Razia Grover

Razia Grover's book on mosques is primarily an art/architecture book that showcases prominent mosques (and one not-a-mosque....) from the main regions ruled by Muslim empires. The main sections cover early mosques in the Arabian Peninsula & Damascus, Spain, North Africa, Mesopotamia, and India. Each chapter places the mosques in question in their historical and cultural context & discusses their prominent and distinctive architectural features.

What I Liked

(1) Each building was placed in its historical context with a discussion of the imperium that constructed it & the local cultural influences on its design. Overall the book demonstrates the evolution of the mosque form & the myriad of local variations around its central elements.

(2) Generally nice-looking, although some of the photos could have been better (see what I didn't like) and the paper was somewhat less than the highest quality. I bought this book for significantly less than its $80+ list price, but it seems that a book that is selling for such a price should be on better paper.

(3) Generally gorgeous buildings, especially the choices in the modern mosques section. Also I liked that this section was even present because it reflected a choice to show that the form was still evolving & further demonstrated regional variations in mosque architecture.

What I Disliked

Sadly, I found a fair amount to complain about. This book was nowhere near as attractive as I had hoped, which I guess is my biggest overall complaint. I also had a lot of little nits to pick - they seem really petty, but some of them are actually fairly significant errors/omissions/drawbacks.

(1) A nit: The Dome of the Rock is not actually a mosque & although the author says this in the separate section on the Dome of the Rock (contained in the Jerusalem section), the building is still identified as a mosque in the introductory map showing the locations of important mosques in the world. This is probably not actually important to most people, but its such a common popular misconception that I would hope the author would try to correct it. Its like she felt the building was too beautiful and significant to leave out, even though it has a different purpose than all the other buildings in the book. Either that or she figured she had to have Jerusalem in the book & the al-Aqsa mosque - despite being the third-most religiously significant mosque after those in Mecca & Medina - could not hold its own.

(2) A second nit: The opening map contains a box on significant Muslim empires throughout history but the empires are listed alphabetically which doesn't really make sense. Listing them chronologically by the particular regions they ruled over seems like it would have been more informative & would have mirrored the overall layout of the book.

(3) The sections are too short, which leads the author to sometimes mention structures that are not pictured in the book, which I found frustrating. Iraq is shorted space and Central Asia is almost completely passed over. This may simply be because many buildings that might have been featured have been destroyed over time & the author lacked significant information on them, but I thought it was an unfortunate oversight.

(4) Some of the photo choices were questionable. This was particularly glaring to me in the section on Turkey, which is the only place I have actually been able to see any of the buildings featured in this book. There are postcards that have better exterior shots of the Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia), which looks pretty unfortunate in this book & the interior shot she used is dark and doesn't show any of the incredible decoration.

(5) Finally, there is a very pretty two-page feature on Islamic decoration that contains somewhat of an inaccuracy that leads to an unexplained apparent contradiction: directly opposite a statement that Islamic tenets frowned upon figural representation is a photo of tilework containing a very figural painted representation of a man. The prohibition on figures really only applies to representational art for the purpose of worship - which is considered a form of idolatry. Forbidding or claiming that Islam forbids all depictions of human form is a misinterpretation or an over-zealous application of sayings contained in the hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad). There has been representational Islamic art - even of Muhammad - throughout Islamic history. Different sects of Muslims - particularly the Shi'a - have been much more open to depiction of human figures in art than have others. Obviously the author can't address this whole controversy in a single page, but she could have caveat-ed her statement more carefully or avoided the whole issue by not putting tilework depicting a human figure immediately opposite a statement that seems to suggest that such tilework should not even exist. Worst of all, there are no captions on the page or text elsewhere in the book that identifies what this tilework even is, where it is from, when it is from, or who the figure in question might be! I know this seems absolutely silly & it probably is, but inaccurate statements like this drive me nuts. If I didn't know anything about Islamic history or Islamic art, I would be completely confused by that page.… (plus d'informations)