Review of: The Palimpsest of the House: Re-Assessing Roman, Late Antique, Byzantine, and Islamic Living Patterns , Ed. Inge Uytterhoeven and Alessandra Ricci (2022) Istanbul: Koç University Press, 300 pp., 38 colour and 27 b&w illus., ISBN: 9786057685841, $50
Review of: 23.5 Hrant Dink Site of Memory , Hrant Dink Foundation, Istanbul, Permanent Exhibition, Opened April 23, 2019
Review of: The Struggle for Development in Iran: The Evolution of Governance, Economy, and Society , Pooya Azadi, Mohsen B. Mesgaran, and Matin Mirramezani (2022) Stanford: Stanford University Press, 296 pp., 103 b&w illus., ISBN: 9781503630468, $70
In Egypt, the swimming pool offered a new bourgeois social space for modern young people to mingle. Women and men walked around in revealing swimwear and socialized in and around the water. These new social spaces provided opportunities to both challenge and reinforce traditional patriarchal social norms that emphasized propriety and control of women’s behaviour. I examine popular culture representations of pools and pool architecture from their emergence around 1930 through the 1960s. Diverse representations of pools intersected with commentary on women’s participation in new social spaces, and the rise of female movie stars. In the magazine al-Kawakib , movie stars were interviewed and photographed in front of their private pools. Special summer issues of al-Musawwar discussed events at sporting clubs, including swimming lessons and competitions. Pools appear in films as important sites for romances to develop and comic relief to occur. With this in mind, what can popular culture sources reveal about the physical setting and social context of pool construction, usage, and meaning in the middle of the twentieth century? Was the pool represented as a private or a public space for women, and what was the significance of this distinction?
In this article, I trace the emergence of the royal library as an institutionalized space within the Gulistan Palace complex in Tehran during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah ( r .1848–96), focusing on the gendered consequences of its consolidation. Drawing on the diaries of I‘timad al-Saltana, architectural histories of Gulistan, and evidence of women’s manuscript ownership, I argue that efforts to organize and secure the library were responding to anxieties about theft and removal intensified by European demand for Persian art. As book collections were increasingly centralized and placed on display alongside museum artefacts, access was reorganized according to the gendered division of andarun (lit. inner space; domestic quarters), and birun (lit. outer space). I show that this process involved recasting women’s quarters as an orientalist harem. Situating the library alongside the palace museum as a site of imperial image-making demonstrates how the management of cultural patrimony in Qajar Iran simultaneously consolidated masculine authority and curtailed women’s control over knowledge. The royal library thus emerges as a key arena in which gender, sovereignty, and Qajar responses to European power intersected.
In 1845, following successive outbreaks of epidemic diseases in Istanbul such as plague and cholera, the Queen Mother Bezmiâlem commissioned the construction of a new civil hospital complex for the urban poor called the Gureba Hastanesi (Paupers’ Hospital). This was part of a broader programme of medical patronage throughout the Ottoman Empire. I argue that Bezmiâlem drew inspiration from traditional venues for women’s patronage, including hospitals and public fountains. Her structures reflected a newly globalized fight against epidemic disease, but Bezmiâlem’s sanitary infrastructure also referenced her own public illness. The newly instituted practice of quarantine was rephrased from a state-mandated punishment into a collective ethical duty, exemplified by the neologism ‘method of protection’. Building upon studies of women’s self-representation in Islamic architecture, I explore how the complex functioned as an architectural synecdoche for Bezmiâlem’s body, and examine the loggia of the complex’s mosque as a space in which the positions of the patron and patient were placed in close proximity. I situate the complex within Bezmiâlem’s wider patronage projects and propose that the emotional investment in Bezmiâlem as a patron figure played a crucial role in the diffusion of new medical governance across the Ottoman Empire.
Rapid urbanization in the Gulf has reshaped social life, public space, and gender relations, creating new expectations for architectural environments that support women’s everyday well-being and autonomy. In Qatar, where modernization intersects with long-standing cultural norms around privacy, modesty, and gendered access, women have historically faced structural constraints in religious and communal spaces. In this article, we examine the Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women in Doha as a contemporary intervention in this evolving landscape. Through site observations, stakeholder interviews, and a perception survey, we explore how the centre’s spatial organization, material choices, daylight strategies, and landscaped courtyards shape women’s sense of safety, comfort, and communal belonging. The findings show strong user attachment, and highlight the significance of dedicated, women-led religious environments within Qatar’s broader history of women’s grassroots and institutional advocacy. At the same time, we interrogate tensions inherent in the women-only model, including debates about the potential reproduction of gender segregation, and the limits of institutional visibility. By situating Al-Mujadilah within wider sociopolitical transformations, we argue that women-focused religious architecture must be understood as both an outcome of long-standing struggles for spatial recognition, and sites in which empowerment is continually negotiated.
Real and imagined spaces are inherently gendered. This relates to widely accepted heteronormative and patriarchal ways of living, and affects how buildings and cities are accessed, used, and experienced. The imposition of traditional gender roles in architecture from patriarchal and heteronormative views impacts urban policy making, architectural education, and decision making in the building of cities. Even the word architect had and may still have gendered associations in historical and contemporary perceptions, as architectural practice continues to be a male-dominated professional field despite the involvement and contributions of women in the transformation of the built environment over centuries. Yet, women and marginalized peoples build alternative communities based on embodied creative design ideas and practices. They have found innovative ways to claim their right to experience and shape cities. Against these complex yet urgent ongoing questions, the contributors to this special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture interrogate the past and present relationship between gender and architecture through an interdisciplinary approach.
Review of: Islamic Architecture through Western Eyes, Volume 1: Spain, Turkey, India and Persia , Michael Greenhalgh (2023) Leiden: Brill, 392 pp., 95 colour illus., ISBN: 9789004524842, $175
The old city of Hebron is an urban space shaped by extreme spatial violence caused by the Israeli occupation. The city is home to a diverse architectural legacy, and holds significant religious importance. However, the Israeli occupation and settlement expansion have fragmented the city’s urban fabric through checkpoints, watchtowers, and restricted zones. These measures have disrupted social and economic life, destroying the sense of urbanity within the city. Despite these oppressive socio-spatial conditions, the old city of Hebron remains a cornerstone of cultural, historical, and symbolic value for Palestinian residents. Palestinian women’s everyday resistance and resilience tactics emerge as a crucial force in reclaiming public space and revitalizing the city. This article examines the role of Palestinian women in resisting Israeli spatial limitations and urbicide through their reclamation of urban space and their assertion of their right to the city through professional initiatives and everyday tactics. Methodologically, we are informed by our own situated knowledge in Hebron, supplemented by archival research, site observations, social media analysis, and reports from organizations such as the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, B’Tselem, and UN-OCHA.
Review of: Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement , Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (2024) Durham: Duke University Press, 432 pp., 107 colour illus., ISBN: 9781478025245, $31.95
In this article, I approach issues of gender and Mughal architecture through the early seventeenth-century tomb of Princess Shah Begum ( d. 1604) in Allahabad, India. In my analysis and contextualization of the tomb’s unusual form, I ask whether the structure may be read as an acknowledgement of the actual plurality of the Mughal bloodline through matrilineage, in conversation with the hitherto unchallenged idea that Mughal emperors privileged their patrilineal descent from the Timurids of Central Asia. Shah Begum’s tomb stands at a crucial point in the development of funerary traditions of both her natal (Kachhwaha) and marital families. Placing Shah Begum’s chhatri (domed kiosk) tomb within the corpus of Mughal funerary architecture and Hindu practices of commemoration, I explore the liminalities of female experience in early modern India, and how fixed notions of imperial and religious identity are complicated by women who cross religious and cultural boundaries. Arguing that the liminal identity of Shah Begum, a Hindu woman married into an Islamic dynasty, is reflected in the form of her tomb, I demonstrate how the lives and experiences of women exemplify the fluid nature of early modern Indian polities that cannot be contained within exclusionary religious or cultural categories.
Review of: Riyadh: Transforming a Desert City , Yasser Elsheshtawy (2022) London: Routledge, 320 pp., 249 colour and 35 b&w illus., ISBN: 9780367485177, $120 Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East , Arang Keshavarzian (2024) Stanford: Stanford University Press, 324 pp., 8 b&w illus., ISBN: 9781503633346, $120
Review of: Agadir: Building the Modern Afropolis , Ed. Tom Avermaete and Maxime Zaugg (2022) Zurich: Park Books, 360 pp., 350 colour and 50 b&w illus., ISBN: 9783038602767, $45.00
Review of: Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran , Farshid Emami (2024) University Park: Penn State University Press, 276 pp., 45 colour and 60 b&w illus., ISBN: 9780271095523, $112
Review of: Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hope , Noa Shaindlinger (2023) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 272 pp., 21 b&w illus., ISBN: 9781474489737, $24.95 In the Land of the Patriarchs: Design and Contestation in West Bank Settlements , Noam Shoked (2023) Abingdon; University of Texas Press, 400 pp., 92 b&w illus., ISBN: 9781477328545, $34.95
Review of: The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art , Ed. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porras (2024) Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 732 pp., 38 colour and 136 b&w illus., ISBN: 9781032261584, $300.00
Review of: Jews, Muslims, and the French Republic , Steven Philip Kramer (2023) Amherst: Cambria Press, 243 pp., ISBN: 978-1-621966-5XX, $109.99
