The sixteenth century Ottoman architect Sinan is today universally recognized as the defining figure in the development of the classical Ottoman style. In addition to his vast oeuvre, he left five remarkable autobiographical accounts, the so-called "Adsiz Risale", the "Risaletu'l-Mi'mariyye", "Tuhfetu'l-Mi'marin", "Tezkiretu'l-Mi'mariyye" and "Tezkiretu'l-Bunyan" that provide details of his life and works. Based on information dictated by Sinan to his poet friend Mustafa Sa'i Celebi shortly before his death, they exist in multiple manuscript versions in libraries in Istanbul, Ankara, and Cairo. The present volume contains critical editions of all five texts, along with transcriptions, annotated translations, facsimiles of the most important variant versions, and an introductory essay that analyzes the various surviving manuscripts, reconstructs their histories, and establishes the relationships between them.

Muqarnas is sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.In Muqarnas articles are being published on all aspects of Islamic visual culture, historical and contemporary, as well as articles dealing with unpublished textual primary sources.

Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans. Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood’s project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland’s past and its present—destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes—in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.

A risky and risqué prison memoir depicts the collective nightmare of life under Saddam.

The complete critical edition of two important texts, Tezkiretüʼl-bünyan and Tezkiretüʼl-ebniye, based on Sinan's own accounts of his life and works. The text is accompanied by scores of full color photographs of Sinan's monuments, miniatures illustrating his works, and facsimiles of the original scripts.

Sinan was the greatest architect of the Ottoman Golden Age - when the Empire reached its zenith of power and magnificence. His style marks the apogee of Turkish art and this volume is a magnificent testament to the achievement of a man who stamped his imprint on an entire culture Beginning as a military engineer and designer of fortifications, he was appointed Chief Imperial Architect in 1538. While Michelangelo was working on St. Peter's, Sinan completed the greatest of Turkish mosques, the Süleymaniye and the Selimiye. Under Süleyman the Magnificent and his successor Selim II, Sinan designed hundreds of buildings: mosques, palaces, tombs, mausolea, hospitals, schools, caravanserai, bridges, aqueducts and baths. As he himself said, 'with time each edifice became - with the help of Allah and thanks to the generosity and benevolence of the State - the very image of the world in the lands ruled by the Ottoman dynasty.' In his greatest works he adapted Byzantine and Islamic styles to produce something quite new: a centralized organization of absolute space unhindered by pillars or columns and covered by a soaring dome. An architect of genius in a dynamic new empire expanding into both Asia and Europe, he was a true man of the Renaissance. Opulent colour photographs, many taken specially by Ara Güler for this publication, pay tribute to the extraordinary space and light of Sinan's buildings. Texts by the most important specialists in this field complement the handsome visual material and offer new interpretations of Sinan's art.

Using the Braudelian concept of the Mediterranean this volume focuses on the condition of “coastal exchanges” involving the Dalmatian littoral and its Adriatic and more distant maritime network. Spalato and Ragusa intersect with Constantinople, Cairo and Spanish Naples just as Sinan, Palladio and Robert Adam cross paths in this liquid expanse. Concentrating on materiality and on the arts, architecture in particular, the authors identify portability and hybridity as characteristic of these exchanges, and tease out expected and unexpected serendipitous moments when they occurred. Focusing on translation and its instruments these essays expand the traditional concept of influence by thrusting mobility and the "hardware" of cultural transmission, its mechanisms, rather than its effects, into the foreground. Contributors include: Doris Behrens-Abouseif, SOAS, University of London; Joško Belamarić, Institute of Art History, Split; Marzia Faietti, Uffizi, Florence; Jasenka Gudelj, University of Zagreb; Cemal Kafadar, Harvard University; Ioli Kalavrezou, Harvard University; Suzanne Marchand, State University of Louisiana; Erika Naginski, Harvard University; Gülru Necipoğlu, Harvard University; Goran Nikšić, City of Split, Split; Alina Payne, Harvard University; Avinoam Shalem, Columbia University and David Young Kim, University of Pennsylvania

10 Useful but dangerous: photography and the Madras School of Art, 1850-73 -- 11 Temporal transformations: terracotta and trash -- Index

"Key Themes for the Study of Islam" examines the central themes and concepts indispensable to an informed understanding of Islamic religion and society. From Gender and History to Prayer and Prophecy, each authoritative chapter focuses on a single aspect of the religion and presents a critical discussion written by a world expert in that field. Exposing as false the idea that Islam and Muslims are incomprehensible to Western culture, this book will become the first choice for students and experts in religion from disparate fields, who wish to know how Islam relates to vital concepts in religion and society today.

Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul explores biography writing and dream narratives in seventeenth-century Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer ‘Aṭā’ī (d. 1637) and with his help shows how learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise. This book demonstrates that dreams provided biographers not only with a means to form learned communities in a politically fragile landscape but also with a medium to debate the correct career paths and social networks in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Istanbul. By adopting a comparative approach, this book engages with current scholarly dialogues about life-writing, dreams, and practices of remembrance in Habsburg Spain, Safavid Iran, Mughal India and Ming China. Recent studies have shown the shared rhythms between these contemporaneous dynasties and the Ottomans, and there is now a strong interest in comparative approaches to examining cultural life. This first English-language monograph on Ottoman dreamscapes addresses this interest and introduces a world where dreams changed lives, the dead appeared in broad daylight, and biographers invited their readers to the gardens of remembrance.