Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs.

• Author: Denny, Walter B.

This is a book about the cultural confrontation of two worlds - the Islamic East and the European-American West - that primarily concentrates on the age of the great international expositions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Zeynep Celik examines the way that the Islamic world was represented, either by Muslim nations themselves, or by their colonial masters, agents, or interpreters, at European and to a lesser extent at American universal expositions in the time of European colonial empires and their accompanying cultural attitudes. In addition to exploring the phenomenon of European Orientalism, Celik examines the ephemeral and often stereotyped Islamic architecture and the idealized, sanitized Islamic urban milieux that were created for these exhibitions as a vehicle for exploring islamic self-conception, a phenomenon molded not only by traditional Islamic values but by European imperialist attitudes.

The book treats the subject in five chapters. The first deals with the question of visitors from the Islamic world who came as both performers and spectators at world's fairs; not surprisingly, the danseuse de ventre, epitomized in American cultural history by Chicago's Little Egypt, is one of the most enduring cultural stereotypes to survive from this epoch. The second chapter discusses the recreations of Islamic cities at the expositions, while the third deals with the peculiar problems of symbolism and self-conception embodied in the architecture of national pavilions from Islamic countries erected at the European exhibitions, and the critical reaction in Europe to these glimpses of the architecture of a synthetic Orient. The short fourth chapter covers Islamic attempts to stage similar expositions in the East, in the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and in the Ottoman exhibitions of 1863 and 1894. Finally, in the fifth chapter Professor Celik deals with the impact of the phenomenon in both East and West. While Orientalist architecture in the West has been the subject of a number of recent studies by Patrick Connor (Oriental Architecture in the West, London, 1979), Raymond Head (The Indian Style, Chicago, 1986) and Michael Darby (The Islamic Perspective, London, 1983), the real importance of Celik's fifth chapter is its revelation of how the architectural self-conception presented at world's fairs abroad came home to the Middle East, where it often found, for better or for worse, even more fertile soil for growth. According to...