Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran is a gorgeous book to hold, to browse, and to read. Beginning with the cover illustration of the city’s monumental central square drawn by the French architect Pascale Coste (d. 1879), Emami takes us through a visual tour of early modern Isfahan. The cool turquoise cotton spine that binds the book echoes Isfahan’s architecture. As we turn every polished page, the texture of images enhances a sensory experience of the city. Blending urban design with urban literature, the reader is taken on a stunning expedition that ends with a panoramic sketch of the cityscape drawn by the Dutch artist, Cornelis de Bruijn (d. 1727). From front to back cover, the book design replicates the journey of the reader, starting with a focused view of the new city and proceeding to a comprehensive exploration of its urban and physical environment. Together, Emami and the Penn State University Press have created an evocative design to capture the ambition of the book, that is, to elicit a tactile experience of Isfahan.

Much has been written about the renovation project of Isfahan, when the Safavid king, Shah Abbas I (1588–1629), began to build a bustling new capital. Emami’s book stands out for its rare pairing of material and textual sources that are deployed to capture Isfahan’s transformations through the prism of architecture and literature. Isfahan conjures a connected city, on both banks of the Zayandeh river, and its ecology, bringing into play a panoply of aerial views, lesser-known sketches and drawings, old photographs, computer-generated reconstructions, European travelogues, and Persian city writings. Emami argues that the brilliance of Safavid urban planning had as its conception the revival of commerce and the reconfiguration of Isfahan’s social order. The author foregrounds the power of design as generative of city life and the shaping of social and cultural practices.

Emami’s narrative corresponds to his structuralist analysis, which moves from urban forms to poetics that are read as structures of feeling. He draws on phenomenology as a heuristic to foreground everyday experiences of the sensorial city scape. Here Emami relies primarily on the urban experience of one poet, Aqa Mansur Semnani (alive in 1656). Semnani, himself a frequent visitor to Isfahan, is a tourist of sorts who writes a fascinating account of his day-long tour of Isfahan. Emami mobilizes Semnani’s city-disturbance (shahrashub) to stroll through the city and illustrate what lies at the core of his book: a study of “embodied sensory encounters” that reveal “new perceptions of self and society” (p. 2). The near complete translation of Semnani’s city-writing is a valuable bonus that will serve as an indispensable pedagogical resource.

It is not given that cities must be represented in writing. Writing the city was an early modern phenomenon in the Persianate world. Safavid literati like Aqa Mansur Semnani admitted the cityscape into writing (shahrashub) to contain it and make it available as an object of exploration. By making a place for the city in writing, Safavid historians have argued that seeing, desiring, and reading became entangled modalities of encounter, allowing residents to experience the city and historians to recognize new forms of sociability. Emami compliments this historiography with his dialogic move between the built environment and urban subjectivity. As an architectural historian, his attention to social and cultural history is impressive. Such a conceptual move, however, requires a method backed by thick description and evidence. Emami would have benefited from an engagement with the historiography to garner further proof for his argument, which is based on a singular poet and his city-writing.

Moreover, Emami’s analysis would gain from a consideration of the social and cultural context in which Semnani produced his city guide. Missing in Emami’s reading of Semnani is the dominant culture of male homosociality that empowers Semnani’s city-writing in a collective experience of male urban bonding. Emami ignores this culture, in and for which Semnani’s guide to strolling Isfahan was written. Instead, he highlights Semnani’s desire for the opposite sex, for his favorite “courtesan” residing on the “new street.” Even if the sex-worker is female, this is the only hetero episode depicted in Semnani’s urban economy of erotics, where the primary object of desire is male. From the “Armenian infidel boys” in the bazaar, to Mirza Ashraf, the coffee cup bearer, and Aqa Hasan Ali, the wrestler, whose peacock gait bedazzles Semnani, the poetics of male desire represents an ideal that is materially and emotionally central to Isfahan’s social fabric. Emami’s erasure of male homoeroticism has a long history and speaks to its stigmatization and association with sodomy and boy-gazing. In recent decades, scholars such as Walter Andrews, Selim Kuru, and Afsaneh Najmabadi have persuasively addressed the nationalist projects that rewrote gender roles and sexual desires, closeting the ubiquitous male beloved (amrad) in premodern Persian, Turkish, and Arabic poetry and practice.

Emami’s disregard for historical context elicits anachronisms. He assumes that Aqa Mansur’s guide to strolling in Isfahan is the solitary performance of a wanderer who anticipates Benjamin or Baudelaire’s flaneur. The entire tour of Isfahan, however, is a collective guide for teaching men the refinements of being urbane and to appreciate the material and the sensual beauties of the city, whether in the Sufi cloister of Nasir, the new and old mosque, the coffee house, the crowded maidan, or on the new street of sex workers. Aqa Mansur is always in the company of men. Far from remaining anonymous to the people and places he visits and recommends, Aqa Mansur, the seasoned connoisseur, recognizes shopkeepers and coffee house owners by their name and tells his audience where the best coffee, tobacco, syrup, and bread is to be had.

Emami is cognizant of a difference between the Isfahani city-disturber and the Parisian flaneur. The distinction lies, he says, in the absence of a Baudelairian epiphany for Aqa Mansur. Another available reading sees Aqa Mansur’s city-disturbance as a revelatory experience that draws on the language of mysticism to break with convention. When Aqa Mansur divulges the identity of his beloved, Aqa Husayn Ali, he makes his secret love a public certainty. Disrupting the adab (etiquette) of love’s decorum, he evokes the eyelashes of his beloved wrestler, which have “the force of the arm of love,” with “the power to pierce open the gazer’s heart,” so much that he loses consciousness in the maidan and faints in the face of his beloved’s beauty in the very space of sovereign authorization. Aqa Mansur’s disclosure explicitly voices the emotional and material processes that his writing entailed: “I restrain myself from the tip of my pen upon the page of tulip quality because according to the law of adab, it is forbidden to write about these hidden secrets and unveil them in public” (my translation; p. 220). These are the places of greater intellectual engagement and collegial difference that enrich and expand our collective knowledge. Emami misses an opportunity to address the critical scholarship on Isfahan’s urban culture more directly and candidly.

But let me end by reiterating the rich contribution of Emami’s Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran. Emami forges eye-opening connections between places, discourses, and practices. Their critical thrust works toward redefining Isfahan’s urbanism, notions of the public, and the experience of architecture.