-----------

The articles by John Burton-Page on Indian Islamic architecture assembled in this volume give an historical overview of the subject, ranging from the mosques and tombs erected by the Delhi sultans in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, to the great monuments of the Mughals in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This work analyzes the Islamic ritual buildings of western India as innovations of the local architectural tradition. These buildings themselves forged new senses of community, initiating processes of social integration and redefinition among Muslim and non-Muslim groups in the region.

This book reinterprets the Muslim architecture and urban planning of South India, looking beyond the Deccan to the regions of Tamil Nadu and Kerala - the historic coasts of Coromandel and Malabar. For the first time a detailed survey of the Muslim monuments of the historic ports and towns demonstrates a rich and diverse architectural tradition entirely independent from the better known architecture of North India and the Deccan sultanates. The book, extensively illustrated with photographs and architectural drawings, widens the horizons of our understanding of Muslim India and will no doubt pave new paths for future studies in the field.

The spread of Islam in India produced some of the most spectacular monuments, the mosques stand as testimony to the great architectural skill and expertise of the Indian subcontinent through centuries and constitute one of the most important aspects of the rich architectural cultural of the region. This volume showcases some 54 important mosques spread across the Indian subcontinent-from Lahore in modern Pakistan to Gaur in modern West Bengal and from Delhi in the north to Kayalpatnam and Bijapur in South India. It mentions the location of the mosques, their history, structure and plan patterns and discusses various elements of the structures in detail: their entrances, pillars, porticoes, type of mihrab and other aspects. It emphasizes the importance of a particular masjid such as its typifying the mosques of a certain period or dynasty and setting the standard for later masjids in some manner. It presents some other plans and proportional elevations in the appendices for a comparative study. An extremely useful list of Muslim rulers of the Indian subcontinent is provided. With maps and drawings of plans of mosques, the book is a painstaking effort to examine the evolution and iconography of the mosque architecture in the region. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and students of Indo-Islamic architecture.

Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.