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This volume takes examples from Morocco, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Germany to demonstrate the potential and the limitations of youth research in the Arab world and beyond. The study of young adults is still underdeveloped as an area of research. Despite growing awareness of its vital significance since September 11th, not a single comprehensive youth study exists for an Arab country. Current research is often scattered, partly inaccessible, and to a great extent concentrates on specialized topics.

In the Islamic middle ages, urban histories were for the most part not the kind of chronicle that one might think, covering the political, economic, or cultural history of a particular city over a certain time. Instead, they were a kind of ʿwhoʾs whoʾ directory of names of a cityʾs prominent inhabitants, mostly from as far back as information would be available until the lifetime of the author. In the case of the city of Nishapur, which saw its greatest blossoming between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, there is al-Ḥākim al-Nīshāpūrīʾs (d. 405/1014) foundational Taʾrīkh Nīsābūr , an Arabic work—now lost—on which many later biographers relied. Al-Ḥākimʾs work was continued by ʿAbd al-Ghāfir al-Fārisī (d. 529/1134) in his al-Siyāq li-Taʾrīkh Nīsābūr . The text published here is described as a partial summary of al-Fārisīʾs work, although Frye in his The Histories of Nishapur (p. 10) still regarded it as a fragment of the Siyāq itself