Fifty Years in the East: The Memoirs of Wladimir Ivanow edited with annotations by Farhad Daftary

Fifty Years in the East : The Memoirs of Wladimir Ivanow, edited with annotations by Farhad Daftary (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2015), xvi + 256 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78076-841-0, £25.00 (First paragraph) Even when considering a sub-discipline that traces its substantive origin to a time as recent as the 20th century, it is easy for the scholar and student “ much less the casual reader “ to take Ismāʿīlism as an outgrowth of disembodied, medieval manuscripts. With indispensable texts such as Farhad Daftary´s on Ismāʿīlī history and doctrines, the reader is confronted with reliable, well-sourced information; less apparent is the considerable physical, political, and interpersonal effort spent in collecting manuscripts, the contemporary ethnographic significance of investigating a marginalized Shīʿī sect further split into smaller groups, and the role of broader political forces in the focused life of a scholar. Daftary´s introduction to Wladimir Ivanow´s memoirs Fifty Years in the East lays out the seminal role in the development of Ismāʿīlī studies that Ivanow played, but Ivanow´s memoir itself should not be relegated to another title in the Ismāʿīlī bibliography.