A well illustrated introduction to the splendid public monuments of Ottoman Jerusalem, including mosques, madrasas, Sufi convents, minarets, fountains and the famous structures of the Haram.
Jerusalem has captivated the world for over 2000 years. This book surveys the revered city's architecture, from the earliest remnants of old Judea, Rome, and Byzantium, through the glories of Islam and the Crusader kingdom, to the pragmatically conceived neighbourhoods built outside Suleiman the Magnificent's 16th-century ramparts, in the years since World War I.
While European eclecticism is examined as a critical and experimental moment in western art history, little research has been conducted to provide an intellectual depth of field to the historicist pursuits of late Ottoman architects as they maneuvered through the nineteenth century?s vast inventory of available styles and embarked on a revivalist/Orientalist program they identified as the ?Ottoman Renaissance.? Ahmet A. Ersoy?s book examines the complex historicist discourse underlying this belated ?renaissance? through a close reading of a text conceived as the movement?s canonizing manifesto: the Usul-i Mi?mari-i ?Osmani [The Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture] (Istanbul, 1873). In its translocal, cross-disciplinary scope, Ersoy?s work explores the creative ways in which the Ottoman authors straddled the art-historical mainstream and their new, self-orientalizing aesthetics of locality. The study reveals how Orientalism was embraced by its very objects, the self-styled ?Orientals? of the modern world, as a marker of authenticity, and a strategically located aesthetic tool to project universally recognizable images of cultural difference. Rejecting the lesser, subsidiary status ascribed to non-western Orientalisms, Ersoy?s work contributes to recent, post-Saidian directions in the study of cultural representation that resituate the field of Orientalism beyond its polaristic core, recognizing its cross-cultural potential as a polyvalent discourse.
Introduction: history of the research -- Natural and man-made city limits -- The Chalcolithic period and the Bronze Age -- The Iron Age -- The Babylonian and Persian periods -- The Hellenistic period -- The Roman period -- The Byzantine period -- The early Islamic period -- The crusader and Ayyubid periods -- The Mamluk period -- The Ottoman period.
Through its material remains, Perspectives on Early Islamic Art in Jerusalem analyzes several overlooked aspects of the earliest decades of Islamic presence in Jerusalem, during the seventh century CE. Focusing on the Haram al-Sharif, also known as the Temple Mount, Lawrence Nees provides the first sustained study of the Dome of the Chain, a remarkable eleven-sided building standing beside the slightly later Dome of the Rock, and the first study of the meaning of the columns and column capitals with figures of eagles in the Dome of the Rock. He also provides a new interpretation of the earliest mosque in Jerusalem, the Haram as a whole, with the sacred Rock at its center.
This study offers a thorough treatment of Ottoman policy with respect to Christianity's holiest shrines during the first two centuries of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem. Based on official Ottoman records found in the registers of the kadi's court in Jerusalem as well as the Prime Ministry's Archives in Istanbul, it sheds new light on one of the most obscure and controversial chapters in the history of Christianity under Islam in Jerusalem.