Abstract

In 1989, the architectural historian Jonathan Bloom published a detailed study of the origins of the minaret in which he contested the widely held idea that Islamic architecture, since its assumedly functional beginnings in Medina, had always been automatically influenced by, or simply modeled on, the pre-Islamic architectures in the newly Muslim lands:

They [scholars] have explained its [the minaret’s] purpose as announcing the presence of Islam to non-Muslims. The common denominator of all these theories is that the minaret is always explained in terms of other cultures and scarcely ever in terms of the culture that produced it. This book attempts to correct that fault and to challenge the received view.