This essay examines how a set of fourteen carpets was designed and used in the tomb of Shah ʿAbbas II (r. 1642–1666), located within the Fatima al-Maʿsuma (d. 816) shrine complex, Qum. Through close study of the carpets’ various spatial dimensions, this paper argues for an experiential, multimedia approach to analyzing space. The Qum carpets not only constituted site-specific works, carefully designed in dialogue with the tomb, but they also constructed space through references to multiple geographies and temporalities. In concert with the tomb’s ornament and structure, they created a realm of total allusion mediated by the bodies of the living and the deceased. Finally, this essay explores how the carpets came to temporarily occupy a new space in 1931, the major International Exhibition of Persian Art in London, where they highlighted issues that arise when displaying historical carpets within the modern museum.
Between 1730 and 1834, the Ottoman imperial family stopped holding citywide royal marriage ceremonies. During this period, urbanite families beyond the court crafted impressive trousseau processions and in-home displays for their weddings with growing aplomb, garnering admirers among Ottomans and Europeans. Urbanite trousseaus from this era tell a multi-confessional counternarrative that produced spectacles of wealth in the face of intensifying sumptuary legislation from the state and religious canons. This study contextualizes trousseaus as curated collections serving a distinct social function that transcended the immediate utilitarian purpose of its individual parts: the staging of trousseau objects orchestrated strategic moments of artistic appraisal during wedding ceremonies, which aided in gauging the collection's monetary value alongside the social import of the bride's family. The migration of the trousseau thus captured a household in motion, revealed to the community's scrutinizing eyes for the first time. Sources on their construction shed light on the roles of women as collectors, organizers, and, in the case of non-Muslims, corporal embodiments of familial wealth during these material rituals. By combining surviving objects with inventories, legal cases, poetry and narrative accounts, a trousseau's journey from construction to display became a performative mode of artistic production.
In recent decades scholarship has shown a special interest in Sufism as a component of Islamic society; nevertheless, the study of its material culture has advanced more slowly, impeding a better understanding of the spaces associated with it. In light of the two different models of zāwiya that other researchers have previously identified in the Middle East—more modest ones undertaken by individuals and monumental ones sponsored by the state—I have so far been able to recognize a similar dichotomy in al-Maghrib al-Aqsa. This article, however, examines the two aforementioned models, placing them on an even broader geographical framework that allows for a comparison between two extremes of the Islamic Mediterranean, the Maghrib and Anatolia, revealing common patterns as well as characteristics peculiar to each.
Abstract The 1860s and 1870s saw a massive campaign of reordering of Galata and Pera’s urban space, led by the newly founded district municipality of Altıncı Daire-i Belediye (the Sixth District)—the model municipal organization for the rest of the Ottoman Empire. The most striking and widespread part of this campaign was the destruction of the district’s medieval Genoese walls, dating back to the fourteenth century. The walls and the attached moats were replaced by wider streets and modern apartment buildings, owned mostly by the local elites. This episode in the history of Istanbul has conventionally been narrated as a careless – albeit necessary—case of urban modernization, often in relation to the similar and roughly contemporary destruction of city walls in European cities. In this article, I rather argue that the destruction of the city walls was actually framed as a project of heritage and knowledge production from the very start. I trace how the history of the Genoese Pera was produced in the popular and scientific circles amidst the destruction of its most important physical manifestation, by concentrating especially on the central role played by the municipal archivist Victor-Marie de Launay. Launay’s later collaborations with Osman Hamdi Bey are relatively well known, but his contributions to the history of the district and an early discourse on urban heritage and archaeology are underappreciated, and, I argue, critical to understanding how the ruins of the district’s past were instrumentalized in making of a space for historical expertise. Launay was a central figure in the emergent antiquarian and archaeological networks in the Ottoman capital in the second half of the nineteenth century, the scholarly output produced in these circles had a lingering effect on the modern history-writing of Pera that has conventionally underlined its “European” heritage at the expense of its Ottoman past.
Abstract On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Muqarnas, I examine the place of this groundbreaking publication in a changing scholarly landscape. Even though the field of Islamic/Islamicate studies has burgeoned—as evidenced by the establishment in recent years of many specialized series and journals—Muqarnas continues to fulfill the enduring need for a global perspective open to all subjects and critical methods. My “Reflections” combine a historiography of the journal with an overview of more specialized new publication venues, while highlighting the reasons for the revised title: Muqarnas: An Annual on Visual, Material, and Architectural Cultures of the Islamic World.
Abstract This essay will explore the arrival, acquisition, and reception of Chinese ceramics within early modern South Asia, with a focus on the Mughal dynasty (r. 1526–1857) courtly context. The first step in placing South Asian ceramic collecting practices within the broader historical and geographic circulation of porcelains in the Gulf and Indian Ocean worlds is understanding the breadth and nature of South Asian collections. While the Safavid porcelain collections donated by Shah Abbas to Ardabil, and the massive Chinese porcelain collection of the Ottoman courts held today in Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace are well known and relatively well published, the Chinese ceramic collections of South Asia have received less scholarly attention. Fresh material presented here includes new evidence of the extent of multi-generational Mughal interactions with, and interest in, Chinese ceramics. The broader question to be addressed is how these porcelains were perceived, utilized, and displayed in the South Asian context. Considering textual evidence, contemporary paintings, extant architecture, archaeological finds, and surviving inscribed objects, this essay will argue that Mughal porcelain collections should be understood within the context of their broader collecting activities, and in relation to the porcelain collections and displays of their Timurid ancestors.
Abstract This article examines the sole courtly Shāhnāma of Firdausi to be produced during the Abu’l-Khairid dynasty (commonly called Shaybanid Uzbek, in power 1500–99). It is a lavish—albeit unfinished—copy, and the discussion details the circumstances of its 1564 patronage by the powerful leader ʿAbdullah bin Iskandar Khan (r. 1557–98). Situating the object in the context of Abu’l-Khairid developments in arts and politics during the second half of the sixteenth century, this analysis incorporates the concurrent production of multiple Tīmūr-nāma manuscripts by artisans in Transoxiana. It is posited that the copies of this latter title were made with the intention of conflating Timur’s military conquests with those of ʿAbdullah’s to be the righteous heir of Chinggis Khan. Departing from the 1560s, a final section dwells on the 1590s, during which ʿAbdullah had secured victory and control over the strategic Safavid province of Khurasan. Presented in Istanbul by an embassy arriving from Bukhara, ʿAbdullah’s personal Shāhnāma manuscript was given to the Ottoman sultan Murad III in 1594. This dispatch allows for an examination of the political relations and military coordination between the Ottomans and Abu’l-Khairids, the extent of which are not fully known. These exchanges can, however be gleaned from the Shāhnāma manuscript and the diplomatic circumstances of its transfer.
Abstract Humayun’s tomb-garden has many levels of spatial significance that include the garden’s elegant layout, monumental size, and strategic location in the Nizamuddin area of New Delhi. Previous research has shed light on spatial aspects of the tomb’s architecture, visual power, and religio-political symbolism. This article focuses on the garden’s fourfold and ninefold layout, size, and location. It interprets the garden’s hasht bihisht layout through a combination of historical geographic and spatial analysis methods. Conversion of garden measurements to gaz-i Sikandarī (a unit of measurement introduced by Sikandar Lodi [r. 1489–1517], 77.01 cm) units enabled testing hypotheses about garden layout in 5-gaz and 6.5-gaz modules. Topographic analysis sheds light on the garden’s siting in relation to natural landforms, drainage, urbanization, and antecedent architectural sites. Geometrical analysis identifies strong spatial linkages between the tomb-garden, dargāh of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Awliyaʾ, and grave of Nizamuddin’s poet-disciple Amir Khusraw, with additional connections to antecedent tombs, the city of Dinpanah (Purana Qila), and the Grand Trunk Road from Agra to Delhi. The paper concludes with an interpretation of parallels and connections among Amir Khusraw’s poem Hasht Bihisht, Humayun’s imaginative administrative apparatus, and the hasht bihisht tomb-garden layout.
Abstract On the western side of the palace of the Partal Bajo (Palace of the Portico or of the Summer Retreat), likely built by Muhammad III (r. 1302–9) and located within the palatine city of the Alhambra of Granada (Spain), stands a group of houses that, albeit formally connected, are structurally and chronologically distinct both to each other and to the palace. One of these is typologically unique, in relation to previous Andalusi residential architecture, and considered the smallest surviving Andalusi house. In 1908, outstanding figurative mural paintings were discovered on its second floor, conferring on it the name it still bears: the House of Paintings. This study consists of two articles, the first of which, in the present volume, examines the architecture of the House of Paintings and the history of its restorations, and offers a hypothesis for its original design. The second article in this study (forthcoming in Muqarnas 41) addresses the exceptional figurative paintings on the second floor of the house, including historiographical matters, the history of their visual documentation until today, and the artistic techniques with which they were executed. After an iconographical and iconological analysis of these works, I briefly consider the hypotheses that have been offered regarding the artist responsible for them and their relation to the function of the house itself. I argue that the House of Paintings is an architectural translation of a royal military tent, probably meant to memorialize one of the most resounding victories in the history of the Andalusi jihad, when the Nasrid army defeated a Christian coalition at the Battle of the Vega in 1319 outside Granada, a battle likely visible from what would become known as the House of Paintings. In the mural paintings, this battle is depicted alongside other military and hunting scenes, where reality may be interwoven with allegory. This study thus situates representations of war within an old Mediterranean tradition that seems to have been revived during the Crusades, when Islamic jihad and Christian holy war ideologically confronted one another.
Abstract This paper seeks to describe a significant imperial project: the establishment of the city of Shahjahanbad and its monuments, laid out from 1639 onwards in the area of Delhi, as described in the Padishāh-nāma of Shaykh Muhammad Waris, an official historiographer of Emperor Shah Jahan, the fifth Indo-Timurid ruler of India. Waris emphatically connected the foundation of the city to the personal involvement of the emperor. The monumental fortress palace, Jama Masjid, Akbarabadi Mosque, and Fatehpuri Mosque, along with the royal bazaars formed the backbone of the urban master plan conceived and executed by the emperor with a team of dedicated experts knowledgeable in the art of building (kār agāhān-i-ʿimārat). In the founding of a new city, abundance of water and a temperate climate (muʿtadil hawā) were major criteria. The River Yamuna and the system of canals and reservoirs were always vital to the landscape of urban life in the Delhi area. The existing waterways were used and transformed through the laying out of formal gardens such as the Hayatbakhsh Garden, Jahanara Garden, and Shalimar Gardens into a sophisticated water system derived from Nahr-i Bihisht. The appendix contains selected passages from Shaykh Muhammad Waris’s Pādishāh-nāma, translated by Wheeler M. Thackston.
