ABSTRACT
In the late tenth century the Central Asian city of Bukhara was a hotbed of cross-cultural influences brimming with new ideas as an intellectual center, as well as a frontier outpost through which bands of marauding raiders traveled on their way someplace else. One poet, Abu Ahmad b. Abi Bakr al-Katib, described its rank fetid canals, and crowded and unhealthy conditions in scurrilous terms. 1
