In my work, I strive to understand how diverse populations of people used and experienced architecture in the medieval Islamic world. The texts I have chosen for my personal canon explore these cultural interactions, bringing the complexity of medieval humanity to life. The Cairo Geniza The Cairo Geniza, which is
Jonathan Bloom– While writing my book Architecture of the Islamic West: North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, I came across a citation about a 16th-century annotated plan of the royal palace in Marrakesh. It had been inserted into a manuscript in the Escorial written in 1585 by the Trinitarian friar
Some of the most outstanding examples of world architecture, such as the Mosque of Córdoba, the ceiling of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo and the Alhambra Palace in Granada, belong to the Western Islamic tradition. This architectural style flourished for over a thousand years along the southern and western shores
In 2005, Yale University Press published David J. Roxburgh’s The Persian Album, 1400-1600: From Dispersal to Collection. Choice named it an outstanding academic book of the year, it received Honorable Mention for the Saidi Sirjani Book Award sponsored by the International Society for Iranian Studies, and it was described in
Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th – 9th Century), the revelatory exhibition now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (accompanied by a rich catalogue of the same title), was recently lauded in the New York Times, praised specifically for “offering a soothing picture of artistic continuity.” The
Today, The Metropolitan Museum of Art reopens a suite of fifteen galleries devoted to Islamic Art, after an eight year renovation project. The new space will display 1,200 works of art from Arab lands, Turkey, Iran, Central, and South Asia, among them the celebrated Emperor’s Carpet, and the Damascus Room,