Art and Architecture

In one of the most remarkable artistic pilgrimages in history, the nineteenth century saw scores of Western artists heading to the Middle East. Inspired by the allure of the exotic Orient, they went in search of subjects for their paintings. Orientalist Lives looks at what led this surprisingly diverse and idiosyncratic group of men—and some women—to often remote and potentially dangerous locations, from Morocco to Egypt, the Levant, and Turkey. There they lived, worked, and traveled for weeks or months on end, gathering material with which to create art for their clients back in the drawing-rooms of Boston, London, and Paris. Based on his research in museums, libraries, archives, galleries, and private collections across the world, James Parry traces these journeys of cultural and artistic discovery. From the early pioneer David Roberts through the heyday of leading stars such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Frederick Arthur Bridgman, to Orientalism’s post-1900 decline, he describes how these traveling artists prepared for their expeditions, coped with working in unfamiliar and challenging surroundings, engaged with local people, and then took home to their studios the memories, sketches, and collections of artifacts necessary to create the works for which their audiences clamored. Excerpts from letters and diaries, including little-known accounts and previously unpublished material, as well as photographs, sketches, and other original illustrations, bring alive the impressions, experiences, and careers of the Orientalists and shed light on how they created what are now once again recognized as masterpieces of art.

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The book is a 2019 PROSE Awards finalist in the Humanities / Art History and Criticism category. Click here to read more.

In this groundbreaking work, film scholar Viola Shafik examines popular and commercial movies from Egypt’s film industry, including a number of the biggest box-office hits widely distributed in Egypt and the Arab world. Turning a critical eye on a major player in Egyptian cultural life, Shafik examines these films against the backdrop of the country’s overall socio-political development, from the emergence of the film industry in the 1930s, through the Nasser and Sadat eras, up to the era of globalization. In unearthing the largely contradictory meanings conveyed by different films, Popular Egyptian Cinema examines a broad array of themes, from gender relations to feminism, Islamism and popular ideas about sexuality and morality. Focusing on representations of religious and ethnic minorities—primarily Copts, Jews, and Nubians—Shafik draws out issues such as the formation of the Egyptian nation, cinematic stereotyping, and political and social taboos. Shafik also considers pivotal genres, such as melodrama, realism, and action film, in relation to public debates over highbrow and lowbrow culture and in light of local and international film criticism.

The Middle Eastern bazaar is much more than a context for commerce: the studies in this book illustrate that markets, regardless of their location, scale, and permanency, have also played important cultural roles within their societies, reflecting historical evolution, industrial development, social and political conditions, urban morphology, and architectural functions. This interdisciplinary volume explores the dynamics of the bazaar with a number of case studies from Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Nablus, Bursa, Istanbul, Sana’a, Kabul, Tehran, and Yazd. Although they share some contextual and functional characteristics, each bazaar has its own unique and fascinating history, traditions, cultural practices, and structure. One of the most intriguing aspects revealed in this volume is the thread of continuity from past to present exhibited by the bazaar as a forum where a society meets and intermingles in the practice of goods exchange—a social and cultural ritual that is as old as human history.

Silver Treasures from the Land of Sheba documents a disappearing artistic and cultural tradition with over three hundred photographs showing individual pieces, rare images of women wearing their jewelry with traditional dress, and the various regions in Yemen where the author did her field research. Ransom’s descriptions of the people she met and befriended, and her exploration of the significance of a woman’s handmade jewelry with its attributes of power, protection, beauty, and personal identity, will appeal to ethnic jewelry fans, ethnographers, jewelry designers, and art historians. Amulet cases, hair ornaments, bridal headdresses, earrings, necklaces, ankle and wrist bracelets are all beautifully photographed in intricate detail, interspersed with the author’s own photographs of the women who shared their stories and their hospitality with her. A chapter on the history of silversmithing in Yemen tells the surprising story of the famed Jewish Yemeni silversmiths, many of whom left Yemen in the late 1940s. This is the first in-depth study of Yemeni silver, uniquely illustrated with photographs of a world that is transforming before our eyes, and animated with the portraits of a precious legacy.

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In a major addition to the academic library on the cinema of Youssef Chahine and on Arab and Egyptian cinema in general, Malek Khouri here presents the most comprehensive and up-to-date study on Chahine’s work to appear since his death in 2008. The methodological approach of the book, and more precisely the discussion of the theme of Arab national unity from a post-colonial point of view, emphasizes the ideological underpinnings of this Egyptian director’s themes as well as his esthetics. The author focuses on the interaction between Chahine’s personal and political preoccupations, his eclectic cinematic style, and his devotion to connecting with a wide audience of filmgoers. The Arab National Project in Youssef Chahine’s Cinema is an important contribution to original scholarship in the fields of cultural studies, sociology of film, and history of cinema, and will be of great interest to scholars, students, and cinema lovers all over the world.

In 1980, Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas traveled to Lebanon to film a documentary of interviews with Palestinians of the refugee camps around Beirut about their dreams. The Dream: A Diary of the Film is Malas’s haunting chronicle of his immersion in the life of the camps, including Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, Nahr al-Bared, and Ein al-Helweh. It also describes the filmmaking process, from the research stage to the film’s unofficial release, in Shatila Camp, before it reached a global audience. In vivid and poetic detail, Malas provides a snapshot of Palestinian refugees at a critical juncture of Lebanon’s bloody civil war, and at the height of the PLO’s power in Lebanon before the 1982 Israeli invasion and the PLO’s subsequent expulsion. Malas probes his subjects’ dreams and existential fears with an artist’s acute sensitivity, revealing the extent to which the wounds and contingencies of Palestinian statelessness are woven into the tapestry of a fragmented Arab nationalism. Although he halted his work on the film in 1982, following the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, he completed it in 1987, turning 400 interviews into 23 dreams and 45 minutes of screen time. Both diary and film present these people somewhere between present and past tense, but they are preserved forever in the word, magnetic tape, and now in digital code. The Dream is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Palestinians in the modern Middle East, and for students and scholars of Arab filmmaking, politics, and literature.

Just to the south of modern Cairo stands the historic enclave known as Old Cairo, which grew up in and around the Roman fortress of Babylon, and which today hosts a unique collection of monuments that attest to the shared cultural heritage of ancient Egyptians, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. In this lavishly illustrated celebration of a very special place, renowned photographer Sherif Sonbol’s remarkable images of the fortress, churches, synagogue, and mosque illuminate the living fabric of the ancient and medieval stones, while the text describes the history of Old Cairo from the time of the ancient Egyptians and the Romans to the founding of the first Muslim city of al-Fustat, focusing on the Jewish history of the area (exploring the famous Genizah documents found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue that tell so much about everyday life in medieval Egypt), the early Coptic Christian churches, some of the oldest in the world, and the arrival of the Muslims in the seventh century, their establishment of al-Fustat on the edge of Old Cairo, and the building of the oldest mosque in Africa.

The search for meaning in Islamic art is of enduring interest. This book explores the iconography of Islamic art and presents a diverse range of approaches. Despite this variety, there is an overarching theme—the linking of the interpretation of objects to textual sources. This results in a collection of in-depth studies of motifs as diverse as the peacock, trees, and the figure holding a cup and branch. In addition, new interpretations are presented of other objects, such as an Ayyubid metal basin or Mongol paintings. Textual sources on the Ka’ba or the use of marble provide a starting point for the examination of objects and their relationship to history. The architectural decoration of monuments from Egypt to India is analysed, and Arab and Safavid paintings are mined for meaning. Links with Christian elements in Sicily or Buddhist stupas are appraised. Professor Robert Hillenbrand’s writings on Islamic art and architecture cover an enormous range, from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries, and from Spain to India. The multiplicity of approaches to the search for meaning in Islamic art found in this book mirrors the broad range of his scholarship. Lavishly illustrated throughout, with color and black-and-white photographs and line-drawings Contributors: Sylvia Auld, Marianne Barrucand, Sheila S. Blair, Jonathan M. Bloom, Barbara Brend, Anna Contadini, Abbas Daneshvari, Geza Fehervari, Barbara Finster, Finbarr Barry Flood, Oleg Grabar, Ulrike al-Khamis, Marcus Milwright, Bernard O’Kane, B. W. Robinson, Avinoam Shalem, Raya Y. Shani, Rachel Ward.

Just to the south of modern Cairo stands the historic enclave known as Old Cairo, which grew up in and around the Roman fortress of Babylon, and which today hosts a unique collection of monuments that attest to the shared cultural heritage of ancient Egyptians, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. In this lavishly illustrated celebration of a very special place, renowned photographer Sherif Sonbol’s remarkable images of the fortress, churches, synagogue, and mosque illuminate the living fabric of the ancient and medieval stones, while the text describes the history of Old Cairo from the time of the ancient Egyptians and the Romans to the founding of the first Muslim city of al-Fustat, focusing on the Jewish history of the area (exploring the famous Genizah documents found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue that tell so much about everyday life in medieval Egypt), the early Coptic Christian churches, some of the oldest in the world, and the arrival of the Muslims in the seventh century, their establishment of al-Fustat on the edge of Old Cairo, and the building of the oldest mosque in Africa.

Minarets have defined Cairo’s skyline since its early history: they are one of the most characteristic features of Islamic architecture. In Egypt, where civilizations have manifested themselves through awe-inspiring structures since antiquity, ‘a thousand minarets’ reveal the impact of Islamic civilization and urban aesthetics. The Minarets of Cairo offers an accessible and vivid insight into the religious, historical, and architectural significance of the minaret in Cairo from the Arab conquest, through the Abbasid, Fatimid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods. Students and scholars will welcome historian and art historian Doris Behrens-Abouseif’s excellent new research and analysis as well as over one hundred illustrated entries for individual minarets, brought to life by Nicholas Warner’s masterly architectural drawings and reconstructions. With nearly three hundred illustrations, this beautiful book provides depth and color, displaying to full effect historic Cairo’s most impressive monuments.

Less than ten years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the new religion of Islam arrived in Egypt with the army of Amr ibn al-As in AD 639. Amr immediately established his capital at al-Fustat, just south of modern Cairo, and there he built Africa’s first mosque, one still in regular use today. Since then, governors, caliphs, sultans, amirs, beys, pashas, among others, have built mosques, madrasas, and mausoleums throughout Egypt in a changing sequence of Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, Ottoman, and modern styles. In this fully color-illustrated, large-format volume, a leading historian of Islamic art and culture celebrates the great variety of Egypt’s mosques and related religious buildings, from the early congregational mosques, through the medieval mausoleum–madrasas, to the neighborhood mosques of the Ottoman and modern periods. With outstanding architectural photography and authoritative analytical texts, this book will be valued as the finest on the subject by scholars and general readers alike. Covers more than 80 of the country’s most historic mosques, with more than 500 color photographs, in 400 pages.

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The Northern Cemetery of Cairo deals with the beginnings, growth and decline of one of the most important cemeteries of Cairo, which is quintessentially a product of Mamluk patronage. The Mamluks, unlike the preceding dynasties ruling Egypt, failed to develop a new significant urban settlement in their domains. Instead they primarily extended and consolidated some of the existing cities. The establishment of the Northern Cemetery reflects a shift in the Mamluks’ policy. The area was used for military training and as a parade ground, reflecting the military spirit of the formative years of the young state. Urbanization of the area started during the third reign of al-Nasir Muhammad and proceeded slowly during the ensuing period of internal struggle after his death. The Burgi period witnessed royal patronage of the area for the first time; the economic, military, and social decadence of the later Burgi sultanate did not prevent the steady growth and the artistic excellence that characterized the period here, as it did elsewhere in Cairo. The Northern Cemetery was a separate entity isolated on all sides; to the south the steep descent of Bab al-Wazir and the Citadel complex separated it from the Qarafa; to the west the Barqiya mounds and the Cairo wall separated it from the city proper; to the east al-Gabal al-Ahmar fixed its physical limit; its northern boundaries, however, are not clearly defined. The area is perhaps the nearest attempt of the Mamluks to establishing an urban settlement, dedicated not to the living but to the deceased.