Volume 38 of Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World, is a yearly volume of articles on art and architectural history, edited by CMES Steering Committee member Gülru Necipoğlu, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, is now available.
Three articles in this issue concern Ottoman Tunisia and were written by members of the CMES community:
- CMES AM and NELC PhD alumnus Youssef Ben Ismail traces the rise of the fez in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, considering the commercial and cultural history of the red felt cap with a focus on Tunisian merchants.
- CMES Tunisia Administrative and Program Manager Sihem Lamine interprets the Zaytuna minaret in Tunis (built in 1892) as a colonial object that signaled a shift in power from the Ottomans to the French protectorate through its neo-Almohad style.
- And past CMES Tunisia Postdoctoral Fellow Ridha Moumni likewise critically examines a French colonial project, the Bardo Museum, and demonstrates that native Tunisians had already laid the groundwork for the museum through archaeological and collecting efforts earlier in the nineteenth century.
Read more about this issue on the Harvard Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture website, where you will also find links to purchase and download this and previous issues from the publisher's website.
Founded by Oleg Grabar in 1983, Muqarnas is the first academic journal devoted to art, architectural history, archaeology, as well as all aspects of Islamic visual and material cultures, historical and contemporary. Full-length articles are accompanied by shorter submissions grouped under a separate section titled “Notes and Sources,” for which we particularly welcome studies that introduce textual and visual primary sources. Muqarnas is sponsored by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
