The last appearance of a volume of collected papers on the arts of the Mamluk period was almost thirty years ago (Oleg Grabar (ed.), Art of the Mamluks, published as Muqarnas, vol. II, New Haven and London, 1984). It contained selected papers from a symposium held in Washington, DC, in May 1981, during the run of a major exhibition on Mamluk art in the city, The Renaissance of Islam: Art of the Mamluks. No exhibition of this scale on this subject has been seen since, further evidence that Mamluk art is relatively neglected.
The current publication, a collection of fifteen papers, is also the fruit of a conference, The Arts of the Mamluks, held at SOAS, University of London, in September 2009. The book is satisfyingly rich, and in some instances its contents will have far-reaching consequences. Rachel Ward, for example, has undermined the conventional account of Mamluk art through her work on enamelled and gilded glass. Mamluk art, we are always told, began at a high point of development, soon reached a peak of maturity and then spent two centuries in decline. By isolating the enamelled glass that can be dated with some certainty, placing it in a chronological sequence and observing its technical features, Ward is able to show that during the fourteenth century, enamelled glass continued to become more sophisticated, not less, as previously presumed. As a result, some of the finest early Mamluk glass can now be attributed to a later period.
The notion that “good” does not necessarily mean “early” is also reflected in other papers. In his soundly based essay on Mamluk carpets, Thompson can only discuss items from the reign of Sultan Qaytbay (1468–98) and later, as we have no real evidence from preceding periods. At about the same time, Qaytbay made changes to the magnificent throne hall inserted over the Ayyubid entrance to the citadel of Aleppo from 1406–07. In her discussion of this monument, Julia Gonnella shows how this architectural innovation was commissioned by a rebellious provincial governor at a time when the Mamluk empire's prestige was at a very low ebb. Yet, although not replicated elsewhere, the throne hall was completed and then maintained by later sultans, who understood its usefulness.
A broader sense that Mamluk architecture did not simply undergo a lengthy decline is given by the historian Julien Loiseau, who discusses the enormous increase in the number of Friday mosques in Mamluk cities. Saladin closed all but two of the Friday mosques in Cairo: in 1250, when the Mamluks came to power, there were still only three in operation; but in 1517, when the Mamluk regime fell, there were 221. Loiseau shows how the strict interpretation of Shafiʿi law on this matter was undermined by a range of factors, including the progressive weakening of the sultan's monopoly on patronage.
All these essays chime with the ideas put forward by Nasser Rabat in his essay, where he criticizes the presentation of Mamluk art as a monolithic, ahistorical block, and calls for a periodization based on focused studies that acknowledge and explain the changes that took place. “This”, the editor tells us, “is also the primary aim of this book” (p. 15).
Like that of Gonnella, the paper by Iman Abdulfattah and Mamdouh Mohamed Sakr is on palatial architecture, but this time on the citadel of Cairo, the very heart of the empire. The excavation of a reception hall almost certainly erected by Sultan Muhammad ibn Qalawun (d.1341) provided evidence of the use of mosaic decoration, a medium that has survived above ground almost entirely in religious settings. One of these is the tomb of Tankiz – one of Sultan Muhammad's great amirs – in Damascus, and Ellen Kenney's essay is devoted to the reconstruction of the large mosque Tankiz erected on the same site, of which only fragments survive. A similar exercise is the subject of Bernard O'Kane's contribution. In this case the mosque is in Cairo and was built by Bashtak, another great amir of Sultan Muhammad. O'Kane uses informative drawings by the English architect James Wild to understand how the mosque looked before much of it was pulled down in 1863–64.
These impressive monuments would have been equipped by their founders with many fine manuscripts. The poor coverage of book production in this publication is a weakness, but the excellent colour reproductions in the one essay on the subject is a high point. This contribution, by Zeren Tanındı, concerns the luxury copies of a Sufi work in Turkish commissioned by two Mamluk amirs in the 1470s. Another link with the Turkish-speaking territories to the north is discussed by Mehmet Baha Tanman. He traces Mamluk mannerisms in individual monuments in Turkey, as well as addressing the more completely Mamluk architecture of south-east Anatolia.
Roland-Pierre Gayraud provides a valuable survey of the whole of Mamluk ceramic production, and his essay is the closest the book comes to an encyclopaedia article, whereas Rosalind Wade Haddon's paper is focused on the relationship between Mamluk ceramics and Mongol-period ceramics made in lands to the north. This very specific interaction with another part of the Muslim world is set in context by Doris Behrens-Abouseif's impressive survey of the interactions of the Mamluks with a much wider range of foreign cultures.
Mamluk metalwork is discussed in two papers. One, by J.M. Rogers, is on court workshops, while the other, by Sophie Makariou and Carine Juvin, shows that a brass plate in the Musée du Louvre was the top of a type of six-sided brass object from the Mamluk period conventionally called a kursī. They demonstrate that we can no longer call such objects by this name, although their original function has still to be identified.
