Cosmology And Architecture In Premodern Islam: An Architectural Reading Of Mystical Ideas
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Product Details
- Hardcover: 262 pages
- Publisher: State University of New York Press (June 30, 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0791464113
- ISBN-13: 978-0791464113
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
Review:
Cosmology and Architecture in Pre-Modern Islam
Samer Akkach’s “Cosmology and Architecture in Pre-Modern Islam: An Architectural Reading of Mystical Ideas” is a work that anyone interested in the interplay between Islamic cosmology and traditional Islamic architecture should pick up. Insofar as the spiritual economy of Islam is concerned the Absolute is postured as pure `Object’, and so cosmology is an integral part of its metaphysical dialectic. The inner cosmology, or the world of the psyche, is an aspect of Sufi metaphysical discourse–how could it not be–but it is the cosmological that is given the emphasis. Understanding how the cosmos was envisaged by the luminaries of the Islamic tradition is a most important step in “breathing” the air of that dispensation of sacred names and forms commonly known as Islamic.
It is complete with diagrams and lengthy explanations of the sacred logic behind the Ka’ba, the Umayyad Dome of the Rock, Sufi Shrines, gardens, and Mosques. He also pins down the reductive tendencies in academia which attribute little or no spiritual significance to the motives behind the fashioning of Islamic art and architecture; some of whom even question whether or not the term `Islamic’ applies to the traditional architecture that decorates the Muslim world. To these inanities Akkach sends forth the argument of those who make up the traditionalist school, and kindly disposes of the modern/post-modern hermeneutics of symbolism and architecture which tyrannizes the academies and “educated minds” of today. He also examines how certain scholars such as Otto and Eliade have interpreted sacred symbolism, and offers a few adjustments to their appraisal. However, the main value of this work lay in its precise exposition of metaphysics and cosmology–as communicated through the prism of the Islamic symbolic economy–and how these not only inform Islamic architecture, but also how those sensitive to the geometry of the sacred might behold them through it.
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