Review: Architecture of the Islamic West: North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1800

Abstract

Jonathan M. Bloom's gorgeous new survey of the architecture of the Islamic west, much like his earlier work The Art and Architecture of Islam 1250–1800 (coauthored with Sheila S. Blair), is opulently illustrated with color images and useful plans.1 Like that earlier work, this book aims to appeal to the widest possible audience and will likely find enthusiastic adoption in college courses. The book covers the “Islamic west,” which Bloom defines as including not only Northwest Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, as indicated by the subtitle, but also Sicily. The temporal frame is unusually expansive, ranging from the arrival of Islam in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula around the year 700 and continuing to 1800, long past the common stopping points of the conquest of Granada in 1492 and the establishment of Ottoman rule in central North Africa. Bloom also includes an innovative epilogue that discusses “the legacies of Maghribi architecture,” culminating with the “Moroccan Court” installed in 2011 at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.Relatively few mosques in North Africa are open to non-Muslims, and historians may have trouble finding images of the interiors of these buildings. This book includes interior images of many important structures that have been understudied in the Anglo-American academy. By describing their histories and features, and by providing images and plans, Bloom makes these fascinating and important buildings accessible. While examples such as the congregational mosque of Kairouan (836–62 CE) and the Great Mosque of Córdoba (786–988 CE) are well known, others, like the Aghlabid Zaytuna Mosque in Tunis (864–65 CE), are less familiar. By grouping images, plans, and descriptions of all three structures in a single chapter, as he does in chapter 1, “Islamic Architecture in Umayyad al-Andalus and Aghlabid Ifriqiya,” Bloom offers new insight into the parallel development of such forms as horseshoe arches supported by spoliated Roman columns on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. The book's generally chronological organization, often incorporating multiple dynasties in a single chapter, facilitates comparative views of the architecture of this region. With this approach, Bloom's work fits into the recent scholarly trend of considering the premodern Western Mediterranean as a single interconnected cultural zone.2Chapter 2, “Rival Caliphates in the West during the Tenth Century,” focuses on the architecture elaborated as part of the competition between the Fatimid caliphate, initially based in Ifriqiya (now Tunisia), and the Umayyads in Córdoba, who claimed the caliphate twenty years after the Fatimids. This framing works very well for the tenth century, as each dynasty sought to outshine the other in the construction and expansion of luxurious mosques and palaces. The third chapter, “The Long Eleventh Century: Dissolution of Empire,” looks at the multitude of city-states (Arabic ṭāʾifa) that emerged on the Iberian Peninsula after the collapse of the caliphate of Córdoba, as well as the smaller dynasties of the Zirids and Hammadids that emerged in North Africa following the departure of the Fatimids for Cairo in 972. Bloom includes Norman Sicily in this chapter, and it is refreshing to see the famous buildings of the Cappella Palatina, La Cuba, and La Zisa alongside the palaces and mosques of the Normans’ contemporaries and rivals in North Africa and Iberia. This perspective makes clear how the competing rulers of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Western Mediterranean might have draw upon shared traditions, materials, and perhaps even communities of craftsmen.Chapter 4, “The Almoravids and Almohads, c. 1050–c. 1250,” brackets the previous chapter in temporal terms, since the rise and fall of the Almoravids predates the second ṭāʾifa period and the construction of the Norman buildings in Palermo. Chapter 5 focuses on the Nasrid dynasty of Granada, concentrating primarily on the Alhambra, with a short and limited aside about the question of “Mudéjar architecture” (171–73). Here Bloom's treatment misrepresents some of his sources and ignores the foundational work of Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza and others.3 Chapter 6 focuses on the Hafsid and Marinid dynasties in North Africa. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the period 1500–1800 in central North Africa (Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria) and Morocco, respectively. In considering the territories of North Africa under Ottoman influence alongside lands under early colonial rule, Bloom illuminates how foreign powers transformed the architectural traditions of North Africa. His final chapter is an epilogue that provides an overview of how the architecture of the premodern Islamic west inspired structures from Owen Jones's 1854 Crystal Palace to the contemporary Mosque of Hassan II in Casablanca.Bloom's conclusion frames his project explicitly as a tribute to the work of the “pioneering scholars in the field,” who were, in many cases, “colonial figures” (278). These figures, including Georges Marçais (1876–1962), Henri Terrasse (1895–1971), and K. A. C. Creswell (1879–1974), served as the founding fathers of the study of Islamic art and architecture in North Africa while also holding positions as colonial administrators, running museums and centers for Oriental studies created by the French and British in Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt, respectively.4 Bloom justifies their centrality to his study by citing their “unparalleled, unrestricted, and leisurely access to these structures” (279), access that he elsewhere laments not having had himself (9). He also holds the work of these early scholars in particular esteem because they “cared more about the elucidation of typological forms and styles than the social purposes and motivations that are considered more important today” (279).Indeed, throughout the book, Bloom presents himself as an “old-fashioned” architectural historian, interested more in a “prosaic approach” than in the “attempt to reveal hidden meanings lurking behind what were once considered to be merely decorative façades and typical plans” (10). In rejecting approaches that have sought to find iconographic or symbolic meaning in Islamic art and architecture, Bloom sets aside two generations of scholarship. He engages parsimoniously with current scholarship on important monuments like the Great Mosque of Córdoba and the Alhambra. In his introduction, he points out a single transliteration error in an impressive recent book on the Alhambra (14), but in his discussion of the palaces he includes an endnote on this book in which he states that it was published too late for him to incorporate its ideas (289).5 While in occasional endnotes Bloom acknowledges the publications of Susana Calvo Capilla, a scholar who has devoted her career to deep study of the architecture of Islamic Iberia and North Africa, he hardly demonstrates any engagement with her ideas. In discussing the Great Mosque of Córdoba, for example, Bloom describes the extensive epigraphic program of the tenth-century expansion as “presumably chosen to make theological points” (70). In contrast, Calvo Capilla's 2008 article on this expansion describes the epigraphy alongside the architecture as constituting a visual language that drew together philosophical, theological, and scientific currents to present an ideology of the new caliphate.6Bloom's framing of the Islamic west itself, while certainly connected to other recent attempts to consider the Strait of Gibraltar as “less of a barrier and more of a bridge than is commonly thought” (13), can also be seen as a return to the expansive approach of early Islamic architectural historians. Marçais's 1954 L'architecture musulmane d'Occident has the same geographic scope as Bloom's book—though its temporal frame is smaller—and some of Bloom's chapter titles echo those of the earlier book (i.e., “The Heirs of the Almohads in North Africa” and “Les dynasties héritières des Almohades”; “The Sharifian Dynasties of Morocco” and “Le Maroc sous les dynasties chérifiennes”).Most contemporary architectural history offers a broader exploration of the people who built these structures, the ideas they sought to advance, and what their experience of the spaces might have been. However, by preparing careful descriptions of the important monuments of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, alongside copious illustrations and consistently drawn plans, Bloom has rendered an immense service to the field, one that will doubtless entice more students of Islamic art and architecture to the study of the Islamic west, and for this important undertaking he is to be commended.