Showing posts with label Islamic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islamic. Show all posts

Friday, January 30, 2026

Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia

 


Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia brings together the work of 11 international scholars into an unprecedented volume focused on religion and performance in a nation celebrated for its extraordinary arts, religious diversity, and natural beauty. The resulting collection provides a panoramic view of Indonesia's Islamic arts in a variety of settings and communities. Together the authors address how history, politics, spirituality, and gender are expressed through performance and how Indonesian Islamic culture intersects with the ideology and practice of nationalism.

Unique and engaging,
Divine Inspirations will fascinate readers interested in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Islam, world religions, global discourse, and music, arts and ritual.

 

Saturday, November 15, 2025

A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture

 


The two-volume Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture bridges the gap between monograph and survey text by providing a new level of access and interpretation to Islamic art. The more than 50 newly commissioned essays revisit canonical topics, and include original approaches and scholarship on neglected aspects of the field.
  • This two-volume Companion showcases more than 50  specially commissioned essays and an introduction that survey Islamic art and architecture in all its traditional grandeur
  • Essays are organized according to a new chronological-geographical paradigm that remaps the unprecedented expansion of the field and reflects the nuances of major artistic and political developments during the 1400-year span
  • The Companion represents recent developments in the field, and encourages future horizons by commissioning innovative essays that provide fresh perspectives on canonical subjects, such as early Islamic art, sacred spaces, palaces, urbanism, ornament, arts of the book, and the portable arts while introducing others that have been previously neglected, including unexplored geographies and periods, transregional connectivities, talismans and magic, consumption and networks of portability, museums and collecting, and contemporary art worlds; the essays entail strong comparative and historiographic dimensions 
  • The volumes are accompanied by a map, and each subsection is preceded by a brief outline of the main cultural and historical developments during the period in question
  • The volumes include periods and regions typically excluded from survey books including modern and contemporary art-architecture; China, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily, the New World (Americas)
 


Saturday, August 2, 2025

Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam



Tracing the connections between music making and built space in both historical and contemporary times, Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam brings together domains of intellectual reflection that have rarely been in dialogue to promote a greater understanding of the centrality of sound production in constructed environments in Muslim religious and cultural expression.

Representing the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, art history, architecture, history of architecture, religious studies, and Islamic studies, the volume’s contributors consider sonic performances ranging from poetry recitation to art, folk, popular, and ritual musics—as well as religious expressions that are not usually labeled as “music” from an Islamic perspective—in relation to monumental, vernacular, ephemeral, and landscape architectures; interior design; decoration and furniture; urban planning; and geography. Underscoring the intimate relationship between traditional Muslim sonic performances, such as the recitation of the Qur’an or devotional songs, and conventional Muslim architectural spaces, from mosques and Sufi shrines to historic aristocratic villas, gardens, and gymnasiums, the book reveals Islam as an ideal site for investigating the relationship between sound and architecture, which in turn proves to be an innovative and significant angle from which to explore Muslim cultures. 

 

Saturday, December 7, 2024

Music and Musicians in the Medieval Islamicate World: A Social History

 

 

During the early medieval Islamicate period (800–1400 CE), discourses concerned with music and musicians were wide-ranging and contentious, and expressed in works on music theory and philosophy as well as literature and poetry. But in spite of attempts by influential scholars and political leaders to limit or control musical expression, music and sound permeated all layers of the social structure.

Lisa Nielson here presents a rich social history of music, musicianship and the role of musicians in the early Islamicate era. Focusing primarily on Damascus, Baghdad and Jerusalem, Lisa Nielson draws on a wide variety of textual sources written for and about musicians and their professional/private environments – including chronicles, literary sources, memoirs and musical treatises – as well as the disciplinary approaches of musicology to offer insights into musical performances and the lives of musicians. In the process, the book sheds light onto the dynamics of medieval Islamicate courts, as well as how slavery, gender, status and religion intersected with music in courtly life. It will appeal to scholars of the Islamicate world and historical musicologists.

 

Saturday, August 17, 2024

Islamic Jewelry in The Metropolitan Museum of Art • MET






The Muslim world has given rise to a rich and varied tradition of jewelry making, characterized by the combination of great artistic invention and a fidelity to inherited traditions. Beauty of overall design and harmony of color -- the aesthetic impulses underlying all the arts of Islam -- were the Islamic jeweler's highest priorities. These skills and aesthetic principles are splendidly exemplified in the extensive collection of Islamic jewelry in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Based on recent scholarship, as well as on early visual representations and literary documents, the text traces the development of Islamic jewelry from the seventh century to the twentieth through aesthetic and technical analyses of selected Islamic jewelry pieces in the Museum's collection. This volume also includes a glossary and an informative technical appendix.