PAT R I C I A B L E S S I N G

Teaching Islamic Architecture

This article is specifically about teaching Islamic architecture, rather than Islamic art ingeneral. It addresses the particular challenges presented by teaching Islamic architecturein contexts where visits to monuments are impossible. Some such observations are ofcourse valid to teaching architectural history in general, while others are specific to thebuilt environment of the Islamic world, and monuments relating to Muslim commu-nities around the globe. One of the greatest challenges in teaching Islamic art history, asKishwar Rizvi eloquently describes, is how to talk about the beauty and sophisticationof historical monuments and objects in a time of war and violence.1 I strongly believethat it is impossible to teach Islamic art history without discussing present-day geopol-itics. With current events in mind, students have questions about the historical back-ground of specific regions. I see my role equally as a teacher of the historical art andarchitecture of the Islamic world, and as an intermediary who provides students withthe tools to research and analyze cultural, historical, and religious issues. This is espe-cially the case when discussing cultural heritage, while also addressing the overwhelminghuman suffering intertwined with the destruction of major historical cities such asAleppo or Mosul.

A second challenge that presents itself is with the term “Islamic architecture.”2 Firstand foremost, the term implies religious monuments related to Islam—mosques, shrines,

1 . Kishwar Rizvi, “It’s Harder than Ever to Teach Islamic Art —But Never More Important,” The WashingtonPost, 6 January 2017 , https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/06/its-harder-than-ever-to-teach-islamic-art-but-never-more-important/, accessed 31 January 2020 .

2 . I will not get into the discussion surrounding the term “Islamic art” here. For discussions of these questions,see Gulru Necipoglu and Finbarr Barry Flood, “Frameworks of Islamic Art and Architecture: Concepts, Approachesand Historiographies,” in Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gulru Necipoglu(Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), vol. 1 , 2–56; Gulru Necipoglu, “The Concept of Islamic Art: Inherited Discourses andNew Approaches,” originally published in Islamic Art and the Museum, ed. Benoıt Junod, Georges Khalil, StefanWeber, and Gerhard Wolf (London: Saqi Books, 2012), reprinted in Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012). SheilaS. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, “The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field,” TheArt Bulletin 85 .1 (March, 2003): 152–184 . More broadly on the meaning of “Islamic” and “Islam” in pre-modernMuslim-ruled societies, see Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton and Oxford:Princeton University Press, 2016).

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Journal of Medieval Worlds, Vol. 2 , Issue 3-4 , pp. 124–133 , e-ISSN 2574-3988 © 2021 by The Regents ofthe University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy orreproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page,https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10 .1525/jmw.2020 .2 .3-4 .124

madrasas.3 Indeed, much of what has been preserved falls into these categories, oftensimply because these monuments survived through constant use and upkeep, while res-idential buildings disappeared as their inhabitants left. Commercial buildings such ascaravanserais, khans, and bath-houses (hammams) are also at times still in use. Theresidential buildings that remain are often palaces—for instance, the Topkapı Palace inIstanbul, or the Alhambra in Granada—while for other types of housing, we have to relyon archaeological evidence. Of course, none of this is specific to the Islamic world. Inaddition to monuments that are “Islamic” by virtue of their relationship to religiouspractice, however, there are buildings that in my view should be included: those belongingto non-Muslim communities living in Muslim-ruled regions.4 Synagogues, churches, andZoroastrian, Buddhist, and Hindu temples are among them, as are residential areas forJewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Hindu communities within cities under Muslim rule.5

Yet “architecture of the Islamic world” does not work, either, since mosques built byMuslim communities across the globe become a topic of discussion, particularly as wemove into the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries.6 Overall, a realistic goal for a coursethat covers a vast geography, and a wide chronological range (from c. 600 CE to thepresent), is to provide students with the tools to understand these various architectures,and to be able to conduct further research on their own if interest arises.

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The challenge of teaching Islamic architecture without being able to take students to a setof buildings certainly applies in the Americas: at most, a modern mosque or Islamic centercan be available for a visit, but certainly no medieval or early modern buildings. (Ofcourse, that is also true for courses that cover medieval and early modern architecture inother regions of the world.) In much of northern and western Europe, the same limitsapply, while university teachers in, for instance, Albania, Bosnia, Greece, Kosovo, Mace-donia, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey may have the possibility of accessing monuments rightin the city where they teach. Even in those cases, of course, much of the instruction has totake place in the classroom in order to cover a wider range of buildings and regions. This

3 . For an overview of the development of these building types, as well as minarets, palaces, and caravanserais inchronological and geographical order, see Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1994).

4 . I use the term “Muslim-ruled” rather than “Muslim-majority” because for instance the Ottoman Empire didnot become “Muslim-majority” until Ottoman sultan Selim I conquered the Levant and Syria in 1517–16 . A largeproportion of the population of under Ottoman rule in the Balkans and Anatolia was Christian throughout theEmpire’s reign (late 13

th century to 1922).5 . Jennifer A. Pruitt, “A Miracle at Muqattam: Moving a Mountain to Build a Church in the Early Fatimid

Caliphate (969–995),” in Sacred Precincts: Non-Muslim Religious Sites in Islamic Territories, ed. MohammadGharipour (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2014), 277–90 (and further chapters in the same volume); MohammadGharipour, ed., Synagogues in the Islamic World: Architecture, Design, and Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2017).

6 . Elisabeth Becker, “Reconstructing the Muslim Self in Diaspora: Socio-Spatial Practices in Urban EuropeanMosques,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 8 .2 (July, 2019): 389–414 ; Theodore van Loan and Eva-Maria Troelenberg, “The Rome Mosque and Islamic Centre: A Case of Diasporic Architecture in the GlobalizedMediterranean,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 8 .2 (July, 2019): 417–432 .

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is also true for Muslim-majority countries across the globe, at least for general courses onIslamic architecture that are not designed to focus on a specific region. Therefore,photographs and architectural drawings are crucial, and often not easy to track down.An excellent resource devoted to Islamic architecture is Archnet, an open-access platformsponsored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) and the Aga Khan Documen-tation Center, MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT). The site provides photographs of a widerange of buildings, with floor plans and other architectural drawings included in somecases. A timeline feature presents historical information on major Muslim dynasties alongwith related buildings. The “Pedagogy” tab provides access to syllabi on a wide range oftopics related to Islamic art and architecture.

As there is no other central platform for teaching resources in Islamic art history,much of the material needs to be found on sites such as the Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline ofArt History and ArtStor. The platform smarthistory.org has also begun to expand itssection on Islamic art, with more to come in the future. Especially useful to start with isits page on basic features of mosque architecture.7 Back on Archnet, a PowerPoint file on“The Language of Islamic Architecture” contains a particularly useful section explain-ing basic features of Islamic religious monuments, along with an explanation of the maintypes of architectural drawings: plans, sections, elevations, axonometric views. This bringsme to a further challenge in teaching architecture in general: students often do not knowhow to read architectural drawings, and how to imagine a space by looking at them.(More on this in “Assignments.”)

YouTube and other platforms to share videos come with the advantage that nearlyevery space (yes, even the ones where cameras are supposedly banned) can be viewed. Thisis especially useful for monuments and sites such as Mecca that are central to teachingIslamic architecture, but not accessible to non-Muslims. The materials provided by thosewho are able to visit these monuments—whether scholars with specific research projectsor Muslims going for pilgrimage and prayer—greatly enhance my teaching, and also givestudents insights into the contemporary life of historical monuments.8 Documentaries onwide-ranging topics such as the Umayyad palace city of Madinat al-Zahra near Cordoba(Spain) or the sixteenth-century Ottoman architect Sinan can be found.

With regard to cultural heritage, sites connected to research projects such as“Monuments of Mosul in Danger” provide access to reconstructions and 3D models,further resources for students to explore which open up possibilities for class assign-ments.9 3D-models of a few buildings are also available, for instance of Bab Zuwaylain Cairo, an eleventh-century city gate with fifteenth-century additions that was metic-ulously restored (as documented in the page created by the American Research Center in

7 . Kendra Weisbin, “Introduction to Mosque Architecture,” Smarthistory, August 8 , 2015 , https://smarthistory.org/introduction-to-mosque-architecture/ (accessed January 31 , 2020).

8 . This YouTube video of a young Emirati couple performing the ‘umrah pilgrimage to Mecca is just oneexample of this religious experience being shared. https://youtu.be/lhktGdq1KLg (accessed 5 December 2020).

9 . See examples on Roman and Swahili architecture in Jeffrey Fleisher, “Building Medieval Worlds: AClassroom Experience in Digitally Reconstructing Ancient Buildings,” Journal of Medieval Words 1 , no. 1

(2019): 107–116 . Monuments of Mosul in Danger, http://www.monumentsofmosul.com/ (accessed 5

December 2020).

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Egypt). A full list of resources cannot be displayed here, but the ones given above area good place to start; a much more comprehensive list of resources that also includesmuseum collections, epigraphic databases, and historical photographic archives is theYork Islamic Art and Architecture Database, prepared by Richard P. McClary, whocontinues to update it.10 Finally, a list of online teaching resources compiled by theInternational Center of Medieval Art during the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020

also contains resources relevant to Islamic architecture.11 In July 2020 , the Historians ofIslamic Art Association (HIAA) hosted a recorded discussion on online resources withChristiane Gruber (University of Michigan), Ruba Kana’an (University of Toronto,Mississauga), and Michael Toler and Matt Saba (Archnet/MIT). A crowd-sourced pro-ject of gathering short pedagogical videos about objects, buildings, and themes, recordedby specialist of Islamic art history, resulted from this discussion to enhance onlineresources for teaching. Led by Professor Gruber as the president elect of HIAA, thisproject, “Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online,” was started with the aim of supportingonline teaching during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and videos are continuouslybeing posted on a designated website.12

A word on readings: of course, a number of textbooks or survey books on Islamic arthistory exist, although none of them focus exclusively on architecture.13 With the excep-tion of one title, these books are out of print, and the cost of used copies varies greatly.14

None of these titles are available as e-books, an additional difficulty in the COVID-19pandemic when most students are unable to access campus libraries.15 I should also notethat these books were published between 1991 and 2000 , and thus do not reflect the last20 to 30 years of vibrant scholarship in the expanding field of Islamic art history. Aftertrying out several books over the years, I have now abandoned a textbook in favor ofindividual articles or book chapters, some “classics” in the field, others brand-new pub-lications by early-career scholars. Among these readings, I still assign chapters from thetextbooks I used previously, and from other, similar works.16 For recent scholarship

10 . https://www.academia.edu/38972057/YIAAD_York_Islamic_Art_and_Architecture_Database_Islamic_Art_and_Architecture_Resource_List (accessed 5 December 2020).

11 . https://www.medievalart.org/onlineteaching (accessed 5 December 2020).12 . https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/khamseen/ (accessed 5 December 2020).13 . Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture works well to look up specific monuments, but is difficult to use as

a narrative text, since this is not how the book was composed.14 . Only the following title is still in print: Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Art and Architecture (London: Thames

& Hudson, 1999). Other books I have used are: Barbara Brend, Islamic Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1991); Robert Irwin, Islamic Art in Context: Art, Architecture and the Literary World (New York: H.N.Abrams, 1997); Markus Hattstein and Peter Delius, ed., Islam – Art and Architecture (Cologne: Konemann, 2000;paperback Rheinbreitbach: H.F. Ullmann, 2008); I have not yet used Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, Islamic Arts(London: Phaidon, 1997), another popular choice.

15 . The 18 students in my lecture course on Islamic art history at Princeton this semester live in time zonesacross the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.

16 . Two volumes in the Pelican History of Art are Richard Ettinghausen, Oleg Grabar, and Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Islamic Art and Architecture 650–1250 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) andJonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250–1800 (New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 1994). Both volumes are available online through the Art and Architecture ePortal, which requiresan institutional subscription for access, at https://www.aaeportal.com/home. The recent two-volume BlackwellCompanion to Islamic Art and Architecture, edited by Gulru Necipoglu and Finbarr Barry Flood, is not designed as

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specifically on architecture, I have also used the International Journal of Islamic Architec-ture, which extends to architectural practice both in the Islamic world, and Islamicreligious and cultural spaces elsewhere, as well as restoration projects.

A S S I G N M E N T S

While introducing architecture in any class, an exercise I like to ask students to do isdrawing a floor plan of a building they know well. This could for instance be theirdorm, the home they grew up in, or any campus building. The crucial element issurprise: students do this assignment in class, with paper and pens that I provide, sothat there is no time to look up things online and make the drawings look pretty. Theidea is not to be exact and draw to scale (since I have not so far taught architecturestudents), but rather to represent the building in a way that corresponds to conventionsof plans: walls have a thickness, doors and windows appear as gaps, etc. I ask students todo this after I briefly introduce architectural plans, something that generally elicitsboredom, since “Oh of course I know what a plan is! Why is she going on and onabout this? I am not learning anything here!” Having to draw a plan quickly breaks upthese presumptions, and students realize how tricky it can be. To the point of effec-tiveness: I have to credit Leıla el-Wakil, who introduced this assignment in the very firstclass on architectural history that I took at the University of Geneva in 2001–02 . Thefact that this stuck with me until I began to teach my own classes more than a decadelater speaks volumes as to the assignment’s success. And yes, I failed miserably atdrawing a functional building.

In a recent iteration of my introductory class to Islamic art, I experimented withWikipedia editing as a final assignment. I was inspired by the edit-a-thon to edit Wiki-pedia articles on Islamic art that Stephennie Mulder (University of Texas, Austin) andAlex Dika Seggerman (Rutgers University Newark) launched in fall 2018 in partnershipwith Leslee Michelsen at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art.17 Mulder publisheda Twitter thread with details on the assignment in her class. While I cannot speak to thebenefits of the final edit-a-thon that allows students to complete and upload their workcollective, I did find the editing assignment productive. The resources provided by theWikipedia Student Program allow for customizable class online class schedules withweekly assignments, and contain detailed tutorials on guidelines and technical aspects.In my class with 14 students, 6 articles were edited, since I opted for group-work; studentsadded 12 ,000 words of text and 109 references. One of the articles on architecture thatstudents edited is the entry on the fifteenth-century Green Mosque in Bursa, Turkey.Students were generally happy with the public-facing outcome of the class, and liked that-

a textbook, and at a publisher’s list price of $410 for the print edition, and $329 for the online edition, it is toopricey to require students to purchase it. The volumes should, however, find their way to the library since individualchapters provide up-to-date scholarship on a wide range of topics and regions that work well as assigned readings. Forhistorical background intertwined with object histories, see Ladan Akbarnia et al., The Islamic World: A History inObjects (London: British Museum, 2018).

17 . A further edit-a-thon in fall 2019 also had Emily Neumeier’s students at Temple University join. Since myclass at Pomona College had to be taught in spring 2019 , I was not able to join this collaborative project.

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their writing had become part of a world-wide community of knowledge gathering andseeking. This project works really well for a topic like Islamic architecture, where evensome major monuments have very little information. One of the challenges of the projectwas to find open-access images that could be published on Wikipedia, according to theplatform’s image guidelines.

In a spring 2020 class that focused on sensory perception in medieval and earlymodern art in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, I experimented with an assignmentusing the game-design software Unity. With the support of game designers CameronBollinger and Erica Holcomb of Explorasaurus Studios, students worked with a 3Drecreation of several rooms in the Alhambra: the Hall of Comares, the Courtyard ofLions, and the Hall of Two Sisters.18 Students worked on furnishing the rooms withobjects, imagining the building in use during different times of the day and in differentseasons. To this end, students researched objects, life at the Nasrid court, and theAlhambra’s building history. Initially, the greatest challenge was that the first versionof the Unity project did not run on Mac laptops, which is what most students used in thiscase. The final results are now available to download as an open-access desktop version forboth Mac and PC.

An initial attempt to open the Courtyard of Lions model on my own Mac led to whata student aptly termed the “Barbie House Alhambra” with bright pink water (Figure 1).After struggling to find an available computer lab with more powerful machines, ideallyrunning Windows, the solution was to create a version of the project with stripped-downgraphics (Figure 2) that ran on Macs. This did not look as good as the first version, butstudents were finally able to work on their own laptops while completing their assign-ment. The final version still had a few bugs in rendering plants, but gives a good sense of

FIGURE 1. The Courtyard of Lions in Unity, with pink water.

18 . While there is a vast specialist literature on the Alhambra in Spanish and English, for a general introduction,see Oleg Grabar, The Alhambra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), and Olga Bush, Reframing theAlhambra: Architecture, Poetry, Textiles and Court Ceremonial (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 1–16 .For the the class project, see https://explorasaur.us/2020/05/virtual-alhambra/ (accessed 5 December 2020).

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FIGURE 2. The Hall of Comares in the stripped-down version of the model in Unity.

FIGURE 3. The Courtyard of Lions in the final version of the project.

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FIGURE 4. The Hall of Comares in the final version of the project.

FIGURE 5. The Hall of Two Sisters in the final version of the project.

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the space (Figure 3). Students were able to successfully furnish the Hall of Comares asa dining hall (Figure 4) and the Hall of the Two Sisters as a bedroom (Figure 5). Studentsincluded furniture, ceramics, and textiles in the process. The ability to include captionsfor objects in Unity also allowed students to include further information: for instance, ona large curtain from the Nasrid period (Figure 6), one of a pair held in the ClevelandMuseum of Art (inv. no. 1982 .a-b).

Since instruction was moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic for the secondhalf of the semester, the project did not continue quite as smoothly. Students generallystruggled to adjust to following classes online while also trying to settle in back at home,or into temporary off-campus housing. For the digital component of the classes, chal-lenges included the lack of access to high-speed internet and laptops with sufficient RAM,and difficulties in coordinating with group members in different time-zones. Overall, themain takeaway is that students were deeply engaged with complex scholarship on mul-tisensory perception in medieval art and architecture, and able to deploy concepts theyhad read about in these text as they were working on their models. The deep reflectionthat went into these projects emerged in final papers that students were able to draftdespite the changed circumstances of instruction. I will certainly use a similar approach infuture semesters, hopefully back in the classroom with students. n

FIGURE 6. One of the “Alhambra curtains” in the project’s gallery space with caption.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First of all, I thank Geraldine Heng for suggesting that I write this essay. Thanks are due to DanielMichon, who encouraged me to pursue Unity for a course and introduced me to Cameron Bollinger andErica Holcomb, whose contribution in creating the model and working with students was invaluable.I also thank Leigh Lieberman for discussing ideas for the course with me, and for inviting me to presenton the course in progress in the Digital Humanities Research Studio at the Claremont Colleges inFebruary 2020 . For bearing the brunt of the experiments with assignments described below, I thank allstudents in ARHI 120: Introduction to Islamic Art in spring 2019 and ARHI 122: Sensory Spaces,Tactile Objects: The Senses in Art and Architecture in spring 2020 , both taught at Pomona Collegewith students from all five Claremont Colleges. Going back to my undergraduate studies at the Uni-versity of Geneva, I thank Leıla El-Wakil for teaching an inspiring course on architectural history thatstarted what has become my scholarly career.

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