The Muqarnas

We’re currently preparing for the launch of our monthly blog series, Rethinking, Remaking, curated by GPRI Co-Project Manager, Aqsa Ijaz. As a teaser for the type of content you can expect to enjoy, here’s a reflection on the muqarnas as a model for collaborative research in the humanities, written by our very own Jill Caskey, Co-Principal Investigator and professor of Visual Studies.

Each piece of a muqarnas has a distinct role in the structure’s design…the interlocking forms work together to support the whole.

Jill Caskey

A Reflection on the Muqarnas

by Jill Caskey

The entrance to the Abbas Great Mosque (Shah Mosque) in Isfahan features a muqarnas, a complex faceted structure that melds the rectilinear walls of the iwan portal with the curved vault above. Composed of myriad interlocking pieces of diverse shapes and sizes, such intricate muqarnas vaults and domes appear across the medieval and early modern Islamicate world, in secular settings as well as religious ones. Each piece of a muqarnas has a distinct role in the structure’s design, however difficult it may be to discern; the interlocking forms work together to support the whole. We hope that The Global Past comes to resemble a muqarnas, with participants working together from their diverse disciplinary, methodological, and institutional vantage points, to explore the overarching problem of the global.