AKPIA-Medieval Studies Lecture on Medieval Islamic Architecture

Alexander Brey (Wellesley College), Ruins, Reuse, and Memory in Early Islamic Architecture. Co-sponsored by the Committee on Medieval Studies and the Harvard Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.

While the earliest Arabic chronicles tend to mention architecture briefly, if at all, Arabic sources attributed to ninth- and early tenth-century authors reveal that mutually entangled concepts and practices led to the construction of buildings, the reification of memory, and the reshaping of history. This talk builds on studies of commemorative architecture and the medieval legacies of pre-Islamic ruins by scholars like Oleg Grabar, Sarah Cresap Johnson, and Martyn Smith, as well studies of the relationship between memory and architecture by historians of Latin and Byzantine traditions like Mary Carruthers and Robert Ousterhout. Using both textual and architectural evidence, it argues that the creation, maintenance, renovation, destruction, reuse, and interpretation of buildings across the ʿAbbasid caliphate functioned as memory practices, and seeks to place these acts in dialogue with other practices for fixing memory and history.