Architecture of Anxiety, Body Politics and the Formation of Islamic Architecture

This book offers a counternarrative for the formation of Islamic architecture presented as five microhistories c. 632-705. Structured around phenomena of embodied audience, it offers a reinterpretation of the history of the mosque, palace, and shrine.

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Structured as five microhistories c. 632-705, this book offers a counternarrative for the formation of Islamic architecture and the Islamic state. It adopts a novel periodization informed by moments of historical violence and anxiety around caliphal identities in flux, animating histories of the minbar, throne, and maqsura as a principal nexus for navigating this anxiety. It expands outward to re-assess the mosque and palace with a focus on the Qubbat al-Khadraʾ and the Dar al-Imara in Kufa. It culminates in a reading of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem as a site where eschatological anxieties and political survival converge.