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Nasser Rabbat

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Architecture, Faculty Member

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Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. An architect and a historian, his scholarly interests include the history and historiography of Islamic architecture, urban history, modern Arab affairs, contemporary Arab art, and post-colonial criticism. Professor Rabbat has published more than 100 scholarly articles and several books. His most recent book is al-Naqd Iltizaman: Nazarat fi-l Tarikh wal ‘Ururba wal Thawra (Criticism as Commitment: Viewpoints on History, Arabism, and Revolution) (Beirut, 2015), which deals with the roots and consequences of the "Arab Spring." He regularly contributes to a number of Arabic newspapers on current political and cultural issues and consults with international design firms on projects in the Islamic World.

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Harvard University

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New York University

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Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt Universität Berlin, Universität Potsdam

Marwa M . El-Ashmouni

University of Adelaide

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Books by Nasser Rabbat

Foreword: NASSER RABBAT | CRITICAL ENCOUNTERS

NASSER RABBAT | CRITICAL ENCOUNTERS, 2023

Foreword to the book Critical Encounters, which is the result of countless interviews with the su... more

Introduction: A Singular Mamluk Historian

Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and his Historical Project, 2022

Recounts the life of Egypt’s greatest historian, contextualises his work and assesses its impact ... more Recounts the life of Egypt’s greatest historian, contextualises his work and assesses its impact then and now Although al-Maqrizi is recognised as the most influential historian of premodern Egypt, he has never received the probing historical treatment warranted by his standing and scholarly output. This book fills that gap, providing a full personal and intellectual biography of this most intriguing and controversial of Mamluk historians. Arranged in three sections, it tells al-Maqrizi’s life story in the first, analyses his oeuvre in the second and considers the afterlife of his work in the third. Considering al-Maqrizi’s work in light of his beliefs, ethics, feelings, education, social standing, world views, politics and personal circumstances, the book offers insights into his theorising, his conception of history and the influence of his teacher Ibn Khaldun. It goes on to reconstruct the afterlife of his oeuvre as it made its way into the Ottoman historical tradition and was later mined by Arabists and Orientalists. This book opens a window onto the man who has been reclaimed in the modern Egyptian consciousness as one of the most original voices of Egypt, demonstrating how he was woven into the fabric of the modern Egyptian sense of self as a model, moral guide and true citizen of Egypt avant la lettre. Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although al-Maqrizi is recognised as the most influential historian of pre-modern Egypt, he has never received the probing historical treatment warranted by his standing and scholarly output. This book fills that gap. Arranged in three sections, it tells al-Maqrizi’s life story in the first, weaves it with historiographical, textual and methodological analysis of his oeuvre in the second, and reconstructs the afterlife of the author and his work down to the present in the third part. Introduction:
(pp. 1-8)
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Sometime in late 1413, Taqiyy al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), a pious Egyptian scholar who had recently returned to Cairo from a long stay in Damascus, suffered what would appear to us today as a severe mid-life crisis. He had spent the previous twenty-six years of his life trying to navigate the treacherous waters of clientage in the pursuit of employment in the state administration or the religious establishment. This quest had left him both disillusioned and disgusted with the whole process of cultivating benefactors and overcoming rivals in the utterly corrupt and shifty Mamluk backstage politics. He...

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Part 1 The Life of al-Maqrizi

CHAPTER 1 The Formative Years
(pp. 11-59)
CHAPTER 1 The Formative Years
(pp. 11-59)
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Today, it is all too common to view any author’s oeuvre in the light of their circumstances and psychological, emotional, and intellectual conditions and proclivities. Background, upbringing, successes and failures, and all the other experiences are seen as fundamental building blocks in shaping, understanding, and explaining an author’s oeuvre. So established has this mode of inquiry become that it has spread from its original application to creative pursuits to permeate the study of all literary and scholarly forms, even those social sciences that have traditionally claimed to be governed by rules of objectivity, empiricism, and scholarly detachment immune to the...

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CHAPTER 2 Career, Moral Crisis, and Withdrawal
(pp. 60-114)
CHAPTER 2 Career, Moral Crisis, and Withdrawal
(pp. 60-114)
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When the Mamluks came to power in 1250, Cairo was still a city struggling to define its territorial boundaries and reassert its supremacy in the region after a chaotic century in which Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, and other smaller cities rose to competitive positions under rival amirs of the Ayyubid clan or crusading princes. In less than a century, the Mamluks managed to transform the city not only into the undisputed capital of their formidable military empire, but also into the foremost Islamic metropolis of its time. In a building fury, sultans and amirs sponsored splendid mosques, madrasas, ribats, khanqahs, and...

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Part 2 The Writings of al-Maqrizi

CHAPTER 3 Harvest of a Lifetime
(pp. 117-153)
CHAPTER 3 Harvest of a Lifetime
(pp. 117-153)
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Al-Maqrizi was “hands-down the shaykh (chief or dean) of the historians of his generation,” if not of the entire fifteenth-century Mamluk history writing, which was one of the richest and most elaborate Islamic historical traditions.¹ This is not so only because of the volume of his historical writing or the variety of topics he covered. It is also because his was an exhaustive, structured, and principled historical project with clear ethical messages pursued in an intellectual milieu replete with history writing that seems by and large to have accepted a non-committal chronicling function.² In contrast, al-Maqrizi consciously and unabashedly wrote...

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CHAPTER 4 The Khitat:
(pp. 154-202)
CHAPTER 4 The Khitat:
(pp. 154-202)
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Al-Maqrizi’s considerable historical oeuvre on Islamic Egypt appears to us today to have been systematically structured to cover every aspect of its history from the perspective of a medieval Muslim scholar: its annals, important and remarkable people, tribes, cities, countryside, the Nile, and deserts, wonders and religious merits, glorious days and gloomy ones, and its changing relationships to its larger Islamic and world context. This large set of topics, each treated under its specific title or titles written over more than thirty-five years, was nonetheless intertwined with the writing of the Khitat, which was al-Maqrizi’s first true introduction to history...

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Part 3 The Afterlife of al-Maqrizi’s Writing

CHAPTER 5 Al-Maqrizi and the Orientalists
(pp. 205-233)
CHAPTER 5 Al-Maqrizi and the Orientalists
(pp. 205-233)
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When considered within his own intellectual tradition, al-Maqrizi appears almost as an anachronistic figure, both for his dedicated focus on the history of Islamic Egypt as a lifelong project (the Prophet Muhammad’s life story being the second one) and for the critical stance displayed in most of his texts, especially the Ighathat, Khitat, and Suluk.¹ Certainly, no other Mamluk historian seems to have absorbed the Khaldunian perspective into his subject matter as al-Maqrizi did. Nor did any of his contemporaries capture the intensity of feelings displayed in his description of his country and city, his predictions of their ruination, or...

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CHAPTER 6 Reading al-Maqrizi in Modern Egypt
(pp. 234-283)
CHAPTER 6 Reading al-Maqrizi in Modern Egypt
(pp. 234-283)
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As a premier source for the urban history of Egypt, al-Maqrizi’s Khitat stood unrivaled for well over 400 years, a scholarly feat that would not be contested until the beginning of the nineteenth century with the appearance of the monumental Description de l’Égypte, ordered by Napoléon Bonaparte immediately after his army took Cairo in 1798. Only the Description was no real sequel to the literary Khitat tradition of medieval Egypt, although al-Maqrizi’s Khitat constituted one of its principal sources.¹ It was instead an imposing herald of another intellectual tradition that will dominate the modern study of history: the empirical method...

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In the Guise of a Conclusion:
(pp. 284-287)
In the Guise of a Conclusion:
(pp. 284-287)
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In a review of a biography of Susan Sontag in The New Yorker entitled “The Unholy Practice of Biography,” Janet Malcolm wrote:

Biographers often get fed up with their subjects, with whom they have become grotesquely overfamiliar. We know no one in life the way biographers know their subjects. It is an unholy practice, the telling of a life story that isn’t one’s own on the basis of oppressively massive quantities of random, not necessarily reliable information. The demands this makes on the practitioner’s powers of discrimination, as well as on his capacity for sympathy, may be impossible to fulfill.¹...

The Citadel of Cairo: A Historic Guide

2nd Edition- Supreme Council of Antiquities-Cairo-Egypt 2009

Papers by Nasser Rabbat

Vernacular Architecture as a Radical Humanist Enterprise

Inclusive Architecture: Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2022, 2022

Argues for a reevaluation of the real import of vernacular architecture as a communal and dialogi... more

The Palaces of Cairo’s Belle Époque

The Arabist: Budapest Studies in Arabic

Many visitors to Cairo, driving from the airport to the city on Salāḥ Sālim Road, would notice a ... more Many visitors to Cairo, driving from the airport to the city on Salāḥ Sālim Road, would notice a strange stupa-like structure, standing in the middle of a large empty plot on the left of the road in Miṣr al-Ǧadīda (Heliopolis). This is the Palace of Baron Empain (1852-1929), built in 1907 for this rich, eccentric investor, who was in the process of planning a whole new suburb north of Cairo for an exclusively foreign community. His palace is but one of the city's many notable turn-of-the-century palaces spread all over town and into the suburbs, which, despite their run-down state today, still reflect unmistakable majesty and opulence. Together with other splendid but equally neglected architectural gems from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they constitute the visual remnants of an extraordinary chapter in the life of the Egyptian capital, an era that has been evocativelyand somewhat arrogantlycalled "la Belle Époque" in literature about modern Egypt. 1 The Belle Époque architecture of Cairo is concentrated in what is known today as Wasaṭ al-Balad (Middle of the City or Downtown), and its surrounding early 20thcentury residential extensions, such as Ḥilmiyya, ʿĀbdīn, Garden City, Būlāq, Šubra, and Zamālik on the island of al-Gazīra, in addition to the uniquely gracious suburbs of Heliopolis, a few kilometres to the north, and Maʿādī, another few kilometres to the south. These neighbourhoods burst with outstanding structures that cover a panoply of architectural styles from the Neo-Moorish, Neo-Classical, and Neo-Baroque palaces and mansions of the late 19th century, to Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Neo-Mamluk villas and apartment buildings of the early 20th century, to the rarer modernist villas of the 1940s and 1950s, in addition to a smattering of Rococo, Italian Renaissance, and Neo-Pharaonic religious and commercial buildings. 2 Until recently, the Belle Époque architecture received little attention in a country where time is measured by millennia, not centuries, and where historical architecture dates back at least to 3000 BC. In fact, only a few hasty studies dealt with it before the infitāḥ or the economic opening and shift away from socialism, initiated by President Anwar as-Sādāt (r. 1970-1981) in the 1970s. Since then, the interest in thenow nostalgically rememberedarchitectural vestiges predating the 1952 revolution

The Global Phenomenon of Islam Through the Lens of Late Antiquity

Cromohs - Cyber Review of Modern Historiography

The global reach of Islam is a poorly theorised historical phenomenon. This essay focuses on the... more The global reach of Islam is a poorly theorised historical phenomenon. This essay focuses on the evolving conceptualisation of Late Antiquity as a framework for the inclusion of Islam in a West-oriented, though universally applied, periodisation. My argument, indebted to Garth Fowden, is that Islam came out of late antiquity but brought in “Eastern” epistemologies to the mix in order to construct its own direction at its own pace. Cover image caption: A segment of the remaining frieze on the facade of the Mshatta Palace near Amman, Jordan, dated to the 740s and ascribed to the Caliph Walid II (743-44). Photo Nasser Rabbat.

Encounters with Modernity in the Arab World

Perception of Architecture in Mamluk Sources

Mamluk architecture is one of the most extensively though unevenly studied categories in the fiel... more Mamluk architecture is one of the most extensively though unevenly studied categories in the field of Islamic architectural history today. Several surveys, varying in scope, numerous articles and monographs on individual monuments, and a few comparative studies of regional variations in architectural style exist. Many more are being published at an unprecedented rate as the field of Mamluk studies gains more students and researchers, and now has a journal of its own, Mamlu≠k Studies Review. Even a few preliminary theoretical discussions have been held on some of the formal, symbolic, and sociocultural attributes of this architectural tradition, and a number of historiographic essays have attempted to understand it in the context of Mamluk and Islamic cultural and social history, something that is generally lacking for other medieval Islamic architectural traditions. This scholarly attention should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the sheer number and variety of Mamluk build...

Mamluk History through Architecture: Monuments, Culture and Politics in Medieval Egypt and Syria

The most enduring testament to the Mamluk Sultanate is its architecture. Not only do Mamluk build... more The most enduring testament to the Mamluk Sultanate is its architecture. Not only do Mamluk buildings embody one of the most outstanding medieval architectural traditions, Mamluk architecture is actually a key to the social history of the period. Analysing Mamluk constructions as a form of communication and documentation as well as a cultural index, "Mamluk History Through Architecture" shows how the buildings mirror the complex - and historically unique - military, political, social and financial structures of Mamluk society. With this original and authoritative study, Nasser Rabbat offers an innovative approach to the history of the Mamluks - through readings of the spectacular architecture of the period. Drawing on examples from throughout both Egypt and Syria, from the Citadel and Al-Azhar Mosque of Cairo to the Mausoleum of al-Zahir Baybars in Damascus, Rabbat demonstrates how Mamluk architecture served to reinforce visually the spirit of the counter-Crusade, when the...

Continuity and Rupture in Islamic Architecture

International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 2021

This essay considers the prevalence of the binary constructs of continuity and rupture in the stu... more This essay considers the prevalence of the binary constructs of continuity and rupture in the study of Islamic architecture, which warrants a more sustained critique at this particular historical juncture. This is so because, on the one hand, the field of Islamic architecture is steadily moving toward developing its own disciplinary methodologies and epistemological contours. On the other, the world, or at least the western part of it – which is where the field is still primarily located – is steadily moving toward a more suspicious and dismiss- ive stance vis-à-vis anything related to Islam.1 The situation is clearly para- doxical, for although residues of old biases and archaic analytical structures still mar the development of the study of Islamic architecture – as they do in all post-orientalist fields of inquiry – new approaches, greater crossdisciplinar- ity, and an increasingly sophisticated engagement with theory and criticism are repositioning Islamic architecture in a more reflective place despite the political and inherently ideological setbacks caused by factors that are totally outside of its control, and even outside academe.

Where Europe Begins and Where It Ends

People in Motion, 2021

It is said in the myths of the Greeks that the Phoenician Princess Europa was playing on the seac... more

Foundational Aesthetics: on ‘Ancient Nubia Now

Artforum, 2020

Review of the “Ancient Nubia Now” exhibit at the MFA

Rifat al-Chadirji (1926–2020): Designing a transhistorical Iraq

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, 2021

In the middle of the twentieth century, a group of young architects who studied abroad, mostly in... more In the middle of the twentieth century, a group of young architects who studied abroad, mostly in Britain, returned to Baghdad imbued with patriotic spirit and modernist soul. Hailing from leading families, these architects aspired to actively share in the building of a new Iraq. They engaged both in the national struggle to achieve independence from the British and in the introduction of modernism through their practice and their involvement in the budding art and culture debates in the country. They all contributed, each in his own way, to laying the foundations of modern architecture in Iraq. And although they were very much devoted to the tenets of international modern architecture, they were also eager to reconnect, formally and materially, with the heritage of architecture in the country from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Abbasid Caliphate and beyond. In their design and writing, these architects wanted to reconcile modernist design with a rationalized historical and cultural rootedness. Merging these two endeavours was an expression of their search for a distinct architectural identity at an age of national liberation and progressive

Laila ‘Ali Ibrahim (1917-2002)

Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 2003

She was 85. She was the most knowledgeable scholar of the architectural and urban history of Cair... more She was 85. She was the most knowledgeable scholar of the architectural and urban history of Cairo. In fact, many students of Mamluk art and architecture have come to identify Laila with Cairo: she was the 'Godmother' of the City and the guardian of its monuments. Laila had no formal art historical education. She gained her expertise through exposure to the best minds concerned with the fate of historic Cairo in the 1940s and 1950s. These included her father, Dr. v Ali Ibrahim, a major Islamic art collector whom she adored, and K.A.C. Creswell, the eccentric Briton who spent most of his working life studying the Islamic architecture of Cairo. But she had one thing that most scholars of Cairo of her time did not have: total devotion to her subject. This showed in her publications, public lectures, and participation in countless organizations for the safeguard of the monuments of Cairo. It also came across in her formal and informal teaching. For many years, she taught the history of Cairo at the American University of Cairo (AUC) and made herself available to any researcher, Egyptian or international, interested in studying Mamluk Cairo. Laila's articles and one published book are solid, carefully researched, and clearly written pieces. She focused mostly on little studied aspects of Cairene architecture that other scholars avoided. She took special interest, for instance, in Mamluk residential architecture, about which she published a number of erudite articles. She also delved into writing on little known or ruined monuments, such as the Khanqahs of Amir Qawsun and of Zayn al-Din Yusef or the Madrasa of Badr al-Din al-'Ayni. Her book on Mamluk building terminology, published in 1990 and co-authored with the late Muhammad Muhammad Amin, is an indispensable source for all students of Cairo. It is the distillation of the expertise of these two irreplaceable scholars: Laila with her intimate and extensive knowledge of the historic buildings and Amin with his profound familiarity with the legal documents related to them. Laila spent more than half a century studying, teaching, and speaking for and on behalf of the architecture of Cairo. But she shunned ail ceremonial social events and was interested only in productive or scholarly ones. Her admirers managed to put together a collection of essays in her honor, The Cairo Heritage, which was edited by Dr. Doris Abouseif and published by AUC Press in 2001, although Laila unfortunately was unable to read it. Laila left a small but extremely valuable library that I hope will find an institutional home where it would of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

The Global Phenomenon of Islam Through the Lens of Late Antiquity

Cromohs (Cyber Review of Modern Historiography), 2021

Islam resembles what was later to be called "the Western tradition" in so many ways-the intellect... more Islam resembles what was later to be called "the Western tradition" in so many ways-the intellectual efforts to fuse Judeo-Christian scripture with the categories of Greek philosophy, the literary emphasis on courtly love, the scientific rationalism, the legalism, puritanical monotheism, missionary impulse, the expansionist mercantile capitalism-even the periodic waves of fascination with "Eastern mysticism"-that only the deepest historical prejudice could have blinded European historians to the conclusion that, in fact, this is the Western tradition DAVID GRAEBER 2007:340.

Documenting Buildings in the Waqf System

Thresholds

Buildings are a peculiar brand ofcultural artifact. They are both time-and energy-consuming, and ... more Buildings are a peculiar brand ofcultural artifact. They are both time-and energy-consuming, and require complicated planning, financing, and a multitude of skills to build. Over time, they acquire multiple functions, meanings, and associations that may or may not conform to the intentions of their original builders. But they have one consistent physical trait: they are usually anchored in place (save for temporary exhibition pavilions

In the Beginning Was The House: On the Image of the Two Noble Sanctuaries of Islam

Thresholds

Architecture is an expansive concept with multifarious definitions. It Is primarily the envelope ... more Architecture is an expansive concept with multifarious definitions. It Is primarily the envelope of human activities and beliefs expressed diversely depending on time, culture, environment, setting, and technical capability. But It Is also that branch of human creativity that is relied upon to frame, embody, and preserve memories. Despite Victor Hugo's melancholy proclamation, ceci tuera cela, suggesting that printing will eliminate architecture as the carrier of memory, the Interdependence between architecture and memory has never waned. Nor does it show any sign of weakening in the more than a quarter century since the Introduction of computers, followed by telecommunication, digitization, and the web. In fact, recent developments in the study of memory have focused on architecture as a fertile field of investigation Into the mechanisms by which Individuals as well as groups create, store, retrieve, and manipulate their

Identity, Modernity, and the Destruction of Heritage

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Cultural heritage in the Middle East is under attack. Brutal civil wars and foreign interventions... more Cultural heritage in the Middle East is under attack. Brutal civil wars and foreign interventions have inflicted tremendous direct and collateral damage on historic sites, monuments, and museums. The chaos has also facilitated the emergence of new identitarian politics wielded by groups operating outside the framework of the nation-state. Consequently, history and geography are being contested and reconfigured, while cultural heritage itself is being divided and reappropriated, and its ill-fated fragments captured by groups that do not recognize them as their own heritage, or as heritage at all, destroyed.

The Right to Architecture

Thresholds, 2013

Despite the humanistic roots of their modern profession, architects are first and foremost servic... more Despite the humanistic roots of their modern profession, architects are first and foremost service providers. Their output, design and building, requires large layouts of funds, labor, and resources. They thus have to work with patrons (clients or financiers in our modern usage, whether they are individuals or collective entities) who have the means to finance and implement their designs. The architecture that the patrons pay for, and about which they usually have the final say, is perforce subject to their social, political, and economic predispositions. It is thus not neutral. However, architecture changes once it leaves the realm of design and enters the social space. There, it acquires functions and meanings that may not have been intended or anticipated at the design stage or wished for by the first patrons. History is full of such examples. Royal and princely palaces, for instance, have become museums, schools, and offices after either the old political regimes disappeared or new economic realities forced their alteration. Churches and mosques have been converted into banks, theaters, and sometimes residences, when real-estate pressures and a diminishing holiness of religious institutions provided the rationale for such action. Countless other elaborately private or sacred spaces became public or

The Dialogic Dimension of Umayyad Art

Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2003

Foreword: NASSER RABBAT | CRITICAL ENCOUNTERS

NASSER RABBAT | CRITICAL ENCOUNTERS, 2023

Foreword to the book Critical Encounters, which is the result of countless interviews with the su... more

Introduction: A Singular Mamluk Historian

Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and his Historical Project, 2022

Recounts the life of Egypt’s greatest historian, contextualises his work and assesses its impact ... more Recounts the life of Egypt’s greatest historian, contextualises his work and assesses its impact then and now Although al-Maqrizi is recognised as the most influential historian of premodern Egypt, he has never received the probing historical treatment warranted by his standing and scholarly output. This book fills that gap, providing a full personal and intellectual biography of this most intriguing and controversial of Mamluk historians. Arranged in three sections, it tells al-Maqrizi’s life story in the first, analyses his oeuvre in the second and considers the afterlife of his work in the third. Considering al-Maqrizi’s work in light of his beliefs, ethics, feelings, education, social standing, world views, politics and personal circumstances, the book offers insights into his theorising, his conception of history and the influence of his teacher Ibn Khaldun. It goes on to reconstruct the afterlife of his oeuvre as it made its way into the Ottoman historical tradition and was later mined by Arabists and Orientalists. This book opens a window onto the man who has been reclaimed in the modern Egyptian consciousness as one of the most original voices of Egypt, demonstrating how he was woven into the fabric of the modern Egyptian sense of self as a model, moral guide and true citizen of Egypt avant la lettre. Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although al-Maqrizi is recognised as the most influential historian of pre-modern Egypt, he has never received the probing historical treatment warranted by his standing and scholarly output. This book fills that gap. Arranged in three sections, it tells al-Maqrizi’s life story in the first, weaves it with historiographical, textual and methodological analysis of his oeuvre in the second, and reconstructs the afterlife of the author and his work down to the present in the third part. Introduction:
(pp. 1-8)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.7
Sometime in late 1413, Taqiyy al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), a pious Egyptian scholar who had recently returned to Cairo from a long stay in Damascus, suffered what would appear to us today as a severe mid-life crisis. He had spent the previous twenty-six years of his life trying to navigate the treacherous waters of clientage in the pursuit of employment in the state administration or the religious establishment. This quest had left him both disillusioned and disgusted with the whole process of cultivating benefactors and overcoming rivals in the utterly corrupt and shifty Mamluk backstage politics. He...

Save
Cite
Part 1 The Life of al-Maqrizi

CHAPTER 1 The Formative Years
(pp. 11-59)
CHAPTER 1 The Formative Years
(pp. 11-59)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.8
Today, it is all too common to view any author’s oeuvre in the light of their circumstances and psychological, emotional, and intellectual conditions and proclivities. Background, upbringing, successes and failures, and all the other experiences are seen as fundamental building blocks in shaping, understanding, and explaining an author’s oeuvre. So established has this mode of inquiry become that it has spread from its original application to creative pursuits to permeate the study of all literary and scholarly forms, even those social sciences that have traditionally claimed to be governed by rules of objectivity, empiricism, and scholarly detachment immune to the...

Save
Cite

CHAPTER 2 Career, Moral Crisis, and Withdrawal
(pp. 60-114)
CHAPTER 2 Career, Moral Crisis, and Withdrawal
(pp. 60-114)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.9
When the Mamluks came to power in 1250, Cairo was still a city struggling to define its territorial boundaries and reassert its supremacy in the region after a chaotic century in which Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, and other smaller cities rose to competitive positions under rival amirs of the Ayyubid clan or crusading princes. In less than a century, the Mamluks managed to transform the city not only into the undisputed capital of their formidable military empire, but also into the foremost Islamic metropolis of its time. In a building fury, sultans and amirs sponsored splendid mosques, madrasas, ribats, khanqahs, and...

Save
Cite
Part 2 The Writings of al-Maqrizi

CHAPTER 3 Harvest of a Lifetime
(pp. 117-153)
CHAPTER 3 Harvest of a Lifetime
(pp. 117-153)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.10
Al-Maqrizi was “hands-down the shaykh (chief or dean) of the historians of his generation,” if not of the entire fifteenth-century Mamluk history writing, which was one of the richest and most elaborate Islamic historical traditions.¹ This is not so only because of the volume of his historical writing or the variety of topics he covered. It is also because his was an exhaustive, structured, and principled historical project with clear ethical messages pursued in an intellectual milieu replete with history writing that seems by and large to have accepted a non-committal chronicling function.² In contrast, al-Maqrizi consciously and unabashedly wrote...

Save
Cite

CHAPTER 4 The Khitat:
(pp. 154-202)
CHAPTER 4 The Khitat:
(pp. 154-202)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv32vqj4k.11
Al-Maqrizi’s considerable historical oeuvre on Islamic Egypt appears to us today to have been systematically structured to cover every aspect of its history from the perspective of a medieval Muslim scholar: its annals, important and remarkable people, tribes, cities, countryside, the Nile, and deserts, wonders and religious merits, glorious days and gloomy ones, and its changing relationships to its larger Islamic and world context. This large set of topics, each treated under its specific title or titles written over more than thirty-five years, was nonetheless intertwined with the writing of the Khitat, which was al-Maqrizi’s first true introduction to history...

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Part 3 The Afterlife of al-Maqrizi’s Writing

CHAPTER 5 Al-Maqrizi and the Orientalists
(pp. 205-233)
CHAPTER 5 Al-Maqrizi and the Orientalists
(pp. 205-233)
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When considered within his own intellectual tradition, al-Maqrizi appears almost as an anachronistic figure, both for his dedicated focus on the history of Islamic Egypt as a lifelong project (the Prophet Muhammad’s life story being the second one) and for the critical stance displayed in most of his texts, especially the Ighathat, Khitat, and Suluk.¹ Certainly, no other Mamluk historian seems to have absorbed the Khaldunian perspective into his subject matter as al-Maqrizi did. Nor did any of his contemporaries capture the intensity of feelings displayed in his description of his country and city, his predictions of their ruination, or...

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CHAPTER 6 Reading al-Maqrizi in Modern Egypt
(pp. 234-283)
CHAPTER 6 Reading al-Maqrizi in Modern Egypt
(pp. 234-283)
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As a premier source for the urban history of Egypt, al-Maqrizi’s Khitat stood unrivaled for well over 400 years, a scholarly feat that would not be contested until the beginning of the nineteenth century with the appearance of the monumental Description de l’Égypte, ordered by Napoléon Bonaparte immediately after his army took Cairo in 1798. Only the Description was no real sequel to the literary Khitat tradition of medieval Egypt, although al-Maqrizi’s Khitat constituted one of its principal sources.¹ It was instead an imposing herald of another intellectual tradition that will dominate the modern study of history: the empirical method...

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In the Guise of a Conclusion:
(pp. 284-287)
In the Guise of a Conclusion:
(pp. 284-287)
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In a review of a biography of Susan Sontag in The New Yorker entitled “The Unholy Practice of Biography,” Janet Malcolm wrote:

Biographers often get fed up with their subjects, with whom they have become grotesquely overfamiliar. We know no one in life the way biographers know their subjects. It is an unholy practice, the telling of a life story that isn’t one’s own on the basis of oppressively massive quantities of random, not necessarily reliable information. The demands this makes on the practitioner’s powers of discrimination, as well as on his capacity for sympathy, may be impossible to fulfill.¹...

The Citadel of Cairo: A Historic Guide

2nd Edition- Supreme Council of Antiquities-Cairo-Egypt 2009

Vernacular Architecture as a Radical Humanist Enterprise

Inclusive Architecture: Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2022, 2022

Argues for a reevaluation of the real import of vernacular architecture as a communal and dialogi... more

The Palaces of Cairo’s Belle Époque

The Arabist: Budapest Studies in Arabic

Many visitors to Cairo, driving from the airport to the city on Salāḥ Sālim Road, would notice a ... more Many visitors to Cairo, driving from the airport to the city on Salāḥ Sālim Road, would notice a strange stupa-like structure, standing in the middle of a large empty plot on the left of the road in Miṣr al-Ǧadīda (Heliopolis). This is the Palace of Baron Empain (1852-1929), built in 1907 for this rich, eccentric investor, who was in the process of planning a whole new suburb north of Cairo for an exclusively foreign community. His palace is but one of the city's many notable turn-of-the-century palaces spread all over town and into the suburbs, which, despite their run-down state today, still reflect unmistakable majesty and opulence. Together with other splendid but equally neglected architectural gems from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they constitute the visual remnants of an extraordinary chapter in the life of the Egyptian capital, an era that has been evocativelyand somewhat arrogantlycalled "la Belle Époque" in literature about modern Egypt. 1 The Belle Époque architecture of Cairo is concentrated in what is known today as Wasaṭ al-Balad (Middle of the City or Downtown), and its surrounding early 20thcentury residential extensions, such as Ḥilmiyya, ʿĀbdīn, Garden City, Būlāq, Šubra, and Zamālik on the island of al-Gazīra, in addition to the uniquely gracious suburbs of Heliopolis, a few kilometres to the north, and Maʿādī, another few kilometres to the south. These neighbourhoods burst with outstanding structures that cover a panoply of architectural styles from the Neo-Moorish, Neo-Classical, and Neo-Baroque palaces and mansions of the late 19th century, to Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Neo-Mamluk villas and apartment buildings of the early 20th century, to the rarer modernist villas of the 1940s and 1950s, in addition to a smattering of Rococo, Italian Renaissance, and Neo-Pharaonic religious and commercial buildings. 2 Until recently, the Belle Époque architecture received little attention in a country where time is measured by millennia, not centuries, and where historical architecture dates back at least to 3000 BC. In fact, only a few hasty studies dealt with it before the infitāḥ or the economic opening and shift away from socialism, initiated by President Anwar as-Sādāt (r. 1970-1981) in the 1970s. Since then, the interest in thenow nostalgically rememberedarchitectural vestiges predating the 1952 revolution

The Global Phenomenon of Islam Through the Lens of Late Antiquity

Cromohs - Cyber Review of Modern Historiography

The global reach of Islam is a poorly theorised historical phenomenon. This essay focuses on the... more The global reach of Islam is a poorly theorised historical phenomenon. This essay focuses on the evolving conceptualisation of Late Antiquity as a framework for the inclusion of Islam in a West-oriented, though universally applied, periodisation. My argument, indebted to Garth Fowden, is that Islam came out of late antiquity but brought in “Eastern” epistemologies to the mix in order to construct its own direction at its own pace. Cover image caption: A segment of the remaining frieze on the facade of the Mshatta Palace near Amman, Jordan, dated to the 740s and ascribed to the Caliph Walid II (743-44). Photo Nasser Rabbat.

Encounters with Modernity in the Arab World

Perception of Architecture in Mamluk Sources

Mamluk architecture is one of the most extensively though unevenly studied categories in the fiel... more Mamluk architecture is one of the most extensively though unevenly studied categories in the field of Islamic architectural history today. Several surveys, varying in scope, numerous articles and monographs on individual monuments, and a few comparative studies of regional variations in architectural style exist. Many more are being published at an unprecedented rate as the field of Mamluk studies gains more students and researchers, and now has a journal of its own, Mamlu≠k Studies Review. Even a few preliminary theoretical discussions have been held on some of the formal, symbolic, and sociocultural attributes of this architectural tradition, and a number of historiographic essays have attempted to understand it in the context of Mamluk and Islamic cultural and social history, something that is generally lacking for other medieval Islamic architectural traditions. This scholarly attention should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the sheer number and variety of Mamluk build...

Mamluk History through Architecture: Monuments, Culture and Politics in Medieval Egypt and Syria

The most enduring testament to the Mamluk Sultanate is its architecture. Not only do Mamluk build... more The most enduring testament to the Mamluk Sultanate is its architecture. Not only do Mamluk buildings embody one of the most outstanding medieval architectural traditions, Mamluk architecture is actually a key to the social history of the period. Analysing Mamluk constructions as a form of communication and documentation as well as a cultural index, "Mamluk History Through Architecture" shows how the buildings mirror the complex - and historically unique - military, political, social and financial structures of Mamluk society. With this original and authoritative study, Nasser Rabbat offers an innovative approach to the history of the Mamluks - through readings of the spectacular architecture of the period. Drawing on examples from throughout both Egypt and Syria, from the Citadel and Al-Azhar Mosque of Cairo to the Mausoleum of al-Zahir Baybars in Damascus, Rabbat demonstrates how Mamluk architecture served to reinforce visually the spirit of the counter-Crusade, when the...

Continuity and Rupture in Islamic Architecture

International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 2021

This essay considers the prevalence of the binary constructs of continuity and rupture in the stu... more This essay considers the prevalence of the binary constructs of continuity and rupture in the study of Islamic architecture, which warrants a more sustained critique at this particular historical juncture. This is so because, on the one hand, the field of Islamic architecture is steadily moving toward developing its own disciplinary methodologies and epistemological contours. On the other, the world, or at least the western part of it – which is where the field is still primarily located – is steadily moving toward a more suspicious and dismiss- ive stance vis-à-vis anything related to Islam.1 The situation is clearly para- doxical, for although residues of old biases and archaic analytical structures still mar the development of the study of Islamic architecture – as they do in all post-orientalist fields of inquiry – new approaches, greater crossdisciplinar- ity, and an increasingly sophisticated engagement with theory and criticism are repositioning Islamic architecture in a more reflective place despite the political and inherently ideological setbacks caused by factors that are totally outside of its control, and even outside academe.

Where Europe Begins and Where It Ends

People in Motion, 2021

It is said in the myths of the Greeks that the Phoenician Princess Europa was playing on the seac... more

Foundational Aesthetics: on ‘Ancient Nubia Now

Artforum, 2020

Review of the “Ancient Nubia Now” exhibit at the MFA

Rifat al-Chadirji (1926–2020): Designing a transhistorical Iraq

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, 2021

In the middle of the twentieth century, a group of young architects who studied abroad, mostly in... more In the middle of the twentieth century, a group of young architects who studied abroad, mostly in Britain, returned to Baghdad imbued with patriotic spirit and modernist soul. Hailing from leading families, these architects aspired to actively share in the building of a new Iraq. They engaged both in the national struggle to achieve independence from the British and in the introduction of modernism through their practice and their involvement in the budding art and culture debates in the country. They all contributed, each in his own way, to laying the foundations of modern architecture in Iraq. And although they were very much devoted to the tenets of international modern architecture, they were also eager to reconnect, formally and materially, with the heritage of architecture in the country from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Abbasid Caliphate and beyond. In their design and writing, these architects wanted to reconcile modernist design with a rationalized historical and cultural rootedness. Merging these two endeavours was an expression of their search for a distinct architectural identity at an age of national liberation and progressive

Laila ‘Ali Ibrahim (1917-2002)

Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 2003

She was 85. She was the most knowledgeable scholar of the architectural and urban history of Cair... more She was 85. She was the most knowledgeable scholar of the architectural and urban history of Cairo. In fact, many students of Mamluk art and architecture have come to identify Laila with Cairo: she was the 'Godmother' of the City and the guardian of its monuments. Laila had no formal art historical education. She gained her expertise through exposure to the best minds concerned with the fate of historic Cairo in the 1940s and 1950s. These included her father, Dr. v Ali Ibrahim, a major Islamic art collector whom she adored, and K.A.C. Creswell, the eccentric Briton who spent most of his working life studying the Islamic architecture of Cairo. But she had one thing that most scholars of Cairo of her time did not have: total devotion to her subject. This showed in her publications, public lectures, and participation in countless organizations for the safeguard of the monuments of Cairo. It also came across in her formal and informal teaching. For many years, she taught the history of Cairo at the American University of Cairo (AUC) and made herself available to any researcher, Egyptian or international, interested in studying Mamluk Cairo. Laila's articles and one published book are solid, carefully researched, and clearly written pieces. She focused mostly on little studied aspects of Cairene architecture that other scholars avoided. She took special interest, for instance, in Mamluk residential architecture, about which she published a number of erudite articles. She also delved into writing on little known or ruined monuments, such as the Khanqahs of Amir Qawsun and of Zayn al-Din Yusef or the Madrasa of Badr al-Din al-'Ayni. Her book on Mamluk building terminology, published in 1990 and co-authored with the late Muhammad Muhammad Amin, is an indispensable source for all students of Cairo. It is the distillation of the expertise of these two irreplaceable scholars: Laila with her intimate and extensive knowledge of the historic buildings and Amin with his profound familiarity with the legal documents related to them. Laila spent more than half a century studying, teaching, and speaking for and on behalf of the architecture of Cairo. But she shunned ail ceremonial social events and was interested only in productive or scholarly ones. Her admirers managed to put together a collection of essays in her honor, The Cairo Heritage, which was edited by Dr. Doris Abouseif and published by AUC Press in 2001, although Laila unfortunately was unable to read it. Laila left a small but extremely valuable library that I hope will find an institutional home where it would of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

The Global Phenomenon of Islam Through the Lens of Late Antiquity

Cromohs (Cyber Review of Modern Historiography), 2021

Islam resembles what was later to be called "the Western tradition" in so many ways-the intellect... more Islam resembles what was later to be called "the Western tradition" in so many ways-the intellectual efforts to fuse Judeo-Christian scripture with the categories of Greek philosophy, the literary emphasis on courtly love, the scientific rationalism, the legalism, puritanical monotheism, missionary impulse, the expansionist mercantile capitalism-even the periodic waves of fascination with "Eastern mysticism"-that only the deepest historical prejudice could have blinded European historians to the conclusion that, in fact, this is the Western tradition DAVID GRAEBER 2007:340.

Documenting Buildings in the Waqf System

Thresholds

Buildings are a peculiar brand ofcultural artifact. They are both time-and energy-consuming, and ... more Buildings are a peculiar brand ofcultural artifact. They are both time-and energy-consuming, and require complicated planning, financing, and a multitude of skills to build. Over time, they acquire multiple functions, meanings, and associations that may or may not conform to the intentions of their original builders. But they have one consistent physical trait: they are usually anchored in place (save for temporary exhibition pavilions

In the Beginning Was The House: On the Image of the Two Noble Sanctuaries of Islam

Thresholds

Architecture is an expansive concept with multifarious definitions. It Is primarily the envelope ... more Architecture is an expansive concept with multifarious definitions. It Is primarily the envelope of human activities and beliefs expressed diversely depending on time, culture, environment, setting, and technical capability. But It Is also that branch of human creativity that is relied upon to frame, embody, and preserve memories. Despite Victor Hugo's melancholy proclamation, ceci tuera cela, suggesting that printing will eliminate architecture as the carrier of memory, the Interdependence between architecture and memory has never waned. Nor does it show any sign of weakening in the more than a quarter century since the Introduction of computers, followed by telecommunication, digitization, and the web. In fact, recent developments in the study of memory have focused on architecture as a fertile field of investigation Into the mechanisms by which Individuals as well as groups create, store, retrieve, and manipulate their

Identity, Modernity, and the Destruction of Heritage

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Cultural heritage in the Middle East is under attack. Brutal civil wars and foreign interventions... more Cultural heritage in the Middle East is under attack. Brutal civil wars and foreign interventions have inflicted tremendous direct and collateral damage on historic sites, monuments, and museums. The chaos has also facilitated the emergence of new identitarian politics wielded by groups operating outside the framework of the nation-state. Consequently, history and geography are being contested and reconfigured, while cultural heritage itself is being divided and reappropriated, and its ill-fated fragments captured by groups that do not recognize them as their own heritage, or as heritage at all, destroyed.

The Right to Architecture

Thresholds, 2013

Despite the humanistic roots of their modern profession, architects are first and foremost servic... more Despite the humanistic roots of their modern profession, architects are first and foremost service providers. Their output, design and building, requires large layouts of funds, labor, and resources. They thus have to work with patrons (clients or financiers in our modern usage, whether they are individuals or collective entities) who have the means to finance and implement their designs. The architecture that the patrons pay for, and about which they usually have the final say, is perforce subject to their social, political, and economic predispositions. It is thus not neutral. However, architecture changes once it leaves the realm of design and enters the social space. There, it acquires functions and meanings that may not have been intended or anticipated at the design stage or wished for by the first patrons. History is full of such examples. Royal and princely palaces, for instance, have become museums, schools, and offices after either the old political regimes disappeared or new economic realities forced their alteration. Churches and mosques have been converted into banks, theaters, and sometimes residences, when real-estate pressures and a diminishing holiness of religious institutions provided the rationale for such action. Countless other elaborately private or sacred spaces became public or

The Dialogic Dimension of Umayyad Art

Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2003

Toward a Critical Historiography of Islamic Architecture

Collections Electroniques De L Inha Actes De Colloques Et Livres En Ligne De L Institut National D Histoire De L Art, Sep 4, 2005

Margaret Bentley Sevcenko

Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 2002

Umayyad Architecture: A Spectacular Intra-Cultural Synthesis in Bilad al-Sham

… processes from late antiquity to early Islam …, 2008

النوبة وصراع تاريخ الحضارات

Al-Arabi al-Jadid, 2020

A critical review of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

عن العصر الذهبي العباسي أو أي عصر ذهبي آخر

Al-Arabi al-Jadid, 2020

جائزة الآغاخان: أربعون عاماً مع العمارة الإسلامية

العربي الجديد, 2019

A short article on the Aga Khan Award for islamic Architecture on the occasion of the Award Cerem... more

طباعة - كمال بُلّاطه: حياة في هوى القدس

Al-Arabi al-Jadid, 2019

Remembrance of Kamal Boullata (1942-2019)

الأم - الوطن: ألم الفقدان ومعناه

جريدة الحياة ١٥ حزيران ٢٠١٨

ترامب والهويات الجديدة التي تتشكل في الغرب

On Trump and hybrid identities in the West

الحرية التي ترضي الغرب

On a slogan left by Dash in the city of Manbij

ليست له أية علاقة بالدين

Discusses the issue of the relationship between the religion and the behavior and views of contem... more

عن ثقافتنا وعدم فهم الآخر

On Not Understanding the Other Al-Hayat, June 14, 2016, Page 8 http://www.alhayat.com/Opinion/Wri... more

تدمر: حيث تنتهي أوروپا

العربي الجديد-ملحق الثقافة-١٩ أبريل ٢٠١٦

في ذكرى ولادة وطن

On Syria on the 70th Independence Day anniversary

ساحرة الإبهار: زها حديد -بغداد، ١٩٥٠- ميامي، ٢٠١٦

العربي الجديد- ملحق الثقافة- ٥/٤/٢٠١٦

سوريون معتقلون وآخرون مغيبون

مأزق المعرفة المهاجرة العربية

A discussion of the dilemma of Arabic intellectual production in the West

AN interview with Dima al-Choukr of al-‘Arabi al-Jadid on architecture, culture, and Arabic history