Muqarnas: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture, vol. 9.

• Author: Bloom, Jonathan M.

The last volume of Muqarnas to be edited by its founder, this issue reflects the broad range of his interests. It covers a gamut of topics by art-, architectural-, and social historians, scientists, archaeologists, and curators - a fair sampling of the professions to which such a journal and its articles might and should be of interest. As one would expect, the articles vary in quality and represent a broad range of different approaches to the study of the visual arts of the Islamic lands, but they confirm that scholars in all fields of Islamic studies should follow what is published in this important annual.

If the emergence of great differences of opinion signals that a field has come of age, Christopher Taylor's article questioning the role of Shiites in the development of Islamic funerary architecture in Egypt demonstrates that the study of Islamic art in the United States is mature indeed. Taylor has set out to topple the idols in the temple, in this case scholars (including the present reviewer) who have written on the role of the Shiite Fatimid dynasty on the development of funerary architecture in the medieval Islamic lands. None of us, I imagine, would or could have ever argued that Shi ites played an exclusive role in the development of funerary architecture, but a selective choice of quotes has created a straw man that can easily be ignited by polemical discourse. While a new synthesis is welcome, it should include monumental remains in and outside Egypt, such as the extant mausoleum of the Samanids at Bukhara (early tenth century), whose sophisticated construction presupposes a long tradition of models in western Central Asia, or lost buildings as described in Terry Allen's important article, "The Tombs of the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad," BSOAS 46 (1983): 421-32.

These omissions demonstrate that the field of Islamic art, despite its maturity, has failed to make a dent on the historian's traditional approach, which values textual sources more than visual ones. Whatever the merits of Taylor's argument, it is clear that he - like most historians - is more willing to believe the evidence of texts than that provided by works of art. This is particularly troubling because the arts may present evidence at odds with the normative histories written by urban elites. A more art-historical but still text-based approach can be found in Nuha N. N. Khoury's article differentiating flat mihrabs ("mihrab images") from the concave mihrabs...