The Making of Islamic Heritage

Heritage Studies in the Muslim World Series Editor Trinidad Rico Rutgers University New Brunswick New Jersey, USA “Heritage” is implicated in the creation and circulation of categories through which Islam is studied and understood. The categories used in the management, identification, and safeguarding efforts of all heritage— authenticity, integrity, endangerment, values, and stewardship—are built on relationships between communities and their history, identity, politics, and beliefs, which are often employed as categories and relationships that are rigorous and normative. In contrast, a critical heritage framework recognizes the diversity of heritage constructs across territories and time and, accordingly, aims to destabilize these categories by considering and revealing the agendas and biases that have nurtured these categories and their underlying relationships, methodological approaches, and research agendas. The series Heritage Studies in the Muslim World invites a breakaway from disciplinary legacies that are involved in the study of “Islamic heritage.” It features broad representation of disciplines and voices that intersect at this subject of study, with scholarship that is often located at the margins of disciplines and domains. In this aim, the series welcomes a broad representation of voices that intersect to address heritage discourses and prac- tices, considering the natural and built environment, material culture, traditions, performances, technologies, discourses, and other political and legal instruments that are associated with heritage. Contributors to this series recognize the Muslim world as a diverse and fluid territory where Muslim and non-Muslim communities engage with Muslim and non-Muslim heritage constructs. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15128 Trinidad Rico Editor The Making of Islamic Heritage Muslim Pasts and Heritage Presents Editor Trinidad Rico Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA Heritage Studies in the Muslim World ISBN 978-981-10-4070-2 ISBN 978-981-10-4071-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4071-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937891 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. 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The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This edited book is the result of two academic events that I hosted in Doha between 2014 and 2016 in order to explore the way that different disciplinary interventions create a field subject of “Islamic heritage” through their specific methodologies: the first event was a research workshop titled “Islamic Pasts,” held in December 2014 at UCL Qatar; and the second was a conference session titled “Islamic Presents,” which was part of the Liberal Arts International Conference organized in January 2016 at Texas A&M University at Qatar. Following these focused initia- tives, the completion of this edited book relied, above all, on the support, patience, and feedback from the contributors themselves, and I would therefore like to thank them again for investing their time and scholarship on this small collection. In addition, I would like to thank the blind peer reviewers for their critical but encouraging comments on earlier versions of this book, and Dr. Giulia El Dardiry and Dr. Imad Mansour for their logistical support, their generous thoughts, and their endless supply of mana’eesh and tabouleh during our shared time as scholars in Doha. This book was made possible by a Conference and Workshop Sponsorship Program grant from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). v CONTENTS 1 The Making of Islamic Heritages: An Overview of Disciplinary Interventions 1 Trinidad Rico 2 The Intertwining of History and Heritage in Islamic Contexts 13 Shahzad Bashir 3 Muslim Cultures and Pre-Islamic Pasts: Changing Perceptions of “Heritage” 23 R. Michael Feener 4 Reclaiming Heritage Through the Image of Traditional Habitat 47 Ali Mozaffari and Nigel Westbrook 5 Framing the Primordial: Islamic Heritage and Saudi Arabia 67 Ömer Can Aksoy 6 Images of Piety or Power? Conserving the Umayyad Royal Narrative in Qusayr ʿAmra 91 Gaetano Palumbo vii viii CONTENTS 7 The Buddha Remains: Heritage Transactions in Taxila, Pakistan 109 Hassan Asif and Trinidad Rico Index 125 LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 4.1 A pedestrian walkway in Shushtar Noʾw, development stage 1 56 Fig. 4.2 General view of Shushtar Noʾw rooftops, development stage 1 58 Fig. 6.1 Two of the “kings” before and after conservation. The 1975 intervention did not allow the perception of the “real” quality of the paintings 95 Fig. 6.2 One of the numerous representations of Prophet Jonah found in Qusayr ʿAmra 97 Fig. 6.3 Standing figure holding a basket of grapes, flanked by a feline (a panther?)—perhaps a representation of Dionysus 99 Fig. 6.4 The so-called Six Kings panel, either representing the kings defeated by the Umayyads, the six regions of the Earth, or the recipients of Prophet Mohammad’s embassies 100 Fig. 7.1 Buddhist relic caskets placed in front of Islamic calligraphy with “Allah” inscribed on the stone (left); schist stone lying by the gate of Raheem’s house (center); Buddha sculpture in the bodhisattva stage, unveiled from behind a plant pot (right) 111 ix CHAPTER 1 The Making of Islamic Heritages: An Overview of Disciplinary Interventions Trinidad Rico Abstract This chapter introduces the challenge that brought together the contributors to this collection of essays, describing the trajectory that heritage studies has had in the face of established discourses about Islam and heritage in order to suggest ways in which these perceptions can be disrupted. In this introductory chapter, I define the value of involving different disciplinary conversations and forms of expertise that entangle specific languages, boundaries, categories, and concerns in the shaping of “Islamic heritage” as a subject of study. I propose that a consideration of alternative modes of thinking and established biases may be an essential tool to rupture the current problematic trajectory in critical heritage work about Muslim communities and their construction of heritage value. Keywords Expertise Á interdisciplinarity Á critical heritage MAKING HERITAGES In a space of definitional ambiguity and through an appeal to inclusivity, both Islam and heritage have been said to be “all things to all people” (Ahmed 1998, xi; Larkham 1995, 85). In consideration of this T. Rico (*) Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA © The Author(s) 2017 1 T. Rico (ed.), The Making of Islamic Heritage, Heritage Studies in the Muslim World, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4071-9_1 2 T. RICO simultaneously privileged and inconvenient proposition, this collection of chapters takes the intersection of these complex concepts—Islamic heritage—as a challenging site of construction, where different viewpoints, in the form of disciplines, their sources and methods of analysis, shape both a subject of study and a process of heritage recognition. This collection does not aim to promote the existence of a discrete category of “Islamic heritage” or characterize or authorize what is “Islamic” about this construct; contributors do acknowledge, however, that Islamic heritage as a category is often constructed and circulated as a discrete, identifi- able designation. Therefore, these chapters are not addressing heritage from a teleological position—they neither prescribe how to maintain or define a relationship between religious, sacred, and secular values in the work of tangible and intangible heritage in Muslim contexts,1 nor do they aim to promote or endorse any specific iteration of Islamic heritage.2 Rather than doing

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