M. Manazir Ahsan received his PhD in Middle Eastern History from SOAS University of London in 1972. In 1980 he founded the Muslim World Book Review, of which he is still Editor. He was Director-General of the Islamic Foundation from 1985 to 2010. He is currently Chair of the Board of Directors of the Markfield Institute of Higher Education.Julia Bray is Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at St John's College.

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"an intoxicating miscellany of information about what people wore, ate, and drank, where they lived and what their surroundings looked like, all the more fascinating because of the huge gaps in the surviving material evidence" from the Foreword by Julia Bray