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Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy
Muthanna, also known as mirror writing, is a compelling style of Islamic calligraphy composed of a source text and its mirror image placed symmetrically on a horizontal or vertical axis. This style elaborates on various scripts such as Kufic, naskh, and muhaqqaq through compositional arrangements, including doubling, superimposing, and stacking. Muthanna is found in diverse media, ranging from architecture, textiles, and tiles to paper, metalwork, and woodwork. Yet despite its centuries-old history and popularity in countries from Iran to Spain, scholarship on the form has remained limited and flawed. Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy provides a comprehensive study of the text...
Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in Its Illustrated Manuscripts
Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in its Illustrated Manuscripts focuses on a period of great artistic vitality in the region of Baghdad, a frontier area that was caught between the rival Ottoman and Safavid empires. In the period following the peace treaty of 1590, a corpus of more than thirty illustrated manuscripts and several single page paintings were produced. In this book Melis Taner presents a contextual study of the vibrant late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Baghdad art market, opening up further avenues of research on art production in provinces and border regions.
Gifts in the Age of Empire
Explores the Safavid and Ottoman empires through the lens of gifts. When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi'ism, it prompted the more established Ottoman Empire to align itself definitively with Sunni legalism. The political, religious, and military conflicts that arose have since been widely studied, but little attention has been paid to their diplomatic relationship. Sinem Arcak Casale here sets out to explore these two major Muslim empires through a surprising lens: gifts. Countless treasures—such as intricate carpets, gilded silver cups, and ivory-tusk knives—flowed from the Safavid to the Ottoman Empire throughout the...
Empire of Salons
A history of the Ottoman incorporation of Arab lands that shows how gentlemanly salons shaped culture, society, and governance Historians have typically linked Ottoman imperial cohesion in the sixteenth century to the bureaucracy or the sultan’s court. In Empire of Salons, Helen Pfeifer points instead to a critical but overlooked factor: gentlemanly salons. Pfeifer demonstrates that salons—exclusive assemblies in which elite men displayed their knowledge and status—contributed as much as any formal institution to the empire’s political stability. These key laboratories of Ottoman culture, society, and politics helped men to build relationships and exchange ideas across the far-flung ...
Iran and the Deccan
In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.
Behind the Story: Ethical Readings of Qurʾānic Narratives
Behind the Story: Ethical Readings of Qurʾānic Narratives is a pivotal work that presents groundbreaking research on the Qurʾānic narrative as a literary genre with profound moral significance. It underscores the genre's integral role in shaping Islamic moral thought, as manifested in areas like Islamic law, theology, Sufism, politics, and art. The book offers insightful interpretations of various Qurʾānic narratives, delving into their ethical dimensions and challenges. It also examines their historical reception and influence across both Muslim and non-Muslim scholarship, covering diverse disciplines such as mysticism, art, and applied ethics. This volume stands as an invaluable reso...
The Diez Albums
The five Diez albums in Berlin, acquired by Heinrich Friedrich von Diez in Constantinople around 1789, contain more than 400 figurative paintings, drawings, fragments, and calligraphic works originating for the most part from Ilkhanid, Jalayirid, and Timurid workshops. Gonnella, Weis and Rauch unite in this volume 21 essays that analyse their relation to their “parent” albums at the Topkapı Palace or examine specific works by reflecting upon their role in the larger history of book art in Iran. Other essays cover aspects such as the European and Chinese influence on Persianate art, aspects related to material and social culture, and the Ottoman interest in Persianate albums. This book m...
Histories of Ornament
This lavishly illustrated volume is the first major global history of ornament from the Middle Ages to today. Crossing historical and geographical boundaries in unprecedented ways and considering the role of ornament in both art and architecture, Histories of Ornament offers a nuanced examination that integrates medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and modern Euroamerican traditions with their Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican counterparts. At a time when ornament has re-emerged in architectural practice and is a topic of growing interest to art and architectural historians, the book reveals how the long history of ornament illuminates its global resurgence today. Organized by thematic s...
Mustafa Âli's Epic Deeds of Artists
The earliest known Ottoman literary source about the lives and works of calligraphers, painters, limners, and book-binders of the Ottoman and Persianate worlds, Mustafa ʿÂli’s (1541-1600) Epic Deeds of Artists (1587), was hitherto considered to be primarily a biographic dictionary. Based on a comprehensive reading of the descriptive and analytic tools of ʿÂli’s biographical writings as well as his passionately penned personal reflections on sixteenth-century attitudes toward art and artists, this critical edition by Esra Akın-Kıvanç brings to the fore the significance of Epic Deeds not only as a guide to the connoisseurs and aficionados of the time, but also as a fascinating commentary by a prominent intellectual on the spiritual meaning and material value of art.
