Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World is sponsored by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Muqarnas 32, subtitled “Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing In and Beyond the Lands of Islam” and guest edited by Olga Bush and Avinoam Shalem, is the outcome of a two-day conference (“Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing”) held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence in October 2012. Along with introductions by each of the guest editors, the volume contains ten articles that examine the gaze and the aesthetic experience of the beholder as they are constructed, depicted, and theorized within the culture-specific frameworks pertinent to the field of Islamic studies, through approaches developed in the fields of art history, visual culture, and anthropology.
Authors include Samer Akkach, Olga Bush, Holly Edwards, Emine Fetvacı, Laura U. Marks, Gülru Necipoğlu, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Matthew D. Saba, Avinoam Shalem, and Eva-Maria Troelenberg.
Gülru Necipoğlu, (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1986) is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She has been the editor of Muqarnas since 1993.
Muqarnas 32
Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing In and Beyond the Lands of Islam
Guest Editors: Olga Bush and Avinoam Shalem
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Avinoam Shalem, Amazement: The Suspended Moment of the Gaze
Olga Bush, Prosopopeia: Performing the Reciprocal Gaze
Conference Essays
Gülru Necipoğlu, The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of Islamic Visual Cultures: Sight, Insight, and Desire
D. Fairchild Ruggles, Visible and Invisible Bodies: The Architectural Patronage of Shajar al-Durr
Samer Akkach, The Eye of Reflection: Al-Nabulusi’s Spatial Interpretation of Ibn ʿArabi’s Tomb
Olga Bush, Entangled Gazes: The Polysemy of the New Great Mosque Of Granada
Emine Fetvacı, The Gaze in the Album of Ahmed I
Matthew D. Saba, A Restricted Gaze: The Ornament of the Main Caliphal Palace of Samarra
Avinoam Shalem, Experientia and Auctoritas: ʿAbd al-Latif al-Baghdadi’s Kitāb al-Ifāda wa’l-iʿtibār and the Birth of the Critical Gaze
Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Arabesques, Unicorns, and Invisible Masters: The Art Historian’s Gaze as Symptomatic Action?
Holly Edwards, Glancing Blows, Crossing Boundaries: From Local to Global in the Company of Afghan Women
Laura U. Marks, The Taming of Haptic Space: From Málaga to Valencia to Florence
Those interested in the visual culture of the Islamic world, as well as Byzantinists, Europeanists, medievalists, historians of the early modern era, and architectural historians.