International Journal of Islamic Architecture - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014

This study aims to explore a number of conceptual models that may prove fruitful in the study of architectural mobilities within and beyond Islamic lands from the eighteenth century until today. Beginning with a discussion of the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm, the essay explores several examples of architecture on the move via textile metaphors, micro-architecture, flows and hubs, tentage traditions and urban ‘slumming’. The use of the kiswa and small-scale models reveals how the Ka‘ba and the Dome of the Rock have been symbolically dispersed and repurposed in new geographical and religious contexts. Moreover, tensile forms are frequently cited in order to promote notions of authenticity and transience while also serving as weapons within urban warfare, as seen in the 2013 Gezi Uprisings in Turkey. These types of movement between media, spaces and places highlight the fact that architectural practices are never wholly distinct or dichotomous; that mobility and fixity are very often mutually dependent; that the past is frequently ‘moved’ – both conceptually and emotionally – into the present; and that manipulations of urban space can serve as highly visible stages for the enunciation and performance of ideological conflict today.

Under the Shi’a Nawabs, the city of Lucknow connected the north Indian province of Awadh westward to Mughal Shahjahanabad, Persia and beyond. To the east, terrestrial and waterborne traffic linked Awadh to Bengal (under the East India Company), and on to China. Locating Lucknow amid political, economic, intellectual and spiritual routes, this article draws attention to the hybrid architecture that materialized diverse ideas and techniques, from the work of Vanbrugh to the Indo-Gangetic vernacular. Most intriguingly, the article examines portable models (known as taziya and zareeh) that were paraded through Lucknow to mourn the martyrdom of Shi’a Imam Husayn during Muharram. The travelogue of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who served in the sophisticated court of Asaf-ud-Daula (r.1775–97), offers an itinerary to interpret the intentionally hybrid architecture of Lucknow – including the imambaras where the models were housed – and to connect it to the city’s regional, continental and global networks. This hybridity has been criticized for its excess or dismissed as mimesis. However, a number of recent heritage surveys prompt fresh analysis. Despite this new scholarship, Lucknow has not been duly recognized as one of the most significant sites of exchange amidst a vast network of Eurasian architectural mobility in the eighteenth century.

Despite a revolution two months earlier, the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1909) still sat on the throne upon the inauguration of the Hijaz Railway in September 1908. Dismissed as military strategy or as propaganda, the railway nevertheless signified more to many Muslims. This article examines the Hijaz Railway from an uncommon perspective, beginning with a component of the train largely neglected by scholars, the cami-vagonu or ‘mosque wagon’. A mobile space recapitulating historic loci of Ottoman Islamic ritual, it contributed to the production of an imperial discourse of legitimacy and authority. Within this wagon, the designers reproduced architectural forms and calligraphic motifs to incorporate the railway in a larger representational space. They also deployed modern maps to orient the mosque wagon and represent the railway, linking the calligraphic and the cartographic in a distinctly Ottoman visual-cultural language. These factors would inform the conception and reception of the sultan’s project in local and trans-imperial networks of patronage. The planners of the railway enhanced the functions of this network by sacralizing modern technological resources. In documenting architectural, aesthetic and ritual aspects of the mosque wagon, this study presents a more nuanced picture of the Hijaz Railway and its infrastructure in both the Hamidian and the Second Constitutional periods and explains how it was a ‘pious’ as well as a ‘pragmatic’ project.

During the first centuries of Ottoman rule, sultans were constantly on the move and thus required transportable lodging in the form of the tent. As the nomadic dynasty grew into an empire, Ottoman tents quickly evolved into complex constructions that scholars often describe as ‘mobile palaces’. These extravagant tents continued to be used until the end of the Empire, and throughout the centuries, evolved stylistically in tandem with other imperial art forms such as permanent architecture and painting. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tentmakers had a fantastically rich and varied repertoire of visual elements at their disposal, some of which were adapted from international artistic milieus, and still others that developed domestically. In the sprawling landscape of late Ottoman Istanbul, tents functioned as transitional spaces between indoors and outdoors, like mobile pleasure pavilions, through which members of the court could enjoy the sensory pleasures of nature. Moreover, tents of all shapes and sizes functioned as interim palatial architecture and lavish silken stage settings for imperial ceremonies, which in the last centuries of Ottoman rule were employed to propagate the sultan’s power through his visibility.

This article explores the role of human mobility in the reconfiguration of Egypt’s modern identity in the nineteenth century. It connects James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997) with Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) to interpret the construction of identities during the reign of Khedive Ismail (1863–79). The argument focuses on Ismail’s attempts to modernize the country passed through discursive ‘routes’ that were manifested in socio-political systems and architectural practices. While the Suez Canal represents the new routes advocated by the Khedive, its inauguration in 1869 manifests the notion of ambivalence between imperialism and anti-imperialism. This ambivalence materialized in the hybrid designs of both the Gezira Palace (1863–68) and the ‘Abdin Palace (1863–74), and in the emulation of the Haussmann Plan – which resulted in, this article argues, a ‘contact zone’ or ‘interstitial’ spaces in which political coalitions with global powers were prefigured. This material history cannot be dismissed as exotic follies, accidental hybrids or romantic Occidentalism.

In 1877, Robert Murdoch Smith, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s agent in Iran, undertook a brief project that differed from his more typical modus of bulk purchasing from local dealers and private collectors. Unable to purchase original decorative tilework from Safavid Isfahan’s sacred monuments, he commissioned flat, full-size copies of 33 designs, traced directly from the tiled surfaces of six building complexes, and painted in full colour. Thus the South Kensington Museum (as it then was) would possess a record of these historic surface designs, and not the glazed tiles themselves. As such they still satisfied the Museum’s mission to inform and improve contemporary practice in British industry. The primary site was the Madrasa-ye Madar-e Shah complex on Chahar Bagh Avenue, a prominent monument close to Murdoch Smith’s offices in Isfahan. Since the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the madrasa and two other major Safavid mosques had been recorded and illustrated by European visitors, and published by these outsiders as national epitomes. The 1877 project marks a waystage in this increasingly international visibility, occurring long after these monuments were first built as Safavid projections of splendour, and not long before their cosmetic appearance acquired renewed political significance in Pahlavi Iran.

This article explores Doris Duke’s (1912–93) practices as the ‘creative persona’ in building Shangri La, both her home in Hawai‘i and the fifth largest collection of Islamic art in America. Discussion begins with historical contextualization. A brief review of elite collecting in the 1930s extends the timeline of American orientalism to Duke’s project at Shangri La. Enabled by the emergence of interior design as a field for women’s creativity, her practices as the first major western female collector of Islamic art are considered against American orientalism’s gendered slant. Thereafter, the discussion turns to theoretical concerns. First, Duke’s deliberately hybrid spaces, mixing Islamic art from various regions and also combining historical objects with replicas, is studied as the creation of an Islamicate dwelling place, which, contrary to the colonial bases of orientalism, recognized the contemporaneity of the Islamic world. Duke’s practices of replication and recollection suggest relocation as the conceptual mode in which mobile objects create a sense of the transitory that supplants static architecture. Finally, the concept of relocation enables an examination of Duke’s major innovation. She moves Islamic tentage indoors to express her understanding of transitional space in Islamic architecture relocated to its setting in Hawai‘i.

Khayamiya, or Egyptian tentmaker appliqué, is a distinctly Egyptian architectural tradition that has been ignored by most architects. The vibrant ornamental qualities of this art form are slowly gaining recognition by designers from other fields, such as fashion, interior design, visual art and textile crafts, but it remains inexplicable that such an intensely visual aspect of Egyptian vernacular culture is not highly regarded, or even widely considered, as a national design icon of Egypt. This article will present an overview of khayamiya as a distinctly Egyptian architectural textile. The suradeq, or khayamiya pavilion / street tent, is the exemplar par excellence of this rich and complex art form. Recent developments in technology and reorientations towards international audiences have changed the work of the tentmakers of Cairo, veering away from architecture, towards contemporary art. These changes both threaten and encourage the survival of khayamiya as an important Egyptian living heritage. There is a great deal yet to be contributed to contemporary Islamic architecture and design by those who can reassess the endangered art of khayamiya within its original architectural context: the suradeq.

The Art and Architecture of Twelver Shi’ism: Iraq, Iran and the Indian Sub-Continent, James W. Allan (2012) London: Azimuth Editions, 174 pp., 26 illus., 96 colour plates ISBN 9781848851689, $60.00 (hardback)

The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shi’ism: Iconography and Religious Devotion in Shi’i Islam, Pedram Khosronejad (Ed.) (2012) London: I.B. Taurus, 284 pp., 105 b/w illus., 17 colour plates ISBN 9781848851689, $100.00 (hardback)

Damascene ‘Ajami Rooms: Forgotten Jewels of Interior Design, Anke Scharrahs (2013) London: Archetype Publications Ltd, xvi + 311 pp., 525 b/w illus., ISBN 9781904982661, $45.00 (paperback)

Postmodernizm Jest Prawie W Porządku: Polska Architektura Po Socjalistycznej Globalizacji / Postmodernism is Almost all Right: Polish Architecture After Socialist Globalization, Łukasz Stanek (2012) Warsaw: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana (in association with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw), 95 pp., 127 illus., 55 plates, ISBN 9788362418145, $45.00 (paperback)

Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age, Zeynep Yürekli (2012) Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 199 pp., 56 b/w illus., ISBN 9781409411062, $119.95 (hardback)

Les Lions En Pierre Sculptée Chez Les Bakhtiari: Description Et Significations De Sculptures Zoomorphes Dans Une Société Tribale Du Sud-Ouest De L’iran, Pedram Khosronejad (2013) Canon Pyon, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing, 260 pp., numerous tables, line drawings, halftones and colour illustrations, ISBN 9781907774225, $250.00 (hardback)

‘The House is Black’, Rose Issa Projects, London, United Kingdom, October 14–November 14, 2013

‘Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800’, Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 16, 2013–5 January 2014

‘Iran Modern’, Asia Society, New York City, September 6, 2013–January 5, 2014

‘Nur: Light in Art and Science From the Islamic World’, Focus-Abengoa Foundation, Seville, Spain, October 2013–March 2014

‘Regional Vis-À-Vis Global Discourses: Contemporary art From the Middle East’, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom, July 5–6, 2013

‘Orientality: Cultural Orientalism and Mentality’, Pembroke College, Cambridge, United Kingdom, May 17–18, 2013