The Minarets of Cairo

What can historical buildings tell us about the eras in which they were constructed, and subsequent vicissitudes? Do they offer encoded narratives revealing political and social history? Or do they add only details to the outlines preserved more substantially in textual sources? These are the questions thrown up by two recent books on medieval Islamic architecture, which demonstrate that a building is never just a building, and that medieval Islamic material culture is neglected by the modern historian at his or her peril.

Yet few modern historians of medieval Islam appear equally at home with architectural and textual witnesses to Islamic civilization. This dual expertise is what Nasser Rabbat brings to the table in a new selection of his writings on Mamluk architecture and history written over the sixteen-year period 1989–2005. As a professor of Islamic architecture for twenty years, one might expect his reflections on Mamluk material culture to be sophisticated and groundbreaking; yet his readings of textual and documentary sources are equally revealing and in some cases seminal. Texts and buildings both speak clearly to this historian, and this is one of the intriguing features of this collection, which explores, explicitly and implicitly, the correlation between the two types of ‘narrative’ or expression. Rabbat habitually exploits one type of medium to throw light on the other.