"Qasr Amra" by Paul Mannix is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The Values of Heritage: The Islamic Reinterpretation of Western Categorization was written in Dillon's Islamic Architecture Seminar. Beginning as early as Carolus Linnaeus’ 1735 publication of Systema Naturae, theorists and historians have been motivated towards classifying their studies. Albeit discussed in a biological context, Linnaeus’ propositional mechanics were soon adopted by Denis Diderot and later expressed in his 1751 reference Encyclopédie. A challenge pursued by those in both the natural sciences and social sciences, classification practices persisted well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s rediscovery of Greece the same year, further European interests in the Ottoman East culminated with Max can Berchem’s multivolume Matiriaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum. Around the same time, Ernst Herzfeld completed his excavation of Samarra. As an explanation for the enlightened Western rationale, “Islamic Art” became the receptacle for nearly fourteen centuries of stylistic, social, and religious artifacts. Still used by scholars today, the term has come under scrutiny in recent years; Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom consider it a “convenient misnomer.” Given the term’s vast geographical, historical, and cultural associations, Blair and Bloom question its categorical appropriateness. That said, if the physical manifestations of the Medieval Islamic world cannot sufficiently be classified under a single Westernized field, then how can their intangible qualities do the same? Among others, Trinidad Rico confronts the context to which “Islamic Heritage” has been constructed. Because of this framed classification, many important values are overlooked. Thus, much of the Islamic Middle East lacks the necessary policy to drive meaningful preservation of their built heritage. Please scroll down to the final paper, The Values of Heritage: The Islamic Reinterpretation of Western Categorization.
the islamic reinterpretation of western categorization
