The Great Mosque Of Damascus

Focussing on the Great Mosque of Damascus, this volume discusses the scope and significance of the building campaign undertaken by the Umayyad caliph al-Walid b. ‘Abd al-Malik (86-96/705-15), and its implications for the development of early Islamic visual culture.

An expansive illustrated history of the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus is one of the oldest continuously used religious sites in the world. The mosque we see today was built in 705 CE by the Umayyad caliph al-Walid on top of a fourth-century Christian church that had been erected over a temple of Jupiter. Incredibly, despite the recent war, the mosque has remained almost unscathed, but over the centuries has been continuously rebuilt after damage from earthquakes and fires. In this comprehensive biography of the Umayyad Mosque, Alain George explores a wide range of sources to excavate the dense layers of the mosque's history, also uncovering what the structure looked like when it was first built with its impressive marble and mosaic-clad walls. George incorporates a range of sources, including new information he found in three previously untranslated poems written at the time the mosque was built, as well as in descriptions left by medieval scholars. He also looks carefully at the many photographs and paintings made by nineteenth-century European travelers, particularly those who recorded the building before the catastrophic fire of 1893.

A detailed and well-illustrated study of the history, architecture and symbolism of the early 8th-century mosque. The heavily annotated text includes analyses of the mosque's mosaic, interior decoration, clock and colonnade and broader discussions of the ambiguous meaning of the mosque's decorations, the topography of early medieval cities and the visual culture of Muslim architecture.

Within the context of globalization, cultural transformations are increasingly analyzed as hybridization processes. Hybridity itself, however, is often treated as a specifically post-colonial phenomenon. The contributors in this volume assume the historicity of transcultural flows and entanglements; they consider the resulting transformative powers to be a basic feature of cultural change. By juxtaposing different notions of hybridization and specific methodologies, as they appear in the various disciplines, this volume’s design is transdisciplinary. Each author presents a disciplinary concept of hybridization and shows how it operates in specific case studies. The aim is to generate a transdisciplinary perception of hybridity that paves the way for a wider application of this crucial concept

Die Beiträger des Bandes haben es sich zum Ziel gesetzt, den umfangreichen Bestand an Handschriftenfragmenten, der sich in der Qubbat al-khazna von Damaskus befindet, in der Geschichte des Mittleren Ostens zu verorten. Ebenso wie ihr berühmtes Pendant, die Geniza in Kairo, wurde die Qubba im 19. Jahrhundert "entdeckt", doch ihre 200.000 Fragmente fanden in der Forschung bisher nur geringe Aufmerksamkeit. Ein internationales und interdisziplinäres Team von Wissenschaftlern hat sich nun zusammengefunden, um die faszinierende Geschichte dieser Sammlung zu skizzieren und die außergewöhnlichen multilingualen, multireligiösen und multiscripturalen Artefakte, die sie beinhaltet, zu erfassen. Dieses Buch ist grundlegend für jene, die an Handschriftenstudien, Philologie und an der Geschichte des Mittleren Ostens interessiert sind.

In Articulating the Ḥijāba, Mariam Rosser-Owen analyses for the first time the artistic and cultural patronage of the ‘Amirid regents of the last Cordoban Umayyad caliph, Hisham II, a period rarely covered in the historiography of al-Andalus. Al-Mansur, the founder of this dynasty, is usually considered a usurper of caliphal authority, who pursued military victory at the expense of the transcendental achievements of the first two caliphs. But he also commissioned a vast extension to the Great Mosque of Cordoba, founded a palatine city, conducted skilled diplomatic relations, patronised a circle of court poets, and owned some of the most spectacular objects to survive from al-Andalus, in ivory and marble. This study presents the evidence for a reconsideration of this period.

This book examines non-Muslim religious sites, structures and spaces in the Islamic world. It reveals a vibrant portrait of life in the religious sites by illustrating how architecture responds to contextual issues and traditions. Sacred Precincts explores urban context; issues of identity; design; construction; transformation and the history of sacred sites and architecture in Europe, the Middle East and Africa from the advent of Islam to the 20th century. It includes case studies on churches and synagogues in Iran, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco and Malta, and on sacred sites in Nigeria, Mali, and the Gambia. With contributions by Clara Alvarez, Angela Andersen, Karen Britt, Karla Britton, Jorge Manuel Simão Alves Correia, Elvan Cobb, Daniel Coslett, Mohammad Gharipour, Mattia Guidetti, Suna Güven, Esther Kühn, Amy Landau, Ayla Lepine, Theo Maarten van Lint, David Mallia, Erin Maglaque, Susan Miller, A.A. Muhammad-Oumar, Meltem Özkan Altınöz, Jennifer Pruitt, Rafael Sedighpour, Ann Shafer, Jorge Manuel Simão Alves Correia, Ebru Özeke Tökmeci, Steven Thomson, Heghnar Watenpaugh, Alyson Wharton and Ethel S. Wolper.