C. P. W. Gammell's The Pearl of Khorasan is a history of the city of Herat from Mongol times to 2001 in six chapters. The title of the book refers to a poem highlighting Herat's centrality in relationship to the surrounding province of Khorasan and the world in general. There is no clear connection between the title, with its emphasis on Herat as part of a larger region, and the topics covered in the text. The first three chapters instead offer a monolithic account of events affecting the city without relating it to Khorasan. It is only in the final chapters, when Gammell describes Herat's uneasy position within the modern state of Afghanistan, that he provides any regional framework whatsoever.
Gammell endows Herat with anthropomorphic, even feminine attributes. The city “is self-sufficient, yet vulnerable” (p. 5); it “attracts, seduces, collapses, recovers and then repeats” (p. 16); Sufism runs in its...
