Muqarnas: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture, vol 10, Essays in Honor of Oleg Grabar Contributed by His Students.

• Author: Whelan, Estelle
• Position: Review

Edited by OLEG GRABAR. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1993. Pp. xiii + 390. HF1 136, $78.

In 1983, the annual Muqarnas was launched under the editorship of Oleg Grabar, who announced in his preface a set of goals and expectations that generated considerable enthusiasm among historians of Islamic art and architecture at the time: to provide a vehicle for scholarly and critical studies, including theoretical essays and works in progress; to encourage debate over issues; and to make the journal widely available, especially in Muslim countries. In commenting on that first issue the present reviewer noted that, despite expressed eagerness for more daring, imaginative, or speculative approaches, the articles were almost entirely traditional in orientation, combining careful formal and iconographic analysis with conscientious use of relevant texts. This tenth volume of the journal is devoted to a Festschrift for its founder and thus offers an appropriate occasion for assessment of progress toward his announced goals.

Of thirty-seven contributions, twenty-two are devoted to what Professor Grabar has elsewhere called "the built environment," eight to various aspects of painting, and the remainder to other media or to more general questions. The proportion representing methodological innovation is no larger than it was in 1983, nor are all such departures successful. One example of a stumble is "Survivals and Archaisms in the Architecture of Northern Syria, ca. 1080-ca. 1150," by Yasser Tabbaa. Because of a three-hundred-year gap in the surviving monuments leading up to the period in question, there has been long-standing controversy over whether "classicizing" Syrian architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries represents continuity or revival of classicizing forms known from the eighth century and earlier. Tabbaa, having apparently forsworn Creswell's "positivist methodology," passes lightly over what evidence, however limited, might be drawn from Hamdanid architecture of the crucial period in the region, in order to focus instead on the regional use of stone as building material and on a single decorative device, the continuous exterior molding, as proof of the continuity of architectural style through the troubling gap. A stone tradition does not by itself provide evidence pertaining to architectural form, however, and the continuous molding can just as well be interpreted - and has been interpreted - as pointing to a revival of the classicizing...