Arts, Architecture and Culture

Islamic artistic traditions developed a distinctive visual and literary language: calligraphy elevated to the highest of the arts, geometric and vegetal ornament worked to extraordinary complexity, and an architecture of courtyards, domes, and muqarnas adapted across climates from Andalusia to Bengal. Poetry and music carried comparable prestige, and the planning of cities was itself treated as a design problem with legal and social dimensions.

This collection gathers the encyclopaedia's cultural coverage: surveys of Islamic art and architecture; the specific traditions of calligraphy, poetry, and music; urban planning as practised in the classical Islamic city; and the individual monuments that demonstrate these traditions at their most ambitious, including the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, the Blue Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, Topkapı Palace, and the major mosques of the twentieth century.