The second edition of The Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI/2), published since 1954 by E.J. Brill in Leiden, is well known as an unparalleled scholarly reference for the history and culture of the Islamic lands. By late summer 1994, the Encyclopaedia had reached the entry Riḍā Shāh in the middle of the eighth volume. The volumes, each approximately 1000 pages long, are lodes of information about the people, places, events and ideas of Islamic history and thought; but simply by handling the volumes, a reader would never realize that the visual arts were an important component of Islamic culture. There are very few illustrations, none of them in color. Even to the most unsophisticated eye, EI/2 is a dense, ponderous, and user-antagonistic reference tool. Nevertheless, it is a useful resource for the history of art and architecture in the Islamic lands, particularly to those who already know something about Islamic civilization, although the reader must be an experienced miner to discover the ore-bearing strata.

Readers normally assume that encyclopedias will be, well, encyclopedic, but they probably do not usually expect that a particular encyclopedia will function as a forum for advancing the state of knowledge in a field. Those who are familiar with Volumes I-V of the Encyclopaedia Iranica already know that its editor, Professor Ehsan Yarshater, has not only insisted that this encyclopedia would be exceptionally comprehensive, but that he has also encouraged many of his contributors to submit essays that represent innovative and original scholarship in Iranian studies. In fascicles 1-6 of Volume VI Professor Yarshater and his distinguished board of editors have maintained the exceptionally high standards of the first five volumes. Occasionally—but just occasionally—they have commissioned articles that seem to have marginal importance for the field, but ultimately scholars will appreciate and even delight in such entries which, in a sense, are a distinguishing trait of the editors’ ambitions and success.

In 1993 I taught an NEH summer seminar for high-school teachers on the Arabic novel in translation. As I went through the listing of translated novels that are available in the 1990s and also made a choice from translations of other genres as back-up materials, I became newly aware of the wealth of material that we now have available. To be sure, it is not of the size and variety that is available for many other literary traditions, but there are now sufficient published novels and anthologies of poetry, drama and short-stories to devote entire courses or at least significant segments of them to individual genres and themes. I could not help thinking back to the start of my teaching career in 1968.