New Najaf?!

An interesting post in Reuters' blogs on a "new design" of Najaf (here)

Historic Cairo suffering from lack of preservation

A few days ago a message in H-Islamart warned "the Islamic monuments of Historic Cairo have recently been struck by a series of damaging thefts. Many unique and precious objects have been looted from mosques and other important monuments." (see here the rest of the message sent by Iman Abdulfattah from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities).

Then today a report has been published in Aljazeera.net (Arabic) warning that some of Cairo's historic mosques, including Sultan Hasan's Mosque-Madrasa and Masjid al-Rifai, are "falling" and "highly damaged" (see the report here).

Islamic Art and Architecture in the news

A piece in the NYT's architecture pages includes a paragraph on the new building (to be inaugurated this November) of the Qatari's Museum of Islamic Art (here); more photos in here. The same building has been also discussed in the French newspaper Le Figaro (here).

An article in huliq.com (here) on the exibition being held in San Francisco's Asian Art Museum titled "From Turkey to Indonesia".

A report on contemporary glassblowing in Tunisia today in Aljazeera.net English (here). An article on the same topic in georgraphically more generic terms and with a more hiostorical approach in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Rai (here).

Qayrawan has been in the news lately for being the "Islamic cultural capital" of the year. This means basically some festivities (poetical recitals, exibitions...) but also a symposium on the history of the city as it's reported for example in the Qatari newspaper Al-Raya (here).

Spaces and Visions symposium, Philadelphia Oct 16-18

Symposium website

The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) will be holding an international symposium at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. This symposium is intended as the inauguration of a biennial cycle of meetings within the field in order to reflect its growth, to support its expanding methodological, regional, and temporal scope, and to give HIAA greater visibility internationally as the leading organization for historians of Islamic art, architecture and archaeology.

STRUCTURE OF SYMPOSIUM

The first symposium will take place over a three-day period and will have each of the three days focused on a different zone of interest. The first day, “Out of Late Antiquity,” takes up the field’s formative emphasis on early Islamic art, a field remade in recent years through continued archaeological investigations and critically informed readings of the historical sources. The second day, " ‘Unity and Variety’ Once More: Time, Place, Material,” examines the field’s definitive shift since the late 1970s to regional, dynastic, and media based inquiries. The third day, “Confronting Modernity,” addresses the extension of the field into the modern and contemporary periods, and emerging debates about their study.

The program for each day will consist of three separate elements: a keynote address, three sessions of papers, and a specialized workshop. The three keynote addresses will be supported by three scholarly sessions, each comprised of four papers. Session organizers have been be asked to develop a theme appropriate for the day for their session, and invite speaker or call for papers. They were free to invite a co-organizer. They have also been encouraged to recruit one of their four papers from abroad, preferably from scholars residing in countries of the Islamic world. The workshops, each led by an expert, are meant to familiarize colleagues with new directions or findings in specific sub-fields that may not familiar or easily accessible.