This volume focuses on a series of mosques constructed after north-west India came under the political control of the Ghurid sultanate of Afghanistan in the 1190s. The most famous of the group is the Qutb Mosque in Delhi. The book explores the complex relationship between pre-modern architecture, history, and modern historiography. It brings together divergent voices that have enriched nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship on some of the earliest surviving mosques in South Asia. Piety and Politics analyzes the different traditions that contributed to the development of the earliest mosques in South Asia. It examines the evidence that architecture offers for cultural exchange, identity formation, and political polemics in the Ghurid and early Delhi sultanates in order to understand the context of contemporary debates, memories, and perceptions related to the mosques that form the subject of the volume. Presenting a range of perspectives on the meaning of pre-modern monuments, it contributes to broader debates on the nature of modern historical writing. The collection includes writings on the beginnings of mosque architecture in South Asia (Alka Patel); the socio-political milieu of these structures (André Wink and Richard M. Eaton); controversies concerning the origins of the Qutb Mosque and Qutb Minar (Alexander Cunningham and J.D. Beglar); continuities and innovations in early Rajasthani mosques (Michael W. Meister and Robert Hillenbrand); and recent approaches to interpreting the Qutb complex in Delhi by Mohammad Mujeeb, Fritz Lehmann, Sunil Kumar, Anthony Welch, Hussein Keshani, and Alexandra Bain. Highlighting both continuities and ruptures in the architectural traditions of the period, Finbarr Barry Flood's introduction constructs a socio-political context for the various academic positions represented in the volume. Flood underlines the need for multiple narratives and variant readings of the monuments.  Part of the prestigious Debates in Indian History and Society series, this reader will interest scholars, teachers, and students of medieval Indian history particularly those concerned with Islam and Indian and Islamic architecture.

Piety and Politics in the Early Indian Mosque (Debates in Indian History and Society)

History

Flood, Finbarr Barry

Asia

Oxford University Press

Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history.
 The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.

Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

New perspectives on early globalisms from objects and images Tales Things Tell offers new perspectives on histories of connectivity between Africa, Asia, and Europe in the period before the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. Reflected in objects and materials whose circulation and reception defined aesthetic, economic, and technological networks that existed outside established political and sectarian boundaries, many of these histories are not documented in the written sources on which historians usually rely. Tales Things Tell charts bold new directions in art history, making a compelling case for the archival value of mobile artifacts and images in reconstructing the past. In this beautifully illustrated book, Finbarr Barry Flood and Beate Fricke present six illuminating case studies from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries to show how portable objects mediated the mobility of concepts, iconographies, and techniques. The case studies range from metalwork to stone reliefs, manuscript paintings, and objects using natural materials such as coconut and rock crystal. Whether as booty, commodities, gifts, or souvenirs, many of the objects discussed in Tales Things Tell functioned as sources of aesthetic, iconographic, or technical knowledge in the lands in which they came to rest. Remapping the histories of exchange between medieval Islam and Christendom, from Europe to the Indian Ocean, Tales Things Tell ventures beyond standard narratives drawn from written archival records to demonstrate the value of objects and images as documents of early globalisms.

Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms

Fricke, Beate

Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l'Islam: Pèlerins, reliques, copies

Religion & Spirituality

Islam

Hazan

A detailed and well-illustrated study of the history, architecture and symbolism of the early 8th-century mosque. The heavily annotated text includes analyses of the mosque's mosaic, interior decoration, clock and colonnade and broader discussions of the ambiguous meaning of the mosque's decorations, the topography of early medieval cities and the visual culture of Muslim architecture.

The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies in the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (Islamic History & Civilization)

Religious

BRILL

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Books by Flood, Finbarr Barry