This publication of the correspondence of Khw?ja 'Ubayd All?h A?r?r and his associates provides remarkable new evidence of a dynamic network of social, economic, and political relationships between the Central Asian Naqshband? community of Samarqand and the Timurid court of Herat in the late fifteenth century.

Jo-Ann Gross, Ph.D. (1983) in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, New York University, is Professor of History at the College of New Jersey. She is the editor of Muslims in Central Asia: Expressions of Identity and Change (Duke University Press, 1992) and the author of numerous articles on the social and economic history of the Naqshbandīya and Khwāja ʿUba Allāh Aḥār.
Asom Urunbaev, is Dr. at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He is the author of Pis'ma-avtografy Abdarrakhmana Dzhami (The Autograph Letters of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Tashkent, 1984), the translator (into Russian and Uzbek) and editor of several editions of Persian texts, and the author of numerous articles on the history of Central Asia.