This book is a much expanded version of the Yarshater Lectures on Persian Art delivered at the School of Oriental Studies, University of London in January 2017. The lectures focused on the architecture of four Central Asian shrines—the Gur-i Mir in Samarqand, the Khwajah Abu Nasr Parsa in Balkh, the Noble Rawzah of Mazar-i Sharif, and the Prophet’s Cloak at Qandahar. The first shrine is in Uzbekistan today, the other three are in Afghanistan. I have dealt in different ways with all of these shrines in previous publications (see bibliography). In some cases, parts of the present work have only been slightly changed (the information on the exhumations at Gur-i Mir in 1941 was in a lecture published in 2003, for example). However, the chapters on the Noble Rawzah of ʿAli at Mazar-i Sharif and the Prophet’s Cloak at Qandahar contain mostly new material.
In all four cases the approach to the shrine’s architecture is through their social histories, the experiences of those responsible for first constructing then maintaining and renovating the shrines’ buildings as well as those affected by the shrines—the pilgrims who visited them and others for whom the shrines represented a tradition worth maintaining or repurposing.
These four shrines share certain things in common, besides the obvious one of being pilgrimage destinations. They are all linked by roles played in their stories by one, two, three, or all four of these iconic historical figures: the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632 AD); ʿAli, the son of Abu Talib (d. 661 AD), the fourth Caliph of the Sunnis and the first Imam of the Shiʿis; Baha al-Din Naqshband (d. 1389 AD), the founder of Naqshbandi Sufism; and Mir ʿAli Shayr Nawaʾi (d. 1501), a literary figure of Herat and writer in Chaghatay, the precursor of modern Uzbek. Three of the four shrines—Gur-i Mir, Khwajah Abu Nasr Parsa, and the Noble Rawzah of Mazar-i Sharif—are bound by a common neo-Chinggisid socio-political history extending over three centuries, the fifteenth through the seventeenth. For the last three centuries, three of the four shrines—Abu Nasr Parsa, Noble Rawzah, and Khirqat al-Nabi (Shrine of the Prophet’s Cloak)—have shared a common political history, this time dominated by Durrani Afghans. The fourth, Gur-i Mir in Samarqand, experienced a very different trajectory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, succumbing to European imperialism and then subject to the consequences of the Soviet socialist experiment through most of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century has seen all four shrines caught up in the tumultuous repercussions of religio-nationalist movements which have greatly affected their architecture.
This book is an attempt to see architecture, specifically the architecture of sacred places, in a social context, and to understand its evolution and changes over time as reflecting changes in society and the changed meanings society derives from the architecture. An ever-present and guiding concern has been the problem of knowing where to place the limits on what constitutes the social context.