Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 4 (2023) 143–152

brill.com/mcmw

An Introduction to Approaching Architecture in the

Muslim World: Novel Paths of Investigations

Ruba Kana‘an and Avinoam Shalem

Approaching Architecture in the Muslim World: Novel Paths of Investigations questions

the historiography of the “Islamic Architecture” field by scoring particular instances
that fractured its foundations or methods, thereby shaping its objects of study. Our use
of the word “approaching” in the title of this volume embraces different purposes, all of
which are important to be mentioned. In the first place, the use of the verb approach
in its continuous tense underscores the non-ending and constant act of architectural
historians in the field to try to understand and explain aesthetic notions as related
to materials, technologies, and more importantly, the social demands of the time.
However, simultaneously, “approaching” hints at the act of getting closer. Thus, beyond
the metaphor, “approaching” refers to the corporal spatial experience of getting closer
to our object of observation, as if we can learn more by reaching to, looking at, and
even touching the surface of architecture. Therefore, it is the spatial lens in focus that is
hinted at by using this verb. Lastly, the word “approaching” reminds us how any move-
ment in a specific direction could pave a particular path, which clearly impacts what
we see and how we understand it. In short, all that we normally term methodology. Yet,
it must be emphasized that the word “approaching” also evokes the notion of attempt
and the making of an effort that does not claim arriving at the end point of our goal.
It is rather about the getting closer to than getting there – a sort of an attempt at a closer
approximation. Collectively, the contributions in this issue address the topic from theo-
retical concerns and specific case studies. The aim of this issue, then, is to open new
horizons for rethinking “Islamic” architecture and suggest novel interrogative paths to
challenge the canonical frameworks that have dominated our approaches when dis-
cussing architecture in the lands of Islam, namely “typology,” “regionalism,” “master nar-
ratives,” and “patronage.”
The contributions in this issue build upon recent publications reflecting on the
art and architecture of the Muslim world, including the tenth-anniversary issue of
the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) (2021; and its expansion and
re-publication in Gharipour and Coslett, 2022), a special issue on Islamic art in the
Journal of Art Historiography (2012), and the edited volume Islamic Art and the Museum:
Approaches to Art and Archeology the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century (2012).
These publications, amongst others (Hillenbrand, 2003; Necipoğlu and Flood, 2017;
Rabbat, 2012), highlight the unease and self-criticism within a young field that was
encumbered in its first hundred years by the heritage shaping its formation – from what
buildings, regions, and objects are deemed worthy of study, to the frameworks of their
interpretation (Lermer and Shalem, 2010; Necipoğlu, 2008; Vernoit, 2001). The new
wave of renovation, re-installation, or new establishment of galleries and museums for
the display of “Islamic art” over the last two decades broadened the discourse to engage
with debates over re-framing the colonial gaze, de-colonizing art institutions, and the
art histories of global interactions (Benoit et al., 2012; IJIA 2018, 7,2; Shalem, 2020).

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144 Kana ‘ an and Shalem

In the field of architecture, much has been done to document historic buildings and
environments through in-depth studies, new technical drawings, and photography, as
well as creating curated and accessible online archives, including Archnet (launched
2002). The launch of IJIA in 2012, with a broad mandate bringing together historical
and theoretical aspects of architecture and creating opportunities for dialogue between
scholars and practitioners, filled an important gap in the field. IJIA has succeeded in
expanding into broader geographical regions as well as new areas of research, including
archives, conservation, environmental issues, and refugee settlement, while also pro-
viding theoretically focused volumes on topics relevant to our post-colonial era and
decentring the Zeitgeist. More recently, the increased complexity of architectural field-
work in the region due to wars, security concerns, and at times, the detrimental effects
of mass urbanization and conservation practices entangled with the writing of the past
have also been the subjects of scholarly exploration (Allais, 2018; Um, 2021; Blessing,
2022; Mulder, 2022).
The contributions to this issue of MCMW approach architecture from the perspec-
tive of moments and incidents of rupture exemplified by patterns of the presence and
absence of the individual actor who shapes the architecture and its image and changes
interpretation. They also explore new paths of investigation that raise the question
of the shape of architectural history in the Muslim world as a field of study if we
re-direct the focus from architectural patronage and its preoccupation with the semiot-
ics of power, origins, and influences. Together, the articles in this issue address three
moments of rupture in the architecture of the Muslim world: “visuality,” “typology,”
and “displacement.”

1 On Visuality

While much has been written about “the gaze” as a critical tool for art historical prac-
tices past and present, the first three articles present case-based examples reflecting
moments of rupture and change in the objectification of architecture and urban space
through the medium of drawing and photography. These articles (Behdad, Shalem,
and Jamaleddine) explore regimes of seeing and representation during the nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries in the traditional centers of the Muslim world under the
Ottomans, Qajars, and the nation-states after them. Collectively these articles question
whether an architectural edifice (or its image), as a presence or absence, embodies a
move from the sensory to the discursive. A move from “the gaze” as a fixed moment to
probing its multitudes and the unfolding role of the beholder in its manifestations.
Behdad’s article brings together two vignettes of “historical monuments” photogra-
phy to demonstrate the multivalent nature and function of nineteenth-century pho-
tographic representation. The first vignette contrasts the photography of medieval
monuments in Europe as a means to evoke historical memory in the service of national-
ism and the coeval photography of “medieval” Egypt and the Holy Land as an Orientalist
tool of appropriations and colonialism. He further explores the concept of simultane-
ous crafting of different gazes by examining the work of nineteenth-century photog-
raphers working under the Ottomans and the Qajars. In response to the Orientalist
representations of perpetual medievalism through the nostalgic images of “historical
monuments,” these photographers purposefully differentiated between commercial
and official photography. While commercial photography was memetic and catered
to the imagination of the intrepid tourists whose numbers were on the increase, offi-
cial photography represented an alternative view of the empire that was selective in
its focus on symbols of legitimacy and modernity. Consequently, his article questions
using the “colonial gaze” as an all-encompassing analytical framework.
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An Introduction to Approaching Architecture in the Muslim World 145

Using the framework of a “distant gaze,” Shalem explores the history of capturing the
city’s image as an object admired from afar instead of a living place encountered and
experienced. He examines the different ways Mecca was depicted by exploring how the
image of the Haram was flattened to represent the city-as-a-map and how its architec-
tural components were abstracted into representative symbols – arcade, Kaʿba, minaret,
minbar – thus rendering the city and its image as a none-changing and unchangeable
place of sanctity. While this canonical representation of Mecca as the Haram in an
abstracted ground plan format continues today – one can think, for example, of the
creative iterations in prayer rugs – a three-dimensional perspectival view that places
the Haram into a quasi-natural landscape representing Mecca started to emerge in the
twelfth/eighteenth century. Shalem attributes this change to the circulation of printed
images of cityscapes (vedute), shifting the gaze from the distant “city as object” to an
approachable “city objectified within a landscape,” evoking the sense of the view of the
city as an ‘event of seeing’ and marking the beholder’s role and experience as shaper of
the view.
Jamaleddine explores the changes in the orthographic representation of mosque
plans in the major published surveys of “Islamic architecture” from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries and their impact on the study of mosque architecture. Through a
detailed study of the progressive representation of mosque plans for al-Hakim, Ahmad
ibn Tulun, and the Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hasan in Egypt; the Great Mosque of
Qayrawan in Tunisia, and the Süleymaniye in Istanbul, he demonstrates the shift in
representation from the exotic to the technical and from the historic to the “ideal.”
The article traces how the abstracted ground plan as a mode of representation operated
on multiple levels that privileged ideas of origin and form over history and use. These
plans isolated, monumentalized, and de-contextualized mosques by regularizing their
architecture and clearing around them metaphorically and physically through urban or
social context erasure. Using the solid poche infill technique in rendering mosque plans
also led to their “diagramatization” and the erasure of their history, thus rendering them
as examples of a fixed – usually medieval – historical moment. As these plans and the
fixed gaze they represent are still the main orthographic source for architectural stud-
ies (Korn, 2021), the isolation of the mosque’s history and physical context continues to
restrict new approaches in many contemporary architectural studies.

2 On Typology

This issue also foregrounds moments of rupture as a critical approach to exploring

building “typology.” In his 1994 Islamic Architecture, Robert Hillenbrand delineates six
building types into separate chapters representing the mosque, minaret, madrasa, mau-
soleum, caravanserai, and palace, to focus on “the function of the major Islamic build-
ing types within the medieval society which produced them” (1994: p. 1). Hillenbrand
explains his approach as a crucial attempt to redress the scholarly bias towards mor-
phological and stylistic analysis so that a building type’s “immanent characteristics and
functions will stand out from the medley of less important regional and temporal varia-
tions” (1994: p. 1). Several articles question the notion of “immanent characteristics” as
a master narrative by expanding the rigid boundaries of “the type,” both physical and
conceptual, by exploring one such typology: the mosque (Holod, 2017).
Kana’an’s article questions how a history of the Friday mosque can be (re)written
if approached from the perspective of prayer. Therefore, it shifts the critical approach
to the mosque from a chronological and regional architectural analysis focusing on a
mosque’s physical attributes and architectural patronage to one based on the mosque
as a ritual and social space produced by conditions and practices related to prayer. The
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146 Kana ‘ an and Shalem

article, thus, uses legal sources to propose a new paradigm for thinking about archi-
tecture. Highlighting the unevenness of doctrinal histories and geographies of the
mosque’s evolution, it raises broader questions about polycentric and asynchronous
evolutions of mosque architecture. It also suggests the potential of this approach to
raise new questions about how pre-modern Muslims articulated and negotiated urban
spaces, margins, hinterlands, and the perennial question of defining a city. As a result,
the article challenges the traditional perception of art and architecture as a scholarly
field born from aesthetics and philosophy by re-emphasizing the field’s strong links
to sociology.
Avcıoğlu’s article approaches the mosque from points of rupture in its evolution as
part of an urban assemblage. The article starts from the perspective that between the
ninth/fifteenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries, the multifunctional religious complex
(külliye) with the imperial and sub-imperial mosques at its symbolic physical and meta-
phorical center represented the main architectural and urbanization unit in Istanbul.
The author then traces the changes to the symbolic and administrative function of the
külliye during the twelfth/eighteenth and nineteenth centuries due to increased urban
density and modernization and demonstrates that it led to two separate and detached
buildings: the mosque and the imperial tomb. This “relational reading” of Istanbul as
palimpsest shifts the focus to the külliye as its hypotext and traces the replication and
reduction that it was subject to through “excision, condensation, and concision of the
original külliye prototype.” Thus, the symbolic role of the placement and displacement
of the mosque and the tomb during the nineteenth century proposes new approaches
to visualizing Ottoman modernity and its architecture.

3 On Displacement

Akcan’s article enables the reader to think about the architecture of displacement and
the displacement of architecture, as exemplified by the aftermath of the Lausanne
Treaty of 1923, which deals with the repatriation of Muslims and Christians in Turkey
and Greece. It highlights the inherent paradox of displacement and forced migration
posited on an assumption of “difference,” and a re-settlement plan couched in the uni-
form architectural solutions of residential modernism that flattens the same “differ-
ence.” The article demonstrates how the national authorities of the Exchange Treaty
“conceived land as a religious category but resettlement as a modernizing technology”
thus serving nation building aspirations to the detriment of the multi-generational
ethno-pluralism of architecture and place-making in the region. In addition to chal-
lenging the ethics of ethno-nationalism, Akcan’s approach raises the question of how
will “master narratives” with their focus on “periodization,” “typology,” and “regional-
ism” engage with and interpret moments of rupture such as forced migration, demo-
graphic engineering, and displacement.
While proposing these new paths of architectural investigation, this volume is far
from covering the many approaches taken today by numerous other scholars aiming at
enriching and diversifying the field; especially those looking ahead and thinking about
architecture and space for the future while critically turning their gaze to the past.
Therefore, it seems important to mention here, if briefly, some of the major frameworks
and pertinent attempts shaping the study of architecture now and presenting possible
routes of academic investigations for the future.
Firstly, there is a shift in the thinking about spirituality in general and in “Islamic” art
and architecture in particular.1 This trend, coined by us as “Beyond the secular gaze,”
suggests an alternative to the two opposing predominant approaches to interpreting

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An Introduction to Approaching Architecture in the Muslim World 147

architecture in the Muslim world: the Orientalist gaze that frames architecture and dec-
orative patterns as manifestations of underlying principles of faith – regarded as both
universal and timeless – and the iconological approach with its Cartesian interpreta-
tion of architecture as a visual signifier of a culturally constructed meaning – relevant
to a specific time, place, and context of production. While the first approach considers
art, architecture, and the built environment as expressions of Muslim faith, and espe-
cially the concept of Divine Unity, the second approach, which gained momentum after
Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, challenges the concepts of faith and spirituality
in architectural interpretation. As befits a young academic field, the study of architec-
ture in the Muslim world continues to place emphasis on documentation and classifi-
cation into stylistic schools and historical patterns that are predominantly interpreted
through a framework of power and patronage. The intellectual and interpretative ten-
dency in the study of the architecture of the Muslim world, thus, continues to prioritize
the formal and political over any consideration of the experiential, sensorial, spiritual,
or juridical. For example, the art and architecture of Shiʿism are often identified through
the presence or absence of what can be explicitly perceived as Shiʿi without considering
the cross-sectarian veneration of the ahl al-bayt. Thus, the name ʿAli is almost always
considered an indication of Shiʿa provenance, while Muhammad is representative of
Sunni traditions (Khosronejad, 2011; Allan, 2012; Suleman, 2015).
The spiritual and metaphysical realm palpable in the everyday life practices and lit-
erary traditions of Muslims, whose architecture is subject to the scholarly secular glaze,
has only recently begun to (re)inform our field. This phenomenon rose mainly, but not
exclusively, in parallel to the rise of studies focusing on mystical devotion, whether in
the form of representational images of the prophet (Elias, 2012; Gruber, 2018) or the
study of shrines, dargahs, and mausolea (Akkach, 2005; Mulder, 2014; Talmon-Heller,
2020; Yürekli, 2016). The past few years have also seen a steady growth in research on
spiritual, mystical, and metaphysical portable objects. Multiple exhibitions, publica-
tions, and doctoral dissertations, for example, were dedicated to some aspect of the
occult and magic.2 Collectively, these studies on architecture and portable arts signal
a reckoning with, or even a rupture in, the inherited colonial orthodoxies imposing a
sharp divide between science and faith, sacred and secular, and spiritual and ritual.
The most recent addition in this expanding effort to (re)interpret architecture in the
Muslim world using indigenous world views is the growing role of legal texts, albeit
still limited to urban and hisba studies (Ghabin, 2009; Kana’an, in this volume and
forthcoming; O’Meara, 2007). While here specifically addressing the architecture of the
Muslim world, this rupture in the secular gaze and the rise of the spiritual, the local,
and the indigenous as a frame of art historical analysis responds to broader trends in art
history engaging with spiritual cosmologies and the attempt to decolonize art history
(Elkins, 2021; Heartney, 2020; Shaw, 2019; Blotkamp et al., 1986).
The “Digital Turn,” beginning around 2000 and initially discussed in terms of velocity
and spreadability of images and “data,” developed to encompass other fields and is at
present baptized under the rubric “digital humanities.” Indeed, technology has always
played a part in the ways historians studied and transmitted ideas about architecture
and the built environment – from interpreting historical technical drawings such as the
plaster panel from Takht‐i Sulaiman (50 × 50 cm) inscribed with a muqarnas design
dating to ca. 668/1270 (Harb, 1978) and the Timurid scroll found in the Topkapi Saray
Museum in Istanbul (Necipoǧlu, 1995), to the masterful use of technical drawings, cam-
eras, and survey theodolites that characterized early-twentieth-century surveys such as
those by Creswell, Pope, or Herzfeld. The age of digitization, including databases such
as Archnet (2002), shifted the scale and range of possibilities available to scholars and
facilitated broader comparative and stylistic studies. Scholars of Islamic architecture

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148 Kana ‘ an and Shalem

are yet again engaging with another technological leap brought about by the new affor-
dances of computational devices in digital humanities and data visualization. A call for
papers for a special issue of IJIA on The Urgency of the Digital scheduled for publica-
tion in 2025 was circulated as we were ready to go to press. It reminds us that digital
research comes with the warning that databases “bear the marks of the epistemologies
that shape them” (see also Kana’an, 2022). Therefore, several important questions about
archive(s) are raised, for example, how to decolonize the archive, and how to engage
with their multitudes and assumptions critically before generating new research and
knowledge.
The potential of this work is immense, and it continues to expand with the increasing
work in digital humanities through collaborative multi-disciplinary research by archi-
tectural historians, computer graphics and visualization specialists, as well as other
digital media specialists. The visual representation of lighting in the Great Mosque of
Cordoba between the second/eighth and fourth/tenth centuries, for example, was a
pioneering research project (2009), bringing together the architectural and archeologi-
cal expertise of Renata Holod with the computational expertise of a visualization and
digitization team. The resulting visualization is generative. It suggests plausible levels
of lighting in the mosque while at the same time impressing upon the researcher the
need to reconsider and perhaps reinterpret the experiential impact of the choice of
building materials, use of colors, and arch forms for the fourth/tenth century expansion
of the mosque.3 Other projects digitally reintegrate fragmentary archeological evidence
from building remains, museum collections, new architectural studies, and historical
photographs to recreate derelict monuments and historical landscapes. Recent exam-
ples include Patricia Blessing and Richard McClary’s project for a digital reimagining
of the Qilij Arslan II Kiosk in Konya (2022), and Heba Mostafa’s ongoing virtual reality
project to reconstruct the changes to the inscriptions, structure, and precinct of Cairo’s
Nilometer (forthcoming). In addition to creating immersive experiences for research
purposes, Glaire Anderson explores the use of video games and mixed reality to benefit
research and education and make Islamic art and history accessible to a broader public
(2013; Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture and Collections https://digitallabivcc.com/).
These examples, as indeed the many others that we could not include here, usher a way
forward in digital research stressing the need for the digital to be critical and generative
as a research tool rather than merely expansive and documentary.
The “Sensory Turn,” too, bears upon the study of architecture in a Muslim context.
Apart from the obvious attention given to the surfaces of buildings (Bruno, 2014), the
“Sensory Turn” enables novel discussions on the spatial aesthetic experience of archi-
tecture. Moreover, this spatial experience underscores the third-dimensionality of any
edifice, the fact that this experience is bound to time and involves bodily interaction.
Liberating architecture from its arresting two-dimensional image and adding to its
sculptural character the sense of time can certainly help us pay attention to the flux of
architecture, moving beyond the iconic and canonical architecture history, which has
regularly been built upon statis key buildings and architectural forms. The experience
of architecture recalls our experience of films. Building upon Lefevbre (1991; 1991a) and
de Certeau (2011), the urban experience of the Muslim city renders it possible to be
described as a walking experience, setting our body in motion (O’Meara, 2007; Shalem
in this volume). Additionally, the soundscape of cities can provide us with novel topo-
graphical mapping systems, as attested in the edited volume of Frishkopf and Spinetti
(2018; also see Alibhai, 2008; Atkinson, 2016) and opens discussions on cityscapes from
the perspective of the aural.
Similarly, the timely global and public concern with climate change fuels the growing
interest in environmental art and environmental art history. Sustainable architecture

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An Introduction to Approaching Architecture in the Muslim World 149

and building materials in historical architecture and landscape set in motion new stud-
ies and a new direction in the field. Hans Wulff’s study of the crafts of Persia (1966),
Hasan Fathy’s pioneering work in 1970s Egypt, and Ahmad al-Hassan and Donald Hill’s
study of Islamic technology brought traditional building materials and techniques into
a sharper focus and opened the door to new approaches that are increasingly informing
studies in architectural history. More recently, Marcus Milwright’s anthology of Islamic
arts and crafts (2017) and the two websites he developed for the crafts of Syria and Iraq
are a reminder of the great potential of material studies in advancing architectural
history. Likewise, the conference on Stucco Decoration in the Architecture of Iran and
Neighbouring Lands organized by the University of Bamberg in May 2022 highlighted
the immense advances that can be achieved by exploring a single material and its sty-
listic and technical affordances (Korn, forthcoming).4 In addition, broadening the field
of research away from the centers of power in the Islamic heartland to a more global
approach that considers the historical outreach of Muslim communities through trade
or war as well as the migration and translocation of Muslim communities and their
visual cultures in the more recent past, have blurred the borders between the academic
fields of history and geography (O’Kane, 2021; Akcan in this volume). These two research
fields, which used to be divided between the academic sectors of humanities and sci-
ence, are now being reshaped and appear to overlap in the study of architecture and
landscape. It comes as no surprise, then, that this is mostly manifested in the current
focus on the study of cartography, bringing the fields of geography and geology to the
interdisciplinary fields associated with social humanities and architecture.5 This spe-
cific development bridges between landscape and architecture studies. Consequently,
architecture is studied as forming part of histories of landscaping and the curating of
nature. For example, D. Fairchild Ruggles’ many contributions to the field pioneered
the effort to shift the gaze from the traditional study of “Islamic gardens” to the study
of landscapes and environmental management technologies (Ruggles, 2021; 2007; also
see Wescoat, 2022).
This volume, then, is a small but timely contribution to the wave of new research pos-
sibilities for the field of architectural history in the Muslim world, where scholars are
actively participating in the broader discussions of architecture and its histories. What
is specific here, to our minds, is the choice of topics and contributions that form a point
of rupture and an invitation to a new path.

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Notes

1 For spiritualism as a reaction to some, among others, neoliberal bankruptcies about rationality and the
global market, see https://news.artnet.com/art-world/spirituality-and-art-resurgence-1737117. Regarding
traditional approaches to spirituality in “Islamic” architecture, see (Burckhardt, 1976; Stoddart, 2003;
Corbin, 1977; Nasr, 1987; see also the discussion on sufism in Ahmed 2016, mainly in chapter I, especially
pp. 19–31).
2 Recent exhibitions include Falnama: The Book of Omens, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Insti-
tute (opened October 2009); Un Art Secret, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (opened February 2013);
Power and Protection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (opened October 2016). Publications include Saif
et al., (2021).
3 Kider Jr. et al., (2009) Recreating Early Islamic Glass Lamp Lighting. See also Holod, R. Medieval Art
Matters. Podcast, January. https://youtu.be/SOypa2h5MfQ.
4 https://www.uni-bamberg.de/en/islamart/events-and-cooperations/stucco-conference/.
5 For example, see the conference at the Courtauld Institute: https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/the-art-and
-architecture-of-mapping-visual-and-material-approaches-to-cartographic-objects%EF%BF%BC/.

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