Muqarnas: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture, vol. 5.

• Author: Kane, Carolyn

The issues of this journal are not always thematic, but serve as a reliable annual on Islamic and even non-Islamic research. This volume includes articles on different aspects of Islamic art in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and India. Eleven contributors discuss pottery, architects and architecture, jewelry, gardens and historical texts.

Oleg Grabar's introduction concerns the interaction between technology and science, and art history and connoisseurship. It is a thoughtful review about two recent publications, by Jean Soustiel, La Ceramique islamique (Fribourg, 1985), and by W. David Kingery and Pamela B. Vandiver, Ceramic Masterpieces: Art, Structure, and Technology (New York, 1986). He raises a number of questions about the interaction between the fields of ceramics and technology. The urgent task remaining is research "to integrate the industrial arts into the fabric of the societies that produced them."

Howard Crane reports on the active pottery production in the Sardis region of western Turkey. Both men and women are potters, using either a kick wheel or turntable for fashioning utilitarian vessels. Photographs illustrate the various aspects of the two techniques. Perhaps in the future, reporting will combine videotaping for a lasting document on present day Turkish handicrafts.

Doris Behrens-Abouseif contributes a fascinating article on the first Ottoman religious foundation in Cairo, the Takiyyat Ibrahim al-Kulshani (1519-24). She fully analyzes the foundation, plan, waqfiyya, and the biographical data on the founding shaykh and his unorthodox sufism. He was a favorite of the members of the Cairene Turkish army and only Turks patronized the tekke. Unique in Cairo was the placement of an isolated, domed mausoleum in the middle of the complex, erected on an important commercial street for a relatively obscure man. The original historical and Qur anic inscriptions are printed in Arabic and English in the appendix. Her conclusion on the possible symbolism of the complex is provoking.

In a disjointed and rambling article Godfrey Goodwin discusses Ottoman and other Islamic burial practices. He elaborates on the procedures, customs, and ceremonies carried out in the Ottoman Gardens of paradise, influenced, according to Goodwin, by Turkish shamanism and other Central Asian faiths during the Mongol period. It would have been instructive to learn his opinion about the symbolism of the flowers and floral decoration in Ottoman cemeteries.

Jale Erzen...