The Ideological Significance of theDār al-Adlin the Medieval Islamic Orient

Abstract

Medieval Islamic architecture presents the scholar with a fascinating set of histo-riographical problems. Some are methodological; others are related to the nature of the sources, and they are shared by various other branches of research in medieval history such as urban history, topography, and the history of arts and crafts whose inquiries depend on the same sources. Still others are peculiar to the specific domain of architectural history. These last are the most challenging, for they require particular strategies that take into account the disparities in our knowledge of the two basic components needed to reconstruct the history of any architectural object: the physical remains and the contemporary documents related to them. There are three possible kinds of disparity: in the best cases, buildings that are still standing and in fairly good shape can be studied in light of relevant contemporary documents. In more difficult cases, the structures still exist, but supportive documents, written or otherwise, do not. Most difficult of all is when we have documents describing, or referring to, a structure or a group of structures for which we have no visible trace.