Art Histories
2014/ 2015

Peter Webb

Text, Image and Idea in Islamic Architecture: ‘Buildings and Books’

Peter Webb

Peter Webb (PhD SOAS, University of London, 2014) is an Arabist whose research interests focus on early Islamic History and the Cultures, Literatures and Arts of the classical Muslim world. His doctoral thesis, and forthcoming book, Imagining the Arabs, explores the story of the Arab people in early Islam, examining the emergence of Arab identity, the rise and fall of Arab communities, and the ways in which Muslims creatively reconstructed the pre-Islamic past to mythologise Arab origins. He has published a number of scholarly articles and book chapters on Arabic Literature and Muslim Narratives of pre-Islamic History, and with the Saudi Archaeologist, Saad al-Rashid, he co-authored Medieval Roads to Mecca, a history of the early Hajj. Webb taught classical Arabic Literature and History at SOAS (2009-14) and at the American University of Paris (2013-14).
 

Text, Image and Idea in Islamic Architecture: ‘Buildings and Books’

During the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices fellowship Webb investigates text and space in the monumental architecture of Mamluk Cairo. It has the dual aims of exploring (i) the semiotic nexus of text and image in architecture; and (ii) the relationship between the experience of using a space and the act of reading. During the Mamluk period, very literate people possessing great appreciation for books frequented Cairo’s public buildings, and the saturation of those architectural spaces with ornaments created from the written word were presumably intended to, and were avidly read by their visitors. To grasp Mamluk architectural aesthetics, perhaps we need to ‘read’ buildings as ‘books’ too, and this project shall explore how the patrons’/architects’/artists’ selection, arrangement and renderings of text within buildings related to and enhanced buildings’ functions. To ‘read a building’, this project develops theoretical approaches to the aesthetics of the written word in space, and it will also specifically contextualise architectural ornament and inscriptions within the wider bibliophilic culture of Mamluk Egypt by revealing the universe of slogans and icons which buildings shared with poetry, Sufi and magical writings.