A very good piece (no matter how much it knows it).

That said, I think Brook is wrong.

Islamic architecture is sublime. The Muslim prohibition of idolatry required Mughal artisans to become masters of symmetry and tesselation, giving their structures a mathematical beauty. The Taj Mahal stands as the most perfect edifice in an India that has plenty of grand buildings of British colonial (Lutyens' Delhi) and Hindu origin (the Brihadishwara temple, for one).

That Aleppo was a religiously mixed city is not the point. The point is that Muslim architecture actually was much more beautiful than that of rival civilizations. Atta, viewing the world through an architectral lens, presumably took this to mean that Islamic civilization was superior in every respect.

As a point of comparison, there are those in the West who view the world through a financial lens and conclude that we are superior because we are richer. Both forms of tunnel vision can lead to radicalism and violence.

Heh. So, you can see the idolatry to Mammon in Western architecture? Did Mohammed Atta? And the same for US foreign policy?

Let's be honest it, isn't democracy but capitalism that the US hopes to spread through the aggressive use of its armed forces around the world (as evidenced by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to cite the too-often used examples).

Is this rhetoric or do you actually believe this?

Islamic architecture is sublime.The Muslim prohibition of idolatry required Mughal artisans to become masters of symmetry and tesselation, giving their structures a mathematical beauty.

Are you really drawing a causal connection between the prohibition of idolatry (I'm assuming that you are referring to the Hadith that allegedly prohibit artists from representing nature) and mastering symmetry? I wonder how it is, then, that Brunelleschi was able to create the magnificent proportions of the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo while also retaining the sculptural ability to finish runner-up to Ghiberti in the famous Baptistery doors battle. Or how Palladio was able to create the Villa Rotunda in Venice at the same time that Titian was operating. Or how Sinan was able to design all of his mosques while Ottoman miniature painting flourished. Or how the Taj Mahal's anonymous architect was able to master symmetry, while Shah Jahan simultaneously kept his court artists busy making god knows how many representations of himself.

Also, if you're going to use a word like sublime, you should understand that it has a very particular meaning in art and architectural criticism that has little to do with qualities like symmetry and tesselation.

The Taj Mahal stands as the most perfect edifice in an India

Even if we accept that the Taj Mahal is the most perfect edifice in India, as opposed to, say the Jain Temple at Ranakpur or Le Corbusier's Millowner's Association Building, it is not at all clear to me that this can be attributed to the fact that it is an exclusively Muslim building. If anything, what has long been remarkable about the Taj, and Shah Jahani architecture in general, is its Cosmopolitan nature, the way that it drew from a number of sources and traditions that Shah Jahan had brought to his court. His name, after all, is King of the World, not King of Islam. I would refer you to the work of Ebba Koch for more details.

That Aleppo was a religiously mixed city is not the point.

But it is precisely the point, just as it is precisely the point at Shah Jahan's court. You want to ascribe the qualities you love in the buildings you love to some exclusive Islamic provenance, just as Atta did. The fact is that most great Islamic architecture, indeed most great architecture, comes about from an architect's ability to distill a variety of competing ideas and influences to achieve a new synthesis. If what Atta loves about Aleppo did not occur because of some sort of experiment of Islamic isolationism, but was rooted in Islam's confrontation with other cultural ideas, then Atta's worldview is simply wrong.

Indeed, it is interesting is that the qualities you love as "Islamic" in the monumental works you cite are anathema to the qualities of the everyday architecture of Aleppo that Atta was praising. If clear and simple symmetry really were some sort of exclusively Islamic quality, shouldn't Atta embrace the symmetrical and monotnously planned "Western" portions of Aleppo?

The problem isn't that Atta viewed the world through an "architectural lens," the problem is he viewed it through an ideologically hardened lens that led him to misinterpret what he saw. Cultures for him were not porous and in flux, they were fixed, unchanging, and unyielding. I'd say, judging from your post, you suffer from the same problem. And I think that's the real path to radicalism and violence.

piffle and poppy cock. islamic architecture is boreing and mosques are truely eyesores.

the important thing was that atta did not see reality he saw ideology and was lead down a evil path because of that.

The problem isn't that Atta viewed the world through an "architectural lens," the problem is he viewed it through an ideologically hardened lens that led him to misinterpret what he saw. Cultures for him were not porous and in flux, they were fixed, unchanging, and unyielding. I'd say, judging from your post, you suffer from the same problem. And I think that's the real path to radicalism and violence.

Belief is the death of intelligence. Everywhere. All the time.

I'm uninterested in how you define the word "sublime" - I use it in the way my people have always used it. And, as a European who I suspect has travelled in Europe far more than you have, I'm perhaps less over-impressed by the European structures you reference.

The fact that you consider the style of the Taj Mahal to be more "cosmopolitan" than Islamic indicates that you are not well versed in what consitutes Islamic art and architecture. Have you actually been to Agra?

There is a degree of subjectivity in any aesthetic judgement. If you believe Islamic architecture to be inferior, that is your prerogative. However, your point that "all cultures are an admixture" is both facile and sophomoric.

I don't know who "your people" are, but they obviously aren't Edumund Burke or Immanual Kant, because they would have found the idea of "sublime symmetry" to be an oxymoron, since the entire idea of the sublime, as they theorized it, was that it was an aesthetic quality defined by the immense and the terrible, that which seemed beyond man's powers of reason and understanding.

I don't care how impressed you are with the Villa Rotunda. I was using it to deflate your argument that the alleged prohibition on naturalistic representation found in the Hadith led Islamic artisans to some superior mastery of symmetry. It has a far clearer symmetrical balance than, say the Great Mosque of Cordoba, yet it was built in a culture with absolutely no prohibition on representation. Symmetry is symmetry It can be mastered by anybody.

I don't consider the Taj Mahal to be a "Cosmoplitan style" any more than I consider it to be an "Islamic style". I do not think using "style" that broadly has any functional art historical value or meaning. What is the "Christian style"? Is it Chartres or St. Peter's? What's the "Western style"? Is it Villa Savoye or the Pantheon? What is the "Islamic style," is it the Great Mosque of Cordoba or the Taj Mahal?

If we must categorize every building as a particular style, then the Taj Mahal is Mughal or, more specifically, Shah Jahani.

Now the question becomes how do we understand Mughal style architecture? Does it make sense to say, well the Mughals were Muslim, so everything about it represents an Islamic way of building? Or does it make more sense to say the Mughals were Muslims who were nonetheless proud that their lineage could be traced to Ghengis Khan, had conquered a foreign people whom they nevertheless drew cultural inspiration from (particularly Akbar), and held international court where they delightedly accepted gifts from all over the world, including Europe? In the latter case, Islam forms the basis of their culture and their building heritage, but it is not some monolith that dictates a particular way of building, but a complex and living tradition that they used selectively (in combination with other traditions) to shape their own understanding of themselves.

Here are the problems if you consider the Taj Mahal simply an exemplary "Islamic" monument:

1. You have to explain why this exemplary monument is a tomb, when the Hadith forbid the erection of tombs.

2. You have to account for the symbolic connotations of material in red sandstone and white marble, which does not have broad usage across the Islamic world, although it can be accounted for if one turns to the Vishnudharmottara-purana.

3. You have to invent a non-existent Islamic history of pietra-dure prior to its adoption by Shah Jahan's court.

4. You have to ignore the resemblance between inlaid and stuccoed flower vases at the Taj Mahal and those illustrated in European scientific herbals, even though it is known they were disseminated among Shah Jahan's artists.

5. You have to explain how the onion dome is a specifically Islamic form, if it isn't used at, say, the Dome of the Rock, but can be found on any number of Russian Orthodox churches.

6. You have to explain why the chattris that flank the dome can't be found anywhere in the Muslim world besides India.

But, you may protest, I haven't talked about pishtaqs, minarets, char bagh gardens, or hasht bihisht plans. Surely these are all "Islamic" features of the building. After all, the char bagh is supposed to mirror Qur'anic descriptions of the gardens of paradise, the hasht bihisht plan has similar paradisic connotations, and the pishtaq and the minaret have functional roles in mosques (the former is used for the display of Qur'anic inscriptions, the latter for calls to prayer). So yes, these are all features that come from a specifically Islamic context. Nevertheless, they do not represent some pan-Islamic style, because one can find plenty of buildings that do not have these features. In fact, the Taj Mahal is only the second major Mughal tomb to include minarets. Further, in the case of the hasht bihisht and the char bagh, they have extremely ancient pedigrees that predate the life of Mohammad. So these purely "Islamic" features are themselves tainted with connotations that extend far beyond Islam.

Oh by the way, I have spent about seven years in Europe on a number of trips too many to recall and a year in India on four separate trips, one of which included the obligatory trip to Agra, and I love lots of mosques, tombs, and palaces that were erected by Muslims. But frankly that's irrelevant.

And finally, I do agree with you on one point. This was an excellent series of articles, one of the best I have seen in Slate.