Book Talk: Waleed Ziad in Conversation with Rustin Zarkar

The remarkable discoveries of over 300 new varieties of local copper currency from the Sakra region in northwestern Pakistan, covering a 700-year period, have opened up new vistas in the study of Gandhara in late antiquity. This monograph introduces the native Sakra copper coinage, which can be dated from ca. 500 to 1100, corresponding to the Nezak, Turk Shahi, Hindu Shahi, and Ghaznavid periods.

Waleed Ziad is assistant professor and Ali Jerrahi Fellow in Persian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his doctorate in history at Yale University. His dissertation (entitled Traversing the Indus and the Oxus: Trans-regional Islamic Revival in the Age of Political Fragmentation and the ‘Great Game’, 1747-1880, 797 pp.) was awarded the university-wide Theron Rockwell Field Prize, one of the two most prestigious Yale dissertation awards, awarded to two students selected from all disciplines. At the intersection of social history, religious studies and anthropology, Ziad’s research concerns the historical and philosophical foundations of Muslim revivalism and the varying revivalist responses to internal political fragmentation and colonialism in the ‘Persianate’ world (South and Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran).

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Co-sponsored by Persian Studies at UNC-CH, the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies.