Finbarr Barry Flood

Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum

This article uses the recent controversy regarding the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas as a paradigm to challenge essentializing notions of an “Islamic” response to the image. Beginning with a history of premodern iconoclastic practice in the Islamic world, it explores the reception of the Bamiyan Buddhas in light of evidence for a complex range of responses to Buddhist and Hindu images in Afghanistan. Finally, it relates the destruction of Buddhist antiquities in 2001 not to a timeless theology of images but to the role of the museum as the locus of a secular iconolatry characteristic of the modern nation-state.

Pillars, Palimpsests, and Princely Practices: Translating the past in Sultanate Delhi

history, the conquest of northern India by the army of the Ghurid sultan Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad (r. 1163-1203) in the last quarter of the twelfth century figures a profound rupture in the cultural fabric of the region. Many of the monuments erected in the wake of the conquest appear to confirm this, for they make extensive use of architectural elements that predate the conquest and are assumed to have been purloined from temples destroyed in its wake. The idea of the trophy looms large in published discussions of these monuments, largely on the basis of a practice of reuse that has never been subjected to any serious analysis. Analysis has been obviated, in large measure, by the widespread perception that reuse offers support for the lurid and highly formulaic tales of looting, spoliation, and desecration found in the medieval texts that have

Signs of Violence: Colonial Ethnographies and Indo-Islamic Monuments

The article focuses on the ways in which the subject of architectural violence was deployed in colonial constructions of Islam in the Rovolt of 1857 when the Indian troops of the British rebelled, leading to massacres, sieges and reprisals. The architecture of the times gives the best picture of the religious faiths of the country, showing how and when they arose, how they became corrupted and when and by what steps they declined.

“God’s Wonder”: Marble as Medium and the Natural Image in Mosques and Modernism

Comparisons have often been made between aesthetic shifts in the arts of late antiquity and the rise of abstraction in early twentieth-century Euro-American art. These include the use of marble in both late antique and modernist architecture to orchestrate patterned effects read as ornamental, or even figural. The analogy might be extended to some early and medieval mosques, in which the natural images seen in marble patterning authorized figural imagery within an otherwise aniconic environment. In both mosques and modernism, marble was embraced by architectural cultures that were ostensibly suspicious of ornament and imagery, if for quite different reasons. Rather than suggesting a fortuitous parallel, this essay argues for a common relation to the architecture of late antiquity: direct in the case of the mosque, indirect and highly mediated in the case of modernist monuments. This debt to earlier precedents qualifies standard antihistoricist representations of modernist architecture.