The present volume of Muqarnas marks both the eightieth birthday of Oleg Grabar and the thirtieth anniversary of the Aga Khan Program of Islamic Architecture at Harvard which he was instrumental in founding. The fifteen contributors, apart from the first two Patricia Crone and Michael Cook both of whom are distinguished Princeton historians, are all former pupils of Grabar. They were asked to address some aspect of his work – a theme, a problem, or a methodology he himself has addressed in his publications. Shortage of space precludes notice of all the contributions, but the present review gives a good idea of the scope of the volume which, appropriately, ranges geographically from Marrakech to Agra and chronologically from the pre-Islamic period to the twentieth century.

Patricia Crone and Michael Cook both protest their innocence of Islamic art history, but they certainly have lessons to teach the ‘professional’ Islamic art-historians. Dr Crone's ‘“Barefoot and naked”: What did the Bedouin of the Arab conquests look like?’ (pp. 1–10) deals wittily and concisely with a surprising iconographic problem, the frequent, but implausible, reports by Roman historians of the scanty, even scandalous, clothing of their Arab foes, and, for example, the ivories of the Throne of Maximian in Ravenna, present them as bare-headed with long flowing hair, bare torsos and a mere waist-cloth and shawl (a dress frequently referred to in the poetry of the Jahiliyyah). Few, if any, of the historians can have been writing from personal experience, and the ivories are scarcely reportage. Datable petroglyphs in the Arabian peninsula show them, however, exactly as they are on the Ravenna ivories, and even suggest that this costume was already established a full millennium before the coming of Islam.

Michael Cook's ‘The namesake taboo’ (pp. 11–16) considers, with a wealth of comparative detail, a surprising but little remarked custom in late ‘Abbasid society. In his manual of court etiquette the Buwayhid adīb, Hilal al-Sabi states that anyone who has the same name as a caliph is forbidden to utter it, or the name of anyone else of that name, in his presence. And if the name, for example khayzurān (‘bamboo’, the name of the mother of Harun al-Rashid) had a meaning, it was forbidden to speak of bamboo in her presence. His explanation is ingenious: the primary function of a name is to identify the bearer, and to refer at once to more than one person of the same name will cause confusion, so in a steeply hierarchical society it makes sense that the confusion should be obviated at the expense of the inferior.

It is not quite clear whether this explanation covers the Khayzuran case, and Cook concedes that work needs to be done on the prevalence of the prohibition in Islamic cultures. A possible corollary of Hilal al-Sabi's principle, however, might be the disapproval occasionally voiced by the ‘ulama of giving children the name of a prophet.

Gülru Necipoğlu's ‘The Dome of the Rock as palimpsest: ‘Abd al-Malik's grand narrative and Sultan Süleyman's glosses’ (pp. 17–105) is an impressive study, taking into account all the major literature on this central Muslim monument and the complex of buildings of which it is the centre, from its foundation to the works of Süleyman the Magnificent (circa 1525–1562), their meaning and what inspired them. The argument is dense and somewhat exhausting to read at one go, and it is to be hoped that it will soon appear on its own, with a lay-out which is somewhat more reader-friendly.

Sixteenth-century Ottoman perceptions of the Dome of the Rock, as she properly observes, were largely shaped by earlier Arabic and Ottoman Turkish compilations based on the faḍā’il Bayt al-Maqdis with instructions to pilgrims regarding the relics to be visited, the prayers to be said at each station and the order in which they were to be seen. Architecturally these are mostly of limited value, but are valuable sources for the historical topography of the Haram al-Sharif. She augments these with contemporary Ottoman manuscript sources and makes good use of Evliyā Çelebi's comprehensive account of Jerusalem, concluding that Süleyman's protracted building activities at the Dome of the Rock, like his renovations of the Haram, unleashed a deep-seated popular veneration of the Rock and encouraged a revival of ritual practices frequently censured by Mamluk scholars, mostly Hanbali and Shafi'i, as unorthodox innovations.

Her brilliant review of these heterogeneous sources includes a new and much improved reading (p. 65) of the foundation inscription on the tiles of the outer tympanum of the north gate of the Dome of the Rock.

Yasser Tabbaa's contribution ‘Andalusian roots and Abbasid homage: The Qubbat al-Barudiyyin in Marrakech’ (pp. 133–146), argues persuasively that this monument, dating from 1117, which probably commemorates the provision of a permanent water supply to Marrakech by ‘Ali b. Yusuf b. Tashufin (r. 1106–42), has been the victim not merely of centuries of neglect but of the distorting effect of viewing Almoravid and Almohad architecture in Morocco from a Cordoban perspective. Various features of its plan and its rich decoration, inside and out, betray its eastern origin. The double dome and its complex geometrical ornament are in the style of the muqarnas-domes of Iraq and Ibn Jubayr's description of four domes at the Haram in Mecca built by the caliph, al-Muqtadir in the early tenth century; and the elegant cursive of its foundation inscription is more characteristic of Seljuk and Zengid than Maghribi epigraphy. It appropriately reflects, therefore, both Almoravid allegiance to the ‘Abbasids as the symbolic rulers of Islam and the safeguard of Sunnism, and the pious acts of the ‘Abbasids at the Haram of Mecca.

The occasion of Sheila Blair's article, ‘A brief biography of Abu Zayd’ (pp. 155–176), is a lustre-painted bowl, dated Jumada II 600 (February-March 1204) recently acquired by the C. L. David Foundation in Copenhagen signed (bi-khaṭṭihi) by the prolific Kashan potter and tile-maker, Abu Zayd. He was a man of many talents, painting both in lustre and in mīnā’ī and signing both pottery and tiles – though in strikingly different styles in the two media. On occasions he collaborated with another craftsman, as on the mihrab from the Masjid-i Maydan in Kirman, dated Safar 623 (February 1226), which is also signed by the Husayni sayyid Muhammad b. Abi Tahir. He composed verses and inscribed them, as well as verses by numerous other poets, on his pots, sometimes, evidently, taking them down from dictation.

The best one can say of most of the verses is that they are inconsequential or even trivial and Blair has to confess that they invoke relations “which we do not appreciate today”. “Literary historians”, she says, “are beginning to decode the multi-level metaphors of medieval Persian poetry or prose, and the art-historian must do the same for the visual arts”. All very well: but how to procede? She appends a useful list of thirty one pieces signed by or attributable to Abu Zayd.

Cynthia Robinson's ‘Marginal ornament: Poetics, mimesis and devotion in the Palace of the Lions’ (pp. 185–214), following the current views of Spanish scholars, argues that the Court of the Lions, if not an official madrasah, was an institution for the teaching of Sufism, a zawiyah and a burial place for Muhammad V – which implies, at the very least, a very idiosyncratic view of the history of such institutions. Besides, it brings one up against the problem of the paintings of chivalry on leather in the vaults of some of the galleries. Here the author really bites the bullet and argues that they are the figural counterpart of the abstract ornament of the vaults of the various chambers which she regards as legible only through the lens of poetic convention – she assumes that the content of the numerous poems inscribed on the walls of the complex were a blue-print for its construction and are to that extent implicated in the structure.

This argument, invoking the cultural and literary sophistication of the Nasrid court and the historical and literary consciousness of Nasrid poets and their public, may actually be no overstatement. She notes that the paintings are not misunderstandings of the Arthurian cycle but give significantly islamicised versions of stories like the tale of Floire and Blanchefleur or the Tristan legend which would also have awakened a sympathetic response in the contemporary Christian courts of Castile and Seville. This is, of course, rather speculative, but it shows the importance of studying the architecture of the later periods of the Alhambra in the context of the courtly life of the contemporary Christian kingdoms of Spain.

Howayda al-Harithy's study, ‘Weaving historical narratives: Beirut's last Mamluk monument’ (pp. 215–230), is of the zawiyah of Ibn al-‘Arraq, built in 1517, brought to light in the course of the planned demolition of the ruined souqs of Beirut, where it had disappeared in the course of their expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On its rediscovery it was claimed by a Shi'i group as the shrine (maqām) of the Ayatollah Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-‘Iraqi al-Dimashqi, who died in 933 (1526), though the Faculty of Legal Studies of the University of Beirut more plausibly identified it as the zawiyah of Muhammad b. ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Arraq, a Sufi and Shafi'i jurist, who died in the same year. Many more details of his biography are furnished by al-Ghazzi, who recounts a series of visits to Beirut by him when the city was menaced by danger from the infidel. The need to take proper account of this inconvenient survival led to some prevarication on the part of the reconstruction company, SOLIDERE, which has been a neat demonstration that it takes more than a slogan to recreate a historic city.

Tülay Artan's ‘A Book of Kings produced and presented as a treatise on hunting’ (pp. 299–330), discusses an Ottoman translation of an Arabic text on hippiatrics, hippology and hunting, a rare genre in Ottoman literature, with 164 miniatures, presented to Sultan Ahmed. Its author is stated to be Hajib ‘Ashıktimur, a typical Mamluk name (a Sayf al-Din Ishiqtimur, who died in 1388, was governor of Aleppo), as is the genre, though the section on hunting is not easy to parallel in Mamluk texts. It begins with a frontispiece on two successive pages (folios 1a, 1b), the second, with a group of figures possibly representing the author, the translator or the artists responsible for producing the manuscript.

Basing herself upon a remark of Oleg Grabar's that many of the Shāhnāmah episodes and the illustrations to them occur in other contexts, Professor Artan considers the third of the treatises, on hunting, in detail. Her detailed exposition of the text is a significant contribution to later Ottoman social history. She traces the vicissitudes of the royal hunt in the decades following the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent and its revival under Sultan Ahmed, which made the treatise a very suitable offering to him. The illustrations, some derived from Mamluk models, cover a wide range of subjects: some are military, with cavalrymen wearing war masks, as well as riders on giraffes, elephants and camels. The resemblance of its illustrations to those of copies of the Şehnâme-i türkî in New York, Uppsala and Paris, at least one of which was for Hafız Ahmed Paşa, Ahmed I's head falconer, one of his boon companions, and, posthumously, one his sons-in-law, leads her to attribute the production of the hunting treatise to him. This, in her view, explains the debt of its illustrations to the hunting scenes in the latter, to the extent that, with pardonable exaggeration, the manuscript might be seen as ‘yet another Book of Kings’.

Marianna Shreve Simpson (‘Mostly modern miniatures: Classical Persian painting in the early twentieth century’, pp. 359–395) discusses, possibly in more detail than the subject is worth, a manuscript in Princeton University Library (84 G), a Khamsah of Amir Khusrav Dihlavi, written by the eminent Safavid scribe Mir ‘Ali al-Husayni at Herat in Rajab 930 (January – February 1524). At some point in its history it was unbound and eight miniatures arranged in thematic and visually complementary pairs were incorporated into it. They are all in a single style, and one of them is signed Turabi Beg Khurasani. Some of them are versions of well-known paintings by the studio of Shah Tahmasp I, and most of them have close parallels in detached leaves in a rather livelier palette of colours in the collection of the Free Library in Philadelphia.

While the debt of the ‘Turabi’ Beg paintings to their more famous originals is, to us, fairly obvious, they are also conspicuously indebted to the seventeenth-century Isfahan school, which was extensively imitated in the late Qajar period. At this point she considers how the originals could have become available to the supposed painter and shows that they were first published in works on Persian painting, like F. R. Martin's study of 1912, the catalogue of the d'Allemagne Collection of 1913, or the catalogue of the Sambon Collection in 1914, all, revealingly, in black and white. This must explain the uncharacteristic palette of the Princeton paintings, basically nīm qalam with pale colour washes and only occasional highlights of brighter colour, which have absolutely nothing to do with the Safavid or Timurid originals. The obvious conclusion is that they were forgeries.

The production of the volume is, unfortunately, not up to the eminence of its dedicatee: the standard of the images reproduced, particularly those in colour, varies from mediocre to bad, and on at least one occasion (p. 2) a confusion in pronouns suggests that something has gone badly wrong in the editing, for Potiphar seems to be a woman!