographical and transliteration errors.

A couple of minor methodological cautions can be raised. First, on a few occasions, Antrim makes her case primarily by using case studies drawn from the central Islamic lands. To take one example, in the section on foundation and conquest narratives (pp. 42–60) quite wide-ranging conclusions are drawn from a discussion of works about Mecca, Jerusalem and Baghdad. For many reasons these three cities were rather exceptional, and perhaps a little more might have been done to demonstrate the involvement in this aspect of the discourse of the place of other, ostensibly less exceptional, cities, especially in the regions west of Egypt and east of Iraq. Second, many of the texts which Antrim uses – especially in the first two parts on Home and City – are in fact relatively short extracts from much larger works. Although her use of the framework of the discourse of place to analyse these sections of the larger works does achieve important results, it may miss something by not also contextualizing them fully within the wider expectations of the literary genres in which they participate, and their authors’ aims for the larger works as a whole. For example, in the sub-section on “The transferability of the Waṭan” (pp. 21–9) much use is made of the individual chapters (no more than c. 10–20 pages) on leaving one's homeland (waṭan) from multi-volume literary anthologies such as al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī’s Muḥāḍarāt al-udabā’ and Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr's Bahjat al-majālis. Later on in the book, Antrim nicely analyses (at pp. 55–60, 72–5) al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s foundation narrative for Baghdad in terms of the discourse of place, but with very little reference to the following thirteen-and-a-half volumes of the Ta'rīkh Baghdād. I can only presume that light would be shed on al-Khaṭīb's intentions for his foundation narrative by a thorough reading of the rest of the work that accompanies it.

These are, however, relatively minor comments which in no way undermine the validity of the book as a whole or of the key conclusions which it presents. With Routes and Realms Zayde Antrim has produced an innovative analysis of real importance which should be considered carefully by all who work on early Islamic history and the Arabic and Persian literary texts of the period.