The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival is a book that will be read with great interest by all historians of Islamic art and will have a broad appeal to those interested in the relationship between medieval cultural or political formations and the dissemination of artistic forms. Ambitious in scope and innovative in approach, it is a handsome tome, well written and illustrated. Its two great a priori merits lie in the collation of an array of important material previously scattered through a wide range of diverse sources, and in an analysis that challenges both Islamists and Orientalists by reintroducing the question of agency into a discussion that has often been framed in essentialist and/or evolutionist terms.

Yasser Tabbaa’s general thesis is:

As the title of the book suggests, the author acknowledges a debt to Oleg Grabar’s seminal The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) while focusing on a series of transformations that took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, two to three hundred years after what is generally considered the formative period of Islamic art. The author considers these transformations as a body and associates them with a concurrent reassertion of political authority and religious orthodoxy by the Baghdad caliphate in the face of the challenges that it faced during the tenth through twelfth centuries. These stemmed from three main developments: the emergence of powerful and politically independent regional dynasties; the establishment of a Shi’i countercaliphate in Egypt in 969; and (from the late eleventh century onward) the advent of the Crusaders. The focus here is firmly on internal challenges and intra-Muslim rivalries rather than any impact that the Crusades had on the development of Islamic art.

The book consists of seven chapters, with the central five concerning a different aspect of artistic production. The first of these deals with changes that occurred in the format, medium, and script of Qur’ans in the early eleventh century. The remaining chapters deal with architectural decoration and architectonic forms such as monumental epigraphy, geometric and “arabesque” ornament (girih), stalactite vaulting (muqarnas), and a range of structural and decorative forms, all of which share the subdivision of space in an illusionist manner.

Reduced to its essentials, the author’s thesis is that the artistic forms he discusses were symbolic forms created, systematized, or monumentalized in Baghdad as part of a reassertion of Sunni authority in the face of the threat posed by the Fatimid caliphate. These forms provided a visual expression of opposition to the Fatimid polity—within which many of them are either absent or poorly documented before its collapse in the late twelfth century—and were positively appropriated by the Sunni dynasties of Syria, Iran, Iraq, and North Africa. The process of dissemination enhanced the Sunni caliphate, publicly affirming its status by indexing a symbiotic relationship between a center that had little military or political clout and a client periphery that sought to exploit its legitimizing potential.

The thesis rests on three assumptions: that the forms originated in Baghdad in the late tenth or early eleventh centuries; that the use of these forms distinguishes Sunni artistic production from that of contemporary Shi’is; and that there was a demonstrable relationship between a series of shifts in the intellectual alignment of the Baghdad caliphate and artistic production in that city during the same period.

In assessing the role of Baghdad in the creation or canonization of artistic forms, Tabbaa (like many historians of Islamic art before him) is hampered by the dearth of monuments surviving from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Nevertheless, he succeeds in making a good argument for the centrality of Baghdad to artistic production during the period. It is less certain, however, that all of the forms he considers were created in and disseminated from this center. The author acknowledges the importance of regionalism to the discussion, distinguishing, for example, between illusionistic vaulting effects orchestrated in Andalusian monuments such as the Great Mosque of Cordoba from the tenth century and analogous forms that appear in Syria in the twelfth century and in Anatolia a little later. This very regionalism introduces a weakness into the argument, a weakness that is most apparent in the discussion relating to the use of polylobed arches. Such arches (or, at least arches decorated to give them the appearance of being polylobed) were known in Sasanian Iraq and appear in ‘Abbasid monuments such as the palace at Ukhaydir. Their use in the Zangid monuments of the Jazira in the twelfth century might therefore be seen as evidence for regional continuity rather than the embrace of forms newly imbued with specific sectarian connotations.

While central to the discussion, the idea of difference is also perhaps not as clear-cut as it first appears. Geographical disjunctions in the distribution of certain architectonic forms or modes of decoration (for example, the rarity of early cursive Qur’ans from Egypt) go a long way to support the author’s central thesis. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that some of these disjunctions may reflect the nature of the surviving material. The use of muqarnas is restricted to relatively minor contexts in surviving Fatimid monuments, but its proliferation in the monuments of Norman Sicily (which had strong cultural affinities to Fatimid Egypt) raises the possibility that it enjoyed a popularity in Fatimid palace architecture, no examples of which have survived. Of course, such a disjunction between the use of muqarnas in Fatimid religious and secular architecture would not necessarily obviate the thesis (and could even support it), but it might also point to complexities in the dissemination of artistic forms to which a simple Sunni-Shi’i opposition would not do justice.

In addition, certain forms were common to the Fatimid and ‘Abbasid domains, and these shared forms were as integral to the medieval visual landscape as signs of difference. The proliferation of figural ornament in the secular arts of both cultural spheres during the eleventh and twelfth centuries indicates that there was more of a shared artistic culture (or at least of common iconographic types) than a focus on primarily funerary and religious architecture suggests. Equally, even forms invested with specific sectarian connotations were capable of being adopted by those of opposing religious persuasions. Perhaps the most surprising example is provided by the striking of coins that feature a series of concentric epigraphic circles by a number of eastern Sunni dynasties in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These issues are clearly modeled on a well-known coin of Fatimid design that Irene Bierman has convincingly interpreted as a visual embodiment of the central tenets of Fatimid religious and political ideology. The reasons for its impact on the numismatic issues of Sunni dynasties in the eastern Islamic world await further investigation; it should be borne in mind, however, that emulation is not always a sign of homage and can have a more subversive intent. In other words, the degree and nature of difference needs to be considered in a broader perspective that includes the transmission of certain forms across religious and cultural boundaries.

As is often the case with studies that address the meanings that artistic forms possessed or acquired in the medieval Islamic world, Tabbaa is frequently obliged to make a leap of faith between suggestive juxtapositions. It should be noted that this problem is also evident in the work of those who have sought to provide alternative explanations for the same forms. (Terry Allen, for example, proposed that the use of the joggled voussoir [155, ff.] should be attributed to its geographical associations rather than any sectarian connotations.) Despite such uncertainties, it is clear that the relatively arcane theological debates that took place in medieval Baghdad could resonate in the art and architecture of the medieval Islamic world in surprising ways. For instance, a series of ninth- or tenth-century Qur’anic inscriptions in the Great Mosque of Banbhore in Sind have been interpreted as a sophisticated commentary on the Mu’tazilite controversy that was then raging in Baghdad, which the author discusses in Chapter 1.

The specifics of such transitions from religious or philosophical speculation to artisanal practice or from theoretical science to applied artistry need further investigation, but one potentially useful source for bridging the gap lies in medieval biographical dictionaries. These provide a wealth of information on the training of artisans of certain sorts. From them we learn, for example, that during the period in question the creators of a series of monumental clocks in Damascus were educated in medicine, mathematics, and the philosophical sciences.

The question of the relationship between theory and praxis is just one of a number of important topics on which this exciting and challenging book is bound to engender a lively discussion. Such a debate can only be healthy for the field as a whole, for, as the author asks in closing his introduction, “Is it not through challenge and controversy that ideas are sharpened, identities reaffirmed, and new concepts created?” (10).