Muqarnas, an Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture, vol. 8: K.A.C. Creswell and His Legacy.

• Author: Kane, Carolyn

Edited by Oleg Grabar. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991. Pp. 138. HFI 90, $51.43. K. A. C. Creswell's works are continually being reexamined and updated. A Festschrift, Studies in Islamic Art and Architecture in Honour of Professor K. A. C. Creswell (American University in Cairo Press) was dedicated to him in 1965. This volume of Muqamas contains articles adapted from lectures originally delivered at an Oxford University symposium, held on May 1 and 2, 1988. Grabar, a contributor to the 1965 publication, introduces the latter volume with a personal memoir of the man and gives an assessment of Creswell's contribution to the field of early Islamic architecture. Though not a disciple of Creswell's methodology, Grabar credits his work as seminal to the study of early Islamic architecture (as it is today for all beginning Islamic architectural historians), for other scholars to expand, evaluate or revise.

Creswell was a mathematician, teacher, researcher, author, scholar, bibliophile, draftsman, skilled photographer, soldier, surveyor, archaeologist, encyclopedist, traveller, and preservationist who focussed his attention on the Middle East and early Islamic architecture. His demeanor and dress were sober and formal, not reflecting an imaginative or speculative nature. He was disputatious, cantankerous, intolerant, and hypersensitive to criticism, but capable of responding with kindness. Creswell was a technocrat with a devotion to the idea that the basis for a study of architecture could be found by rigidly adhering to facts. Multiculturalism was not his forte.

Julian Raby cites the reviews of Creswell's publications and annotates them. J. W. Allan further updates his recent revised edition of Creswell's Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, pointing out new architectural discoveries and research. Robert Hillenbrand juxtaposes Creswell with the German-speaking power houses of Central Europe, contemporary Byzantine and Islamic art historians. Creswell was an insular architectural historian, and they, for the most part, were classically educated theoreticians. Michael Rogers recalls his association with Creswell and his library in Cairo, and comments on his methodology. Jonathan Bloom selects some thoughts from his own recent book on the minaret, and shows how they differ from Creswell's theory of the origins of the structure. John Warren reinforces Creswell's theory concerning dating early Islamic architecture through the study of the "acuteness...