This collection of essays provides a timely reassessment of nineteenth-century Islamic art and architecture. The essays demonstrate that the arts of that era were vibrant and diverse, making ingenious use of native traditions and materials or adopting imported conventions and new technologies. However, traditionalists, revivalists and modernists all referred in one way or another to an Islamic heritage, whether to reinvent, revive or reject it. Beginning with an historical introduction and an assessment of changing attitudes towards the visual arts the following essays provide case studies of...

Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World is sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Muqarnas articles are published on all aspects of Islamic visual culture, historical and contemporary, as well as articles dealing with unpublished textual primary sources.

In this book, Doris Behrens-Abouseif responds to the Mamluk chroniclers whose loquacity regarding clothing matters demands our attention. Using a multiplicity of sources including chronicles, European and Muslim travel narratives, popular storytelling, legal treatises, literature, and poetry, Behrens-Abouseif delves into the details of Mamluk dress. Whether as a vehicle for the sultanate’s self-representation both internationally and domestically or as an expression of religious and social identities, status and wealth, female assertion, urban culture, and artistic creativity, clothing...