The Aga Khan Program at Harvard University publishes scholarly works on the history of Islamic art and architecture. Established in 1983, Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World, is a volume of essays on art and architectural history. Muqarnas 39 is the most recent volume, edited by Gülru Necipoğlu and Maria J. Metzler.
Muqarnas 39 offers a rich panoply of studies extending across the breadth of the Muslim realm—from Andalusia to India—and across a millennium. The volume’s topics range from the material artifacts of textiles, pen boxes, fourteenth-century manuscripts, valuables of the Ottoman treasury, a nineteenth-century Ottoman coin collection, classical marble frieze slabs, royal palanquins, and sphero-conical vessels, to Orientalist internalization, mosque and city architecture—the construction even of an entire city—and the archaeological, museological, legal, and sociological analysis of such. Luxuriously illustrated and thoroughly researched, each of the twelve articles presents a visual and engaging unpacking of an aspect of Islamic culture that will introduce the reader to new and fascinating insights.
Textual primary sources for visual culture are featured in Supplements to Muqarnas. Fourteen of these volumes have now been published, the latest of which is Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4) (2 vols). The subject of this two-volume publication is an inventory of manuscripts in the book treasury of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II from his royal librarian ʿAtufi in the year 908 (1502–3) and transcribed in a clean copy in 909 (1503–4). This unicum inventory preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára Keleti Gyűjtemény, MS Török F. 59) records over 5,000 volumes, and more than 7,000 titles, on virtually every branch of human erudition at the time. Edited by Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar and Cornell H. Fleischer.
Both Muqarnas and Supplements to Muqarnas may be purchased through Brill.
For further information about each publication, visit the Muqarnas and the Supplements to Muqarnas sections of our website.
For submission guidelines to Muqarnas, click here.
Aga Khan Program Editorial Office
Sackler Museum
485 Broadway
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617-495-3774
Fax: 617-496-8389
Email: The Managing Editor
For Muqarnas 39 Table of Contents, click here
