Robert Hillenbrand: Islamic architecture: form, function and meaning. xxvi, 645 pp. Edinburgh

1 Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture Robert Hillenbrand's Islamic Architecture is a work on a grand scale - 617 pages, 302 black and white photographs, 24 colour plates, and the exceptional total of 1246 line drawings. Essentially it is a panorama of the architecture of the central Islamic lands in the pre-modern period, but with a considerable level of detail. As the author tells us, he presents the material by building type, rather than by chronological period. Thus there are chapters on the mosque, the minaret, the madrasa, the mausoleum, the caravanserai and the palace: each type is treated across the breadth of the Islamic world, and down the ages from the beginnings of Islam to AD 1700. The text presents us with a discussion of the various groups and regional styles within each type, illustrated by black and white photographs which are largely drawn from archives of historic photographs, and line drawings which are mainly axonometric, isometric or perspective views or reconstructions. At the end of the text is a graphic catalogue of 132 pages of more technical line drawings - plans, elevations, decorative details, and mosque fittings such as lamps. The work was originally conceived within the terms of the well-known Islamic Surveys series of Edinburgh University Press, and, although not in the end published in that series, has continued to be influenced by its style: it is aimed at the student and the nonspecialist educated reader, and there are no footnotes. The hand of an experienced university teacher is evident in the writing; it has the type of comprehensiveness that a student needs, and our students were keen to read it. There is no doubt that Professor Hillenbrand's range of knowledge illustrated in the book is highly admirable, and he has himself seen a very large proportion of the sites mentioned: this reviewer can personally testify to the energy with which sites were visited. Nevertheless it is obvious that there is a limit to what a single human being can put into a book, both the author in composing the text and assembling the documentation, and the reader in absorbing the content. The subject is an enormous one - too big to treat adequately in today's state of knowledge - and an author has to decide whether to give a high level general survey, without documenting what he has to say, or to write a documented book on a more limited theme. In fact it is this second type of book which is lacking in many aspects of Islamic architecture: this reviewer would await with eagerness a certainly classic work by Robert Hillenbrand on the Saljuq architecture of Iran, for example. Here Hillenbrand gives us a general survey with a certain degree of documentation: the catalogue of line drawings, but no footnotes. The documentation of the monuments discussed is the aspect of the book most open to question. The catalogue of line drawings is an extremely useful tool, which the reviewer found himself constantly making reference to. However there are no captions, only illustration numbers making reference to a list elsewhere. That list gives only the name, but neither the date nor the geographical location; so it is impossible for the average reader to take forward an interest in a particular little-known monument he has been given a glimpse of. This degree of documentation leaves a sense of frustration, which makes one wonder whether it was wise to include the catalogue, especially as such a large collection is bound to have recopied some drawings of rather questionable value. Professor Hillenbrand could not have been expected to justify his viewpoint on specific interpretations within the space available; it is the global vision that is important. In effect the book is a series of essays on the evolution of six building types. The concentration is on the relationship of form with function - function as expressed in terminology and evidence from texts. There is no treatment of the evolution of architectural decoration. These essays fall short of comprehensiveness, partly for the obvious reason that there are insufficient examples of some types to justify a chapter to themselves, but also because of the absence of two fundamental areas: military and domestic architecture. On the 2 one hand residential architecture simply cannot be divided between house and palace: there is a single unbroken continuum between the smallest Omani barasti and the Caliph's palace, a point particularly evident in the thousands of contemporary house plans recovered from the Abbasid period at Samarra'. On the other hand, while housing is perhaps "vernacular" architecture, which Hillenbrand excludes from consideration (p.1), military architecture, only mentioned as a side issue connected with caravanserais, is one of the great glories of Islamic construction, notably the great medieval citadels of Syria, Egypt and Anatolia. As a result, it is a strongly religious vision of Islamic architecture: the mosque, the minaret, the madrasa, and the mausoleum. Is this the right emphasis? Is Islamic architecture the architecture of a religion, as Professor Hillenbrand seems to suggest, or of a human culture, where secular architecture plays an equal role with the religious? This reviewer takes the view that, rather like Roman architecture which had a common tradition between Hadrian's Wall and Palmyra, Islamic architecture is the distinctive common tradition of a culture which was formed by the religion of Islam, and spread over varied geographical and ethnic regions. Nevertheless it is true that the comparable study of Byzantine and Medieval (European) architecture is at present equally largely concentrated on religious buildings. The typological approach to the subject has advantages and disadvantages. By this method it is possible to see the evolution of a building type much better than when architecture is treated by period or regional style. On the other hand, the choice of chapter subjects in itself sets in concrete a particular view of Islamic architecture: in this case a medieval Iranian vision. A book about the architecture of the early Islamic period, for example, could not have had more than two chapter headings the same (palaces and mosques), while only in the Iranian world are minarets sufficiently separate entities to justify a chapter to themselves. Hillenbrand's very mildly pro-Iranian sentiment is most visible in his seeing the spiral minaret of the mosque of Samarra' (al-Malwiya) as having its origin in the Sasanian tower at Firuzabad in Fars (p. 144), rather than the usual explanation of a relationship with a northern version of the Mesopotamian ziggurat, as excavated at Khorsabad (for the latest interpretation of the Firuzabad tower, see Huff, Istanbuler Mitteilungen, 19/20 (1969-70), pp 319-338). In sum it is a book admirable for its intellectual rigour, both in terms of its methodological justifications of the bases of its enquiries, and the lengths it goes to to carry out its premises. Its overtly art-historical approach was deliberate, and, it must be said, is not the only possible one. An archaeologist would have treated a much wider range of building activities, and a historian would have treated in greater depth the relationship of building and society. If there is a fault in the book, it is that its very size has overstressed the production process; a few remarks could have been tightened up, and the choice of a few drawings is somewhat questionable. Alastair Northedge