Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art – serie

Located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock was constructed at the end of the seventh century by order of caliph ‘Abd al-Malik. This seminal structure has been much studied but no definitive interpretation yet exists of the meanings conveyed by the Dome at the time of its completion. The recovery of meaning is complicated by the paucity of primary written sources relating to the construction phases of the building and the motivations of its patron. This book concentrates on the most important surviving primary text, the long mosaic inscription running around the interior. Comprising a dedication and date (72/691-92) and material of a religious nature, the mosaic inscription provides vital evidence for the reconstruction of the meanings and functions of the Dome of the Rock. The detailed study of the mosaics helps to place them in the context of Late Antique monumental writing, particularly in Greek. The book makes use of contemporary Islamic coins, graffiti, and other inscribed objects in order to examine the Dome of the Rock in the relation to the ideological concerns of the Umayyad elite during and after the second Civil War.

Linda Komaroff, long-time curator of the Art of the Middle East at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), has pioneered in the study and exhibition of Islamic art to include contemporary works. Her interests have long focused on the arts of Iran. With this volume her friends and colleagues celebrate her broad scope with essays exploring many new areas. These 13 essays examine different media, including architecture, manuscripts, portable arts and textiles, as well as the contemporary arts of painting, photography, printmaking and video, from the early Islamic period to the present. In addition to traditional approaches to art-historical scholarship, such as textual analysis, connoisseurship, design, technical and material analysis, and archaeology, the contributors take on such newer themes as gift giving, the diaspora of Iranian art, political art, the relationship of the present to the past or vice versa, and the connections between Iranian art and the arts of the West. Some essays also deal with music and dance.

Mina'i, or polychrome overglaze, ware was made in Iran between the late 12th and the early 13th centuries. However, most pieces in museums have in fact been rebuilt, often from pieces of multiple different vessels with extensive plaster fill and modern overpaint. Only by closely examining unrestored archaeological sherds genuine fragments of pots can we build an authentic picture of what mina'i ware actually looked like. In this innovative book, Richard P. McClary studies sherds in collections around the world to help us to understand the production, decoration and distribution of the wares. He then examines the increased popularity of mina'i ware from the late-19th to the mid-20th century, with a focus on the dealers, collectors and curators, as well as the various types of faking, restoration, repair and conservation that has occurred over the last century.

The Ghaznavid and Ghurid Qur’ans (c. eleventh–Twelfth centuries CE), studied for the first time as a corpus, inform of how the Qur’an was copied at the beginning of a transformative period in the history of its production when paper, new scripts and the vertical format were adopted. As the book illustrates the ways in which local visual trends were shaped out of diachronic and synchronic multidirectional movement within a medieval landscape that was continuously in flux, it shifts the focus to the eastern frontiers of the Islamic world, reclaiming them as centres of cultural production. It is by contextualising the Qur’an’s materiality within the religious, social and political context that the book ‘rehumanises’ them offering an understanding of how the manuscripts were conceived, produced and used, up until our day.

Gardens were both a setting and showcase for nearly every aspect of social and daily life at the royal court during the early Islamic period in Western Asia. Safa Mahmoudian uses ?a wide range of ?primary source materials including ??contemporary ??Arabic manuscripts, together with archaeological ?reports, aerial ?photographs, and archaeologists' letters ?and diaries.? ?Through close readings of this evidence, Mahmoudian creates a picture of these gardens in their historical, architectural and environmental contexts and examines various factors that influenced their design and placement. In doing so, Mahmoudian adds to our understanding of these gardens and palaces and, ultimately, early Islamic-period court culture as a whole.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century much of Iran's architectural heritage gave way to urban development. Among the casualties were the seventeenth-century Safavid palaces of Isfahan. Local dealers salvaged a series of astonishingly beautiful pictorial arch-shaped panels composed of cuerda seca tiles from one of these. Beginning in 1911 whole panels and many single tiles were sold through Hagop Kevorkian. The authors have assembled (digitally) 36 friezes once part of this set.The iconographic program consisted of three themes: secular pastimes (picnics, hunt, games), Persian literary episodes, and religious festivals (e.g., the Ashura). The first two themes have a long history in Iranian mural painting, but the third was new and will be of interest to cultural historians. The friezes are stylistically datable to c. 1685-95. One clue to the identity of the original site is the duplication of almost all the friezes. The authors deduce that the scenes were paired across a courtyard and suggest three possible sites. Fully assembled, the suite emerges as a hitherto unknown, outstanding creation that should be added to the canon of Safavid art.

This book reassesses the idea that Islamic objects in seventeenth-century Italy were considered mere curiosities, sparking no cultural or historical interest. It focuses on Italy's largest collection of Islamic artefacts of the time, assembled by the Medici agent and Bolognese nobleman Ferdinando Cospi in his public gallery: the Cospi Museum. Through an extensive investigation of inventories, letters, and archival documents, the book follows the objects through the various paths which took them from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, through North African cities, to Livorno, Florence and, finally, Bologna. These paths reveal the presence of a network of enslaved Turks, Arab scholars, Egyptian fishermen and Armenian merchants, all responsible for importing both the items and their stories, biographies and anecdotes to Italy. The book thus brings forward to the seventeenth century a phenomenon of cultural inquisition that was thought to start only a century later.

This is the first major book about Islamic stucco, and the central theme is the re-examination of the uses of stucco in architecture across the Islamic world in the pre-modern period.The book engages with new methodological approaches, including those that go beyond traditional art-historical ones, and works with a wide range of disciplines, including material science and archaeology. It includes numerous sites that have not been previously studied in detail, as well as new approaches to the study of the material, and presents a greater understanding of the use of colour and understanding of materiality.It includes contributions from a range of leading scholars from around the world working on this ubiquitous, important, but at times ephemeral and still poorly understood, medium in a wide variety of different cultural contexts. There are separate parts for each of the main geographic areas, with each of these sections arranged broadly chronologically. Coverage includes Iran and reaches as far afield as Spain and India.

This book explores the unprecedented Ottoman interest in illustrated cosmographies and their representation of the world and its inhabitants. It analyses fifteen illustrated manuscripts of four cosmographical texts on the Old and New Worlds (in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish) produced in the capital Istanbul and the Ottoman provinces of Egypt, Syria and Baghdad, c. 1550 1700.Overall, dozens of richly illustrated cosmographies were copied across the span of six hundred years, from the late thirteenth until the nineteenth century, in different artistic centres and by different political entities in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and India. This study points to an unprecedented and unparalleled production of illustrated cosmographies in the Ottoman period, in particular during the second half of the sixteenth century. It explores the changes introduced into Ottoman cosmographical manuscripts, including representations of holy geography, popular medicine, the dangers of seafaring, Egyptian antiquities, portraits of the Ottoman sultans and depictions of the Orthodox Christian and European.

Based on the 2025 Yarshater Lectures in Persian Art, this book presents distinctive aspects – some familiar and others overlooked – of Persianate manuscripts and manuscript making during the early modern period. Its four parts focus on paintings that often come at the beginning and end of manuscripts (frontispieces and finispieces); on the presence and use of page markers on manuscript folios; on the graphic and pictorial style of ‘Abdullah al-Shirazi, a prolific sixteenth-century painter-decorator; and on the image of the book in illustrated manuscripts from Iran and India. Marianna Shreve Simpson explores particular material and artistic features, forms and functions that shaped the making of deluxe Persianate manuscripts over the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, and that contribute to the continuing appeal of this celebrated tradition today.

This book examines the well-known but still poorly understood corpus of lajvardina ware from Iran, Central Asia and Russia. Acting as a follow-up volume to Mina'i Ware: A Reassessment and Comprehensive Study of Iranian Polychrome Overglaze Wares Through Sherds (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), it employs a broadly similar methodological approach to the next phase in the development of overglaze painted wares. Most vessels in museums are rebuilt, often from pieces of multiple different vessels with extensive plaster fill and modern overpaint. This is similar to mina’i wares, but, unlike the earlier technique, the majority of extant lajvardina wares are tiles, and not subject to the same level of restoration and overpainting.Beginning with a study of the process of transition from mina’i to lajvardina (with a shift from primarily white glaze to cobalt blue, a decline in figural decoration and a proliferation of new vessel forms), the book then moves on to address the extant corpus of tiles and vessels and integrates the later, related, lajvardina wares produced in Central Asia and Russia in the fourteenth century for the first time. Finally, the book examines the reception, trade, publication and display of lajvardina from the late nineteenth century to today.

This lavishly illustrated volume presents the major surviving monuments of the early period of the Rum Seljuqs, the first major Muslim dynasty to rule Anatolia. A much-needed overview of the political history of the dynasty provides the context for the study of the built environment which follows. The book addresses the most significant monuments from across the region: a palace, a minaret and a hospital are studied in detail, along with an overview of the decorative portals attached to a wide array of different building types. The case studies are used to demonstrate the key themes and processes of architectural synthesis and development that were under way at the time, and how they reflect the broader society.

This is a comprehensive study of the surviving monuments of the Qarakhanids – an important yet little-known medieval dynasty that ruled much of Central Asia between the late 10th and early 13th centuries. Based on extensive fieldwork and many hard-to-find Russian sources, the book places the surviving monuments into the wider cultural context of the region. Many photographs and new ground-plans are included, as well as detailed studies of individual monuments and the wider architectural aesthetic. These monuments serve as the link between the mostly lost Samanid architecture and the far larger and better-known monuments of the Timurids.

In their own words, Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair espouse ‘things and thinginess rather than theories and isations’. This book’s practical, down-to-earth dimension, expressed in plain, simple English, runs counter to the current fashion for theoretical explanations and their accompanying jargon when exploring the world of Islamic art. Its many insights, firmly anchored in artistic practice in architecture, painting and the decorative arts, are supported by ample technical know-how. The range is wide – mosques becoming temples; how religious buildings reflect politics; Yemeni frescoes and inscriptions; domestic Syrian 18th-century ornament; Egyptian bookbinding techniques; recycling and repair in Damascene crafts; conservation versus restoration; narrative on ceramics; metalwork with architectural motifs; lost buildings reconstructed; how objects speak;Muslim burials in China; the role of migrating potters; Mughal painting; stone carpet weights; the use of metals in Islamic manuscripts, calligraphy and modern artists’ books.

This beautifully illustrated history of Safavid Isfahan (1501–1722) explores the architectural and urban forms and networks of socio-cultural action that reflected a distinctly early-modern and Perso-Shi‘i practice of kingship.An immense building campaign, initiated in 1590-91, transformed Isfahan from a provincial, medieval, and largely Sunni city into an urban-centered representation of the first Imami Shi‘i empire in the history of Islam. The historical process of Shi‘ification of Safavid Iran and the deployment of the arts in situating the shifts in the politico-religious agenda of the imperial household informs Sussan Babaie’s study of palatial architecture and urban environments of Isfahan and the earlier capitals of Tabriz and Qazvin.Babaie argues that since the Safavid claim presumed the inheritance both of the charisma of the Shi‘i Imams and of the aura of royal splendor integral to ancient Persian notions of kingship, a ceremonial regime was gradually devised in which access and proximity to the shah assumed the contours of an institutionalized form of feasting. Talar-palaces, a new typology in Islamic palatial designs, and the urban-spatial articulation of access and proximity are the architectural anchors of this argument. Cast in the comparative light of urban spaces and palace complexes elsewhere and earlier—in the Timurid, Ottoman, and Mughal realms as well as in the early modern European capitals—Safavid Isfahan emerges as the epitome of a new architectural-urban paradigm in the early modern age.

This beautifully illustrated history of Safavid Isfahan (1501 1722) explores the architectural and urban forms and networks of socio-cultural action that reflected a distinctly early-modern and Perso-Shi'i practice of kingship. An immense building campaign, initiated in 1590-91, transformed Isfahan from a provincial, medieval, and largely Sunni city into an urban-centered representation of the first Imami Shi'i empire in the history of Islam. The historical process of Shi'ification of Safavid Iran and the deployment of the arts in situating the shifts in the politico-religious agenda of the imperial household informs Sussan Babaie's study of palatial architecture and urban environments of Isfahan and the earlier capitals of Tabriz and Qazvin. Babaie argues that since the Safavid claim presumed the inheritance both of the charisma of the Shi'i Imams and of the aura of royal splendor integral to ancient Persian notions of kingship, a ceremonial regime was gradually devised in which access and proximity to the shah assumed the contours of an institutionalized form of feasting. Talar-palaces, a new typology in Islamic palatial designs, and the urban-spatial articulation of access and proximity are the architectural anchors of this argument. Cast in the comparative light of urban spaces and palace complexes elsewhere and earlier in the Timurid, Ottoman, and Mughal realms as well as in the early modern European capitals Safavid Isfahan emerges as the epitome of a new architectural-urban paradigm in the early modern age.

What happens when a monotheistic, foreign religion needs a space in which to worship in China, a civilisation with a building tradition that has been largely unchanged for several millennia? The story of this extraordinary convergence begins in the 7th century and continues under the Chinese rule of Song and Ming, and the non-Chinese rule of the Mongols and Manchus, each with a different political and religious agenda. The author shows that mosques, and ultimately Islam, have survived in China because the Chinese architectural system, though often unchanging, is adaptable: it can accommodate the religious requirements of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Islam.

Tracing its origins and development, Bloom reveals that the Minaret, long understood to have been invented in the early years of Islam as the place from which the muezzin gives the call to prayer, was actually invented some two centuries later to be a visible symbol of Islam. From early Islam to the modern world, and from Iran, Egypt, Turkey and India to West and East Africa, the Yemen and Southeast Asia, this richly illustrated book is a sweeping tour of the minaret's position as the symbol of Islam.

In the absence of a tradition of self-portraiture, how could artists signal their presence within a painting? Centred on late Timurid manuscript painting (ca. 1470-1500), this book reveals that pictures could function as the painter's delegate, charged with the task of centring and defining artistic work, even as they did not represent the artist's likeness. Influenced by the culture of the majlis, an institutional gathering devoted to intricate literary performances and debates, late Timurid painters used a number of strategies to shift manuscript painting from an illustrative device to a self-reflective object, designed to highlight the artist's imagination and manual dexterity. These strategies include visual abundance, linear precision, the incorporation of inscriptions addressing aspects of the painting and the artist's signature. Focusing on one of the most iconic manuscripts of the Persianate tradition, the Cairo Bustan made in late Timurid Herat and bearing the signatures of the painter Bihzad, this book explores Persian manuscript painting as a medium for artistic performance and self-representation, a process by which artistic authority was shaped and discussed.

Focusing on 5 objects found in the main media at the time - ceramics, metalware, painting, architecture and textiles - Sheila S. Blair shows how artisans played with form, material and decoration to engage their audiences. She also shows how the reception of these objects has changed and that their present context has implications for our understanding of the past. Greater Iranian arts from the 10th to the 16th century are technically some of the finest produced anywhere. They are also intellectually engaging, showing the lively interaction between the verbal and the visual arts.

The first illustrated, architectural history of the ‘Alid shrines, increasingly endangered by the conflict in SyriaThe ‘Alids (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad) are among the most revered figures in Islam, beloved by virtually all Muslims, regardless of sectarian affiliation. This study argues that despite the common identification of shrines as ‘Shi’i’ spaces, they have in fact always been unique places of pragmatic intersectarian exchange and shared piety, even - and perhaps especially - during periods of sectarian conflict. Using a rich variety of previously unexplored sources, including textual, archaeological, architectural, and epigraphic evidence, Stephennie Mulder shows how these shrines created a unifying Muslim ‘holy land’ in medieval Syria, and proposes a fresh conceptual approach to thinking about landscape in Islamic art. In doing so, she argues against a common paradigm of medieval sectarian conflict, complicates the notion of Sunni Revival, and provides new evidence for the negotiated complexity of sectarian interactions in the period.

Rising from nomadic origins as Turkish tribesmen, the powerful and culturally prolific Seljuqs and their successor states dominated vast lands extending from Central Asia to the eastern Mediterranean from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. Supported by colour images, charts, and maps, this volume examines how under Seljuq rule, migrations of people and the exchange and synthesis of diverse traditions—including Turkmen, Perso-Arabo-Islamic, Byzantine, Armenian, Crusader and other Christian cultures—accompanied architectural patronage, advances in science and technology and a great flowering of culture within the realm. It also explores how shifting religious beliefs, ideologies of authority, and lifestyle in Seljuq times influenced cultural and artistic production, urban and rural architecture, monumental inscriptions and royal titulature, and practices of religion and magic. It also presents today’s challenges and new approaches to preserving the material heritage of this vastly accomplished and influential civilization.

Between the Mongol invasions in the mid-13th century and the rise of the Ottomans in the late 14th century, the Lands of Rūm were marked by instability and conflict. Despite this, a rich body of illuminated manuscripts from the period survives, explored here in this extensively illustrated volume. Meticulously analysing 15 beautifully decorated Arabic and Persian manuscripts, including Qur’ans, mirrors-for-princes, historical chronicles and Sufi works, Cailah Jackson traces the development of calligraphy and illumination in late medieval Anatolia. She shows that the central Anatolian city of Konya, in particular, was a dynamic centre of artistic activity and that local Turcoman princes, Seljuk bureaucrats and Mevlevi dervishes all played important roles in manuscript production and patronage.

The subject of this book is the so-called London Qazvīnī, an early 14th-century illustrated Arabic copy of al-Qazvīnī’s The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existing Things, which was acquired by the British Library in 1983 (Or. 14140). As is commonly the case for copies of this text, the London Qazvīnī is lavishly illustrated, with 368 extant paintings out of the estimated original ca. 520.Its large format, ambitious illustrative cycle and the fine quality of many of the illustrations suggest that the atelier where it was produced must have been well-established and able to attract craftsmen from different parts of the Ilkhanid area. It also suggests that its patron was wealthy and curious about scientific, encyclopedic and cajā’ib literature, and keen to experiment with the illustration of new texts like this work, which had been composed by the author only two or three decades earlier. The only centre that was capable of gathering such artistic influences ranging from Anatolia to Mesopotamia appears to have been Mosul.The London Qazvīnī is an important newly surfaced document for the study of early illustrated Arabic copies of this text, representing the second earliest known surviving manuscript, as well as for the study of Ilkhanid painting. In a single and unique manuscript are gathered earlier Mesopotamian painting traditions, North Jaziran-Seljuq elements, Anatolian inspirations, the latest changes brought about after the advent of the Mongols, and a number of illustrations of extraordinary subjects which escape a proper classification.

Picturing the life story of Jalal ad-Din Rumi, a premier Muslim mystic and the original Whirling Dervish, the images in three extant manuscripts of Aflaki’s Wondrous Feats of the Knowers of God provide a unique way to interpret the text. Part One: History and Context provides the medieval Anatolian historical setting; the broad contours of literary and artistic works of Islamic Hagiography; and the specific details of the three manuscripts to be explored. Part Two: Text and Image proposes a method for interpreting a hybrid literary-visual document as a grand narrative of the Family Rumi at the inspirational and ethical core of a virtuous community: flourishing within a complex Muslim society under divine providence. Pictures in the three manuscripts were produced by studios of painters under the patronage of major late 16th-century Ottoman sultans. The result of their efforts is a kind of ‘visualised hagiography’ uniquely capable of suggesting distinctive and often surprising twists on the narratives, enhancing the text with images of striking beauty and rich detail.

The Nasrid builders of the Alhambra – the best-preserved medieval Muslim palatial city – were so exacting that some of their work could not be fully explained until the invention of fractal geometry. Their design principles have been obscured, however, by the loss of all archival material. This book resolves that impasse by investigating the neglected, interdisciplinary contexts of medieval poetics and optics and through comparative study of Islamic court ceremonials. This reframing enables the reconstruction of the underlying, integrated aesthetic, focusing on the harmonious interrelationship between diverse artistic media —architecture, poetry and textiles — in the experience of the beholder, resulting in a new understanding of the Alhambra.

Showcases the best recent research on epigraphy across the medieval Islamic worldExplores Islamic epigraphy from a wide range of perspectives and geographical areas, from the Maghreb to India and Central Asia and beyondCovers the period from the rise of Islam to the 15th centuryDetails 20 case studies of inscriptions found on a wide range of objects from coins, pen cases, textiles, tiles, pottery and wall paintings to public buildings, monuments, tombs, minarets, monasteries and madrasasBeautifully illustrated with 200 colour photographs of inscriptions on buildings and objectsIncludes contributions from some of the leading experts in the field including Jonathan Bloom, Robert Hillenbrand, Sheila Blair, Doris Behrens-Abouseif and Carole HillenbrandThis volume offers an overview of the state of the field, and shows the importance of Islamic inscriptions for disciplines such as art history, history and literature. The chapters range from surveys to detailed exploration of individual topics, providing an insight to some of the most recent cutting-edge work on Islamic inscriptions. It focuses on the period from the rise of Islam to the fifteenth century, ranging across the Islamic world from the Maghreb to India and Central Asia, and inscriptions in Arabic, Persian and Turkish.The five sections of the book draw together some of the principal themes: 'Royal Power' investigates the role of sultanic patronage in epigraphy, and the use of inscriptions for projecting royal power. 'Piety' examines the relationship between epigraphy and religious practice. 'Epigraphic Style and Function' explores the relationship between the use of specific epigraphic styles and scripts and the function of a monument. 'Inscribed Objects' moves from monumental inscriptions to those on objects such as ceramics and pen-cases. The final section considers the interplay between inscriptions and historical sources as well as the utility of inscriptions as historical sources.