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, devoted primarily to the history of Islamic art and architecture, is a lively forum for discussion among scholars and students in the West and in the Islamic world. Subjects to be covered in its pages will include the whole sweep of Islamic art and architectural history up to the present time, with attention devoted as well to aspects of Islamic culture, history, and learning.
Muqarnas 33 contains articles that range chronologically and geographically from a study of architectural innovations in the early mosque under the
Umayyads to an analysis of archaeological finds in medieval Armenia, the book culture of
Bijapur, and a discussion of a nineteenth-century Muslim cemetery in Malta. Readers will also discover essays on, respectively, the influence of a Tabrizi workshop on Cairene architecture in the fourteenth century, and the brilliant ceramic tiles of the fifteenth-century Uzun Hasan Mosque in Tabriz, as well as the latest research on the coffeehouses of
Safavid Isfahan and on the architectural patronage of Shah ʿAbbas. A study of a
Timurid pilgrimage scroll in the
Museum of Islamic Art in
Doha and an essay on Bihari calligraphy round out the volume. The Notes and Sources section features a never-before-published treatise on the
Sultan Ahmed Mosque in
Istanbul. Muqarnas 33 includes articles by Heba Mostafa, Diana Isaac Bakhoum, Sandra Aube, David Roxburgh and Mounia Abudaya-Chehkhab, Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, Keelan Overton, Charles Melville, Farshid Emami, Conrad Thake, Ünver Rüstem, and Hans Barnard, Sneha Shah, Gregory E. Areshian, and Kym F. Faull.