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Beautifully illustrated, this is an essential reference work for students and connoisseurs of calligraphy alike.
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.
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When the Umayyads, the first Islamic dynasty, rose to power shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632), the polity of which they assumed control had only recently expanded out of Arabia into the Roman eastern Mediterranean, Iraq and Iran. A century later, by the time of their downfall in 750, the last Umayyad caliphs governed the largest empire that the world had seen, stretching from Spain in the West to the Indus valley and Central Asia in the East. By then, their dynasty and the ruling circles around it had articulated with increasing clarity the public face of the new monotheistic religion of Islam, created major masterpieces of world art and architecture, some of which sti...
Laboile's timeless and universal images inspire longing for the endless summer days of our childhood.
Twelve scholars contextualize and critically examine the key debates about the controversy over icons and their veneration that would fundamentally shape Byzantium and Orthodox Christianity.
A quest for the legendary Blue Manuscript of medieval Islam becomes a voyage of self-discovery for characters from east and west in this fascinating, many-layered novel. The Blue Manuscript is the ultimate prize for any collector of Islamic treasures. But does it still exist, and if so, can it be found? In search of answers to these questions, an assortment of archaeologists heads for a remote area of Egypt, where they work with local villagers to excavate a promising site.But as social and cultural preconceptions amongst both visitors and hosts start to unravel, the mystery seems only to deepen and darken ... What do the fables of the village storyteller mean for the westerners, and can the...
Kepel has traveled throughout the Muslim world gathering documents, interviews, and archival materials, in order to give readers a comprehensive understanding of the scope of Islamist movements, their past, and their present. 7 maps.
First published in English in 2007 under title: The history of terrorism: from antiquity to al Qaeda.
The collection of Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan contains some of the world's finest examples of painting and calligraphy and is perhaps the most important private Muslim collection of Islamic art. This volume, richly illustrated with 24 color plates and 101 black-and-white photographs, provides a brief history of the collection and offers a generous selection of paintings, manuscripts, calligraphies, bindings, and drawings that spans the geographic range of Islamic art from North Africa to India. Detailed discussions of each illustration introduce readers to the major patrons and artists in the development of the arts of the precious book. Anthony Welch and Stuart Cary Welch have selected the mo...