RESOURCES(Paris, 1952-65) puts authors into an historical context and is a con-
venient place to identify poets. An indispensable guide to articles is
J. D. Pearson's Index Islamicus, 1906-1955: A Catalogue of Articles on
Islamic Subjects in Periodicals and Other Collective Publications
(Cambridge, 1958), with supplements at five-year intervals thereafter
until 1977, when it was succeeded by the Quarterly Index Islamicus.
C. Cahen's Jean Sauvaget's Introduction to the History of the Muslim
East (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965) is a critical bibliography which
is organized both topically and chronologically and is still a good
guide to the older literature. A more extensive introduction to the
literature on Islam is provided by C. L. Geddes in An Analytical Guide
to the Bibliographies on Islam, Muhammad, and the Qur'an (Denver,
1973). The bibliography by R. M. Savory and G. M. Wickens called
Persia in Islamic Times (Toronto, 1964) covers a much longer chron-
ological period and is somewhat peripheral to this study but includes
references to works on early Islamic Iran.
Cultural Legacies
Compared to the frequency of the phrase "continuity and change"
in the titles of modern works, little theoretical consideration has been
given to the nature of either. A useful and suggestive theoretical dis-
cussion is provided by A. Gerschenkron's essay, "On the Concept of
Continuity in History," in his Continuity in History and Other Essays
(Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 11-39, even though his comments were
generated by the modern argument over whether industrialization was
a gradual or abrupt historical phenomenon.
Questions of cultural transmission pertaining to Islamic civilization
have tended to be concerned more with details of cultural content
than with theoretical explanations for diffusion. They have also con-
centrated on two issues: what "older" civilizations "contributed" to
Islamic civilization, and what Islamic civilization "contributed" to
western Europe. There is an immense literature on the latter question,
but much of it tends to be apologetic in nature. Within this literature,
two works stand out for their use of the idea of receptivity in diffusion
theory, similar to the use of reinforcement for continuity in this study.
One is H.A.R. Gibb's "The Influence of Islamic Culture on Western
Europe," Bulletin of the John Ryland's Library 38 (1955-56): 82-- The other is T. Glick's Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early
Middle Ages (Princeton, 1979). Although Glick's theoretical discussion
is impressive, he has a much better command of the literature and