Expanding the ‘Islamic’ in Islamic heritage

Stephennie Mulder

doi:10.1017/s1380203821000179

Abstract

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Highlights

As an art historian and a practising archaeologist who has spent the majority of my career working in Syria, I bring my own disciplinary perspective, one developed over many years in the field alongside Syrian colleagues and heritage specialists
In 2017, in the aftermath of the highly mediatized destruction of museum objects and heritage sites in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), I edited a special issue of the International journal of Islamic architecture that aimed to explore Islamic attitudes to the material remains of the pre-Islamic past (Mulder 2017)
The special issue asked whether, in the premodern period, we can discern an ‘Islamic’ notion of heritage value that pre-dated the modern Western European idea of heritage, and in particular it aimed to lay out an initial conceptualization for several distinct types of heritage value accorded by Muslims to pre-Islamic objects, places and localities

Summary

Introduction

As an art historian and a practising archaeologist who has spent the majority of my career working in Syria, I bring my own disciplinary perspective, one developed over many years in the field alongside Syrian colleagues and heritage specialists. Rico makes a trenchant and insightful analysis, arguing that ‘two forms of knowing and acting upon historic resources (a universal/ secular and a local/spiritual one) have not been acknowledged enough in the literature of contemporary and critical heritage studies’

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Conclusion