Michal Biran begins her detailed and judicious history of the Qara Khitai by outlining some of the difficulties of its study. Namely, in order to fully explicate the development of this pivotal state in Eurasian history that merged the Islamic and Chinese worlds, it is necessary to be competent in two linguistic and scholarly fields that often do not meet. Previous scholarship has often relied mainly on either Middle Eastern or East Asian sources, resulting in a skewed perspective. Biran, however, is one of the few scholars who can work with both. Utilizing nearly 200 primary sources, as well as recent archaeological discoveries, she has truly ushered in a new age in the study of the Western Liao.
Her study is divided into two parts: a political history of the rise and fall of the empire (1124–1218) and a cultural and institutional history investigating the Chinese, nomadic, and Islamic roles...
