ARTISANS AND MATHEMATICIANS IN MEDIEVAL ISLAM.

• Author: SALIBA, GEORGE

AN UNWIELDY BOOK LIKE THIS is often not intended to be read. To start with, its dimensions make it cumbersome: it is 26.75 inches long when opened flat, 11 inches high, and weighs close to ten pounds. You can not carry it easily in your hands for long, nor could you place it on your lap for more than a few minutes, and the script is far too small to read from a distance when opened on a stand or a table. But with its 61 color- and 277 black-and-white illustrations, it is certainly a beautiful book to exhibit. Its object is the reproduction of a scroll now kept at the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul (MS H. 1956) containing what look like architectural designs. Necipoglu begins with an examination of the history of architectural drawings in Islamic culture by attempting to trace the history of scrolls, and then determining the date and provenance of the specific Topkapi scroll, and concludes that the scroll itself is a "mirror of late Timurid-Turkmen architectural practice." In part two, she takes to task the orientalist tradition regarding the Arabesque and the modern literature on that subject. Part three discusses the "Geometric Mode," as exhibited in geometric patterning, in terms of geography, chronology, and "semantics." Part four deals with geometry and the contribution of the mathematical sciences, and strives to discuss seriously the manuals of practical geometry that were written, or known to have been written, during the long period of Islamic scientific production. Part five recaptures the theme of geometry and aesthetic theory. That is followed by a full-color reproduction of the entire scroll, almost always accommodating one pattern to a page for all of its one hundred and fourteen patterns.

In the form of an appendix, there is a short essay by Mohammad al-Asad that deals with the geometric analysis of the phenomenon of muqarnas, the stalactite-like decorative architectural elements that are often characterized as the distinctive creation of Islamic architecture. In this essay al-Asad tries to teach the reader how to transform, with the help of computer-assisted design software, one of the plane designs of a muqarnas, as represented in the scroll, into a three-dimensional architectural unit. But he quickly admits that, with the many "adjustments," "symmetry (which) is partially broken" and lack of "exacting standards of precision" inherent in medieval manuals, his rendering is only one possible interpretation of the design and many other renderings could be conjured up, as well. Towards the end of the essay he confesses: "Although the conversion of these plans into three-dimensional objects may seem to the modern eye to be a highly interpretative process, it was standardized for medieval artisans." Only we do not know how, for "the procedure was a carefully guarded secret known only to members of the guild, who often belonged to the Sufi orders, or tariqas...." In other words, despite not documenting the existence of such guilds and their secrets, the author confesses that we do not know how these plans, if they did indeed exist in the first place, were materialized architecturally by working artisans on a given site.

But even with the help of a relatively elaborate description of how those artisans could have calculated areas of various types of muqarnas, as preserved in the work of the fifteenth-century mathematician and astronomer Kashi (d. 1429), one can still not tell for sure the exact measurements involved. Al-Asad is correct in concluding (p. 354), with Kashi that, in the final analysis, such measurements depend on "the aesthetic judgment of the builder, the profile of the arch or vault surrounding the muqarnas ...," and other such extraneous factors.

Exploring the relationship between the predominant geometric features of Islamic art and the theoretical works on mathematics that were produced during the heyday of Islamic civilization can shed light on the relationship between the artisan and the scientist in that culture--and that is surely desirable. But first one has to demonstrate that such a connection really did exist. One might have hoped that the introductory five-part essay of this book would have accomplished that task. What it seems to do, however, is to analyze instead a scroll of uncertain date anal provenance, filled with designs that are subject to various interpretations and have no text accompanying them so as to control any of those interpretations. It then attempts to solicit aid from other written sources that are either for the most part irrelevant (as are the tenth-century Buzjani's manuals that are still preserved but have no descriptions of designs that are similar to the ones in the Topkapi scroll) or actually do not exist (as the works of Ibn al-Haytham [d.c. 1040] and Karaji [d. 1020] from the next century) in a vain effort to discern what it could all mean, and ends up saying that "the absence of anachronistic motifs inconsistent with an international Timurid-Turkmen design vocabulary further argues for the late fifteenth- or sixteenth-century date that Filiz (Cagman assigns to the Topkapi scroll on the basis of her long experience with comparable documents in the Topkapi Palace Museum Library's manuscript collection" (p. 34).

Anyone who has dealt with those manuscript collections, as well as others, knows quite well how risky it is to assign dates to manuscripts that are sometimes even supplied with explicit colophons, let alone those that have no "writing, date, or watermark that might point to when and where it was put together or how it entered the Ottoman imperial treasury collection" (p. 29). In light of the Ottomans' famous practice of recording almost everything in a special defter (record), the last remark becomes all the more poignant, especially when the author herself readily admits that: "It may, of course, be that the scroll's Timurid-Turkmen repertory was copied at a much later date, but this is quite unlikely given the striking difference between its sophisticated drafting conventions and those of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scrolls" (pp. 33-34). However, on the basis of techniques and conventions alone, one would intuitively expect to move chronologically from less sophisticated to more sophisticated rather than the other way around. As to how the scroll ended up at the Topkapi Palace, this reviewer finds the suggestion (pp. 38-39) of its having been carried there by the astronomer and mathematician Qushji (d. 1474) simply unfounded. Because a mathematician had mathematical treatises in his library does not mean that he also carded scrolls on his last perilous journey, especially as he had no apparent intention of using such scrolls and was not known to have worked as an engineer or architect in so far as we can tell.

With the predicament of date and provenance left unresolved, the author builds enough circumstantial evidence, such that, if a reader accepts it, he will be led to believe that this specific Topkapi scroll can be regarded as a "mirror of late Timurid-Turkmen architectural practice," as the heading of chapter three suggests. But, on demanding more rigor in the documentation, one is left with many more problems unresolved.

At the beginning, where Necipoglu attempts to document the references to architectural drawings in Islamic literary texts, her zeal to engage the European reader in the enterprise by restricting most, if not all, of her primary-source references to those that have been translated into European languages, leads her at the same time to fall victim to those same translations by reading into them nuances that are not present in the original. For example, the first reference that she cites for the existence of architectural plans is a note in the history of Ya qubi (d. 897), his Kitab al-buldan, where he describes the founding of the city of Baghdad by the caliph al-Mansur (r. 754-75). In that regard she asserts that Ya qubi "mentioned the tracing of the plan directly on the ground" (p. 3). Her reference is Gaston Wiet's translation of Ya qubi's work, which appeared under the title Les Pays. Now the original text of Ya qubi (vol. 2, p. 373, of the Beirut edition) says of al-Mansur: "fa-ikhtatta madina-tahu ..." (he laid out his city). The verb ikhtatta been obviously interpreted to mean the technical drawing of a plan on the ground, thus making of al-Man.sar an architect in disguise, although he would probably have been the only caliph ever to have had such a skill. A few pages earlier, however (p. 358 of the same edition), the same Ya qubi had already mentioned the establishment of another city, al-Rafiqa, on the Euphrates for which he uses the same terminology, thus saying "wa-ikhtatta al-Rafiqa ala shatt al-Furat" (he founded al-Rafiqa on the shore of the Euphrates) but adds immediately after that " wa-handasaha lahu Adham b. Muhriz" (and it was constructed/engineered [or drawn up] for him by Adham b. Muhriz). In the mind of Ya qubi, there seems to have been a difference between the two terms ikhtatta and handasa, and the second of the two technical terms handasa was in all likelihood meant to be as...