Publications
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 Material, Visual, and Architectural Cultures of the Islamic World, is a volume of essays on art and architectural history. Muqarnas 41 is the most recent volume, edited by Gülru Necipoğlu and Karen A. Leal.
Muqarnas 41 begins with Professor Gülru Necipoğlu’s remembrance of His Late Highness Prince Karim al-Hussaini Aga Khan IV (1936–2025), who in 1979 established the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and MIT. The volume features groundbreaking research on topics such as early Ottoman silk banners decorated with gold and silver, as well as silk carpets made for the tomb of Shah Abbas II; it also contains part II of an article on the Alhambra’s House of Paintings, which analyzes the exceptional figurative paintings on that building’s second floor (see Muqarnas 40, pp. 69–102, for Part I). Other articles reassess the paintings of the British Library/Chester Beatty Akbarnāma and compare medieval zawīyas in the Maghrib and Anatolia. Authors include Walid Akef, Íñigo Almela, Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya, Gwendolyn Collaço, Heike Franke, Tuba Kurtuluş, Sarah Molina, and Nur Sobers-Khan. We are also honored to publish in this volume the last article by Catherine B. Asher (1947–2023), professor emerita in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota and a longtime member of the Muqarnas advisory board.
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.
Celebrating Muqarnas' 40th volume here.
See Muqarnas via Archnet.
For submission guidelines to Muqarnas, click here.
Aga Khan Program Editorial Office
Harvard University
Department of History of Art and Architecture
485 Broadway, 4th floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617-495-3774
Fax: 617-496-8389
Email: The Managing Editor
For Muqarnas 41 Table of Contents, click here
Muqarnas Supplements, Volume: 14
For Muqarnas Supplement 14 Table of Contents, click here