International Journal of Islamic Architecture - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2016

The Arab Spring launched political shifts that were once considered impossible. Five years later, the events have taken a darker turn, with a mounting death toll; the displacement of millions; and the destruction of cities and infrastructure. The role of cultural heritage in the protests and conflicts of the Arab Spring and the Middle East generally is manifold. Culture has become a collateral damage of war, as the destruction that opponents have inflicted on each other has also harmed cities and cultural heritage sites. But, more than merely an unintended target, culture has also been ‘combatant’ and ‘victim’ at the same time, engaged, wielded and contested in three primary, interrelated dimensions: a war over culture; a culture at war; and a culture of war. Analysis of issues in cultural heritage and an awareness of the historic resonance of culture seem all the more urgent at a time of great uncertainty, contestation and ongoing violence.

Briefly reviewing the history of urbanization in the Arab world, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present, this article argues that comprehensive heritage preservation did not obtain until the late twentieth century, in tandem with mounting economic and urban pressures on historic cities, which threatened not only their architectural monuments but also their entire social fabric. Analysing the situation since these transformations, the article concludes that the rampant real estate capitalism of the last quarter century, fuelled by investments from the Gulf region, worsened the conservation conditions of these old cities and unravelled their civil qualities. The article posits that the Arab Spring was partly a response to these dismal conditions. It brought to the forefront the value of civil rights, whose Arabic equivalent, al-huquq al-madaniyya, combines in one semantic field the notions of city, civil, civilization, law and religion. This makes it possible to re-conceive heritage preservation as a civil right that is meant to serve both the cities and their citizens.

Cairo’s landscape has morphed over the past century due to uncontrolled urban growth. This transformation has overturned the city’s iconic status as a city of great monuments of Islamic art, the ‘City Victorious’. While Cairo has occupied a central position in the study of historic art and architecture from the Middle East, poor planning and mismanagement of heritage sites have put the city’s historic significance into a state of crisis. While historians turn away from Cairo’s contemporary urbanity, by contrast, photographers such as Anthony Hamboussi have refocused their lenses on the city’s current realities. The city’s historic monuments are drowning in an urban topography that resulted from impoverished governance and improvised urban expansion. What can we learn from photographs of Cairo’s ongoing urban informality, uneven development and spatial inequality? This article critically examines one photographer’s project to make visible the undesirable majority of contemporary Cairo. The author argues that engaging with the city’s contemporary reality, in this case through photography, is key to understanding its declining heritage status and the poor condition of many of its monuments of Islamic architecture.

When demonstrations against Yemen’s former regime first began in 2011, observers expressed surprise at two developments: first, that women led the demonstrations, and second, that Yemen’s heavily armed tribes did not lead the country into civil war. Instead, a significant number of tribesmen went into cities to protect demonstrators from harm, and others protected their own communities from the incursions of outsiders. This article suggests that both developments are rooted in a deeply engrained tribal heritage that provides social capital, contributes to Yemeni society’s resilience and counteracts stereotypes of primitivism by prioritizing mediation, dialogue and consensus above the facile use of force or terrorism. Ways in which this heritage can be harnessed to support national reconciliation and development are proposed. Yemen’s tribal heritage is threatened by recurrent political and economic crises, various forms of modernism, and imported conservative interpretations of Islam that perceive tribalism as divisive and women’s mobility unacceptable. By far the most serious threat to Yemen’s population and heritage, however, is the current war unleashed by Saudi Arabia and its allies, which threatens to destroy the very foundations of Yemeni society.

A widespread nostalgia for the Ottoman period is visible in numerous urban regeneration projects proliferating across the Middle East. This article explores how Ottoman heritage in Palestine and Istanbul both propels oppressive sociospatial schemes and forms the basis for social movements formed to contest these schemes. In Istanbul, the banner of urban regeneration has been used to expropriate and displace local populations in a context marked by rapidly escalating real estate values and huge profits realized by developers allied with an entrepreneurial political class. The politically-driven heritagization occurring in Istanbul uncannily resembles the efforts aggressively pushed forward by an alliance between Israeli settlers and the government in Israel/Palestine – a form of class cleansing as opposed to a predominantly ethnic one targeting Palestinians. In response, Palestinian heritage organizations are endeavouring to rehabilitate old cities in towns and villages of the West Bank, in an attempt to improve the economic and social livelihoods of Palestinians and help them resist colonization.

This article discusses recent Occupy-style protests that took place at sites of heritage quality in Turkey. It looks into the material and discursive ways in which the protests have negotiated possession, dispossession and belonging across time. Cultural heritage is more often than not understood as a ‘thing’ belonging to a particular proprietor (regardless of heritage’s intangibility or the proprietor’s collectivity or anonymity). It is regulated as such not just on the level of nation states but also globally. The examples discussed in this article, however, have seen much of this association thrown into disarray by shifting focus, instead, to vulnerability and dispossession. This shift of focus invokes the following two forces: (1) the violent pasts and their role in the production of ‘cultural heritage’ as such, and (2) the risk of earthquake and its prompting of negotiations over the use, ownership and physical layout of heritage-quality sites. What sorts of political agency might heritage enable when it is experienced and conceptualized through vulnerability and dispossession? What might such experience and conceptualization mean for the temporalities and human–nonhuman hierarchy associated with conventional understandings of belonging in and through heritage? The article explores these questions through two cases: Gezi Park and its environs in Istanbul, and the Tigris Valley (including Hewsel Gardens and Mount Kırklar) in Diyarbakır.

The Syrian civil war has resulted in over 250,000 deaths and several million displaced refugees within Syria and abroad. In addition to this human toll, the conflict has resulted in the devastation of the country’s acclaimed cultural heritage sites and the historical fabric that composed the country’s social landscape and the identity of its population. In this article, we consider the reaction of the international heritage community to this moment of crisis. To date, the international heritage community has developed three kinds of projects: site documentation projects; public-awareness-raising projects; and emergency training and mitigation projects. Most of these undertakings have prioritized the collection and dissemination of information about heritage loss. Less attention has been given to emergency interventions to support Syrians inside the country and the at-risk heritage. A significant gap exists between international knowledge about heritage in this crisis and the immediate needs of Syrian heritage professionals. Here, we consider some of the reasons for the divergence between on-the-ground-need and international response, along with the intended and unintended outcomes resulting from the documentation and public-awareness-raising projects. In terms of tangible results, there is no substitute for efforts conducted within a humanitarian framework. The challenge is in encouraging the international heritage community to embrace such an approach.

WORLD HERITAGE, URBAN DESIGN AND TOURISM: THREE CITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST, LUNA KHIRFAN (2014) Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 196 pp., 58 b&w illus., ISBN 9781409424079, $104.95 (hardback)

THE POLITICS AND PRACTICES OF CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE MIDDLE EAST: POSITIONING THE MATERIAL PAST IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES, RAMI DAHER AND IRENE MAFFI (2014) London: I.B. Tauris, 320 pp., ISBN 9781848855359, $99.00 (hardback)

RAYY: FROM ITS ORIGINS TO THE MONGOL INVASIONS: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL STUDY, ROCCO RANTE (2015) Leiden and Boston: Brill. xiv + 165 pp., 107 illus., ISBN 9789004279292, $149.00 (hardback)

LEGENDS OF AUTHORITY: THE 1215 SELJUK INSCRIPTIONS OF SINOP CITADEL, TURKEY, SCOTT REDFORD (2014) Istanbul: Koç University Press, 288 pp., 112 figures, ISBN 9786055250300, $32.50 (paperback)

DEMYSTIFYING DOHA: ON ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM IN AN EMERGING CITY, ASHRAF SALAMA AND FLORIAN WIEDMANN (2013) Farnham, Surrey: Publishing Limited, 260 pp., 122 illus., 13 tables, ISBN 9781409466345, $119.95 (hardback)

‘CITIES OF THE DEAD: THE ANCESTRAL CEMETERIES OF KYRGYZSTAN’, ARTHUR A. HOUGHTON GALLERY, THE COOPER UNION, NEW YORK, JANUARY 27–FEBRUARY 28, 2015

‘ISLAMIC ART NOW: CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE MIDDLE EAST’, THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, LOS ANGELES, FEBRUARY 1, 2015–JANUARY 3, 2016

‘VISION OF MUGHAL INDIA: THE COLLECTION OF HOWARD HODKIN’ AND ‘INSPIRED BY INDIA: PAINTING BY HOWARD HODGKIN’, AGA KHAN MUSEUM, TORONTO, CANADA, FEBRUARY 21–JUNE 21, 2015

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA ART HISTORIANS ‘OLD SPACES, NEW NARRATIVES: ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIES’, COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION 103RD ANNUAL CONFERENCE, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 11–14, 2015

BAMIYAN CULTURAL CENTRE DESIGN COMPETITION ANNOUNCEMENT, UNESCO OFFICE, KABUL, AFGHANISTAN, FEBRUARY 18, 2015