Collected essays honoring the work of British professors Carole and Robert Hillenbrand.

Carole and Robert Hillenbrand are legendary British professors, both of whom have made immense contributions to the fields of Islamic history and art history, and they are highly respected and beloved by the academic community. For these two volumes, editors Melanie Gibson and Ali Ansari have gathered an eclectic mix of scholarly contributions by colleagues and by some of their most recent students who now occupy positions in universities worldwide. The eleven articles in the volume dedicated to Carole Hillenbrand include research on a range of topics, including the elusive Fatimid caliph al-Zafir, a crusader raid on Mecca, and the Persian bureaucrat Mirza Saleh Shirazi’s history of England. In Robert Hillenbrand's volume, the thirteen articles include studies of a rare eighth-century metal dish with Nilotic scenes, Chinese Qur’ans, the process of image-making in both theory and practice, and a shrine in Mosul destroyed by ISIS.

The first publication to feature the full collection of Iznik ceramics at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

The Benaki Museum of Islamic Art in Athens has a substantial collection of Iznik ceramics, intricate works created in the city of Iznik in Asia Minor that are decorated with vibrant colors and designs. Although well known to many who visit the museum, this collection—which includes tableware, tiles, and sherds—has never before been published in its entirety.
 
Archaeologist, scholar, and curator John Carswell first began studying and cataloging these objects in the 1980s. This project has since been revived and guided to fruition by the curator of the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art, Mina Moraitou, who has also contributed a chapter on the Museum’s founder Antonis Benakis and the formation of its Iznik collection. The catalog brings together these admired and sought-after ceramics, featuring over three hundred illustrations of pieces from the Museum’s collection.
 

Collected articles on Iranian art from the Qajar dynasty.

The thirteen articles in this volume were originally given as presentations at the symposium of the same name organized in June 2018 by the Musée du Louvre and the Musée du Louvre-Lens in conjunction with the exhibition The Empire of Roses: Masterpieces of 19th Century Persian Art. The exhibition explored the art of Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while the nation was under the rule of the Qajar dynasty. The symposium set out to present research on previously unknown and unpublished objects from this rich period of art history.
 
This volume, published with the Louvre Museum in France, is divided into four sections. The first, “Transitions and Transmissions,” is dedicated to the arts of painting, illumination, and lithography. The focus of the second section, entitled “The Image Revealed,” also considers works on paper, looking at new themes and techniques. “The Material World” examines the use of materials such as textiles, carpets, and armor. The articles in the final section discuss the history of two groups of artifacts acquired by their respective museums.
 

An expansive illustrated history of the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus is one of the oldest continuously used religious sites in the world. The mosque we see today was built in 705 CE by the Umayyad caliph al-Walid on top of a fourth-century Christian church that had been erected over a temple of Jupiter. Incredibly, despite the recent war, the mosque has remained almost unscathed, but over the centuries has been continuously rebuilt after damage from earthquakes and fires. In this comprehensive biography of the Umayyad Mosque, Alain George explores a wide range of sources to excavate the dense layers of the mosque’s history, also uncovering what the structure looked like when it was first built with its impressive marble and mosaic-clad walls. George incorporates a range of sources, including new information he found in three previously untranslated poems written at the time the mosque was built, as well as in descriptions left by medieval scholars. He also looks carefully at the many photographs and paintings made by nineteenth-century European travelers, particularly those who recorded the building before the catastrophic fire of 1893.