In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Architecture of Islamic Central Asia

  • Introduction
  • Funerary Architecture
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Architecture Planning and Preservation Architecture of Islamic Central Asia
by
Richard McClary
  • LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190922467-0104

Introduction

The architecture of Islamic Central Asia is a vast topic that encompasses the built environment from Eastern Iran to western China, and Southern Russia to the north of the Indian subcontinent. It encompasses the entirety of the post-Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, as well as Afghanistan. The temporal span is equally vast, and covers from the tenth century to the present. The vast majority of the scholarly literature on the subject is in Russian, and dates from the early years of the twentieth century up to the 1990s, after which point more of the Turkic languages of the newly independent republics start to dominate. There are also a great deal of publications in French, German, and English, and a selection of these are included here. It is not possible to include even the major publications on all the key monuments but a selection of the ones addressing the most significant sites is given, along with some of the key foundational texts on the region and some more recent survey volumes. The region of Central Asia is a somewhat arbitrary concept, and many of the monuments were built in the same style as ones in Iran since much of the region was once part of the Persianate world; Merv, Samarkand and Herat were just as important as Isfahan, Rayy and Tabriz at various times. Therefore many of the books listed here also address material in Iran, but the majority of the titles listed are primarily concerned with Central Asia. Many of the more recent as well as older publications take a nationalist approach to the architecture of the region, using anachronistic national identities largely the product of the Soviet era, that do not address the unifying aspects of the architecture of the region that seamlessly crossed the lines drawn on more recent maps; on the other hand, the dynastic approach has dominated much of the scholarship published outside the region, and so a combination of these two albeit flawed approaches are used here in order to best navigate the key publications that deal with the Islamic architecture of Central Asia. The extensive losses to the corpus of buildings over time means that archaeological reports are a key resource. The attempted eradication of religion under the Soviet system led to extensive losses and a lack of new construction of Islamic monuments until the last decade of the twentieth century, and so the focus here is primarily on the buildings dating back to the period spanning the tenth to the sixteenth centuries.

General Overviews

Owing to the huge area and timespan covered, there are a vast number of publications on the subject. Many of these are studies of specific regions, others are of specific cities or even monuments. Numerous photo books with little or no text were produced in the second half of the twentieth century and these are deliberately left out. The following titles all address the whole area in one way or another; the foundational text for ornament is Deniké 1939, while the most important study of Timurid architecture is Golombek and Wilber 1988.

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