Resources & Publications

Book

Edited by Melanie Gibson

This volume of articles dedicated to Robert Hillenbrand includes contributions by his colleagues and students. Thirteen essays encompass some of his wide-ranging interests, with one section devoted to…

Book

by Barbara Brend, Translation and commentary by Ursula Sims-Williams

In this book, Barbara Brend provides a detailed study of the paintings in two celebrated Persian manuscripts housed in the British Library (Or.6810 and Add.25900). These two copies of the Khamsah of Nizami…

Book

Edited by Gwenaëlle Fellinger & Melanie Gibson

This new book, a co-publication with the Louvre, consolidates the major achievement of the 2018 exhibition held at the Museum of Louvre-Lens, L’Empire des roses. Chefs-d’oeuvre de l’art persan du…

Book

Authors: Ulrich Marzolph and Roxana Zenhari

Mirzā ʿAli-Qoli Khoʾi is the unsurpassed master of the art of illustration in Persian lithographed books of the Qajar period, both in terms of quality and quantity of production. In the decade of documented…

Book

Richard J.A. McGregor

Islam and the Devotional Object offers a history of Islamic practice through the aesthetic reception of medieval religious objects. Elaborate parades in Cairo and Damascus included decorated objects of…

Book

Editors: Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, Aïda El Khiari, and Annie Vernay-Nouri

Kalīla wa-Dimna is one of the best-known texts of medieval Arabic literature and counts among the most illustrated works in the Islamic world. The extent of the corpus and its journey through the ages…

Podcast

Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr

An Interview with D. Fairchild Ruggles

Shajar al-Durr--known as "Tree of Pearls"--began her remarkable career as a child slave, given as property to Sultan Salih of Egypt. She became his concubine, was manumitted, became his wife, served as governing regent, and ultimately rose to become the legitimately appointed sultan of Egypt in 1250 after her husband's death. Shajar al-Durr used her wealth and power to add a tomb to his urban madrasa; with this innovation, madrasas and many other charitably endowed architectural complexes became commemorative monuments, a practice that remains widespread today. A highly unusual case of a Muslim woman authorized to rule in her own name, her reign ended after only three months when she was forced to share her governance with an army general and for political expediency to marry him.

Despite the fact that Shajar al-Durr's story ends tragically with her assassination and hasty burial, her deeds in her lifetime offer a stark alternative to the continued belief that women in the medieval period were unseen, anonymous, and inconsequential in a world that belonged to men. D. Fairchild Ruggles' Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar Al-Durr (Oxford UP, 2020)--the first ever in English--places the rise and fall of the sultan-queen in the wider context of the cultural and architectural development of Cairo, the city that still holds one of the largest and most important collections of Islamic monuments in the world.

Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Podcast

From Granada to Berlin: The Alhambra Cupola

An Interview with Anna McSweeney

Part of the series CAHIM Connecting Art Histories in the Museum, Anna McSweeney's book From Granada to Berlin: The Alhambra Cupola (Kettler Verlag, 2020) is the story of an extraordinary survivor from the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain: the Alhambra cupola, now in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. The cupola, a ceiling crafted from carved and painted wood, was made to crown an exquisite mirador in one of the earliest palace buildings of the Alhambra. The book is the cupola's biography from its medieval construction to its imminent redisplay in Berlin. It traces the long history of the Alhambra through the prism of the cupola, from the Muslim craftsmen who built it, to its adaptation by the Christian conquerors after the fall of Granada in 1492, to its creation as a heritage site. The cupola was sketched by artists from across Europe before it was dismantled by a German financier and taken to Berlin in the 19th century. It witnessed the dramatic events of the 20th century in Germany and was eventually bought by the Museum in 1978. In recent decades, the new visibility of the cupola to the wider public has prompted questions about the object and its movement from Granada to Berlin. Its removal from the Alhambra and the complex reasons behind this loss is central to this biography. Setting the cupola within the wider context of Islamic heritage, it considers the role of collecting practices in the transformation of living monuments into heritage sites in the 20th century. This book presents a focused study of this unique object that cuts across academic disciplines and geographic boundaries to reveal a new perspective on the legacy of Islamic art in Europe and its continuing relevance today.

Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.