[Nov 22, 2024] Architecture of Anxiety: Body Politics and the Formation of Islamic Architecture

When and Where

Friday, November 22, 2024 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm

In person: Room 200B, Bancroft Building (4 Bancroft Avenue, Toronto)

Zoom: Register Here

Speakers

Heba Mostafa (University of Toronto)

Join us for the last Marmura talk of this semester to celebrate our own Heba Mostafa‘s new book that shows how moments of historical violence and anxiety around caliphal identities in flux were central to developments in Islamic architecture.

Structured as five microhistories c. 632-705, this book offers a counternarrative for the formation of Islamic architecture and the Islamic state. It adopts a novel periodization informed by moments of historical violence and anxiety around caliphal identities in flux, animating histories of the minbar, throne, and maqsura as a principal nexus for navigating this anxiety. It expands outward to re-assess the mosque and palace with a focus on the Qubbat al-Khadra and the Dar al-Imara in Kufa. It culminates in a reading of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem as a site where eschatological anxieties and political survival converge.

Bio:
Heba Mostafa is Associate Professor of Islamic art and architecture at the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto, St. George and Senior Fellow at Massey College. She received her doctorate from Cambridge University’s Department of Architecture in 2012 and holds degrees in architecture and the history of Islamic architecture from Cairo University and the American University in Cairo. Her research explores the formation of Islamic architecture through the lens of early Islamic sectarianism and governance, addressing the mediation of political conflict and confessional division through architecture at the intersection of politics and the sacred. She focuses on Islam’s interface with late antiquity, Christianity and Judaism through commemorative architecture, pilgrimage, and ritual practice, with a particular focus on Jerusalem and Cairo. Her current project explores nature veneration practices in Medieval Cairo, with a focus on the Nilometer at al-Rawda Island, bringing into conversation the mediatory role of nature in reconciling the religious, spiritual, and scientific contexts in Medieval Islam.