Forschungen zur Almohadischen Moschee Lieferung 1: Vorstuften by Christian EwertReview by: Oleg GrabarInternational Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Aug., 1983), pp. 394-395Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/163532 .

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394 Reviews 394 Reviews

detailed accounts (recits) which appear to support his theses may be taken to show that social relations were rather more open-ended than segmentary theory or any other set of "rules" would allow. Despite its problems, all scholars interested in North Africa and in Muslim tribal peoples will find Honneur et baraka of great interest. Unfortunately its appalling price-reflecting a lamentable trend in the publishing industry-will probably keep most scholars from owning it.

Human Relations Area Files MICHAEL A. MARCUS

CHRISTIAN EWERT, Forschungen zur almohadischen Moschee Lieferung I: Vorstuften, Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Madrider Beitrage 9 (Mainz am Rhein, Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1981). Pp. 207 + 64 plates, 58 figures.

The difficulty of reviewing the intellectual content of this book is that it is the introductory volume to a second, as yet unpublished, one on Almohad mosques; yet it assumes that the point apparently to be made in the second volume-that there is a clearly defined Almohad mosque type-has been demonstrated.

On a more specific level, there are three parts to this book. The first one is an analysis of the plans of a dozen pre-Almohad mosques all over the Muslim world in which the author seeks to find, or signals the absence of, the characteristic Almohad T-plan. The second one is a study limited to western Islam of the ways in which arches and supports are distributed in mosques; I shall return to it shortly. The third part is a typological catalogue of all the reused pre-Islamic elements in the mosques of Cordova and Kairouan and of all the elements imitating such reused pieces.

The third section is a first-rate catalogue, superbly illustrated and of a precise and meticulous scholarship. The first part contains a large number of interesting remarks on well-known monuments like the mosques of Cairo, Fez, and, of course Kairouan and Cordova, but its main point-the pre-history of a T-plan-is not altogether a startling discovery and, while the formal component is superbly analyzed, what is missing is the cultural link between forms and society.

This remark becomes even more important when one turns to the second part of the book, when the author's meticulous scholarship provides startling schemes for the composi- tion of the mosques of Cordova and Kairouan. Especially for the latter (pp. 50 and ff; fig. 23) he tries to show that the arrangement of columns, capitals, and arches was not haphazard but sought to introduce into the Tunisian sanctuary the plan of the Dome of the Rock and of the Aqsa mosque. While I would be the last one to object to anyone's attempt to go beyond descriptive analysis and to seek more complex relations between forms in early Islamic architecture, I have some doubt as to whether the choice and positioning of columns which can only be understood visually when drawn on a plan could have been the vehicle through which memories and associations with far-away holy places were expressed. The point of such associations is no doubt correct, but its visual translation must have existed in a less arcane and less abstract shape than the one proposed here. In a deeper sense, this book of unbelievably accurate taxonomic scholarship reflects a curious dilemma of the study of Islamic art, perhaps of many other arts as well. As the technical expertise of the art historian-archaeologist increases in precision and quality, his results become an end in itself and lose the immediacy of human and cultural context which should precede rather than follow visual analysis.

We owe to Dr. Ewert many remarkable studies on the architecture of the Muslim West,

detailed accounts (recits) which appear to support his theses may be taken to show that social relations were rather more open-ended than segmentary theory or any other set of "rules" would allow. Despite its problems, all scholars interested in North Africa and in Muslim tribal peoples will find Honneur et baraka of great interest. Unfortunately its appalling price-reflecting a lamentable trend in the publishing industry-will probably keep most scholars from owning it.

Human Relations Area Files MICHAEL A. MARCUS

CHRISTIAN EWERT, Forschungen zur almohadischen Moschee Lieferung I: Vorstuften, Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Madrider Beitrage 9 (Mainz am Rhein, Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1981). Pp. 207 + 64 plates, 58 figures.

The difficulty of reviewing the intellectual content of this book is that it is the introductory volume to a second, as yet unpublished, one on Almohad mosques; yet it assumes that the point apparently to be made in the second volume-that there is a clearly defined Almohad mosque type-has been demonstrated.

On a more specific level, there are three parts to this book. The first one is an analysis of the plans of a dozen pre-Almohad mosques all over the Muslim world in which the author seeks to find, or signals the absence of, the characteristic Almohad T-plan. The second one is a study limited to western Islam of the ways in which arches and supports are distributed in mosques; I shall return to it shortly. The third part is a typological catalogue of all the reused pre-Islamic elements in the mosques of Cordova and Kairouan and of all the elements imitating such reused pieces.

The third section is a first-rate catalogue, superbly illustrated and of a precise and meticulous scholarship. The first part contains a large number of interesting remarks on well-known monuments like the mosques of Cairo, Fez, and, of course Kairouan and Cordova, but its main point-the pre-history of a T-plan-is not altogether a startling discovery and, while the formal component is superbly analyzed, what is missing is the cultural link between forms and society.

This remark becomes even more important when one turns to the second part of the book, when the author's meticulous scholarship provides startling schemes for the composi- tion of the mosques of Cordova and Kairouan. Especially for the latter (pp. 50 and ff; fig. 23) he tries to show that the arrangement of columns, capitals, and arches was not haphazard but sought to introduce into the Tunisian sanctuary the plan of the Dome of the Rock and of the Aqsa mosque. While I would be the last one to object to anyone's attempt to go beyond descriptive analysis and to seek more complex relations between forms in early Islamic architecture, I have some doubt as to whether the choice and positioning of columns which can only be understood visually when drawn on a plan could have been the vehicle through which memories and associations with far-away holy places were expressed. The point of such associations is no doubt correct, but its visual translation must have existed in a less arcane and less abstract shape than the one proposed here. In a deeper sense, this book of unbelievably accurate taxonomic scholarship reflects a curious dilemma of the study of Islamic art, perhaps of many other arts as well. As the technical expertise of the art historian-archaeologist increases in precision and quality, his results become an end in itself and lose the immediacy of human and cultural context which should precede rather than follow visual analysis.

We owe to Dr. Ewert many remarkable studies on the architecture of the Muslim West,

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 16:57:23 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Reviews 395 Reviews 395

especially of Spain. Their technical accuracy is astounding, as is obvious from everything in this book. Somehow, however, the living vibrancy of the monuments has been lost.

Harvard University OLEG GRABAR

Cambridge, Massachusetts

JANET L. ABU-LUGHOD, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1980). Pp. xxii + 374. Illustrations, index, and bibliography.

Rabat resembles Janet Abu-Lughod's earlier Cairo (1971) in scope and comprehensiveness, and sets a new standard for North African studies in the analysis and interpretation of complex urban statistical data, derived in this case from the 1971 census results for the twin cities of Rabat-Sale.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I traces the growth of Rabat-Sale from neolithic times to the mid-nineteenth century in ninety-two pages; Part II follows the fortunes of the two cities from the mid-nineteenth century period of accelerated European economic acceleration through the end of the French protectorate (1912-1956). Part III presents both an analysis of post-1956 planning policies and a "factorial ecology" of Rabat-Sale.

Part I, the least successful section of the book, is loosely organized in part by a geological metaphor which, for instance, has 1300 years of Islam "washing over" the "sequential deposits" of earlier civilizational "layers" (p. 9). This section seems to have been included principally to make Rabat encyclopedic in coverage. As Abu-Lughod acknowledges, much of the same ground is covered in Kenneth Brown's monograph-length article in Hesperis- Tamuda ( 1971). A condensation of some of this material in favor of expanding her brief but tantalizing intraregional comparisons of long-term urban growth with Algiers, Tunis and Cairo (esp. pp. 35-37) would have related this section more strongly to the book's principal theme.

Abu-Lughod's major argument is that the French instituted "caste cleavages" of social and spatial segregation in 1912; cleavages that were progressively transformed by the late 1940s into a "complex but rigid system of class stratification along ethnic lines" (p. 220) and finally into a residential separation based upon class distinctions.

For Abu-Lughod, the system of de facto urban separations encouraged by French colonial urban policies was nothing less than apartheid. At several points in her argument, she acknowledges that Moroccan and other scholars have objected to her application of the term to Morocco (pp. xvii, 216), but responds that "South African laws are merely an extreme version of more general colonial policies . .. and that the French in Morocco, while lacking 'national' laws of apartheid, were equally blatant in their intent and effective in their results" (p. xvii). A similar reasoning underlies the book's idiosyncratic use of "caste" (p. 216) and loose comparisons between the ideologies implicit in the work of French colonial urban planners and the attitudes of white slaveholders in the antebellum United States (p. 144).

If the assumption is accepted that all colonial systems are essentially the same in intent and results, then there is little motivation to study them in detail. At the outset of Rabat, Abu-Lughod invokes a culinary metaphor which she attributes to Socrates, that the historian must learn to "carve at the joints" where "history," to shift metaphors again, "weaves its patterns" (p. 9). Surely a component of this task is an effort to delineate the "subjective" categories, by no means constant, by which both colonizers and colonized construed the society in which they both lived and to determine how these assumptions

especially of Spain. Their technical accuracy is astounding, as is obvious from everything in this book. Somehow, however, the living vibrancy of the monuments has been lost.

Harvard University OLEG GRABAR

Cambridge, Massachusetts

JANET L. ABU-LUGHOD, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1980). Pp. xxii + 374. Illustrations, index, and bibliography.

Rabat resembles Janet Abu-Lughod's earlier Cairo (1971) in scope and comprehensiveness, and sets a new standard for North African studies in the analysis and interpretation of complex urban statistical data, derived in this case from the 1971 census results for the twin cities of Rabat-Sale.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I traces the growth of Rabat-Sale from neolithic times to the mid-nineteenth century in ninety-two pages; Part II follows the fortunes of the two cities from the mid-nineteenth century period of accelerated European economic acceleration through the end of the French protectorate (1912-1956). Part III presents both an analysis of post-1956 planning policies and a "factorial ecology" of Rabat-Sale.

Part I, the least successful section of the book, is loosely organized in part by a geological metaphor which, for instance, has 1300 years of Islam "washing over" the "sequential deposits" of earlier civilizational "layers" (p. 9). This section seems to have been included principally to make Rabat encyclopedic in coverage. As Abu-Lughod acknowledges, much of the same ground is covered in Kenneth Brown's monograph-length article in Hesperis- Tamuda ( 1971). A condensation of some of this material in favor of expanding her brief but tantalizing intraregional comparisons of long-term urban growth with Algiers, Tunis and Cairo (esp. pp. 35-37) would have related this section more strongly to the book's principal theme.

Abu-Lughod's major argument is that the French instituted "caste cleavages" of social and spatial segregation in 1912; cleavages that were progressively transformed by the late 1940s into a "complex but rigid system of class stratification along ethnic lines" (p. 220) and finally into a residential separation based upon class distinctions.

For Abu-Lughod, the system of de facto urban separations encouraged by French colonial urban policies was nothing less than apartheid. At several points in her argument, she acknowledges that Moroccan and other scholars have objected to her application of the term to Morocco (pp. xvii, 216), but responds that "South African laws are merely an extreme version of more general colonial policies . .. and that the French in Morocco, while lacking 'national' laws of apartheid, were equally blatant in their intent and effective in their results" (p. xvii). A similar reasoning underlies the book's idiosyncratic use of "caste" (p. 216) and loose comparisons between the ideologies implicit in the work of French colonial urban planners and the attitudes of white slaveholders in the antebellum United States (p. 144).

If the assumption is accepted that all colonial systems are essentially the same in intent and results, then there is little motivation to study them in detail. At the outset of Rabat, Abu-Lughod invokes a culinary metaphor which she attributes to Socrates, that the historian must learn to "carve at the joints" where "history," to shift metaphors again, "weaves its patterns" (p. 9). Surely a component of this task is an effort to delineate the "subjective" categories, by no means constant, by which both colonizers and colonized construed the society in which they both lived and to determine how these assumptions

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 16:57:23 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions